#jews don't count

[notaplaceofhonour]

Antisemitism Required Reading

I get a lot of ignorant comments & tags on my posts about antisemitism, and I’ve already spent way too much time & energy engaging with them. So to preserve my sanity, I’ve made the decision not to engage too deeply with any commenters who haven’t at least read all of these in their entirety:

“Jewish Space Lasers” by Mike Rothschild

“People Love Dead Jews” by Dara Horn

“Jews Don’t Count” by David Baddiel

"More Than a Century of Antisemitism", GEC Special Report

If you’re not Jewish, please read all of this literature before adding anything to my posts about antisemitism.

Jews, please add any books you think should be on the list!

#I'll be adding and updating this post as I find & vet anything I feel should be required reading #antisemitism #people love dead jews #jews don't count #jewish space lasers #required reading #reading list #dara horn #david baddiel #more than a century of antisemitism #mike rothschild #jewish history

[im-not-your-nice-jewish-boy]

I saw a particular antisemite on this website say that it was hilarious that we (filthy Zionists) say the same things over and over again in a massive echo chamber and have our own tags

Okay

Have you considered that we say the same ten things over and over again because y'all don't learn the first hundred times?

Have you considered that it can't be an echo chamber with y'all forcing your way into our tags with antisemitic shit constantly?

And that those tags pre-dated you all finding out that you hate Jews?

And that we use those tags to talk to each other which is part of why you all doing that to us is so fucked up?

Just a thought

#jewblr #antisemitism #don't be an idiot #literally five seconds of critical thinking #oh wait #it's about jews #and #jews don't count #anyway #jewish and proud #free palestine from hamas #antizionism is antisemitism

[hairtusk]

David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count (2021)

#david baddiel #jews don't count #antisemitism #literature

[feste-the-mad]

First They Came (updated):

First they came for the African-Americans,

and I spoke out, because Black Lives Matter.

Then they came for the Gays,

and I spoke out, because Love is Love.

Then they came for the Muslims,

and I spoke out, because We Stand Against Islamophobia.

Then they came for the Transgenders,

and I spoke out, because Trans Rights are Human Rights.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I spoke out, because Hate has no Place.

I joined them, because Jews are Zionist oppressors who kill babies.

#antisemitism #leftist antisemitism #jewish #jumblr #jewblr #jews don't count #vent poem

[hellochildrenoftheatom]

Finished Jews Don't Count by David Baddiel

It took me a while to read it but that's more about how this book was published in 2021 but is very relevant to the current moment in 2024.

Like the book mainly focuses on British examples of leftist antisemitism, but all those examples could be easily replaced by American leftist antisemitism. Especially from the past few months.

There's so many people who should read this book that won't.

#jews don't count #david baddiel #antisemitism #leftist antisemitism

[insane-control-room]

actually, no. antizionism is antisemitism. zionism, by definition, is believing in the jewish people's right to live in their home land.

you do not have to be an antizionist to be against israel's government, just like any citizen of any country can be against something their government is doing and not hate the country they live in. shocker, isnt it?

you do have to be an antisemite to claim that we have no ties to the land or our historic holy sites (as the UN does. look it up. unfortunately bbc was the only non-jewish news site i could find that even spoke about the erasure of our history).

tell me, in what way is antizionism not antisemitism? because i havent seen anything that separates the two - in fact, the more i see that thrown around, the more i see the inherent antisemitism.

i hope that all of you well meaning individuals (cough, goyim) will reblog this and truly reflect on what you are marching for. ask questions. study our history. maybe learn about how israel is the only democratic state in the region (ever since tunisia's downgrade to a hybrid regime), and ask yourself and others why. ask, in what way is your antizionism not antisemetic?

what are you marching for?

#antisemitism #jewish history #jewish erasure #appropriation #israel #i hope people reblog this #erasure #jews don't count #what are you marching for

[pearwaldorf]

Some shit has come across my dash that reminded me about this talk* between David Baddiel and Toby Lichtig that discusses his book Jews Don't Count. (There is also a documentary of the same name, which I have not been able to find. Supposedly it's on iTunes, but I'm not downloading it to find out.)

It discusses the duality of antisemitism wherein Jews are seen as both powerful but also "the usual" tropes we associate with non-Jewish marginalized people. It's all tangled up with white privilege (because some Jews are white), the idea of passing, and the conflation of Jewishness** and Judaism.

This is instructive and useful for everybody, but especially people who consider themselves leftist or progressive. I very much hear (or not hear) the silence on the left when antisemitic stuff comes up, from the left or the right. (And it's amazing how that shit sounds exactly the same regardless of which side it comes from.)

As a goy and somebody who considers myself progressive, this is something I find extremely fucking concerning. If a group of people are being attacked and marginalized because of things they can't control, they should be protected. I don't see how proximity to whiteness*** (and some Jews benefit from white privilege) changes how we approach the issue.

Like. This article from 2020 talks about how Tottenham Hotspur uses a word considered to be a racial/ethnic slur to describe their fans and players. I substituted the n-word or the c-word and it became extremely clear how offensive this is.

It is enraging to hear people say it's reclaimed when they were the ones who made it a slur in the first place. A dominant group can never reclaim a slur that is leveled against a marginalized group. That's called, uh, using a slur to describe a marginalized group. You would never do this with anybody other ethnic/racial group today, but it's acceptable because antisemitism is baked into western culture.

One of the things I have been most surprised and appalled by is how very little I know about Israel and how that affects what I know as an American. I was in my 30s before I learned there were non-zionist Jews. I had never met or heard of one.

[Part of this might be where I grew up. The PNW has a very small population of Jews (~1%), and I knew exactly three: my 2nd grade teacher, the annoying kid, and the annoying kid's dad (who was a rabbi and came to talk to my high school class). My primary exposure to Jewish culture was Kornblatt's and Mel Brooks.]

So maybe my knowledge of Jewish (and Israeli-American) politics is kind of remedial. I can't recall a subject where I continually learn something that makes a lot of things fall into place. And sometimes I wonder if other people have this experience too.

--

* "BAME" is a term that comes up a lot in the video, which is an abbreviation for "Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic". It is now an outdated term, but it takes time for that to filter into everyday consciousness.

** As Baddiel bluntly puts it, "It doesn't matter if I'm an atheist, that wouldn't have gotten me a pass out of Auschwitz."

*** Honorary whiteness is a whole different can of worms which is not quite relevant here.

#antisemitism #david baddiel #jews don't count #pear text #word vomit #i didn't mean to make the post that long sorry

[roamwithahungryheart]

'With rising tensions in the Middle East, will it cause a rise in antisemitism?' Babe it already HAS. REPORT IT.

#the news doesn't care lmao #jews don't count

[readingbooksinisrael]

Book Review: Jews Don’t Count/David Baddiel

[image id: the cover of the book Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel]

This was pretty much what I was expecting, coming into this as a Jew who knows all about this topic, but it is still an important book because it really does outline the way Jews are often ignored in modern leftist culture.

It isn't academic: it doesn't go further than what David Baddiel can see as a Jew in leftist online and some offline spaces, and it is very much centered in DB's experience as a non-religious Jew, which he mentions at the beginning of the book that it will be.

I have two criticisms with the book:

1. I understand that it is centered in DB's experience as a non-Orthodox Jew but the nearly complete absence of how the left sees religious Jews (there was one sentence about the left dismissing religion as a whole), especially Orthodox Jews who are obviously Jews felt lacking. I feel that there should have been at least a long paragraph about it.

2. At one point he falls into the trap that this whole book is about, and declares Israeli Jews to not really be Jewish (because they're not nebbish enough). As an immigrant to Israel, I understand why he's saying this, but it is, actually part of the trap of #JewsDon'tCount in an #OnlySomeJewsCount way. Israeli Jews do not experience the antisemitism that non-Israeli Jews do in offline spaces, it is true, but we are still part of the same nation. As he himself puts it so succinctly, the Nazis still want to kill us. But, more than that, we share a history and traditions.

3.5 stars because of not being deep enough, rounded up because of the importance of the topic

#jews don't count #david baddiel #jumblr #antisemitism #booklr #book reviews

[hazel2468]

Oh, and here’s one that got me;

“A memo given out by the British Ministry of Information in 1940, an instruction to its own propagandists, suggested that the idea of atrocity- what it calls “horror”- “must be used very sparingly, and must deal with the treatment of indisputably innocent people: not with violent criminals, and not with Jews.” This instruction came from a number of beliefs. Primarily, it came from a sense, prevalent in the government at that time, that the British public should not feel they were fighting a war on behalf of the Jews. But underneath that is something deeper. Underneath that is the profound belief that Jews do not belong in the category of the indisputably innocent: that, just by the virtue of being Jewish, they have sinned.”  

This line snagged me. It snagged because, though this book does go into amazing detail about the association between Jews and Capitalists, the making of the image of the Jew into the image of The Man, into how antisemitism is so very often framed as “punching up” and “rebelling” against the “whites in power” (this book also wholesale refutes the idea that Jews are white, and brilliantly so), I think that THIS line digs down into the heart of it.

The idea that Jews are guilty, that we are “sinning” (though I know most progressives would be loath to admit they think of us that way), is something I feel is at the heart of the refusal of progressives to offer the same allyship and concern to Jews the way to do to almost every other minority. The willingness to connect Jews to evil capitalists, to demand that we bend over backwards to prove that we are “innocent”- in many progressive spaces this means anti-Zionist, despite this being about America and American Jews who have about as much say in Israeli politics as we do in any other Middle Eastern nation...

If I had to pick something that all of this shit stems from. I think it would be this. There is an idea that Jews are inherently not innocent, that we are always “up to something”.

And I wish more progressives would look at the antisemitism in their exclusion of Jews, in their outright condemnation of Jews and the banning of Jews and Jewish symbols from their spaces, in the way they so easily fall into antisemitic stereotypes because they so easily accept them because they, too, buy into this notion that Jews are just inherently guilty- I wish more progressives would look at that and be willing to see the racism in it, just as they are seemingly open to seeing the racism elsewhere.

#antisemitism #antisemitism is racism #yeah fuck it that's it it is #not gonna beat around the bush anymore it's a form of racism #jews don't count #seriously go read this shit it's good #it's well written #and if you think that YOU surely don't need to read it #yeah you do that's how you know

[im-not-your-nice-jewish-boy]

I think the thing that really makes it clear how little people care about antisemitism and Jews on average is how okay people are just slinging shit at us and the reaction to said shit slinging. You could be talking about literally anything to do with Jewish history or culture, and some goy will come in like "actually i think i know your side of the story better than you". And they'll often use that to try to gaslight us into forgetting what's been done to us or to erase all of the things we've been forced to live through since before we were even a ~people~ in the first place.

And the part that I'm getting at here is how people who do that face basically no consequences for doing so. They accost us like that then go about their day, not only not facing any consequences for being an antisemitic ass to someone who didn't do anything except exist in public as a Jewish person, but will often be praised for it.

I've said repeatedly that I'm not surprised by any of this, and I'm really not

But it really does bear repeating that this isn't acceptable

Just because treating us like this has been normalized doesn't make it okay; it never has been and it never will be

Anyone who feels alright doing stuff like that, I really hope you grow the capacity to look at yourself more critically, for your sake and everyone else's

#antisemitism #antisemites #never forget #jumblr #jewblr #jews don't count #the jews are tired #leave us the fuck alone

[hairtusk]

David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count (2021)

#david baddiel #jews don't count #antisemitism #literature

[melodyofmystery]

Antisemitism is rife on this website and in the world

#say it with your chest #jews don't count

[denimbex1986]

'J Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who inspired the recently released Christopher Nolan biopic Oppenheimer, was Jewish. Although he did his best to assimilate, he was fundamentally and thoroughly of the tribe. Cillian Murphy, as you might ascertain from his name, is not.

Murphy has won acclaim from critics and the public for his portrayal of the tortured scientist behind the atomic bomb since the film’s release last week.

While many people probably don’t care about Oppenheimer’s faith or indeed Murphy’s, as with so many things, the Jewish community is split over the perennial issue of “jewface.” At its most simple, this is the idea is that the Jewish experience is something unique and that Jewish actors should always be favoured for roles where the character is Jewish.

The debate has taken many iterations over the years, notably last year when Dame Maureen Lipman questioned whether Dame Helen Mirren could do justice to the role of Golda Meir, Israel’s first female prime minister.

In his oft-cited book and subsequent documentary, both entitled Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel makes the argument that if any other minority’s characters were given to people not of that ethnic background there would be outrage and an almost guaranteed cancellation. He’s right: thankfully the use of blackface and yellowface have been drummed out of polite society.

This is where I depart from the jewface school of thought. Where some would argue that to have a Cillian play an Oppenheimer or a Mirren play a Meir is to diminish their Judaism, I’m more open-minded. To state the obvious point, acting is acting. Actors like Mirren and Murphy take their craft seriously, to often incredibly moving results, and they are more than capable of inhabiting the minds and bodies of historic figures and doing them justice – not to mention producing films that stand on their own purely from an artistic perspective.

Secondly, as long as the writing and direction of the story mentions their Judaism if and when it’s relevant (as Oppenheimer does) then why does it matter who takes the role? To people like Baddiel, Jews in Hollywood are Schrodinger’s Jews, simultaneously different and unique and also able to play any non-Jew they want to, both assimilated and not. Either we are part of the mainstream or we’re not.

To play devil’s advocate, should there not be Italian voices trying to say that the Jewish James Caan should not have played Sonny Corleone? Should Paul Newman have only been in Exodus and no other films? Frankly it’s a position that doesn’t hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.

It’s especially ludicrous when you consider how most Jews would not know or care that Jason Biggs, whose portrait of American suburban Jewish neurotic made American Pie, is not Jewish. That Rachel Sennott, who stole the show in the achingly Jewish angst drama Shiva Baby, is Catholic and Italian. Who cares that Meg Ryan’s pitch perfect channelling of Nora Ephron’s anxieties was performed by a very gentile gentile.

With the right scripts, actors can and should be allowed to portray Jewish stories.

I don’t want to live in a world where Jews are giving ourselves another reason to be othered, to insultingly say that being ethnically Jewish, even tenuously, is a better qualification for a role than whether you can act well.

There is an important conversation to have about stereotypes about Jews, about the way that Jewish characters are written and the way Jewish stories are told. But actors are often at the blunt end of a writer’s words, doing their best to portray a character from the script that’s placed in front of them. The decisions that actually matter about how Jews are represented are made long before people show up on set.

Historically, Jews have assimilated into tolerant societies by rejecting diktats and quotas, and embracing the open-mindedness necessary to make great art. I don’t like it when people perform Jews badly, but the alternative proposed by critics like Baddiel is not the answer.

To insist on this form of token representation is a very clunky and indelicate way of seeing the world. It’s reductive and patronising and culturally naive, and worse: it will lead us to bad films.'

#Oppenheimer #Christopher Nolan #Cillian Murphy #Jews Don't Count #David Baddiel #Maureen Lipman #Dame Helen Mirren #Golda Meir #James Caen #Sonny Corleone

[dostoyevsky-official]

as long as you choose to never actually express your stance on Israel (though I can guess what it is seeing that you're an American Jew) I don't take you seriously

hurriedly running after people talking about a certain issue, what do you think of this other issue on the other side of the world? interrogating reporters covering burma, i've noticed you haven't said a word about massacres in ethiopia. getting kicked out from assuredly guilt-ridden revisionist academic panels on the mediterranean migration crisis for demanding their stance on what's happening in kashmir. you have the attention span of a flea, the self-satisfaction of a leech, and the endearing presence of both

#i don't need anyone here‚ the baby fandom website i largely despise‚ to take me seriously #not jewish and least of all an 'American Jew' #this is the russia‚ former soviet union‚ and nyc blog you little psycho #blocked for good measure - good to see the follower count go down by 1 #for context this nut sent me an endless stream of what is your stance on israel asks

[amarriageoftrueminds]

But you know what? Rewatching CATFA, the part where Abraham Erskine was shot and killed by a Hydra spy, I kept thinking this: yes, I know that Hydra had spies everywhere, but I had kept thinking that Peggy had something to do with Abraham's death. Because he died almost immediately after Steve was injected with the serum, and how did that Hydra spy get into that secret room in a bookstore so easily??? I still think Peggy had something to do with Abraham's death, not JUST that Hydra spy that Richard Armitage played..

Peggy says she's supervisor of all SSR operations (but then jumps a foot in the air when her boss shows up behind her, and then spends the rest of the film carrying clipboards. So is she really?)

Neither Col. Phillips or Howard Stark are framed as anything to do with 'intelligence.' So, according to Peggy herself, the person in charge of making sure there aren't any Nazi spies around is... her.

Then she goes to a top-secret base in Brooklyn. And there are shady guys hanging around outside, and she doesn't notice.

Then we're introduced to a Nazi spy embedded at the State Department. Peggy again doesn't notice. (And hasn't noticed before this time.)

When that guy sets off a bomb and kills Erskine, Peggy grabs someone else's gun (she doesn't have one of her own) and misses every shot at him. She fails to stop the saboteur, who looks to be successfully escaping with serum.

(Even in other universes, where she's in the room with Erskine, she's still inept at stopping him being killed. In fact, even more people get shot if she's in the room.)

So Steve has to chase down the saboteur barefoot.

When Steve wants to go off to raid a Hydra base and rescue soldiers, she tries to dissuade him from doing that -- even though she was acting like she wanted Steve to quit his anti-Nazi money-raising job a second ago.

She's also shown to have intell. on what the Nazis are up to -- she knows Krausberg is a factory. And yet her 'plan' to help Steve amounts to flying through enemy gunfire, dropping him in the middle of a Nazi weapons factory, where Red Skull is that very minute, and which is also laced with explosives.

(Tantamount to dropping Steve on a minefield, really.)

This, while Steve has: a wooden shield, and no means to communicate except a flimsy transponder, and no back up plan for if the flimsy transponder proves useless.

And then, despite her acting like she's Boss of Intelligence, she cannot get planes to find any any aerial reconnaissance to show the 107 have survived. (That's 500+ men marching back to base in broad daylight over 3 days, and Miss Spy can't manage to spot them.)

And when the soldiers come back, safe and sound, she looks not pleased at all but rather pissed off about it. (Because Steve wasn't under her control, or paying her attention).

When Steve is about to jump on the Valkyrie, to go stop Red Skull, she stops him and makes him kiss her.

When Steve is about to crash the Valkyrie and save millions from Red Skull's final plan, she tries to dissuade him from doing that.

Oh, and she of course throws a temper tantrum and fires a gun at Steve (in a way which coincidentally endangers multiple other people).

Then it's revealed in CATWS and What If...? that she hired Nazis and happily worked with them, in exactly the circumstances which she herself admitted she would in AOS. In AOS she also claimed she, alone was solely responsible for the Nazi-hiring decisions, and in the one universe where she, alone, wasn't in SHIELD... there weren't any Nazis in it, either.

It's also shown that she's power hungry for the serum herself, would monologue like Red Skull about it, would literally step over Steve's bleeding gunshot body to steal it from him, and throw more violent temper tantrums about not being given more power immediately (also literally throwing her weight around).

And that if she knew Bucky was being tortured and enslaved for decades (ditto the child victims of the Red Room) she wouldn't do anything about it.

This in the MCU, and the Cap movies, where not ignoring a situation "pointed south" is explicitly framed as what makes you a hero.

("When you can do the things that I can, but you don't, and then the bad things happen ... they happen because of you.")

All of which is to say:

if you wanted to write Peggy as a Nazi villain doing heinous shit on purpose (including feigning constant incompetence as a nepotism hire, which coincidentally always benefits the Nazis), and/or thinking she's the moral center of the universe despite this, you wouldn't have to change a single thing about the character herself, only the way other characters treat her.

🤷‍♀️

#toAyourQ #dat's me #hey nonny #antipeggy #antisteggy #cynthia glass #p*ggy meta #mcu critical #steggy is hydra trash party #meta #mcu meta #erskine isn't even the only jew she's got shot #counting ana jarvis #remember folks: REBLOG 🔁 / DON'T JUST LIKE 🤍