u/Swimming_Care7889

The Movement Against Antizionism recently had their first big political conferences recently. One of the attendees was Ben Shapiro. I am kind of divided about this. Since antizionism is a form of Jew hatred, all Jews are going to be effected. In fact, even antizionist Jews like Molly Crabapple will be effected once their use as tokens is over. Ben Shapiro is a Jew and as an Orthodox Jew is the most likely to be attacked because he is visibly Jewish. It would be uncharitable not to include him. At the same time, the people we need to convince that the antizionists are not acting in good faith and are really just massive Jew haters are going to be on the liberal-left side of the political spectrum. Ben Shapiro is not going to be a credible figure for this argument because most people on the liberal-left spectrum hate him. I have no way around this dilemma.

Elon Gilad, who does short videos on Hebrew etymologies and some of the more obscure parts of Jewish and Israeli history, has a video on how Labor Zionist pioneers in the Jezreel Valley attempted to recreate Shavuot as a harvest festival before the Religious Zionists and the Rabbinate stomped it out. I'm always fascinated about the history of trying to create or recreate Jewish national culture in the pre-state and early state eras of Israel. It is really hard to find a lot of this information in English so anything is welcome.

Rabbi David Ingber takes on his fellow progressive Rabbis by pointing out how some do not care enough about their own people. IMO, this is a thing but I am not sure if it as much as a thing as David Ingber is claiming. From my personal experience in the Bay Area, many progresssive Rabbis are basically trying to keep their synagogues together because of deep faction disagreements in the congregation itself on the current moment.

The title of the post is a bit clumsy but this is something that I've been thinking about for a long time. There seems to be a very big disconnect between how we Jews see ourselves and how I think many non-Jews see us. Basically, many Jews, in our own way, see ourselves as one of the great civilizations of the world and something that should be treated with respect. For more than a few non-Jews, we are annoying bugs of a people with a very bad case of main character syndrome that get in the way. Thoughts?

It speaks for itself. Jews are feeling unsafe in the United Kingdom, United States, and elsewhere and are considering to go to the one place where they know where they will be welcome.

I touched on this briefly in the Kristoff thread but one of our many challenges is that many of the contemporary blood libels like the dog sexual assault libel comes from organizations with names that sound credible to liberal-left leaning people like Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. Now this organization is linked to Hamas and is basically being used by Hamas to spread blood libels in ways that Western liberals and leftists would be open to. The name of the organization reeks credibility to many. "Surely an organization with this name can't be an astroturf front group for Hamas spreading vile blood libels? Nobody would do something like that." How do we over come this?

Adam Louis-Klein would argue that trying to prove the link between these credible sounding organizations and people and Hamas is a pointless endeavor because we aren't dealing with good faith arguments. We just need to maintain a hardline about antizionism as a hate movement engaged in libels until it gets drilled through people's heads and the antizionist movement gets discredited. I am not so sure about this. I think that failing to address these blood libel accusations beyond mere denunciation of them makes us look like we are dodging the issues. Proving that these organizations are in fact not credible is important but it has to be done in a somber manner rather than a joking one.

One of my long standing theories is that one reason why the I/P conflict is generating a lot of passion these days is that many people in the Anglophone world are using the I/P conflict as an indirect way to deal with their own internalized guilt over what happened to the Native Americans, Australian Aboriginals, and other indigenous groups. It explains why the language of indigenousness is so important to many people's understanding of the conflict and how they twist and turn to ignore all evidence of a Jewish presence in the land. It is also why such an absolutist stance is taken. "Destroy Israel and the Native Hawaiians" will be avenged. Any thoughts?

People defend these protests because the real estate is in the WB and that makes the synagogue an appropriate place of protest but the protests go way behind their alleged target. They call for the complete destruction of Israel and do violence against Jews, attempting to storm the synagogue and hurt those inside. I am tired of people who are very intelligent on all other forms of racism get dumb dumb when it comes to racism against Jews.

This controversial essay caused a bit of a stir when it first appeared 16 years. The basic theory is that you can't really have epic Jewish fantasy in the way you can do for other cultures because, tl/dr, Jews as a whole aren't going to be prone to romanticize medieval like settings because those were bad times for us overall and Judaism is a collective and technical religion that is very wary of dualism or the idea that God can be meaningfully challenged. Fantasy generally needs something individualistic so the hero can go on the epic quest and a Big Bad that can be defeated. Any thoughts?

Does anybody know what is happening in Belgium? They recently arrested three mohels for essentially performing a brit millah without a medical license. Belgian authorities say that they were acting on tips from within the Jewish community, which I find kind of hard to believe, and Rabbis are telling the Jews of Belgium to get out.

I know that the Magen David has a long and complicated history as a Jewish symbol but when did Jews really start wearing the Magen David, miniature Mezuzahs, and Chai symbols as necklaces in the way that Christians would wear a cross or crucifixes. My attempts at researching this has not led to really any firm dates. It seems pretty modern, like 20th century, to me personally but I think the Rambam grudgingly stated that Jews can wear a mezuzah as necklace as long as we don't attribute magical powers to it. Does anybody know when Jews started wearing Jewish religious/identity necklaces in mass, well as much of a mass as our small and contradictory community can manage.

I was today years old when I learned that the reason we have pets is because a Zoologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel Aharoni, domesticated the Syrian hamster for use in labs. All domestic pet hamsters are descendants of his experimentations.

In this time of growing Jew hatred, people with Jewish fathers, who aren't recognized as Jewish under Halacha, will be targets of Jew hatred because Jew haters really don't care about the finer points of Jewish law and just want to go after as many Jews as possible. How should the Jewish community deal with this? I'm somewhat of two minds. On the one hand, allowing Jew haters to define who is and who is not a Jew takes away our right to determine our own community. On the other hand, they are being targeted and persecuted as Jews and denying them community with us is really ungenerous.