My tradition teaches a message of radical inclusion and love. Will you sit down and learn Torah with me, and learn love?
The Alt Right has many definitions. One is that it is not the conservatism ruling in the Republican party which stands for, “Invade the world, invite the world.” Another explanation is that it is an entry vehicle for white nationalism which is inherently racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic.
Is racism, xenophobic and anti-Semitism ever rational? Ever self-interested? Or is it always crazy and destructive to the hater?
Steve Sailer writes: “There is not really that much of a market for Jewish self-awareness. It’s not as if a novelist as talented as Roth is incapable of it, but there’s simply little demand these days for Roth to go very deep into these kind of patterns.”
* The Pharoah’s daughter saves Moses. Why? Because women rarely have national or racial loyalty above and beyond their feelings. She sees this baby and her heart goes out to it, even though it is a child of her country’s enemy (in the eyes of Pharoah). And she adopts him.
* Ex. 2:12. If Moses saw a Hebrew beating an Egyptian, would he also have intervened and beat the Hebrew?
In the Book of Exodus, we have a Pharoah who wants to make Egypt great again and perhaps puts Egypt first, not Israel first. This rise in Egyptian nationalism is dangerous to residents of Egypt who don’t identify as Egyptian, such as the descendants of Jacob. The Torah uses the word “Am” to mean “blood nation” when quoting the new Pharoah about the threat of the Jews. It is one blood nation threatened by another blood nation.
The other Hebrew word for nation is “goy” which does not have the same connotation of blood ties.
The Jews apparently moved throughout Egypt, and didn’t just stick to Goshen. It could have been Hitler speaking in Ex. 1:9. From a racial perspective, a Jew can’t stop being a Jew, while from a religious perspective, Jews can convert to your religion. You could not convert to being an Egyptian or Greek (though you could become a Roman) perhaps today to being French or German.
Dennis Prager: “The Jewish dream is that the world not be based on blood ties. It is the only dream ultimately that will save humanity given the horrors of blood historically. Blood beliefs are the greatest source of cruelty in history because if you are not my blood, you are not valuable. That’s how people have lived.”
“The reason that Hitler so hated the Jews was a belief in blood. The Jews are the world’s polluters of blood purity. If you are into the purity of blood, the Jews are your quintessential enemy because wherever the Jews are, they assimilate in part and stay Jewish in part. They are part of you but not fully part of you because of their blood. If they fully assimilate, they are still dangerous… The assimilated Jew was the ultimate polluter of German purity. If you believe in the purity of the nation, the Jews are the quintessence of opposition to you.”
“The only nation to keep its identity and still be all over was the Jews.” (Dennis’s lecture on Exodus 1, as part of his Torah verse by verse project.)
“He [Pharoah] doesn’t like that the Jews are all over Egypt, maintaining their identity but also a part of Egyptian life. He was interested in blood purity.”
Another way of understanding “blood purity” is that you know who your parents are. Ninety eight percent of whites in America have no black DNA. That’s a result of “blood purity” in North America as opposed to the assimilation of Latin America.
Being against “blood ties” is being against the importance of family and relations. Family means blood ties. Family not connected by blood ties are not as close. Parents do not provide the same support for children who are not theirs biologically. Genetic similarity fuels bonds, self-sacrifice, and nationalism. The closer the genetic tie, the more likely people will get along.
I think there is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Egypt because at this point in time Egypt and its new Pharoah had not yet learned how to be multicultural. And I think Jews were going to be part of the throes of that transformation, which had to take place. Egypt was not going to be the monolithic society they once were in the last century. Jews were going to be at the center of that. It’s a huge transformation for Egypt to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode and Jews will be resented because of our leading role. But without that leading role and without that transformation, Egypt will not survive.
As a Jew, I think of how Jews have saved gentile countries such as Joseph saving Egypt from famine. But I understand how non-Jews can read the same texts and study the same history and come to different conclusions.
From the Torah perspective, in the first chapter of Exodus, a Pharoah arises who feels no gratitude to the group that saved his country.
Jews feel the same lack of gratitude from blacks. Jews funded and led black civil rights but the more educated the black, the more likely they are today to be anti-Semitic.