[Image: The “Is this a pigeon?” meme. An android marked “Goyish leftists” holds his hand up to a yellow butterfly labeled, “Basic things about Judaism,” and asks, “Is this Zionist propaganda?”]
Drashe for Yom Kippur 5781
Here on Earth, in our lives, is where we learn the meaning of being human; we hurt and are hurt, we cry and laugh, we make mistakes and are given the chance to make up for them and learn from them. When we left Ganeyden, we left with a newfound knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, harm and reconciliation. It is so integral to who we are, as beings with free-will.
The fabled “Labor Zionism”
Spotted on Haaretz English.
Now more than ever, American Jews can’t afford grifters and bullshitters
Brooke Goldstein’s article “The Time Is Now for a Jewish Civil Rights Movement” takes an opportunity to make an argument for Jews and uses it instead to take cheap shots at trans people, anti-ICE activists, and Palestinians.
Was Karl Marx a shining example of Jewish leftism?
Marx was baptized, raised Protestant, and knew nothing of Judaism his entire life. His father had gone to great pains to escape his Jewishness and provide a better life for himself and his son, even changing his name. As a result, Marx was inevitably brought up with a considerable amount of internalized antisemitism.
Does Judaism try to control the lives of Jews?
Someone asked in a comment on The Queer Diasporist facebook page whether or not Jewish communities try to control the lives of its members. Here’s my attempt at an answer:
Bundism wasn’t about opposing Zionism
Bundism wasn’t created to oppose Zionism; it was created as a solution to the very same crushing oppression faced by European Jews of the time that Zionism was created to solve.
Jews were the first people to be called a “diaspora”
The word “diaspora” was originally coined for the scattering of Jews from Eretz Yisroel, and later extended to any other group of people living away from some point of origin. Now we have a strong tendency for certain leftists to act like this original diaspora was a myth or a lie.
On Being A Hebrew
Separating “Hebrews” from Jews is a Christian tactic used to rationalize the cognitive dissonance between their contempt for Jews and their religion’s reliance on “Hebrew” scripture.
Jews policing Jewishness in left-wing Jewish spaces
The resurgence of the Jewish left is a great opportunity to shed the antisemitism of the broader left, but only if it such antisemitism isn’t imposed from within.