Please don’t recommend this diary — I’m not writing to score points or persuade, but only to inform anyone who wishes to be informed.
There’s quite a few Jewish posters here. Plenty of them are Hillary supporters or undecided. I don’t speak for them but only for myself.
I’ve seen anti-Semitic comments here since I came to this site. I/P (Israel/Palestine) diaries pretty much had to be banned here because they always devolved into a big mess; legitimate criticisms being grouped along with anti-Semitic comments comparing Israelis to Nazis, that kind of thing.
I didn’t participate much in those diaries.
Since Bernie Sanders decided to run for office, frankly, I have not been looking forward to anyone talking about Jewish issues insofar as anti-Semitism is concerned or talking about Bernie Sanders as a Jew. I had some understanding as to how Black posters here must feel when they read ignorant comments about racism — not necessarily racist comments, but ignorant ones.
Since Bernie decided to run I’ve called out two posters who made anti-Semitic comments and one diarist who I felt enabled one of those poster’s comments. I also got annoyed at one of my own “side’s” posters who I felt made an insensitive comment about Bernie being Jewish even though that poster is a Bernie supporter.
My feelings about anti-Semitism have been enlightened, though, by what Bernie has been saying.
They want to divide us. They want to divide us by race, by gender, by sexual orientation, by ethnicity, by religion (or lack thereof) by whatever measure we can be divided.
Who is “they?” I call “them” the oligarchy. They have gone by many names during many historical periods. I call “them” the Greedy Ones who want all the power and all the money and all the power is not enough and all the money is never enough.
As long as we fight about our identity, and then it’s a never-ending fight, isn’t it? — we won’t unite and accomplish anything for those who are suffering the most.
Because there’s never enough, is there? If one group gets something, then the other group feels it’s been shafted. So we are played one against the other and the powers that be stay happy knowing we’ll never unite. Never. Never.
So yes, I hate racism and anti-semitism and homophobia and all the various ignorant types of hatred towards this or that group that stem from fear over there never being enough, that the other guy will get something and I won’t.
But what I hate the most is using these kinds of bigotry as a political tactic, and everyone does it, everyone. That kind of dynamic never, never brings anyone together, it never eradicates the hatred and ignorance, the only thing it accomplishes is to consolidate power.
We’re all suckers. That’s why I value what Bernie Sanders is saying. He sees through the game. He sees who the real enemy is. It isn’t the Republicans. It isn’t Hillary Clinton. It’s the power structure in this country who use both parties to keep us divided.
I am Jewish, I was raised in a very traditional Jewish home. I’m not a secular Jew because my spiritual practice is Buddhism, but it doesn’t matter, I’m still a Jew. It’s a tribal thing, for sure. I know Jews who believe everyone who isn’t Jewish is de facto anti-Semitic — what’s worse is that I understand that feeling.
If you really want to understand the kind of Jew Bernie is, there’s lots of ways to educate yourself. I have an understanding because his people come from the same place in the Old Country, as we call it, as my people. Poland.
Poland was once the center of European Jewry. In the Orthodox Jewish culture there, Talmudic scholarship was given the same fame and reverence as we give rock stars today. The best of the best scholars came to Poland to study under the best of the best teachers.
And then the Holocaust wiped them all out.
Those who came from Poland to America were not all Orthodox Jews but they held the ethos of that culture just the same.
It’s a long story and one I never get tired of learning more about. I love that culture even as I have often been at odds with it.
We are so divided, we are at each others throats. It’s not just at Daily Kos, it’s everywhere in this country where people are suffering. Donald Trump encourages those kinds of feelings, but even he isn’t the enemy. No one person is the enemy.
I don’t like calling out anti-Semitism. I don’t feel it matters when I do and it just makes people get upset for being called anti-Semitic, just as people get upset over being called racist. It’s tiring.
I will continue to do so only because my parents raised me to do so and it hurts more not to do it than to get in a flame festival with others over it. I think many of us call things out for similar reasons.
Is my view of what is anti-Semitic subjective? Sure. It is, however, based on my own learning over 55 years (I started learning about Judaism when I was 5) as a descendant of those Polish Jews to whom learning meant more than anything else. That’s my lineage, and I trust it.
I have no intention to write about Judaism in the future here at Daily Kos. I don’t think anyone really cares much about it as a subject to be explored. That’s ok, this is a political blog.
I just wanted to get this out of my system, due to various circumstances that have arisen since the beginning of the primaries.
