r/JewsOfConscience • u/AutoModerator • Sep 18 '24
AAJ "Ask A Jew" Wednesday
It's everyone's favorite day of the week, "Ask A (Anti-Zionist) Jew" Wednesday! Ask whatever you want to know, within the sub rules, notably that this is not a debate sub and do not import drama from other subreddits. That aside, have fun! We love to dialogue with our non-Jewish siblings.
Please remember to pick an appropriate user-flair in order to participate! Thanks!
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u/Kreyl Non-Jewish Ally Sep 18 '24
Thanks for these threads! I've wanted to ask clarification on something that I felt was an inherently antisemitic argument to me (I called it out as such and reported the post for antisemitism)... but I suppose I'd appreciate confirmation? And this is probably the place I trust best to confirm. I don't seriously expect to hear "yes that was totally fine," I don't want to present this as if it's an AITA post where the poster is clearly in the right and just wants headpats and cookies. I guess I'd just never seen this particular angle on antisemitism before (I presume it's an old one), and I do have a small but lingering minor social desire to check with somebody and be like "I read this right, yes?" So yeah, this seems like the place for that.
The thing that I saw was a comic being shared by a leftist account; I don't recall the exact wording, but it very explicitly, like, not at all subtext, compared Jewish people believing they are the chosen people to Nazis believing that they are the master race because of their skin.
This one struck me as inherently antisemitic, for one because while I feel like comparisons between the Israeli government and Nazis might sometimes be appropriate, it comes off to me like hitting below the belt. I'd rather call out the abuses without bringing in direct comparisons to Nazi Germany. For another, while I don't know the different schools of answers myself, there's guaranteed to be thousands of years of Jewish philosophy that would have been tackling exactly the question of what it means to be a chosen people.
The only justification I could see for the comparison, if I was going to try to be as charitable as humanly possible, is that maybe some miniscule number of people have interpreted it in a supremacist way. Perhaps Netanyahu and people in change of the Israeli military think that way, I don't know. Maybe not even them. But to casually equate all Judaism to white supremacy is way, WAY the fuck out of line.