"Work Sets You Free" -- sign over Auschwitz
Preamble:
In America, a Jewish person may or may not be white.
Article I:
Section 1.
This fact of ones’ Jewish status as either white or not white is independent of ones’ own self-identification. Let me explain.
First, “White” itself is a social category that relies on a recognition from other members coded or labeled as “members of that category” – in this case “white” -- to similarly recognize someone as also belonging to that category, or not. In America, to be white means to belong to a particular category or class of people that is bound up with specific histories and legacies, including the white hegemonic power structure (the structure of the ruling class, which tends to be more white, more Christian, more wealthy, more voiced, more of a political body, and more agent). This affiliation then creates white privilege, which is a fancy way of saying the ability to move through society with a kind of invisibility, a kind of immunity, and a kind of ease that others may not possess. The word “privilege” does not mean absolute privilege. The privileges may be flagrant, partial, or discrete, but they refer to the hegemonic social bodies’ recognition of other bodies as a microcosmic expression of a white macrocosm, a unit of white measure.
Prior to World War II, no Jewish Americans were white and all were cultural Other. After World War II, Jewish Americans were afforded variable access to “being white,” often dependent on geographic variation, with areas that were more heavily diasporic-Jewish being more “willing” to accept Jews in as units-of-white-bodies while less-diasporic areas maintained that Jews were and are “cultural others.” This follows a pattern of perceptual distribution that is predictable, with Jews-as-whites found in more urban, more multicultural, or more tolerant areas whereas Jews-as-non-whites can be found in regions where race tends to be more of a sticky wicket. This geographic landscape may be psychological and independent of where a particular person sizing up someone’s whiteness physically lives. We find this topography highly present in the perceptions of all racists, for example. Anti-Semitism – which I will define shortly -- in the United States has been rising steadily in recent years. Anti-Semitism’s history is nearly unprecedented in global thought, going back to Greco-Roman times. In contemporary Rome, one can still walk through the Jewish Quarter, where Jewish merchants who came to Rome were forced to live in small and squalid quarters, for example. Later, around the time of the Crusades, Jews were murdered en masse, exiled by law from England in 1290 and in many other parts of Europe, forced to live in enclosed spaces under deep surveillance and curfew, or charged with blood libel – the belief that Jewish people were rounding up Christian babies and using their blood in their pagan rituals. Yes. This was a real belief that people had. If it sounds a little Medieval, that is because it is; however, there is a similarly bizarre belief today that persists amongst anti-Semites which states that Jews secretly control the entire world vis-à-vis a New World Order which features Jewish-controlled international banking and media as well as Government influence. Some less-thoughtful anti-Semites today even believe that Jews are shape-shifting reptiles from another planet. This is more common of a belief than one would ever imagine among the unhinged racist right.
In 2014, there were 21% more documented incidents of open, injurious anti-Semitism than from the year before, although doubtlessly most incidents of anti-Semitic behavior go without report. Earlier this year, Jeffrey Goldberg, writing for The Atlantic, wondered outright “Is it Time for Jews to Leave Europe?” Closer to home, it is reported that there are anti-Semitic incidents in NY every week and that “anti-Semitism has become fashionable again.”
For the purposes of this discussion, anti-Semitism will be defined loosely in contemporary terms as “the belief that Jewish people are inferior, are worthy of hostility or prejudice, or are worthy of negative and predictable stereotypes.” A few more refinements of this definition would include the following definition from Prof. Helen Fein, a scholar of Jewish genocide: “a persisting latent structure of hostile beliefs towards Jews as a collective manifested in individuals as attitudes, and in culture as myth, ideology, folklore and imagery, and in actions—social or legal discrimination, political mobilization against the Jews, and collective or state violence—which results in and/or is designed to distance, displace, or destroy Jews as Jews.” Building from Fein’s definition, scholar Deitz Bering, adds “"Jews are not only partially but totally bad by nature, that is, their bad traits are incorrigible. Because of this bad nature: (1) Jews have to be seen not as individuals but as a collective. (2) Jews remain essentially alien in the surrounding societies. (3) Jews bring disaster on their 'host societies' or on the whole world, they are doing it secretly, therefore the anti-Semites feel obliged to unmask the conspiratorial, bad Jewish character." Other beliefs about Jews that The U.S. State Department says, and I paraphrase, “It’s really hard to define anti-Semitism, but you sure know it when you see it because it is hatred towards Jews.”
Image of a vandalized garage in Brooklyn, NY
However, most Jews (especially older Jewish people, and moreso Jewish people with immediate familial connections to the Holocaust) know they are Jewish regardless of how white Americans choose to encode and decode their bodies.
This may be similar to the notion of “passing” by other non-whites.
Section 2.
In the case of current Presidential contender, Bernie Sanders, some white people may accept his Jewish status as “white,” but for a certain group of the American public, they will always reject his claim to “whiteness.” This is because Bernie Sanders is Jewish, along with a minority 2.2% of the American population. “Jewish” may refer to ones’ race, ones’ ethnicity, or ones’ religious background. It may even refer to some combination of these. Sanders’ family were Polish immigrants; his father’s family were murdered in concentration camps in the Holocaust before moving to Brooklyn, NY – Sanders attended Hebrew school on weekends, studying Torah. After attending college, he spent six months in Israel on a kibbutz, a kind of labor-oriented farming commune founded on Socialist principles like equity for all people; this would undoubtedly lead to Sanders’ later Democratic Socialist principles. Once in politics, Sanders never pushed the issue about his Jewish-ness, and with good reason: some Americans, a fairly sizable group of people really, would tend to regard Sanders, first and foremost, as “a Jew,” which precludes any claim to whiteness and thus to equal access, that he might have afforded to him. This opens Sanders up to something troubling -- Anti-semitism. In fact, during his run as Mayor of Burlington, VT, Sanders found himself attacked by anti-Semitic smears, which he ignored.
As a Jew, you learn to ignore people when they question the legitimacy of your existence. This is a survival mechanism for those of us from families who went through the Holocaust and who now live in a nation teeming with rampant white supremacy.
Article II.
Section 1.
A recent diary about Bernie Sanders’ courtship of “The Trump supporter” – and the conversation that it gave rise to, with thousands upon thousands of statements in this and other spin-off diaries -- left me feeling chilled to the bone, sick, and weary inside. The diary, written by a rightfully concerned African-American writer, expressed fears that if Sanders tried to “reach out and attract Donald Trump supporters,” then the Democratic Party would “embrace the very instruments of our oppression.” I share that terror about racists of as instruments of “our oppression.” Where we part ways is how we interpret what is actually going on with Bernie Sanders’ — a Jewish man’s — engagements with said racists, which takes on a very specific and irrefutable valence when examined through the lens of his Jewish identity.
The diary went on to say that “I’m a Democrat because I don’t have to share space with Klansmen. They can go to hell in a handbasket.”
Good. I could not agree more that “Klansmen” are a poor demographic for Bernie Sanders to target and can indeed “go to Hell in a hand basket.”
But the diarist, and so many commenters there, seem to have forgotten a fundamental point, the most fundamental of all points:
Bernie Sanders is Jewish, and no Jew can “attract” the votes or interest of ANY “Klansmen,” or even garden-variety racist bigot BECAUSE Sanders is, specifically, Jewish. And American racists reject Jews as “not white.”
Please read that again.
People responding to this diary (and other diaries) expressed some very curious calculations, wavering from cynical to naïve to frankly partisan, in trying to understand Sanders’ so-called courtship of the disaffected Trump voter. The first premise stated was that “all Trump voters are racists against all black people” without accounting for how anti-black racists would subsequently take any interest at all in a Jewish politician whose message to these prospective voters was pretty gosh darned specific, with Bernie Sanders specifically and point-blank telling them:
“What I'm suggesting is that what Trump has done with some success has taken that anger, taken those fears -- which are legitimate -- and converted them into anger against Mexicans, anger against Muslims."
For these hardline racists, no amount of reasoned appeals would humanly pry them away from their racist perceptions of Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans, or their anti-Semitic hatred of Jews. They would as soon as vote for Barack Obama. So who exactly was Sanders talking to? Commenters here began to wonder. They began to say, “Well he is either a racist himself, trying to court the Nazi vote, or he is running a foolish campaign.”
This ignored the actual point of Sanders’ appeal (which was not to racist Trump voters but to voters who rejected Trump-as-a-racist-zealot, by and large) AND mistook his audience for “racist Trump supporters,” who again, would have negative-zero interest in voting for a Jew, a heretic, an Other, the downfall of all of humanity. It is evident that Sanders was making an appeal, however, to people who might normally vote for the Republican front-runner but who found Trump’s racist rhetoric a bridge too far.
Sanders went on to state:
“For his working class and middle class support…we can make the case that if we really want to address the issues that people are concerned about...we need policies that bring us together, that take on the greed of Wall Street the greed of corporate America and create a middle class that works for all of us rather than an economy that works just for a few.”
This is an appeal to populism. It is not an appeal to racism. Racists CANNOT find Sanders “appealing.” Sanders is a Jewish man. Racists might as well be a type of exotic insect whose carapaces are covered in a fine layer of ultra-sensitive hairs since even the tiniest bit of existential threat to their whiteness leave them quivering. Jews threaten whiteness. Jews exist in a liminal state between white and not white. Jews are the ultimate in sliding signifiers. Jews trespass upon white racial purity more than nearly any other American group. Jews are a transgressive force. Perhaps the most interesting question mark about Jewish whiteness comes from Charleston’s Emanuel Baptist Church white supremacist mass murderer, Dylann Roof, who writes in his own manifesto a section dedicated to Jews:
“Unlike many White nationalists [my emphasis], I am of the opinion that the majority of American and European jews are White [**so Roof is stating that most white nationalists do not view Jews as white]. In my opinion the issues with Jews is not their blood, but their identity. I think that if we could somehow destroy the Jewish identity, then they wouldn’t cause much of a problem. The problem is that Jews look White, and in many cases are White, yet they see themselves as minorities. Just like niggers, most Jews are always thinking about the fact that they are Jewish. The other issue is that they network. If we could somehow turn every Jew blue for 24 hours, I think there would be a mass awakening, because people would be able to see plainly what is going on. I don’t pretend to understand why Jews do what they do. They are enigma.”
Section II.
Returning to the original diary in question, the conversation in the diary devolved into reductio ad absurdum, argument from “reducing to the absurd” which pushes an argument past its absolute logical limits in an attempt to justify the way that Bernie Sanders (Jewish person!) was trying to court racist Trump voters and moreover, to actually attempting to court neo-Nazi votes. The diarist posted video “proof” demonstrating how terrible Bernie Sanders’ appeal to neo-Nazi Trump voters would be for the Democratic Party, should Sanders draw these prospective voters into the fold, sharing a video clip of white supremacists shouting “Sieg Heil!”
The argument then went as follows:
All Trump supporters are racists. Some Trump supporters are neo-Nazis. Sanders wants all Trump supporters’ votes. Therefore Sanders wants neo-Nazis’ votes.
How to even begin unpacking such a fallacious line of reasoning?
Sieg Heil!
Here the diarist forgets that Sanders is not white here, forgets utterly that he, as a Jew, would never seek out the embrace of those who would use those terrible words. The diarist forgets that the despicable neo-Nazis in these videos are not “disaffected” Trump voters up for grabs but rather unshakable, unflinching, and wholly committed Trump supporters who find, in Trump, a state-sanctioned conduit for their primordial rage towards ALL Others (most apparent, in their appropriation of Nazism, toward no less than Sanders’ own ilk: Jews). The diarist forgets completely what it means to be a Jew, that it means to be a Jew, that a Jew is not “white” to these people, and that the Holocaust is still with us today. The warning for us to “Never Forget” the systematic, calculated annihilation of six million Jewish bodies at the hands of Nazi Germany not yet a century ago is either conveniently or naively forgotten. This forgetting is unacceptable. This forgetting resuscitates the spectre of Joseph Mengele, a Third Reich state-sponsored serial killer a.k.a. “doctor” who performed acts so sadistic upon Jewish bodies that he was named “the Angel of Death.” From such Nazis, we know about Treblinka soap, created from the fat of Jewish bodies, and lamp shades rendered from the very skin of Jews. The fact is that Sanders, upon hearing “Sieg Heil,” would hear the burning sound of the skin of his relatives, of my relatives, children, mothers, babies, aunts, fathers, grandmothers, human beings as they were burned alive in ovens or as they were rounded up and placed into chambers where they were asphyxiated with the insecticide Zyklon-B, a form of cyanide, that is what a Jew hears when he hears “Sieg Heil!”
Survivors of Dachau Concentration Camp Show How Jews are Burned in Ovens
A Jew, upon hearing “Sieg Heil!” does not hear a potential voting bloc.
To say otherwise is sickness. Madness. Badness. Lies.
This is what “Sieg Heil” sounds like to a Jew
Article III.
Section I.
Bernie Sanders is a Jew.
As numerous people – liberals! -- continued to illogically equate the quite-Jewish Sanders’ admonishment to racist Trump voters to stop fearing and blaming the Other with his courtship of white supremacist voters, this Jewish woman protested, objected, pointed out that Sanders was a Jewish person, that his experience was that of a Jewish man, that neo-Nazis would not support him and that he would not support neo-Nazis, and yet this Jewish woman was told that I was “finger-wagging,” “tedious,” “bonkers,” and that my visceral disgust was “an imaginary problem.”
I remain completely and utterly disgusted by this idea been touted by anyone that a Jewish man is out soliciting the neo-Nazi vote. I cannot unsee what I have now seen. I am saddened by this. My keyboard hears the spilling of my heart, beating its pounding blood down upon it, my fevered pulse typing through a kind of mental shock and fugue. It has worn me down to a fine-tipped point, a primordial pen spitting out its wounds. It is a vulnerable place at the nexus of all sweltering emotion.
For two nights, I have been unable to sleep well over this matter, a matter which to my eyes appears to be born of a combination of people-of-color’s rightful and real terror of white supremacists (which any Jew shares) as well as a complete misreading of Sanders’ ontological status as a Jew. Since the very beginning of this election, I have stated my concern that Sanders would not be “accepted” as a Jew, and now, instead, he has being reinvented in a counterfactual manner as a white man, a neo-Nazi lover and sympathizer, on bended knee begging for the votes of those who would shout “Sieg Heil!” and shove him in an oven too, just like they would take the body of a black person and hoist it up a tree with a rope. The distinction between Other and Other is worth nothing in the eyes of the bigoted racist.
Section 2.
Okay. We’re going to have stop right here to point something out that apparently a lot of people simply do not realize or do not want to accept:
Even if Sanders, a Jewish man whose family died in the Holocaust, had forgotten all about the murder of his own family members at the hands of racists and actually decided to be callous and cynical enough to angle for the “racist” vote (which has not happened, incidentally, at least not on any appeal whatsoever made TO racism — and the only dog-whistles I hear are about Sanders being a self-hating Jew willing to “overlook” the genocide of his people to get votes from people who will never vote for him, ergo he is seen as “dim-wittted, or else just “lumping” Jews in with white people), the key to this is that neo-Nazis hate Jews and would never vote for, or support, or let their daughters marry, or do much other than burn a cross on the lawn of a Jew. And it is not only neo-Nazis who hate Jews, but that was the very argument made about whose votes Sanders was after. Run-of-the-mill racists are no bigger fans of Jews than the mouth-breathing racial purity-freaks who view white people as the very best people in the world (see: Anders Breivik). Southern Poverty Law Center sheds light on the way that Jews are seen as a threat not only to whiteness but also to white supremacy and white dominance, the wet dream of every minor-league bigot in the United States, with mouthpiece Kevin McDonald calling Jews “a virus” who infect the success of other Americans, so that hatred of Jews by gentiles is a “logical reaction to Jewish success.”
Perhaps some people are a little nervous, then, of Sanders, a Jew, attaining as much success as he has in this particular Presidential race. Perhaps some people are okay with then saying that Sanders will “do anything” to achieve the white, racist vote. Perhaps some people have simply misstated their point. If so, it should be explained.
And as if he could achieve that racist vote!
And as if it were NOT anti-Semitic, either intentionally or otherwise, for gentiles (non-Jewish people) to judge the actions, and responses, of Jewish people to an appeal for social equality amongst disaffected low-information voters. It is almost like some long-lost Jon Stewart – another Jew! -- skit where the Jewish politician gets down and dirty with the racist voters of America to turn out the vote. Yes, that would be stupid strategy, now wouldn’t it. The problem is, it’s not real. It is not, was not, and will never be Sanders’ strategy to pursue racist votes! He does not have that privilege. Of course, I, as a Jew, am to be ridiculed soundly for suggesting otherwise, even as the comments flooded in, each more absurd than the next, each more mendacious, twisted, and ignorant than the last, reducing me to tears outright for their horrific implications about yet another anti-Semitic trope: that Jews are tricky manipulators who stop at nothing to achieve their nefarious ends. Cue Shylock. Cue that pound of flesh.
I thought better of you.
I guess I too am just another stupid Jew.
In short, the core ideology behind white supremacy, white pride, and racial animus in America specifically is to reject Jews and to blame them for virtually everything wrong with America in very alarming and depraved ways. Sanders is Jewish. He codes AS Jewish too. We have all heard the dog whistles now, sadly, from liberals on this site that Sanders is a Nazi-lover and a Nazi sympathizer, that he appeals to bigots of the worst stripe. This is an anti-Semitic dog whistle that Jews are disloyal to other Jews as well as that Jews are opportunistic, hapless, and Machiavellian. If some used that dog whistle by accident, these people should apologize for that. Quietism, or worse, doubling-down, when accidentally offending people of other social categories to which one does not belong, has always elicited the liberal-Left admonition to “Listen to those who express hurt.”
- When African-Americans claim offense, liberals listen to them and their hurt.
- When Native-Americans claim offense, liberals listen to them and their hurt.
- When Latinos claim offense, liberals listen to them and their hurt.
- When women claim offense, liberals listen to them and their hurt.
- And when Jews claim offense, liberals damned well should listen to them and their hurt; that has not happened, and thus I write this diary, not demanding a fair hearing, per se, but expressing the offense, injustice, and pain separate from all partisan hopes and dreams.
Therefore Sanders will not be “appealing” (meaning both “be attractive to” as well as “to attract”) racist white voters anytime soon. I also am quite sure he is aware of his own Jewishness. White privilege is a real thing, a very serious thing, and Sanders possesses this, but that so-called privilege – to be invisible or to gain access to the hegemonic coffers of white America -- is checked right at the door when the racist Right fails to accept you or to let you “pass” as a Jewish person, never a “white” person. Apparently, through whatever woeful amnesia, some non-Jewish people on this site have completely forgotten about the depth of neo-Nazi animus towards Jews (even though the Holocaust is pretty hard to forget). They have, in fact, forgotten about this so badly that they have forgotten that Sanders himself is Jewish or what “Jew” means, ontologically and existentially. They imply that Sanders could be, to use the African-American term for the same thing, “an Uncle Tom,” a traitor to his own race. That is horrifying enough. But worse yet, they forget one key fact: Jews cannot BE traitors to their own race if neo-Nazis and other racists perceive someone who is Jewish as non-white, which they do.
Section 3.
Further, I took the liberty, after my first sleepless and sad night where I felt like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, to wade into the disguising filth of Stormfront.org, since after all, the claim made was that because Sanders was courting disaffected Trump voters, therefore Sanders is courting neo-Nazi voters (further illustrated with probably quite true assertions that some Trump supporters were shouting every Jew’s favorite thing to hear at any rally, “Seig Heil!”). Not only are there numerous problems with this statement that have already been well reviewed by many people, the glaring part that has not been addressed in full is the false premise that “Sanders CAN court neo-Nazi or other racist voters.”
As a Jewish man, he does not actually have the privilege to do so, however. He is not coded as “white” but as “cultural Other” — a nice name for what Stormfront expresses towards him.
So that you don’t have to wade through the filth of Stormfront, let me briefly quote from one of the top threads there today, which has 71 pages of replies, by a Stormfront neo-Nazi racist member named “neitmcnamara” who starts a post called “Why I refuse to vote for Trump.” Clearly, he is a “disaffected” Republican who we would expect to vote for Trump.
Here are some key tidbits of his post:
So, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially given that we're now only a year away from the general elections. Trump has been just as vocal over the past couple months and has extended his rhetoric past just Mexicans. He's now making waves for things he's said about Muslims, Refugees, and the Black Lives Matter crowd.
Before I go any further, I will say that I do agree with what he has said on the above topics. My problem is, as it was before, that I don't think he's genuine about the things he is saying. I think he's saying them to get attention. I still think he's a media whore. I think he's an egomaniac who loves the attention. So, he'll say whatever outlandish stuff he can say to get him headlines and column inches. But that's no longer my main objection to him. Why? Because, while I think he's doing this for attention, and originally probably never thought in a million years he'd have a shot at the presidency, I do believe that he would like to be the President. It'd be the ultimate ego stroke for him.
No, my main objection to him now, and this was something that has bothered me and others on this forum and has been mentioned a-plenty, is his ties to the Jews. Are the violent, criminal, thug blacks a problem in this country? Yes. Are the violent, criminal, rapist Mexican illegals a problem in this country? Yes. Are the violent, criminal, terrorist Muslims a problem in this country? Yes. But we all know who's the biggest problem in this country and in this world: The Jews! And Trump has business and familial ties with the Jews. He is and will be working hand-in-hand with the Juden and the ZOG Machine. That is basically what the American Government is. Has he ever criticized the Jews? Not once. And he won't. They're practically family.
My emphasis. Why does a Stormfront member not support Trump? Because Trump is allied with Jews, and Jews are “the biggest problem” in the entire world, worst according to this poster than “violent, criminal, rapist,” and “terrorist” Mexicans and Muslims. He goes on to say:
Trump will only do what the Jews want, same as any other President in this ZOGovernment.
... Am I saying other candidates are any better? Not at all. Once again we find ourselves stuck between a rock and a hard place, being forced to choose between the lesser of evils. But all of those lesser evils are still working for the Ultimate Evil: The Jewish Masters. If we elect Trump, or any of these Zionist Clowns, when we wake up on November 9th, 2016, our country will be worse off than it was. And white people will continue to get shafted. I, for one, will not be to blame for this when it happens. I will not be voting for Trump. Or any of them.
...
I'm not going to vote for a pro-Jew [Trump]. Please explain to me how that lines up with White Nationalism.
...
Stop being complacent with the crumbs that are being forced upon you by the Jews. Because, trust me, this guy is a part of the ZOG* machine just as much as Obama, Hillary, Bush, et. al. And if he gets in office he'll be selling whites down the river just as fast as his Democrat counterparts. Trump doesn't believe in white power.
(*ZOG = “Zionist Occupied Government” or the conspiracy theory that the US Government and world Governments are secretly controlled by Jews)
Nazis and racists will not accept Sanders, a Jewish man, for President. They view Jews with this much disdain and hatred. They believe in vast conspiracy theories about Jews ruining the white race. Sanders is not courting the votes of these people. Sanders realizes he is Jewish. They also realize he is Jewish. They attempt to go on for several pages to tell this disaffected racist to vote for Trump to avoid a “multicultural” world, calling Trump “the lesser of two-evils.” One page in and their hate has so far been directed almost exclusively at Jews with a dash of hatred towards Muslims, Mexicans, Black folks, and assorted immigrants.
Someone argues on behalf of poor, maligned Trump:
Is it not pro-White to deport ~30 million non-White invaders? Besides, why would somebody who is "beholden to Jews" keep a copy of Hitler's speeches on his nightstand and boldly admit to it as well.
Their terror of and hatred towards Jewish people is palpable. Their admiration for Hitler is also note-worthy. Again, I see no potential for them to vote “for a Jewish person,” and the only one running in this election is Sanders, therefore I see no interest at all in Sanders (and again, Sanders is quite aware of this, as he himself is a Jew, and Jews are quite AWARE of the way that neo-Nazis and racists view them, just as plainly as African-Americans are aware of how they are viewed by the same neo-Nazis).
I am on page 3 and have seen no mention of Sanders. As a Jew, he would never be a viable consideration. The neo-Nazi racists are definitely not going to exempt Sanders from their ideological desire for a pure white America as in their minds, Sanders is “dirty,” a Jew, untouchable, Other, unacceptable, like “the chimp in the white house” that one member mentions (page 3/71). And yes, these would be the people shouting “Seig Heil” at Trump rallies. And while many think the OP is a “troll” for not voting for Trump, this is specifically because they are terrified of the prospects of a further Jewish-owned America that is kind to Muslims, Mexicans, and “negroes.”
Bernie Sanders is not trying to court these voters. He could not court these voters. These voters, these virulent Trump supporters, are racists who do not recognize Sanders as white any more than they recognize Barack Obama as white. However, to say that he is trying is not only to say he is cozying up with the same people who killed his family but to say that he embraces that for political purposes, and it is a cynical and ugly thing to say, outright, as well as being counterfactual and ungrounded in any fact whatsoever, period, at all.
Sanders’ Jewishness is the elephant in the room in this entire conversation, and apparently so many people are either so privileged or so partisan that they do not know — or do not care — what “Jewish” means to many non-white bigots, that it means to kill, through genocide and incineration, mountains of Jewish bodies so that they are no more than ash, to long for a world purified of the filth of Jewish ash, and to perceive Jewish victims of this as actual, active, agent participants, in their own self-immolation, which is perversion outright. What to the Jew is the Fourth of July? The allegation is either grounded in ugliness or else sheer ignorance, it is anti-Semitic on its face, it accuses Jews of willful undermining of other Jews, it accuses Jews of a political calculus that would undermine the perpetuation of their very own people in a white-supremacist America, and I will have none of it as a Jewish person who has been on the receiving end of white-supremacist hatred myself, as a woman whose own family also died due to the Holocaust. People who wish to forget about the signs over Nazi death camps that “Work Makes You Free,” that to be Jewish is to forever remember the charred, mangled, and tortured bodies of your ancestors, and that to be Jewish is to feel your stomach drop when you hear the words of Nazis – like the chants of “Sieg Heil”-- and all of those who support white supremacy (whether it be directed at Jews or at other people who are similarly with in their scopes) – these people have forgotten the way.
So this is, again, the elephant in the room. It cannot be overlooked: Sanders is a Jewish man. You cannot negate that. You cannot make it what it is not. You cannot plaster it over with some other interpretation of the truth. You cannot negate the very real pain and offense it causes to overlook that, or to refashion Sanders, or any other Jewish person from a Holocaust family or from the Jewish diaspora which fled persecution, as a newly-minted white man conspiring with bigots and racists either. He does not have that capability or capacity. His Jewishness precludes any embrace from racist white America, neo-Nazis in the extreme, and “soft racists” as well. If people wish to sculpt his image into the new Trump, that is their own paranoia and imagination, ungrounded in fact, rooted in fiction, spawning terrifying and dizzying division. The palimpsest of Sanders’ Jewishness, however, cannot be papered over.
As someone who makes it a deep practice listen to the pain of others, I would simply ask people to “Never Forget.”
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, says this, which we would be wise to remember in this particular conversation:
History has shown that wherever anti-Semitism has gone unchecked, the persecution of others has been present or not far behind. Defeating anti-Semitism must be a cause of great importance not only for Jews, but for all people who value humanity and justice.
It is not a surprise to me that the Holocaust Museum notes the intersectionality between all persecuted minorities in the United States. To support equal rights, we must support equal rights for all: for Jews, for Muslims, for African-Americans, for women, for LGBTQ persons, and for all human beings.
We cannot let other forces get in the way of that goal.
There is no victory to be found down that path. None.
Everyone loses in that fight.
We must now ask ourselves if we have gone too far, and if so, how we may make amends. This is no longer about an election. It is no longer about who wins. It is about who does not lose. There is no room for blood sport in poetry.
Banksy: There is Always Hope
Note and apology: this diary is incomplete. Sadly, I was working on it, and my computer crashed and failed to save my original draft. I have attempted to restore it as well as possible but am certain that it remains somewhat of a fragment. It has been an entire day in the writing, and it has been a very difficult thing to write for many reasons, some very personal.
Solidarity.
These are not the lies we tell ourselves.
