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I think Thomas (whose posts I overall have a lot of respect for) misunderstood my initial question as an indication of surprise at the mere accusation, and felt

I think Thomas (whose posts I overall have a lot of respect for) misunderstood my initial question as an indication of surprise at the mere accusation, and felt the need to explain why such accusations of anti-semitism are unsurprising. Read that way, I can see why he thought the ADL statement on JVP might be relevant and accurate (it certainly does accurately represent the views of a number of people within the Jewish community, though I think many also use the allegations of anti-semitism tactically to distract from legitimate criticism of the actions wrought by an attitude of ethno-religious exceptionalism). To be fair, as a descendant of Jewish holocaust survivors myself, I'm glad there's a high-profile group that makes it their mission to bring light to actual anti-semitism when it occurs, but unfortunately the ADL is influenced by actors I believe to be operating in bad-faith and has strayed from their mission in order to hand-wave away legitimate criticism of actions stemming from prejudice that exists within the Jewish community. The Jewish community is by no means unique here; there are elements of prejudice within every demographic, and I'd wager that a near-majority of practitioners of every religion have an attitude of exceptionalism, though Judaism is unusual in having religious practices very tightly coupled with an ethnic identity that often excludes practitioners of Judaism-the-religion who aren't considered ethnically Jewish, or are an unconventional kind of ethnically Jewish (see [1] and [2]). But I suppose to someone less familiar with the topic, criticism of prejudice that exists within a minority population can be hard to distinguish from prejudice against that minority population, so I can understand what seemed like a strongly oppositional reaction to my earlier post. If anyone is this deep in the thread and wants modern perspectives by well-respected scholars, Gabor Mate (a holocaust survivor himself) and Noam Chomsky (another Jew who has been unfairly accused of anti-semitism and holocaust denialism by the ADL) have spoken extensively about related issues. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Jewish_communities#Jews_of_color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Jewish_communities#J... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Jewish_communities#Sephardim_and_Mizrahim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Jewish_communities#S...

tptacek 3y ago
You of course run into pretty big problems with both Gabor Mate, an admirer of Hamas, and Noam Chomsky, who among other things is infamous for denying the genocide in Cambodia on campist grounds. About the whole cursed situation you can distill out a through-line, of people starting their analyses with the axiom that an alliance of western capitalist world powers is responsible on a daily basis for all the ills of the world, and extrapolating from there. I don't know what I think about JVP other than that they're not a mainstream organization. I went down a grim rabbit hole of reading about their advocacy to evangelical churches and the whole "Zionism Unsettled" thing. Look, there's nothing wrong with being resolutely leftist. It's just that it's not reasonable to argue that a resolutely leftist organization is representative of American Jewish people, or that it can insulate other activists from charges of antisemitism when it itself is continuously subjected to those same charges. About ADL, I probably mostly agree with you, that they haven't navigated the distinctions between anti-Zionism and antisemitism well, and, like other antiracist activist organizations, diluted their credibility with mission creep and capture. Like Rationalwiki, I read ADL things for the receipts they bring and disregard the analysis. This thread, too, is deeply cursed, and I don't mean to try to "win" any arguments here; there's no such thing, especially on this topic. I'm just clarifying what I dropped in here to say.
- tptacek 3y ago
  (after rereading what I just wrote) Actually Gabor Mate and Noam Chomsky are just really good examples of what I'm talking about, right? Like: if an activist said something, and a normie person objected to it, and you came back with "Noam Chomsky says this is just fine to say", you wouldn't expect that to persuade the normie. That doesn't make Chomsky wrong! It just makes him not all that rhetorically useful. Same deal with JVP.

tptacek 3y ago

You of course run into pretty big problems with both Gabor Mate, an admirer of Hamas, and Noam Chomsky, who among other things is infamous for denying the genocide in Cambodia on campist grounds. About the whole cursed situation you can distill out a through-line, of people starting their analyses with the axiom that an alliance of western capitalist world powers is responsible on a daily basis for all the ills of the world, and extrapolating from there. I don't know what I think about JVP other than that they're not a mainstream organization. I went down a grim rabbit hole of reading about their advocacy to evangelical churches and the whole "Zionism Unsettled" thing. Look, there's nothing wrong with being resolutely leftist. It's just that it's not reasonable to argue that a resolutely leftist organization is representative of American Jewish people, or that it can insulate other activists from charges of antisemitism when it itself is continuously subjected to those same charges. About ADL, I probably mostly agree with you, that they haven't navigated the distinctions between anti-Zionism and antisemitism well, and, like other antiracist activist organizations, diluted their credibility with mission creep and capture. Like Rationalwiki, I read ADL things for the receipts they bring and disregard the analysis. This thread, too, is deeply cursed, and I don't mean to try to "win" any arguments here; there's no such thing, especially on this topic. I'm just clarifying what I dropped in here to say.

tptacek 3y ago
(after rereading what I just wrote) Actually Gabor Mate and Noam Chomsky are just really good examples of what I'm talking about, right? Like: if an activist said something, and a normie person objected to it, and you came back with "Noam Chomsky says this is just fine to say", you wouldn't expect that to persuade the normie. That doesn't make Chomsky wrong! It just makes him not all that rhetorically useful. Same deal with JVP.