Tuesday, September 10, 2019

The Great Jewish "Whiteness" Thing

Michael Lumish

Micha Mitch Danzig, Attorney,
former IDF, Middle East analyst
The question of Ashkenazi Jewish "whiteness" is receiving increased attention.

If to be "white" means anything it means to be of European descent. But in today's western-left political culture what it really means is "bad, racist, colonialist, imperialist, hater of all-things-good."

In other words, it means to be a contemptible person.

To be "white" no longer merely suggests ethnicity, but a toxic ontology (way of being) and a toxic epistemology (way of knowing.)

Ironically, this racist view of "whiteness" primarily derives from those who claim to be the ideological descendants of Martin Luther King, Jr. If King stood for anything, however, he stood for judging people according to character, not ethnicity and not gender. Those who despise "whiteness" assign this racial category to Ashkenazi Jews in order to spread that hatred onto one of the most persecuted peoples on the planet. This tendency among "progressives" is nothing if not illiberal.

It is, at least in part, for this reason, that many American Jews are walking away from the progressive-left and the Democratic Party.

In any case, in a July, 2017, piece, Micha Mitch Danzig writes:
The reality is that the entire notion of Ashkenazi Jews as “White people” is very new (from a historical perspective) and it is also completely detached from any historical context, including in America, where, as recently as the early 1960s there were still quotas on Jewish enrollment in some Ivy League schools. Ironically, since the origin of the European pseudoscientific racial classifications (dividing humanity as White, Black, and Yellow races); Jews in Europe (both Ashkenazi and Sephardi alike) were regularly persecuted on the basis of being “non-white.”
This is worth a read because the question of Jewish "whiteness" goes to the question of Jewish indigeneity within the Land of Israel.

And the fact of Jewish indigeneity goes to the very heart of the Movement for Jewish Freedom, which we affectionately call "Zionism."

30 comments:

  1. Very good article and essentially correct.
    I just hate having to step, even with just my big toe, into this sewer of race obsession.
    I consider myself white, but in the casual sense that I have white skin, and thought we had left history behind us. Definitions change, and when I filled in the demographics portion of a government form recently, "white" was considered any of the peoples of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. That the "progressive" left hangs on so tightly to the Hitler version is instructive. And of course, the willful ignorance about Jews, who they are, their history, their culture, their contributions, and rights, goes on and on from all directions. There's a word for that.
    That's not my best comment, but, hey, I'm not getting paid. :0)

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    1. BTW, if you have any SJW hipster anti-zionist acquaintances who buy into the nonsense and who mention that someone or other "looks Jewish," do remember to respond with, "a ha!"

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    2. I agree. It's very ironic that what Martin Luther King said in the "I Have a Dream" speech is ignored by the ones who would judge everyone by the color of their skin.

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    3. It may not have been your best comment, but it was very good...

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  2. Here is something that almost competes with gazing at the lint in your navel:

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2017.1312006?src=recsys

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1070289X.2014.944183?src=recsys

    Fun stuff, huh!

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  3. Replies
    1. OK, Ashish, what exactly does it mean to be "white"?

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    2. Then you are defining people according to a superficial attribute of skin color. Unfortunately, many people today are attaching a political significance to skin color, which is probably the problem here.

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  4. Agreed Asish yet to intersectionalists and other wags whiteness needs to be eliminated. These types think their problems will go away then. Silly wabbits.

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    1. I wish progressive Jews would realize that no amount of whining or enabling the left (an ungrateful left) will EVER make Ashkenazi (or even Mizrahim) be seen as anything other than white.

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    2. There should be no progressive Jews. Progressiveness has become an evil enterprise.

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    3. One of my favorite books is "Think a Second Time," by Dennis Prager. In this book, one of the sections deals with liberalism (which has been hijacked by the "progressives"). He made the point that a liberal in 1960 would be a conservative today, and also pointed out that liberalism today is not necessarily Jewish (contrary to how many Jews see liberalism).

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  5. We were all 'white' at one stage in the region. Arabs were the dark skinned people.

    Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and Lebanese were fair skinned and head with blue eyes.

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    1. Hi Shirl, thanks for dropping by.

      I think that if you take the word "white" in normative ethnic usage it means a person of European descent.

      In contemporary western-left political usage it generally suggests "bad person."

      Thus, if people consider Ashkenazi Jews "White" -- despite historical, anthropological, and genetic evidence to the contrary -- it denies essential claims to Israel as our ancestral homeland and severs our connection to our brothers and sisters who are Sephardic or Mizrahi or Ethiopian.

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    2. Exactly Mike. It's a typical Neo-Commie (aka Progressive) scam to control the narrative to fit their twisted ideology.

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    3. Mike, they can attempt to sever our connection to our brothers or sisters, but they will never succeed because we are ONE FAMILY--the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In fact, when the fourth name appears--Israel--it refers to Jacob's sons, the Tribes of Israel. Therefore, if anyone tries to sever Ashkenazi Jews from Sephardi or Mizrachi or Ethiopian or any other Jews, remember that an attack on one of us is an attack on all--and when that's family, watch out!

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    4. Mike, I was blood tested as part of a research group. There's a great deal of research happening at present. As far as I knew there was no intermarriage in my family. They always lived in shtetls where there was little or no chance of that.

      Am I white?


      I am probably 3/4 Ashkenazi and 1/4 Sephardi.

      My blood after proper genetic testing ( not the rubbish people pay $100 for)My result shows that I am 100% from the region of Israel. Pure Jewish as research shows.

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    5. I'm not really sure about that. If all these peoples were Mediterranean, then it's more likely that they (and the Jews who lived in the Land of Israel at the time) were probably dark-skinned.

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    6. Because the climate in that region would have been different.

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  6. "DOG OWNERS!

    Stop saying “good boy” and “good girl” to your pets.

    This kind of gendered language is normalising the myth of canine sexual dimorphism, and delegitimises the lived experience of transdogs."

    https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath/status/1171436347719962625

    So far, this is satire; so far. OTOH, Israel's "Vegan Washing," is not apparently.

    "Israel is using veganism as a calculated facade to justify its military’s program of terror, gloss over its occupation of Palestine, and appropriate regional culture and traditions that predate Israel by hundreds if not thousands of years."

    http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-immorality-of-sarah-doyel-who.html

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  7. In 1968, I was thirteen years old. Slightly before that, in my hometown of Memphis, there was a sanitation workers strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King here. The sign that the sanitation workers carried had four words: "I AM A MAN." How powerful that was! That's also what we all should remember when the so-called white nationalists try to claim they are superior to everyone else on the basis of a superficial thing like skin color (or whatever they claim it on). I was very young then, but after the 50th anniversary of the sanitation workers' strike this sentiment has made an impression with me.

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  8. Thane Rosenbaum [author of many
    books and a Distinguished Fellow at
    the NYU School of Law] said:


    “In this universe of automatic virtue
    bestowed upon anyone with a history
    of oppression, Jews are, bizarrely, kicked
    off the team, their privileges suspended,
    all because of their ostensible White privilege.”

    SOURCE: ‘Fiddler on the Roof’
    reminds us of age-old Jewish truths

    by Thane Rosenbaum, 2019 August 7
    www.algemeiner.com/2019/08/07/fiddler-on-the-roof-reminds-us-of-age-old-jewish-truths/

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    1. And why do you think it is? I think it is a well-known word beginning with A. Jews seem to be not victim enough for the intersectionality club but ironically not privileged enough for others.

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  9. Shirl, I took the test with Ancestry DNA and it showed predominately European Jewish ancestry (my ancestors lived in Lithuania, Galicia, and Poland). I am curious about which "proper genetic testing" you did. If you can reveal the organization, that would be appreciated. As it stands, I am wondering how this finds "100% from the 'region' of Israel." That is "pure Jewish" and I am intrigued about this result.

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  10. You may have missed my reference to that above.

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  11. The WHITENING!!!!!!! Da da da.....

    "As a contribution to the debate over Zionism and Jewish whiteness, this essay establishes a typological framework that analyzes the history and politics of Israel’s self-whitening. The typology argues the Zionist emphasis on self-westernization has resulted in three modes of Ashkenazi-Israeli whitening: while colonial whitening describes the acquisition of whiteness by means of conquest, anticolonial whitening consists in the self-critique as colonial settlers, a process of acquiring whiteness by denouncing it. In contrast, postcolonial whitening shifts its emphasis to the politics of memory and atonement, a form of becoming white by means of white guilt. In order to explore the continuities and ruptures throughout the process of Israel’s whitening, the analysis focuses on both Zionism and Anti-Zionism, with a special emphasis on the two left-wing organizations Matzpen and Zochrot. Based on the typological framework, the essay argues all three forms of Ashkenazi-Israeli whitening might best be compared to what Edward Kamau Brathwaite describes as “bastard metropolitanism,” the long-distance Eurocentrism and denial of Creolization which characterizes the elite culture of postcolonial societies. "

    http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2019/09/academia-embraces-racism-in-obsessively.html

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    1. Does anyone even read this stuff?

      This academic prose is way over my head. The bad news is that people will read a headline based on this and not know a thing about what it means.

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    2. However Academics is real smart like these Israeli Professors

      "More than 80 Israeli academics endorsed a special pre-election ad published this past Friday in Haaretz newspaper urging the public to vote for the Joint Arab List.

      “We’re on board, how about you?” read the title of the ad.

      “The Joint List is the home for all those who believe in full civil and national equality for Arabs and Jews, in ending the occupation, in true democracy, in peace and in social justice,” wrote the academics.

      “On September 17, we’re voting for the Joint List!” concluded the ad."

      http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/268919

      Zionist dogs disagree "Matan Peleg, CEO of the Zionist watchdog organization Im Tirtzu that first reported the ad, called the ad “disgusting.”

      “It is nothing short of disgusting that these academics would urge the public to vote for an anti-Israel party who one of its members, MK Heba Yazbak, praised the terrorist Samir Kuntar who murdered a four-year-old girl by bashing her head on rocks,” said Peleg."

      Oh, sorry. That was watchdog, not dogs. Sometimes I not so smart. I thought Kuntar was a bad guy. What's the worst that could happen if Arabs get voted in and just because they like baby killers what the problem? They is probably just freedom fighters.

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    3. Whitening?
      Welcome to the brave new world of nesting doll scholarship - you get to build a thesis upon so-called facts (Bupkis, p.119) which are already slippery (Cowpie, p.212), and you keep referring back to other works (Garbage In, Garbage Out, p.314) when your thesis actually doesn't have the intellectual heft of a toothpaste commercial (For whitening, see Colgate).

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