Emily L. Hauser: 🧵ok brace for what may be a longish thread! @lifewinning.com really has hit the bottom-line point. It's bananas. And/but, let me explain a little of how we got here, because that also matters right now: American Jews have not been able to agree on what "being Jewish" means for decades. 1/

🧵ok brace for what may be a longish thread! @lifewinning.com really has hit the bottom-line point. It's bananas. And/but, let me explain a little of how we got here, because that also matters right now: American Jews have not been able to agree on what "being Jewish" means for decades. 1/

imagine being a nation state terrified of college students in another country

A lot of Jewish legal structure & tradition is (VERY loosely speaking) about making sure there are bright lines around out community so we know who we are. "Don't drink nonkosher wine," eg, is about keeping kosher AND ALSO about making sure we don't get drunk with people who aren't Jewish. 2/

tl;dr: Our rabbis & we were protecting ourselves & our communities. In the 1950s US antisemitism (which had been p virulent) began to wane for reasons including the CRM, the growing understanding of the horrors of the Holocaust, the end of McCarthyism (which was often really anti-Jew-ism), & 3/

the establishment of the state of Israel, which many American non-Jews saw not only as a triumph of the little guy over history (which is a story Americans in particular love) but which ALSO served to undo the antisemitic canard that Jews are, by nature & thus eternally, weak and cowardly. 4/

The fact that other Americans were becoming less religious also helped + Americans, regardless of faith tradition, were staring down the barrel of a genuinely expected nuclear war & a LOT of them were, as a result, wrestling with the very idea of God. All this helped make Jews seem less freakish. 5/

We began to be accepted in golf clubs & housing associations, etc, & began to be a comfortable, accepted part of the broader American tapestry—which in turn became a challenge for us. The boss invites you to a company bbq on Saturday (Shabbat)—do you say no bc you were bar-mitzvah'ed 20 yrs ago? 6/

Mostly you don't. Mostly American Jews began to find new ways to be both parts of that label. In the meantime, a century-ish before the Holocaust, the Reform & Conservative mvmts had been founded in Germany, introducing new ways of relating to Jewish law & tradition, & had made it to America. 7/

Thanks for this Emily.

❤️❤️❤️

Yes. This is great and helps me put a lot of things together. Also explains the wine!

This is great. Did you see @tikkunolamunist.bsky.social’s thread on this history? A good complement to yours.

Here it is:

52/ So when you hear US suburban Jews say something astonishingly stupid and jingoistic about Israel or Palestine, chances are, this is the reason why. They've tied their whole Jewish identity around Israel-right-or-wrong, and they think the Jewish people would blink out of existence if they didn't.

Here it is as thread.

A BlueSky thread by Tikkun Olamunist - ירמל גרױס on Skyviewskyview.social 1/ I was having a conversation with a friend about my book, and he asked me to clarify the difference between the Zionism that the various ideological schools of Zionism (Cultural, Labour, Revisionist...

Thank you for saving me the search! And for making sure the folks reading this thread will see yours.

Thank you for sharing this. It's really interesting and has given me some excellent food for thought.

📌

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