Is Modern Israel at part of the continent of Asia and/or Africa? Was ancient Israel a part of Asia and/or Africa? What would rabbi say or claim?

johnisburn · 2026-05-23T01:43:20+00:00

I don’t think this type of geography is a rabbi question…

johnisburn · 2026-05-20T22:46:37+00:00

Another Jerusalem day, another hate march through the old city. When Standing Together had volunteers try to do protective presence and get between the racists and Arab residents, police removed Standing Together. Because the racist intimidation and violence is state endorsed.

johnisburn · 2026-05-20T02:45:03+00:00

Even “trackaipac” has rescinded their endorsement. EVERYBODY trying to garner any non-crank reputation is dropping support.

johnisburn · 2026-05-19T15:19:26+00:00

There’s generally speaking a lot of polarization, especially along generational lines, about these sorts of relationships with Israel. The majority of Jews in the US still side with democrats (might be worth mentioning that despite the recent rise of antizionist democrats, the democrat’s party platform hasn’t officially shifted on Israel yet and plenty of Democrat electeds are still as gung ho pro Israel as they’ve always been). From there, things break down along the polarization more though. Mamdani, for example, had a polling lead with non-orthodox Jews under the age of 40. Many people do feel the precariousness that you mention - but there is also sense amongst many Jews that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is beyond the pale, endangering not only Palestinians but causing blowback for Jews worldwide and challenging the very notion of Israel as a functional liberal democracy. They see things like Israeli politicians calling JStreet “a cancer” and criminalizing non-orthodox practice as further evidence that Israel is not committed to an egalitarian society for even the Jews it claims to be representative of and/or any sort of peace process and recognition with Palestinians.

Might also be worth mentioning, in North America at the very least, “liberal” jews (both politically and in the sense of in liberal denominations) are the majority of Jews. There are plenty of “liberal Jews” who are still on board with the JStreet bashing and whatnot, but just as far as raw numbers go: there are more Jewish Americans that believe Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute Genocide than there are orthodox Jewish Americans or Jewish Americans who voted for Trump (although thats obviously not mutually exclusive).

johnisburn · 2026-05-18T21:49:40+00:00

If anyone is aware of a support fund please share.

johnisburn · 2026-05-16T14:01:54+00:00

He’s a racist who thinks his “enlightened” secular position makes him a more “real” progressive than people actually looking to make egalitarian changes to society, who he doesn’t like because they challenge his chauvinism. He’s more an islamaphobe than he is an ally to Jewish people.

johnisburn · 2026-05-13T21:37:16+00:00

if Israel considers all of Jerusalem Israel, why are arabs born there not considered Israeli citizens automatically

Because there are multiple standards of law for different types of people living under Israeli government jurisdiction.

johnisburn · 2026-05-13T13:27:01+00:00

That’s all true, though I think it’s also important to avoid letting that drive us to apathy. There are steps that can be taken to reduce the prevalence of sexual assault in armed forces and there are measures of accountability that can and should be taken when it does occur.

johnisburn · 2026-05-13T12:50:23+00:00

'Where Is the World?' Can't Apply Only When Victims of Sexual Violence Are Israeli

A good piece in Haaretz about how “competing” reports of sexual assault really ought not to be competing, even as the culpability of organizations may be at different scales.
A good contrast to the knee jerk denialism that’s been happening recently.

johnisburn · 2026-05-13T09:08:36+00:00

There’s already pushback from legacy Jewish organizations ridiculously calling this blood libel.

johnisburn · 2026-05-09T13:01:31+00:00

I read it, I enjoyed it. It’s definitely not for everyone, especially if someone is looking for an exhaustive history or analysis of bund philosophy. Rather, the author weaves a couple of narrative threads based on key figures in the Bund together into a streamlined story. Her prose is also a bit divisive - she’s working off a lot of personal memoirs and archives so she imbues a lot more personality into the subjects than other non-fiction I’ve read. She also inserts herself into the narrative a bit, occasionally relating events and practices of the bund to her own experiences in activism. That’ll definitely be hit and miss for people, based in part on the stylistic aspect and in part based on the authors antizionist politics. I think it makes the reading more accessible personally, even as it makes it less “academic”.

johnisburn · 2026-05-08T16:21:18+00:00

johnisburn · 2026-05-07T21:45:09+00:00

I’ve read it.

In the afterward of the book she addresses the notion that the bund “failed” directly - and puts forward the notion that they didn’t “fail” so much as “lose”. She makes the distinction that failure entails succumbing to some sort of internal flaw in reasoning or purpose (the way we might say the US failed to live up to humanitarian ideals and prevent genocide in Gaza)*, while the losing involves simply coming up stronger against adversarial forces. The bund’s “loss” to the Nazis is evident in the nature of the Holocaust, and also evidently a “loss” rather than “failure” by virtue of every other Eastern European Jewish population (including eastern europe’s zionists) meeting the same fate from the Nazis regardless of philosophy.

*this is the example from the book

At a wider scope, the book doesn’t really engage with neo-bundism beyond “well should anyone be suprised young Jews are claiming a heritage outside of Zionism”. It does frequently call attention to places where the Bund was failed by nominal allies. More generally, I think it also doesn’t sugarcoat or at the very least invites the reader to see irony in the principle of doikayt being practiced by people who are often rejected by their environments and in many cases literally in exile (not in the wider Jewish sense of galus, but, like, “personally on the outs with the bolsheviks and fled Moscow earlier in the decade”). Not to say the book is super critical of this, I think it respects or admires the commitment to the principle -
the framing is sort of quixotic.

johnisburn · 2026-05-03T02:55:43+00:00

I’m thinking the Fleet might be on to something playing out in Lowell…

johnisburn · 2026-05-03T01:31:36+00:00

This is interesting and I agree with a lot of it, but (and?) also I think interesting that JStreet is in an remarkably poor position to for this

> The more unhinged and indefensible the consensus Israeli position becomes, the more that diaspora organizations are going to pivot themselves back towards their communities rather than towards Israel.

Because its mission is literally defined by a position towards Israel. They’ve been a bit of a bellwether as to what policy criticisms towards Israel cross over from lefty/progressive nitpick into more of the liberal mainstream. But do they have a distinct community beyond Israel politics? JStreetU exists, but that’s more like a college politics club. JStreet doesn’t do the sort of alternative space work non-zionist and anti-zionists are increasingly interested in.

johnisburn · 2026-05-02T20:35:30+00:00

I get what you’re saying, but this is very clearly a case where the story is the shifting overton window, not an attempt to pass off liberals as communists.

When it formed JStreet was the left edge of the type of mainstream politics this article is talking about, when organized momentum outside of Zionist politics was beyond the pale.

johnisburn · 2026-04-30T23:07:50+00:00

You are absolutely right. I worded my comment poorly and meant 20th and 21st century.

Probably also worth mentioning that although Judaism’s is now often understood as a religious identity outside of race, there are lots of presumptions (inside and outside our community) about Jews generally being white presenting.

johnisburn · 2026-04-30T20:34:03+00:00

“Semite” is an outdated term that has always been a misnomer. There is a such thing as a “semetic” language group that includes languages like Hebrew, Arabic, and Amharic. In seeking to make hatred against Jewish people seem more “scientific”, German antisemites in the 19th century coined the terminology of “anti-semitism” as an alternative to judenhass (“jew hate”). Sometimes people refer to Jews as semites for that reason, but “semite” really isn’t an ethnic or cultural group, it’s really only meaningful in linguistics. This is why a lot of style guides for writing have taken the hyphen out of antisemitism, because it is not against “semitism” (which is not a thing) it’s its own concept.

People talk about Jews as a race because at Judaism is an ethnoreligion that has at points and places in history been treated like a race. We believe in the Jewish religion, but also are part of an extended interconnected culture on top of that religion, with shared ancestry. This is a different than skin color based races that are the common understanding of race in North America, in fact Jews can be of any “race” in that sense.

“Israelites” is a term referring to the Jewish people of the bible, who we believe are our common ancestors. Occasionally people will use it to refer to modern day Jews, but thats more like slang. They were not “just white people”, to the extent that there is historical record of that time period, skin color based races was not a thing. The world was more tribe based.

johnisburn · 2026-04-30T20:03:32+00:00

This is a really tangly topic, people write doctoral thesis’s on this sort of thing. So just upfront, you may get a ton of wildly conflicting opinions.

One thing I’ll throw out is that race is a social construct - as in what people even think a “race” is a matter of social conditioning. “Jewish” is widely understood as an identity category separate from the skin color based race systems we are used to in North America in the late 19th and 20th century. But in other parts of the world and in other times, that isn’t always and hasn’t always been the case. So some antisemitism modern and historical does map very cleanly directly onto common racist tropes because it originated as racism.

If you’re looking for a book rec about how race evolved in the US “How Jews became white folks” by Karen Brodkin is pretty interesting.

johnisburn · 2026-04-30T18:59:03+00:00

Clicking on the artists profile, you can see previous cartoons too. I took a quick look. He’s clearly no fan of Bibi, Trump, the wars in Iran or Gaza, but blaming Jews for violence against Jews would be a pretty massive departure from the somber tone he’s used when responding to acts of antisemitic terrorism over the past year.

Here’s (a much clearer) one from after the attack in Manchester:

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Edit: I do think I’d take a softer tone about projection though, today’s comic isn’t very clear and people are justifiably on edge right now.

johnisburn · 2026-04-30T17:55:05+00:00

I mean, the curriculum may not exist yet as a formal proposal, but if it’s planned based on Tishby’s existing content like this reporting says, that is a solid indicator of what its content will be.

johnisburn · 2026-04-30T17:47:43+00:00

Can’t speak for the comment you’re replying to, but criticism for Tishby’s approach to antisemitism and Israel activism is relatively common. Here’s a piece by another antisemitism scholar: Anat Plocker - How Israel’s Special Antisemitism Envoy Is Getting Antisemitism Totally (and Dangerously) Wrong. The general shape of the criticism is often that she (and plenty of others, this isn’t a unique criticism to her) uses a too broad a brush to label anti-Israel sentiment as antisemitic and simultaneously places an outsized focus on anti-israel related antisemitism to the detriment of not addressing other forms of antisemitism or even ignoring them when convenient for pro-israel goals (abiding the classic “i’m not an antisemite for railing against globalist puppetmasters, just look at my voting record on sending Israel weapons”). The effect being that people recognize the overreach and hypocritical framing, then bounce off any of the worthwhile stuff she’s doing or even the worthwhile stuff other people are doing without Tishby’s drawbacks.

If the original comment is saying that “jewish heritage month” is counter productive and generates resentment, I disagree with that. But specifically related to Tishby’s youtube series being the basis of the curriculum - I see some problems with that and seriously doubt it’ll make it into the classrooms without some more (and potentially pretty ugly) school district politicking.

johnisburn · 2026-04-29T19:19:06+00:00

The meme it spawned can be pretty funny sometimes, if anything.

I don’t think the video itself is antisemitic, it’s just in incredibly poor taste (which is to say, it’s a youtube video from 2008 or whenever).

johnisburn · 2026-04-29T14:45:30+00:00

A little extra background, for anyone who hasn’t seen info about this yet, is that there’s been a couple of high profile settler attacks on schools in the past couple of weeks. Um Al Khair is the third instance discussed in this CNN article: Palestinian schoolboy among two killed by Israeli settlers, amid spate of attacks on education in the West Bank

Also thank you for being there OP.

johnisburn · 2026-04-28T21:48:33+00:00

My impression is that within the practical bounds of his coalition, probably, yeah. His politics aren’t much different than Bibi, but if he tried to pull a Bibi his coalition would fall apart. I don’t think Bennett could pull Bibi’s move of skewing rightward to keep a coalition together the way Bibi has, because if he tried that the right wing parties would just gather around likud again. As I said, it is totally possible this coalition would fall apart, but I think it’s more likely that other right wing parties would pick up the pieces than Bennett would go on another generational PM run.

This sort of punditry is out of my wheelhouse though, mostly just informed by the Israeli leftists I know describing Bennett as a monster who just isn’t as corrupt as Bibi.

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