I do appreciate that the author really lays their cards on the table of: 1) only Europeans can eradicate culture after Christopher Columbus, and 2) Jewishness is somehow undefinable, not the same as whiteness but akin to it, and 3) nobody cares about ancient atrocities so stop whining about them.
I am linking to this article because it is bad, but also because it is a lot more about discussing what exactly "indigenous" means than asking important questions: do Jews have historical ties to the land they call Israel? Guess what word that starts with an "h" that doesn't appear in this article.
The argument here, which in my opinion is antisemitism, is that the diaspora worked and the most unifying and relevant parts of Jewishness simply vanished or ceased being relevant after that. If you are Jewish-American for instance, in the spectrum of colonizer vs colonized, you're a colonizer.
No, the argument is that European colonialism used a separate sort of system when it was opressing Jewish people. It's not a settler - indigenous axis of conflict.
Similar way it would be wrong to call racism against Arabs "antisemitism". It's just not what the word indigenous means in context.
Yeah I am kind of struggling to understand the usefulness of a definition of “colonizer” that includes people not from the colonizer country who were apparently granted that status overnight
This whole piece gets much uglier when you stop and think the author picked the least sympathetic portraits of Jews he could muster - in Algeria for instance, or slaveowners in the American South.
“Jewish people are not indigenous anywhere” is not great but if you pair it with “and they are not necessarily at home wherever they were born” it’s impossible to defend
I’m fine accepting that it’s possible through extended absence to lose connection to a place - but then surely where you are born and live is now your homeland
Listen Jews were never colonized because the only place the author is willing to put down as a Jewish homeland that got colonized also happened to kill or drive off all the Jews there! Easy peasy, got to be alive and present to be colonized after all.
Very annoying that (1) basically all right wing critiques of left wing academia are very dumb, wrong, and dangerous but (2) yes you will sadly find some academics who say things like, definitions are colonialism so you're an oppressor if you ask for one or use one
Will also just say that there are actually plenty of definitions in this piece; e.g. he says you can identify when a group is in the settler colonialist category if they have property rights, the presumption of innocence, better health outcomes, and some religious freedom. That's just a definition
The Pale of Settlement was not technically a colony, therefore, Jews are colonizers, am I reading this correctly?
Good Christ, I can’t imagine what this person’s thermonuclear takes on Russian imperialism would be like. Something something Estonia neoliberalism…
Do you think this dipshit is aware of the Ottoman Empire? I am quite sure it A: existed after 1491, his ridiculously arbitrary date and B: it sure as fuck colonized a whole load of places that had Jewish populations.
To be maximally fair, I feel like he missed an opportunity to capitalize "Colonialism", to try and set it apart from the more broadly understood meaning of the term. He does this with "Indigenous", which is helpful.
The article is dumb, but there is a big difference between "ethnic groups" and Jewishness. Even ignoring Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, (and Kaifeng) all being "Jewish" but very different, there's also the strangeness about tribe vs country. Can you be a half-Jew? Is a convert "Jewish?" Their kids?
So hard not to make a dumb joke about big trucks or w/e for the second question! But these are interesting ?s. Being American wasn’t something I thought of as a meaningful piece of my identity until I did Peace Corps after college & realized how much I shared a culture w/the other Americans there &
how different we were from the locals. Even Americans who’d lived very different lives than myself. So much of my self-ID from adolescence on was based on membership in subcultures & *not* being a “typical American” so it was a bit shocking to see that actually yes, you’re very much an American
Jews are both an ethnic group and a religion, it's possible to be an ethnic Jew and non-religious, and a non-ethnic Jew and religiously Jewish. Both would be welcome in Israel, because identity is more than your genetics or where you happened to be born.
I know... trust me I know. But it's much harder to define, and it's got many more generations of forced diaspora and assimilation than most "ethnicities." Not to mention all sorts of baggage from generations of pogroms and of course The Shoah. It's complicated.
How's this, in every ethnicity there are plenty of people where "are they x" is complicated. For Jews (if you even accept Jewish as an ethnicity) that fringe is much, much larger, and more complicated than most.
Not all Jews are welcome in Israel. For example, if you converted basically any way besides Orthodox, or you are a Reform Jew and your dad is Jewish but your mom is not, you don’t have right of return.
This person needs to be smacked in the face with a tuna fish.
This is such an Americentric take, it’s like saying the people in the Balkans are undefined thus they cannot be oppressed.
It's a very concise formal of the lazy academic theory that's been going around leftie circles for decades, which is basically "lot of Jews were white and lived in Europe, therefore they are neither a true minority worth recognizing and they are also imperialists."
Right? Like...the actual conclusion to draw here is that these are all lazy and useless concepts and maybe we should talk about things in completely different terms
Right, but because this all goes back to Gaza you realize the reason this stuff is being written is to remove every possible sympathetic frame you could muster for the Israeli Jew.
Quite unlike tenure track academics whose areas of expertise are subjects where the answers on the final exam are the opinions of the instructor.
All of whom transcend questions of ethnicity, and are all Heroes of Labour.
Would it even matter if they did? Definitions are a Eurocolonialist structure that restrict meaning, so as it turns out you don't have to read any word at all, since whatever you read you can just decide means whatever you want it to.
I think this is an accurate description of the state of the scholarship, which also makes clear why there is so much reticence about continuing state funding for this scholarship
There’s a real chef’s kiss element to someone self-identifying as Quechua (you know, the Lingua Franca of the Inca *Empire*) defining colonialism to exclude anything their ancestors might have been involved with.
