cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4339383

Passover (Hebrew: פֶּסַח Pesach) commemorates the story of the Exodus, in which the ancient Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt. Passover begins on the 15th day of the month of Nisan in the Jewish calendar, which is in spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and is celebrated for seven or eight days. It is one of the most widely observed Jewish holidays.

As a gentile with an interest in the history of labor, the story behind Passover interests me. Some Jewish historians have come to the conclusion that Exodus was a dramatization of real events: there are certainly truths at the story’s core, but the story itself is probably best interpreted as largely symbolic:

“It’s not a historical event, but it’s also not totally invented by someone sitting behind a desk,” explains Thomas Romer, a renowned expert in the Hebrew Bible and professor at the College de France and the University of Lausanne. “These are different traditions that are brought together to construct a foundation myth, which can be, in a way, related to some historical events,” he says.

[…]

[I]f the Israelites were just a native offshoot of the local Canaanite population, how did they come up with the idea of being slaves in Egypt? One theory, proposed by Tel Aviv University historian Nadav Naʻaman, posits that the original Exodus tradition was set in Canaan, inspired by the hardships of Egypt’s occupation of the region and its subsequent liberation from the pharaoh’s yoke at the end of the Bronze Age.

A similar theory, supported by Romer, is that the early Israelites came in contact with a group that had been directly subjected to Egyptian domination and absorbed from them the early tale of their enslavement and liberation. The best candidate for this rôle would be the nomadic tribes that inhabited the deserts of the southern Levant and were collectively known to the Egyptians as the Shasu.

One of these tribes is listed in Egyptian documents from the Late Bronze Age as the “Shasu of YHWH” — possibly the first reference to the deity who that would later become the God of the Jews.

These Shasu nomads were often in conflict with the Egyptians and if captured, were pressed into service at locations like the copper mines in Timna — near today’s port town of Eilat, Romer says. The idea that a group of Shasu may have merged with the early Israelites is also considered one of the more plausible explanations for how the Hebrews adopted YHWH as their tutelary deity.

As its very name suggests, Israel initially worshipped El, the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon, and only later switched allegiance to the deity known only by the four letters YHWH.

“There may have been groups of Shasu who escaped somehow from Egyptian control and went north into the highlands to this group called Israel, bringing with them this god whom they considered had delivered them from the Egyptians,” Romer says.

This may be why, in the Bible, YHWH is constantly described as the god who brought his people out of Egypt — because the worship of this deity and the story of liberation from slavery came to the Israelites already fused into a theological package deal.

I hope that I don’t offend anybody by proposing a reinterpretation of Exodus as mostly symbolic. My intention is not iconoclasm — quite the contrary! Looking behind the scenes make me appreciate it all the more, and in any case it is absolutely true that some of your ancient ancestors endured slavery… repeatedly.

That leads me to my next point: the Bronze Age was not the last time that you endured slavery. You endured it again… and again… and again. Whether it was Rome:

when Titus sacked Jerusalem in 70 CE, he carried off 97,000 Jews into slavery

Per Catherine Hezser’s Jewish Slavery in Antiquity, pages 240, 253:

It is likely that the supply of Jewish slaves was much larger than that of gentile slaves in Roman Palestine of the late first and second century CE. […] After the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century CE Jewish slaves are said to have been sold by the Romans at markets in Gaza and Hebron.^35^

Malta:

A community of up to 1,000 Jewish slaves on the archipelago of Malta, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, established over the course of two centuries by the Knights of St. John, a Catholic order of pirates left over from the Crusades, was officially abolished on this date in 1800.

Poland:

In September 1941, 24,000 employees were engaged in the ghetto’s own operations, working for the Wehrmacht, police, and SS, and later for the private companies with workshops there. Nine thousand were employed by Jewish institutions.

We can find cases of Jewish serfdom in, for byspel, Georgia, but this topic is not meant to be exhaustive. Nonetheless, I do want to touch on neoslavery today:

Passover can be a difficult time of year for Jewish inmates. First of all, the prisoners may particularly miss their families during the time of this family holiday celebration.^225^ Furthermore, the irony of the prisoners’ situation—celebrating a ritual of liberation inside prison—is not lost on them.^226^ Sid Kleiner, longtime director of Beth Tikvah Jewish Prisoner Outreach,^227^ explains:

Along with separation from family, there is a painful theme to the holiday—redemption, freedom from bondage and captivity. Jewish inmates gather around the Seder table and declare that, “this year we are free.” It isn’t easy to make this declaration with barbed wire, high walls, and correctional officers in view.^228^

And finally, your Palestinian kin:

Workers consistently and overwhelmingly claim that having no other choice is the reason behind them working in the [Zionist] settlements and putting up with the exploitative work conditions that are part and parcel of the settlement employment sector for West Bank Palestinian workers. The work, they say, is not a free choice but a necessity where no other options exist; a way to put food on the table, and scrape a living in the fragile, poverty‐stricken, and often dangerous environment of the occupied West Bank.

It’s not hyperbole. There is no free or genuine choice regarding employment for many workers who have been systematically streamlined into settlement work. Who are, due to circumstances forced on to them, unable to turn down the exploitative and politically damaging settlement work or find any alternative. This idea of no choice has come about due to a combination of several [Zionist] policies that have purposefully stifled Palestinian development and growth throughout the occupied West Bank, in particular in the rural (read: Area C) communities that have suffered substantially from land annexation.

Yet while the situation looks severe, the Palestinians have inherited much from you, and because of that I have no doubt that they’ll overcome their oppression, as you repeatedly have.

Have a wonderful Passover!

Reposting my essay in commemoration of the anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The Spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is Alive in the Al-Aqsa Flood

During the German annexation of Poland in WWII, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees were herded to Warsaw. As the Nazis approached the capital, they pulled the noose tighter and tighter around the Jewish population. They faced growing violence and degradation: the nazis rationed food, banned communal prayer, curtailed business, robbed homes, and so on. As their grip became certain, they forced the construction of a walled ghetto around the Jewish district. The Nazis expelled all Jewish people from the rest of the city, confiscating their land, homes, and possessions.

Conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto were dire and extremely overcrowded with more than 400,000 people forced into a 3.3 square kilometer area, 9 people to a room.1 Rations were carefully kept at or below the survival level.2 Virtually no medical supplies or cultural materials were allowed into the ghetto.3 The means of survival let alone full human life were non-existent.

In 1942, one quarter of the ghetto's population were sent to their deaths in Treblinka under the guise of "resettlement". This lie was uncovered, and the Nazi-imposed Jewish government lost all credibility. The leader, Adam Czerniakow, committed suicide. At this point, resistance factions became the dominant political force. Residents in the ghetto realized anything short of all-out mobilization was tacitly accepting their genocide. They would not do this.

Sparsely armed, on 18 January 1943 resistance fighters engaged the nazis in direct armed struggle. They were able to prevent or delay the deportation of 3,000 people and condemn the silence of the world. Battles continued off-and-on until late April. Rather than quietly shuffle a compliant population into cattle cars. the resistance fighters compelled the Germans to announce their genocidal intent to the world and burn them out, block-by-block.

The remainder of the ghetto residents were martyred as they would have been without struggle, but the world could no longer ignore the Nazi genocide. The partisans of the Warsaw Ghetto will be remembered as heroes for all time. They proclaimed their pride, their dignity, and their humanity until the end.

Now the Zionist Fascists invoke this memory and the holocaust to justify their own genocide. The Zionist fascists invoke this memory and order over a million people to move into a smaller section of their own walled ghetto. Now the Zionist Fascists invoke this memory and bomb hospitals. Now the Zionist Fascists invoke this memory and call Palestinians "subhuman animals".4 It is an abomination. It is every Jew's responsibility (mine included!), to condemn this anti-Semitic invocation of our past. We must declare ‘NOT IN OUR NAME!’ as the Zionist Fascists do everything in their power to play out the role of the Nazis.

The tragedies the Zionists inflict on Palestine mirror the tragedies the Nazis inflicted on the Jews. As the Nazis cheered the demolition pf the Warsaw Synagogue, IDF soldiers recorded themselves applauding the demolition of the Palestinian Justice Palace.5 It is important to note that Judaism is not Zionism and Zionism is not Judaism no matter how loudly the Israelis proclaim it. Nor was the special feature of Nazism anti-semitism. Instead their special feature was fascism: the construction of a ethnonationalist garrison state organized for the destruction of a racial enemy as a false solution to its internal contradictions.

The Zionists do not have the same enemy as the Nazis, but their ideology is the same. We should not see resistance against one any differently than resistance against the other.

While aspects of the resistance actions of October 7th are horrible, they must be understood in the context of a people facing genocide. The reaction of the Zionist entity confirms this. They have shown the world who the true 'terrorist', the true fascist, the true victim is.

At time of writing, more than 18,000 Palestinian people—principally non-combatants and children—have been killed under weeks of relentless bombing.6 Every institution of Palestinian civil society is labelled a ‘Hamas Base’ and rendered into dust. And when international investigators fail to find the promised evidence of military installations hidden below ruined hospitals, ruined lives, the Zionists shrug.7 At most, one or two squeamish Americans shoot and cry while Washington and Berlin proclaim “an absolute right to self-defense”.

As the Seleucids turned our Second Temple into a stable, settlers in the West Bank evict Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque to proudly hold and record dance parties.8

One popular slogan holds “resistance is justified when people are occupied.” This sentiment is encapsulated in a speech given by PFLP Leader George Habash to western hostages taken as a reprisal for refugee camp bombings in June 1970 titled "Our Code of Morals is Our Revolution."

He begins:

I feel that it is my duty to explain to you why we did what we did. Of course, from a liberal point of view of thinking, I feel sorry for what happened, and I am sorry that we caused you some trouble during the last 2 or 3 days. But leaving this aside, I hope that you will un¬derstand, or at least try to understand, why we did what we did. People living different circumstances think on different lines… After 22 years of injust¬ice, inhumanity, living in camps with nobody caring for us, we feel that we have the very full right to protect our revolution. We have all the right to protect our revolution. Our code of morals is our revolution. What saves our re-volution, what helps our revolution, what pro¬tects our revolution is right, is very right and very honourable and very noble and very beautiful, because our revolution means justice, means having back our homes, having back our country, which is a very just and noble aim.

Now the occupation is in its 75th year. Unlike Habash’s day, the recent decades of resistance have taken the form of political negotiations and peaceful protests. They did nothing to gain the world's attention or support for Palestinian liberation. Clearly, only armed struggle against imperialism can win liberation. Thank God the Palestinians have more than the few handguns and makeshift explosives available to my people 80 years ago.

The Spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is alive in the Al-Aqsa Flood!

Long live Palestine!

Footnotes & References 1 — Compare to 2.3 million people sharing 360 square kilometers (about the size of Detroit) in the Gaza Strip concentrated into a few overcrowded cities void of open space. https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-hamas-war-90e02d26420b8fe3157f73c256f9ed6a 2 — Israel (which controls all imports into Gaza) closely restricts the amount of food allowed in to survival levels calculated at 2,300 calories per day per person. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/17/israeli-military-calorie-limit-gaza 3 — Regular and acute drug shortages in the occupied territories were a fact of life prior to the 2023 invasion. Article below for-instance. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-06-08/ty-article/.premium/palestinian-authority-blames-israel-for-acute-medicine-shortage/00000188-9773-df21-a1b8-b7ffbba40000 4 — Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Arieh King: “They are not human beings and not even human animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated.” https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/israeli-municipality-official-calls-burying-alive-subhuman-palestinian Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu (A Philly native) on the will of the Israeli people: “They are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world,” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/benjamin-netanyahu-amalek-israel-palestine-gaza-saul-samuel-old-testament/
SS Solider Jürgen Stroop describing slain ghetto fighters: “180 Jews, bandits and sub-humans, were destroyed.” https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-stroop-report-may-1943 5 — Demolition of the Justice Palace https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/footage-shows-idf-demolishing-main-hamas-courthouse-in-gaza/ 6 — Palestinian Death toll https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/12/14/israel-hamas-war-live-rain-brings-misery-to-displaced-in-gaza
Even the most skeptical Israeli sources place the Palestinian death toll at 4x the number of Israeli dead. https://www.newsweek.com/real-gaza-civilian-death-tollwhat-we-know-1849655 7 — No evidence of ‘Hamas Command Center’ found below IDF-bombed Al Shifa hospital https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/16/what-has-israel-found-in-gazas-al-shifa-hospital IDF soldier claims a calendar found at the hospital is a ‘Hamas Names List’. One instance of the farce. https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/truth-or-fake/20231116-idf-claims-to-find-list-of-hamas-names-but-it-s-the-days-of-the-week-in-arabic
8 — Israeli settlers hold dance party in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque April 18th https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gS_jgsd4JM https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220419-israel-closes-ibrahimi-mosque-to-palestinian-worshippers-holds-concert-for-settlers/

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4280603

The capitalist media (example) have been playing down Iranian Jews’ approval of the counterattack, claiming that Tehran is figuratively holding a gun to all of their heads to appreciate it.

Iranian Jews don’t have to lie! Even here in the North, where the capitalist media dominate, there are thousands (maybe scores of thousands) of anticolonial Jews who loathe Zionism’s neocolony, and I suspect that they would be at least understanding if not approving of the Iranian counterattack. So claiming that the Islamic Republic of Iran must be forcing its Jewish population to appreciate these well aimed blows on an antisemitic régime is utterly laughworthy.

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4269754

(Mirror.)

After 1953, Jews and Armenians continued to be disproportionately overrepresented in various underground political parties and anti‐Shah circles.^39^ On par with their political activism during the Pahlavi period, Jews were part of 1970s revolutionary movement groups in addition to the Tudeh, such as student organizations and the Association of Jewish Iranian Intellectuals. They, too, took to the streets and participated in political demonstrations supporting a wide variety of revolutionary movements.

It is difficult to quantify the extent of Jewish participation in the revolutionary movement, but sources suggest that it was not inconsequential. In March 1978, nine months before the shah left Iran, Jewish radicals, some of whom were socialists and republicans, won the elections for the leadership of the central organization of the Jewish communities, defeating the old guard establishment that was identified closely with the shah and his alliance with [Zionism].^40^

These activists formed the aforementioned AJII. Later in 1978, particularly in September and December when the demonstrations grew larger and more frequent, there are multiple reports of thousands of Jewish protestors marching in Tehran, and the Jewish hospital in the city operated rescue teams together with the leadership of the revolutionary movement.^41^

It should be noted that from that moment on there were no official voices in the community in support of Zionism. There were myriad motivations and reasons for Jews (and non‐Jews) to support the revolution, some more prosaic than others.

[…]

One of the highest profile trials and executions was that of the industrialist […] and Jewish community leader, Habib Elghanian, on 9 May 1979. Given the […] fabricated charges of being a “friend of God’s enemies, spying for [Zionism’s régime], and spreading corruption on earth,” Iranian Jews feared that if the new government executed Elghanian no Jews would be immune from such treatment.^43^

Shortly afterward, the Iranian Jewish leader Hakham Shofet led a small delegation to Qom to meet with Ayatollah Khomeini to seek clarification. The meeting helped to allay the Jewish community’s concerns.

In his proclamation, Khomeini acknowledged the deep roots of the Jewish communities in Iran, underscored the elements of monotheism present in both Judaism and Islam, and distinguished between Zionism and Judaism: “We know that the Iranian Jews are not Zionist. We [and the Jews] together are against Zionism. […] They [the Zionists] are not Jews! They are politicians that claim to work in the name of Judaism, but they hate Jews. […] The Jews, as the other communities, are part of Iran, and Islam treats them all fairly.”^44^

At the same time, this societal chaos produced euphoric dreams for the postrevolutionary republic. In less than two years, from February 1979 to summer 1980, Iran witnessed its broadest political participation and freedom of the press that resulted in hundreds of new publications, which in turn helped to inform and shape public opinion. Such participation and euphoria were enjoyed by all the religious minorities, including the Jews.

The Jewish community’s leadership now had direct relations with the revolutionary leaders, and they were given a place to represent the Jews and other religious minorities in shaping the character of the new republic. One of its community’s leaders, ʻAziz Daneshrad, an ex‐Tudeh activist, was elected to represent the Jews in the Constitutional Experts Council (Majlis Khobrigan‐i Qanun‐i Asasi). The council’s main rôle was to write the republic’s new constitution and bring it forth for referendum.^45^

At the same time that news reports [under Zionism] and around the world claimed that Iran was building extermination camps for Iranian Jews, Daneshrad as a sitting member of the council raised the idea of revoking the reserved seat for the religious minorities, allowing minority candidates to compete in the general party lists. To his disappointment, the measure was not approved.

[…]

Iranian Jews are not hiding in taqiya mode. In present‐day Iran, those who remain speak up against injustices. They express a desire to be part of the Iranian nation and maintain independent positions relative to the Islamic Republic, as well as to [Zionism] and Jewish issues worldwide. The Iranian Jewish response to an ongoing discourse of “rescue” has been far less enthusiastic than expected.^79^ In general, Iranian Jews living in Iran want to remain Jewish and Iranian without compromising any component of their identity.

After Ahmadinejad’s two presidential terms, Iranians elected a pragmatist, Hassan Rouhani. Under his leadership (r. 2013–21), Jews experienced a number of political and cultural achievements. In December 2014, the government unveiled a monument with Persian and Hebrew text that commemorated the Jewish soldiers who sacrificed their lives during the Iran–Iraq war.^80^ In addition, the Majlis passed new laws that corrected prevailing inheritance laws, which prioritized Muslim heirs over their Jewish relatives, and another law that excused Jewish students in public schools from attending classes on Shabbat.^81^

Under Rouhani’s tenure, the president and his foreign minister made it a tradition to bless the Iranian Jewish community on their official Twitter accounts on Rosh HaShana.^82^ In one of his many Twitter threads, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif referred to the former president’s Holocaust denial and countered: “Iran never denied the Holocaust. The man who denied the Holocaust is now gone. Happy New Year.”^83^

Although Zarif meant to draw a line between Ahmadinejad as the most prominent Holocaust denier and the Rouhani administration that he (Zarif) was part of, it is important to note that Holocaust denial remains prevalent in the ranks of the Iranian government. Iran’s Supreme Leader, ʻAli Khamenei, has himself engaged in Holocaust denial and such references remain on his social media and official website.^84^

Zarif’s point, however, has some merit in that Holocaust denial is not as dominant as in other Middle Eastern societies.^85^ Even during Ahmadinejad’s presidency, state‐run TV aired the drama Zero Degree Turn, based on the story of Abdol Hossein Sardari, the Iranian diplomat in [Fascist]‐occupied Paris who forged passports for French Jews.^86^ […] Iranian Jews speak and write, and their views, opinions, struggles, and actions can represent their complex experiences of living in Iran. Scholars can understand Iran and Iranian Jews better when they listen to Iranian Jews when they speak and write about their experiences of being Kalimian in Iran.

(Emphasis added.)

"Like many others, I now find myself standing outside ​“the Jewish community,” fearing that there are few Jews I can be shoulder-to-shoulder with in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza if they can call only for the release of hostages without a word for the many, many, many Palestinians killed by bombs and dying of starvation."

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4188616

For Alexandrov, only public condemnation of rabbinic injustices could regain the public’s trust and convince them that Alexandrov and his peers would not manipulate their flock for material gain. Alexandrov put this idea into action in his sermons during Shabbat services, in which he harshly attacked “those impudent dogs, the guardians of practical religion who are far from any sense of true belief. Only because of them has religion deteriorated, as everyone can see how these holy mice strive only to collect their breadcrumbs” (Alexandrov 1932, p. 85).

This kind of criticism of the traditional rabbinate is directly borrowed from the arsenal of Soviet propaganda, as Alexandrov himself noted in another letter to Krasilshchikov:

The more I contemplate the spiritual condition of our people in this day and age, the more I realize that the Marxist perspective is right in explaining historical developments as products of class struggle for their economic wellbeing. That can explain how communal leaders, who have no godliness and love of the Torah in their hearts, are appealing to the masses’ orthodoxy in order to preserve their economic and material condition. (Alexandrov 1932, p. 64)

[…]

Nineteenth‑century thinkers such as Aaron Shmuel Liberman (1845–1880) and Elia Benamozegh (1823–1900) had already tied Kabbalah to Marxist and universalistic aspirations, and twentieth‑century Jewish thought expanded on this trend when thinkers such as Avraham Yitzhak Kook (1865–1935), Yehuda Ashlag (1885–1954), Leon Askenazi (1922–1996), and many others claimed Kabbalah as the centerpiece of their Jewish politics.

Ashlag, in particular, is famous for promoting “altruistic Communism” through a new understanding of the Lurianic corpus,^19^ and like him, it is no accident that Hilewitz likewise used Kabbalistic language to defend historical materialism. For him, historical materialism took the Hasidic worldview of Habad to its logical conclusion: if God is indeed one, if his presence is everywhere and in everything, then there is no difference between stating that “everything is spirit” or “everything is matter”; it is all but one substance which manifests itself in every part of reality.

However, Netanyahu’s objection elides the passage’s violent legacy, which is not an exclusively Jewish one. Europeans used it to justify murdering Native Americans, and Hutus used it to justify massacring Tutsis. It’s been deployed against Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Jews (sometimes by other Jews), and quoted by Afrikaaners, Germans, and other European colonial powers against those who resist colonization.

Still, the passage’s most significant and potent repurposing has been by right-wing Jewish extremists in Israel: It likely influenced the actions of Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinians while they were praying in the West Bank city of Hebron on Purim morning in 1994, and was invoked by settlers last year as a rallying cry for the pogrom committed in the Palestinian town of Huwara.

[…]

The rabbinic tradition’s reckoning with the biblical text does provide some solace. In this canon, the understanding of Amalek is not fixed, but understood and interpreted variably. (The Israeli right consistently chooses to return to the Bible while eschewing the rabbinic tradition that has interpreted it, even though it’s hard to think of anything less Jewish than sola scriptura—the Chrisian idea that the Bible alone has sole authority.)

Crucially, the rabbis chose to preserve the voices of those who expressed discomfort with a text that commands murder: The Talmud, for instance, imagines King Saul arguing with God over the injunction. And as early as the Mishnah, written some 2,000 years ago, the rabbis insisted that Amalek no longer exists as a distinct entity, thus obviating the commandment; later commentators note the ethical challenge this passage poses and warn against celebrating or sanctifying it.

In some cases, the tradition reworks the basic moral logic of the text. An interesting strand of interpretation blames not Amalek but the Jews themselves for Amalek’s deeds.

The Talmud, for example, states that the mother of Amalek, the progenitor of the nation that later bore his name, sought to convert to Judaism but was rejected, leading her to have a child with Esau’s son instead. Other texts similarly place responsibility on the Jews, whether for spiritual shortcomings—such as being lax in their observance of Torah and mitzvot or being ungrateful, disobedient, or not trusting of God—or for ethical shortcomings, like being unjust in their business dealings or not taking care of the vulnerable.

There is also a long and rich history of reading Amalek symbolically, such as a strand of Hasidic thought in which Amalek represents the ongoing struggle of eradicating the evil inside of ourselves.

While I’m grateful to have the richness of the rabbinic tradition to complicate the biblical text, I also mistrust my own impulse to seek relief in it. Given the calamity of the present moment, it feels insufficient to embrace a tradition that “fixes” the problem. Part of me actually feels more partial to confronting this disturbing biblical text directly—the pain of reading it matches more faithfully the pain of this moment than the satisfaction of an erudite explanation that explains it away. […] This is another way of understanding Zakhor: We remember Amalek because it hurts on every level—Amalek’s attack against the Jews, the bloodthirst against the Amalekites that followed, and the legacy of living on with this commandment.

And still, at its best, interpretation is not simply a way of explaining away difficulties; it is a project of world-building—of letting texts be changed by the world and the world by texts. Taken as a whole, the rabbinic tradition offers a model for inventive reading that breaks down the rigidity of a decisive command. Examining past rabbinic treatments of earlier texts helps to make clear our own positionality as active participants in the chain of tradition.

Returning to that lineage provides a path toward an alternative understanding of the command to destroy Amalek. Several rabbinic commentators, attempting to explain why Amalek’s actions were so reprehensible, argue that Amalek ambushed the Israelites for no reason and without warning, attacking the weakest and most vulnerable. The commentator Nechama Leibowitz picks up on this linkage of the gravity of Amalek’s sin to their disregard for the vulnerable.

She observes that the Torah describes Amalek as “lo yarei Elohim” (lacking fear of God) and notes that other biblical uses of the phrase “fear of God”—when Abraham expresses his fear that a foreign kingdom would kill him, when Joseph agrees to release his brothers after accusing them of spying, and when the midwives refuse to murder the Israelite male infants in Egypt—refer not to belief in God or fear of God’s wrath but to the subjects’ attitude toward the vulnerable.

“The criterion for ‘fear of God’ in a person’s heart is in relation to the weak and the stranger,” she writes. The sin of Amalek, then, is one that remains pervasive today—the use of force against those with less power. That is a force worth eradicating, “a war against Amalek in every generation.”

This helps explain Rashi’s comment that “God’s name and God’s throne are not complete until Amalek’s name is fully wiped out.” This work of making God’s name whole is not in God’s domain to enable: What is required is actually a human change, a reordering of our society and how we treat one another.

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4062599

When I became anti‐Zionist in […] ’72, fifty‐one years ago, my father’s first reaction was calling me a terrorist. And so for some years we just had a shouting match. I was all the time telling my dad that [this neocolony] is not satisfied with a ’67 occupation and not with the Nakba. But that it also wants to occupy Lebanon. And he dismissed it, no way. So when in ’82, [neocolonists] invaded Lebanon, clearly with a view to occupy Lebanon, […] that was a massive shift in my father. And after that, he became my biggest supporter.

In the ’80s, he was saying that how he suffered from antisemitism as a child [under German Fascism] was nothing as the racism that [Zionist settlers] have against Palestinians.

Happy Purim to all my Hexbear comrades! Have a joyous holiday however you celebrate. In spirit, I’ve baked a special batch of hexentaschen for all of you.

The good part about history repeating itself is that you can know that the warmongerers will get themselves all killed, and the quiet, more studious part of Yisroel will get to keep chilling.

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3888839

Quoting Steve Cushion in On Strike Against the Nazis, pages 11–2:

On 11 February 1941, about fifty WA [Weerbaarheidsafdeling, a fascist paramilitary] members marched through Amsterdam to Waterlooplein, a neighbourhood where many Jews lived, putting up signs saying ‘No Jews Allowed’ as well as vandalising the old Jewish quarter. In response, Dutch opponents of the occupation, both Jews and others, created knokploegen, self‐defence groups that became involved in violent confrontations with the WA.

In one of these fights, WA member Hendrik Koot was wounded and died a few days later. In response, the [Axis authorities] temporarily closed off the Jewish quarter. On 19 February, a massive fight broke out in the Jewish ice‐cream parlour Koko after the police tried to enter but were confronted with a knokploegen self‐defence unit from the neighbourhood, injuring several officers[.]

The [Axis authorities] used the incidents as an excuse for the first round‐ups of Jews. On 22 and 23 February 1941, 425 young Jewish men were rounded up, beaten and taken away. To resist this growing [Axis] repression the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) held an open air meeting at the Noordermarkt. There, they discussed how to stop the persecution of the Jews and the institution of forced labour.

The 250 people present decided to call a strike. On Tuesday 25 February, the tram workers went on strike, while dockers and shipyard workers walked out in Amsterdam Noord and marched across the river. The strike spread to other trades and the strikers marched through the streets, calling on people to join in.^12^

Journalist Salomon de Vries wrote in his diary:

The news ran round through the city. The Amsterdam Dry‐dock Company, the shipbuilding industry, Vries Lenz, Fokker — they’re on strike everywhere! The ferryboats aren't running! The trams aren’t running!

Mientje Meijer worked in a clothing factory. Her husband was one of the organisers of the tram strike.

I kept walking to the window. Finally I saw him, and he nodded. I could feel my heart freeze. I looked into the shop and saw all those girls and the boss. I wasn’t at all accustomed to speaking before a group. I said, “Ladies, all of Amsterdam has come to a standstill because they’ve been rounding up Jews and taking them away. We’ve got to join in”. To my surprise everyone took to the streets. I thought, “now I’m going to be sacked”, but even the boss went along! We went to the Noordermarkt and the procession just kept growing. It was overwhelming.^13^

Over 300,000 workers in Amsterdam and Utrecht went on strike that day and the next in what was effectively a regional general strike. The [Axis] quickly responded with great ferocity, opening fire and throwing hand grenades, killing nine and wounding about thirty‐five other demonstrators. The mayor was forced to resign and many city workers were sacked. Many Communists were arrested, some deported to Buchenwald and a handful executed.^14^

But news of this action quickly spread to neighbouring Belgium.

(Emphasis added.)

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3220137

I have said many times that only Jews can really come close to understanding the impact the Porrajmos has had on the Romani population, and I venture to think that only Romanies can come close, on an emotional level, to understanding the Jewish tragedy. The Holocaust, sadly, just doesn’t seem to mean as much for anyone else. But neither Jew nor Rom can fully understand the other’s experience, then or now, nor should either begin to presume to interpret for the other.

— Ian Hancock

As the old saying goes, misery enjoys company, and there is perhaps no better example of this than the plight of Jews and Roma in Europe. Although Jewish and Romani cultures have little in common (at least at first glance), in many cases it was easy for Jews and Roma to put aside whatever differences that they had when their lives were at stake. Quoting Kateřina Čapková and Eliyana R. Adler in Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, page 5:

Because the discrimination against Jews started earlier than that against the Roma, there were cases of Romani families hiding Jewish families in Romani settlements.^16^

Volha Bartash, page 41:

The memories of Jewish–Romani wartime encounters were not limited to recollections of mass killings, ghettos, and concentration camps. The stories of survival, to an even greater extent, demonstrate the awareness of each other’s destiny and readiness to help. For instance, Wanda Stankiewicz, a Romani woman from Ejszyszki, rescued a Jewish girl who had lost her parents in one of the early massacres in 1941.^75^

While hiding in the woods, Jews and Roma often stuck together, sharing food and warning each other of danger. The poetry of Papusza (Bronisława Wajs), considered to be one of the earliest accounts of the Holocaust of Roma also sheds light on the connections between Roma and Jews in the Volhynian forests (current Ukraine).

Papusza and the members of her community later recalled the Jews who were hiding together with their group; many verses of her poetry are dedicated to the plight of Romani and Jewish women and children, who were particularly vulnerable to the harsh conditions of the natural environment.^76^ Survivor accounts indeed show that a Jewish and a Romani family in hiding faced similar challenges.

[…]

As a result of their common destiny, the Romani and Jewish communities of Belarus and Lithuania currently share a number of memory sites (some along with other victim groups). […] How the Romani and Jewish communities of both countries coordinate their commemoration projects represents another potential line of inquiry for further research.

It is interesting that the Belarusian Jewish community has supported a number of Romani commemoration efforts. For instance, Romani and Jewish victims of the Kaldychava (Kołdyczewo) concentration camp have been commemorated together in one memorial complex.^77^

Ari Joskowicz’s Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust may be to date the most complete account (in English) on Jewish–Romani relations during the twentieth century and specifically during WWII. For example, page 42:

While the majority of Papusza’s poetry uses natural imagery to express her sense of loss in the face of destruction, “Tears of Blood” describes her wartime experiences in concrete terms, describing the solidarity she felt for persecuted Jews and the Jewish children who found their way into the forests.^115^

I saw a beautiful young Jewish girl,
shivering from cold,
asking for food.
You poor thing, my little one.
I gave her bread, whatever I had, a shirt.
We both forgot that not far away
were the police.
But they didn’t come that night.^116^

Elsewhere in the poem, she implores a bright star to blind the Germans “so the Jewish and Gypsy child can live” and also seeks to protect two Jews who were the sole survivors of their families.^117^ Together with the work of Sutzkever, Papusza’s poetry memorializes moments of shared Romani–Jewish battles for survival and resistance in [Axis]‐occupied Europe.^118^

These acts of joint resistance extended beyond partisan activity: in the ghettos in Radom and Tarnów, Roma participated in the smuggling networks and illicit supply chains that fed starving Jewish ghetto inmates.^119^

You may be pleasantly surprised to learn that it is actually fairly normal for Romani adults to mention Jews in their narratives pertaining to the Fascist era. Quoting Zsuzsanna Vidra in Multi‐Disciplinary Approaches to Romany Studies, page 206:

The Romany interviewees tell stories of their experiences with their Jewish neighbours from the post‐war period.^8^ As a matter of fact, the “Jewish theme” comes up spontaneously in the narratives. […] In contrast to the narratives of the post‐war majority society, my Romany interviewees born after 1945 openly and spontaneously shared stories about their Jewish neighbours without using any narrative techniques to hide or avoid mentioning the ethnic origin of the people in question.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Just for the sake of balance, I should admit that Jewish–Romani relations haven’t always been so romantic. In particular, Rain of Ash discusses instances not only of solidarity but also of conflict, especially between Jews or Roma who were relatively privileged such as police or Kapos, but it is possibly worth mentioning that in‐group conflicts were far from unknown either; after all, the Fascists loved to pit their enemies against each other.

In any case,

The fact that the issue of persecution of the Roma is almost always linked to persecution of Jews, prevents it from being treated as an autonomous subject of scientific research, and consequently as a historical phenomenon that should be contemplated independently of other events.

(Source.)

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3442569

The Soviets could be merciless when tackling antisemitism. Quoting Morris Kominsky’s The Hoaxers, pages 206–7:

In 1897, the dreaded Czarist secret police, the Ochrana, claimed that it had obtained a copy of the report of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders allegedly held in Basel, Switzerland. This alleged secret report, the “Protocols,” was published as an appendix to a book published in Moscow by Professor Sergei Nilus in 1905.

[…]

The 1912 edition of Nilus’ book triggered a series of pogroms in 1913 and served as a springboard for the Mendel Beiliss frame‐up, about which we have already taken notice. During World War I, Czarist secret police agents brought the “Protocols” to the secret service agencies of the Allied Powers, who refused to treat the document seriously. In 1917 the “Protocols” were openly circulated by the Czarist police in what came to be known as the Pogrom Edition. The results can be summarized in one sentence: Oceans of Jewish blood flowed.

Meanwhile, like a vulture feasting on carrion, Nilus derived a huge income from the distribution of his book. In 1917, shortly after the Pogrom Edition had done its damage, the Communists (Bolsheviks) came into power in Russia and a decree was issued, making mere possession of the “Protocols” punishable with a sentence of death.

Albert Szymański’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union, chapter 3:

Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution expressions of anti‐Semitism became a crime. In July 1918, the Council of People’s Commissars called for the destruction of ‘the anti‐Semitic movement at its roots’ by forbidding ‘pogromists and persons inciting to pogroms’.^53^ In 1922, the Russian Criminal Code forbade ‘agitation and propaganda arousing national enmities and dissensions’ and specified a minimum sentence of one year’s solitary confinement (and ‘death in time of war’) as punishment.

In 1927, the Russian Republic passed legislation outlawing the dissemination, manufacture or possession of literature calculated to stir national and religious hostility. Article 74 of the Russian Criminal Code, which came into effect in 1961 [sic], reads, ‘Propaganda or agitation aimed at inciting racial or national enmity or discord […] is punishable by loss of personal freedom for a period of six months to three years, or exile from two to five years’.^54^

During the Civil War and throughout the 1920s there was an active official government campaign against anti‐Semitism, incidents involving, and actions taken against, were frequently reported in the Soviet press. In this period the Party published over 100 books and brochures opposing anti‐Semitism.^55^

Jewish intellectuals and workers were disproportionately active in the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire. In 1922, Jews represented 5.2% of Communist Party membership (about five times their percentage of the population). From the late 1920s through to World War II the proportion of Jews in the Party was about 4.3%.^56^

During the Civil War large numbers of non‐Marxist Jews rallied to the Bolsheviks, the only major non anti‐Semitic organized force. The White Armies and their allies systematically promoted pogroms and other forms of anti‐Semitism as part of their campaign to defeat the revolution. Many of the top Party leaders were Jews, e.g. Kamenev, Trotsky and Zinoviev (members of Lenin’s leadership); Kaganovich and Litvinov (members of Stalin’s leadership).

(Emphasis added in all cases. Click here for more.)

After the Soviet [government] had removed all the traditional Czarist restrictions on Jews, they eagerly took advantage of the new educational, economic and social activities opened to them. As a result both of the elimination of traditional barriers and the general leftist mobilization in which most Jews participated, large numbers gave up their traditional ways, and became part of the mainstream of the newly emerging Soviet society.

The majority of the young generation of Jews became alienated from both the religion and the cultural practices of their parents. As a measure of the rapid integration of Jews into Soviet society, intermarriage, which was extremely rare before the Revolution, became quite common.^57^ In the 25 years after the revolution, traditional Jewish life was revolutionized as the Communist Party organized new organizations to impart a socialist content to Jewish culture.

Special ‘Jewish national districts’ for Jewish settlement were set aside in the south of Russia, the Ukraine and Crimea.^58^ In 1928, an autonomous Jewish Republic was established within the Russian Republic of Birobidzhan, on the border of Manchuria. This was meant not only as a ‘Jewish homeland’, but as a means of encouraging development of an undeveloped area of the East. Birobidzhan was officially proclaimed an autonomous region in 1934, and although it has attracted relatively few Jewish settlers, it continues to exist as a Jewish Autonomous Republic.^59^

Kominsky’s summary that ‘Oceans of Jewish blood flowed’ is barely an exaggeration: with the possible exception of the Polish–Cossack War of the mid‐17th century, the White Army committed the deadliest pre‐1940s massacre of Jews, killing 115,000 or possibly even 200,000 Jews. You can read examples of the Whites’ cruelty here. Unsurprisingly, the Whites later had an influence, some would argue the most important influence, on Fascist antisemitism, too.

Enacting the death penalty for possessing anti‐Jewish propaganda is pretty hardcore, and maybe even a little too harsh, but either way having this context in mind is necessary for understanding the enactment.

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3313701

As I was editing my essay on why the Fascist bourgeoisie committed the Shoah, I looked for a thread that I made correcting Bordiga’s exaggeration that ‘no one anywhere else wanted to allow [Jews] to enter […] no one could allow them to enter’. To my surprise, I had not yet made such a thread!

Quoting Nathan Weinstock’s Le Sionisme contre Israël, page 146:

La grande majorité des juifs européens qui ont réussi à échapper au massacre ont trouvé refuge en Union soviétique : 1.930.000 personnes, soit 75,3 % de l’ensemble des réfugiés juifs^18^. D’après les recherches de Schwartz^20^, l’évacuation méthodique des populations juives menacées d’extermination par les autorités soviétiques, dont on a souvent fait état, reposerait cependant sur une exagération manifeste de la portée réelle — fort restreinte en vérité — de l’intervention des autorités de l’U.R.S.S. dans ce domaine. Les estimations de l’Institute for Jewish Affairs de New York reproduites ci‐dessus incluent vraisemblablement les juifs de la Pologne orientale et des pays baltes occupés par l’Union soviétique.

[Citations]

19. Données fournies par l’Institute for Jewish Affairs de New York et citées d’après S. Adler‐Rudel, The Agony of a People, in The Future of the Jews. A Symposium edited by J.J. Lynx, London, 1945, p. 38, tableau 2.
20. Schwartz, o. c., pp. 222 et ss.

This translates to:

The vast majority of European Jews who managed to escape the massacre found refuge in the Soviet Union: 1,930,000 people, or 75.3% of all Jewish refugees. According to Schwartz’s research, the Soviet authorities’ methodic evacuation of Jews threatened by extermination, which one frequently mentions, could be based on an exaggeration of the real range — quite narrow in reality — of the Soviet authorities’ intervention in this domain. New York’s Institute for Jewish Affairs’s estimations reproduced above probably include Jews from eastern Poland and from the Soviet Baltics.

A corroborating source for this is Professor Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, third edition, volume I, page 295:

When the Einsatzgruppen crossed the border into the USSR, five million Jews were living under the Soviet flag. The majority of the Soviet Jews were concentrated in the western parts of the country. Four million were living in territories later overrun by the [Wehrmacht]:

Buffer Territories:^2^

Baltic area 260,000
Polish territory 1,350,000
Bukovina and Bessarabia up to 300,000

---

up to 1,910,000

Old Territories:^3^

Ukraine (pre‐1939 borders) 1,533,000
White Russia (pre‐1939 borders) 375,000
RSFSR Crimea 50,000
Other areas seized by [Fascists] 200,000

---

ca. 2,160,000

About one and a half million Jews living in the affected territories fled before the [Fascists] arrived.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Just to supplement these data, here is an anecdote from Adam Broner’s My War Against the Nazis: A Jewish Soldier with the Red Army, page 18:

The commander of the cavalry unit who met us about three miles inside Soviet territory started negotiating with us. He asked why we were coming over to their side. People in front told him that we were fleeing the fascists and we wanted to lead a productive life in the Soviet Union.
“Are you working‐class people?” the commander asked.
“Sure we are. Look at our hands!”
“If you promise not to push any further, I will ask at headquarters if we can let you in.”
“Yes, we promise.”
“Then,” said the commander, “wait here. It will take me two to three hours to return.” We promised to behave and waited anxiously for his return. Then afar we saw him riding back bringing the good news that we were allowed to enter the USSR. Hurray!

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1014518

(Alternative link.)

Excerpt:

After a careful study of gentile behavior toward the Jewish population in these two regions, our research indicates that there was a remarkable difference between actions taken in Bessarabia and Transnistria.

On the basis of more than two hundred Jewish survivor testimonies, a mail‐in survey with Jewish Holocaust survivors, interviews with over one hundred non‐Jewish Holocaust witnesses located on the territories of Bessarabia and Transnistria, and archival material from the Romanian, German, and Soviet governments, we found the following: the Bessarabian population was more likely to commit abusive actions against Jews (for example, beatings, theft, murder, rape), whereas the Transnistrian population was both (1) less likely to commit abuse and (2) more likely to behave in a cooperative manner (for example, providing food and hiding Jews from persecution).

We believe that the prewar state policies encouraging either animosity or affinity between ethnic groups greatly contribute to our understanding of this outcome.

[…]

Above all, we believe that there was a clear and overwhelming political commitment by the governing communists to achieve interethnic cooperation and societal integration during this interwar period, and government policies flowed from this commitment.

These changes in policies, we argue, led to the construction of interethnic cooperation that came to be internalized by the gentile population and then led to continued cooperative behavior even after the Soviet Union was replaced by the anti‐Semitic Romanian forces during World War II.

[…]

One of the most remarkable findings from all our research in Transnistria was actually a nonevent: we did not find evidence of a single anti‐Jewish pogrom anywhere in Transnistria.

Pogroms in Bessarabia were reported by survivors and are referenced in archival material and secondary sources, but the same cannot be said for Transnistria, as we found no evidence of such activities in survivors’ testimonies, government records, or the secondary sources we consulted.

More generally, survivors made very different remarks when commenting on the people from Transnistria, which had been located in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Some survivors stated it explicitly: “In Ukraine the attitude was better than in Bessarabia.” Many of the survivors stated that “the Ukrainians did help,” that “the Ukrainians were not bad,” that they had “a compassionate attitude,” or that “the majority of them gave us bread.”

One survivor, a native of the town of Orhei (Bessarabia), stated that of his experience in Transnistria, “one [a Jew] could not feel too much hatred, with the exception of the collaborators,” and his impression was that “the majority [of the local population] did not perceive the Jews with alienation … but rather … the majority perceived the occupying power as alien, but the Jews as theirs.”

Another survivor, this time a native of Transnistria, concluded that the population of his city (Moghilev‐Podolsk) had a sympathetic attitude toward the Jews and that only a small minority was comfortable with the fact that the Jews were forced from the city to the ghetto.

Several survivors recalled that, during the long marches toward the ghettos, many locals in Transnistria threw food from a distance and some peasant women even left packages with food on the road in front of the columns of Jews approaching.

[…]

There were also cases of Jewish children being sheltered by Transnistrian locals in their houses. The Romanian counterintelligence reports confirm the occurrence of cases of Jewish children being adopted by the Ukrainian population in order to save them from deportation.

Hilda Schwartz, a survivor of Kopaygorod, described her escape to a neighboring village, where a woman housed her first and later her mother and sister as well. After the liberation of the camp, Hilda’s family continued to live with the woman for another two months.

While we did find individual cases of theft, beatings, and murder committed by the local population in Transnistria, the incidence was substantially lower than in Bessarabia.

More importantly, the level of cooperation was overwhelmingly apparent in all sources we consulted, which was in stark contrast to what we found for Bessarabia. This becomes clearer with a quantified picture of events, which we present in the next section.

(Emphasis added.)

There is more that I wanted to include, but the excerpt is pretty lengthy as it is. If you have the time, I encourage you to read the rest of the article (which is forty‐two pages long, excluding the preface), but I should warn you that it does quote some slurs and describe some violent incidents.

For a book on this subject, see Diana Dumitru’s The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union.

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1132778

(Mirror.)

Quoting Derek J. Penslar’s Jews and the Military: A History, page 208:

Of all the armies in which Jews took part, the Red Army had the greatest level of Jewish involvement and sacrifice. In keeping with the general patterns of mortality among combatants in the Soviet Union and the United States, over one‐third of Soviet Jewish soldiers perished during the war as opposed to only 1.5 percent of American‐Jewish soldiers. There were almost twice as many Jews in the United States as the Soviet Union, yet Jewish generals and admirals in the USSR outnumbered their American counterparts ten to one.^49^

In other ways, however, certain patterns of specialization and placement united Soviet and North American Jewish soldiers. As in earlier conflicts, so in World War II Jews were concentrated disproportionately in branches of service that required education and technical expertise. In the Red Army of the 1930s, the professor and major general G. Eierson had developed new theories of mobile warfare, and other Jewish officers had been prominent as inventors and developers of tanks and other armored vehicles.

Twelve of thirty Red Army armor specialists sent to Spain had been Jews. In 1939, the Spanish war hero Yakov Smushkevich was appointed commander of the Red Army’s air force, only to be liquidated by [Moscow] in 1941. During World War II, Jewish engineers developed the Red Army's most successful tank and fighter aircraft. Three of the Red Army’s twenty most highly decorated submarine commanders during World War II were Jews.^50^

While these data are impressive in and of theirselves, Penslar did not specify the number of Jews in the Red Army. This is why I put Gabriel Mayer’s research in the URL. Quote:

It has been documented that 500,000^3^ Jews fought in the Red Army during WWII, and that the total numbers of Jews fighting in WWII amounted to approximately 1.7 million^4^ out of a worldwide population of less than 16 million, in other words, more than 10% of the worldwide Jewish population. Nevertheless, the earliest (and for a long time the only) recognition of Jewish participation in military operations was of Jewish GIs discussed in the American press.^5^

(Somebody might point out that there were approximately 600,000 Jews in the U.S. armed services, but keep in mind that ‘U.S. armed services’ is a broader category than ‘Red Army’.)

With the outbreak of WWII, the disproportionate representation of Jews in the Red Army increased even further, as did the ratio of promotions and decorations awarded to Jewish combatants. The following numbers illustrate the recruitment of Jews, as volunteers and conscripts, in large population centers:^12^ Moscow — 140,000 (population of 5 million); Leningrad — 130,000 (population of 3.2 million); Odessa — 55,000 (population of 604,000); Kiev — 35,000 (population of 846,000).

In certain military units, such as the Latvian Division, where Jewish soldiers constituted 30%, the numbers are even more disproportionate.^13^ The motivation of the Jews to fight was clearly fueled also by the news of the destruction of Jewry at the hands of the [Axis]. This circumstance did not escape the attention of the political leadership of the Red Army (GPUKA), which stated, “the most loyal elements in the Red Army during this difficult phase of the war were mostly Russians defending the homeland (“Mother Russia”) and Jewish soldiers.”^14^

The special motivation of the Jews prompted a suggestion to form Jewish fighting units. Thus, on February 12, 1943, Abram Margolis, the Commissar of the 32nd Infantry Division, called for the formation of a Jewish division, in light of the singularly horrific suffering that Jews were experiencing at the hands of the [Axis].^15^

Numbers alone do not tell the full story, however. During WWII, Jewish soldiers attained high ranks and received prestigious decorations. In Lithuania, the following Jewish generals participated in and commanded units during some of the most arduous phases of the war: General and Commander Izrail Borskin of the 65th Army, General Grigori Plaskov of the 2nd Armored Corps, and General Moise Kharkovsy of the 12th Artillery.

These generals and scores of other Jewish soldiers received “Order of Lenin” decorations.^16^ Altogether, during the 1940–1945 period, a total of 229 Jews were promoted to the rank of General or Admiral.^17^ The ranks of the decorated soldiers and officers were entirely out of proportion with the percentage of Jews in the population at large or even in the armed forces: in absolute terms, Jews accounted for the fourth largest number of highly decorated soldiers by nationality, following Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, but naturally, out of a far smaller population.^18^

The highest military honor, “Hero of the Soviet Union,” was accorded to 154 Jews.^19^ A telling detail of this remarkable saga is that on January 31, 1943, at Stalingrad, General von Paulus, Commander of the German 6th Army, surrendered to Lt. Colonel Leonid Vinoukur, a Jew.^20^

As to be expected, the author could not resist mischaracterizing Moscow’s (admittedly rather harsh) anti‐Zionism as antisemitism, but most of this paper is still worth reading.

While the Jewish motive for joining the Allied forces is obvious, it may be less clear (unless they were pacifists) why other Jews would be reluctant to join them. We can derive a very plausible explanation for that by looking at how the Axis handled Jewish POWs. Quoting from Tom Bird’s American POWs of World War II: Forgotten Men Tell Their Stories, page 131:

Jewish POWs [whom] I interviewed were frightened throughout their imprisonment and were constantly aware of the possibility that they could be sent to a concentration camp.

These fears were a result of knowledge not only of what was happening to Jewish civilians, but also of what had happened to other POWs, notably Soviet Jewish prisoners. In 1941, Hitler issued the Commissar Order, which called for the elimination of political representatives and commissars, whom he considered the “driving forces of Bolshevism.” Included in the extermination order were all Soviet Jews. In July 1941, all Jewish POWs from the eastern front were ordered to be killed. No similar order was ever made concerning Jewish POWs from Britain, France, or the United States.

The reason may be that despite [Axis] propaganda that the Allies did not care about Jews, the [Axis] thought those nations would care very much if Jews from their armies became victims. A more likely explanation was that the [Axis was] concerned that [its] POWs would be mistreated if the Western nations learned that Jewish prisoners were being abused. But the apparent failure of the United States to investigate mistreatments of Jewish POWs implies that [Axis] propaganda was correct: The United States did not even care about its own Jews.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

As a gentile, I, personally, can think of no choice for an Allied soldier more behooving than a Jew; their cause for joining is arguably the easiest of them all to understand. Nevertheless, when I think about it, they also had a good reason to be reluctant, because if the Axis had confirmation of their heritage then they could expect some especially harsh mistreatment during capture. With this in mind, I think that the Jews who fought in or alongside the Allies were especially brave.

For a biography related to this subject, see My War against the Nazis: A Jewish Soldier with the Red Army.

ETA: Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering.

In the 17th century, the simplicity and elegance with which Isaac Newton had succeeded in explaining the laws governing the motion of bodies and the stars, unifying terrestrial and celestial physics, dazzled his contemporaries to such an extent that mechanics came to be considered complete. By the end of the 19th century, however, the relevance of certain phenomena that classical physics could not explain was already unavoidable. It fell to Albert Einstein to overcome these shortcomings with the creation of a new paradigm: the theory of relativity, the starting point of modern physics.

As an explanatory model completely removed from common sense, relativity is among those advances that, at the dawn of the 20th century, would lead to a divorce between ordinary people and an increasingly specialized and unintelligible science. Nevertheless, either during the physicist's lifetime or posthumously, even the most surprising and incomprehensible aspects of relativity would eventually be confirmed. It should come as no surprise, then, that Albert Einstein is one of the most celebrated and admired figures in the history of science: knowing that so many barely conceivable ideas are true (for example, that the mass of a body increases with velocity) leaves no choice but to surrender to his genius.

Origins

Albert Einstein was born in the German city of Ulm on March 14, 1879. He was the first-born son of Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch, both Jews, whose families came from Swabia. The following year they moved to Munich, where his father established himself, together with his brother Jakob, as a dealer in the electro-technical novelties of the time.

Little Albert was a quiet, self-absorbed child, and his intellectual development was slow. Einstein himself attributed to this slowness the fact that he was the only person to develop a theory such as relativity: "A normal adult does not worry about the problems posed by space and time, because he considers that he knows everything there is to know about them from early childhood. I, on the other hand, have had such a slow development that I did not begin to ask myself questions about space and time until I was older".

In 1894, financial difficulties caused the family to move to Milan; Einstein remained in Munich to finish his secondary studies, joining his parents the following year. In the fall of 1896 he began his higher studies at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, where he was a student of the mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who later generalized the four-dimensional formalism introduced by the theories of his former student.

On June 23, 1902, Albert Einstein joined the Confederal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, where he worked until 1909. In 1903 he married Mileva Maric, a former fellow student in Zurich, with whom he had two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard, born in 1904 and 1910 respectively. In 1919 they divorced, and Einstein remarried his cousin Elsa.

Relativity

During 1905, he published five papers in the Annalen der Physik: the first of these earned him a doctoral degree from the University of Zurich, and the remaining four would eventually impose a radical change in science's picture of the universe. Of these four, the first provided a theoretical explanation in statistical terms of Brownian motion, and the second gave an interpretation of the photoelectric effect based on the hypothesis that light is composed of individual quanta, later called photons. The remaining two papers laid the foundations of the special theory of relativity, establishing the equivalence between the energy E of a certain amount of matter and its mass m in terms of the famous equation E = mc², where c is the speed of light, which is assumed to be constant.

Einstein's efforts immediately placed him among the most eminent of European physicists, but public recognition of the true scope of his theories was slow in coming; the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he received in 1921, was awarded to him exclusively "for his work on Brownian motion and his interpretation of the photoelectric effect". In 1909 he began his university teaching career in Zurich, then moved to Prague and returned to Zurich in 1912 to become a professor at the Polytechnic, where he had studied.

In 1914 he moved to Berlin as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The outbreak of World War I forced him to separate from his family, who never joined him again. Against the general feeling of the Berlin academic community, Einstein was then openly anti-war, influenced in his attitudes by the pacifist doctrines of Romain Rolland.

On the scientific level, between 1914 and 1916, his activity was focused on perfecting the general theory of relativity, based on the postulate that gravity is not a force but a field created by the presence of a mass in the space-time continuum. The confirmation of his predictions came in 1919, when the solar eclipse of May 29 was photographed; The Times presented him as the new Newton and his international fame grew, forcing him to multiply his lectures around the world and popularizing his image as a traveler of the third class railroad, with a violin case under his arm.

Towards a unifying theory

During the following decade, Einstein concentrated his efforts on finding a mathematical relationship between electromagnetism and gravitational attraction, determined to advance towards what, for him, should be the ultimate goal of physics: to discover the common laws that were supposed to govern the behavior of all objects in the universe, from subatomic particles to stellar bodies, and to group them into a single "unified field" theory. This research, which occupied the rest of his life, was unsuccessful and ended up by making him a stranger to the rest of the scientific community. After 1933, with Hitler's accession to power, his loneliness was aggravated by the need to renounce German citizenship and move to the United States; Einstein spent the last twenty-five years of his life at the Graduate Institute of Princeton (New Jersey), where he died on April 18, 1955.

Einstein once said that politics had a fleeting value, while an equation had value for eternity. In the last years of his life, his bitterness at not finding the formula that would reveal the secret of the unity of the world was accentuated by the need he felt to intervene dramatically in the political sphere. In 1939, at the urging of the physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Paul Wigner, and convinced of the possibility that the Germans were in a position to manufacture an atomic bomb, he addressed President Roosevelt urging him to undertake a research program on atomic energy.

After the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions in World War II, Einstein joined scientists seeking ways to prevent future use of the bomb and proposed the formation of a world government from the embryonic United Nations. But his proposals for humanity to avert threats of individual and collective destruction, formulated in the name of a unique amalgam of science, religion and socialism, received from politicians a rejection comparable to the respectful criticism among scientists of his successive versions of the idea of a unified field.

Albert Einstein continues to be a mythical figure of our time; even more so than he became during his lifetime, if we take into account that the photograph of him showing an unusual mocking gesture (sticking out his tongue in a comical and irreverent expression) has been elevated to the dignity of a domestic icon after being turned into a poster as common as those of song idols and Hollywood stars. However, it is not his scientific genius or his human stature that best explain him as a myth, but, perhaps, the accumulation of paradoxes contained in his own biography, accentuated by the historical perspective. Einstein, the champion of pacifism, is still remembered as the "father of the bomb"; and it is still common to attribute the demonstration of the principle that "everything is relative" precisely to him, who fought fiercely against the possibility that knowing reality meant playing blind man's buffalo with it.

Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein

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cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3905416

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was a Jewish space. While not all of its employees ascribed to Judaism, the religion was prevalent because the Jewish community was at the heart of the factory, which only began to change when the owners started firing the Jewish girls for striking and hired Italian [gentiles] in their stead.

Esther and Max were Jewish, and Mary believed that “the hundreds of girls [who worked in the shop] were mostly Jewish...” just like them, with a minority population of Italian immigrants.^42^ Even the factory owners themselves, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were a part of the Jewish community.^43^

It is entirely possible that Blanck and Harris went to the same synagogue as some of their employees. Did Blanck and Harris guiltily look away as Mr. Hochfield said Esther’s name before the Mourner’s Kaddish? Did they have to listen to name after name be called out in shul each year around the anniversary of the factory fire, knowing that they were the reason that there were so many deaths to remember? Their Judaism, and the Judaism of the people they employed, was inextricable to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

We can also see this in how the majority of the 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire were Jewish people.^44^ When Esther Hochfield perished in the fire, Mary Domsky‐Abrams recalled that “All New York—certainly, all of Jewish New York—came to the funeral.”^45^

While it is unlikely the entirety of New York City, or even Jewish New York went to Esther’s funeral, the sentiment is still worth acknowledging. Perhaps Mary really meant that everyone who mattered to her was there. These could have been people from the factory, members of her synagogue, and her friends from the union.

It is also worth acknowledging that, to Mary, the response to the tragedy was distinctly Jewish, and that was probably because of the Jewish nature of the factory community.

News of the fire reached all the way back to Eastern Europe. This is evident from how, “Elizabeth Hasanovitz, who migrated shortly after the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911, recalled how news of the disaster had reverberated throughout her small shtetl in Russia: ‘I still remember what a panic that news caused in our town when it first came. Many families had their young daughters in all parts of the United States who worked in shops. And as most of these old parents had an idea of America as one big town, each of them was almost sure that their daughter was a victim of that terrible catastrophe.’”^46^

Ultimately the factory community was made up of members of the Jewish community, so much so that the tragedy reached all the way back to their families in Eastern Europe. Many of the factory members, including the owners, worked alongside members of their families who had made their way to the United States. In order to better understand the fire, the lives that it took, and those that survived, it is essential to look into the Jewishness of the affected community, because it was so much of a part of their lives both at home and at work.

(Emphasis added.)

crosspost from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3618992

Zionists want everybody to believe that anti‐Jewish sentiment is totally out of control among Palestinians, perhaps so much so that any attempt to address the situation is doomed to failure, and that the best approach available is separatism. (This latter conclusion, funnily enough, echoes the consensus of premodern Zionists who saw antisemitism as natural and inevitable.) In reality, Palestinian gentiles’ relationship with Jews is more complex than that.

Quoting Ilan Pappé’s Ten Myths about Israel, pages 47–8:

The official [Zionist] narrative or foundational mythology refuses to allow the Palestinians even a modicum of moral right to resist the Jewish colonization of their homeland that began in 1882. From the very beginning, Palestinian resistance was depicted as motivated by hate for Jews. It was accused of promoting a protean anti‐Semitic campaign of terror that began when the first settlers arrived and continued until [1948].

The diaries of the early Zionists tell a different story. They are full of anecdotes revealing how the settlers were well received by the Palestinians, who offered them shelter and in many cases taught them how to cultivate the land.^4^ Only when it became clear that the settlers had not come to live alongside the native population, but in place of it, did the Palestinian resistance begin. And when that resistance started, it quickly took the form of every other anticolonialist struggle.

This initial hospitality is, sadly, a trope throughout colonialism’s history. For example, the Taíno and the Aztecs were, at first, in awe of their new arrivals and the strange technologies and creatures that they brought with them. They offered gifts to their new guests and displayed a willingness to accommodate them, but this innocent hospitality was short‐lived once it was time for colonialism to expand.

In the Palestinian gentiles’ case, many of them were likely aware of their Jewish roots, and it’s probable that many of them frequented Mosques that reminded them to respect strangers in their lands, or taught them that Jews, like Christians, are ‘people of the book’. The intellectuals were surely aware of Judaism’s influence on Christianity and Islam, too, so in any case, anti‐Jewish sentiment would have been not only illogical, it wouldn’t have served a purpose either.

Nevertheless, despite Palestinians’ hospitality, the Zionists were dead‐set on realizing their ethnonationalist and neocolonial project. Pages 48–9:

The idea that impoverished Jews were entitled to a safe haven was not objected to by the Palestinians and those supporting them. However, this was not reciprocated by the Zionist leaders. While Palestinians offered shelter and employment to the early settlers, and did not object to working should to shoulder with them under whatever ownership, the Zionist ideologues were very clear about the need both to push the Palestinians out of the country’s labor market and to sanction those settlers who were still employing Palestinians or who worked alongside them.

This was the idea of avoda [ivr]it, (Hebrew Labor), which meant mainly the need to bring an end to avoda aravit, (Arab Labor). Gershon Shar, in his seminal work on the Second Aliyah, the second wave of Zionist immigration (1904–14), explains well how this ideology developed and was practiced.^5^

The leader of that wave, David Ben‐Gurion (who became the leader of the community and then prime minister of [his neocolony]), constantly referred to Arab labor as an illness for which the only cure was Jewish labor. In his and other settlers’ letters, Hebrew workers are characterized as the healthy blood that will immunize the nation from rottenness and death. Ben‐Gurion also remarked that employing “Arabs” reminded him of the old Jewish story of a stupid man who resuscitated a dead lion that then devoured him.^6^

The initial positive Palestinian reaction confused some of the settlers themselves throughout the period of British rule (1918–48). The colonialist impulse was to ignore the native population and create gated communities. However, life offered different opportunities. There is extensive evidence of coexistence and cooperation between the newly arrived Jews and the native population almost everywhere.

[Zionist] settlers, particularly in the urban centers, could not survive without engaging, at least economically, with the Palestinians. Despite numerous attempts by the Zionist leadership to disrupt these interactions, hundreds of joint businesses were formed throughout those years, alongside trade‐union cooperation and agricultural collaboration. But without political support from above this could not open the way for a different reality in Palestine.^7^

A good example of Zionists opposing Palestinian hospitality is looking at the rôle of Palestinian volunteers during World War II:

With regard to the internal relationship between the Arab and Jewish volunteers in the mixed units before they were separated, we do not have much information. However, from a few of the letters and documents that dealt with the subject, it appears that the relationship was generally good and instances of open hostility were very few in number.

For example, from one of the documents we learn about a quarrel about radio broadcasts. The Jewish soldiers complained that their Arab colleagues wished to listen to broadcasts in Arabic, while the time given to them to listen to broadcasts in Hebrew was brief. This developed into a squabble which ended in the jailing of soldiers from both sides. In another instance a dispute broke out over the question of cleaning the rooms and the kitchen.^68^

[…]

In contrast with the leadership of the [Zionist] Yishuv, the research shows that those Palestinian leaders who had worked so hard for the sake of volunteering did not have any clear national agenda. They did not demand setting up separate Arab Palestinian units similar to those of the [Zionists], in spite of British encouragement.

The leaders of the Yishuv succeeded through continuous pressure to break away from mixed units already in 1942, and in some of the units even earlier. Slowly they advanced in the direction of setting up a Jewish fighting division that in the future would fulfil an important rôle as the basis for a [Zionist] army by the end of the Mandate period.

From the protocols of the Jewish Agency Directorate, it may be learnt that already at an early stage the leaders of the [Zionist] Yishuv had reservations and even opposed the idea of mixed units, and did all they could to keep separate from the Arabs.^103^

From October 27, 1946:

There were, Mr. Sulzberger said, countless Arabs “who would admit that there is room at the moment in Palestine for 350,000 Jewish refugees, but not room for a Jewish state.”

Mr. Sulzberger said [that] he was opposed to political Zionism not solely because of the fate of Jewish refugees but because he disliked the “coercive methods” of Zionists in this country who use economic means to silence those with differing views.

From all of this information here, it feels like the Palestinians loved Jews more than the Zionists themselves!

It is true that the Palestinians did not want to live in a Jewish state, but not because of its Jewishness per se; they simply did not want to live in an ethnostate, which would have inevitably relegated them to the status of second‐class citizens (if allowed at all). It wouldn’t have made a difference to them if the ethnostate were Jewish or gentile.

One premodern example that Zionists use to ‘prove’ that Palestinians are bigoted is the Hebron massacre of 1929. There are quite a few details to this incident, but for brevity’s sake, Pappé summarizes the causes on page 50:

In 1928, the Palestinian leadership, notwithstanding the wishes of the overall majority of their people, consented to allow the Jewish settlers equal representation in the future bodies of the state. The Zionist leadership was in favor of the idea only for as long as it suspected the Palestinians would reject it. Shared representation stood against everything Zionism was supposed to be.

So, when the proposal was accepted by the Palestinian party, it was rejected by the Zionists. This led to the riots of 1929, which included the massacre of Jews in Hebron and a much higher death toll among the Palestinian community.^10^

But there were also other reasons for the wave of violence, the most serious since the beginning of the Mandate. It was triggered by the dispossession of Palestinian tenants from land owned by absentee landlords and local notables, which had been bought by the Jewish National Fund. The tenants had lived for centuries on the land but they were now forced into slums in the towns.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

There are, of course, moderner concerns to address, like the claim that Hamas massacred over one thousand Jews on October 7 (it didn’t), and that Hamas hates Jews (it doesn’t), but this thread is getting lengthy enough as it is, so I’ll trust you to do your own research. I would, nevertheless, like to add one of these anecdotes:

There was also also a good ama post on the Israel sub from a dude who converted to Islam that was raised orthodox and spent a considerable time in the WB [West Bank]. Dude told at least a few Palestinians he was Jewish and they were intrigued, excited and even protective of him, which is the opposite of chopping off his head like everyone assumes.

None of this is to say that there is no Judeophobia among Palestinians. Indeed, when their oppressors repeatedly emphasize their Jewish identity and claim that they are somehow committing their atrocities for the good of Jewry, it would be very surprising if no Palestinians conflated their oppressors with, for example, unarmed Jewish proletarians.

That being said, Palestinian Judeophobia cannot and should not be treated the same way as neofascist antisemitism, for the main reason being that the causes are very different. Palestinian Judeophobia is the sad but inevitable consequence of an underpowered and largely helpless minority—Palestinians—knowing little else what to do but express their frustrations against their privileged oppressors—Zionists—in a crude manner.

Neofascist antisemitism, in contrast, is more complex. It is, to quote Bordiga, ‘the petit bourgeois reaction to the pressures of big capital.’ Neofascist antisemitism is not only colonialist, but seeks to forcibly crush economic competition (from any class) and to channel capitalism’s consequences on one segment in society. Resisting neofascism is inevitable until we abolish its cause: capitalism.

The two have differing causes and neither can nor should be addressed the same way. My suggestion to addressing Palestinian Judeophobia is not resistance, but compassion. This may sound difficult to do, but if you recognize how much less power they have in the situation, it is easier to shrug off their sentiment as unthreatening. So should you see a Palestinian making a remark like this:

It is baffling how Jews (among all people) are not anti-Zionists hundreds of times more than Palestinians and Arabs! Are Jews this ignorant? or have they been dumbed down to this degree? Are Jews terrified of being canceled from within the community? Or are Jews willing accomplices in propagating the Big Lies? Do you understand now why German Jews consider those imposters the enemy from within?

…my advice: try to calm down, since responding with vitriol isn’t going to fix anything. If the generalization upsets you, you can try cordially inviting the person to behold thousands of anticolonial Jews. When you do everything in your power to end Zionism, you prevent more sentiments like that one.

There are a lot of Trotskyites in my synagogue with the explanation 'Stalin was a special evil guy' which does not feel adequate. Nor does it explain later Soviet opposition to Zionism/Israel. See for instance the linked article. The extent of the explanation relies on the syllogism 'the USSR did a bad thing because it was failed socialism headed by the vile man Stalin'; no explanation is attempted:

A few days later, on May 17, the bureaucratized Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin also recognized the Zionist State after initially expressing support for the creation of a Jewish state. The following day, May 18, Czechoslovakia, which was already part of the Soviet Bloc, added its recognition and later sent weapons to the Zionists.

My Rabbi shared this brief philosophical outline of Reconstructionist Prayer which has helped me develop my framework. Reconstructionism seeks to strip back Jewish Spirituality to a nucleus which is compatible with the Materialist conception of the modern world while still keeping a vibrant spiritual life and concept of divinity.

To me, God is an abstraction for talking about the universe entire. It is a call to grounding humility. From that perspective, the typical prayer-call for intercession does not work. This paper outlines an approach of tapping into divine love and divine consciousness for the strength to take agency rather than a request for intercession.

It keeps the profound contemplative outlet of prayer without needing an omniscient and personified God figure.

publicação cruzada de: https://hexbear.net/post/1739765

publicação cruzada de: https://hexbear.net/post/1739466

Yes, Zionism is folkism. You can't say you're for anti-folkism if you're for Zionism

Jewish UPenn Students Could Face Discipline For Screening Film Critical Of Israel

by Matt Shuham, HuffPost

University of Pennsylvania administrators told a student group it could lose funding and organizers could face consequences for screening "Israelism."

A Jewish student group at the University of Pennsylvania is facing potential disciplinary action for screening a documentary critical of the Israeli government.

Multiple universities have now attempted to stop student screenings of “Israelism,” an award-winning film that features the stories of American Jews who have traveled to Israel and subsequently reexamined their relationship with the country and with their own pro-Israel religious educations in the United States after seeing how Israel treats Palestinians.

Students from Penn Chavurah, a progressive Jewish group on campus, hosted a screening of the film Tuesday night, even though the university refused to permit access to a venue. Nearly 100 people packed into a classroom to watch the documentary, according to Jack Starobin, a board member and organizer at Chavurah.

“It’s moments like these where we’re counting on strong leadership to stay true to this university’s values, and that’s where I think the failing has been on the part of Penn administrators,” Starobin, a senior at Penn, told HuffPost.

A screening of the film, which was released in February, was scheduled for Oct. 24 but was postponed after Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent retaliatory attacks on the Palestinian territory of Gaza.

Starobin said he’d been in talks with university administrators for weeks about holding a screening this month instead. A few days ago, the university denied organizers’ request for event space to hold the screening, suggesting it be delayed until February. Administrators never provided any specifics behind their reasoning, Starobin said. Erin Axelman, a co-director and producer of the film who participated in a question-and-answer session after Tuesday’s screening, said administrators referred “vaguely only to campus safety.”

When administrators found out that organizers planned to hold the screening this week anyway, they told Starobin that doing so could jeopardize Chavurah’s status and funding from the school, and could lead to disciplinary action against organizers, he told HuffPost.

Harun Küçük, the director of UPenn’s Middle East Center, which ultimately arranged a room for the screening, resigned from that post Tuesday over “inappropriate pressure from administrators” regarding the screening, according to a letter from the school’s chapter of the American Association for University Professors. Küçük, who did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment, confirmed his resignation to The Daily Pennsylvanian, telling the paper, “I would not have resigned if I had any comment left in me.” He is still an associate professor of history and sociology of science at UPenn.

A university spokesperson who declined to give his full name acknowledged to HuffPost that administrators sought to postpone the screening until February ― citing “the safety and security of our campus community” without explaining further ― and said that student organizers had “disregarded” the university’s direction by hosting the screening this week.

“Consistent with University policy, the student organizers will be referred to the Office of Community Standards and Accountability to determine whether a violation of the Code of Student Conduct occurred,” the spokesperson said.

Axelman accused the university of a “profound lack of academic integrity” and of attempting to intimidate and censor student organizers.

“We are honestly baffled and deeply disappointed by UPenn’s continued attempt to censor progressive Jewish voices, at the exact time when nuanced conversations about Jewish identity and the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are most needed,” Axelman said.

Since Oct. 7, Penn has come under significant pressure from politicians and benefactors who have pushed administrators to fight antisemitism, broadly defined.

Earlier this month, more than two dozen members of Congress wrote to Penn President Liz Magill condemning “your institution’s silence in condemning the terrorist attack that took place by Hamas on October 7, 2023.” (Magill had been far from silent, releasing numerous statements that condemned the attack and antisemitism.) Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a signatory, sent similar messages to Yale, Columbia and Harvard, CNN reported.

That letter, and various donors to Penn, also condemned the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, which was held on Penn’s campus in September.

On the other hand, some professors, students and pro-Palestinian activists have criticized Magill for statements that, as the Arabic literature scholar and Penn professor Roger Allen told The Daily Pennsulvanian, “vastly under-represented opinions and status” of Arab and Palestinian community members.

Starobin criticized what he viewed as a double standard at the university. Earlier this month, he noted, Rabbi Shmuel Lynn commented during an event hosted by Penn Hillel and Meor Penn, another Jewish group on campus, “It is not trite to say that there’s a war, there’s another frontline, there’s another camp of battle that we’re all fighting ... there’s a two-front war, in this sense, for the heart and soul of us, the people, [and] for the existential threat, the survival.”

The Penn student said he regretted that Penn Chavurah’s decision to hold the “Israelism” screening had turned oppositional and noted that organizers had cooperated with police who were on hand the night of the screening. His organization’s goal, he said, was to provide an opportunity to discuss a controversial topic in an open environment. The university’s action to prevent the screening, he argued, boded poorly for academic freedom.

“It suggests that the university feels it has the license to shut down any dialogue on campus if it conflicts with the preferences of its donors or the dominant current of national politics,” Starobin said. “And that kind of caving toward the dominant strain of thinking on a controversial issue is precisely the kind of intellectual tunnel vision that a university should seek to avoid, combat and provide space to escape.”

“That kind of caving toward the dominant strain of thinking on a controversial issue is precisely the kind of intellectual tunnel vision that a university should seek to avoid.”

• Jack Starobin, UPenn senior

Fights over the film, which have played out on various college campuses, are part of a larger public debate over the limits of acceptable criticism of the Israeli government. On Oct. 7, Hamas militants based in Gaza killed about 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostage in a surprise attack, according to Israeli authorities. Israel responded with devastating airstrikes and a ground invasion on the Gaza Strip that have now claimed at least 15,000 lives, according to Palestinian authorities, and led to the displacement of nearly 2 million people, according to the United Nations. Several Israelis held in Gaza have now been swapped for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel as part of a cease-fire agreement that continues to be negotiated.

Hunter College canceled a scheduled screening of “Israelism” earlier this month. The New York City college’s interim president, Ann Kirschner, said that the decision was made in the interest of ensuring “the safety of our learning community” and that administrators wanted to avoid “targeting any students, faculty or staff based on their identity: the essence of bigotry.”

“In the current climate, we seek to balance our commitment to free speech and academic freedom with the danger of antisemitic and divisive rhetoric,” Kirschner said, noting that police were investigating the drawing of swastikas on posters surrounding school buildings.

The school’s senate, composed of students, faculty and staff, subsequently passed a resolution criticizing what it called “an egregious and illegitimate violation of the academic freedom necessary for departments to pursue their academic missions and institutions of higher education to operate with integrity.” The university rescheduled the screening for Dec. 5.

Daniel J. Chalfen, one of the film’s producers, told The New York Times that Hunter’s initial decision to cancel the screening was the result of “a very organized campaign to shut it down.” The Times noted at least two email campaigns that produced hundreds of messages urging Hunter administrators to cancel the screening, including one originating from a Facebook post that described the film as “antisemitic.”

The following day, The Forward, the nonprofit Jewish publication, reported on a pattern of similar email campaigns attempting to prevent screenings of the film at several colleges, including Oberlin and Yale. The publication also reported that Dov Waxman, the director of UCLA’s center for Israel studies, said he’d come “under intense pressure from numerous organizations and individuals,” including calls asking for major donors to the center to push for his firing, because he’d decided to host a screening of “Israelism.”

“The opposition is not from students,” Sam Eilertsen, who co-directed the film with Axelman, told The Forward. “The opposition is coming from just people on the internet.”