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https://twitter.com/erikmbaker/status/1982830426285895704

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David Bernstein

@ProfDBernstein

Oct 28

It's important to reiterate that Nazi antisemitism is not only not the only form of antisemitism, it's aberrational in that it thought every Jew an enemy warranting extermination. More standard political antisemitism tends to have a conspiratorial tone blaming Jews for everything, 1/

BUT, it exempts the "right kind" of Jews. The right kind may be Jews who convert to Christianity, Jews who adopt the right political ideology, Jews who join antisemites in attacking other Jews, etc. Antisemite @MearsheimerJ exempts "righteous Jews," for example. 2/

So, to be direct about it: the fact that Mamdani has a reasonably large group of Jewish leftists around him doesn't mean he's not an antisemite. It does mean he's not overly prejudiced against individual Jews, and is willing to accept or even embrace them if they agree with his /3

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David Bernstein

@ProfDBernstein

Oct 26

In all seriousness, part of the Mamdani phenomenon, and the related growth of "socialism" in the circles of young, highly educated Democrats is that the traditional jobs you'd get as a humanities major from fancy liberal arts colleges--publishing, media, paralegal--have disappeared. 1/

You are an under-30 graduate in English, Art History, etc from the likes of Vassar, Smith, Oberlin, and move to NYC to make your fortune like prior generations. You aren't likely to get a job at the Times, or Harper & Collins, or Sullivan & Cromwell. 2/

So you find yourself working retail or waiting tables, and you are seething with resentment. You did everything you were supposed to. You were a star high school student, you checked every box to get into an elite college, you won the social justice essay competition in your freshman writing seminar. 3/

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David Bernstein

@ProfDBernstein

Oct 25

If you are philanthropist and want spread ideas you care about, eg pro Israel or pro free market, instead of reinventing the wheel why not look for individuals or institutions that are already doing a good job and ask them if incremental additional resources will help, and how. 1/

You are likely to get a much bigger bang for your buck this way. Imagine for example you find someone who already has a book forthcoming on the topic you care about. That person has already invested a huge amount of time and resources in the book. 2/

But will anyone read it? Maybe 15 or $20,000 will pay for a decent PR campaign to get the author on podcast and on the pages. The author, especially if here she is an academic, may have invested the equivalent of 100 K or more in the project already. 3/

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David Bernstein

@ProfDBernstein

Oct 22

The essential problem with far leftists and Jews is that not that they harshly criticize Israel and so forth, but that they refuse to apply the analytical frameworks they apply to every other minority group to Jews. 1/

If it weren't Jews and Israel, imagine going to your average leftist and saying, "here's a group that was (literally!) demonized by the Christian majority for centuries, and that were treated as perfidious inferiors by Muslim majorities. 2/

They now have a country of their own, which is also literally being demonized and treated as innately perfidious in the Christian and Muslim worlds. Plus this group was also targeted by extremist right-wingers on secular grounds and subjected to a mass genocide within living memory. 3/

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David Bernstein

@ProfDBernstein

Oct 21

Did you know that @ggreenwald is a zionist, or at least not an antizionist? Or at least that's what he told an interviewer as recently as last year? 1/

"People can debate those things, but certainly one of my goals is not to eliminate Israel as a Jewish state. I understand the importance for world Jews of having a state, but it's important to recognize that it is an ethno-state. The idea of it is that a certain group of people will remain, the majority will remain supreme. We talk about white nationalism being evil. We talk about other forms of ethno-nationalism being evil. It is a form of ethno-nationalism." 2/

But I think the idea is that the Holocaust was such a momentous recent event that in order to feel safe, Jews have to have a certain part of the world, a very kind of small sliver of a country where they will always have refuge and remain the majority. But I don't think it's some kind of sacred idea that can't be debated. But it's not one of my goals to eliminate that. I don't think it's realistic, and it's not part of what I'm trying to do. 3/

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David Bernstein

@ProfDBernstein

Oct 14

One the weirdest things that Palestinian propagandists seem to believe is that before, during, and after WWII, Palestinian Arabs welcomed Jewish refugees to Mandatory Palestine with open arms. Even in the US, some prominent Palestinians have stated that it comforts them to know that while their ancestors suffered, they at least take solace in knowing that their ancestors helped Jewish refugees survive the Holocaust. 1/

This is such a bizarre, counterfactual take on history that it's hard to know where to begin. Let's start with the fact that the story they tell is based on the notion that local Arabs, not the British (and before them, the Turks), controlled Palestine before Israel existed. 2/

Then we can move on the the very bloody Arab revolt of 1936, which was a revolt against the British allowing Jewish refugees into Mandatory Palestine. 3/

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