How Hitler sneaked into American Bar Mitzvah rites, and more. (Also, how Pankaj Mishra helps us understand why a visit to the U.S. in 1985 left Primo Levi intractably depressed...)
What a brilliant piece. I try to avoid, in this time of genocide inflicted on the Palestinian people by Israel, being one of those who bemoans what the genocide has done to Jews and Judaism. But reading your piece did leave me sad for the Jews. How in God’s name did such an intelligent even intellectual people fall for the Zionist lie: that descendants of people who lived in Palestine 1900 years ago had a right to displace the current inhabitants and then to slaughter them for resisting. It’s like the Zionists were the best PR men in world history, even better than their counterparts who convinced hundreds of millions of people that inhaling smoke into their lungs was healthy not deadly.
The only answer is the replacement of the Jewish state with one democratic state for all the people who live there.
Same with falling for communism. It's the tendency to be a revolutionary people. It's time for assimilation and to abandon the obsession with tribalism, and just be a part of the host nation, rather than being antagonistic and trying to change other people's cultures.
"As a Jewish convert to Orthodox Christianity with a fairly wide set of historical books under my belt, it troubles me to see some hierarchs and channels following the world's narrative about "anti-Semitism" and all the things that have been done to "combat anti-Semitism." I'll tell you directly, as a 100% pure blooded Ashkenazi man, how to fix "anti-Semitism:" Anti-Semitism will end when faithless Jews leave other groups of people alone and stop trying to transform their nations and cultures in ways that invariably harm the populations in question. It is really not that complicated.”
Israel is not better or worse than any other country in the Middle East. Have you ever been there? Israel is a Middle Eastern country par excellence, as is most of its Jewish population. They are not foreigners to the region, nor are they superior to any other Middle Eastern society. They are, however, a minority (like the Maronites, Druze, and others) and therefore heavily outnumbered. But this is simply another conflict in the long history of human struggles; no need to sensationalize or dramatize it. By the way, you may not be aware of the vast right-wing discourse that is deeply antisemitic and often uses anti-Zionism as a tool to reinforce itself.
Israel is committing a genocide. And the ideology in the name of which that genocide is committed is Zionism. Those are facts, and they cannot be overturned. There was a before for Zionism, and there will be an after. They will be very different.
Absolutely, all the ashkenazim who first conquered and then ruled the country for its first 40 years were not foreigners to the region, they just grew out of the sand like chia pets. The conquest left them outnumbered in the region which means everything is permitted up to and including genocide. The fundamentally ethnocratic nature of the state they constructed is just how states work, man. Am I getting this right?
I obviously knew that you were not exactly a great fan of Israel or Zionism. I didn't appreciate quite-how-much you hated Israel and its supporters. Or quite-how-far you'd go to disparage both Israeli and Jewish concerns.
Israel is not better or worse than any other country in the Middle East. Have you ever been there? Israel is a Middle Eastern country par excellence, as is most of its Jewish population. They are not foreigners to the region, nor are they superior to any other Middle Eastern society. They are, however, a minority (like the Maronites, Druze, and others) and therefore heavily outnumbered. But this is simply another conflict in the long history of human struggles; no need to sensationalize or dramatize it. By the way, you may not be aware of the vast right-wing discourse that is deeply antisemitic and often uses anti-Zionism as a tool to reinforce itself.
I certainly agree with your opening statemen that you are an anti-Semite, but the rest of the article is a grotesque confection of truth inversions and fake narratives. The constant references to Nazis and South Africa is incoherent word salad and goes nowhere. A meaningless essay that would undoubtedly be awarded an A* if it was submitted as course work in a third tier US liberal arts college. I assume you would prefer this miniscule sliver of land to be returned to the ancient (c 1964) Palestinian tribe and turned into yet another constructed, lawless, totally broken levantine state run by kleptocrats or theocrats where gender apartheid is a central tenet among many other vile subjugations. Or do you think that democracy would miraculously break out across the region as soon as it became judenrein. This would of course involve 7.5m Jews being ethnically cleansed from the territory. Perhaps they could go back to all the Arab countries that expelled them in 1948? Sadly, I think you'll find there's no right of return, which is why their numbers have shrunk from about a million to about ten thousand. Compare that to the 2m Arabs living in Israel. Details details eh? Or perhaps on one of your more charitable days you are amenable to the idea of a two-state solution where Palestine is formed out of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza - you know, all the land the Arabs controlled in 1967 just before they attacked again. Oh, and speaking of genocides (real ones, not the pretend one you refer to) what are your thoughts on Syria, Yemen and Sudan? Not bothered? 😂
I totally agree with your opening statement that you are an anti-semitic, but more correctly, you are a self hating Jew. Useful idiot. Why? Because the whole article is fallacious, unfactual, and a good propaganda piece for Hamas, who you probably support.
This is a brilliant essay loaded with worthwhile information and helpful references. It is such a tragedy that history is almost always perverted to serve somebody impure purpose.
Tony Karon thoroughly unpacks how the embedding of the Holocaust in the American psyche was pulled off and why it in part succeeded so spectacularly: basically, it functions as a convenient deflection from America's foundational genocide of indigenous people.
*A brilliant piece of sharp, flawless reckoning with the deception, fraud, and hypocrisy of the Zionist and Western colonial propaganda Magic Flute. A flute that entangled the masses in an orchestrated, misleading narrative to conceal and whitewash centuries of heinous atrocities perpetrated by the same flute player.*
Dear Tony, please accept the warmest admiration from a palestinian anti-zionist brother
You stupid ignorant little fuck. You father was correct. You are an antisemite. And if or when the Jihadists take over South Africa they’ll kill you first.
You nailed it. One analogy--the construction of Nazi antisemitism in the US--the Holocaust--in the 80's and beyond is analogous to the white southern creation of their "Lost Cause' in the 1920', with all its statutes of white southern heroes and the ramping up of lynchings of Blacks. And one question: I did not find the part you promised about Primo Levi's reaction to American views of the Holocaust.
Two observations: the only “memory of the holocaust” that makes sense if we really want to learn from it and prevent new genocides is to study the perpetrators instead of the victims and understand their motivations. That would of course reveal that there are monsters in all of us and that we need to keep them in check. There is nothing to learn from the victims as victims except a fake righteousness. The weak sort of righteousness that suffering confers, if it even exists, belongs only to the victims themselves. If we can’t reverse the focus the holocaust becomes just a pathetic excuse for the unwarranted sanctification of the Jews as Jews and the genocide of the Palestinians. The second one is an insight from an observant Jewish friend: the Jewish obsession with the holocaust plugs that part of a God-shaped hole in the modern Jewish psyche that Zionism does not manage to fill.
What a brilliant piece. I try to avoid, in this time of genocide inflicted on the Palestinian people by Israel, being one of those who bemoans what the genocide has done to Jews and Judaism. But reading your piece did leave me sad for the Jews. How in God’s name did such an intelligent even intellectual people fall for the Zionist lie: that descendants of people who lived in Palestine 1900 years ago had a right to displace the current inhabitants and then to slaughter them for resisting. It’s like the Zionists were the best PR men in world history, even better than their counterparts who convinced hundreds of millions of people that inhaling smoke into their lungs was healthy not deadly.
The only answer is the replacement of the Jewish state with one democratic state for all the people who live there.
Zionism was and is a catastrophe.
Same with falling for communism. It's the tendency to be a revolutionary people. It's time for assimilation and to abandon the obsession with tribalism, and just be a part of the host nation, rather than being antagonistic and trying to change other people's cultures.
"As a Jewish convert to Orthodox Christianity with a fairly wide set of historical books under my belt, it troubles me to see some hierarchs and channels following the world's narrative about "anti-Semitism" and all the things that have been done to "combat anti-Semitism." I'll tell you directly, as a 100% pure blooded Ashkenazi man, how to fix "anti-Semitism:" Anti-Semitism will end when faithless Jews leave other groups of people alone and stop trying to transform their nations and cultures in ways that invariably harm the populations in question. It is really not that complicated.”
– Brother Augustine
"Let's us Europeans do another round of settler colonial dispossesion" was not a radical revolutionary stance, my guy.
Marginal as your unhinged nazi views are in American public life, I'll just note that openly espousing them is not helping the anti-zionist struggle.
This is brilliant and needs to be made into a book.
Israel is not better or worse than any other country in the Middle East. Have you ever been there? Israel is a Middle Eastern country par excellence, as is most of its Jewish population. They are not foreigners to the region, nor are they superior to any other Middle Eastern society. They are, however, a minority (like the Maronites, Druze, and others) and therefore heavily outnumbered. But this is simply another conflict in the long history of human struggles; no need to sensationalize or dramatize it. By the way, you may not be aware of the vast right-wing discourse that is deeply antisemitic and often uses anti-Zionism as a tool to reinforce itself.
Israel is committing a genocide. And the ideology in the name of which that genocide is committed is Zionism. Those are facts, and they cannot be overturned. There was a before for Zionism, and there will be an after. They will be very different.
Absolutely, all the ashkenazim who first conquered and then ruled the country for its first 40 years were not foreigners to the region, they just grew out of the sand like chia pets. The conquest left them outnumbered in the region which means everything is permitted up to and including genocide. The fundamentally ethnocratic nature of the state they constructed is just how states work, man. Am I getting this right?
I obviously knew that you were not exactly a great fan of Israel or Zionism. I didn't appreciate quite-how-much you hated Israel and its supporters. Or quite-how-far you'd go to disparage both Israeli and Jewish concerns.
I think you've lost the plot.
He also failed to register his longtime employer as the representative of a foreign nation, which it obviously is.
Israel is not better or worse than any other country in the Middle East. Have you ever been there? Israel is a Middle Eastern country par excellence, as is most of its Jewish population. They are not foreigners to the region, nor are they superior to any other Middle Eastern society. They are, however, a minority (like the Maronites, Druze, and others) and therefore heavily outnumbered. But this is simply another conflict in the long history of human struggles; no need to sensationalize or dramatize it. By the way, you may not be aware of the vast right-wing discourse that is deeply antisemitic and often uses anti-Zionism as a tool to reinforce itself.
I certainly agree with your opening statemen that you are an anti-Semite, but the rest of the article is a grotesque confection of truth inversions and fake narratives. The constant references to Nazis and South Africa is incoherent word salad and goes nowhere. A meaningless essay that would undoubtedly be awarded an A* if it was submitted as course work in a third tier US liberal arts college. I assume you would prefer this miniscule sliver of land to be returned to the ancient (c 1964) Palestinian tribe and turned into yet another constructed, lawless, totally broken levantine state run by kleptocrats or theocrats where gender apartheid is a central tenet among many other vile subjugations. Or do you think that democracy would miraculously break out across the region as soon as it became judenrein. This would of course involve 7.5m Jews being ethnically cleansed from the territory. Perhaps they could go back to all the Arab countries that expelled them in 1948? Sadly, I think you'll find there's no right of return, which is why their numbers have shrunk from about a million to about ten thousand. Compare that to the 2m Arabs living in Israel. Details details eh? Or perhaps on one of your more charitable days you are amenable to the idea of a two-state solution where Palestine is formed out of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza - you know, all the land the Arabs controlled in 1967 just before they attacked again. Oh, and speaking of genocides (real ones, not the pretend one you refer to) what are your thoughts on Syria, Yemen and Sudan? Not bothered? 😂
I totally agree with your opening statement that you are an anti-semitic, but more correctly, you are a self hating Jew. Useful idiot. Why? Because the whole article is fallacious, unfactual, and a good propaganda piece for Hamas, who you probably support.
This is a brilliant essay loaded with worthwhile information and helpful references. It is such a tragedy that history is almost always perverted to serve somebody impure purpose.
Thank you.
Tony Karon thoroughly unpacks how the embedding of the Holocaust in the American psyche was pulled off and why it in part succeeded so spectacularly: basically, it functions as a convenient deflection from America's foundational genocide of indigenous people.
Thoughtful, intelligent, educated, well put.
*A brilliant piece of sharp, flawless reckoning with the deception, fraud, and hypocrisy of the Zionist and Western colonial propaganda Magic Flute. A flute that entangled the masses in an orchestrated, misleading narrative to conceal and whitewash centuries of heinous atrocities perpetrated by the same flute player.*
Dear Tony, please accept the warmest admiration from a palestinian anti-zionist brother
🫶🫶❤️❤️
You stupid ignorant little fuck. You father was correct. You are an antisemite. And if or when the Jihadists take over South Africa they’ll kill you first.
Brilliant.
You nailed it. One analogy--the construction of Nazi antisemitism in the US--the Holocaust--in the 80's and beyond is analogous to the white southern creation of their "Lost Cause' in the 1920', with all its statutes of white southern heroes and the ramping up of lynchings of Blacks. And one question: I did not find the part you promised about Primo Levi's reaction to American views of the Holocaust.
Two observations: the only “memory of the holocaust” that makes sense if we really want to learn from it and prevent new genocides is to study the perpetrators instead of the victims and understand their motivations. That would of course reveal that there are monsters in all of us and that we need to keep them in check. There is nothing to learn from the victims as victims except a fake righteousness. The weak sort of righteousness that suffering confers, if it even exists, belongs only to the victims themselves. If we can’t reverse the focus the holocaust becomes just a pathetic excuse for the unwarranted sanctification of the Jews as Jews and the genocide of the Palestinians. The second one is an insight from an observant Jewish friend: the Jewish obsession with the holocaust plugs that part of a God-shaped hole in the modern Jewish psyche that Zionism does not manage to fill.
brilliant!