5 ms·

The article that Grabowski[1] wrote seems extremely heavy-handed and reeks of having an axe to grind. I am no fan of Wikipedia or their incessant edit wars, bad

• frozenport 4y ago
  If they don't call editors it unverifiable. Sometimes you gotta call the bad actors by name.
• twawaaay 4y ago
  The "Jew with a Coin" is antisemitic. The coin is used in this case to symbolise greed which antisemites here automatically assign to all Jews. (I know, I am a Pole)
  • catiopatio 4y ago
    I’m curious of your assessment of the Wikipedia article’s accuracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew_with_a_coin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew_with_a_coin It takes a more measured tone than your own, but the practice still seems rooted in deeply anti-semitic tropes.
    • dvt 4y ago
      Hm, yeah, all of a sudden I think I'm more on Grabowski's side. This is extremely weasel-worded: "Opinions about the motif vary; some cultural studies scholars believe it promotes Polish–Jewish dialogue or view it as harmless folklore or nostalgia, while others believe it is an antisemitic and offensive stereotype." Maybe you can argue the trinkets aren't in themselves anti-Semitic, but I completely agree with you that they're 100% undeniably rooted in anti-Semitic tropes. I mean even the word "nostalgia" there is weird. Nostalgia for what?
    • twawaaay 4y ago
      So the way antisemitism here works is pretty much the same way it always did. The same way Nazis used. People assign certain qualities to Jews. They repeat the same ad nauseam in jokes, in caricature, etc. Rather than treat Jews individually, antisemites tend to treat them in a way that dehumanises them -- which is a move that makes further antisemitism easier. You see, dehumanising is about disconnecting your empathy, about not seeing "them" as individuals but as a class of people that you can assign to qualities you hate. Also there is a reason Nazis hated Jews so much. The whole goal was to find a way to be able to make people do things by finding a common enemy that will be easy to vilify. And Jews were already pretty common (everywhere in Europe), easy (no own government) target and already with pretty poor sentiment. No, Nazis did not invent antisemitism. The funny thing about all this is that historically Jews were prevented here from many trades and, out of necessity, they took up certain professions connected with finances because they just couldn't do much else. Because of this Poles formed this connection between Jews and money and greed while completely forgetting that it was the governments at the time that caused this.
      • rajin444 4y ago
        > Because of this Poles formed this connection between Jews and money and greed while completely forgetting that it was the governments at the time that caused this. I don’t think they’ve forgotten. In much of Europe rulers that issued crippling taxes or engaged in ruinous financial schemes are not remembered fondly.
  • dvt 4y ago
    I'm not sure even Grabowski agrees, here's what he first says about it: > Anthropologist Erica Lehrer wrote about this phenomenon in Kazimierz (a center of Jewish life in Kraków) in her 2013 book Jewish Poland Revisited, uncovering that some Poles collect these odd pieces of art as good luck charms and may not consciously attribute sinister meaning to them. Maybe Wikipedia editors are whitewashing antisemitism, but he should really find more clear cut cases.
    • tptacek 4y ago
      People collect Lawn Jockeys for good luck too, but, like the "Jew With A Coin", they're self-evidently bigoted.
    • viraptor 4y ago
      Those ideas don't oppose each other. The figurine may be generally antisemitic and may be collected by some as odd piece of art. Similar to Gollywogs.
    • twawaaay 4y ago
      No conflict here. You can own a piece of art that is racist or antisemitic without being racist or antisemitic. Also, in certain parts of Poland antisemitism is so pervasive that it is basically part of local folklore. So you try to go read children's book and there will be a Jew in it trying to steal kids money... and nobody thinks twice about it just like nobody questions stories about a fat guy wearing red suit flying around dropping presents.
  • epolanski 4y ago
    My polish grandmother has it as a painting in her house (a jew counting coins). She bought it few years ago. She says the jew brings good luck. She is absolutely not racist nor antisemitic.
    • locopati 4y ago
      She might not be, but the notion of "the jew brings good luck" is absolutely anti-semetic and dehumanizing (associating Jews with money and reducing the people to a notion).
      • epolanski 4y ago
        Well it's hard to not associate Jews with money in Europe, especially eastern one, where for cultural and religious reasons the minority was heavily involved in trade and banking since middle age. Even today despite global jews being less than 0.2% of world population are 20% of Forbes 200 richest, e.g. 5 of the 10 richest americans are jews.
        • viraptor 4y ago
          There's a difference in statistics which don't say anything about causality - like the mentioned involvement in banking due to religious/cultural restrictions, and the association going the other way - this is a Jewish figurine with money, therefore it's lucky. That's the whole issue with antisemitism, racism, etc. It's like the historical connection of black people being banned from public pools -vs- associating being black with not being a good swimmer. It's actually pretty easy to not do associations the other way... just need to be aware and care. It's easier for us now than for previous generations to be aware at least, but being open-minded in general always helped.
        • mminer237 4y ago
          Just because a stereotype has a historical basis doesn't make it not racist. In the Americas black people were slaves for hundreds of years, but if I carry around a little statue of an African slave because that's what I still associate with black people, that's definitely racist and dehumanizing.
  • dukeofdoom 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • feoren 4y ago
      A "normal" (whatever that means to you) person is stingy with money: "Wow, that guy is really stingy!" A Jewish person is stingy with money: "Wow, Jews are really stingy!"
      • tptacek 4y ago
        A normal person is careful with money. "Jews" are "stingy".
• lo_zamoyski 4y ago
  This is a very touchy area indeed, and I think that especially for those people who are not on the "in" about the topic, I would suggest approaching any article about it with reservation and suspend judgement. To do otherwise is to risk committing an injustice through false accusations. Slander and libel are very difficult to retract once spread. One very common equivocation that occurs involves the word "collaboration". The Slate article is one of the few I've seen that actually touches on it. The prewar Polish government of the Second Republic, which went into exile in London and lasted until the end of the Cold War as the Polish government-in-exile (its last president, Ryszard Kaczorowski, died in the 2010 air disaster in Smolensk), never collaborated with the Nazis or the Soviets. They were the first to report to the Allies what was happening in Poland under Nazi occupation (reports which were dismissed). This absence of state collaboration marks a major difference between the Polish state and many other European states who did, in fact, collaborate. That's one meaning of "collaboration". When we use phrases like "the Poles collaborated", we are invoking an organized, corporate entity ("the Poles"), but since the Polish state is that organized, corporate entity, it is a false statement. "The Poles" did not collaborate. This is not subject to debate. The other meaning of "collaboration" concerns individuals. Were there individuals who collaborated? Even without knowing the facts, the banal presumption is generally that in any war, especially one involving an occupied country with tens of millions of citizens living under brutal occupation, and occupied by two savage occupiers, no less, you are bound to find some collaborators, both willing and unwilling (for example, at gun point; note also that the Nazis were exceptionally brutal in Poland even with those who were merely associated with people who aided Jews, like children; see the Ulma family for an example[0]). I don't know of anybody who denies that some Poles collaborated with the Nazis. We must not equivocate the two meanings of "collaboration". There is a discernible tendency on the part of some, either out of ignorance or malice, to conflate the two and attribute to "the Poles" some kind of quasi-constitutional antisemitic racism. (A recent example, ambassador Israel Katz, quoting Yitzhak Shamir, made the stupid and racist remark that the Poles "suckle anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk". Perhaps a case of racist projection? Perhaps it was Katz and Shamir who suckled Polonophobic bigotry with mother's milk? Can you picture what would happen if the roles were reversed?) Now, underneath his equivocation is the matter of scale (how widespread was the collaboration) and the question of Polish antisemitism as such. With respect to the first, the research can be tendentious or sloppy, involving hastily drawn conclusions unsupported by the evidence. An example is Jan T. Gross' "Neighbors". Some Poles do seem to resist any suggestion that collaboration occurred in Poland, however, I would not overstate this, and much of this comes from a place of fear of exaggeration, of dishonest research, and of the exploitation of this tragedy for political ends (the so-called "Holocaust industry", to borrow Norman Finkelstein's phrase) or the use of such facts to downplay the suffering Poles endured under both Nazi and Soviet occupation, including the later communist occupation, which have not been fully digested or researched (the Soviet-installed postwar communist government was especially keen to suppress anything negative about the Soviets, like the Katyn massacre). With respect to the second, the accusation of deep-seated Polish antisemitism, this is an extremely unfair accusation. Antisemitism is an animus based on racial antipathy. That is the variety that we see in Nazi Germany. In Poland, early 20th century anti-Jewish sentiment mostly revolved around economic resentments and questions around patriotism and loyalty to the Polish state. While there were certainly assimilated Jews who were Polish patriots, the ambivalence among many living in Poland during a period of high national tension led to the European "Jewish Question", which in Poland was not racial in nature. Zionism was also in the air. Recall also that Poland, for centuries the Paradisus Judaeorum, had just been reconstituted after having been partitioned by three empires 123 years earlier, had just fought a war with a Soviet empire with ambitions to spread west, and was facing the threat of a re-militarizing Germany. Having Jewish ancestry was not at the root of Polish-Jewish tensions. But what is also problematic is a tacit double standard. Be honest with yourself for a moment. Is it worse to be an antisemite or a Polonophobe? Which group is it worse to hate? You might be embarrassed to admit your own biases out loud. Are we to presume that holding bigoted attitudes toward others is something Jews have never done and never do? No cases of Jewish mothers telling their children not to play with the goyim? Untrue that Jews were vastly over-represented in some of the, shall we say, less flattering organs of the Soviet civil bureaucracy, including the cheka, and the NKVD? What are we to conclude here? That "the Jews" were murderous thugs? That "the Jews" are Soviet collaborators? Level heads must prevail. Time is needed. Until then, I read such claims with a grain of salt. [0] https://ipn.gov.pl/en/news/10474,Poles-Who-Rescued-Jews-The-Story-of-the-Ulma-Family.html https://ipn.gov.pl/en/news/10474,Poles-Who-Rescued-Jews-The-...