Behind the Aegis
Behind the Aegis's Journal(JEWISH GROUP) With White Nationalism Emboldened, American Jews Consider Exit Strategies
THIS IS THE JEWIHS GROUP! RESPECT!WASHINGTON — The day after the election in 2016, Nancy Goldstein, a 55-year-old Brooklyn writer and academic who has never been to Israel, opened up her computer and began the process of applying for Israeli citizenship.
In Washington, D.C., 49-year-old entrepreneur David Bennahum began the complex process of moving his family and startup business to Montreal, finally establishing all four of them and the company there in July.
The one thing they had in common: They are both Jewish. And both had looked at the campaign of Donald J. Trump and decided they would be safer as Jews and as liberals if they had an exit strategy from America.
The question of living as a Jew in America under Trump has provoked varying degrees of anxiety in the year since he tweeted out an anti-Semitic meme about Hillary Clinton — the infamous Star of David tweet — and then sought to defend it as a “Sheriff’s Star.” That’s when I first started to hear the half-panicked, half-joking conversations about exit strategies if Trump won and considerations about where to go if America were ever to become unsafe. A friend whose grandparents had fled Germany talked to her mother about going back there. A half-Jewish, half-Australian friend decided to pursue — and ultimately secured — dual citizenship and an Australian passport.
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Can't say I am surprised. I am also not surprised by Jews who are finally waking up to an uncomfortable truth. Of course, there are those who think Jews aren't a "real" minority and discussion of anti-Semitism should be on their (non-Jewish) terms! They, ignorantly (or stupidly) think the only privileges which exist in this country come in "white" or "male" variety and completely ignore, sidestep, or diminish privileges such as "heterosexual", "cisgender", and yes, "Christian", among others. It explains why more than a few supposed allies to diversity and equality completely ignored the anti-Semitism from Charlottesville, and when it became obvious they could no longer ignore it, decided to complain about Jews who didn't preform to their (again, NON-JEWISH) standards. The Jews ranged from Sanders to the Kushners. It also explains why more than a few feel "privileged" to come into Jewish spaces and say whatever they fucking please because "Jews aren't a minority worthy of respect"!
(JEWISH GROUP) Poll: 1 in 3 UK Jews considered emigrating over anti-Semitism
THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!37% of over 7,000 respondents say they have been concealing signs that would indicate that they’re Jewish; 767 anti-Semitic attacks in first half of 2017
The findings are part of a report published Sunday by the Campaign Against Antisemitism watchdog group, which conducted since 2015 interviews with more than 10,000 British Jews together with the YouGov market research company.
In interviews conducted in 2016 and 2017 with a combined sample population of 7,156 respondents, 37 percent of them said they have been concealing in public signs that would indicate that they are Jewish.
Only 59% of the respondents since 2015 said they feel welcome in the United Kingdom and 17% said they feel unwelcome.
Only 39% of respondents from 2015 onward said they trust justice authorities to prosecute perpetrators of anti-Semitic hate crimes.
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Why the Charlottesville Marchers Were Obsessed With Jews
The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was ostensibly about protecting a statue of Robert E. Lee. It was about asserting the legitimacy of “white culture” and white supremacy, and defending the legacy of the Confederacy.
So why did the demonstrators chant anti-Semitic lines like “Jews will not replace us”?
The demonstration was suffused with anti-black racism, but also with anti-Semitism. Marchers displayed swastikas on banners and shouted slogans like “blood and soil,” a phrase drawn from Nazi ideology. “This city is run by Jewish communists and criminal niggers,” one demonstrator told Vice News’ Elspeth Reeve during their march. As Jews prayed at a local synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, men dressed in fatigues carrying semi-automatic rifles stood across the street, according to the temple’s president. Nazi websites posted a call to burn their building. As a precautionary measure, congregants had removed their Torah scrolls and exited through the back of the building when they were done praying.
“This is an agenda about celebrating the enslavement of Africans and their descendants, and celebrating those that then fought to preserve that terrible machine of white supremacy and human enslavement,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL. “And yet, somehow, they’re all wearing shirts that talk about Adolf Hitler.”
For these demonstrators, though, the connection between African Americans and Jews is clear. In the minds of white supremacists like David Duke, there is a straight line from anti-blackness to anti-Judaism. That logic is powerful and important. The durability of anti-Semitic tropes, and the ease with which they slide into all displays of bigotry, is a chilling reminder that the hatreds of our time rhyme with history and are easily channeled through timeless anti-Semitic canards.
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(JEWISH GROUP) Does Your Progressivism Include Jews?
THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!In the wake of Charlottesville and the literal Nazis chanting “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us,” there’s been an outpouring of sympathy and solidarity from non-Jews in the wake of Charlottesville.
Along with the (very welcome) renewed discussion about anti-Semitism on the right, some of us are also taking this opportunity to push forward conversations about anti-Semitism on the left. It’s real, and it’s a problem, and we need to do something about it.
Friends on the left, this is your reminder that denouncing literal Nazis is the easy part. Being an ally to your Jewish friends also requires the uncomfortable work of fighting anti-Semitism in progressive spaces and recognizing how rhetoric and attitudes on the left contribute to hatred and violence against Jews.
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Demands that individual group members answer for others are bad. You can’t ask random Black people why there is so much “Black on Black crime,” and you can’t demand that random Muslims denounce ISIS. For the same reason, demanding that individual diaspora Jews explain/answer for/denounce Israeli policies is anti-Semitic. Doubly so if off-topic (e.g. anti-Israel protests at Hillel bake sales).
Listen to Jews when they tell you about anti-Semitism. Don’t talk over Jews trying to point out that something is anti-Semitic. Dismissing claims of anti-Semitism as “not that bad” or refusing to classify Jews as a discriminated-against minority is unacceptable. Especially if the reasoning is that Jews “have so much power” or in lefty-speak “are so privileged.” Don’t even think of accusing Jews of using anti-Semitism as a false flag to undermine efforts to oppose Israeli policy, or of “playing the anti-Semitism card.”
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Oregonians Greet Northbound Eclipse Tourists With Anti-Semitic Overpass Banners
Californians driving to Oregon see signs on I-5 saying "UNJEW HUMANITY" and "Jewish Financing Available."
Beth Dershowitz, her husband Michael and their children decided to drive from their home in Sacramento to Oregon this week because they wanted to see something unusual—Monday's solar eclipse.
Instead, on their drive up I-5, the Dershowitzes, who are Jewish, saw something they were not expecting.
"We witnessed two seemingly coordinated displays of hate on overpasses yesterday heading north," Beth Dershowitz tells WW via email.
The first was somewhere south of Eugene. It said "UNJEW HUMANITY." We were shaken but continued out of the rural area. Then I saw another near Salem, and my husband pulled to the shoulder to get a picture."
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Doesn't seem to be the work of neo-Nazis, now does it?! 
(JEWISH GROUP) The Lefts Blind Spot: Anti-Semitism
THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!Babe.net describes itself as a website “for girls who don’t give a fuck.” True to form, after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville they published a piece titled “We’re not going to fuck you, you Nazi losers,” by Dana Schwartz. “If you’re a 20-year-old pretending to be a Nazi, you’re not a bad boy; you’re a racist virgin so humiliated by his own sexual inadequacy and terrified at rejection that you’ll blame your feelings of weakness on some unseen Liberal Agenda,” she wrote. “First and foremost, the neo-Nazi alt-right movement is about racism. Second, it’s about sexual insecurity.”
Jezebel’s Kelly Stout did not see the essay as an act of criticism or humor by an established journalist, comedian, and young adult author. Instead, in her own essay (let that sink in), she accused Schwartz of being “a white woman who uses a tragedy to promote her brand” and that she “should be embarrassed.” Stout concludes by arguing that “the Nazis in Virginia weren’t really there to protest white women’s right to be alive. And the violence in Virginia does not cry out for a response from sassy white women who know a thing or two about virgins living in their moms’ basements.”
But here’s the catch: Schwartz is a prominent Jewish journalist and an outspoken target of white supremacist harassment. Assuming Stout is aware of the Nazi position on Jewry, and of Schwartz’s identity, it’s ambiguous whether she is arguing that whiteness cancels out Jewishness or whether she hadn’t picked up on Schwartz’s identity beyond “white woman.”
It’s certainly true that structural racism in the U.S. does not primarily target Jews, and to focus only on anti-Semitism would be myopic. But it’s a stretch to say that Jews responding in a personal way to a neo-Nazi rally are centering themselves, and it’s untenable in the context of Charlottesville to discuss white Jews simply as white people in need of etiquette instruction from fellow-progressive. While we should defend groups we’re not part of, we are also part of a group currently under attack.
Progressives in America pride themselves on being hyperaware of the persecution of minority groups of all kinds—blacks, women, LGBT people, immigrants—but they have a blind spot. The left first needs to recognize the very real, immediate threat of anti-Semitism in Trump’s America, and to acknowledge anti-Semitism as its own axis of oppression.
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(JEWISH GROUP) What the Lynching of Leo Frank Shows Us About Hate
THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP!! RESPECT, PLEASE!It was a small Southern town, not known for its violence, when a mob of racist and anti-Semitic men rose up, marched through the streets and claimed the life of an innocent person.
This was not Charlottesville last week, but Marietta, Georgia, 102 years ago today. The victim was Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was questionably convicted of murdering a young woman, then lynched by an angry mob. Although more than a century separates these two incidents, the similarities are eerie and painful.
After more than 100 years of struggle and progress, it is dispiriting to think that we are again seeing anti-Semitic mobs marching through our streets.
It is unconscionable that President Donald Trump has, at best, danced around the issue of condemning the neo-Nazis and white supremacists marching in Charlottesville. Trump brought shame to his office by failing a basic test of moral leadership and breaking with decades of precedent of presidents of both parties condemning this kind of bigotry. It is worth nothing that the only people in the public conversation applauding Trump’s remarks are notorious white supremacist David Duke and his fellow traveler Richard Spencer, and their followers.
These bigots ostensibly have reason to gloat. Throughout the 2016 race for the White House, the Trump campaign recycled hateful rhetoric or demonstrated almost inexplicable hostility toward Mexicans, Muslims, Jews, women and other minorities. In the past 18 months, the Anti-Defamation League has recorded an uptick in white supremacist recruiting at colleges and universities. Anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise, including the second desecration of the Holocaust memorial in Boston.
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See: This story in GD, and a biography of Leo Frank, also in GD. Please go to both and kick them. MAKE people see those posts.
What the Lynching of Leo Frank Shows Us About Hate
It was a small Southern town, not known for its violence, when a mob of racist and anti-Semitic men rose up, marched through the streets and claimed the life of an innocent person.
This was not Charlottesville last week, but Marietta, Georgia, 102 years ago today. The victim was Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was questionably convicted of murdering a young woman, then lynched by an angry mob. Although more than a century separates these two incidents, the similarities are eerie and painful.
After more than 100 years of struggle and progress, it is dispiriting to think that we are again seeing anti-Semitic mobs marching through our streets.
It is unconscionable that President Donald Trump has, at best, danced around the issue of condemning the neo-Nazis and white supremacists marching in Charlottesville. Trump brought shame to his office by failing a basic test of moral leadership and breaking with decades of precedent of presidents of both parties condemning this kind of bigotry. It is worth nothing that the only people in the public conversation applauding Trump’s remarks are notorious white supremacist David Duke and his fellow traveler Richard Spencer, and their followers.
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With Frank's murder, we raw the rebirth of the KKK.
What Jewish Children Learned From Charlottesville
This dirty Jew remembers every penny thrown at him.
The ones thrown from above, as we waited to be picked up from the public pool in my hometown on Long Island, our yarmulkes pinned to wet hair. By then, I was big enough to feel shame for the younger kids, who knew no better than to scurry around, as our local anti-Semites laughed.
I remember walking home from synagogue at my father’s side, in our suits and ties, and seeing a neighbor boy crawling on his hands and knees, surrounded by bullies, this time picking up pennies by force. I remember my father rushing in and righting the boy, and sending those kids scattering.
I remember when, at that same corner, on a different day, those budding neo-Nazis surrounded my sister, and I raced home for help. I remember my parents running back, and my father and mother (all five feet of her) confronting the parents of one of the boys, who then gave him a winking, Trumpian chiding for behavior they didn’t care to condemn. Even if it’s “kids with horns,” they told their son, he should leave other children alone.
I’ll never forget the shame of it. Nor any of the other affronts, from the swastika shaving-creamed on our front door on Halloween to the kid on his bike yelling, “Hitler should have finished you all.” I remember every fistfight, every broken window, every catcall and curse. I remember them because each made me — a fifth-generation American — feel unsafe and unwelcome in my own home, just as was intended.
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The more things change...Dr. Suess takes on the Nazis...in the 1940s!!
And just because this is also relevant:
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