Folks, relevant information - not context - about that USC valedictorian people are posting about.
Relevant information because you maybe don't want to valorize her as some kind of hero.
Not context because the information doesn't remotely change that the school is wrong and her harassers vile
(She's posted deeply antisemitic stuff to her instagram account claiming that, essentially, Jews have no historical connection to the land, that "zionism" arose is the early 1800s when Jews started coming to the land to steal it as part of a european conspiracy, etc.)
I’m not sure if I buy that those are antisemitic statements - the idea that Jews have no historical connection to the land is questionable, but Zionism emerging in the 1800s as a political movement of European Jews looking to settle in Palestine is a historical fact.
Zionism has been a key facet of the Jewish ethnoreligious identity for 2000 years. It's baked in. It didn't state in the 1800s.
If you want an example of an ancient ritual that mentions it explicitly, get yourself invited to a somewhat traditional seder next week and stick around until the end.
"Zionism" as a political movement was founded in the late 1800s. "Zionism" as the Jewish longing for, and intent to, return to the land of Israel is 2000 years old.
Don't equivocate between the two; they're related but different
I think it’s ahistorical to assume that the majority of Jews over the past 2,000 years wanted to uproot their lives and move somewhere their distant ancestors lived, which they knew about mainly through religious texts. It negates diaspora Jewish existence in a way I’m uncomfortable with.
You’re the one making sweeping claims about an entire group of people. It seems undeniable that a Jewish person in, like, 1400 in Lithuania would have had very little knowledge of the Land of Israel other than what was in their religious texts.
Hundreds of Hasidic rabbis and their families left that area in 1776 and immigrated to Jerusalem. A few years later a couple hundred rabbinic disciples of the Vilna Gaon did the same. Ethiopian Jews tried at least twice to walk to Jerusalem, once in the 1800s, once before that. Jewish communities…1/
…worldwide sent representatives to live in Jerusalem all throughout recorded history. They also sent money yearly to support the Jewish community there. Nachmanidies, known also by RaMbN, the acronym of his Hebrew name, immigrated from Spain in 1267. The synagogue he built in Jerusalem’s Jewish…2/
…Quarter is still there. I worked a block away & used to pray there often. The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 & Portugal a few years later. Hundreds eventually immigrated to Sefat in northern Israel. Others lived in different Israeli cities. These are just a few examples. There are more.
That’s all very cool history! And it’s in the context of Jews migrating to Israel to be subjects of whichever empire happened to be ruling there at the time, not to establish a Jewish state.
I'm gonna say yeah people living in Eastern Europe who were damn near constantly set upon by progroms probably longed to return to a land where they weren't at the whims of what ever King decided to use them as scapegoats. You really don't know the history of the people, do you?
