The Diaspora Jew
an essay inspired by Lee Weissman
“rather than something assumed or given, one's existence is something brought forth through conscious effort and struggle” — Piasczener Rebbe
Monday January 27th, 2025 — welcome to Holocaust Memorial Day.
Writing about the Shoah is a deeply personal experience. It’s a spiritual endeavour to write about industrial level human cruelty and suffering and pogroms, and the baffling apathy that enabled this actual genocide perpetrated by the entire world, including Canada.
I learned nothing of the Shoah or Nazis from any formal education. I learned from my mother, who was a young 14 year girl living in the French quarter of Winnipeg at the time the Russians and allied forces liberated the death camps. Mum never stopped witnessing the suffering and took every opportunity that presented itself to teach me about what happened in human terms. She never looked away from those terrible first hand accounts in the early days, mum leaned in and brought me with her. Her tireless and unceasing teaching of the Shoah and the harms of extremism are what saved me in adulthood when I was navigating the Muslim world and facing the most dangerous and difficult Jew hatred I had ever witnessed in my own life. Never ever doubt the power of education, my Holocaust education literally was a breastplate to guard my heart.
This is my mother’s memory becoming a blessing, it is the suffering of my siblings and family, and even myself—who each and all suffered terrible and tragic ruptures unrelated to the Shoah before and after I was born and whose suffering I witnessed + experienced over my lifetime—transformed into love and wisdom and seeking repair for the world. Everything G-d presents us in this existence we can use for fuel to move forward as we give birth to ourselves in this life. I cannot explain a blade of cat grass emerging from a seed, I cannot explain a mighty oak growing from a humble acorn, I certainly cannot explain the most horrific things that humans do to other humans, and I will not try to explain, that distraction takes me away from that which I seek.
The entirety of my personhood lies in between the external stimulus inflicted upon me and my response to that stimulus inflicted upon me, a dynamic entity in a dynamic system of systems, surrounded by other dynamic entities. Note — seeing one snapshot of a human does not in any way equal knowing that person enough to assess their character, just the same as seeing a photo of a human does not mean you met the human. To see a human being in motion we need to see moving film, a book of snapshots does not suffice, we need to see the picture play out. What I mean by this esoteric speak is that we cannot judge another human based on one action we observe, ultimately we get to choose, like many before us did, the fact that facing choices we do not like does not negate the reality that we do indeed have the freedom to choose, even in the darkest hour.
Your search for meaning hinges on those moments when all seems dark and you still must make it to the next dark moment. You are the cell of light trapped in the darkness. I am that cell of light trapped in the inky oil slick of darkness. The whole of my being as a person comes alive in this darkest moment. So, to see the world in a particular way — that’s the choice embodied in individual personhood. To even limp along embodies a certain hope. We can choose to see the things that happen to us as attacks and punishments and we can glorify the lack and the carnage of the wound. This feels like eating our wounds, to be honest. I have done that in my life and seen others do it also — it leads us away from wellbeing, and away from the Divine. Note, it’s a normal natural human response to pain and not a sign of weakness, it can become a weakness if we encourage it though.
The best teachers instill in us a thirst for more, and a desire to engage the process to know and understand + see + witness the human condition and the biosphere that supports and accompanies. Life has been my teacher, the most unpalatable and uncomfortable and painful parts, in particular. The second world war cast such massive shadow on the world that came after it, in which we now live. To understand now requires us to know yesterday, that is, to know the terrible thing that flung the world into hell, and what hell felt and tasted and looked like. Remember, when you are a body in a sea of bodies, you don’t see the entirety of the crowd. Living through horrible things feels like that, and students of history must never become arrogant and forget their humanity.
My Jewish people, I deeply and dearly and fiercely love you. I cannot verbalise it and I hope you can feel it. I wrote this for you.
Introduction
This piece begins with a reprint of the Facebook post which inspired it, written by a teacher who challenges and inspires me to reach for g-d in all I do. It moves onto my own writing, beginning with Jewish nomenclature and terms for Jews and what they mean. I ask you to think for yourself about what is Zionism. I include with permission an honest reaction to Israeli nationalism hijacking Judaism, written by a religious Jew, Yonassan Gershom, a Rabbi who was born a year before the state of Israel came into being. I remind you all that asking people to think about stuff does not qualify as offensive, it’s how we solve conflicts:
how do we negotiate Zionism and Judaism?
how do we negotiate Zionism and Religious Fascism?
how do we negotiate anti-Zionism and Nazism?
how do we negotiate anti-Zionism and Hamastinianism?
how do we negotiate multiculturalism with a racist and intolerant and narcissistic Islamic world still bent on eliminating Jews and Christians and infidels?
how do we negotiate multiculturalism with a racist and intolerant and narcissistic Christian Supremacist world still bent on blaming Jews for killing g-d and making sure we are saved by the blood of the lamb, Jesus Christ?
how do we negotiate interfaith dialogue and reconciliation in a world dominated by an intolerant and narcissistic Christian Supremacist faction still bent on castigating all Mohammedans as blood thirsty war mongering holy warriors bent on eliminating infidels?
how do we negotiate a world in which Jews live through successive iterations of the crusades throughout time? Let’s face it, we are living through a modern day holy war. Jews never fare well in such times. Will Israel help or hinder collective survival for Jewish people, globally?
how do we value the sacredness of life when we elevate terror and mass murder and collective punishment?
how do we negotiate the concept of ransom, historically and presently, as a Jewish people? Liberation has meant ransom in the past.
when we face the ransom deals of now, how do we come to grips with the fact that some of us are here because of uncomfortable deals made with Nazis to save lives during WW2?
how do we honour the sanctity of life when we make human beings integers or placeholders in a horrific geopolitical equation created by Hamas and their Muslim and Social Justice groupies?
Feel free to think about the answers to those questions like a mature and humble and intelligent adult who possesses a measure of self love and honesty and true devotion to the Creator or something bigger than yourself that is not Machiavellian and materialistic and Mad Men or Jim Jones moronic. We don’t want to be martyrs, we don’t want to have more martyrs. We want to eat kosher cheeseburgers and kosher poutine and sing hava nagila and smash our plates on the floor in glee and be joyful not think about or be or eat or wear or smell death.
Finally, most importantly, this essay describes the overlooked experience of Sephardi and Mizrahi Holocaust suffering and mass murder. Because the elephant in the Rooms of Judaica and Zionism remain that not all Jews are Ashkenazim. Readers, please read this essay and re-read it and share widely. Paid subscriptions welcome if you can afford it, they support the work we do here. Do know though, that I would never paywall this stuff—it belongs to all of humanity, beginning with my children and grandchildren.
Baruch Hashem. May we be wiser and love better and more fiercely.
Never forget, always remember and never stop learning about what happened. If you look hard enough you will see a familiar thing in new detail. Engage.
A Case for the Diaspora Jew
[by Lee Weissman]
Zionism created the legendary “New Jew” liberated from the Ghettos of Europe (and later the Mellahs of North Africa, etc) to build a new Jewish society in the Holy Land. For secular Zionists, the ideal was the “Pioneer.” Religious Zionism, particularly the teachings of Rav Kook clothed even the most secular pioneer in hidden light of holy purpose. Living in the Land of Israel and for the Land of Israel for Zionists became the primary purpose of Jewish life. The centrality of the concept of “The Land” fairly seamlessly transferred to “The State of Israel.” The sine qua non1 of the Jewish experience is to be a Jew in our Homeland.
And what of the “Diaspora Jew”, the hopeless relic of the ghettos? They are useful. If they don’t live in The State, they can at least support it politically and financially. Their Jewishness can be measured by standards of allegiance. Do they fly the flag? Do they give money? Do they support pro-Israel organizations? The “Diaspora Jew” from this perspective is a second-class Jewish citizen, supporting cast in the main Jewish mission.
I would like to defend the “Diaspora Jew” for the heroes that we are. We are the Jews who left the ghettos and didn’t necessarily dive back in. We brave being Jewish in a diverse world. We have lived in nearly every nation you can imagine. We have imbibed the music, cuisine and customs of nation after nation and added them to our cultural repertoire. Many of us believe that our ubiquitous presence is also part of the Divine plan. We believe that the light unto the nations, does not have to take the form of a [nation]state defined by geo[politics] but by a “Nationality” defined by Torah. We strive to be model neighbours and beacons of kindness and generosity even under sometimes difficult circumstances. We also embrace prosperity and freedom while accepting the beauty and discipline of Jewish life.
We have survived almost 20 centuries without war against another people or depriving any other people of their rights. We have learned to live side by side, in peace, sometimes difficult peace, with our neighbours, committed to our Creator and His2 Torah. We recognize that we are not alone in this mission of bringing G-d consciousness to the world. We partner with other believers in the One G-d to create more just societies everywhere, the ideal containers for G-d’s light in the world.
I agree that [the diaspora] has shrunk and I won’t try to cover that up in any way. That too is not a simple story. Jews were not "ethnically cleansed" from North Africa, they were often recruited by Zionist organizations, sometimes under false pretenses. The exodus of Jews from Arab lands was often not only encouraged but engineered by Zionist organizations. [Mossad operations, including Lavon Affair] Secularization took its bite out of Jewish life (both in the diaspora and in Israel). The Holocaust another bite. Nevertheless, the mission continues. There have been expulsions and ethnic cleansings before. We survive and thrive.
The mission of the Diaspora Jew is far from over. I embrace it proudly.
—Lee Weissman aka Jihadi Jew, January 2025
Nomenclature of the Jewish People
Hey fam, it’s Bad Hijabi. I started writing this thing before Ways of Peace are Vast was even a sparkle in my brain. Go have a read if you haven’t already. In The Torah G-d describes the descendants of Abraham—Isaac—Yisrael as plentiful as the stars in the sky, and as the sands of the seashore, as a blessing to all nations of the world. This seems to denote requiring a fair degree of exile from any dominating and oppressive military-backed locus of power for the Jewish people, a nation unto themselves within the nations of the world.
Ashkenazi Jew Sephardi Jew Mizrahi Jew — what is the difference?
NB: I realise Mizrahi, which means Eastern in Hebrew, emerged out of the Israeli sociopolitical landscape, however, I think it helps gentiles in the Christian dominant and Ashkenazi dominant west to understand the peoples we call The Jews and which Mohammedans call People of the Book. Ashkenazim come from Western Europe, Sephardim come from Andalusian Europe and moved into North Africa and eastern Europe and the Balkans, Mizrahim are all non European Jews without a connection to the Iberian Peninsula. In some contexts Mizrahi can simply mean “not Ashkenazi”, mostly that’s contextual to Israeli politics, where the overlap occurs. In Canada and the US, all three distinctions exist and in order to thwart IslamoNazis, we must understand the truths that cause their lies to dissolve. To understand this foundational truth about the Jewish people and the distinctions that form it leads us to better appreciate the complexity of Zionism as a term to describe collective self determination. It helps the non Jewish reader cultivate an understanding of the subtlety of meaning of ‘anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism’.
Anti-Zionism versus Zionism versus Judaism
Anti-Zionism as pro Palestinian activism defines it does indeed meet the standard of anti-Semitism—it means erase Israel entirely and destroy all Jewish and Hebrew traces throughout the land. During the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Europe, anti-Zionism involved religious leaders discouraging and forbidding their devout followers from emigrating to Mandatory Palestine. When Palestinian nationalists position themselves as anti Zionist they force everyone to choose between Jews and Palestinians, which becomes a choice between Jews and Muslims … that’s a holy war not a struggle for collective freedom. The Torah unites Jews, when you strip away the bling — secular and religious, the Torah unites them both into one nation. It’s precise and rigorous, not one letter more than necessary to express the meaning in the passage. Replete with profoundly frustrating and relatable human stories that still inspire complex thoughts thousands of years after first told. It’s the glue holding Jews together. Oppositionality cannot liberate Palestinians, only becoming themselves can free them.
Zionism created the legendary “New Jew” liberated from the Ghettos of Europe and later the Mellahs of North Africa, etc — Lee Weissman
Anti-Zionism, in its most conservative form, during the terrors of Nazi Europe, discouraged rebellion and uprising and liberation, invoking words like heresy for maximum impact. To use the language of neurobiology3, anti-Zionism psychologically diminished people, beating them into freeze mode. It thus made itself a part of the ongoing phenomenon of de-peopling humanity, meaning removing the spark in human beings that make them alive and vibrant beings in G-d’s image. In a few cases anti Zionism blocked Zionist rescue efforts. In few cases the rabbis who preached against Zionism ended up fleeing, accepting help from the Zionists they preached against, abandoning their people to the death trains and gas chambers. They then rebuilt their sects in America to much acclaim, riding on the social capital the moniker Holocaust Survivor afforded them. In the odd extreme case, these anti Zionist rabbis who saved themselves at the expense of their followers and students never relinquished their anti Zionist beliefs and refused to acknowledge or thank the Zionists who saved their lives.
So, we had Zionists, organising rescue efforts to facilitate Jewish escape from mass murder. Then we had anti-Zionists, preaching the heresy of Zionism, thwarting efforts of Zionists. Where’s Judaism, in all this? Zionism refers to liberation, so escape from something. Zionism denotes a movement away from danger and anti Zionism denotes a blockading of the movement away from danger. Note this defines the rupture, the experience destroyed. I don’t mean the destructive force, I mean the thing under attack. The story Zionist V Anti-Zionist, the story of Nazis take over Europe, though each important don’t define being a Jew, the thing Nazis sought to destroy. So what’s Judaism, the thing that terrified the Third Reich so horribly? Let me tell you about what the Nazis took from Judaism during the Holocaust by giving you a taste of the rabbinical wisdom of the era. Then maybe you can appreciate the atrocity fully in ways you yet have not done.
The Rebbe of Piaseczno believed Torah and Mishna and Talmud had the power to transforms all who study them. If through learning the Scriptures a student has really internalised the Scriptures … [it will give] the strength to ignore and overcome all obstacles. In a sermon delivered 26 October 1940, Piaseczner Rebbe beckoned his faithful to imagine the formless void G-d transformed into the creation of heaven and earth, and to seek meaning in and through creation by studying Torah, through which we may see the Original Thought (Eish Kodesh, J Hershy Worch translation, p. 149). He gave this sermon 3 years after having lost his wife, and just months after the Nazis shot and killed his only son and daughter in law, and after his mother died shortly thereafter. His mother raised him alone, his father died when he was 3 years old. When you read the words of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira you can know he ain’t talking through his ego blowhole, that his wisdom comes from wrestling with G-d.
How can we attempt to understand these acts of God, and then suffer a blemish [in our faith] when we do not succeed? If we cannot grasp the real meaning of even one blade of grass which God created … then how could we ever attempt to know that which He alone understands? — Piaseczno Rebbe
It’s a bummer when you study the experience of the Shoah and see Billy Joel song lyrics brought to life so horribly, only the good die young. Until now I failed to wholly grasp the devastating loss for Torah wisdom and leadership, for humanity, for love of the hatred. Whilst some of the most devoted and powerful rabbinical figures went with their people into the ghettos and then into Nazi execution, some of the weakest and most morally corrupt rabbinical figures ditched their people and built their following back.
What is Yisrael? One who wrestles with g-d.
What is a powerful rabbinical figure? A rabbinical figure who lives and breathes so fully before me (through the teachings he left behind) that I grieve his loss on a human level, 82 years after his murder? A rabbinical figure who survived the Nazi pogroms at the expense of his followers and moved to a new country and restarted his sect? Your answer forms part of your bringing yourself into being. What if you give birth to yourself as you engage the struggle of moral dilemmas life presents you, such as this one?
Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira wrote about personhood and how we forge our existence rather than receive it prepackaged: please gaze within yourself, have you brought forth the truth of yourself, wrote the Piaseczner Rebbe, in response to the despair-riddled cry of choicelessness, frequently heard during his lifetime, Where is my free will? It is as if I am bound in the thick cords of this-worldly desires, to the point that it is nearly impossible for me to rule over myself, to choose what to desire, and what to reject.4
What if the Piaseczner Rebbe meant spiritual eclosion is how we become a person?
To elaborate I’ll use Rabbi David Maayan’s translation, rather than something assumed or given, one's existence is something brought forth through conscious effort and struggle (elsewhere he compares it to "swimming upstream"). One articulates a unique self through both introspective consciousness and through actions which articulate one's unique self.
Piaseczner Rebbe took a unique approach to personhood and being human, he believed that we bring ourselves into being through the conscious dynamic perpetual struggle of existing. I imagine eclosion as an illustrative example. A butterfly emerges from the chrysalis when metamorphosis has completed itself. S/he does this through a process called eclosion. The struggle gives a butterfly life, literally you kill a butterfly when you try to help it by hastening its eclosion.
[Piaseczner Rebbe] also changes the portrait of the typical teacher, because he keeps saying that the teacher must use his students’ own language and he has to treat them as equals. He encourages the teachers to use humour in their teachings and he wants them to teach the students to use imagination: to visualize certain elements and through those visual elements you can introduce particular ideas into the world of the young people. — Marta Dudzik-Rudkowska
Judaic Collective Consciousness and Jewish Self Determination
Jews are one nation under Torah. A Jew is an individual who wrestles with the one g-d and who lives and who serves The One G-d by and through the Torah. Period. Whatever else haters think, well that’s your projection onto the Jewish people. Zionism is a part of the Jewish experience and it’s not the entirety. Let’s move beyond such shallow discourse that equates the two on stifling modern terms.
Look fam, Jews debate amongst themselves about the Israel project and opinions vary. Contrary to popular belief, no Jew who has any awareness of their heritage wishes for the complete annihilation of Israel, much as they loathe Ben Gvir and the Kahanist flair of Israeli politics gripping the governing coalition right now, much as they do not necessarily give blanket endorsement to the government of Israel or the IDF or Mossad etc. It is identity politics, a 21st century game of thrones, where a throne means empire of lies.
Which free thinking adult who engages politically always agrees with his or her or any government or collective leadership? There’s a difference between political disagreement and wanting to annihilate something. Disagreement is not hate. Remember Zionism began as a secular concept in reaction to the Dreyfus Affair. Religious leaders first viewed it with skepticism. The Holocaust galvanised a lot of opinion. Collective trauma becomes a living thing in the human experience. History lives still, even though it’s the story of the dead, because it’s also our origin story. During the time of Dreyfus 9 million Jews lived in Europe. A hundred years later (that’s 16 years ago btw) 1.5 million Jews lived in Europe. Because actual genocide means a large swath of the population has been eliminated and for generations that population does not recover, if ever.
Please use the word genocide with care or refrain from speaking.
Note Native American people and ADoS and anyone claiming a victimhood identity to gain hegemony in society via anti racism, note the following, below.
You participated in genocide along with the rest of the world by virtue of existing in a system that perpetuated the apathy and industrial machinery of mass murder crimes of the Nazis and accomplices against Jews and undesirables across continental Europe into the Balkans and also North Africa.
You participated in genocide along with the rest of the world by virtue of living in Canada, said to be sympathetic based on historical evidence.
You participated in genocide along with the rest of the world by virtue of existing in a system that directly enabled the death of hundreds of children, maybe more, blocked from coming to Canada, and ultimately sent to Auschwitz to die.
As an aside to this essay on The Diaspora Jew, however related to the topic of genocide, slavery was genocide and the fur trade powered the demand for sugar cane production, as well as the exploitation and abuse and mass murder that the fur trade required in the name of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the indentureship of Indians from the Indian Subcontinent and even other parts of Asia. Complicity in a historical context becomes chaotic and ridiculous.
The Shoah and other state perpetrated collective mass murders existing in history must not become your sociopolitical or identity cipher.
So, the matter of historical blame, the matter of historical victimhood and complicity, in a morally sound and cognitively rigourous discourse proves quite complex and pointless beyond a certain point. In the end, when we study the history of human conflict, we learn that we each have something to reconcile with each other. As we heal from the thing that hurt us we must realise the things that hurt others that maybe we benefitted from unknowingly.
To quip with the Franz Fanon Cult of Dehumanisation — I’m apparently responsible for stuff I didn’t know that harmed others and you’re mad about historical disparities and want equality, so you’re responsible for stuff you didn’t know that harmed others, too. Happy to share the blame with you muppets as, like you lot, I heal from my peoples’ own post colonial inter-generational traumas. See how that works? Pretty cool, let’s play ideological volleyball with historical atrocities. Race me to the bottom, b1tches! 🫠🙄. Perhaps accusing each other of genocide is not how we ought to engage Truth and Reconciliation moving forward.
So, we all know about the Ashkenazi liberation movement we call Zionism. How could we not? It succeeded and haters remain mad about it.
Imagine how Gudrun Himmler stewed in her boots the day Israel gained status as a nation state? Imagine Josef Mengele’s despair, living in hiding whilst the object of his hatred triumphed? Hatred destroyed Mengele’s life and his family’s name for all time. And Israel became a nation in his lifetime. Must have been a nasty fall for the ones who rose to might on homicidal hatred. Not Sorry, after decades of hardcore personal Holocaust research, these particular thoughts warm me inside, I ain’t sorry for that.
Anyway, back to Zionism means different things depending where you come from. Did you know that Sephardi Jews have a conception of Zionism amongst themselves? Did you know that Mizrahi Jews also have a conception of a Zionist movement amongst themselves? Why would you think they did not?
These communities of Jews come from different lands and cultures, in which they fully lived as part of the society, therefore their concept of liberation from these societies which cast them out will differ! Let me illustrate my point with familiar examples. Canadian and American concepts of collective self determination differ vastly, despite the fact that as collective peoples, we seem identical. English and Welsh and Irish and Scottish concepts of collective self determination differ, even though these people belong to a United Kingdom. Think about why that is and how those people on that island balance that so deftly. Culture matters, doesn’t it? Indeed. So, why would Jews be any different? Think about this stuff.
If you are stuck in the conspiracy theories, I invite you to expand your reading about Jewish people beyond what Tsarist Russia, the Kremlin, Goebbels, and post Nazi Nasserian Egypt produced for you to read. Also I invite you to go beyond what the Israeli hasbara department produced for you to read about history, and definitely please do go beyond the entire Christian Zionist vision of Judaism. Note also, the normal controversy within the Jewish world about Zionism and Israel and collective self determination gets exploited by the ignorant and anyone with an agenda. Anti-semitism is old because Judaism is old. Cats do not agree on things because they are not herd animals they are independent creatures. Neither do Jews agree on things so easily, because the nature of Judaism is to move you to think independently. Judaism produces Level Five Thinkers, b1tch. So cope.
Moving on.
Many of us believe that our ubiquitous presence is also part of the Divine plan. We believe that the light unto the nations … take[s] the form of … a “Nationality” defined by Torah. — Lee Wiessman
Arabists refer to Jews as Yahud in Arabic, meaning from the realm of the Kingdom of Judah. Think about the psychological warfare behind the choice to shifting from the factual identification, Yahud, toward the nationalist term made into pejorative, Zionist, when Muslims talk about how much they hate Jews. You cannot appreciate the dishonesty and the mind-fcuk until you learn that Zionist in Arabic is sahyuniun, which refers to the Jewish thirst for Eretz Yisrael. The Comprehensive Aramaic lexicon tells me the Syriac word for thirst, below, sahyu. Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, the language that preceded the Islamic conquest and which has influenced the Arabic language.
ṣhyw, ṣhywtˀ (ṣahyū, ṣahyūṯā) n.f. thirst
Think about browbeating a people that you have repressed and demeaned and undermined for thousands of years by making their collective longing for their ancestral land a pejorative and assigning racism and colonialism and a host of other secular sins to that longing. Think about the language used to describe the Jewish longing for Erez Yisrael — thirst.
Think about the physicality + humanity of denying a human being water and then mocking their thirst responses as you deny them water some more and then you abuse them and threaten to kill them for expressing thirst and they become more thirsty and they never quit trying to quench their thirst and you never quit trying to call them bad and evil for trying to fight you to survive. Wow, that’s purely psychological torture, the height of intentional cruelty. That’s worthy of the label Goebbelsian. It’s unbelievable to me. That is what the Arabic word for Zionism embodies. This is what Muslims express when they use that word Zionist to describe a Jew or any western, ie descended from the British Empire, person.
Ashkenazi Jews come from Central and Eastern Europe. Genesis 10:3 lists Ashkenaz as the son of Gomer, who is the son of Japheth, who is the son of Noah. Rabbinical literature associates Japheth and his lineage as the progenitors of the Aryan population group. Sephardi Jews come from the Iberian Peninsula and spread to the Balkans and to the Maghreb after expulsion from Al-Anadalus. Obadiah 1:20 mentions Sefarad, and in the context of the Biblical text it means separated and some scholars have identified it as Sardis, a city in Anatolia aka Asia Minor aka Turkey, whilst others have identified it as Sparda, also in Asia Minor. Mizrahi Jews come from the Maghreb (modern day name is North Africa) and Babylon (modern day name is Iraq) and Persia (modern day name is Iran) and Yemen. Mizrahi means eastern in Hebrew and refers to the Jews who trace their origins to the region we have come to call the Middle East, itself. Mizrahi practically speaking means not western European, not Ashkenazi, it refers to eastern Jews.
Takeaways for the Jew haters + those who do not know what they do not know — Ashkenazi Jews are fully Jewish and have a definite attachment to the Jews of the Biblical era. Jews are not a European project. Jews are not a side quest of the British Empire to creep Arab Palestinian whatever whatever. Theodore Herzl was not evil, he was a simple Jew who lived through what we call The Dreyfus Affair and saw that Jews in Europe needed a survival plan because they faced extinction. So, Herzl was not plotting to steal your puppy or your land, Arabs.
The “Diaspora Jew” … is a … supporting cast in the main Jewish mission. — Lee Weissman
The projected guilt in every accusation Arabists, Islamists, and Christians make against Jews and Israel amuses me the more I learn about the history. Perhaps think about a thing Thomas Merton wrote — we see things as we are and not as they are — and reflect on your accusations as a confession of your wrongdoing. In my Catholic childhood we were taught remove the plank from your eye before you remove the sliver from another person’s eye. Jews are not settler colonialists, they are exiles from the Holy Land. Sephardi Jews are as Jewish as Ashkenazi Jews, whose blood is not redder and Sephardi Jewishness is not inferior, only flavoured differently. Mizrahi Jews are not Arab Jews any more than Jesus was a Palestinian Jew, this terminology screams Arab imperialism and arrogance.
Jews are Jews, no matter where they live. Eastern Jews are not necessarily Arabs. The thinking on this seems characterised by ambivalence, some Mizrahi Jews maybe embrace an Arab identity, and others associate Arab culture and identity with Islam and its bloodthirsty conquests. This is kind of similar to post Holocaust Jews avoiding tying the descriptor German to their identity — a valid response to societal trauma. To be practical, these nation states stripped these Jews of national citizenship so why would any post Holocaust Jew want to call themselves a German Jew or Hungarian Jew or Polish Jew or etc etc? That’s my thinking out loud, do we want to be identified so closely with our abuser? No, primally we do not, not on an individual level and not on a collective level either. In Canada indigenous people struggle with an ambivalence about nationstate citizenship and what it represents to them personally and collectively.
Yet to compare the struggles of any peoples who suffered under imperial persecution, with European Jewry, requires us to remember that Jews functioned as integral and important parts of the civil society, fully integrated in the professional and business and banking class and property ownership, despite the underlying societal hostility towards Jews. The Holocaust ripped all that away from Jews, thereby decimating entire communities of Jews and also permanently harming the societies themselves, who suffered because Nazis extinguished the light of the world in Europe. And then after the war ended, the physical evidence of the crimes committed glared at the world, who gasped in horror at the cruelty and we all learned about ourselves that day, we learned we have the capacity to become this depraved and horrible.
That is the lesson of the Shoah we humans refuse to learn — stop using humans for the Machiavellian glory of things and ideas and beliefs and to begin using and discarding things and ideas and beliefs for the sanctity and value and sacredness of humans.
Nonetheless, the human condition demands that we lean in and recognise that we constantly evolve, from hour to hour we change. In physical existence, we attend to the things that bring us discomfort and we nurse the ailment or wound or inflammation and we heal. This is the human experience and condition — it is the way of creation, the way G-d created and the nature of creation itself, made by Her word and actions and in Her image. Therefore, many things we see now can give only limited insight as to the intention of good people who did morally problematic things 80 or 100 years ago. We derail ourselves from our mission to grow and continue to sustain and nurture the creation project when we sit selfishly and indulge the compulsion to transform the worst atrocities in humanity into our Rage Pornography.
Gaslighter :: Yahud Yahudah Judah Judea Jew
Note to the Islamists who deny the attachment of Jews to the Holy Land, y’all call Jews Yahud. What that means, you think? Where that word comes from, you think? Who was Yahudah? Do you know? You wanna tell the class of western useful idiots who believe you when you tell them the Muslim Brotherhood is a harmless fraternity like Knights of Columbus, who does good works? Yes, Sheikh Yasin was a harmless old bloke. Yes yes.
Because many readers and many people in the room you hoodwinked into your cause may not have familiarity with the story of Yaakov who became Yisrael, and his 4th son with Leah, Judah, one of the clan heads of the tribe of Yisrael. First of all the King of Jordan made a unilateral decision to start calling Judea and Samaria West Bank, because narcissists will always try to claim a thing by disenfranchisement. That clever subtle trick of Don Draper Geopolitics did much to erase the knowledge of attachment of Jews to that region of the world.
Who tried to undermine the nascent Islamic state in Medina and who incited Quraish in Mecca, as well as other tribes against its foundation? It was a Jew! Who stood behind the fitna-war and the slaying of the third caliph Osman and all what followed hereafter as tragedies? It was a Jew! And who inflamed national divides against the last caliph and who stood behind the turmoil that ended with the abolition of shari’a? It was Ataturk, a Jew! The Jews always stood and continue to stand behind the war waged against Islam. Today, this war persists against the Islamic revival in all places on earth. — Sauyyid Qutb, Ma’rakutna ma’a al-Yahud/Our Struggle against the Jews., 1950
Islamists, every time you sing about the Khaybar Battle you remind us your cult’s founder committed brutality and violence and perpetrated cruel rapes and that you need to make up stories about his goodness to make yourselves feel better. Hate makes us stupid, that’s a you problem, haters. Maybe don’t sing about Khaybar anymore, mmmkay?
Also note Khyber Pass, another place that is separate from Khaybar btw, historically has proved a gateway to invading India, so when you are an Arab Islamist chanting the word Khaybar or Khyber in Canada, Canadian people will view you and your entire collective as threatening. This is not rocket science, Muslims. Yes, I address the entire community here, you are responsible for yourselves collectively — check your extremists and your religious mafia thugs please. It is your history Muslims, and many people came to Canada to flee racist homicidal Islamists, did you stop and think about that?
Three years later Mohammed conquered Khaybar, the wealthiest city in northern Arabia. Because the Muslims did not know agriculture, Mohammed permitted most of the Jews to live as dhimmis, officially second-class citizens who had to pay exorbitant taxes. Eventually the second Caliph banished the Jews of Khaybar, in obedience to Mohammed’s policy that permitted no religion other than Islam to be practiced in Arabia. — Sara Yoheved Rigler
Fun Fact: One of the wives of the founder of Islam was called Safiyya bint Huyayy, she was a Jewish woman from the Banu Nadir tribe in Arabia. During the Battle of Khaybar in 628, she was widowed, after the tribe surrendered Safiyya’s husband refused to give away the location of the tribe’s treasure and the Most Beautiful Founder of the Religion of Peace tortured and decapitated Safiyya’s husband and male relatives and took her captive and raped her, before forcing her to convert to his demented cult of violence and looting.
Readers, Fam, Westerners, listen up. When Islamists start chanting about Khaybar remember Safiyya bint Huyyay, a child of 18 years old whose life the founder of the religion of peace made a living hell. Islamists will tell you their version of reality.
The Messenger of Allah was the most hateful to my eyes; he killed my husband and my father, but he kept apologising to me and saying: “Your father incited the Arabs against me and did this and that,” until that which was in my heart went away’ … Regarding the marriage of Safiyyah (ra) to the Messenger (sa) of Allah, I must mention that Allah gave her these glad tidings in a vision. Safiyyah (ra) deeply loved her compassionate husband, the Messenger (sa) of Allah, and preferred him over her family and clan. This was, of course, because of his excellent treatment of her, even though she was the daughter of someone who had conspired to kill him several times (Khan 2023).
Reader, this explanation defies comprehension, it screams extremism, it screams collective malignant narcissism. Note the date of the piece — approximately a month after the October 7th massacre of over a thousand people in Israel perpetrated by Palestinians. Also note how the attitude has not changed since the beginning, because that when you don’t see a problem with your attitude you don’t need to fix your attitude and you need everyone else to fix theirs.
In its first public report since the [October 7th] attack, Hamas said it was “a necessary step and a normal response to confront all Israeli conspiracies against the Palestinian people” … The report also listed the reasons that led to the attack, citing Israel’s campaign of settlements’ construction “and Judaization of the Palestinian lands in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem”, and the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians from 2000 until this year. (Al Jazeera 2024)
Perpetual message of Islamic conquestors: look what the Jews made me do.
Islamists, y’all only let Jews stay in Arabia after Khaybar because they had the skills you did not have to produce agriculturally etc etc, you needed Jews to sustain yourselves as a society. This is the history of exploitation that repeats itself. Christianity behaved the same way towards Jews. The most Jewish thing is to see a historical image of a Rabbi carrying a Torah scroll out of town as he flees homicidal psychopaths trying to kill him and his followers. IYKYK.
“Sharia rules that every land conquered by Muslims is theirs until qiyama” — Hamastinians
What does it means to be a Jew?
Lee, aka Jihadi Jew, engages the world as a light for others, this is how he lives his Jewish life. He is a dedicated Diaspora Jew, even getting himself kicked out of Hebrew school as a young man for giving an award winning speech on peace between Israel and Palestine. He chooses the side of mercy, frustratingly so, he chooses against the harshness I sometimes express and that means he offers a soft landing spot in the face of fierceness. You know, like a feral street cat who expresses mistrust and hostility needs a constant and confident human caregiver to patiently work with her to recondition her, to teach her that the world is not just enemy, but also not yet my friend and that we overcome difficult patches in any relationship connection by returning to the table, with love, with a desire and commitment to keep going and try again. Recall from above that Rabbi Shapira wrote about the existential struggle of swimming upstream, of confronting the truth of oneself within. So, I see similarities in the approach to being Jewish exhibited by these two men from different eras.
The road to peace is that, reader — it is that gesture of love, that undeserved soft landing. The stars return night after night. The sun returns day after day. The sun and stars are there even when we think they have left. Such is the love of soft landings of a Jew like Lee Weissman. As a human, I appreciate this approach to Judaism more than secular nationalism, it does more to relieve darkness in the world.
How compatible are the Zionism predicated upon Torah Judaism, ie the actual canon of Judaism itself, and the Zionism of Israeli Nationalism? How compatible is vehement anti Zionism with the Torah conceptualisation of collective self determination? What is a good idea? An idea which inspires people to seek liberation and save themselves and their future generations? An idea which inspires people to resist liberation and accept their fate and thus lock future generations into the same horrible fate? When the idea that inspires people to rescue themselves violates the teachings of the gdolim, and it saves thousands of lives — is that idea good? When the idea that inspires people to resist their own rescue follows the teachings of the gdolim, and it causes the loss of millions of lives — is that a good idea? I have no answer to give you, you must reflect on that constructively and humanely for yourself, reader. When you publicly socially-masturbate your amygdala-based5 emotional reaction to a complicated geopolitical situation rooted in a holy crusade and persecution, you’re denying yourself the opportunity to reflect critically. You also become an obstacle to peaceful coexistence when you do this. When you emote you cannot think clearly and you compromise your capacity to collaborate.
Engage yourself like an adult.
This is Not Mad Men for Geopolitics
You are not Don Draper. Neither am I. Shhhh, this is not a Mad Men episode. Anyway, muh — can I ask a small favour? Can we ALL stop abusing terms like ethnic cleansing and genocide to promote a particular side in a geopolitical holy war? It’s lazy and obfuscating. It results in a net harm situation for humanity. It destroys societies. It’s a lie.
“The Jews are used to living on the blood of others, and whatever the Jewish people have achieved was mainly arrived at by means of disorders which they themselves provoked to help attain their goal. The Communist Revolution in Russia was organised by the Jews for their own ends. World War II against Hitler was a Jewish war.” — an excerpt from Nasser government propaganda, 1964.6
Okay, well, fam, scroll up and read about the Banu Nadir in Arabia then tell me who parasites whom, mmmkay? Look, Nassers words, not mine. The language of dehumanisation is an invitation to hatred and worse. Jew hate has devoured Islam—confessions can take the form of accusations. Shhh and go think about that for yourselves.
Let’s talk facts, because this isn’t Mad Men for Geopolitics, like I said, you aren’t Don Draper and neither am I.
There was no genocide in Gaza, there was a war of self-defense. Responding to an unprovoked attack isn’t genocide, logically and pragmatically speaking. The unprovoked attack itself was the genocide, not the response to the attack. No reasonable human being tells the victim of criminal abuse about the context for the abuser’s actions, that is not the victim’s problem, shhhh. The originating event is the October 7 Pogrom. Period. Negotiating with reality = delusion, seek help for your delusional problem if you have one, please and thanks.
There was a genocide in southern Israel on October 7th, a pogrom is a kind of ethnic cleansing activity. The entire world financed and enabled it over a period of decades by supporting UNRWA and other endeavours that helped Hamas grow and increase the disparity between haves and have-nots in Palestinian society.
There has been a genocide in Gaza perpetrated by Hamas against Palestinian people. I would also argue that the Palestinian Authority perpetrates a genocide against its own people through its Pay to Slay policy, whereby the Palestinian state infrastructure incentivises terrorist violence and suicidal extremism. Again, the entire world financed it over a period of decades by tacitly endorsing and openly repeatedly enabling Arafat and other corrupt terrorist narcissists exploiting the Palestinian people.
Question: Who funded genocide?
Answer: Well, everyone who funded UNRWA funded genocide. What does the chart tell you, fam, about who underwrites genocide globally?
Let’s talk about who feasts on the blood of others, to use the words of Nasserites, shall we, reader? Who is drinking blood? Who is serving the blood of mass victims for the wealthy and narcissistic power junkies and attention whores? Look, fam, Arafat’s daughter lives like a princess in France, feasting on the suffering of her people in style and comfort. Maybe refrain from starting word games you cannot win, mmmkay?
Who in the Arab and Muslim worlds world backed Hamas?
It’s easy enough for me to tell you who in the Muslim world backed the genocide of Palestinians by supporting Hamas and the PLO before it, who weaponised a tribally-based and myopic strategy of casting Palestinians as pawns in a crusade-level Game of Thrones LARP for the Holy Land. Receipts exist. Hamdan [senior spokesperson for Hamas] insisted that the group was attacking only settlers living in illegal settlements, whom he described as legitimate targets, an October 8, 2023 Al Jazeera article about Hamas states. So, a nine month old baby and a four year old toddler and their 30 something mother are legitimate settler targets for supposed resistance fighters, now? Really?
So what about this Hadith, then, Islamists?
If your door to Paradise is at the feet of Shiri Bibas, or Rachel Goldberg-Polin, or Ricarda Louk — what’s that mean for you as a people, Muslims? That’s your problem because it’s your canon not mine. When I saw you were all full of sh1t and not serious about a values-based relationship with g-d, I ditched your collective narcissism train of propaganda for the integrity of my conscience and soul. So, anyhow, feel free to think for yourself and remember you’re gonna owe g-d an explanation not me or anyone else here.
Okay. Kumbaya.
Fam, how does it work in the progressive logic? How is boarding school from 50 or a hundred years ago genocide and stealing babies because they are jewish 460 days ago and hiding them in an underground dungeon for the entire 460 days and refusing to disclose their whereabouts or allow them medical care not genocide and merely corrective resistance work? Facts—progressives always dismissed concerns about Magdalena Laundries and the Taum babies. That genocide never inspires any outrage about imperialism in the GPR-215 cult, who remain largely silent about that and other imperial horrors that involved empires removing children from their families, ahem janissaries. It’s fascinating, this selective empathy. Why is it, d’ya think? Reflect silently and in earnest.
Also, look fam—Rumi and Khomeini each studied the same Quran and you would not know it, would you? Begin putting the squares together to form the tapestry … think.
I have written about this stuff in this space before — go read it’s all free, muppets. Islam is an ideology promoting collective narcissism and violent retribution, a precise anathema to the Divinely conceived neurobiological polyvagal requirements for peaceful humanity. The Saracens are still waging their medieval holy war even though the Templars have moved onto drag shows. And the Jews, well, my people, they are still being Jewish — put 10 Jews in a room and you get 30 opinions and depending which day it is the same 10 people will not give you the same 30 opinions. It’s fascinating.
Speaking of the Crusades … here’s a wee trivia pursuit break for you, Fam.
Do you know Solomon’s Stables? It is an underground vault that was beneath the First Temple of Jerusalem, used as a stable space for the Crusaders during the 12th century. Naturally the Islamists have decided to try to appropriate it whilst they craft a propaganda argument accusing the Jews of doing the offensive thing they themselves have perpetrated. Projection is still a b1tch and that famous Jew (which one hehe) was not wrong about it, was he, Fam?
“It needs a thorough survey by engineers to determine exactly what is happening, but we can’t get in,” Barkai said. (LA Times 2002)
ANYWAY … shhhh … take in the information and think for yourself and draw your own conclusions.
Moving on, more facts about history.
Things that are Genocide.7
The atrocity in Rwanda was ethnic cleansing.
Edi Amin expelling Indians from Uganda was ethnic cleansing.8
The mass industrial execution of Jews by Germany during WW2 was ethnic cleansing.
Maoist policies were genocidal and I wrote about the abuses when I wrote about the psychological torture of social isolation progressives engage in called Cancel Culture — driving people to suicide is a form of societal persecution and terrorising.
Stalin’s Gulags facilitated ethnic cleansing in addition to genocidal political persecution.
Population transfers of undesirables called enemies of the people or some similar dehumanising label conducted en masse by hostile governments led to the deaths of millions.
Be clear, these forcibly transferred peoples ended up in labour gulags, forced labour camps, near slave-like living conditions. That’s genocide, working people to death. Many so called whypipo suffered it at the hands of the Soviets and the Russians before them.
Harm reduction without clinically valid and reliable and effectual and practically and financially and socially accessible drug rehabilitation is genocide.
Palestinians were not ethnically cleansed from the lands of the British Mandate for Palestine during Israeli independence. Jews were not ethnically cleansed from North Africa and Arab countries and lands during Israeli independence.
Displacement is not always genocide or ethnic cleansing.
What’s not ethnic cleansing? Leaders of Arabs and Jews waging a propaganda campaign of divisiveness and nationalist dehumanisation to destroy peaceful coexistence in various societies and to embed fear and suspicions into the fabric of Arab and Jewish groups in these societies, then under false pretenses luring these masses of fear stricken people to migrate to away from that society to another location and leave their homes and possessions behind. That’s Machiavellian, in fact, an argument could be made it’s foreign interference. It’s not ethnic cleansing and it’s not genocide. Please engage this discussion with precision, this is not an orgy it is a discourse about conflict and peaceful resolutions. Say what you mean. Mean what you say. Define your terms. Lean in. This is not a jizzing session. It is human conflict resolution. Engage accordingly.
Let me pause and ask some questions now. Can we talk?
Human Rights and Multiculturalism: What are they + for whom are they?
When does multiculturalism become suicidal empathy? When does it become foreign interference? How can we tolerate socially harmful ideologies and cultures that threaten our collective societal integrity and erode its vital foundations? How on earth is that reconciling the past, how is it promoting tolerance?
Who is lying to themselves about some stuff? I ain’t carrying your damn bags, carry your own sh1t now. Go on, pick up your mat or your bag and walk the fcuk on with a straight back and a head held high.
North Americans love buzz words such as ethnic cleansing and genocide because we see ourselves as the collective World Police and Messiah to Deliver Peace and Freedom to the Globe. So we circlejerk such lazy interpretations as genocide and ethnic cleansing of the conflict in the region of the globe we commonly call The Middle East. Middle East, as opposed Near East, Far East — it’s all Not The West, that’s all we care about here. To us, the conflict happening Way Over There seems like any other thing we debate over for sport and leisure activity: Coke versus Pepsi, Samsung versus Apple, The Beatles versus The Rolling Stones. Queer versus Gay.
It’s all a Mad Men game to us, an edgy rivalry, we don’t give a fcuk.
We have created a superPAC NGO charity tax exemption industry for the bored wealthy narcissists to move their money around to their favourite cause du jour. The Palestinian cause. The Muslim cause. Israel cause. The Zionist cause. BDS. Antisemitism. Each multi million dollar industries all on their own that have together only added to the chaos and Sinat Chinam in North American society. Who, precisely, is freed from the unleashing of this chaos? Accountability for wealthy people and their millions and billions — American white collar criminals and American white collar propagandists are freed by this depravity of capitalists perpetrated by pretend anti-capitalists. Human rights activism has become a global trauma therapy session for amoral wealthy people with Cluster B traits and tendencies and with severe cognitive distortions caused by their projected guilt over geopolitical conflict.
Have you heard of Wespac? Go learn about this ridiculous example of wealthy American narcissism. Wespac is a quiet fiscal sponsor of SJP and Palestinian extremism in Canada and the USA. It doesn’t make its financial sponsorships numbers public. Says Wespac founder Howard Horowitz, former Orthodox Jew who became an anti-Zionist in the 1970s: “By the late 1970s, Labor and Socialist Zionism was being eclipsed by the nationalist Likud and affiliated parties. I was jolted by the populist cooptation of the grievances of the majority Mizrahi Jews. I was jolted by the conditions of life for Palestinians in Israel and in the Occupied territories. My Zionist beliefs were shattered by the historical facts.”
Look, Howard, I will be blunt — I don’t give a fcuk about your “Jewish identity” and your disillusionment with Israeli right wing nationalism creeping the Zionist project. You need therapy or maybe go get some Catholic penance that doesn’t involve destroying the entire western civilization and enabling the ongoing Nazi level harassment of the Jewish diaspora and anyone deemed Eurocentric because you’re upset about an Ashkenazi thing, mmkay? You cannot support the Jewish diaspora and you cannot respect the Jewish religion when you hold it hostage to such a narrow definition of Zionism. You clearly misunderstood Zionism if you think your “Jewish identity” tikkun olam aka repair the world means you must ignore what the Torah tells us about the nation of humans descended from Yisrael, the light of all nations, Zion.
Howard Horowitz, fcuk you for giving a platform to terrorists for the enablement of extremism and promotion of Islamist terror and violence in Canada. Fcuk you, Howard Horowitz, and fcuk your wealthy projected guilt struggle session club of financial sponsorship depravity. Sit down now, Howard Horowitz, you’ve done enough damage all in service to your own internal struggle with your religious identity and wealthy American ego. You believed the lie, Howard, many did. Read on and learn what Rabbi Gershom said about this experience. How long you gonna punish us for your feelings about your naïveté? “The Zionist state has displaced, dispossessed, and dehumanized ...” begins Howard Horowitz in a statement about Israel. Imagine sharing a vision of Israel with the Ayatollah Khamenei. Are you okay, Howard?
I think you’re all confusing Zionism with Israeli nationalism—this rhetorical device has proven primitive and unworthy of intelligent critically thinking individuals with so much social capital and, therefore, power over others, at their disposal. “October 7 was horrible and emotionally devastating. Even as I am horrified by the atrocities committed by Hamas, I believe it is important to understand why these Palestinian fighters broke out from the ghetto wall. My outrage at Hamas's atrocities quickly gave way to my outrage as Israel announced and began the ongoing implementation of …” says Howard when asked about the October 7, 2023 pogrom that involved a massacre of young people at a music festival for peace and hostage taking of kibbutzniks, perpetrated by vengeful and hate-infested Palestinians.
Well, Howard, remember Rabbi Sacks? Go read some Sacks and shhh your big mouth.
Today the argument goes like this. After the Holocaust, every right-thinking human being must be opposed to Nazism. Palestinians are the new Jews. The Jews are the new Nazis. Israel is the new crime against humanity. Therefore every right thinking person must be opposed to the state of Israel, and since every Jew is a Zionist, we must oppose the Jews. This argument is wholly wrong. It was Jews not Israelis who were murdered in terrorist attacks in Toulouse, Paris, Brussels and Copenhagen.
Antisemitism is a form of cognitive failure. It reduces complex problems to simplicities. It divides the world into black and white, seeing all the fault on one side and all the victimhood on the other. It singles out one group among a hundred offenders for the blame. It silences dissent and never engages in self-criticism. The argument is always the same. We are innocent; they are guilty. It follows that if we—Christians, members of the Aryan race or Muslims—are to be free, they, the Jews, or the state of Israel must be destroyed. That is how the great crimes begin.
— Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Anti-Zionism is the New Anti-Semitism, 2016
Howard, can we take your grandchildren hostage and hold them in an underground dungeon for 460 days without much food, water, light, medical care, when we are upset about geopolitics? You essentially excused the taking of a baby and a toddler as political hostages and you excused holding them underground for 460 days, because apparently Palestinians are so emotionally fragile and that’s how they must handle their situation with Israel? Howard, wtf? You are not okay, Howard. I invite you to think about Shiri Bibas and her sons and come up with some better response than she had it coming.
Howard, the Torah has a law about not destroying fruit bearing trees even during times of war. If g-d went to the trouble of instructing Her people not to harm fruit bearing trees during wartime then what you think She thinks about harming women of child bearing age with young children during peacetime? You go ahead and think quietly about your objective truth and your moral compass and foundation. Islam preaches heaven for a man is at the foot of mothers, well many Muslim men are going to hell based on how they treat mothers, Howard. If you amplified Samidoun then you contributed to the thing that harmed Shiri Bibas, Howard. How’s that fit with your tikkun olam?
Is this a joke? I’m not laughing.
"The Holocaust is etched into our DNA. When I heard about mothers in the kibbutzim who silenced their babies so they wouldn't cry and give away the family's hiding place, it reminded me of Natan Alterman’s famous poem ‘Mother, is it okay now to cry?’, inspired by Abba Kovner’s recollections of his time as a partisan." — Prof Hanna Yablonka, Historian
The Not-Ethnic-Cleansing of Jews from Muslim lands
Fam, let’s return to historical facts about the not-ethnic-cleansing of Jews in the Arab and Muslim pockets of the Levant and North Africa in post-holocaust times. And let’s also talk about which Jews are allowed to claim victimhood from the Holocaust and let’s talk about which Jewish communities have their stories of persecution and hatred represented in the Holocaust narrative that exists in the west, particularly. These matters seem unrelated and they have a connection, though.
NOTE: Franz Fanon is not your friend, so please do put him down now, and grow up and come to this discourse with your adult rational humble brain fully engaged. Ditch your Don Draper pseudo-academia-intellectualism: the Settler Colonial Rhetorical Device is not a serious approach to conflict analysis or historical study thereof and I do not endorse or engage with it (this is not negotiable) it is for the low IQ Cluster B mouth-breathing zombified sycophants and geopolitical psychopaths, please go find that room. This is not that room.
“The "Lavon Affair" refers to a false flag Israeli terrorist bombing plot code named “Operation Susannah” against US and other targets in Egypt. It was designed to reverse US policy pressuring British withdrawals and reverting control of the Suez Canal to Egypt. Israeli agents infiltrating as Arabs were discovered, arrested and criminally prosecuted in Egypt when their explosives malfunctioned, leading to a crisis in the Israeli government and relations with the US.” — Declassified US documents
After achieving independence, Israel planned and executed a series of espionage operations throughout the Middle East in order to influence popular opinion and sway public policy in the interests of the nation state of Israel. Israel sought to increase Jewish immigration, in order to make Jews a majority, for a Jewish state. The Lavon Affair was one among many operations, one which left a lasting impact on relations between Israel and Egypt and maybe even on Egyptian antisemitism. The rivalry between Jews and Egyptians has biblical roots and wasn’t helped by Lavon.
Operation Yakhin refers to the illegal emigration of Jews from Morocco to Israel that happened as a result of a tacit agreement between Morocco and Israel in the 1950s and 60s. Qadima, Misgeret and Yakhin, what are these names? Qadima — the Jewish Agency that was responsible for the departure of Jews until 1957 and the transit camp that bears this name, which is located on the road to Eljadida (Mazagan), through which immigrant families passed to leave discreetly, despite the prohibitions of the French Residency, towards Algeria and from there, towards Israel. Misgeret — the branch of the Mossad that dealt with both Jewish self-defense and clandestine emigration between the beginning of 1957 and November 1961. The code name for the evacuation that took place from November 28, 1961 to the end of 1966 — Operation Yakhin — refers to the name of one of the two columns at the entrance to the Temple of Jerusalem.
Again, Operation Yakhin happened in a geopolitical system unleashed after the fall of the Third Reich and the recalibration of the world after WW2 ended both in Europe and Asia. Remember this happens in the context of the ruins left by the Shoah, consider the picture as a whole and not one detail. Can you imagine the thirst for Eretz Yisrael in the years and even early decades after the liberation of death camps in Europe? Judge nothing.
Jew haters and anti-Zionists don’t wet your pants, or maybe you should go change your pants if you’ve already wet yourself reading about the Mossad operations, because Arabs perpetrated the same egregious failures of their own people through fear based hate-centric leadership tactics in this conflict and those manipulations led to mass forced population transfers and worst. The difference is Jews practise accountability and level 5 leadership and thinking and Arabs + Muslims do not, as a rule, because their social approach to human engagement differs and because they (Muslims) face punishing social isolation for employing critical thought in defiance of tribal narratives.
For example, after 9/11, Irshad Manji tried to tell Muslims what was The Trouble with Islam, and she hit a wall and needed bullet proof glass and added security details for several years. In comparison, Ilan Pappé does his own anti-Zionist and anti- Israel thing for Jewish accountability. Jews feel uncomfortable about Pappé’s work and maybe have choice words for him, yet he doesn’t need bullet-proof glass I’m guessing, because Jewish people are taught to tolerate dissent and disagreement, it’s a fundamental part of being a Jew. It’s why they achieve wherever they go and whatever they face. In total contrast to flamboyant styles of accountability seeking, see the methodical scholarly Eliezer Tauber and his work to dismantle the Der Yassin myth. Tauber found admissions were made in retrospect by some Arabs that fear drove the mass displacement of people away from their homes.
You can see how the two faith communities differ, it’s not rocket science and it’s not Zio imperialism and it’s not the result of any oppression-signalling disparity between the two worlds. Jews did not steal your puppy or kill g-d, or do whatever crappy thing to you. Please take responsibility for your sh1t, FFS. Anyway, comparing Der Yassin to the Shoah smacks of intellectually dishonest and cognitively stunted thinking — it’s a rhetorical device proven ineffectual for peaceful discussions between sides of this conflict. Mustafa Akyol has done some solid work on the topic of an Islam Without Extremes, and he was arrested in by Islamic police in Malaysia for giving this talk and his father had to arrange for his release.
My problem with both imperial religions is they exploit and misrepresent Judaism to gain hegemony and manipulate their membership. I take issue with secular people, who ride the religion is imperial fad, as they take their kids for some supposed harmless fun to Santa9, a 3rd century Bishop living in Anatolia who staunchly defended the Trinity as objective truth and made it his life’s work to destroy pagan idols and structures. I take issue with this same secular religion is imperial burn churches Christians are racist and genocidal club celebrating Christmas dinners ahem the birth of the Christian god incarnate ahem in between social justice struggles sessions on decolonisation where they rage-farm about Jews stealing al aqsa mosque, the building Islamic conquestors built on top of the Temple Mount. It’s all pretty disingenuous and it fcuking offends me.
Anyhow.
Invoking Goodwin’s Law against any Jew or group thereof guarantees a derailing of whatever discussion it interrupts. Frankly, I think it’s an evil rhetorical device revealing a sinister collective narcissism and cognitive failure, which Arabists and Muslims and Islamists employ to dehumanise Jews. It’s a particularly cruel and evil form of psychological warfare for any Muslim or gentile, or a Jew actually, to compare any Jew to a Nazi or a Kapo. It’s psychological abuse in my opinion. It cannot be tolerated. No Jew is ever comparable to any Nazi. Not even the most extremist Jew. No.
What do you want? Peace? War? What you want, Fam?? That’s a you problem to face.
Want war? Then keep on treating people who choose to show up and engage the discourse like your personal enemy. Want peace? Then BE PEACE ☮️. It’s very simple. It’s a you thing. It begins with you. So, begin now. Ride That B1tch, as my daughter famously said to her elders several years ago in a profound + intense reality check moment.
My Jewishness is not Secular Nationalism
[Rabbi Yonassan Gershom]
Here’s a wise thought below about Judaism and secular nationalism from a Rabbi I encountered online. I think it’s important to ask why we need to lock ourselves into such a secular + blunt conception + vision of Zionism. I don’t think there’s an understanding of the fact that a Jew like Rabbi Yonassan Gershom doesn’t reject Zionism, he simply rejects the imposition of modern geopolitical definitions onto his religious morality and practise, meaning he doesn’t serve tribal demands that compete with The Divine for glory. He doesn’t need a national pennant to worship g-d or be a light to the world, he needs the Torah. Just like Lee, whose words opened this essay, does. It’s not easy, it’s quite often socially punishing and sometimes really personally painful and you don’t see that side — I do see the punishing effect of their moral courage because these men have shared their personal experiences with me. It is why I respect and love Lee Weissman, actually: because he fields a great deal of hurtful and sometimes personal flack and still shows up for G-d the way the Torah instructs him to do. You reach for the light when it’s dark and you can’t see and you feel suffocated by the fear of the inky black unknown, not when it’s blinding bright and the full spectrum has revealed itself in all glory.
So reader, do us a favour and resist the urge to use Jews like Yonassan or Lee to circlejerk your political social bullying—as mentioned, such Jews struggle a lot to hold the position they each do, at great unseen cost. Kindly refrain from exploiting the hardship of their chosen way to practise Judaism for your shallow and selfish tribal circlejerk.
Back in the 1970s, at the University of Minnesota Hillel House, I heard an Israeli shaliach (representative) give a talk about moving to Israel that was so fear-based, it totally turned me off. His whole approach was that someday my neighbors were going to turn against me like in Germany, and the only safe place in the world for Jews is Israel, so I might as well go there now. His attitude reeked of superiority complex, to the point that he refused to pronounce my name "Yonassan" the Ashkenazic way. "I will call you Yonatan" he said, because Ashkenazic "isn't real Hebrew." I got up and walked out.
I was born in 1947, one year before Israel's independence. I grew up with the idealized picture of Israel as a place filled with suntanned kibbutzniks in shorts and sandals making the desert bloom. That did happen, but so did a lot of other nasty stuff that I never heard about until adulthood. And when I finally did meet Israelis face to face, like the guy I described above, we had nothing much in common. I don't define my Jewishness in terms of secular nationalism.
—Rabbi Yonassan Gershom
Remember fam, religious freedom means that behaviour as opposed to visible tribal membership governs the way we interact with people —
Visibly Jewish people aren’t responsible for your gripe with Israel.
Visibly Muslim or Arab people aren’t responsible for your gripe with Hamas.
Visibly Christian people aren’t responsible for the transatlantic slave trade or boarding schools for indigenous children or for the Pentagon’s policies on the Middle East.
Visibly Sikh people aren’t responsible for your gripe with Khalistani extremism or the Air India Bombing.
Visibly Indian people aren’t all the Hindutva. Hindus aren’t pagans, your religious empire is no longer setting the rules here.
No one who believes in G-d is responsible for your outrage and grief over the entirety of persecution of humanity by religious empires or cults or institutions.
All of the above are responsible for the antisemitism they promote through their tribal behaviour. That’s not religious intolerance to hold you all accountable for your hatred of Jews and exploitation of Judaism.
Also remember everyone’s sh1t stinks, your blood is as red as anyone else’s and your body will die and rot like mine and everyone’s will do. No one is better. No one is worst. Catherine the Great died on the toilet, in the end we are human beings and return to the humble dust and clay and mud from whence we came.
Moving on to more historical facts that have become an inconvenient truth.
Which Jews get to claim victimhood status from the Holocaust? Who decides who was persecuted because of Nazi hatred and who was simply persecuted because of “unfortunate antisemitism that happened to occur at the same time as the Holocaust was happening”? What purpose does such ranking of a collective trauma into hierarchical compartments serve, and whom does it serve?
Kapo Jews
Can we resolve or reconcile the suffering of the holocaust in an Israeli court of law? It always seemed odd to me, on logic and principle. These crimes happened in Nazi Germany by Nazi officials and their volunteers and employees. Or in Poland or somewhere in Europe where concentration camps happened. I take issue with the nation state of Israel using the Holocaust to further its nationalistic ends. Let’s remember the series of events we call the Holocaust—severe and horrible collective traumas which decimated EUROPEAN jewry — countries affect included Germany, Poland, France, Italy, Hungary, Greece, and several other Nazi-occupied countries in Europe and North Africa, and even Iraq. Nationalism can serve shallow political and amoral ideologies. Do we really want to make the Shoah, a crime against all humanity perpetrated against European and North African Jewry, an instrument for Israeli Nationalism? Why?
The past has no cure. —Elizabeth I
Early Israeli thinking cast the Holocaust survivor Kapo Jew on the same moral equivalence as a mass murdering psychotic Nazi. As far as I can observe, early Israeli thinking didn’t make a similar intense and vengeful moral equivalence vis a vis anti Zionist rabbis who preached against Zionism and in some cases thwarted Zionist rescue efforts only to save themselves at the last moments and rebuilt their holy rabbinical mini empire. At any rate, this society, galvanised by a trauma bond formed in response to industrial mass murder of European Jewry, made no distinction between Kapo and Nazi until the Kasztner case and the Eichmann trial forced a shift in thinking.
Jewish Council leaders and rescue workers who negotiated with Nazis to stall and save lives became recast as Nazi collaborators and Israeli society found it compelling to scapegoat Kapos and Jewish leaders and activists like Kasztner and Komoly and others — if only they had led their people to resistance and rebellion rather than compliance hundreds of thousands would have been saved. So the logic goes. That’s the psychological warfare underlying the label Kapo Jew. Be clear, it’s psychological warfare, a kind of propaganda.
Rebbes — Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Rabbi Sacks answered the question Where was G-d with the question Where was Humanity?
“When I first stood at Auschwitz-Birkenau the question that haunted me was not, “Where was God?”. God was in the command, “You shall not murder.” God was in the words, “You shall not oppress the stranger.” God was saying to humanity, “Your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the ground.” God did not stop the first humans eating forbidden fruit. He did not stop Cain committing murder. He did not stop the Egyptians enslaving the Israelites. God does not save us from ourselves. That, according to the Talmud, is why creating man was such a risk that the angels advised against it. The question that haunts me after the Holocaust, as it does today in this new age of chaos, is “Where is man?”” — Judaism’s Life-Changing Ideas, p. 7
When I studied the response of the rabbinical community to the Shoah, the question haunted me in a way it had never done before decades of engaging with Holocaust history: where was humanity? I have often said in my own life, G-d is gone. G-d moves creation through creation, though. So, G-d exists through those made in Her image, humanity. Saying G-d is gone simply points to the fact that humanity ceased to exist in the image of the Divine, and chose to exist in their own Babel-like image. G-d never sleeps, never leaves, the notion of G-d leaving makes no sense — G-d is for all time. However G-d, YHVH, works through Creation, this is the Divine aspect of free will, of womb-like compassion, of giving birth— to connect, to propels us to be love more widely and deeply and fiercely.
So, maybe we invoke G-d’s presence when we behave as She created us to be — a light for the world. And yet, look at the Rebbe, hands on the glass on the train taking him away to safety, looking upon many that would die at the hands of the Nazi pogrom. I do not fault anyone for losing faith, who lived through that time or really looks into the abyss in a personal way. The story of the Holocaust now becomes, how did religious leaders behave, how did they lead their people? With leadership comes great responsibility. Hard and horrific times call for steady and strong leadership. Strong leaders descend into hell when their leadership role demands they do so. Leaders lead through serving those who look to them for guidance.
Did the Rabbinate as a whole learn this lesson from the Shoah? That is a question for reflection.
“A rebbe who is not willing to descend into hell in order to rescue his followers from destruction, is not a rebbe!” — Rav Shapira
“I am witnessing the end of Hungarian Jewry. The [Hungarian] government enabled large parts of the communities to escape. The Jews asked the Chassidic rabbis what to do and they always calmed them down. The Belzer Rebbe said that in Hungary we would get away with mere anxiety. Now the bitter moment has come when Jews can no longer save themselves. Indeed the Heavens have hidden [the truth] from them. But they themselves escaped at the very last moment to the Eretz of Yisrael. They have saved themselves but have abandoned the people like lambs to slaughter! Master of the Universe! In my last minutes of life I beseech you, forgive them for the great desecration of the Divine Name [chillul Hashem]” — last words of Rebbetzin Eva Halberstam of Kosice, May 1944
What’s chillul Hashem, you ask? It’s profaning the name of g-d through your acts in such a way as to denigrate the Torah or damages Jewish religion or collective. Chillul means to desecrate or violate or spoil. Hashem means The Name, and refers to the Tetragrammaton, the four letter word of G-d, which Jews do not pronounce out of reverence for the Unspeakably Holy One.
Abramowitz, in OU Torah, tells us that the Rambam, Maimonides, describes three types of chillul Hashem.
The first is when someone refuses to give up his life when called for.
The second is when one commits a sin not because he’s driven by his urges but pretty much out of spite.
The third category is what we typically mean when we talk about chillul Hashem: when someone who should know better acts in a fashion that is perceived to be beneath him.
The last Chief Rabbi of Kovno and author of Devar Avraham cautioned against spiritual leaders giving a people false hope in difficult and dangerous and uncertain times. He believed it would confuse followers to offer false hope for a reasonable natural anxiety. He was emphatic in his negative response. Saying the [Birkat Hagomel] blessing would only serve “to confuse the Jews,” he wrote, “to crush them and destroy them by means of false hopes and deception,” something that would only “help the miserable murderers [in the] work of exterminating our brothers and sisters.” Kahane-Shapiro returned from his medical trip in Switzerland when he received word his son to join him in the USA, because it had become increasingly unsafe for Jews in Europe. From his sickbed in the ghetto where he died, the Rav of Kovno penned a missive about halachic thought. The 300 page document didn’t survive the Nazi genocide of European Jewry.
When a sage provides false hope to his followers during bleak times he confuse[s] … crush[es] and destroy[es] them … [by his] deception … [and this helps] the murders [and haters] in the work of exterminating [the Jewish people] — Rabbi of Kovno
Many great sages died with their people during the Shoah. They rejected the chances to flee and they chose to stay with their people from the ghettos right through to the platform of Auschwitz. Other great sages survived by staying one or two steps ahead of the Nazis hunting them, doing G-d service as they could, encouraging escape when things looked bleak. Others still, who had dissuaded followers from fleeing all throughout the rise of Nazism, warning against succumbing to Zionism at the risk of damnation, ended up selling their souls to the evil they warned against, running off when the Nazis appeared in Hungary to liquidate Hungarian Jewry.
Aharon Rokeach expended much energy and effort on the run, inventing various identities to dodge his Nazi stalkers whilst he repeatedly discouraged his followers from fleeing to Mandatory Palestine. When it looked hopeless, he made a run for it. Unlike, the last rabbi of Kovno, Rokeach thought nothing of offering false hope and assurance.
“that perhaps, heaven forbid, some danger is hanging over the land,” and that that was why his brother Aharon was leaving for Israel. The rebbe, Mordechai insisted, “is not going in flight or running away in haste, as if he wished to flee from here.” On the contrary, he explained, “the Tzadik [righteous one] sees that good, and all good, and only good and grace will befall our Jewish brethren, the inhabitants of this land.” —Mordechai Rokeach in a speech delivered on his brother Aharon’s behalf January 16, 1944 to an audience of thousands in Budapest.
The Satmar Rebbe provides the most extreme and uncomfortable example of false leadership and hypocrisy and if anyone’s actions could be said to have caused the death of many many Jews it would be a public figures like Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, who rode the Kasztner train despite opposing Zionism, and never publicly thanked his Zionist rescuers. Teitelbaum repeatedly dissuaded his followers from fleeing if it would endanger their beliefs. It was during this period that some 40 rabbis signed a memorandum by which Haredi Jews would be integrated into the Zionist organizations operating networks assisting in the escape and concealment of Jews. When Rabbi Yoel found out about this, he appealed to the Central Bureau in Budapest, which demanded a nullification of the agreement. The Satmar Rebbe accepted a spot on the Kasztner train when his followers raised the $1000 ransom required. His survival enabled him to travel to America and revive his Hasidic sect. Satmar refused to testify on Kasztner’s behalf when asked because of his staunchly anti Zionist views.
One may not join the Agudah [a political liberation movement that began in Poland] because Agudah cooperates with the Zionists, working alongside with them to achieve a Jewish state. That state, once achieved, will certainly be ruled by heretics and non-believers who will use it as a vehicle to wipe out Torah and Emunah (faith) from the holy land …
As to the argument that Jews needed somewhere to flee, the [Satmar] Rebbe, [Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum] responded that the Zionist goal was not to save Jews! They could have saved many more Jews in Palestine by refraining from pressing for a state … And even if some lives could be saved by going to Palestine, one cannot save Jews by subjecting them to a danger to their belief in Hashem (God) and His Torah. —Dovid Meisels
I cannot imagine why I would want to seek any guidance from such a repugnant man. I cannot imagine such a personality using G-d to further his own ends. I left the religion of my upbringing because I cannot coexist in a religious institution dominated by such poisonous thinking — it takes away from service to and union with G-d. So, it’s difficult for me to disagree with the Rebbetzin’s assessment of what took place. That said, I will concede to Bobker this much, I agree with his statement here, below. The instinct for self preservation exists in all of us and to override it poses a horribly unnatural challenge most of us lack the spiritual duress to face.
The fact is this: not a single Jew knew whether his decision, made with the best of intent, would save a life or hasten a death. One Jew’s survival often depended on another Jew’s death, what Professor Lawrence L. Langer, one of the foremost scholars of the Holocaust, calls the “choiceless choice.” — Joe Bobker, 2010
Nonetheless, history demands that its students hold multiple conflicting truths. As we find ourselves farther from the period of the Holocaust, the body of history evidence becomes more vast and deep and slow painful truths bubble up from the surface. Rabbinical identity and Old World nostalgia seem to expunge the morally repugnant behaviours of rabbis during the Holocaust. As Keren-Kratz writes in his Tablet piece, about Teitelbaum, his anti-Zionist worldview, representing as it did to them the Eastern European “Old Home,” expunged his failures during the Holocaust. As his public stature grew, criticism from within diminished, while criticism from without was disregarded and dismissed as Zionist defamation. No one would dream of accusing a runaway rabbi of causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of European Jews or of enabling Nazis etc etc whilst they lambasted Kasztner, not a member of the rabbinical aristocracy, as a collaborator blah blah.
Noted Holocaust scholar Ester Farbstein cautions her students on concocting dramatic narratives, she urges consulting primary sources as much as possible to capture the thinking and mentality and feeling of the time. Post holocaust writings tend to cast a kind shadow on history, whereas diaries and writings from the period provide us with a less self serving portrayal of history. Point taken. Who am I to judge, as Bobker said. Also, at what point do we see our response to the story emerging layered atop of the story history wants to tell us, herself? Additionally, it’s important to remember to see history as people would have seen it, in the story itself. So, maybe they had an idea about the mass murders taking place, maybe they could do nothing and maybe they decided to shhh and live life until it ended. Life is not a Marvel comic, look around you now, in various parts of the world, persecutions happen, people know and who knows what people think about the power they possess to create change. Now consider the political atmosphere — see below for a description of the race laws and aryanisation of society and the massive displacement of people into hard labour camps. When you consider the full array of facts, you cannot do, ie judge, you can only be, absorb and keep the story alive.
I remember being a young catholic woman and seeing how institutional society excused sexually abusive predacious clerics including a head of a lucrative religious order. Marcial Maciel Degollado preyed upon countless young boys and men, he violated his vows by having a wife and fathering children, whom he sexually abused. The coverup campaign happened at the highest levels of the Vatican and it served only the institution of the religion, and not the people it exists to serve. What if each religion has a similar undercurrent of sinister machinations operating within it? The tension between tribalism and the tyranny of we and individualism and the liberation of self determination never fades. In fact, I would argue it is the path to G-d, the struggle to exist in this realm with this human condition.
This dynamic of weak leadership serving its own self interests at the expense of the faithful pervades the human story of the Holocaust. It remains the elephant in the room. This part of the Holocaust story hurts me most of all, religious leadership failing the people who so desperately and devotedly cling to them for the breath of life in challenging times. The faithful have conditioned ourselves to look to sages, and we expect some things from these sages and we believe in them and we end up disappointed. The history of religious people could be distilled to that summary, across denomination.
In this spirit, I find it unjust and cruel to accuse Kasztner of anything sinister at all. Everything he did he did in service for the Jewish people, including giving a few Nazis he worked with character references to try to get information on lost Jewish property and assets. As I watch the nation state of Israel pretend the Gilad Shalid Deal was a great idea and that any deal they make involving releasing recidivist terrorists is good, I find the bitter pill that is the Kasztner case quite impossible to swallow.
Reszo Kasztner
“I was a very common sort of Jewish boy, typical of my time. Only I was a poisoned one.” — Ze’ev Eckstein, Rezso Kasztner’s murderer.
Kasztner symbolises a complex and painful moral conundrum underlying the Jewish experience of and response to the Shoah. The fact that few know anything about him underscores my point.
Who was Kasztner?
Not a victim of the Nazis, a survivor of their brutal reign over Europe. Kasztner survived the Holocaust and did not suffer any physical atrocities or brutalities. He did not suffer in a targeted way as he saw many of his fellow Jews do. I wonder if we can appreciate the experience of the Holocaust in a rigourous way, to appreciate the nuance of experience in such times. Perhaps use the October 7th massacre to inform your understanding — some Israelis remain unscathed, unaffected DIRECTLY by the horrors, and some have indelible and personal scars from the horrors, that affected them personally or their family or close friends. To understand and fully appreciate and move forward, we must have an understanding of who and what is a victim and how that differs from survivor and how the two experiences overlap. In that spirit, Kasztner survived the Holocaust without being a victim of Nazi hatred and then became a victim of Israel vengeance and hatred.
What does it mean when a Holocaust survivor is not safe in the Jewish homeland?
Kasztner spoke eight languages, including Latin, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Aramaic. He planned to follow his older brother to Mandatory Palestine as a young man, and the death of his father changed the course of his life, forcing him to stay and look after his mother. He studied law and worked in politics and journalism, he became known as a political fixer and negotiator. After the Nazi-inspired race laws marginalised professionals and closed Jewish legal practises and newpapers Kasztner worked as a rescue worker for Vaada, trying to help as many Jews escape to safety as he possibly could in any way he could. When Germany invaded Hungary in early 1944 Adolph Eichmann came to Hungary with a mission to liquidate as many Jews from Hungary as possible. When Hoess complained that the flow of Jews to Auschwitz was too much for him to handle selecting inmates for gas chambers, Eichmann suggested just exterminating all the Jews. I’m reminded of Arnaud Amalric, the Cistercian abbot who, during the Albigensian Crusade said, kill them all G-d will recognise His own.
Kasztner belonged to a network of Hungarian Jewish activists that included Joel Brand and Otto Komoly. Whilst for Jews, German occupation spelled certain doom and death, celebrated antisemites like Yaroslov Hunka, who volunteered to be a member of an SS Waffen Galicia, welcomed the German soldiers with joy. The people felt a thaw, knowing that there would be no more of that dreaded knocking on the door in the middle of the night and that at least they would be able to sleep peacefully now … A new “liberator” of the Ukrainian people – Führer Hitler – reigned over the land of Berezhany. Portraits of Hitler in a long greatcoat with a raised collar, which enveloped a menacing face with small, as if artificially attached mustaches under his sharp nose, and with the inscription “Hitler the Liberator” hung in every classroom (Hunka 2011).
Hunka writes about idyllic times for Ukrainian nationalists in July 1941, I had just turned 16, and the next two years would be the happiest years of my life. I had no idea that what I had experienced in those two years would infuse me with love for my hometown so much that it would last me a lifetime. I had no idea then that dreams of those two years, of the company of charming girls, of carefree, cheerful friends, of fragrant evenings in the luxurious castle park and walks around the city would help me get through the anxious times of the following years. (Ibid). In contrast, Jews faced utter terror, a Damocles’ sword hanging over them, swinging wildly. When Hunka’s idyllic life began, a horror began for many Hungarian Jews unable to produce documentation to satiate the Nazi race officials in Hungary. Thousands and thousands faced deportation to what we now call Ukraine, where they faced mass execution in massacres such as the Kamenets-Podolsk Massacre.
Kasztner and his colleagues received reports from the field, and like many of their contemporaries regarded the reports of massacres as exaggerated. Nonetheless, as time passed Kasztner, who had no official leadership position and functioned as a negotiator, the way any modern day negotiator making deals with Hamas does — with no decision making or any official authority. Kasztner, Brand, and Komoly worked behind the scenes quietly, negotiating with Nazis like Eichmann, in order to buy time for Hungarian Jews, and in order to save as many lives as possible.
Hungarian Nazis murdered Komoly two weeks before the Soviets liberated Hungary, Kasztner survived the horrors and made it to Mandatory Palestine. Difficult times call for difficult choices and we cannot always understand what some people did way back then from way over here. To judge the morality of people like Kasztner seems foolish and arrogant and obtuse and self indulgent. It seems cruel to punish a survivor of the worst atrocity in modern times because you think he should have led an armed rebellion against rather than secret negotiations with Eichmann. Vengeance does not serve justice, ie G-d, it serves lust, ie ego. Unhealed wounds create imbalances that lead to extremism and that others can exploit for their own self ends. That’s what happened in this case.
A bloke named Gruenwald published a pamphlet accusing Kasztner, a member of the Labour government, of being a Nazi collaborator. The government charged Greunwald with libel and Gruenwald’s lawyer, a former Irgun commander named Tamir, turned the trial into an inqusition about Kasztner and his supposed Nazi collaboration. The judge, a bloke named Halevy, born in Nazi Germany and who emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1933, accused Kasztner of selling his soul to the devil. Appreciate the irony, reader, from a Freudian POV. The decision triggered a collapse for the Labour government and Tamir, a bloke with ties to the right wing opposition party, received prominent positions in Menachim Begin’s future government. Halevy presided over the Kafr Qasim massacre and the Eichmann trial, and he eventually left the bench to enter right wing politics.
This political circus struggle session trial plunged Kasztner’s life into misery and his family suffered. Right wing extremists connected to a militia group assassinated him in 1957. The Supreme Court cleared most of the charges except for the collaboration charge in 1958. Kasztner’s killers had a history has informants and freelancers for Shin Bet. A right wing extremist cell exploited the trauma of the holocaust by accusing a Jewish Holocaust survivor who negotiated with Nazis to save more Jews than Schindler in order to trigger non confidence in the Labour government of the time.
Right wing extremists had more in common with Moaists than anyone might initially imagine. Amusing, in a dark way, isn’t it? Consider that, whilst in Europe people were helping Holocaust survivor Otto Frank open Ann Frank House, in the Jewish homeland people were plotting to assassinate Holocaust survivor Kasztner.
I wonder out loud about the severe and disproportionate and unforgiving judgement of Kasztner by Halevy, a man of the same generation, who escaped the worst parts of the Hilter’s reign and the accompanying Nazi terror because he managed to get out of Nazi infested Europe and settle in Mandatory Palestine when Hitler became Chancellor, in 1933. Kasztner planned to emigrate to Mandatory Palestine like his brother had done before him and then his father’s death (when Kasztner was 22, so in 1928) meant that he had to stay and look after his mother. Halevy judged a man who stayed in Europe to look after his ma after his pa died, a man who studied and accomplished and learned several languages, a man who rose to the challenge presented by Nazi hatred, who risked his life and thensome in the service of saving life and to stem the tide of The Final Solution any way he could. Halevy, who did no rescue work and saved no European Jews from the Nazis, judged a man who did do. It’s a degree of projection, isn’t it?
Humans are complex and confounding creatures made in g-d’s image, Elokim the judge + YHVH the compassionate — both make up the image in which we are made.
Anyhow, like I said, Freudians feel free to do your thing, if that’s your jam.
Readers, remember—humans human and ours is not to judge, only try to understand so we can human better. Perhaps the existential outrage at the horror itself and what it means on a human scale baffles and bewilders the human psyche so much that anyone who chose to flee might feel angry at those who stayed. Perhaps the decision to judge the difficult and impossible choices made serves the purpose of channeling whatever uncomfortable feelings or survivors guilt or whatever.
Please do not judge. Please stop judging. Put the stick down. Ultimately it’s the stick you beat yourself with, so stop. Put that stick down. Put the stones down. The time for stoning has passed. We all bear responsibility at this point, if you must do that thing where you assign blame. Really, it signals your emotional immaturity. That’s okay, grow, so you can stop projectile vomiting and bleeding all over everything and everyone.
Anti-Zionist Jews are Kapo Jews, right wing Israeli people have a penchant for tweeting and saying. Is that a dopamine hits thing? It reminds me of sucking on a crack rock through a glass tube stuffed with steel wool. It reminds me of snorting lines of cocaine on a mirror, through a rolled up fin or plastic straw, in the bathroom stall of some public establishing. It reminds me of junkie behaviour, and social media incentivises this anti-social behaviour. Imagine feeling so entitled to tweet that sh1t on Holocaust Memorial Day! To what end?
Gabor Maté, a Holocaust survivor, has been himself called a Kapo Jew by right wing Israeli extreme thinkers because he goes against The Jewish Nation by daring to care about Palestinian human rights vis a vis Israeli nationalism and geopolitics and the Zionist project.
What does that mean, to call Gabor a Kapo Jew? What does it mean to call any disobedient Jew a Kapo Jew? Sit down and unpack that behaviour for yourself.
This does not bode well for The Diaspora Jew, who by virtue of the fact that s/he does NOT live in The Jewish National Homeland, occupies second class status, and will have to worship two gods instead of One G-d, the most important deity being the nation state of Israel. In mindset of Jewishness, The Diaspora Jew lives on the defense in perpetuity. The objective of Jewishness then becomes survival, as in flight-fright-freeze, stifling and frustrating—because basing your existence on fighting those opposed to you diminishes your light and limits the reach of your being. Such a human, in perpetual survival mode, is blocked from engaging the Torah as G-d instructs.
Reader, ask yourself — what would it mean to convict as a traitor of The Jewish Nation or as Nazi collaborator a Jewish political prisoner in a death camp who became a prisoner functionary, and for survival means under great dress and pain for torture and death, had to do abusive things to other prisoners?
No such trials ever happened, however, the desire did exist to conduct such a witch hunt.
What would it mean, except humiliating cruelty for a human being and his family, for the sake of a national identity? It smacks of a Maoist struggle session to me. What value does it serve to punish a Holocaust survivor who had to endure being forced to serve as a functionary?
What value did it serve to persecute Holocaust survivor and rescue worker Rezso Kasztner the way Israel did?
Sephardic + Mizrahi Jews in the Holocaust story
Hanna Yablonka noted how the Holocaust in Israel was perceived as a European phenomenon and until the 1980s, Yad Vashem did not mention North Africa in the Holocaust. In the Eichmann trial in 1961 there was only one session on Salonika by survivor Yitzhak Nehama and no inclusion of Bulgaria in the trial, despite 12,000 Jews being sent by Bulgaria to Treblinka for annihilation. Tunisia was omitted even though survivors offered to testify. Also, there was no mention of Libya despite Mussolini sending Jews for forced labor for 13 months in Libya, deporting Jews to Italy, and also to concentration camps in Europe in Austria and to Bergen Belsen (Yablonka 2016: 84–99). A man who was part of the technical team that made the glass cage for the Nazi criminal Eichmann for the trial was a Libyan Jew, Tzion Levi of Tripoli, who was prisoner in Bergen Belsen, and he wondered why he could not testify in the trial (Ibid.: 96). — Y. Kerem, Etnografia Kunstkamera
I’m old enough to remember the John Demanjuk trial in Israel in the late 1980s. The story exploded onto the news and dominated the headlines in North America for quite some time. At the time Ashkenazi Jewish Nazi hunters remained hot on the trail, seeking accountability for the suffering of the Nazi death machine and tracking down all ran away, dodging justice and accountability. The nice Nazi walked out of Spandau Prison and eventually found himself on a Donahue Talk Show. The Nazis cast a long shadow that reached well past the 1980s. In my memory I can see the ugly crying and the emotional reactions to Demanjuk of Holocaust survivors. After a very intense and traumatising experience, the accusation turned out false.
Looking back at this time with my 56 year old self, I feel quite turned off that such incredible suffering and traumatic survival became the target of exploitation of those who chose to serve human vengeance. In the world of trial research, how does this happen, how does confirmation bias become a wall shutting out the machinations of truth, accountability, and reconciliation? According to Sephardic Jewish historian Yitzhak Karem, the Demanjuk trial research did not include Sephardic witnesses or relatives of Jews annihilated in Treblinka. The trial research was prepared by Hebrew University law students, who were interns at the Israel Justice Ministry, and had no historical background, writes Karem.
What of the Sephardi and Mizrahi Holocaust story? Where do they fold into the larger story of the Shoah for The Diaspora Jew? Ashkenazim have for too long sucked all the air from the room called Holocaust memorial, eclipsing the stories of Sephardim and Mizrahim. Below I have tried to capture a flavour of what Jewish communities in the Balkans and Southeast Europe and Maghreb faced. I will include Iraq here because I consider the Farhud part of the event we know as the Shoah, Farhud being instigated by Nazi influences mingled with Islamist ones. This could be more extensive, in fact it’s really worthy of its own book, and I am open to offers.
BULGARIA. King Boris III of Bulgaria positioned himself as an ally of the Jewish people, when, in reality we can justly accuse his Bulgarian fascist regime of ethnic cleansing, imposing illiberal restrictions on its Jewish population, collaborating and scheming to deport a significant numbers of Jews to Nazi concentration camps, engineering the mass murder of almost 12,000 Jews in the Bulgarian-occupied areas of Thrace and Macedonia and the city of Pirot, thereby devastating the very old Greek Jewish communities, which had roots from the times of the Babylonian exile.
In December 1940, the Law for the Defense of the Nation defined several categories of individuals considered to be “of Jewish origin.” Jews with Bulgarian citizenship who had converted to Christianity or had married non-Jews before September 1, 1940 (Art. 33, Para. 1) or were baptized before the law took effect (Art. 33, Para. 2) were not defined as Jews. Further, some anti-Jewish regulations did not apply to Jews with military honors, volunteer veterans, invalids, or war orphans (Art. 33, Para. 2). However, these distinctions tended to fade as the grip of anti-Jewish policies slowly tightened during the war. The decree-law of August 26, 1942, which was – among other goals--intended to facilitate identification by the administration and the police, extended the parameters of Jewishness by adopting a bewilderingly complex definition. “Persons of Jewish origin” henceforth encompassed anyone who, “independently of their citizenship or religion,” had at least one parent or three grandparents of the Jewish faith, or at least one Jewish grandparent and another secondary ancestor who had adopted Judaism (Article 8). — Nadège Ragaru, 2017
As Ragaru rightly notes in her piece, it’s important to consider the wiggle room Bulgaria had in negotiating with Germany. That said, Bulgarian state archives do reveal that government officials actively participated in rounding up Jews for transport, for ethnic cleansing, for extermination. All the regulations and laws sought to more easily identify Jews for state persecution and elimination. Bulgaria state officials condemned thousands and thousands of Sephardi Jews to their death and the state of Bulgaria has yet to take responsibility for its crime of mass murdering Jews.
The Bulgarian National Protection Laws emerged from the Nuremberg Race Laws
The Laws sought to marginalise Jews from society socially, economically, in every way possible.
Laws governed the names Jews could take, preventing them becoming Bulgarian citizens.
Laws prevented inter-marriages with Jews.
Laws prevented Jews from holding public office.
Laws implemented quotas in professions, publishing and the arts, health, banking, arms trades.
Laws required that Jews declare all their assets and property.
Laws required that Jews report any changes of residence.
HUNGARY. Hungarian Jews were largely Ashkenazi and history has documented their story well and fairly and widely, so I only include it here because it’s important to understand the situation facing Hungarian Jewish leaders and anyone living through that time — in light of the horrible case of Rezso Kasztner.
Over the course of 56 days the Nazi government of Hungary transported nearly half a million Jews in 147 trains.10 Each train comprised of 40 to 50 cattle cars, each individual train car stuffed with 80 to 100 humans, one bucket of water to drink and one bucket to toilet in and no fresh air. Nazis forced Jews to collect their tefillin and talitot and burn them. Pause and take the gravity of those number in and pause and contemplate the deliberate and calculated and planned cruelty of the Nazis.
In Hungary alone, the Nazis killed one and half times as many Jews as entirety of Canadian Jewry. They killed the equivalent of the entire Jewish population of Pennsylvania or New Jersey, or Brooklyn. Think about what the numbers of mass industrial murders of Jews in Hungary alone means. Think about it in meaningful terms for your life. Get this, fam. Get it.
Get this so hard you will never again abuse the terms Nazi or Kapo or Holocaust again, get it so hard you will never ever use the Holocaust as a rhetorical device in your political discourse.
It is fcuking important that you get this now, fam.
The entire world is not a fcuking Hollywood Reality TV show for you to pick apart and rate like you are some Siskel & Ebert hot shot cultural critic.
Do a wee exercise, put the numbers of murdered Jews in terms you can relate to so hard the realisation will make you stand up and shout HOLY FCUK so loud your cats run from the room.
Here, I will help you fam, I will put this in some familiar North American terms so everyone can understand this is serious sh1t and not your Geopolitical Porn whatever it is you fcukrs think it is.
In Hungary alone, during a period of 56 days in spring of 1944, from approximately Mother’s day to Independence Day, the Nazis disappeared 435K Jews — this is:
the size of the population Minneapolis or Oakland
approximately SEVEN TIMES the size of the population of Andes, NY EVERY DAY FOR 56 DAYS
84 percent of the population of Vancouver City
one half of the population of Westchester County, NY.
Imagine Jewish community leaders and organisers literally bargaining with men who want to kill them, but not before the killers extract every penny and material asset they can.
An agreement was reached that 1,684 Jews would be spared for a ransom of $1,000 per head, put on a train, and given safe passage to neutral Switzerland. Most of the passengers could not raise the funds themselves, so Kasztner auctioned off 150 seats to wealthy Jews in order to pay for the others. — Zekelman Holocaust Center
Imagine having to play nice with and appease the psychopathic mass murdering Nazis, who seem unsettlingly nice and with whom you must have drinks and play poker like everything is fine, in order save lives. Imagine knowing that Europe is bleeding Jewry at an alarming rate and you can never do enough no matter if you do more than enough. No one believes it’s happening. You barely believe it. The world doesn’t believe it. Like now with the October 7th pogrom.
Imagine it is you.
Imagine the tyranny of choicelessness tests us and we mostly fail and metamorphose into hypocrites. See above for the story of Teitelbaum, Satmar Rebbe, a noted anti-Zionist.
Over the period of the second world war, Hungary had an increasingly Jew-hating and fascist government that sought to curry favour with Nazi Germany, in exchange for land and the usual things men bargain and sell their souls and kill each other’s children over. The race laws happened in four stages, each one seeking to further marginalise Jews from society.
Jews forced to wear an identifying badge.
Jews isolated and sequestered, prevented from having radios and telephones, so they cannot communicate or receive information.
Jews removed from professional life.
Jews barred from participating in the economy.
Jews neighbourhoods restricted
Men aged 16-60 were recruited for forced labor.
Aryanisation of Jewish businesses and financial assets and Jewish banks were blocked.
In spring of 1944, nearly half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered by mass executions.
From 1943 to 1944 Jewish councils were established throughout Hungary, with a central council established in Budapest. Communities elected members to be on the councils, the Nazis approved of the selections. The Nazis crafted their eradication of the Jewish people with such cruel and precise psychological warfare, even choosing to force the Jewish people’s own leaders to carry out the slow and painful and horrific mass industrial scale murder of their people. As the aryanisation of Jewish property and proceeded Jews found themselves forced into liquidation ghettos by mid-April, from which point Nazis forced Jews onto cattle trains and deported to them their mass murder.
Throughout spring of 1944 Razso Kasztner, Joel Brand, and other members of the Relief and Rescue Committee of Budapest began negotiating with the SS to save lives. Kasztner did not have a position on any Jewish Council, he functioned as a rescue worker, so he did not have an official capacity to warn the Jewish community regarding reports he received about Auschwitz.
“The trial quickly turned into an attack on Kastner for collaborating with the Nazis and concealing information about the Final Solution for the Jews of Hungary.” — Center for Israel Education
Um, yeah however many prominent rabbinical figures concealed information from their followers, to use the language of the accusers. Rumours circulated, stories of extermination circulated amongst leadership and that includes rabbinical leadership. History tells us uncomfortable truths. To judge the characters in the difficult stories at this point in our human journey, from this distance, seems self serving and foolish.
He did not have an official position to warn the Jews about the dangers of deportation. Kasztner and many leading Jews in Hungary apparently received a report from Slovakia that detailed the level of murder at Auschwitz … many other leaders did not believe it … the report was compelling enough for Kasztner to become suspicious and concerned about the fate of the Jews being deported … he asked younger members of a nearby Zionist group to span out through Hungary and inform the Jews that deportation was dangerous and could lead to their death. The Jewish Councils simply did not believe them. Kasztner could have tried to speak to the Councils directly, but it's doubtful they would have believed his claims. — Matt Hellfrich, York Dispatch
At the same time, he [Teitelman, Grand Satmar Rebbe] thwarted all attempts at cooperation between the heads of the Orthodox communities and the Zionist organizations, which could have helped to rescue them. He failed to set a personal example and rejected his associates’ advice to prepare a hiding place or attempt to cross the border to Romania. Had he done so, some of his Hasidim may have followed his example and thus survived.
"Let us not go as sheep to the slaughter!" — Abba Kovner, 1942
When put to the test, he chose to save himself clandestinely after his own congregation had already been incarcerated in ghettos and to abandon his followers in the time of their harshest adversity. His conduct stands in stark contrast to that of other rabbis in his vicinity, many of whom rejected pleas to save themselves and accompanied their congregations to the transport trains, the extermination camps, and in some cases even into the gas chambers. — Menachem Keren-Kratz, in Tablet 2014
Haredi historiography reveals the complexity and intricacy of the human condition at the time of the Shoah, which is the calculated and systematic and methodical industrial level attack on European Jewry.
YUGOSLAVIA :: SERBIA CROATIA BOSNIA HERZEGOVINA. Occupied by Germany in 1941. Of the 80,000 Jews Nazis murdered 60,000. According to the US State Department the Vatican had an observer in Croatia and knew about the mass murders, as did US and British leaders. The Croatian state blocked conversions to Catholicism based upon race. Switzerland held the Ustasha treasury in its banking system via deposits in 1944. Funds would have included liquidated Jewish assets. government. In Croatia, Serbs were killed in their villages and towns, usually by being shot, stabbed or burned to death in their own homes and/or Orthodox Churches. Alongside these pogroms, hundreds of Serbian Orthodox clergy were also deported to Serbia or murdered, and numerous Serbian Orthodox churches were destroyed, according to Nevenko Bartulin. Nazis used gas vans to exterminate Jews.
I swear by God almighty and everything which is sacred to me, that I shall follow the Ustaša principles and will submit to its regulations and will unconditionally perform all decrees of Ustaša leadership, that I shall, every secret confined to me keep strictly to myself and never tell anyone anything.
I swear that I shall fight within the Ustaša ranks for the achievement of the independent Croatian state and will do everything which the leadership decrees.
If I am to violate this oath, I am to be, by the Ustaša regulations, punished by the death sentence.
So help me God. Amen. — oath which all Ustaša members had to swear
On March 18, 1942, a Nazi gas van pulled up in front of the Jewish hospital of Belgrade, and for the first time in Serbia was used on Jewish citizens. This van and others that followed killed everyone within the hospital — patients, nurses, and doctors, all of whom were Jews. The Nazis invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941 and immediately fired all Jewish health care workers. Since it was forbidden for them to practice in the public health care facilities, in May 1941 a Jewish hospital was opened in the building of the Jewish Women’s Society. — Three Promises
Jews forced to wear an identifying badge
Jews removed them from professional life
Jews neighbourhoods restricted
Men aged 16-60 were recruited for forced labor
Aryanisation of Jewish businesses and financial assets and Jewish banks were blocked.
From 1941-1942, most of Serbia’s Jews were murdered by mass executions, gas vans, and starvation. Only 1,500 Serbian Jews survived.
In Bosnia Croatia, Jews were persecuted as part of that fascist Catholic pro-German state’s Ustasa regime general genocide of foreigners and minorities.
By the end of 1941 two-third of Croatia’s Jews had been imprisoned and many were later killed by the government.
Many Jews ended up deported to Auschwitz and other concentration camps in eastern Europe.
The gun, revolver, bomb and the infernal machine are the idols which shall bring back the land to the peasant, the bread to the worker and the freedom to Croatia … those are the bells which shall be a harbinger of a new dawn and of the resurrection of the independent Croatian state. — Ante Pavelić, 1932
VICHY REGIME :: FRANCE AND MAGHREB
Under Vichy law, to be French meant not only that one had met the standard minimum criteria for citizenship but also and primarily that one could legally "prove" that one was not Jewish. "Rational" or "State Anti-Semitism" was thus the weapon Vichy France used to defend itself against what it projected as the threat to its national identity and integrity posed in principle by all inassimilable foreigners, but especially by Jews. Rather than continue to struggle militarily with its German occupiers, Vichy France waged a symbolic, economic, cultural, and political war against the Jews in order to enhance its own national status and solidify its identity.
The less "Jewish" France became, the more "French" it allegedly would be.
Whether it was occupied by German troops or not, it would once again, at least in the political imagination of Vichy, be restored to itself. (David Carroll 1998, p 39)
The Vichy Regime ruled France and territories (Maghreb includes Algeria + Morocco + Tunisia) with its racist antisemitic policies a full 40 years after the Dreyfus Affair rocked France. In case anyone wants to blame this phenomenon solely on the Germans, know that reasoning represents naïveté and a failure to appreciate the full historical facts, in addition to a failure to appreciate the full extent of antisemitism in the human world. France sent 75K Jews to extermination and forced labour concentration camps under Vichy Regime rule.
Laws enacted in both occupied and unoccupied France curtailed the civil rights of Jews and expropriated their property.
In October 1940, the Vichy government enacted the first Law on the Status of the Jews, which defined who was Jewish and precluded Jews from civil and military service and from the education, media, and cinema sectors.
The Nazi German military command in occupied France began a process of economic “Aryanisation,” including confiscating Jewish‑owned assets.
An October 1940 military decree defined Jewish-owned firms and established the appointment of provisional administrators for those firms.
A February 1941 French law allowed the administrators to sell firms without the permission of the Jewish owners.
A further German decree in April 1941 and corresponding French law further restricted occupations available to Jews (prohibiting trade and banking, among others) and expanded the scope of confiscation.
A series of French laws from June to December of 1941, including a second Jewish Status Law, expanded many of these restrictions to unoccupied France.11
ALGERIA. With the implementation of the Vichy Regime’s race laws, Algerian Jews became stateless overnight. The Algerian authorities did not wait for orders for their Vichy Regime overlords, they set to work on their task eliminating Jews and their influence from commerce and industry, called the Aryanisation of Jewish Property.
In Algeria, the authorities did not wait for orders from Vichy to exercise the arbitrariness of which the Jews were victims since on June 27, 1941, the Prefect of Algiers, Pierre Pagès, initiated the procedure followed by the Permanent Military Tribunal of Algiers to order the arrest of sixteen Jewish notables who happened to be the most important merchants of Algiers, Oran and Constantine, and the confiscation of their property, subject to the so-called Aryanization law.
Messrs. Adjadje Mardochée, Amselek Albert, Douïeb Élie, Douïeb Lucien, Ghenassia Édouard, Gozlan Élie, Hamou Moïse, Hassoun Joseph (Maurice), Krief (Acrif) Isaac, Lévy David, Morali Salomon, Nathan Félix, Saada Salomon, Smadja Georges, Temime Isaac were arrested, handcuffed and sent separately to forced residence in the most remote oases of the Sahara (Tabelbala, Tindouf, Beni-Abbès, Adrar, Timimoun, Biskra, El Oued, Ghardaïa, Laghouat, Ouargla, Touggourt, El Goléa, In-Salah, etc.).
— Jacob Oliel, Internment Camps in Algeria, 1941-44
The Vichy Regime treated Algeria like a penal colony. Types of internment camps included Labour camps, deportation camps, isolation camps, political camps, disciplinary camps. The state scattered labour camps throughout the land to provide a easy and cheap and abundant source of labour. Deportation camps housed refractory internees, rebels, and hotheads, isolation camps housed escapees, political camps housed people labelled "political", and therefore undesirable in mainland France: a majority of foreigners, including many Jews and Spanish refugees, communists (extremists considered dangerous for the influence they could have intellectually or socially on the population), trade unionists, disciplinary camps housed the political prisoners considered most dangerous and provided the most brutal treatment to prisoners. Dysentery struck half the prisoners, who also had a myriad of wounds and infections and fevers—chronically untreated. Most Dangerous referred to the likelihood that they could influence public opinion in a way that undermined the Machiavellian aka political interests of regime or the state.
“Our clothes were in rags, our shoes worn out, our tents half torn; an infernal heat made life impossible for us; lice were swarming. We all had infected wounds on our arms and legs, but only a pitiful quantity of medicines and bandages was made available to us …” —Michel Golski, A French Buchenwald under the reign of the Marshal, Paris, Fanlac, 1945, p. 14.
“No real criticism of those in charge or of the living conditions of the internees was noted in the reports of the delegates of the International Red Cross, the head nurse or delegate of the French Red Cross, or the nurses of the French Red Cross, who inspected several of the camps.” — Jacob Oliel
“In the camps, the military regime in force in southern Algeria and the Sahara encouraged the abuse of power and cruelty of a few zealous, particularly hateful, perverse and sadistic officials, who were guaranteed impunity.” — Jacob Oliel, ibid
Then, in 1941, during the Nazi Pogrom, as now, in 2025, during the Hamas Pogrom, Civilians or military, doctors or inspectors of the International Red Cross … were duped or accomplices. Personally I think the author offers an overly merciful assessment by included duped as a possibility.
MOROCCO. Jews did not have citizenship in Morocco, so they did not suffer the humiliation of loss of citizenship. Authorities enforced anti-Jewish laws strictly and zealously. Morocco (and also Tunisia) defined Jews as practise of faith, not ancestry. So Jews who converted to Christianity or Islam were not targeted as Jews by the anti-Semitic laws in Morocco and they were targeted as Jews in Algeria. Yoram Haimi recently discovered that hundreds of Jews exterminated at Sobibor Death Camp in Poland came from North Africa. Messasud Aknine, born in Tangier, Morocco in 1870, was one of them. David Aknine … born in 1900 in Tlemcen, Algeria … was [also] killed at Sobibor in 1943. Such was also the fate of Shalom Levy from Boufarik, Algeria, whose ID tag was also unearthed by Haimi. Sultan Muhammad V provided a measure of protection for Moroccan Jews. Approximately 2100 Jews experienced internment in camps throughout Morocco.
TUNISIA. A territory under the control of the Vichy Regime, and also the only one to encounter German Nazis, Tunisian Jews faced a different experience than other Jews in the Meghreb. The Tunisia government did not want to implement race laws. Esteva did not believe the Vichy laws morally sound and delayed their enforcement as long as he could. Ultimately he buckled under pressure. Conditions changed for Tunisia Jews when the Nazis captured Tunisia for 6 months in 1942/3. Nazis forced 5000 men into 32 labour camps scattered throughout the country. Many Tunisian Jews who had travelled or moved to Europe ended up in concentration and labour death camps and outright human liquidation centres. For example, Nazis detained Messaoud Hai Victor Perez, a Tunisian boxer, in the Drancy internment camp and deported him to Auschwitz. Forced by the SS to participate in several boxing matches in Auschwitz, he was later killed during a death march on January 21, 1945, after trying to share bread with his fellow inmates.
From the Montreal Holocaust Museum: The Jewish community of Tunisia has existed since the second century BCE, dating back to Carthage. The Jewish community of Tunis gradually increased during the 11th century, but the Almohad conquest in the 12th century interrupted this growth. After seizing Tunis, the Almohad Caliph Abd al-Mu’min forced both Jews and Christians to convert to Islam. However, during the 13th century, the Hafsid dynasty restored the status of dhimmi (status accorded to non-Muslims under which they had to pay a tax to the Muslim state for protection) to Jews and Christians. Jews were able to regroup in communities and openly practice their religion again. Some returned to the city of Tunis and resettled in the Hara, a district reserved for the Jewish community. The establishment of the French protectorate in 1881 improved the situation of the Jewish community, although discriminatory episodes still occurred. With the French revolutionary promise of Liberté, égalité, and fraternité, many Tunisian Jews began identifying with French culture in the hope that their inferior status as dhimmi could improve with the French protectorate. Nevertheless, their situation shifted drastically in 1940 when the Vichy regime came to power.
LIBYA. Under Italian control since the end of WW1, and under the control of the fascist Nazi-sympathising Mussolini regime since 1922. The Italian regime perpetrated numerous humans rights violations, some egregious crimes against humanity involving Bedouins and brutally crushing uprisings of native Libyans resisting Italian settlers coming to populate the land at Mussolini’s bidding. For Jews conditions grew increasingly worse throughout the 1920s and into the 30s, culminating in the Manifesto of Race in 1938.
In 1942 the Germans entered Libya and sent 2600 Jews to a forced labour concentration camp in Giado, which was liberated by the British when they took Libya the second time. Libyan Jews with British passports were sent to Europe, where they languished in detention centres until the Nazis occupied Italy, then they transferred to Libya Jews to Bergen Belsen Camp.
Giado (or Jado), on the border of the desert, 235 kilometers south of Tripoli, was the most brutal of the camps in Libya. Jado was a former army camp, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Its commandants were Italian, and the guards were Italian and Arab policemen. By June, 1942, the Italians had deported, in stages, a total of 2,584 Jews to Jado; all but 47 of them were Libyan Jews. Living conditions in the camp were miserable. The camp was overcrowded – tens of families slept in a space of four meters and separated only by bedding and blankets. Daily food rations consisted of a few grams of rice, oil, sugar and coffee substitute. Men over the age of 18 were sent out everyday to forced labor. Water shortages, malnutrition, overcrowding, and filth intensified the spread of contagious diseases. Inmates buried the dead in a cemetery on a hill outside the camp which had been an ancient Jewish cemetery. On top of this wretched existence, the Italian guards of the camp enjoyed humiliating the Jews. Out of the almost 2,600 Jews sent to Jado, 562 Jews died of weakness and hunger, and especially from typhoid fever and typhus.4 This was the highest number of Jewish victims in Islamic countries during World War II.
In January 1943, the camp guards left. Several weeks later, British soldiers arrived, but many of the prisoners could not be moved due to their poor physical condition. The first Jews returned to their homes from Jado in the spring of 1943, and and the last group of prisoners only left Jado in October, 1943. — Yad Vashem
The Italian Manifesto on Race emerged from the Nuremberg Race Laws
The Laws sought to marginalise Jews from society socially, economically—in every way possible.
Laws prevented inter-marriages with Jews.
Laws prevented Jews from holding public office.
Laws implemented quotas in professions, publishing and the arts, health, banking, arms trades.
Laws required that Jews declare all their assets and property, which was confiscated.
Laws required that Jews report any changes of residence and assets and other details per regular census.
Foreign Jews were forbidden to settle in Italy, Libya or in the colonial possessions of the Aegean.
The Italian citizenship granted to Jewish foreigners after January 1,1919 was revoked, and they were required to leave within six months.
Jews were banned from attending all education institutions.
Jewish businesses were “Aryanized” (Jewish businesses confiscated by non-Jews).
Jews were forbidden to employ non-Jewish Italian domestics.
Jews were forbidden to serve in the military.
GREECE (Salonika | Ioninna | Kasparia | Rhodes + Kos). In April 1941 Germany invaded Greece and occupied Thessaloniki. Nazis wasted no time implementing Nuremberg Race Laws. In July 1942 Nazis rounded up 9000 Jewish men of conscription age in Elftherias Square and forced them to violate Shabbat by performing calisthenics. Men were attacked by dogs when they collapsed, hosed with water, kicked and beaten, many sustained critical injuries and died. Actresses cheered from balconies of nearby buildings, Greek citizen passersby appeared indifferent. The Jewish community in Salonika could trace its roots to the 4th century. Thousands of men languished in forced labour camps, where many died of disease and exposure. Figures vary, Nazis killed an estimated 50,000 of the Jews living in Salonika, leaving a couple thousand survivors.
The Jewish communities of Greece are amongst the oldest in Europe, dating back more than 2,000 years. Of the estimated 71,600 Jews who lived in Greece at the time of the 1941 Nazi invasion, at least 58,885 perished in the Holocaust. Most Jews lived in Thessaloniki, formerly known as Salonika, which had been the religious and cultural hub for Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Between March and early June 1943, the Germans deported 48,974 Jews, most from Salonika, to Auschwitz where nearly all perished. In addition, Bulgarian authorities deported more than 4,000 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied parts of Greece to Treblinka. — US State Department
In 1943 control of Ioninna passed from Italy to Germany. The SS Officer who suppressed the Warsaw Ghetto became chief of police in Ioninna. He ordered all Jews to register or face elimination. Ultimately, all Jews ended up marked for extermination. A few escaped by bribing their way out and the worked for the resistance til the war ended. Most endured the lengthy horrible cattle car ride, the hardship of which itself killed many. In late 1943 Nazis liquidated the Jewish community in Castoria, home of 11th century Talmudist Tobiah ben Eliezer. The Kastorian Jewish community numbered 900 in 1928, and dwindled to 35 in 1948. In April 1944 Nazis rounded up 1960 of the 2000 Jews in Ioninna and transported them to their deaths in auschwitz-birkenau.
The arrested leaders managed to smuggle a letter out of prison calling for the Jews to flee the city, but the deputy head of the community, Shabetai Kabeli, claimed that the Germans would not harm the Jews as long as the Jews provided them with money and supplies. Kabeli went to parents whose sons had fled the city to join the underground and convinced them to persuade their sons to return, claiming they were in fact collaborating with the Communist underground, thereby endangering the entire community. Only a very few Jews fled into the mountains, among them the four members of the Matsa family. Others obtained false papers, with the help of Greeks such as Father Athanasius, and succeeded in joining the partisans or reaching Athens. Some Christian residents of Ioannina hid Jews in their homes. Some of the leaders of the Jewish community dug a tunnel under the old synagogue in the ancient Jewish quarter, in which they buried all the Torah scrolls, the ornamental curtains, and the ritual items. — Yad Vashem
From Larissa the Jews of Ioannina were deported to Auschwitz and murdered en masse. Bulgaria occupied parts of Greece and Jews in those regions ended up in Treblinka or some other death camp. Police descended on Jewish neighbourhoods in the wee hours of the night, when the army would seal off the streets and authorities would raid homes, and cart Jews off to their deaths. This scenario played itself out countless times across continental Europe and the Maghreb for several years, the lust for Jewish blood never slowed and the apathy never failed and the cycle of hate and dehumanisation never ceased to perpetuate itself until somehow exhausted or violently ended.
On July 18, 1944, the male Jews of Rhodes, age 16 and older, were ordered by the German military commanders to appear the following morning with their identity cards and work permits at the Air Force Command Center. The tactic of requiring the work permits tricked the Jews into thinking they were summoned to be sent for a work camp. The next morning after the Jewish men were assembled, they were brutalized and threatened by the German soldiers who proceeded to take away the identity cards and work permits and herded the Jews into the basement of the building.
On July 19th, the remaining Jewish women and children were also ordered to appear the following day with their valuables under a threat of death. They had no choice but to obey, and once entrapped, their belongings were stripped away. — Rhodes Jewish Museum
On July 23rd, the 1,673 Jews were ordered to march to the port where they boarded onto three crowded boats.
IRAQ. Britain and the UN granted Iraq its independence, going to great lengths as per usual to appease the Arabs and Islamists at the expense of the Jews and even themselves, the Brits and Western Europeans themselves. Call it suicidal empathy, if you want. Naturally, once the Arabists gained hegemony in governance, they collaborated with the Axis powers. As a result, the coup and the Farhud happened. Scroll up to look at Shlomo Mansour’s photo and a memory he had of the Farhud. Mansour is a Sephardi name, incidentally. Less likely Arab, more likely Aramaic. Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, was once the common language of the region, but Arabic largely replaced it after the 7th century Muslim conquests, says Shadi Khalloul, first person to receive the new Aramaic ethnicity offered by the state of Israel.
The Farhud represents a significant turning point because from it, Islamonazis learned that they can undermine an independent Arab majority state in the Middle East. This made a cool testing ground for Hajj Amin and the cultish brand of nationalism he inspired. A thriving Jewish community with roots from the Babylonian exile collapse in the 1940s and never recovered because of the hatred of men like Hajj Amin and because of the selfish arrogant stupidity of men like Herbert Samuel.
One of those challenges was becoming a hotbed of World War II activities. Despite being granted independence by the UK in 1932, Iraq still hosted two large British military bases, which Germany considered to be a threat to its interests and aspirations in the region. Radio Berlin launched its Arabic language service in 1939 and it immediately started in on manipulating Arabist sentiments and promoting Nazism and anti-Semitism. Fritz Grobba, former German ambassador to Iraq, and exiled Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, were conspiring to inflame the Muslim majority in Iraq against the Jewish community and pro-British politicians. Their efforts came to fruition in April 1941 when four Iraqi officers, known as the “Golden Square,” carried out a coup to install Rashid A. al-Gaylani, a strident supporter of the Axis powers, as prime minister. The new government, however, lasted for a very short time. Gaylani fled to Berlin, where he was received by Adolf Hitler.—Ali Shakir
“ … in his message to Mussolini in the summer of 1940 … [Hajj Amin] claimed the “right” of the Arabs at large to solve the Jewish problem in their own lands in line with Axis practices in Europe. This was later translated into his active role in Iraq – where he was involved not only in the Kailani coup but also in inciting for the “Farhud” (pogrom) of June 1941 … With his introduction to Himmler, [Hajj Amin] became actively involved in the grotesque campaign against European and Slavic Jews in the Final Solution.” —Col. (res.) Dr. Eran Lerman 2015 via BESA Centre Bar Ilan University
Question: What is the Farhud?
Answer: It’s an Arabic word that means violent dispossession.
The Farhud happened because Muslims in Baghdad took the failed coup of April 1941 quite badly, having had intense exposure to anti-Jewish and anti-British pro-Nazi pro-Islamist propaganda via Radio Berlin. On June 1st, hell broke loose for the Jewish community of Baghdad, when angry Muslim rioters killed 175 Jews, injured 1000, and robbed and destroyed 900 Jewish homes. Many Jewish girls were raped and children maimed in front of their families. (Shakir, 2021) Sound familiar, fam? Scroll up and look at Shlomo again. Think about the sh1t storm he survived as a wee boy. Then think about the October 7th pogrom that dragged him to the fires of psychological warfare++ hell and death in Gaza.12
Question :: Who was the Sinwar-analogue of the Farhud pogrom?
Answer :: Hajj Amin al Husayni aka the Grand Mufti.
Question :: How did he gain such a position of power and influence?
Answer :: The British appointed him, a candid enemy rather than a renegade friend, Herbert Samuel and Hajj Amin agreed.
The words and political decisions of Herbert Samuel reveal the mindset of imperial leadership of the era and perhaps give us some insight into the motives for modern-day geopolitics and foreign policy, who knowingly appointed a convicted felon13, pardoned for political purposes, of course, Jews very often are extremely irritating people … Palestine’s Arabs … are “fissiparous” — fractious — and “torn by dissensions, based largely upon family connections — [especially] the Husseinis and the Nashashibis. (Oren Kessler, Times of Israel, 2023)
Hajj Amin “… was not a minor figure in the history of the Palestinian people: he was their predominant leader for more than a generation. His aggressive incitement as to Jewish designs on the Temple Mount still reverberates today; and his party’s brutal repression of the more moderate Opposition (Mu’aradah) in the late 30’s sealed off any prospect of a compromise based on partition, and set the stage for the tragedies which followed. He was also unique in retaining his position of leadership after 1945, despite his well-known association with the Nazis.” (Lehman 2015)
How do we see Hajj Amin today, in the post October 7th world?
addictive obsession with Al Aqsa and Free Jerusalem rhetoric
river to sea khaybar khaybar chanting en masse
use of nazi imagery and embracing nazi ideology
invoking islamophobia and deploying DARVO rhetorical devices with the Jewish community and the British people vis a vis historical and imperial geopolitics in the ongoing psychological warfare of the Saracens versus the Crusaders
"I watched people killing at least four to five Jews in front of me," Abudia says. "Every car that passed by was stopped by the mob that pulled Jews out and killed them. I heard they killed 20 to 25 people in the airport area."
Abudia and the others who experienced the two days of horror will never forget standing on the rooftops of their houses as the violence started on the first night.
For many, the first warning was a dull orange glow that appeared over the very heart of the city center where the Jewish and Muslim communities abutted. Then came distant screams and banging, which grew louder as looters moved deeper into the Jewish neighborhoods. Finally, up close, there was the horrifying sight of the neighbors desperately trying to leap with their children to an adjoining rooftop as armed men broke down their doors.
"That night we heard screams coming out of the houses of Jews," recalls Nassim al-Qazzaz, another survivor who now lives in Israel. "They were killed and their homes were pillaged. This continued for less than 24 hours." — Remembering the Farhud, June 2010, RFE, Karam Mnashe and Charles Recknagel
Hajj Amin never accounted for his crimes, he always managed to flee with help, like many of the worst nazis and terrorists have done and continue to do, on the decision of well meaning yet myopic leaders and negotiators who repeat history because they cannot break out of the hostile and damning cycle of manipulation and deception and hate into which Hitler and Himmler and Hajj Amin and Hamas have plunged us all.
Religious people believe humans exist as creations in g-d’s image, all of us, each of us. Yet, when we strip away the finery of religious rhetoric, many of us hate each other, and therefore, we really hate G-d, don’t we? How can any of us claim to love G-d and at the same time hate humanity, a creation made in the image of the Universal Programmer? The Creator made the ones whom we have othered.
When you love your ma and hate your sister, you make an effort to love your sister for the sake of your ma, because you know it means everything to her to see you get along and not throttle one another. I struggled to love my sisters sometimes and ultimately did because I knew and understood how it meant everything our ma for me to do that difficult thing for her. When I learned about my sister and saw how she was like my ma whom I adored and, surprisingly a lot like me, then it was easier to love the insufferable things about her I find grating.
We are called to worship The Divine in this way, by accepting and loving The Other. I never said it was easy or fun. Ride that b1tch anyway. Note, you can begin with curbing your compulsion to chant inflammatory aggressive slogans intended to keep people in fight or flight mode. Begin by curbing your enthusiasm for dehumanising as a form of human interaction. Begin by loving yourself enough to hooman like you do. The road to peace is the vagus nerve.
Secular people claim that a unified god doesn’t exist. In denying One G-d you muppets deny any Divine moral objective. Why employ the language of The Divine in your discourse about your moral code. Why? You chose relative truth, didn’t you? There’s objective truth and therefore objective morality or there is not. Pick one, you can’t have both. G-d gave you intellect for a reason, use it. She gave me one and I refuse to stop using it because it makes you uncomfortable, mmmkay?? Haha. Level up.
May we be wiser. May we understand and know the Diaspora Jew. May we know the Jewish people more fully and appreciate their profound contribution to humanity. May we in the Jewish world know that Sephardi Jews and Mizrahi Jews have a story and a place in the history of Jewish suffering and triumph and no type of Jew has redder blood than any other. The human identity-driven hierarchy of suffering serves ego not g-d.
Writing this proved profound and intense— a deeply personal experience. I made new discoveries I never imagined and they plunged me into a keening sadness for the unspeakable loss to creation. Thousands of humans, snuffed out in methodical and deliberate and industrial manner, slowly and calculated to inflict maximum psychological torment and physical pain. Across continental Europe. Across the Maghreb. Riots turned pogroms in British Mandate for Palestine. The Farhud that decimated the Jewish community in Babylon which became Iraq.
Eight decades after the horrors and archeological discoveries reveal new horrors, the reach of the Nazis and their collaborators goes beyond what anyone could imagine, despite all we know now.
ID tags of Sobibor victims discovered recently reveal that North African Jews died there, and it sheds new light on the Sephardi story of the holocaust, one not recognised until the 1980s. The Eichmann trial excluded Sephardi testimony, for example. The history of the Shoah remains a living breathing thing, it underscores the sacredness of speech—words will hurt me and you too and some other people whom, we have no idea whom! We possess immense power for destructive creation through our capacity for articulation and humbly influencing the hearts of other humans. Truly, we speak things into existence and we cannot unspeak them and in an eternity of regret we cannot fix what we broke in a single moment of weakness and fear and rage.
We create horrific plagues with our tongues, don’t we?
Speech is the power of creation, isn’t it?
G-d spoke the universe into creation, didn’t She?
Recall Parsha Vaera and the 7 plagues of destruction in that Parsha as a chiasm for the 7 days of creation and also as living symbols of the Divine traits of The Creator. 1. Chesed — kindness :: blood 2. Gevurah — severity :: frogs 3. Tiferet — beauty :: lice 4. Netzach — eternity :: wild beasts 5. Hod — glory :: disease 6. Yesod — foundation :: boils 7. Malchut — kingship :: hail.
Final Thoughts
Everything I write is for my children and grandchildren, these words become part any legacy I could leave them — I looked for my mother’s words after I knew she wouldn’t be able to write anymore and there’s never enough words and it’s a forever loss that her brilliance for writing and words died with her. It’s a mother’s job to pass on to her children and grandchildren her culture and oral tradition. That’s complicated because I belong nowhere and everywhere, so assimilating my oral tradition now becomes a life’s work and a labour of love.
The Shoah is a part of every human being’s story, Jew and gentile alike. The story of the diaspora Jew tells of exile and rejection, hope and triumph. Most of all it involves telling of impossible endurance and survival, it’s a story I would leave my children and grandchildren, as treasure.
I’ll end with a video about the story of the MS St Louis. The ship left Hamburg in May 1939 and returned in June 1939. The Americas refused nearly 1000 Jews, condemning at least 500 to extermination camps in Europe. Great Britain took some of the refugees and saved them—those who wished to go to England were saved from Nazis hunting them down.
Anyone choosing France or Holland likely never envisioned what the future held for them. The embryonic beginnings of the Final Solution began brewing in Hitler’s speeches at this time, 1939, as secret plans and quotas to execute them came to life on paper and in weak men’s imaginations. Himmler’s papers corroborate this — the Nazis began fantasizing amongst themselves about their morally driven campaign of mass murder in increasingly disturbing fashion at the time. Propaganda rendered the world complicit in its apathy. Imagine if the world found the will to care about Jews, would Hitler and his bitches feel so emboldened to commit mass murder of Jews?
As Bahya ibn Paquda wrote in Chovot HaLevavot, every decision you make has consequences you cannot imagine and you cannot fix everything you broke. The way to reconcile with Creator is to reconcile with your fellow humans. Yes, everyone has something to reconcile with their fellow humans, there is no such thing as not responsible for your own pathway to yourSelf—you are not without flaws and neither am I. My children and grandchildren, please do this thing for yourselves. Please lean in and across tribal lines and be defiant in your moral courageousness, and learn about a thing the world forgot and has tried to repeat in 21st century terms by using the language of post colonialism to rationalise its moral failure.
References available upon request.
Latin, translates literally to “cause without which not”, meaning absolutely necessary.
As readers know, my convention is to use female pronouns for g-d, however this is Lee’s writing, hence the male pronoun.
Specifically I mean polyvagal theory, the neurobiology of social connection and safety
From Rabbi David Mayaan’s translation.
The amygdala is the reptilian part of our brain and when it’s engaged we behave like alligators on two legs.
Recall, reader, that the US Government blocked the prosecution of Nazi war criminals and appeared not to notice a large swath of Goebbelsian Germans ended up in Nasser’s Egypt working in the Israel department of the Egyptian Information Ministry. Apparently they gave Nasser aid money and this congressional hearing discusses the situation of having given public American money to a Nazi level pan-Arab extremist holding power in Egypt. I have written about the escape of Nazis to Egypt in this publication previously.
Note genocidal policies refer to those which hasten the actual demonstrated (as in demographically by population numbers and not unverifiable emotion-based anecdotal tales) mass death of a group of a population that has experienced marginalisation from power locuses of society and has social capital.
Yes, The Orange Man’s proposal as he describes it amounts to this, purging a people from their homes because of a membership to a nationality. However, when you commit a pogrom of ethnic cleansing and then trot around the world singing khaybar khaybar river to the sea etc etc you are speaking and manifesting things into existence so perhaps think about how we got here rather than circlejerk the same old blood libel against Jews who are simply trying to exist.
Sinterklaas was a Greek Bishop named Saint Nicolas of Myra born in the 3rd century and instrumental in legitimising Christianity as an imperial religion. Sinterklaas became the Patron Saint of Children, Sailors, Thieves, the Falsely Accused, and more.
I consulted a few sources, they corroborate the numbers. Kassa guard statistics | Yad Vashem statistics
Sourced from US Department of State
Though Palestinians have no relation to Philistines of Biblical times, one cannot help notice Jews being hated and mocked and hunted and betrayed by their various enemies, who drag them off and subject them to all manner of horrible things, Joseph dragged off to Egypt, Samson dragged off to Gaza — you can’t help noticing that antisemitism simply mutates throughout history and we seem to always get the bug no matter how we say Never Again.
Hajj Amin was tried and convicted in absentia of inciting riots (a serious criminal offense aka felony) following the Nabi Musa riots in Jerusalem 1920.
From JCFA: “ … as thousands of Muslims returned in a procession from Nebi Musa to Jerusalem, Husseini fired up the crowd. The procession deteriorated into severe violence and on the way five Jews were murdered and 211 injured. Leading the procession itself was Husseini’s stepbrother, Mufti Kamel al-Husseini, who, in contrast to Amin, tried (unsuccessfully) to subdue the passions. The British issued an arrest warrant for Amin al-Husseini, who fled across the Jordan and from there to Damascus. In his absence he was given a military sentence of ten years’ imprisonment. Five months later, when Sir Herbert Samuel assumed the post of high commissioner, the exiled Haj Amin was granted a pardon.
When Husseini returned to Jerusalem he was received by the city’s Arabs as a hero, one who had dared rebel against the British and fight against the Jews.”