Lemmy has a tendency to treat any analysis of how something came to be as being sympathizing with villainy. the truth is the root of the modern zionist movement is the Odessa Pogroms conducted by the Russian empire against Russian and Ukrainian jews, mainly. the predominant reason they did this is that Jews in eastern Ukraine were organizing mutual aid and community defense structures under what they called The Bund.
detour time: if you’re American, The Bund being a leftist jewish thing probably hits your ears wrong since in the United States that was a pro-german pro-nazi party whose only real political position was “we hate Jews.” German and Yiddish have many word cognates in common. German is an Italic language (infuriatingly) and Yiddish is a Slavic language. But Yiddish is a Slavic language the same way English is a Germanic language: they’re 3 languages that jumped another language in a back alley, beat it up, and then forced it to use their grammars. erasing a people’s language is part of distorting a people into who you want them to be. put a pin in that for later, but for now just know that the most recently someone worked to erase a language was in the 80s, boarding school teachers in the US forced their students to speak only in English or Esperanto. since i’m pretty sure i’m talking to mostly Europeans, i’ll briefly explain that in the US a boarding school is not an education facility for elites, it’s a torture facility where native american boys and queer young man go to have their personality erased until they exist in service of whiteness.
in Western Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, and Poland two movements arose in response to the violence against Jews by the russian empire: Zionism and Doikayt. these are ultimately not new thought patterns in Jewish thought, but the 1880s incarnations of them were born then. Zionism is the old response to the Babylonian diaspora of ~800 BCE: we need a nation of our own where we can be safe and secure and we’ll do things differently. sure, every nation state that has ever existed has become an evil and wicked thing, but ours will be different because we run things. Doikayt is the old diasporadic response to the second temple society being a fascist nightmare when for many Jews, our existence is meant to stand in defiance to any oppressor.
in places where authoritarianism was the norm, and Jews lived in fear, particularly east of the pale of civilization in Russia and Eastern Ukraine, Zionism became the “normal” jewish stance. Where Jews had more ability to exist within their communities Doikayt and Bundism became the preferred approach. what really broke things was WWI when the British empire through west asia into total chaos with the Sykes-Picot agreement. this action, as well as the chaos of the Russian civil war enabeled Zionists to begin setting up illegal kibbutzes, settlement of a specific form, in Palestine in the 1920s.
this time period is ultimately the root of the nazi party’s word “Judeo-bolshevism.” today it seems like an impossibly stupid term, but you have to but yourself back into Eastern Germany in the 1920s and 30s. You’re living in a post apocalypse. a country you were just at war with is at a civil war. you are told that within that country, Jews are undermining monarchic power structures through sabotage so they can steal a new homeland. within your own country, the jews are a mix of anarcho-communists, religious-communists, and religious-anarchists. a silly little man with a bad moustache tells you that all jews are in league and they’re in league with the bolsheviks. it almost seems believable with the media environment.
the challenge i have, is i see much of this playing out today. my great great great grandmother lived in a schtetl in Western Ukraine named Brezhnezhy. she moved to Chicago, had her hand chopped off by my great great grandfather’s KKK chapter, and then moved to North Dakota. for as twisted and mean as she became from her experiences, the one thing she always held firm on was that her place in the world was to raise strong children who defied oppressors wherever they saw them. her Jewish descendents hold this belief close to them and promote Doikayt. but still i find myself frequently alienated by people on lemmy who hold all Jews responsible for zionism, equate zionism to Judaism, or otherwise erase the majority of jewish thought to focus on hating people not for their ethics but for their ethnicity.
i asked you earlier to put a pin in that when you erase a people you erase their language to break intergenerational continuity. i want you to think about this. the modern hebrew israelis speak doesn’t sound like the hebrew that was once spoken. hebrew was a dead language around 300 CE. yiddish became the defacto jewish language for the ashkenazi people as we fled late roman/early christian persecution. the places we settled in europe were the places we found tolerance. we adopted new forms of dress and new meals. now, israel is destroying Yiddish and saying that borscht isn’t a jewish food. they want to sever the ties to the friends we made and seek to remember. they want to erase the wisdom of 1500 years of jewish life. no nation state who ever subjigated us ever demanded this much forgetting before.
Israel isn’t just anti-semitic in that semitic peoples are more that just Jews. they’re anti-jewish.
i exist to speak the truths of my people. that has wound up being mainly Appalachia. our truths are that every genocide is interconnected, and that all authority exists with the aim of subjugation. my family is not so unique or special. you’ll find stories like ours all over the world if you choose to look. i have a best friend whose father was decapitated by Wagner in Kiev. i have a neighbor who arrived here from a Siberian orphanage. i have a coworker who spent time on an anti-poaching task force in The Ivory Coast (sorry, i can never remember the french. Cote-de-Ivore?). the importance isn’t to give me empathy, but instead the people who are fighting for survival right now be they in Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, the Congo, Iran, Syria, or Ukraine. we are all one people and our differences are illusions. we have adapted to our environments in different ways, but wherever we are we help who we can
And let us never forget that the only reason Zionism won out was not because it prevailed ideologically, but because the fucking Nazis just straight up killed off most of the Bundists and terrorized most of the rest into silence.
That also applies to non-Ashkenazi leftists by the way. The formidable Avraam Benaroya, a Sephardic labor leader giant from Salonica and one of the founders of the Greek socialist movement, was forced to become a grocer at some small Israeli town later in life, due to the complete defeat of the Greek left and its inability to overcome the nationalist frame.
thank you! i meant to weave that into this passover testimony and just got side tracked by how fucking long it already was. yes. doikayt is on the backfoot in the world’s understanding of judaism because of the nazis and nazi collaborators
no. part of passover is the Seder dinner which in my community was this past friday. someone is chosen to tell the story of Jewish defiance to oppression in their own language. as a non practicing Jew, my responsibility was to sit quietly and listen, and then to carry that story into the next year. this year, the emphasis was on how we are currently living in the re-emergence of the totalitarian hate we all seek to defy, and part of that is the story of the modern israel, and how it exists as an oppressor that claims itself the victim. especially because as we sat and ate, Israeli troops conducted war crimes in Lebanon.
i mean. you’re also not strictly speaking wrong. it is a jewish tradition to multiple times a year, all sit down at a table and have an uncle, bubbula, nanny, or teen go off on a rant about one of the times someone tried to kill all of us, and then eat food about it.
Lemmy has a tendency to treat any analysis of how something came to be as being sympathizing with villainy. the truth is the root of the modern zionist movement is the Odessa Pogroms conducted by the Russian empire against Russian and Ukrainian jews, mainly. the predominant reason they did this is that Jews in eastern Ukraine were organizing mutual aid and community defense structures under what they called The Bund.
detour time: if you’re American, The Bund being a leftist jewish thing probably hits your ears wrong since in the United States that was a pro-german pro-nazi party whose only real political position was “we hate Jews.” German and Yiddish have many word cognates in common. German is an Italic language (infuriatingly) and Yiddish is a Slavic language. But Yiddish is a Slavic language the same way English is a Germanic language: they’re 3 languages that jumped another language in a back alley, beat it up, and then forced it to use their grammars. erasing a people’s language is part of distorting a people into who you want them to be. put a pin in that for later, but for now just know that the most recently someone worked to erase a language was in the 80s, boarding school teachers in the US forced their students to speak only in English or Esperanto. since i’m pretty sure i’m talking to mostly Europeans, i’ll briefly explain that in the US a boarding school is not an education facility for elites, it’s a torture facility where native american boys and queer young man go to have their personality erased until they exist in service of whiteness.
in Western Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, and Poland two movements arose in response to the violence against Jews by the russian empire: Zionism and Doikayt. these are ultimately not new thought patterns in Jewish thought, but the 1880s incarnations of them were born then. Zionism is the old response to the Babylonian diaspora of ~800 BCE: we need a nation of our own where we can be safe and secure and we’ll do things differently. sure, every nation state that has ever existed has become an evil and wicked thing, but ours will be different because we run things. Doikayt is the old diasporadic response to the second temple society being a fascist nightmare when for many Jews, our existence is meant to stand in defiance to any oppressor.
in places where authoritarianism was the norm, and Jews lived in fear, particularly east of the pale of civilization in Russia and Eastern Ukraine, Zionism became the “normal” jewish stance. Where Jews had more ability to exist within their communities Doikayt and Bundism became the preferred approach. what really broke things was WWI when the British empire through west asia into total chaos with the Sykes-Picot agreement. this action, as well as the chaos of the Russian civil war enabeled Zionists to begin setting up illegal kibbutzes, settlement of a specific form, in Palestine in the 1920s.
this time period is ultimately the root of the nazi party’s word “Judeo-bolshevism.” today it seems like an impossibly stupid term, but you have to but yourself back into Eastern Germany in the 1920s and 30s. You’re living in a post apocalypse. a country you were just at war with is at a civil war. you are told that within that country, Jews are undermining monarchic power structures through sabotage so they can steal a new homeland. within your own country, the jews are a mix of anarcho-communists, religious-communists, and religious-anarchists. a silly little man with a bad moustache tells you that all jews are in league and they’re in league with the bolsheviks. it almost seems believable with the media environment.
the challenge i have, is i see much of this playing out today. my great great great grandmother lived in a schtetl in Western Ukraine named Brezhnezhy. she moved to Chicago, had her hand chopped off by my great great grandfather’s KKK chapter, and then moved to North Dakota. for as twisted and mean as she became from her experiences, the one thing she always held firm on was that her place in the world was to raise strong children who defied oppressors wherever they saw them. her Jewish descendents hold this belief close to them and promote Doikayt. but still i find myself frequently alienated by people on lemmy who hold all Jews responsible for zionism, equate zionism to Judaism, or otherwise erase the majority of jewish thought to focus on hating people not for their ethics but for their ethnicity.
i asked you earlier to put a pin in that when you erase a people you erase their language to break intergenerational continuity. i want you to think about this. the modern hebrew israelis speak doesn’t sound like the hebrew that was once spoken. hebrew was a dead language around 300 CE. yiddish became the defacto jewish language for the ashkenazi people as we fled late roman/early christian persecution. the places we settled in europe were the places we found tolerance. we adopted new forms of dress and new meals. now, israel is destroying Yiddish and saying that borscht isn’t a jewish food. they want to sever the ties to the friends we made and seek to remember. they want to erase the wisdom of 1500 years of jewish life. no nation state who ever subjigated us ever demanded this much forgetting before.
Israel isn’t just anti-semitic in that semitic peoples are more that just Jews. they’re anti-jewish.
I appreciate how thorough and how detailed your essay is. This was enlightening, thank you.
I’m sorry that happened to your family. It seems like you’re doing what you can. Shit sucks right now.
i exist to speak the truths of my people. that has wound up being mainly Appalachia. our truths are that every genocide is interconnected, and that all authority exists with the aim of subjugation. my family is not so unique or special. you’ll find stories like ours all over the world if you choose to look. i have a best friend whose father was decapitated by Wagner in Kiev. i have a neighbor who arrived here from a Siberian orphanage. i have a coworker who spent time on an anti-poaching task force in The Ivory Coast (sorry, i can never remember the french. Cote-de-Ivore?). the importance isn’t to give me empathy, but instead the people who are fighting for survival right now be they in Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, the Congo, Iran, Syria, or Ukraine. we are all one people and our differences are illusions. we have adapted to our environments in different ways, but wherever we are we help who we can
And let us never forget that the only reason Zionism won out was not because it prevailed ideologically, but because the fucking Nazis just straight up killed off most of the Bundists and terrorized most of the rest into silence.
That also applies to non-Ashkenazi leftists by the way. The formidable Avraam Benaroya, a Sephardic labor leader giant from Salonica and one of the founders of the Greek socialist movement, was forced to become a grocer at some small Israeli town later in life, due to the complete defeat of the Greek left and its inability to overcome the nationalist frame.
thank you! i meant to weave that into this passover testimony and just got side tracked by how fucking long it already was. yes. doikayt is on the backfoot in the world’s understanding of judaism because of the nazis and nazi collaborators
Lol, is “Passover testimony” a jewish tongue in cheek way of referring to a rant? Do uncles usually go off on rants on Passover dinners? 😄
no. part of passover is the Seder dinner which in my community was this past friday. someone is chosen to tell the story of Jewish defiance to oppression in their own language. as a non practicing Jew, my responsibility was to sit quietly and listen, and then to carry that story into the next year. this year, the emphasis was on how we are currently living in the re-emergence of the totalitarian hate we all seek to defy, and part of that is the story of the modern israel, and how it exists as an oppressor that claims itself the victim. especially because as we sat and ate, Israeli troops conducted war crimes in Lebanon.
Oh I see, that was a literal testimony! Sorry for calling it a rant and thanks for that bit of education.
i mean. you’re also not strictly speaking wrong. it is a jewish tradition to multiple times a year, all sit down at a table and have an uncle, bubbula, nanny, or teen go off on a rant about one of the times someone tried to kill all of us, and then eat food about it.
it’s just that it’s not tongue in cheek 🤣