Alex גדעון בן װעלװל
@JewishWonk
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Columnist @JDForward . U.S. Foreign Policy and Jewish communal concerns. Bylines in @TheAtlantic , @WashingtonPost , @TabletMag . All bad takes are mine alone.
New York, NY
Joined June 2011
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I wrote about the Soviet Union's treatment of Holocaust memory and the role that this deliberately incomplete memory is playing in Russia's assault on Ukraine, and Ukraine's response for
@TheAtlantic
.
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Man have I got upsetting news for a lot of very concerned White people about why Black people have slaver ancestors.
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A "Jewish and Israeli owned falafel restaurant" in Philadelphia cannot do a single thing about Israel's military campaign against Hamas.
What you're looking at is people normalizing antisemitic incitement against their Jewish neighbors.
Protestors in Philadelphia stand outside of a Jewish & Israeli owned falafel restaurant
“Goldie, Goldie you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide”
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Dropping a Nazi flag in front of a Jewish candidate isn't rude or mean. And it's not just a message for Bernie Sanders.
It's a signal of intent.
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Chappelle made a lot of excuses for Kanye and Kyrie Irving's antisemitism on SNL last night. I want to focus on one idea in particular, because it's prevalent far beyond these 3 Black entertainers.
"The Jews control Hollywood."
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Jew haters discovering that Mizrahi Jews exist is currently my favorite social media phenomenon
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Listening to Zelensky's interview with the last remaining independent Russian media outlets and I'm struck by how insane it is to paint this man as some kind of Russophobe. He speaks Russian with such comfort and speed. It is his mother tongue.
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All I can think about every time I see this disgraceful stunt is about how I can't even visit the graves of my ancestors, because I don't know which mass grave they were dumped into, and if it's one that's even been found yet.
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I know this is a call to have me murdered but there's something so hilariously pathetic about "nobody wants to date me, clearly the Jews conspired against me."
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Every day someone wakes up and decides to compete for the most deranged lie about Israel and Palestine.
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Jews who went to public school or have children in public school, if you're comfortable, reply to this sharing a time you had someone else's religion imposed on you through "secular" public schools.
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Depressing Jewish news break. Thread of memes I enjoy that I hope you will too.
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There are ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Syria, Armenia-Azerbaijan, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, multiple countries in Sahel, Congo, and Kashmir.
Pakistan, which has received billions in American aid, is currently ethnically cleansing 2 million Afghans.
If only Gaza makes you sick, why?
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I was born in Belarus. On my father's side we can track our ancestors to living within miles of where I was born since at least 1793
We were never recognized as Poles, Russians, Germans, or anyone else who conquered the land. My birth certificate identified my nationality as Jew
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If a person sharing their grief prompts you to heckle because it makes your preferred politics uncomfortable revisit your politics because you're losing your humanity
WATCH: A San Francisco Jewish man bravely shares his experiences with antisemitism after losing five family members at Kibbutz Be'eri, including two kidnapped by Hamas, only to be met with boos and jeers from anti-Israel activists.
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I am very concerned with government tyranny. What? My flag? Oh it's my American flag but altered so people know I support a police state.
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It's hard to watch Ukrainians, including their leader, be so brave in the face of Russian violence while watching Germany and Italy argue that they should get to continue buying Russian oil and sell Russian oligarchs expensive purses.
BREAKING: In a video conference call last night Ukraine President Zelensky told EU leaders: "This might be the last time you see me alive", two sources briefed on the call told me
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"Jewish students are welcome on native land"
It's easy to focus on the negative stories. It's nice to be reminded that we still have friends.
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I listened to
@ZelenskyyUa
's interview with
@FareedZakaria
on CNN. Fareed asked Zelensky about his family's history during the Holocaust, and it's so very clear to me that he has a Soviet understanding of that period. Which is to say, incomplete.
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"Can't make any criticism of Israel without being called antisemitic"
Oh, did you call for Netanyahu and his far right cabinet to resign?
"No, the other thing"
1/
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Friendly reminder:
If you have a problem with Israeli policy, go protest or write letters to the nearest Israeli consulate.
If you can't tell the difference between the consulate and a synagogue, you're an antisemite.
Sincerely,
The Jews
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When science doesn't match your extreme nationalism so the science is obviously erasing your "bloodline."
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Trump will burn everything down in the name of keeping himself out of prison. That's why he's running. That's why he won't say no violence.
Trump doesn't answer this question: "Will you tell your supporters now, no matter what, no violence?"
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I don't usually wear a kippah after Shabbos but I forgot to take mine off and tonight flew to Chicago for a friend's wedding.
Checking in at the hotel, the woman at the front desk greeted me by wishing me happy Hanukkah and told me where I could find the city's public menorah.
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The "Jews control Hollywood" trope operates the same way, but with a framing that the speaker believes lets them be justified in their bigotry
Any number of Jews having a job in Hollywood is too many Jews for an antisemite
But say "control" and you can act like it's resistance.
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@RNCResearch
"the president is polite and treats people with respect" is not the dunk you think it is dodos
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Jews are not genetically special. We are not magically intelligent. We have no special talents when it comes to money.
The people who believe these things, whether they understand it or not, are promoting antisemitic ideas. In every generation, those ideas get us killed.
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My father has COVID and has been admitted to the ER. If you're the davening type his Hebrew name is Velvel ben Abram.
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This person is on the Board of Directors for
@benandjerrys
. Does the company want to associate with this? Does
@Unilever
?
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your annual Passover reminder that a good debate to have at your Seder is on the question of whether the frog plague was countless little frogs or one colossal frog
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Some thoughts on the "go back to Poland" slogan hurled at Jews, a thread
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Most would understand that if a White person goes to a restaurant and complains that there are many Asians at the restaurant that they're not arguing that Asians control the restaurant or that there's a number of Asian patrons they would accept.
It means they don't like Asians.
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So if you're a Jew reading this and you're getting uncomfortable with how Zelensky invokes the history of the Holocaust - please cut him some slack. He's fighting a war, he can get a Jewish studies degree when they beat back the fascist invaders.
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Can't stop thinking about how a massacre of Jews in Israel inspired antisemitic violence against Jews everywhere else.
According to London police, there were 218 antisemitic hate crimes reported in the capital so far this month, a 1,350% increase over the same period last year.
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Finkelstein helped build this movement despite Jews telling him for years the dangers of what he was unleashing. It's quite fitting that they publicly humiliate him.
Norm Finkelstein cautions students at Columbia against using “from the river to the sea” chants so they can maximize their impact by not causing controversy.
You can probably guess how the clip ends. Incredible.
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American kid finds a Russian document from his great grandparents featuring a Star of David. Posts in a Russian subreddit asking about possible Jewish heritage. His Russian Great grandparents were carrying around a copy of the antisemitic Elders of Zion. Top comment is "oh no."
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A minor anecdote on the current state of New York:
I wore my kippah on my way to get the last of my groceries on the Upper West Side ahead of Shabbos. Just had a pair of teens follow me for a block yelling antisemitic slurs and making threats.
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I wish more people spent time contemplating why, while hospitals are running out of energy, Hamas has the energy to light their tunnels, move their rockets around, launch those rockets, power their propaganda, etc...
Hamas makes choices with resources. It could make others.
Take a look.
Near the Rafah border crossing, Hamas owns fuel tanks, containing hundreds of thousands of liters of fuel.
Please refer the ones complaining about no fuel in Gaza to Hamas.
#BlameHamas
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At 5:20 early Wednesday morning, a man broke into a Jewish family's home in LA. The family, including 4 children, encountered him threatening to kill them. The father fought him off into the backyard.
The man shouted "free Palestine" as he was arrested.
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Her political awakening was saying it's a conflict between white and brown people and the only reason Hamas's massacre of 1,200 civilians was called terrorism is because they're the brown ones. Disgusting and wrong worldview that deserves to be marginalized at every opportunity.
Melissa Barrera says her exit from the "Scream" franchise over social media posts about Gaza has become a personal "awakening."
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I don't have a problem with public prayer but
A) Thanking God for sportsball is, at best, a joke & every God fearing person should know that
B) Every Jew and Muslim in public schooling knows that "religious freedom" to do public prayer in practice is only extended to Christians
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do you know how badly you have to mess up to be subtweeted by a holocaust museum
Opposing calls for genocide against Jews shouldn’t be difficult or controversial.
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There are those who criticize Israeli policy and there are those who seek to demonize Israel and Jews broadly. The conflation of the two as "criticism of Israel" is a slight of hand done by fellow travelers in media.
You'll forgive me for wanting to keep the two distinct.
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The obsession with physical appearance of Israeli Jews as a means of delegitimizing their state is stupid and maddening for a number of reasons. 🧵
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I'm a pretty engaged Jew and Zionist and I don't know what Alan Garber's views on Zionism are. A quick Google search doesn't generate much either.
He is Jewish though.
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Folks who are not Jewish seem to be confused about why Mayor de Blasio's comments last night were bad and wrong. I'd like to talk a little bit about unconscious bias. Here's a quick thread.
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I know this thread won't persuade any antisemite, but I hope folks who can think critically will pay attention to how the "Jews control Hollywood" trope is deployed.
It is not resistance. It's just bigotry in the language of liberation.
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Jews cannot publicly celebrate their religion because of "communal tensions" in London. Is it Jews who are vandalizing and assaulting people? Or is the local government kowtowing to violent Jew haters?
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Where I come from, this is an unthinkable thing. In America, it's a given. May it remain one.
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Put up cryptic music lyrics as away messages
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When I tell you the Russian-speaking Jewish experience in Israel is distinct from other Jews, this is what I mean. This is not the first time that even in death Russian Jews are humiliated and othered. A Rabbinate that is actively hostile to Russian Jews makes this happen.
Alina Falahati was one of the victims of the Nova Festival massacre. Alina was literally buried outside the cemetery wall, because, like 30%+ of Russian-speaking Israelis, she wasn't considered "fully Jewish". She was in the process of full conversion but hasn't graduated yet.
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Chuck is an elected politician so people can protest him, but it's not a good look to be like "haha we know this is family time during the holy Sabbath so we decided to ruin it."
People who have policy goals don't play these kinds of gross games. Trolls do.
Yesterday we received a tip that Chuck Schumer would be having Shabbat dinner with his daughter at her apartment that night…
…So we picketed outside of her building to let Chuck know: Ceasefire now! Free Palestine! 🇵🇸
Not a moment of peace for genocide supporters!
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The USSR systematically murdered rabbis and the Hebrew and Yiddish intelligentsia. It shut down synagogues and Yiddish schools. It banned Yiddish newspapers and printing of prayer books.
It marked Jews as a race on our papers. It denied us access to education and careers.
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20,000 Jewish civilians were executed in a ditch outside my birthplace, Bobruisk, Belarus in one day in 1941.
Leave my dead ancestors out of your mouth. Find a different way to slander the Jewish state.
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Two things can be true:
1) Tlaib receives a lot of animus because she's Palestinian and Muslim, which is wrong and should be condemned
2) Tlaib chooses to die on stupid hills, which in recent months has involved a lot of anti-anti- alignment with literal terrorists
.
@POTUS
is violating Article I of the Constitution by carrying out airstrikes in Yemen without congressional approval. The American people are tired of endless war.
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Chappelle gives us a good idea of what people mean when they say the Jews "control" Hollywood, because in that monologue he noted that in Hollywood "it's a lot of Jews."
An interesting and revealing way of how they think about it.
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There's nothing that Israel can do in Gaza that justifies vandalizing American Jewish institutions, harassing American Jews, assaulting American Jews, and driving us from public life. Those are the actions of antisemites. Israel's actions are just an excuse for their hatred.
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Starting to think settler means something different than I thought it meant
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Mel Gibson still stars in blockbusters, despite very clearly hating Jews as much as Kanye does.
Is it Jewish power that derailed the career of one and not the other? Or is it that white (non-Jewish) audiences still would happily give one of the Jew haters money?
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Hamas is not offering to return hostages. It is holding the corpses of civilians it murdered hostage. Think about that for a moment and ask yourself why so much of American media is sanitizing Hamas's every decision.
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Two-year-old Aiden McCarthy was found wandering alone after the Highland Park shooting yesterday. His parents were murdered. Aiden is now an orphan, being raised by his Soviet Jewish grandparents, Misha & Nina Levberg, who fled to America for a better life
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But let's examine it. What does it mean for Jews, as a class, to "control" Hollywood? How would we measure this? Is there one Jewish agenda? In Washington D.C. there are many Jewish lobbying groups. AIPAC and J Street famously spend their days dunking on each other on Twitter.
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Wearing a kefiyeh is not a crime. It certainly is no justification for violence. These young men deserved so much better. The person who shot them should face the full force of the law for their bigotry and violence.
Three young Palestinian men, Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Ali and Kenan Abdulhamid, students at Brown and other US universities, were shot last night on their way to a family dinner in Burlington, USA. Their crime? Wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh. They are critically injured. And
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Companies involved in Hollywood entertainment compete along many lines for business. How do Jews balance "controlling Hollywood" with the business objectives of the individual companies they work at? Do they collude?
The antisemite lets you fill in the blanks.
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@CaitlinPacific
Specifically targeting Jews for conversion and essentializing "Jewish blood" doesn't become less antisemitic if you're paralyzed.
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This meme is way funnier to me than it has any right being
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You'll never guess where this cheerleader for mass murder lives
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It's not Jews who should hide. The people who hate Jews should hide.
They should be embarrassed to express their bigotry publicly. They should believe it will cost them social standing.
Crawl back under your rock with your flag.
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You can be as upset as you want about what is happening in Gaza, but the moment you think it's reasonable to take that out on American Jewish children it's no longer about Gaza, it's about how you see your Jewish neighbors here.
If you're not able to see how wrong this is, we are doomed.
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It bothers me that a queer Black kid is held accountable for calling for Jews, sorry, Zionists, to die but all the rich white kids saying the exact same things face no accountability.
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The only proof that the antisemite ever offers of Jewish control of Hollywood is when an entertainer says deeply hateful things about Jews, that Jews in the industry speak up about it.
But we spoke up about it when Mel Gibson said some truly heinous shit.
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I will happily be voting for Biden. He has accomplished more than I thought our dilapidated (and in need of reform!) political system was capable of. The both-sides game only benefits Trump to depress voter turnout.
CNN's Abby Phillip: "As Nikki Haley put it -- I think it's actually such a smart way to put it -- maybe the first party to let go of their 80 years old might be the victor, but who's gonna be the one to move first? ... nobody wants Trump, nobody wants Biden."
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Israel undermines its own case through self-indulgent mishegas like this. Take it down.
WATCH: A 13 meter high Hanukkah Menorah in the heart of Shejaiya, inside the Gaza Strip
📹 - Bithaon Sadei
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As someone who came to America as a child refugee, the thing I find most fascinating about this politics is the complete lack of confidence in American culture.
I speak your language better than my native tongue. I don't know anyone who loves America more than my parents.
Right-wingers are just saying with their whole chest now that immigrants are "the destruction of our civilization." No one seems to remember but 5-10 years ago this stuff was the province of neo-Nazis. No pretense of caring about jobs or anything like that, it's just the 14 words
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So it's worth asking, what Jewish agenda do antisemites believe is being carried about by the Jews who "control" Hollywood?
We have anti-Zionists to Kahanists. We have Hasidim to Reconstructionists. What Jewish agenda are the Hollywood Jews carrying out?
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They don't want kids to learn about the Holocaust, slavery, Jim Crow, feminism, or anything to do with LGBTQ people. It's not random. It's to deny people the tools to understand the world around them and limit their ability to change it.
Insane: Under Ron DeSantis's book crackdown, 20 books by Jodi Picoult just got banned at one county's schools.
One of them is "The Storyteller," about the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor.
"Banning 'The Storyteller' is shocking," Picoult tells us:
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|￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣ |
| Have you considered |
| Reading the entire |
| 'I have a Dream' speech |
| Before selectively |
| Quoting it? |
| _______________________|
(\__/) ||
(•ㅅ•) ||
/ づ
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There are other ethnicities in Hollywood. Do any of them have an agenda? Do any of them carry out their agenda? If not, why not? According to the antisemite only Jews "control" Hollywood. What makes Jews so specially capable of exacting control?
The antisemite leaves it to you.
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Israel's government needs to punish these people severely and loudly. You cannot deter this kind of pogromist behavior without harsh consequences.
💥A Palestinian truck driver was attacked by Israeli settlers near a West Bank outpost when they mistakenly assumed he was carrying aid to Gaza. The mob sacked & pillaged the cargo. The driver was taken to hospital (
@JoshBreiner
)
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PSA:
If you are fasting for Yom Kippur you should be hydrating now.
If you are not fasting for an upcoming Jewish holiday you should also be hydrating because when it comes down to it humans are plants with more emotions.
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Jews were ethnically cleansed from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria
The British banned Jews fleeing the Nazis from coming to Mandate Palestine in response to Palestinian riots at Jews arriving.
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There were entire professions closed off to Jews. Yiddish schools and newspapers were shut down. The Holocaust was, as a matter of state policy, denied by the Soviet government. Jews like Natan Sharansky were sent to the gulag for the crime of learning Hebrew.
Tankies are dumb.
There was no institutional antisemitism in the USSR and I'm tired of pretending otherwise. No, your grandma being a refusenik doesn't count nor does some random people saying antisemitic stuff to her. The USSR actively combated antisemitism with the harshest penalties.
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Gonna go harass cancer patients because a rich Jew gave them money. I'm doing it on behalf of kids at an elite institution who wanted to work for his hedgefund. This is leftist activism babyyy
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Let's assume, for the sake of taking an antisemitic argument seriously, that there are Jews in Hollywood who would put Jewish interests ahead of business interests. That it includes publicly traded companies like Disney and Warner Bros Discovery.
What's their agenda?
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Nothing has radicalized me as much as the knowledge that a Hamas massacre of Jews in Israel had a global response of harassing and beating diaspora Jews.
Live update: Dutch Jews record unprecedented number of antisemitic incidents following Oct. 7
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Is it the Jews who are conspiring when we speak up about Black and White people being antisemitic? Or is it that White non-Jewish consumers are more ready to punish Black people for the same things?
Which do we have evidence for?
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No Jew is free of all 3:
-Anxiety
-Lactose Intolerance
-Depression
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I'm not surprised, but I continue to be disappointed, by people who do not know the history of Soviet Jews getting angry at Soviet Jews for not knowing history the way they do. All most of us had were family stories told quietly in private.
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Sharing it just to say for all the depressing news for the Jews there are still countless stories of small acts of kindness.
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Not sure that denying a guy who hates Jews an art degree works out that well
Kanye’s honorary degree has been revoked by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
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Can't believe Cubans have voted the same way they have voted in every election if only I could bother to learn about communities instead of just calling them all Latinos and assuming they're a monolith
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Probably bad optics to embrace a guy calling for Jews to die
Ilhan Omar shaking hands with Khymani James, who openly stated “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” Her daughter then hugs him.
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The "joke" here was reminding a room full of old White Christian men that this woman is a Jew.
Kagan handled it in the most Jewish way possible: she made a better joke and she affirmed her Jewishness in the process
Happy Elena-Kagan-eats-Chinese-on-Christmas Day to all who will be observing tomorrow
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We're like a week away from people quoting passages from Mein Kampf and omitting who the author is.
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Me: I want to learn Yiddish for the same reasons I adopted Jewish practice, because the Russians purged it out of my family, and this is part of the journey in decolonizing my Jewish identity
Me to me: You want to learn Yiddish because Jwitter is making solid memes about it
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1) The majority of Jews in Israel are not descendants of Jews from Poland. There are two major reasons for this.
a) 50%+ are Jews whose families fled from Middle Eastern and North African countries
b) 3 million people - 90% of Polish Jews - were murdered in the Holocaust
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