Thread by @swordsjew

This is absolutely true, Hayyim Nahman Bialik was one of the worst offenders

https://twitter.com/ThylacineReport/status/1127013127327965184

also, for the initial decades after the war, Israelis treated Holocaust survivors who made it to Israel like shit. mocked them. It was seen as shameful, that they were diasporists who deserved what they got. google.com/amp/s/www.haar…

The myth that Diaspora Jews were meek, inferior and had “gone like lambs to the slaughter” led to the decision to make Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day the day the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began. because only “the ones who fought back” deserved memorial.

The full name of Yom Hashoah (Day of the Holocaust) is Yom Hashoah Vehagevurah — “The Day of the Holocaust and the Bravery.” As if surviving the former did not take more bravery in itself than any of us can imagine.

Netanyahu, of course, does not mask his contempt for Diaspora Jews, especially leftist ones. But the very fact that Israel speaks Hebrew comes from a contempt of the diaspora so deep that rather than using its languages, early Zionists revived a non spoken one.

One of the founders of the revival of Hebrew, Bialik, was Israel’s first national poet. Here’s how he described survivors of an absolutely brutal pogrom in 1903 in Chisinau, in which 49 Jews were killed and countless women raped: faculty.history.umd.edu/BCooperman/New…

He went there. He saw the survivors. And wrote about them with violent contempt. Israeli nationalism is as poisonous as any other nationalism (in fact, it emerged, along with Polish and Ukrainian nationalism, in the 19th century as a political movement).

Anyway, the point is, anyone who calls Diasporist and non-Zionist Jews like @elivalley (and me) “self-hating” elides over a century of history filled with tension and cruelty. And the brutality of the nationalist project in the first place.

There are those of us who celebrate the fierce joy and creativity and multifarious ideology of the Diaspora, both before the Holocaust and after. The bundists, socialists, communists, Hasidim, mitnagdim, prostitutes and pickpockets and poets. They fought. Loved. Died. Lived.

Just as we now — poets and prostitutes and journalists, communists and anarchists and centrists, Hasidim, mitnagdim, Modern Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionists — live, and love, and die in places that are not Israel. Diaspora Jews. Not less than for that.

And Israel, by the way, is absolutely vicious to non-Orthodox Jews. The Orthodox Rabbinate has such political power that they do not recognize non-Orthodox conversions or marriages. Women have been arrested for trying to desegregate prayer at the Wailing Wall.

Israelis who are gay, or want an interfaith marriage, must leave the state to get married. The state is brutally racist towards black Jews and African immigrants and has made Gaza the world’s largest open-air prison. I do not support Israel, but I am a Jew with my whole soul.

There are many who would call me a fool, a self-hating Jew, a patsy, a traitor for this stance. But I am an American. I was born here. I’m not an Israeli-in-waiting, a fifth columnist, an operative of world Jewry or a rootless cosmopolitan. This is my country too.

Racists tell me to “go back to Israel,” where I was never from. Christian Zionists claim criticism of Israel is antisemitism while aiding and abetting the ideology that gets American Jews killed while they pray. So what to do? What we’ve always done. Live. Love. Defy. Build.

(nb: Israelis can’t help where they were born and are not a monolith, stop that)