{"id":37818,"date":"2021-11-19T01:31:23","date_gmt":"2021-11-19T09:31:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=37818"},"modified":"2021-11-18T16:08:05","modified_gmt":"2021-11-19T00:08:05","slug":"lean-into-our-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2021\/11\/19\/lean-into-our-identity\/","title":{"rendered":"Lean into our identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Left to right: Eve Barlow, Noa Tishby and Bari Weiss participate in a Nov. 3 panel hosted by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies. (screenshot)<\/em><\/p>\n

In a time of burgeoning antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Jews need to lean into their identities, says a leading voice in the fight against anti-Jewish racism.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn other instances in Jewish history, we believed, wrongly, that the way to get acceptance, the way to get along, was to self-abnegate and erase who we are,\u201d said Bari Weiss. \u201cIf there has been one lesson in thousands of years of Jewish history, it\u2019s that that is a terrible strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weiss is a former writer at the New York Times<\/em>. She resigned her position there, citing a hostile work environment, and is the author of the book How to Fight Antisemitism<\/em>. She was speaking as part of a panel convened Nov. 3 by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies (FSWC). She was joined by Eve Barlow, a pop-culture writer who grew up in the United Kingdom and has worked in music journalism as deputy editor for NME New Musical Express<\/em> but who, most recently, is using her voice to stand up against antisemitism. Also on the panel was Noa Tishby, an Israeli-American actor, producer and author of the book Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The three women have become prominent voices, online and off, in the fight against the latest upsurge of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The Nov. 3 discussion took place in Los Angeles, where all three women are now based. They were joined by Michael Levitt, president and chief executive officer of FCSW, and the panel was moderated by journalist Jamie Gutfreund, both of whom traveled from Toronto for the event, titled State of the Union: Fighting Back Against Hate.<\/p>\n

Weiss said the first step in confronting the problem must be vocal and unequivocal pride in Judaism and Zionism.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe mere act of doing that is radical and contagious and changes the whole conversation,\u201d she said. Doing grassroots work building alliances is another overlooked key to confronting the issue, she added.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s take a page from the book of our political opponents,\u201d she said. \u201cHow have they done what they have done? Deep work inside communities on a grassroots level.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Black Lives Matter organization \u2013 not the wider movement, Weiss stressed, but the leadership of the organization \u2013 has exhibited problematic approaches to Jews and Israel. But no one should concede that there are not plenty of African-Americans (and Canadians) who are allies, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are huge parts of the Black community that the Jewish community in America can still be allied with; there are other parts of it that we would be extremely foolish to try and ally ourselves with,\u201d Weiss said. \u201cThere are other communities though. I\u2019m thinking about Hispanics, I\u2019m thinking about Hindus, I\u2019m thinking about all kinds of other groups that I don\u2019t see our community actively and affirmatively reaching out to and trying to build relationships with based on our mutual interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weiss warned that the polarization of politics in the United States and across the West does not bode well for Jews.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat puts Jews in a deeply uncomfortable position because, I believe, where the political centre thrives, Jews thrive because, if the political centre is thriving, it means that there is room for nuance, that there is room for disagreement, that it\u2019s not a kind of Manichaean, black-and-white, pure-impure, red-blue thinking. Right now, that is the world we are living in and \u2013 guess what? \u2013 we Jews don\u2019t easily slot into either of those categories. We are both hyper-successful and also we are the victims of more hate crimes than any other group in this country. We are white-passing and yet white supremacists hate us because we are the greatest trick the devil has ever played. We predate the newfangled notions of ethnicity, of race, of religion. We are before all of that. I think that there is a dovetailing between fighting antisemitism and fighting Jew-hate, and standing up for liberalism, broadly defined, because, where liberalism thrives \u2026 Jews thrive too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of the panel\u2019s discussion was about flourishing anti-Jewish hatred online, but Barlow warned that no one should assume there is a substantive difference between what happens online and what happens offline.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have seen how [online hatred] has contributed vastly to the amount of physical violence that happens offline and you would have to be extremely ignorant to \u2026 say right now that what happens online does not have offline ramifications,\u201d said Barlow.<\/p>\n

Tishby agreed, but suggested that offline violence may not be inspired by online hate but rather is part of a broader battle.<\/p>\n

\u201cSocial media is just the tip of the iceberg of a well-funded political campaign that has been waged against Israel in the past 20 years,\u201d Tishby said. \u201cThis is not by accident. This happened by design. The language, everything that we are seeing right now, originated in the Durban conference against racism in Durban in 2001 that was so antisemitic that the U.S. and Israel pulled out of it…. They have been putting a lot of money, a lot of effort and a lot of groundwork in going into these social justice causes, going to Black Lives Matter, going to the Women\u2019s March, going to gay and lesbian marches in San Francisco, going to unions and actually slowly changing their minds and poisoning them basically with lies to make them shift against Israel. These are nefarious powers and nefarious countries that want to dismantle the Jewish state, period, end of story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"screenshot<\/a>
At a panel discussion hosted by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, journalist Bari Weiss warned of the potential dangers in pressuring social media giants like Facebook to censor certain messages. (screenshot)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Acknowledging that some of the most prominent anti-Zionists are themselves Jews, Barlow called the phenomenon \u201ckoshering antisemitism.\u201d However, she advocates a compassionate response.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe that how we deal with them has to be different than how we deal with non-Jewish antisemites because they are part of our people, we love them regardless and they are part of our tribe and I think we have to really understand the nuances of why people become anti-Zionist,\u201d Barlow said. \u201cI think a lot of what I see is trauma from the Jewish community and a rejection of the Jewish community that presents itself in this anti-Israel fashion.\u201d<\/p>\n

She offered up what she acknowledged as a controversial joke: \u201cDon\u2019t blame Israel for your daddy issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tishby laid much of the blame for anti-Zionist Jews on the Jewish education system.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to take a good look at ourselves and what we did in order to allow for this,\u201d she said. \u201cWe took our kids, put them through \u2026 this beautiful Jewish education, we give them all the values and we tell them Israel is the most amazing people and place in the world and we send them off to college without ever acknowledging the concepts of \u2018ethnic cleansing,\u2019 \u2018apartheid.\u2019 We let college talk to them about this for the first time.\u2026 Nobody ever [said], let\u2019s talk about why people call Israel an apartheid state. Let\u2019s have a conversation about this, not when they get to college, [but] when the kid is 12, 13, 14, bring it up. Say, here\u2019s the argument, here is where it\u2019s completely false, here are the facts. Let\u2019s talk about what\u2019s happening in the West Bank.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weiss, who has spent her career in mainstream media, said those media outlets are \u201cthe most intellectually homogenous environment I\u2019ve ever been in in my entire life.\u201d But she warned against swallowing conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think sometimes people in the Jewish community who are frustrated by this bias imagine some kind of secret conspiratorial meetings where they\u2019re cooking up how to screw the Jews and the Jewish state,\u201d Weiss said. \u201cIt\u2019s just a reflection of the consistent bias among all the people that work there.\u201d<\/p>\n

The power of social media giants like Facebook and their haphazard responses to hate speech are a problem, Weiss said, but Jews and Zionists may be hastening their own defeat by pressuring them to censor certain messages.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it is a genuinely knotty and complicated question whether or not the Jewish community should be going to these big tech companies and saying, in the same way that you\u2019re censoring x, y and z, also censor the people who hate us,\u201d she said. \u201cMy fear is that, in asking these companies [to] do more censorship on our behalf, then, in a way, we are actually feeding the fuel that will come to burn all of us. The ideology that is currently dictating the choices at many of these companies is an ideology that says Zionism is racism. That is part of that broader worldview.\u2026 What happens six months from now when \u2026 they want to go and censor Zionists because now they have decided that Zionism, to follow the Soviet lie, is a form of racism? Would we be happy with that? I don\u2019t think so.\u201d<\/p>\n

The full video can be viewed by registering at friendsofsimonwiesenthalcenter.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Left to right: Eve Barlow, Noa Tishby and Bari Weiss participate in a Nov. 3 panel hosted by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies. (screenshot) In a time of burgeoning antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Jews need to lean into their identities, says a leading voice in the fight against anti-Jewish racism. \u201cIn […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":37820,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9991],"tags":[801,9523,21010,2873,21009,4242,5914,21008,20811,2427],"class_list":["post-37818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized-en","tag-antisemitism","tag-bari-weiss","tag-eve-barlow","tag-free-speech","tag-friends-of-simon-wiesenthal-centre","tag-history","tag-identity","tag-jew-hate","tag-noa-tishby","tag-racism"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37818\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}