Callum Frew

“...Soviet support for Jewish culture was part of a larger plan to brainwash and coerce national minorities into submitting to the Soviet regime--and for Jews, it came at a very specific price. From the beginning, the regime eliminated anything that celebrated Jewish "nationality" that didn't suit its needs. Jews were awesome, provided they weren't practicing the Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism. The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not antisemitic, merely anti-Zionist. (In the process of not being antisemitic and merely being anti-Zionist, the regime managed to persecute, imprison, torture, and murder thousands of Jews.) What's left of Jewish culture once you surgically remove religious practice, traditional texts, Hebrew and Zionism?”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“The priority given to evolutionary naturalism in the face of its implausible conclusions about other subjects is due, I think, to the secular consensus that this is the only form of external understanding of ourselves that provides an alternative to theism—which is to be rejected as a mere projection of our internal self-conception onto the universe, without evidence.”
― Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False

“The last few generations of American non Jews had been chagrined by the enormity of the Holocaust which had been perpetrated by America’s enemy, and which was grotesque enough to make antisemitism socially unacceptable, even shameful. Now that people who remembered the shock of those events were dying off, the public shame associated with expressing antisemitism was dying too. In other words, hating Jews was normal. And historically speaking, the decades in which my parents and I had grown up simply hadn’t been normal. Now, normal was coming back.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present