JTA: After Elie Wiesel, can anyone unite American Jews?

Another way of posing the question is — aside from victimhood and making a religion out of the Holocaust, is there any way of uniting Jews?

The answer is probably not.

A Jewish identity rooted in the Holocaust is good for fundraising at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and at the ADL and other Jewish victimhood organizations but it is lousy for Jews and for the non-Jews who are harmed by Jewish preoccupation with their own victimhood.

A group never becomes preoccupied with its own victimhood without strengthening its in-group identity and developing more negative views of outsiders. That’s fine if Jews choose to live in the Jewish state, but to have such victimhood Jews in their midst is really bad for gentile nations.

If you think Western civilization is by and large a good thing, you’ll hate Jews whose identity is primarily based on a feeling of victimhood at the hands of goyim.

Except when you are looking at things through the eyes of faith, there are no good guys and bad guys in the universe. There are only different forms of life struggling to survive and to propagate their genes.

Ben Sales writes:

Being an American Jew, more than anything else, means remembering the Holocaust.
That’s what nearly three quarters of Jewish Americans said, according to the Pew Research Center’s landmark 2013 study on American Jewry. Asked to pick attributes “essential” to being Jewish, more Jews said Holocaust remembrance than leading an ethical or moral life, caring about Israel or observing Jewish law.
If anyone personified that consensus, it was Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who through his writing and speaking turned himself into perhaps the leading moral voice of American Jewry. Some quarters of the left derided him for, in their view, being insufficiently sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. But in a fragmented community, he was the closest thing American Jews had to a unifier.
Regardless of religious observance or thoughts on Israel, nearly all Jewish Americans agreed with Wiesel’s message of remembering the genocide and preventing another one.
Following Wiesel’s death on July 2, will another consensus leader rise to take his place? Or is the American Jewish community too divided to unite under any one person’s moral voice?

Posted in Holocaust | Comments Off on JTA: After Elie Wiesel, can anyone unite American Jews?

David Suissa: ‘Israeli religious court goes off the deep end’

“Going off the deep end” is one of the things we say when people act differently from what we want. We also say they’re “sick” or “evil” or that they have “betrayed” us.

In reality, different people have different interests. “Betrayal” is simply a hyperbolic way of noting that someone has acted differently what we expected.

If an Israeli religious court rejects my Orthodox conversion, it’s not because they’ve gone off the deep end. It’s because they are acting out their own values and their own understanding of Torah.

In Jewish and Muslim history, the rigorists usually win out.

I didn’t convert to Judaism expecting the easy way. If somebody wants an easy life, they should not convert to Judaism. Stiff requirements for conversion are warranted as it seems like half the people who convert to Orthodox Judaism end up leaving it and why should Jews accept people with a 50% batting average?

All religions different from your own will likely seem crazy at best and evil at worst. Haredi Judaism is very different from live and let live Sephardic Judaism. Modern Orthodoxy and Reform Judaism are like different religions. Chabad and mainline Orthodox Judaism are like different religions. The other guy will usually look like someone going off the deep end.

In the end, “crazy” is not a useful explanation. It’s better to delve into the other side’s values and learn why they act as they do.

David Suissa writes:

Why would a rabbinic court in the world’s only Jewish state do something that would blatantly turn off most of the world’s Jews?
That’s what I asked myself today when I read that Israel’s top religious court rejected the validity of a woman’s conversion from one of the leading lights of American Orthodoxy, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, rabbi emeritus of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York City.
This is taking chutzpah and arrogance to another level.
It’s one thing when Charedi rabbinic courts routinely offend and reject non-Orthodox streams of Judaism, which is bad enough. But to go against a hard-core, bona fide and beloved Orthodox rabbinic leader?
How could they be so tone deaf?
But wait, it gets worse. This latest decision was on appeal, which means it’s the second time the court has rejected this woman’s conversion. Apparently, they weren’t too moved by the outrage that followed the initial decision.
After that first decision, the Jewish Federations of North America released a statement saying that the “denial of the legitimacy of this convert, who has embraced the Jewish People and undertaken to live a full Jewish life, undermines that fundamental principle (of accepting the convert). Moreover, the Bet Din’s rejection of one of America’s leading Orthodox rabbis is an affront to the country’s entire Jewish community.”
Meanwhile, the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest U.S. group of Orthodox rabbis, expressed “regret [at] the angst caused to this righteous convert, as well as the vulnerability felt by many righteous converts who feel that their legitimate status as Jews remains always subject to scrutiny.”
After the latest decision, Rabbi Seth Farber, who runs the activist group ITIM, released a statement saying that “the rabbinical court has humiliated Nicole, cast a shadow over tens of thousands of conversions around the world, and has created a crisis of confidence between diaspora Jewry and Israel’s government.”

Posted in Conversion | Comments Off on David Suissa: ‘Israeli religious court goes off the deep end’

Is Steve Sailer “SWPL Stormfront”?

Comments:

* Stormfront is equal parts WN LARPing and FBI/SPLC accounts.

Posted in Steve Sailer | Comments Off on Is Steve Sailer “SWPL Stormfront”?

Jewish Journalism Professor Jay Rosen Wants The MSM To Collaborate To Destroy Donald Trump

Jay Rosen writes in the Washington Post:

I know what you’re thinking, journalists: “What do you want us to do? Stop covering a major party candidate for president? That would be irresponsible.” True. But this reaction short-circuits intelligent debate. Beneath every common practice in election coverage there are premises about how candidates will behave. I want you to ask: Do these still apply? Trump isn’t behaving like a normal candidate; he’s acting like an unbound one. In response, journalists have to become less predictable themselves. They have to come up with novel responses. They have to do things they have never done. They may even have to shock us.

They may need to collaborate across news brands in ways they have never known. They may have to call Trump out with a forcefulness unseen before. They may have to risk the breakdown of decorum in interviews and endure excruciating awkwardness. Hardest of all, they will have to explain to the public that Trump is a special case, and the normal rules do not apply.

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off on Jewish Journalism Professor Jay Rosen Wants The MSM To Collaborate To Destroy Donald Trump

Real Talk About Race

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* The problem is — and this is no great revelation — no public figure, whether they be a politician, “celebrity” or “journalist”– is allowed to point out these staggering differences in criminality among black people as compared to whites and Asians. Rudy Guiliani “went there” last week and the New York Times accused him of peddling “myths.” That’s the word they used: “Myths.” Meaning they felt he was making stuff up, not just being impolite.

Sure, one can point out high levels of crime in the “inner city,” but that’s about as far as one can go. And since we can’t blame the inhabitants of these “inner cities” we are left looking elsewhere, i.e. white people.

* Every religion has its myths, and for modern progressives the concept that white supremacy is all around constantly working against striving minorities who would otherwise be achieving (or overachieving) the same life outcomes as whites.

Thus the need for a powerful central government that stands ready to tilt the scales for favored classes.

* The general – and actually only real and meaningful – point to take from all this is that so-called ‘race relations’ between blacks and whites in the USA are no better, and likely even worse than they were 400 odd years ago (or thereabouts), when the very first cargo of ‘neger’ – that’s how they were described in the ship’s manifest – slaves was landed from that fateful Dutch ship at that fateful Virginia port.

If ‘race relations’ haven’t improved in 400 years they are unlikely *ever* to improve.

The lesson to those EU states yet to have mass immigration of black Africans imposed on them from ‘on high’ could not be starker.

But, alas, rest assured, the leaders of those states will prove, inevitably, deaf, dumb and blind to stark,staring, raw, concrete reality.

* Obama is careful not to directly address black violence or racism because he would be giving everyone else permission to openly discuss it and that would be the beginning of the end of white guilt reparations. If he cannot do it, Trump will. This could of been a unique opportunity for the first black President to go against his base to do something important for the country but he will go down instead of being nothing more than a partisan hack.

* Matt Drudge tweeted a link to your Nixon ad post. Have you seen an uptick in traffic?
Does this mean Drudge will start linking iSteve posts on his site?
This could be the big one folks.

* Scott Adams of Dilbert fame noted recently that the intimidation and violence around BLM has had the effect of cratering Trump’s support. Trump won the nomination by being the un-PC dominant male, and now Hillary! has unleashed BLM which trumps, well Trump. You will note he’s said just about nothing regarding BLM and Adams relates constant death threats, no more speaking engagements, and a decline of income of 40% for his Trump content.

Intimidation works as Third World Aristocrat Obama well knows. Obama grew up in a household run by a Suharto minor princeling, and Hawaii home of “Beat Up Haole Day” so he knows well the power of anti-White intimidation. It is natural to him as breathing and he can’t NOT do it. So BLM has been a godsend — intimidating and demoralizing Trump supporters and energizing the army of non-Whites that Hillary! depends upon.

Secondly, Rudy Guiliani was called “far-right” by NBC screencapped by Instapundit. So there is a general Intifada against Whites who notice anything by Blacks that is negative. SJW are at heart religiously attached to a doctrine of noble Black victims of ordinary Joe White racism, with noble White Guy/Gal leaders dancing with Wolves/Avatars/Blue Cats to save the natives. Or somesuch. Its deep WASP culture. [Jews don’t go in for that stuff.]

* During his speech at the memorial for the Dallas policemen, as well as in his famous 2008 speech on race, Obama always follows a certain pattern.

1. Says something unifying–race relations have improved in this country, most policemen are good people doing their best in a difficult job, etc.

2. There’s still a problem–whether they’re conscious of it or not, the racism of white people affects the way they treat blacks.

3. Blacks have legitimate grievances–slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, vague racist-ish things that still go on today (being mistaken for a valet, being followed around in a convenience store).

4. Those grievances make black people angry and white people have to understand that and work harder to expunge racism from their hearts.

What is always missing from the Obama’s analysis is that white people have legitimate grievances too–against black people. These include their neighborhoods being ruined by an influx of blacks; public school quality lowered by unruly black students; the financial burden of supporting a community relies so heavily on government services; losing out on a job or promotion due to affirmative action; having to avoid places because of the threat of black crime; experience of being robbed/raped/assaulted by blacks, or having family and friends who have been. These grievances are dismissed, even mocked, yet they are actually more legitimate, more relevant to the daily experience of whites, than the historical black grievances that Obama insists on rehashing.

As a teenager, my girlfriend (now wife) was raped at knife-point by a black man who followed her into her apartment building. She was still a virgin at that time. Honestly, it did not affect my general view of blacks, but by Obama’s standards, wouldn’t I be entitled to dislike blacks based on that incident?

* It’s worth pointing out that the one thing that white progressives, police unions, and black leaders agree on is disarming young black males. The only reason it doesn’t happen is conservative 2nd Amendment tribalism.

Insisting on the constitutional right for every young black male to own a handgun is one of the Republican party’s dumbest and most destructive stands. Thousands of people die every year because of it.

* Violence, even legitimate violence, is ugly and shocking to those not accustomed to it. This is not my own observation, but that of Rory Miller, retired corrections officer and Iraq war veteran, who has written several excellent books on the subject. (Start with Meditations on Violence.)

* The fixation here is with violent crime.

But, the rates of such criminality as embezzlement, corruption, fraud, abuse of public office etc, also follow the same generalized multiplier effect.

* It is a strange thing: for thousands of years–all of history until a generation ago–being a loser/victim in conflict was nothing to shout about, it was an embarrassment, a great shame, perhaps the greatest. Even after WWII, it took about a generation before the holocaust shibboleth-ism really kicked in, but when it did, did it ever!

Sometime around the 1970′s it seemed that suddenly being a victim was the highest thing anyone could aspire to. Prior to that, if one had suffered profoundly at the hands of another, one didn’t want it known, after about 1970, suddenly one wanted any injustice broadcast and acknowledged as widely as possible. It was a strange turnabout that we still live with yet I’ve hardly ever heard anyone remark on.

I can’t say whether Jews actually created this change as response to their WWII experience, or whether they were simply earlier and more effective users of this change in the zeitgeist.

* When the Holocaust became a PR event, that is the first time I can think of that a group’s injury became their claim to–not equality–but special treatment. This was so successful that now everyone with a grievance seeks to achieve a similar victim apotheosis. Claims for black reparations were scarce in the immediate aftermath of slavery even up to the “civil rights” era. It was only recently, since the success of “holocaust-ism” that the cries for black reparations have become so incessant.

Posted in Blacks, BLM | Comments Off on Real Talk About Race