First, link to the campaign mailer story:http://www.courant.com/politics/hc-pol-anti-semitic-mailer-20181030-story.html …
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Second, some background. Yes, I've tweeted this before but everything old is still ongoing, I guess. In the Middle Ages, Jews were barred from many trades and professions, and it was sometimes illegal for Jews to own land.
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It was convenient for local authorities to permit Jews to work in trades that were repugnant to Christians — most notably moneylending, which was associated in the Christian world with depravity and sin.
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From a Jewish perspective, moneylending was useful for two main reasons. 1) It was somewhat portable, which was practical during an era when expulsions of Jews from villages and even whole countries were not uncommon.
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2) It was also profitable. Most late medieval and early modern European polities taxed Jews at jaw-droppingly high rates, so moneylending’s income was often essential for communities’ survival. Note that both of these reasons are intricately tied to anti-Jewish oppression.
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And so, a trope was born. Even as a small subset of Jews were pushed into moneylending, they were resented for it — and identified with the work in a way that Christian bankers never were.
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(You caught that the reason Jews were pushed into this in the first place was also a result of anti-Jewish oppression, yes? Got it? Good.)
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Most Jews throughout history lived a precarious existence, economically and otherwise. Many times in history we have been tolerated, and even embraced, by the rulers and locals of our host country.
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But we have also been subject to expulsions, pogroms, Inquisitions and genocide many times over — often, indeed, fueled by the trope of the greedy, crooked Jew serving as the scapegoat for other stresses and complexities in society.
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But no, Soros does not pay protesters. No, Soros is not secretly funding the caravan. Soros--and HIAS--do not have some secret power over the migration patterns of vulnerable people seeking refuge in the United States.
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(And YES we are commanded to care for the stranger--the vulnerable non-citizen--among us no less than 36 times in Torah, more than any other commandment.
@HIASrefugees does holy work.Prikaži ovu nit -
But they are not secretly pulling any puppet strings or secretly keeping Trump from implementing more draconian policies.)
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Globalist--one of Trump's favorite dogwhistles (used even after 11 Jews were slaughtered in synagogue on Shabbat! Yes! That one!) implies that someone is not of-this-nation, they're not tied here, their loyalty is not to *us* of this country but to *each other* internationally.
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The idea the Jews' loyalty is not to France or Germany or Poland or etc. because they are infiltrators, outsiders--that's one of the oldest tropes in the book. They're out to get us, to undermine us, not one of us. It's being used to great effect these days.
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Before we loop back around to now, I want to note that these tropes have caused centuries of suffering and pain. Here's one list of expulsions--just the expulsions. Not the Crusades, Inquisition, pogroms, the Holocaust.
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Note that Jews have been guests (if you will) in other people's countries--even when they were citizens! Even when they'd been there for centuries--for most of the last 2000+ years.
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So even if things had been going great for a long time, a time of stress meant that the ruler could (and often did) put the blame on the Jews to deflect blame of the ruler. We were often without protection when this happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsions_and_exoduses_of_Jews …
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List of expulsions a few tweets late, sorry. You get the idea. Don't be mad at me, go ransack the Jews! Common theme.
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When we joke that most Jewish holidays are "they tried to kill us, they didn't, let's eat," well. There's some inherited trauma in that joke. Sometimes they succeeded.
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Anyway. Now we're in 2018 and antisemitism is one piece of a larger racist, xenophobic white nationalist game plan.
@BulldogShadow did some great work on the antisemitic underpinnings of so much of what's now:https://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/06/29/skin-in-the-game-how-antisemitism-animates-white-nationalism/ …Prikaži ovu nit -
We are seeing straight-up racism, dehumanizing language and an increase in hate crimes across the board.
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#TreeOfLifeSynagogue is situated in a context with the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin, all the way back to and beyond to the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.Prikaži ovu nit -
It's situated in a context of a white supremacist country that committed genocide against Indigenous people, enslaved Black people, has created systems and structures to institutionalize racism and disenfranchisement in a myriad of ways since its founding.
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It is situated in a context of the murders of Maurice Stallard and Vickie Jones by a white supremacist who was trying to get to a Black church.
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It is situated in the context of the Muslim ban. The attack on trans rights. Family separation and brutal treatment of immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and folks who came here undocumented following the Statue of Liberty's invitation to look for a better life.
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Antisemitism is interlinked with all of the other hate and justifications for violence on the rise thank you to the current administration. We are all in this together, fam. I am in solidarity with you, and I am grateful for your solidarity with me.
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And also, simultaneously, it's crucial to name the ways in which antisemitism functions differently than many of the other oppressions that we're seeing on the rise. Because it's somehow easier to make it invisible, to elide it, to not see it.
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Yes, many Jews in America have white skin that allows them a certain kind of privilege--and yes, white-skinned yidden, your whiteness protects you from being followed in stores, from being worried about being gunned down by police, from so many kinds of institutional bias.
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