Home » Did you know that black people should never be accused of anti-Semitism?

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Did you know that black people should never be accused of anti-Semitism? — 54 Comments

  1. Babble about ‘racism’ and ‘anti-Semitism’ is 99% humbug and consists largely of status games played by gentry liberals and black chauvinists. This broad utters nothing in good faith and should be ignored if not spat upon.

  2. Nobody is more racist than a leftist
    They have such a low opinion of blacks that they believe it is their duty to protect them from standards.

    Because in their view blacks are lesser beings who can’t be expected to meet them.

    BTW Neo, I agree Islam is the far greater source of black anti-semitism. But since Muslims are another protected class they can’t bear any responsibility either.

    And perhaps we are garden variety Islamophobes for noticing the obvious link.

  3. How is that true? Obama was the first and only anti Semitic Prez that I recall. Somebody needs to clue that nutty woman . Nice hire here UNH.

  4. The idea that any group cannot be anti-Semitic or have any other kind of prejudice is in fact kind of racist. It is seeing them as something separate from the rest of the human race.

    The most anti-Semitic person I knew was Hispanic. He was overly proud of his pure Spanish blood on his father’s side. He believed that the Holocaust was God’s punishment for Christ’s death (which ignores the fact that the Roman’s had a hand in that.) He liked to brag his race was the most creative. (If there is a most creative race it’s probably the Jews. I say that as someone who is, to best of my knowledge, pure gentile.)

  5. Neo – I admire you greatly and always enjoy your writing. You have a gift of never speaking down to readers like me despite being highly cultured and most erudite. But for some reason you chose to devote significant time and keystrokes to the analysis of comments that gave rise to a more succinct response here: “Not only is Ms. Prescod-Weinstein a fool, she is clearly unaware that spouting gibberish like this makes it widely known. Poor woman!”
    She personifies a quote I heard often from my beloved late uncle John: “I’m not nearly educated enough to believe something so stupid as that”.

  6. Scott:

    I wish universities saw it that way.

    But unfortunately, this is the sort of thinking that’s become not just acceptable at universities, but pretty much standard and even required. It struck me as notable that this person is a physicist. I’ve noticed in the last couple of years that the requirements and demands of wokeness have now pervaded the sciences as well as the humanities. Gibberish it may be, but it’s the mode of thought in which generations are being instructed.

  7. “Black people who have developed anti-Semitic viewpoints have done it mostly for two reasons. The first is the usual resentment developed towards people who are sometimes or even often the shop owners and landlords in economically depressed neighborhoods in which a certain group (in this case, poorer black people) tends to live.” neo

    In black neighborhoods, Jewish, Korean, etc. shop owners and landlords who dare to make a profit, regardless of how minimal… are viewed as ‘exploiters’. Anything less than ‘free stuff’ is viewed as oppression.

    One universal among black racists is their entitlement attitude. The world owes them… everything. Which is a self-perpetuating spiral into failure.

  8. Matthew:

    I wonder if that guy knows that many Hispanics tend to have some level of Jewish DNA because of the converso phenomenon:

    …[W]e know that extremely large numbers of those Jews who had been forcibly converted in Spain and Portugal – referred to variously as Anousim, Marranos, Conversos and Crypto-Jews – fled the Iberian Peninsula to the New World during the Age of Discovery, beginning late in the 15th century…

    Now, unprecedented genetic research undertaken by dozens of professors from around the world has provided evidence that almost a quarter of Latinos and Hispanics have significant Jewish DNA. The study, published in Nature Communications in December 2018, revealed that the number of descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jewish communities is far higher than even the largest estimates previously suggested.

    The last official approximation of the number of people in Latin America, conducted by the United Nations in 2016, resulted in a figure of over 650 million. Add to that assessment the 60 million or so Latinos and Hispanics in the U.S., as well as the data from earlier genetic research showing that around 20% of the current population of 60 million people in the Iberian Peninsula have Jewish ancestry and the statistic becomes staggering. There could be as many as 200 million descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish communities around the world today.

    To what extent is this population aware of or interested in an affinity to the Jewish people? Reconectar, an organization facilitating the reconnection of the descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jewish communities to the Jewish world has conducted a number of studies exploring the attitudes of tens of thousands of these descendants towards their ancestry. It has found that in some places as many as 30% are aware of some Jewish ancestry, either through DNA tests, genealogical discoveries, or simple Google searches regarding family origins and traditions, and that as many as 14% would like to identify in some way with the Jewish people.

  9. Amazing how much black prejudice against Jews in New York resembles black prejudice against Koreans in L.A…

  10. This is a variation on the line that says black people cannot be racist, because they are victims, despite the evidence that a number of black leaders hate white people and don’t mind saying so.

  11. Prescod-Weinstein is a somewhat unusual combination of theoretical physicist and leftist social activist,

    You mean like Oppenheimer? It’s not usual for physicists to be left-wing at all, but most of them aren’t quite as activist about it.

    I find the tarring of Trump as “anti-Semitic” quite the most loony of all the slurs thrown his way. He has Jewish grandchildren — actual observant ones, not merely of Jewish heritage. Many of the people he has selected to work with, both politically and in business, are Jewish. He has been a massive (and IMO excessive) supporter of Israel. How he gets to be anti-Semitic is quite beyond me.

    As soon as someone describes Trump as anti-Semitic, I know they have lost the plot. No rational person could do that.

  12. P-W might be but is probably not a “brilliant physicist”. She is a mere assistant professor at a public university, where she is also in Womens’ Studies. There are few black physicists, very few, and even fewer of her sex, so she got her job based on her female melanin in all likelihood to satisfy the unspoken quota..

  13. The American culture has been based on individualism – that each person should be judged on their own character, not on their tribal affiliation of sex, race, religion, or ethnic group.

    These tribalist attacks and PC censorship is to reduce individualism, and judge people more by their groups than as people. This is terrible.

    How to stop it?

    Stop gov’t money to colleges would be a big first step.

  14. “if any Black people have developed antisemitic views it is under the influence of white gentiles”- so what she is saying is that Black people lack the capacity to form their own opinions and therefore can’t be held accountable for them. This is another great example of leftists claiming to be allies of minorities, while really just adopting them as mascots, as Thomas Sowell pointed out. I hope that people will recognize that the quote at the top of this comment translates literally to ” monkey see, monkey do”. That’s what the professor is actually saying.

  15. Neo, I don’t know if he knew that but when I first heard that statistic I thought of him and found it humorous. It was worth noting he wasn’t a scary individual, but rather pathetic. He had a personality that was a smugness hiding deep seated insecurity. This was in junior high so he may have grown out of his beliefs.

  16. Matthew, does your Hispanic friend/acquaintance purport to be some sort of Christian? If so he missed the whole point if he thinks someone needs to be punished for Christ’s death.

    The only reason He condescended to become man was to make a sacrifice of Himself. To die on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins.

    Then rise again on the third day to show He conquered death.

    Tell this guy he’s doing it wrong.

  17. mikesixes:

    And Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is in a rather unusual position in terms of this particular topic, because her heritage is half black (mother from Barbados) and half-Jewish (father).

  18. }}} [NOTE: If you’re interested in learning more about Prescod-Weinstein’s thoughts on the matter, read the whole article about her at Campus Reform. Among other things, she has referred to Trump as “antisemite in chief.”]

    Projection.

    Also not a river in Egypt.

  19. Black people who have developed anti-Semitic viewpoints have done it mostly for two reasons.

    I suspect that there is a third reason: possibly more important, if more diffuse, than the two you found — During the so-called Civil Rights Era (all genuflect), a lot of Southern blacks spent a lot of time working with, and being condescended by, a lot of Northern “Jews” (by which I mean atheistic leftists whose grandmothers were Jews). Blacks can recognize condescension as well as anyone else; and condescension calls forth disdain.

  20. She ain’t brilliant.

    Universities would be trampling the bodies of actual brilliant physicists to hire her if she were even marginally so. Brilliant young physicists don’t wander off into women’s studies, unless there’s some mental illness beginning to peek over the edge of the table.

    Looking at her bio, she got a lot of internships at various places that were probably thrilled to be able to say “we’ve got a black female astrophysicist” at conferences. But UNH isn’t exactly ground zero of theoretical physics. She peaked, and realized it, and now she’s off in the weeds of “studies” to prove that she wuz robbed.

  21. “But unfortunately, this is the sort of thinking that’s become not just acceptable at universities, but pretty much standard and even required. It struck me as notable that this person is a physicist. I’ve noticed in the last couple of years that the requirements and demands of wokeness have now pervaded the sciences as well as the humanities.”

    As another commenter mentioned, the sciences are not immune to leftist thought. I hate to say it, but many physicists still have a leftover trait from childhood where they were most likely shunned as being “nerds”. Many still want to be seen as part of the cool crowd, which in academia is now the far left. They may know deep down that the far left’s push for more social justice in the sciences will result in a degrading of their discipline, but they don’t have the courage to go up against those forces. The term “racist” still strikes fear in many of them.

    And I also agree that this woman was most likely, as is euphemistically called nowadays in academia, an “opportunity hire”. I’ve seen it many times.

  22. @physicsguy:he sciences are not immune to leftist thought. I hate to say it, but many physicists still have a leftover trait from childhood where they were most likely shunned as being “nerds”. Many still want to be seen as part of the cool crowd, which in academia is now the far left.

    My experience of physicists leads me to disagree. They are highly intelligent and they align themselves with the “smart” kids, not the “cool” kids. They believe that applied intelligence solves all problems (“Crazy Eddie”) and for them this has been true. This idea has ever been the siren song of the Left. If only humans were directed intelligently by the best minds working together for the good of all…

    And because physicists are highly intelligent they tend to discount the difficulty of problems in other fields.

    Incidentally while I agree with the assessment that Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is not brilliant as physicists go, she almost certainly is a great deal smarter than the general population, which is worth keeping in mind. There are players in the NBA who have never started, or never even played in an NBA game, who are still nonetheless way better at basketball than you or I or most people.

    I’ve split my working life between physics and business. If you are at the average for business, you are rarely going to meet people who are a lot smarter than you, though of course you will meet a range. If you are at the average for physics, since everyone is in the far right tail of the bell curve, you are going to meet people 2, 3, 10 times smarter than you practically daily. It can be humbling, or it can give you a chip on your shoulder.

  23. “If you are at the average for physics, since everyone is in the far right tail of the bell curve, you are going to meet people 2, 3, 10 times smarter than you practically daily.”

    The question is…what do you mean by smart? Somebody being smarter than you IN PHYSICS does not necessarily equate to greater intelligence in other areas. And I’m not really sure everyone in physics is on the far right tail of the bell curve to begin with.

    Mike

  24. @MBunge:Somebody being smarter than you IN PHYSICS does not necessarily equate to greater intelligence in other areas.

    All else being equal it is the way to bet. If both you, and someone “smarter than you in physics” set out to learn something you both know nothing about, that person is far more likely to learn it faster and understand it better. Again, all else being equal. No one has ever shown evidence for different kinds of “intelligence” that isn’t far weaker than evidence for one single kind of intelligence.

    And I’m not really sure everyone in physics is on the far right tail of the bell curve to begin with.

    If someone has an advanced degree in physics then at minimum they passed calculus and probably a whole bunch of other advanced math. That puts them on the right of the bell curve right there. Again, it is the way to bet.

    As an undergraduate I had three semesters of calculus, two of differential equations, linear algebra and statistics. Furthermore physics courses usually involve very specialized math that you have to learn as you go…

  25. Ilion:

    Oh, so the Jews that helped black people in the South back then, often at the risk of their lives and sometimes even giving their lives to the cause, were obnoxiously arrogant little snobs who deserved to be hated?

  26. Frederick:

    Depends on the field, whether there’s a carryover in terms of intelligence. Being really intelligent in physics doesn’t necessarily seem to carry over into being really intelligent in the humanities, for example, as far as I can see.

    And then there’s wisdom, which IMHO can be quite separate from intelligence in the academic or scientific sense.

  27. @neo:Being really intelligent in physics doesn’t necessarily seem to carry over into being really intelligent in the humanities, for example, as far as I can see.

    I’m not sure what “intelligent in humanities” entails other than being able to read and write effectively. There are far more physicists who can do that, than professionals in the humanities can do lab work or math, in my experience of academia. Perhaps your experience has been different, or perhaps you mean something different by “intelligence”…

    And then there’s wisdom, which IMHO can be quite separate from intelligence in the academic or scientific sense.

    No question. Wisdom tends to live between 95 and 120 in my experience… though it is more likely to be found in the far right than in the far left.

  28. @Andy: I was just rereading “the Two Cultures”.

    I never had any trouble talking about Shakespeare (or Emily Dickinson for that matter) with my colleagues in the English department, nor about Voltaire and Victor Hugo with the professors of French, or Battle of Blenheim with history professors. I didn’t have the specialized knowledge they had, no. But I could read and understand and discuss what they were able to read and understand and discuss. I have never encountered this working the other way.

  29. Frederick:

    I’m not just talking about book learning or reading ability when I talk about intelligence in the humanities. It usually requires some insight into human interaction and human nature that is not required in science or math. And of course there are plenty of professors in the humanities who are professionally successful but who lack that sort of intelligence as well as lacking wisdom.

  30. @neo: It usually requires some insight into human interaction and human nature that is not required in science or math.

    I can see why you would have this impression. But scientists and mathematicians have to deal with humans just as everyone else does.

    For academia, this means faculty committees, teaching, research, grant funding, navigating workplace politics, diversity training, etc. which are no different in the College of Sciences than for the College of Arts.

    Dealing successfully with people is just much required for success in a math or science career, as it is in any other career.

    But very few careers require any proficiency in math or science, even at their most basic. And that’s why I said “I have never found it worked the other way”.

    When I transitioned to business I had a lot to learn about how humans interact in business. (I still do.) It was different from how humans interact in an academic or scientific setting, true. What I have learned (and yet have to learn) might be a long conversation in its own right. But the point is I had to learn it to be at all successful at it just as I had needed to in academia.

  31. 12% of medicine articles are not cited, compared to about 82% for the humanities. It’s 27% for natural sciences and 32% for social sciences That basically sums up the state of the academia in that field.

  32. @Andy: That basically sums up the state of the academia in that field.

    I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. I think what those numbers mean is that science and other technical fields have to build on each other more so than the humanities does.

    For example, you can write a new and startling interpretation of an Emily Dickinson poem that no one wrote before, totally different from anyone else’s. And next year so can someone else. Same goes for philosophy. Each new philosopher can start from zero if they wish.

    With the sciences, you can’t. If the humanities worked the way the sciences did, this is what would happen with my new interpretation of an Emily Dickinson poem:

    1) I’d have to show by some metric why mine was better or explained more that the others that came before.
    2) Dozens of others would immediately refute it, or support it, but either way they’d be discussing it and checking on it.
    3) If refuted, no one would ever be able to take my interpretation seriously again, without doing an enormous amount of work to refute the refutations.
    3′) If supported, no one else could come out with a new interpretation of the poem unless and until they had addressed what distinguished theirs from mine.

    That’s the thing that is always going on in the sciences that doesn’t really happen in the same way as in the humanities.

    “Cancel culture” would seem to be a counter-example: if someone proved tomorrow that Emily Dickinson was really a racist white male, then no one could ever interpret Emily Dickinson in an another way without losing their career. And that sort of thing is true today. But the next generation of academics may have totally different views.

    Science does not work that way at all. The popular view is that Einstein “disproved” Newton. But Newton’s work is still taught, studied, and most importantly used. Because so much of it was objectively right and still is. You can’t put out a paper that contradicts Newton’s laws without an enormous amount of work showing why it’s okay for you to do that (unless it’s in an area where it’s already understood that Newton’s law don’t work well). There are certainly things Einstein’s theories don’t explain and whatever new theory comes out will NOT replace Einstein just as Einstein’s work did NOT replace Newton’s.

  33. Being “smarter in physics” is a really muddy thought. “Smarter” than whom? It is generally acknowledged that females are less able in the STEM fields, but that does not mean they are less “smart”.

    I will buy remarks such as ” Physics and the other hard (as in rigorous) sciences seem to come more easily to some [males] than to others [females]” as Larry Summers posited as president of Haavaad, which cost him his job.

    But the babe in question is undoubtedly smarter than most of her Jamaican DNA-sharing peers, physics included!

  34. @cicero:but that does not mean they are less “smart”.

    If the average for males and females are the same, but the standard deviations are different, you will find more males than females at both the right end and the left end.

    The males found at the left end will not be “less smart” than the females found there. The males found at the right end will not be “more smart” than the females found there. The average for males and females will be the same. Yet “smart” males will outnumber “smart” females and “dumb” males will outnumber “dumb” females.

    Physics departments are one place you find a preponderance of males. Prisons are another, and so is the developmentally disabled populations. Universities are female-dominated and have been for some time. All this is perfectly compatible with what’s observed for the gender distribution in STEM.

  35. Very good analysis, Neo. In a short piece you have encapsulated the history of black anti-Semitism, the elephant in the room no one wants to see. The reason for this is important. The Democrat party knows that if it does not win 91 out of every 100 black votes, they may lose, so they turn a blind eye. The media and entertainment industry, the public relations arm of the Democrats, does the same thing. When forced to pay attention to it (like they are now), they obfuscate with theories and excuses, just like our esteemed professor in this article. It is sad, but black anti-Semitism is a very old and probably permanent fact of life among a substantial portion of the black community and will likely remain so. A high degree of education is no cure for this prejudice, as we can see from the subject of your article. The best defense against this, imperfect as it may be, is exposure, exposure and exposure, thus the importance of conservative internet.

  36. This post pretty much supports everything Neo said.
    NYT editors are not noted for being supporters of white supremacism, in case you didn’t know.

    https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/01/05/nyt-editor-scolds-national-media-for-ignoring-rise-of-anti-semitism-n2558971

    During an interview with CNN’s Brian Stelter, The New York Times’ Bari Weiss laid into the media’s handling of the recent spate of anti-semitic attacks that happened in the Democratic-run state of New York. Stelter asked Weiss, who wrote a recent book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, if she agreed with the arguments made by people like Ben Shapiro and Ivanka Trump who say the press has been too slow to recognize the dangerous uptick in anti-semitism taking place in the excelsior state.

    “Absolutely yes,” Weiss began. “When a white supremacist walked into the synagogue where I became a bat mitzvah in Pittsburgh, a Tree of Life, and said ‘all jews must die,’ everyone recognized that for what it was, which is that he was motivated by hatred of jews plain and simple. For some reason, people cannot seem to get their heads around the fact that when someone machetes their … neighbors, when someone is breaking people’s noses, when someone is punching people in the street, when someone is ripping off someone’s kippah, it’s motivated by the same thing.”

    Weiss also agreed with the recent assessment by Vox’s Jane Coaston that “many of the anti-Semitic attacks aren’t coming from the far right, but from non-white people immersed in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that are just as baseless, virulent, and dangerous as those spread by white nationalists.”

    We’re not hearing the kind of moral clarity that we hear when the attacker is a white supremacist, and the question is why? And that is a question the press needs to answer for itself.”

  37. And from the other side, a black conservative scolds white liberal progressive Methodists for the same kind of condescension about their black constitutency that also figured in some of the comments above.

    The backstory:
    https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbrown/2020/01/05/a-prediction-about-the-coming-split-in-the-methodist-church-n2558954

    In 2019, “The division, which has been brewing for years, came to an impasse last May when delegates in St. Louis voted 438-384 to ban gay marriage and the inclusion of gay clergy.

    “A majority of U.S.-based churches opposed the ‘Traditional Plan’ but were outvoted by conservatives in the U.S., Africa and the Philippines.

    https://www.redstate.com/kiradavis/2020/01/04/760004/

    The United Methodist Church Split – Just Another Example of the Lies White Liberals Tell Themselves About Diversity
    Posted at 8:00 pm on January 4, 2020 by Kira Davis

    The United Methodist Church has come to a tentative agreement to split over the issue of gay marriage. The Hill reports that an agreement was reached in mediation just as the Methodist bureaucracy was about to impose sanctions for any ministers who violate the Church’s official position on the sanctity of marriage.
    The issue of same-sex marriage has been driving a wedge between traditional UMC congregations and the rise of left-wing progressive UMC congregations across North America.

    But that’s really just the tip of the iceberg here. The larger issue at hand is much, much more serious. It is about race, colonialism, and the lies liberals tell themselves about tolerance and diversity.

    You see, this isn’t a split between the tolerant church and the homophobic church. This is a split between the white American UMC and the African UMC. Colonialism established the UMC in Africa. Colonialism made it one of the most powerful faith institutions on the continent. As long as the African church was staying in line with their white American overseers, everything was fine.

    Everyone loves “multiculturalism” until it rears its ugly head and shows you a face you weren’t prepared to deal with. White liberal UMC congregations love black worshippers…until those worshippers no longer toe the liberal line. Which is pretty much always.

    No, this isn’t about marriage. This is about white American liberals who are all too willing to use the racial struggles of non-white cultures to promote their agendas, but who in reality view black people in their midst as culturally inferior. They allow black congregations to have their “cute traditions” and their culture, but when it comes to intellectual and theological issues they absolutely do not believe that black African congregations have the intelligence to participate in and adjudicate such issues. If their views don’t match up with the progressive UMC there can be no discussion. There can be no admission that “those people” have salient, logical arguments to make as well, and that those arguments deserve to be considered on an equal playing field with their white counterparts.

    In church culture, the black voice is valuable only as long as it doesn’t come with any power.

    The UMC has ultimately decided they cannot tolerate the African church holding all the power. Instead of submitting to the authority of their brethren and letting people choose to go or stay accordingly, they’re offering a bribe. They’re going to do what all white liberals do with those pesky black people who have the audacity to think for themselves…pretend they don’t exist.

    At the end of the day, sexuality takes precedence above everything. This is what the African diocese simply could not tolerate. Will Americans be looking to Africa one day as the beacon of freedom? In some ways, we already are.

    Democrats once again seeking to overturn a democratic vote: it’s the new normal.

  38. neo, with the ‘open mind’, totally not turning what I wrote (which is up there in black and white) on its head:Oh, so the Jews that helped black people in the South back then, often at the risk of their lives and sometimes even giving their lives to the cause, were obnoxiously arrogant little snobs who deserved to be hated?

    Way to go!

    But, yes, the leftist carpet-baggers who bungie-flooded the civil-rights organizations in the South in those days contained a high proportion of “obnoxiously arrogant little snobs” … who called forth a corresponding disdain amongst many blacks toward “Jews” … and, sadly, Jews.

  39. nor can they be accused of anti white racism..

    i seem to remember warning about this by pointing out the feminist quote that:
    The oppressed have a right to class hatred against their oppressors

    [this means its ok for everyone to hate whites, hate Jews, for women to hate men, gays to hate straights, and eventually, invest in ovens or some kind of education programs, which we have, but they are on location, not someplace you get sent to (yet)]

    but we dont take the stuff THEY take seriously…
    not until things change and cant change back
    THEN and only then do we believe

    I warned of this outcome over ten years ago…
    because its an incremental process no one believes until the change changes enough that its perceived. some perceive early and are ignored or told negative things till they shut up, others it comes later, and they dont even see it when everyone else does. but when its easy to see and the early viewers are confirmed, its too late… way too late… (because this is the fourth generation, and the organs of the state are full of people whose world view has been trained to the point that this is actually happening and been happening for a long while. a steam cooker doesn’t blow until there is steam, and we ignore the steam phase)

    isn’t that right tovarish (comrade)?

    its now illegal in NY to call an illegal alien illegal alien…
    soon, everyone with think the way they want you to think
    and those that dont, well, will suffer or die…

    welcome to the reality that we let happen…
    and we DID let it happen

  40. And heeeer’es the sequel we’ve all been waiting for! (With, no doubt, many more on the way….)

    Cuckoosfilm Ltd. (very much so, in fact), following up its acclaimed “Up in Smoke”, now proudly presents:
    “The Hemp Pyre Strikes Back”
    (Note: We were going to call it “Sheer Stupidity Strikes Back” but it wouldn’t fit on the marquee.)
    https://www.thecollegefix.com/u-new-hampshire-prof-black-antisemitism-is-the-fault-of-white-gentiles/

  41. Barry – EVERYTHING is the fault of white gentiles (by which she means white Christians, of course).

  42. Surellin on January 6, 2020 at 9:15 am said:
    James Baldwin wrote about Black antisemitism. http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-antisem.html
    * * *
    Very interesting counterpoint to the Prescod-Weinstein assertion that antisemitism in the US historically has been “a white Christian problem,” and anti-Jewish feelings expressed by blacks are due to the “influence of white gentiles.”
    Basically they agree on the essential foundation of that point, but the differences made by 50 years of cultural change, their life histories, and that Baldwin is simply a smarter, better writer, make his essay a thoughtful exposition of the then-existing (1967) serious problem of actual racist oppression of black people, and hers a whiny screed.

    In particular: “There is no systemic Black on Jewish violence,” the professor clarified before insisting that “Putting more police and people with guns outside of synagogues may make white Jews feel safer but it will endanger Jews of color, especially Black Jews and Middle Eastern Jews.”

    One might quibble about the definition of “systemic” here, but how does she deal with this sort of thing:
    https://www.thecollegefix.com/im-a-queer-jew-of-color-woke-college-students-tried-to-shut-me-down-at-vassar/

    HEN MAZZIG – GUEST COLUMN •NOVEMBER 23, 2019

    As part of a recent three-week campus speaking tour, I traveled to colleges across North America to share my family’s story. My father is Tunisian and my mother is Iraqi; their families came to Israel as refugees.

    In my talks, I share their stories and those of the 850,000 Jewish refugees who were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries between 1941 and 1972. We are known as Mizrahi Jews, those whose families came from Arab and Muslim lands.

    Because of this history, I am also an advocate for Israel. Not for a specific policy, government, or political party, but for my country’s right to exist. Being an openly gay Israeli Jew of color, I’m used to my identity and message being the target of Neo-Nazis, radical Islamists, homophobes, and racists online.

    What I did not anticipate was for dozens of students at Vassar College to protest my Nov. 14 appearance on campus by yelling antisemitic chants, all in the name of intersectionality, progressivism and Palestinian liberation.

    For more than 15 minutes, roughly 30 students completely shut me down by shouting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Hearing this slogan pained me deeply. What these students either didn’t know – or were willfully ignorant to – was that they were repeating an antisemitic phrase that dispossesses me of my identity and endangers my safety.

    The slogan is frequently employed by Hamas to allude to the mass murder of all Jews living in Israel, located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea

    How was shutting me down helping to advance their agenda?

    As they were unwilling to engage in respectful dialogue, I do not know for sure. The most likely answer is that these students viewed me a threat because I offer a perspective that is extremely dangerous to their anti-Zionist narrative. The uncomfortable truth for these activists is that I, and millions of other Mizrahi Jews, are breathing proof that Israel has saved lives. Not only white lives, but also those of people of color.

    The problem with such a reality is that it exposes a fundamental flaw of intersectional orthodoxy. In an attempt to advocate for the marginalized, these students shouted down the gay son of refugees. In an effort to stand up for minority rights, they denigrated a Jew of color. In the pursuit of peace, they – perhaps unknowingly – made public calls for the death of my family.

  43. It struck me as notable that this person is a physicist. I’ve noticed in the last couple of years that the requirements and demands of wokeness have now pervaded the sciences as well as the humanities.

    Being knowledgeable in one field, especially science, is no evidence of knowing anything else. For a century or more, folklore has described the absent minded professor or the wild haired mad scientist. This is all “Scientism.”

  44. re: the back and forth commentary by Frederick and numerous others: I think what we have in Frederick is not just an academic snob who refuses to entertain any others’ opinions, but one who attempts to project superiority by slapping down others’ thoughts and opinions and experiences. Ironically, math does provide a basic platform for learning to think and solve problems, and the work of physicists in advanced theory and the complicated analysis and proofs which follow does not necessarily follow that the intelligence of others who excel in the humanities is less. Not being an “expert” or having published and accepted work in either field, I believe physics involves a different direction of thought that posits theory and then attempts to prove or disprove via series of complicated theorums and proofs. In the humanities, breadth of knowledge and experience, the ability to digest and synthesize such knowledge to arrive at various interpretations of others’ work may be more subjective but is not indicative or lesser intelligence. The thought process certainly differs but accomplishment in one field over the other is not indicative of lesser intelligence or ability to process concepts. As to whether males and females differ in the ability to pursue either, it seems that a level of interest is more the deciding factor. And is not the level of interest in specific fields more the result of a combination of factors such as historical and cultural exposure and expectations versus sex and levels of intelligence?

  45. Well that is an interesting opinion and long speculation which “may be more subjective” than that posted by an academic snob with illusions of superiority. But maybe not, it could be a sex or cultural thing. One wouldn’t want to question Fredrick’s character or anything like that.

  46. Moreover —

    neo:Oh, so the Jews that helped black people in the South back then, often at the risk of their lives and sometimes even giving their lives to the cause …

    These are leftists you’re committing hagiography upon.

    Leftists don’t give a damn about justice (except in the negative sense, as they *hate* justice).

    And leftists don’t give a damn about *actual* human beings, and they have even less regard for “persons of color” than they do for other persons.

    These statements are true now, and they were true then.

    So, whatever those leftists may have been doing in the South, and whatever cause some of them may given their lives for, it was never their intention to help black Americans, nor to foster justice for them by ending the Democrat’s legalized-and-enforced injustices against black Americans.

  47. Ilion:

    Your comments convey quite a bit, and I did not accuse you of anything that wasn’t implicit in your comments.

    Leftists are not all demons. Some are misguided – especially during the era we’re talking about. One entire wing of my family when I was growing up (not my nuclear family, but my larger family) were leftists. Communists, to be blunt, for some of them anyway. I have written about this before.

    Not all Communists who went down to help black people were Jews, and not all Jews who went down there to help black people were Communists, by the way. Some were garden-variety liberals. You haven’t a clue whether most of them were condescending or not, personally, to the black people with whom they worked – even if you were one of those black people they worked with in the 50s and 60s (in which case you wouldn’t have known enough of them to say what the majority were like). But I am fairly confident that you were not one of those black people they worked with back then.

    I can assure you that whatever faults the leftists I knew back then had – and they had plenty – most of them were not condescending to black people. They were genuinely outraged at the genuine discrimination black people had to suffer particularly in the days of segregation, and even for many years after that.

  48. That is sometimes a problem; someone who knows how things must have been and someone who knew those who were there. Who is actually being reasonable and rational, Ilion?

  49. Pingback:Soleimani And The Question No One Seems To Be Asking - Manning The WallManning The Wall

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