Status Updates From (((Semitism))): Being Jewis...

today the quote that stuck out to me is “the Torah tells us: Welcome the stranger, for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt”. I also think it’s interesting how intertwined the American Jewish identity and Israel has become. also i know i’m a slow reader

“To stand up to creeping totalitarianism, we needn’t throw ourselves under the tank treads. We just need to not play the game.”

“Had ordinary Germans and Poles and Ukrainians and Austrians and French people not played along, had consumers continued to shop in Jewish establishments and gotten their checkups with Jewish doctors, maybe, just maybe, history would have been altered even a little bit, and the Final Solution would not have been quite so final.”

“We are in a golden age of going through the motions, but we have made no real progress in grounding the People of Israel in a moral purpose. Our return to religiosity is tactical, borne of a desire to connect a wandering Jewish people to the synagogue and to identity. But while it has given many Jews an aura of authenticity, it has not enriched our theology.”

“The hatred of government that spawned the militia movement in the 1990s sparked the vigilante Minutemen a few years later and then the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, and the alt-right. And now there is Donald Trump.”

This should be required reading for everyone, not just Jews.

“George Lincoln Rockwell, an infamous segregationist and anti-Semite, captured the dilemma. ‘That’s one great trouble with our movement,’ he confessed. ‘90% of the people in the movement are lunatics.’”

“American Jewry should be at least as focused on maintaining political support for Judaism in the United States as it is on sustaining Israel’s security.”

“American Jewry was split between the tribalists and the internationalists: those who saw the Jew’s role primarily as falling in behind the lesser of the tribe and those who saw Israel in the larger context of international relations and global security.”

“…I lived comfortably and forgetfully in suburbia, protected by subtlety, where open hate was someone else’s problem. I’m not proud of that.”

“‘I’d say, ‘Are you Russian, grandma?’ ‘No, she’d say, ‘I’m Jewish.’ …. I’d press her on it. Finally, she’d say, ‘Jonah, my father dug a hole underneath the floorboards so I could be hidden from the Cossacks coming to rape me. I saw the rabbi in my village tied by his beard to a cart and dragged from town. I am not Russian.’”