I read Joanne Chen’s article and I was deeply moved. I found it grounded in compassion and empathy for both sides of this conflict! I have said from the start, this is trauma meeting trauma when it comes to Israel and Palestine. I had not made the connection that mine and others reactions are in fact trauma, this is something to ponder. Where I do struggle here is your suggestion that anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism, at least to some degree. I call my self a Zionist, in that I believe that Zionism at its core is the belief that Israel has an intrinsic right to exist and consequently a right to defend herself. Like other movements that turn political (ie. communism) this belief is hijacked by some to be ultra-nationalistic. They used tactics not grounded in compassion to build and serve the nation.
I would argue that the everyone in the Knesset are Zionists, most everyone living in Israel are Zionists and most of the Jewish diaspora are Zionists and many would have an issue defending all of the tactics Israel has used to build a nation. In the same way as a Liberal in Canada, I agree with some of what the current Liberal government puts forward but not all. Am I attacked as a liberal supporter at times? Yes! But not in the way I am attacked as a Zionist. I can’t help but wonder if some if not all of the anti-Zionism is grounded in antisemitism. I don’t know! But it is does seem suspect that the same outrage and anti movement was not picked up in the face of equally outrageous wars and actual genocides around the world. What is that about? I suspect antisemitism is in some way so ingrained in our collective psyche, here was the opportunity to raise its ugly head! I also suspect that at least some of it is unconscious, in that many do not see themselves or their actions and positions as antisemitism.
As always Jay! Thank you for your voice! As someone who has felt without a tribe since October 7th, you remind me that there are others who live from and as both/and. I would suggest that it is only from this place can peace prosper, from within and from without!
Yes, of course reaction to fear and trauma is evident, but I contend this has been brewing for a century (maybe more) and is driven by deeper archetypical subconscious motivations rather than short term situational responses.
Since they were driven from their homeland by the Romans centuries ago, the Jews have been outcasts living as interlopers in various societies of others. Terror Management Theory in psychology studies how under stress we all revert back to the imagined safety of our familiar tribe or clan and automatically demonizing perceived outsiders.
Limbic mind reflexive dualism is an efficient survival mechanism providing quick response to a perceived threat. It takes time and energy to pause and ponder when visions of death flash on our screens before our eyes constantly. "If it bleeds, it ledes." Far right populists worldwide have realized that a hyper-traumatized audience is easy to manipulate. Hamas uses terror as the transmission medium of their message cutting through the nuances zeroing in on primal subconscious archetypes. We naturally want quick relief from existential anxiety and clinging to old stereotypes is addictive. Conspiracy theories give us instant relief from uncertainty and ambiguity.
Ironically, reformed Judaism was founded in 1800's Germany to allow Jews to blend into the predominant culture rather than being obviously "other." Israel was primarily founded by secular reformed Jews bringing their adopted Western ways into a region of traumatized Muslims reeling from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and later a heavy dose of European fascism during German and Italian invasions during WWII. By "reforming" to fit European social standards, Jews now became oddities in their old homeland in the Middle East. Liberal Jews naively welcomed orthodox Eastern European Jews into Israel assuming they would naturally choose to adopt the predominate liberal, secular, Western style of Judaism. Instead, today we have Islamist fascists battling with Orthodox Religious Zionists each demanding ethnic cleansing and genocide "from the river to the sea."
Israel is a modern secular nation at its core. But it has been hijacked by extremists on both the Jewish and Muslim sides. The religious affiliation of the Israeli population as of 2022 was 73.6% Jewish, 18.1% Muslim, 1.9% Christian, and 1.6% Druze. The remaining 4.8% included faiths such as Samaritanism and Baháʼí, as well as "religiously unclassified". Can the secular "center" reclaim its power and curb the Religious Orthodox population? Can the population of "Palestine" be de-radicalized and persuaded to form a secular Arab "state" to partner with fellow Jews? There is no simple explanation and too many moving parts that can go wrong. Hoping for an easy, quick solution is naive and only adds frustration on top of the existing trauma. There is a reason that most modern societies are secular with strict separation between church and state. At its core, religion is a trauma response.
Acting from fear and/or trauma no matter who we are never ends well. It keeps us stuck and unable to get into a place above the fear and trauma to see the bigger picture, and unfortunately leads to creating more fear and trauma.
Sometimes it’s so painfully paralyzing to live in the world of “both/and,” and the suffering that arises as a result. I appreciate your essays Jay. As I’ve commented before, your articles since October 7 have been grounding for me, stabilizing. I agree with you about Joanna’s piece (which, as someone who has lived in and written about living in Israel, struck me as deeply reflective of the both/and of being and acting as a heart-centered human in Israel). It’s infuriating to me that so many of the people screaming at the top of their lungs literally and figuratively (including so many in the indie lit scene) make no effort to actually talk to people who live in the region and especially those like Joanna who are trying to change the system from inside of it. This act by Guernica IMO is fueled less by trauma and more by ignorance, immaturity, and frankly, privilege. The privilege that comes with not being born in or having ever actually lived in the region.
It's certainly been discouraging to see the way blind tribalism has seemed to emerge on the left, as a counterpoint/balance to the blind tribalism on the right we've been primed to oppose for a decade now. We live in a complex world, full of complex problems, where nuance and context is important and there are no simple answers. It's surely tempting in moments of chaos and uncertainty to put our heads down and embrace simplified rhetoric and solutions, because truly contemplating the complexity can be so overwhelming and make actual solutions/resolution seem completely out of reach.
But these moments demand that we actually keep our heads and continue to think about what is the right thing to do from a humanist standpoint, than just choosing the right team to offload our reasoning to. Better to say, "I don't know the answer, or I don't know enough to have a sound opinion on this" than to throw in your lot with one faction or the other *without* being troubled to actually think about what needs to be the long term goals for the people directly affected by these conflicts.
I am particularly struck by the right wing social media sphere in the US suddenly finding an allegiance with the Zionists in flagging & flogging any valid criticism as "anti-Semitism"... after harboring latent and outright anti-Semitist values as a party since even before WWII. I wish more people were giving intentional thought to what has motivated that obvious change in their collective narrative. In my mind, it's a bad faith tactic to both project/misdirect accusations of anti-Semitism from themselves, which is convenient when you want to assure people your authoritarian aspirations will only extend to abusing the human rights of *immigrants,* not Jewish people. *wink wink, trust us*. And secondly, it serves as a convenient way to constantly pour gas on the conversation, when the reality is, for most of these individuals, they still have no love for Jews, but that they despise Muslims EVEN MORE. The idea that they can inflame both sides for a minimal investment of time and energy, ensuring the conflict drags on indefinitely, maiming & killing as many Jews, Muslims, and Arabs as possible absolutely delights them.
People should be much more cognizant of the fact that in the modern age, the enemy of your enemy isn't necessarily your friend, especially when aspiring fascists are concerned. They're putting everyone involved in a hierarchy of human worth, informed by White Christian Nationalism. It's important we don't let that fact escape attention.
Many Republicans deeply resent being called racist, since in their understanding that term means "personally hateful towards others" rather than "embracing political opinions that harm large groups of people who are not white". The left and the right mean very different things by "racist" but it is actually a term that hurts most conservatives feelings. They don't want to be racist. They don't think their policies are racist.
By embracing Jews and particularly the Jews that the left seems to have abandoned, they can pivot the conversation away from their policies and show that they are not racist. The left may have black and brown people, but they have Jews! Their love and protection for us proves that the left is actually hateful and they are righteous.
This claim is totally ineffective on the left because the left sees Jews as white. But it is effective on the right - because the right wing in America has never seen Jews as fully white. Certainly, we're not black - but we ARE a minority. And THEY are NOT. They are "regular people".
Right now, we are their favorite minority because they can love us and prove their goodness without dealing with America's racial history and the much more difficult questions it raises.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I still suspect you're giving most of them too much credit for having even marginally positive intentions. They don't want to be seen as "racist," but they also don't want to give up racist attitudes and behaviors, or the systemic racism that they benefit from. :P
Having listened to my own mother fall down the right wing propaganda rabbit hole, it's largely true that they think their past *privilege* to be openly bigoted against others with some religious pretext was actually a *right.* And the loss of that perceived right is felt as a complete injustice and source of perceived (but fake) "victimhood" which rationalizes them taking whatever means necessary to restore their sense of natural order (White Christian Supremacy) against the people who are simply asking to FINALLY be treated with normal human decency and fairness after all this time.
Hilariously, your post arrived as I was finishing one for Velveteen Rabbi on the same subject. (https://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2024/03/heal.html) I added an addendum to link to yours. Anyway: I figure if both of us are writing about this at the same time, this really is the zeitgeist of this week? Shabbat shalom to you and yours.
Loved this. I have been so discouraged lately by the rancor especially on the Left. A friend stopped talking to me because I did not take the exact same stand as he on Israel. He’s in the group calling Israelis genocidaires, racist colonizers etc. I used to like him but he’s been so mean and judgmental toward me since October that I don’t like him any more. Meanwhile my younger college age family members condemn poor Claudine Gay, not understanding the impossible position she was in. Even some older people don’t understand that. I do, having worked in academia as a teacher. I value free speech but that should not include threats. Unfortunately threats have happened on my local campus: from the Left, directed at a conservative professor. I was deeply embarrassed by this. It did a lot of damage to the reputation of liberals here.
So happy to have you, an artist and writer, weigh in on this debacle. As a past magazine exec (New Yorker, etc) and committed progressive Zionist, it has been unnerving to watch both many of my fellow Jews, and especially the “permanent ceasefire” insistent activists lose any ability to listen, find nuance or even tolerate unorthodox views. My kids experience that on campus (where Zionism is social kryptonite), in LGBTQ+ circles (where claims of supporting Zionism invite distrust or worse) and, last Friday evening in our shared progressive NJ hometown, withering chants telling us “Zionists” weren’t welcome here. (I thank the activist-rabbis of JVP for enabling that). Maybe most dismaying is that the Zionist state, like America, was founded on ideas and writing and all the messy open debate a true democracy invites - however flawed. It seems the editors here, like so many traumatized thinkers, have lost their footing…..thanks Jay for a powerful piece. (R Skeen)
Thanks Richard. Curious where you experienced those chants as I haven't encountered them. (I'm not doubting that you did of course.) It is "interesting" to reflect what the word 'Zionism' means to those opposing it. I'm reminded of Reb Zalman's statement that "I don't believe in the same God you don't believe in." I've often felt that I don't believe in the same Zionism that these people are criticizing. Ironically, the Israeli Right and the American/European Hard Left agree about what Zionism is... just the rest of us don't.
Great piece which I just shared. But one small fact check: Your 68% non-white figure comes from an article that counts Ashkenazi Jews and so excludes emigrants for the former Soviet Union. Not all of those emigrants were white but probably most of them were. And admittedly a fair number are not Jews at all. My guess is that if you were to get a good estimate of the white Jews in this population, it would push the percentage of Jews in Israel who are white up to maybe 40%, maybe a hair higher. Best estimates seem to indicate there are maybe 900,000 FSU Jews in Israel right now. No one seems to want to tell me how many of those are Russian or Ukrainian and so white as opposed to say Georgian, Chechnyan, Kazakh etc but I suspect it is well over half. And no one tells me anything about the ethnicity of the maybe 300,000 FSU migrants who were not officially Jews but attached in some way to Jewish families. Ethnicity is complicated but we always want to use it as a simple lens.
That is a good point, and yes as you know, part of the is that American constructions of whiteness are culturally specific and don't apply to every country. In a nice irony, lefty folks who call Israel "white" are engaging in Eurocentrism and a very dumb projection of Western categories onto non-Western cultures. My understanding had been that FSU folks are almost always counted as Ashkenazi -- albeit with the proviso that you note -- so it would be anomalous if not, I'll check. (I personally am roughly 75% FSU ancestry and am culturally and "ethnically" Ashkenazi [a problematic term] so it would be personally weird if I weren't counted that way!)
The Wikipedia article seems to be discounting only Jews from the FSU who emigrated to Israel in the last big aliyah from that region, i.e. from around 1989 to the present with most of the emigration occurring in the 90's. I have no idea why they would exclude those people and not exclude you and I or people like us, but that is what they seem to do. Technically, I'm not FSU, since my family left Russia and Ukraine for the US before the Soviet Union not after... But this really seems to count Russian migrants from say the 70s as Ashkenazi and Russian migrants from the 1990's as something different. My guess is that this has to have something to do with how the official Israeli state apparatus dealt with the large Russian migration in the 90's. Perhaps creating a new ethnic category to track the large wave? Which would make tons of logistical sense but then ends up creating nonsense when viewed through a more essentialized construction of ethnicity. Which is one more reason to dislike the essentialized view of ethnicity that is at the heart of a lot of what I dislike about the modern US progressive left.
Hi Jay, let me share a positive example of this line: "There are good people on all sides of this conflict, including ones who hold views you find to be reprehensible."
Back in December, I wrote an essay for Medium titled "Five reasons people accuse me of being an 'apologist for genocide.'" (see link below). In it, I explained the curious phenomenon that people were calling me this because I refused to label as "genocide" an approach to the war I had argued against. I had argued for responding militarily but not this way.
The good news: one of the people who had made that accusation wrote back to apologize for doing so. We see things very differently, yet he had the humility to realize that his accusation was seriously off base. So he apologize. And I thanked him for it even though, again, we see things very differently.
That is some great person-to-person dialoguing. I have had similar success (if that's the word) in one-to-one conversations around this issue and the word "genocide." But it feels like these small efforts are dwarfed by mass miscommunication...
I read Joanne Chen’s article and I was deeply moved. I found it grounded in compassion and empathy for both sides of this conflict! I have said from the start, this is trauma meeting trauma when it comes to Israel and Palestine. I had not made the connection that mine and others reactions are in fact trauma, this is something to ponder. Where I do struggle here is your suggestion that anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism, at least to some degree. I call my self a Zionist, in that I believe that Zionism at its core is the belief that Israel has an intrinsic right to exist and consequently a right to defend herself. Like other movements that turn political (ie. communism) this belief is hijacked by some to be ultra-nationalistic. They used tactics not grounded in compassion to build and serve the nation.
I would argue that the everyone in the Knesset are Zionists, most everyone living in Israel are Zionists and most of the Jewish diaspora are Zionists and many would have an issue defending all of the tactics Israel has used to build a nation. In the same way as a Liberal in Canada, I agree with some of what the current Liberal government puts forward but not all. Am I attacked as a liberal supporter at times? Yes! But not in the way I am attacked as a Zionist. I can’t help but wonder if some if not all of the anti-Zionism is grounded in antisemitism. I don’t know! But it is does seem suspect that the same outrage and anti movement was not picked up in the face of equally outrageous wars and actual genocides around the world. What is that about? I suspect antisemitism is in some way so ingrained in our collective psyche, here was the opportunity to raise its ugly head! I also suspect that at least some of it is unconscious, in that many do not see themselves or their actions and positions as antisemitism.
As always Jay! Thank you for your voice! As someone who has felt without a tribe since October 7th, you remind me that there are others who live from and as both/and. I would suggest that it is only from this place can peace prosper, from within and from without!
Yes, of course reaction to fear and trauma is evident, but I contend this has been brewing for a century (maybe more) and is driven by deeper archetypical subconscious motivations rather than short term situational responses.
Since they were driven from their homeland by the Romans centuries ago, the Jews have been outcasts living as interlopers in various societies of others. Terror Management Theory in psychology studies how under stress we all revert back to the imagined safety of our familiar tribe or clan and automatically demonizing perceived outsiders.
Limbic mind reflexive dualism is an efficient survival mechanism providing quick response to a perceived threat. It takes time and energy to pause and ponder when visions of death flash on our screens before our eyes constantly. "If it bleeds, it ledes." Far right populists worldwide have realized that a hyper-traumatized audience is easy to manipulate. Hamas uses terror as the transmission medium of their message cutting through the nuances zeroing in on primal subconscious archetypes. We naturally want quick relief from existential anxiety and clinging to old stereotypes is addictive. Conspiracy theories give us instant relief from uncertainty and ambiguity.
Ironically, reformed Judaism was founded in 1800's Germany to allow Jews to blend into the predominant culture rather than being obviously "other." Israel was primarily founded by secular reformed Jews bringing their adopted Western ways into a region of traumatized Muslims reeling from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and later a heavy dose of European fascism during German and Italian invasions during WWII. By "reforming" to fit European social standards, Jews now became oddities in their old homeland in the Middle East. Liberal Jews naively welcomed orthodox Eastern European Jews into Israel assuming they would naturally choose to adopt the predominate liberal, secular, Western style of Judaism. Instead, today we have Islamist fascists battling with Orthodox Religious Zionists each demanding ethnic cleansing and genocide "from the river to the sea."
Israel is a modern secular nation at its core. But it has been hijacked by extremists on both the Jewish and Muslim sides. The religious affiliation of the Israeli population as of 2022 was 73.6% Jewish, 18.1% Muslim, 1.9% Christian, and 1.6% Druze. The remaining 4.8% included faiths such as Samaritanism and Baháʼí, as well as "religiously unclassified". Can the secular "center" reclaim its power and curb the Religious Orthodox population? Can the population of "Palestine" be de-radicalized and persuaded to form a secular Arab "state" to partner with fellow Jews? There is no simple explanation and too many moving parts that can go wrong. Hoping for an easy, quick solution is naive and only adds frustration on top of the existing trauma. There is a reason that most modern societies are secular with strict separation between church and state. At its core, religion is a trauma response.
Acting from fear and/or trauma no matter who we are never ends well. It keeps us stuck and unable to get into a place above the fear and trauma to see the bigger picture, and unfortunately leads to creating more fear and trauma.
Sometimes it’s so painfully paralyzing to live in the world of “both/and,” and the suffering that arises as a result. I appreciate your essays Jay. As I’ve commented before, your articles since October 7 have been grounding for me, stabilizing. I agree with you about Joanna’s piece (which, as someone who has lived in and written about living in Israel, struck me as deeply reflective of the both/and of being and acting as a heart-centered human in Israel). It’s infuriating to me that so many of the people screaming at the top of their lungs literally and figuratively (including so many in the indie lit scene) make no effort to actually talk to people who live in the region and especially those like Joanna who are trying to change the system from inside of it. This act by Guernica IMO is fueled less by trauma and more by ignorance, immaturity, and frankly, privilege. The privilege that comes with not being born in or having ever actually lived in the region.
It's certainly been discouraging to see the way blind tribalism has seemed to emerge on the left, as a counterpoint/balance to the blind tribalism on the right we've been primed to oppose for a decade now. We live in a complex world, full of complex problems, where nuance and context is important and there are no simple answers. It's surely tempting in moments of chaos and uncertainty to put our heads down and embrace simplified rhetoric and solutions, because truly contemplating the complexity can be so overwhelming and make actual solutions/resolution seem completely out of reach.
But these moments demand that we actually keep our heads and continue to think about what is the right thing to do from a humanist standpoint, than just choosing the right team to offload our reasoning to. Better to say, "I don't know the answer, or I don't know enough to have a sound opinion on this" than to throw in your lot with one faction or the other *without* being troubled to actually think about what needs to be the long term goals for the people directly affected by these conflicts.
I am particularly struck by the right wing social media sphere in the US suddenly finding an allegiance with the Zionists in flagging & flogging any valid criticism as "anti-Semitism"... after harboring latent and outright anti-Semitist values as a party since even before WWII. I wish more people were giving intentional thought to what has motivated that obvious change in their collective narrative. In my mind, it's a bad faith tactic to both project/misdirect accusations of anti-Semitism from themselves, which is convenient when you want to assure people your authoritarian aspirations will only extend to abusing the human rights of *immigrants,* not Jewish people. *wink wink, trust us*. And secondly, it serves as a convenient way to constantly pour gas on the conversation, when the reality is, for most of these individuals, they still have no love for Jews, but that they despise Muslims EVEN MORE. The idea that they can inflame both sides for a minimal investment of time and energy, ensuring the conflict drags on indefinitely, maiming & killing as many Jews, Muslims, and Arabs as possible absolutely delights them.
People should be much more cognizant of the fact that in the modern age, the enemy of your enemy isn't necessarily your friend, especially when aspiring fascists are concerned. They're putting everyone involved in a hierarchy of human worth, informed by White Christian Nationalism. It's important we don't let that fact escape attention.
Many Republicans deeply resent being called racist, since in their understanding that term means "personally hateful towards others" rather than "embracing political opinions that harm large groups of people who are not white". The left and the right mean very different things by "racist" but it is actually a term that hurts most conservatives feelings. They don't want to be racist. They don't think their policies are racist.
By embracing Jews and particularly the Jews that the left seems to have abandoned, they can pivot the conversation away from their policies and show that they are not racist. The left may have black and brown people, but they have Jews! Their love and protection for us proves that the left is actually hateful and they are righteous.
This claim is totally ineffective on the left because the left sees Jews as white. But it is effective on the right - because the right wing in America has never seen Jews as fully white. Certainly, we're not black - but we ARE a minority. And THEY are NOT. They are "regular people".
Right now, we are their favorite minority because they can love us and prove their goodness without dealing with America's racial history and the much more difficult questions it raises.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I still suspect you're giving most of them too much credit for having even marginally positive intentions. They don't want to be seen as "racist," but they also don't want to give up racist attitudes and behaviors, or the systemic racism that they benefit from. :P
Having listened to my own mother fall down the right wing propaganda rabbit hole, it's largely true that they think their past *privilege* to be openly bigoted against others with some religious pretext was actually a *right.* And the loss of that perceived right is felt as a complete injustice and source of perceived (but fake) "victimhood" which rationalizes them taking whatever means necessary to restore their sense of natural order (White Christian Supremacy) against the people who are simply asking to FINALLY be treated with normal human decency and fairness after all this time.
Hilariously, your post arrived as I was finishing one for Velveteen Rabbi on the same subject. (https://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2024/03/heal.html) I added an addendum to link to yours. Anyway: I figure if both of us are writing about this at the same time, this really is the zeitgeist of this week? Shabbat shalom to you and yours.
Shabbat Shalom! And it sure is the zeitgeist in our neck of the woods. People are hurting and we don't know what to do.
Loved this. I have been so discouraged lately by the rancor especially on the Left. A friend stopped talking to me because I did not take the exact same stand as he on Israel. He’s in the group calling Israelis genocidaires, racist colonizers etc. I used to like him but he’s been so mean and judgmental toward me since October that I don’t like him any more. Meanwhile my younger college age family members condemn poor Claudine Gay, not understanding the impossible position she was in. Even some older people don’t understand that. I do, having worked in academia as a teacher. I value free speech but that should not include threats. Unfortunately threats have happened on my local campus: from the Left, directed at a conservative professor. I was deeply embarrassed by this. It did a lot of damage to the reputation of liberals here.
So happy to have you, an artist and writer, weigh in on this debacle. As a past magazine exec (New Yorker, etc) and committed progressive Zionist, it has been unnerving to watch both many of my fellow Jews, and especially the “permanent ceasefire” insistent activists lose any ability to listen, find nuance or even tolerate unorthodox views. My kids experience that on campus (where Zionism is social kryptonite), in LGBTQ+ circles (where claims of supporting Zionism invite distrust or worse) and, last Friday evening in our shared progressive NJ hometown, withering chants telling us “Zionists” weren’t welcome here. (I thank the activist-rabbis of JVP for enabling that). Maybe most dismaying is that the Zionist state, like America, was founded on ideas and writing and all the messy open debate a true democracy invites - however flawed. It seems the editors here, like so many traumatized thinkers, have lost their footing…..thanks Jay for a powerful piece. (R Skeen)
Thanks Richard. Curious where you experienced those chants as I haven't encountered them. (I'm not doubting that you did of course.) It is "interesting" to reflect what the word 'Zionism' means to those opposing it. I'm reminded of Reb Zalman's statement that "I don't believe in the same God you don't believe in." I've often felt that I don't believe in the same Zionism that these people are criticizing. Ironically, the Israeli Right and the American/European Hard Left agree about what Zionism is... just the rest of us don't.
Great piece which I just shared. But one small fact check: Your 68% non-white figure comes from an article that counts Ashkenazi Jews and so excludes emigrants for the former Soviet Union. Not all of those emigrants were white but probably most of them were. And admittedly a fair number are not Jews at all. My guess is that if you were to get a good estimate of the white Jews in this population, it would push the percentage of Jews in Israel who are white up to maybe 40%, maybe a hair higher. Best estimates seem to indicate there are maybe 900,000 FSU Jews in Israel right now. No one seems to want to tell me how many of those are Russian or Ukrainian and so white as opposed to say Georgian, Chechnyan, Kazakh etc but I suspect it is well over half. And no one tells me anything about the ethnicity of the maybe 300,000 FSU migrants who were not officially Jews but attached in some way to Jewish families. Ethnicity is complicated but we always want to use it as a simple lens.
That is a good point, and yes as you know, part of the is that American constructions of whiteness are culturally specific and don't apply to every country. In a nice irony, lefty folks who call Israel "white" are engaging in Eurocentrism and a very dumb projection of Western categories onto non-Western cultures. My understanding had been that FSU folks are almost always counted as Ashkenazi -- albeit with the proviso that you note -- so it would be anomalous if not, I'll check. (I personally am roughly 75% FSU ancestry and am culturally and "ethnically" Ashkenazi [a problematic term] so it would be personally weird if I weren't counted that way!)
The Wikipedia article seems to be discounting only Jews from the FSU who emigrated to Israel in the last big aliyah from that region, i.e. from around 1989 to the present with most of the emigration occurring in the 90's. I have no idea why they would exclude those people and not exclude you and I or people like us, but that is what they seem to do. Technically, I'm not FSU, since my family left Russia and Ukraine for the US before the Soviet Union not after... But this really seems to count Russian migrants from say the 70s as Ashkenazi and Russian migrants from the 1990's as something different. My guess is that this has to have something to do with how the official Israeli state apparatus dealt with the large Russian migration in the 90's. Perhaps creating a new ethnic category to track the large wave? Which would make tons of logistical sense but then ends up creating nonsense when viewed through a more essentialized construction of ethnicity. Which is one more reason to dislike the essentialized view of ethnicity that is at the heart of a lot of what I dislike about the modern US progressive left.
Hi Jay, let me share a positive example of this line: "There are good people on all sides of this conflict, including ones who hold views you find to be reprehensible."
Back in December, I wrote an essay for Medium titled "Five reasons people accuse me of being an 'apologist for genocide.'" (see link below). In it, I explained the curious phenomenon that people were calling me this because I refused to label as "genocide" an approach to the war I had argued against. I had argued for responding militarily but not this way.
The good news: one of the people who had made that accusation wrote back to apologize for doing so. We see things very differently, yet he had the humility to realize that his accusation was seriously off base. So he apologize. And I thanked him for it even though, again, we see things very differently.
https://medium.com/@amielhandelsman/five-reasons-people-accuse-me-of-being-an-apologist-for-genocide-15ebbe8d3bc5
That is some great person-to-person dialoguing. I have had similar success (if that's the word) in one-to-one conversations around this issue and the word "genocide." But it feels like these small efforts are dwarfed by mass miscommunication...