Jewish Group
Related: About this forum(Jewish Group) Dont Appropriate Anti-Semitism. Jews Are More Than Our Suffering
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Decades after Holocaust, European intellectuals, some of them Jewish, began writing books and articles investigating the European history of ideas which led to fascism and, ultimately, to the concentration camps. Many of these intellectuals, prominent philosophers and critical theorists like Jean-Francois Lyotard, began using the jew as a trope or concept (indicated here with the lower case). For them, the jew describes not the Jewish people per se, but rather any minority group scapegoated by the majority culture. Typically, the jew is powerless and homeless; Jews are transient, aliens against whom nationalists and populists define themselves. Anti-fascism, French writer Alain Finkielkraut writes, had established the Jew as a value: as the gold standard of oppression, as the paradigm of the victim.
As the recent article in the The Forward demonstrates, universalizing Jewish persecution to talk about the jew is still very much in vogue.
Borrowing from Zygmant Bauman, Helene Meyers argues that former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is being subjected to anti-Semitism because she is a jew, a victim, in her case, of malicious political rhetoric. Since Jewishness has been universalized into a concept of victimhood, anti-Semitism can be directed at non-Jews like Clinton. The article recites some of the rhetoric leveled at Clinton from across the political spectrum to suggest that the former Secretary of State is our national scapegoat, or our conceptual jew.
That Hillary Clinton ex-Secretary of State, former Senator, and current multi-millionaire who won 65.8 million votes in the 2016 presidential election inhabits the position of the jew reveals the absurdity of turning Jews into a concept.
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Skittles
(153,169 posts)(speaking as a non-Jewish woman) I think Ms. Meyers makes some good points but ultimately the premise (and hence, title) of her article is a stretch
hedda_foil
(16,375 posts)It was in common usage in magazines and speech for the last century if not longer. It's actually a fairly benign form of antisemitism ... if such a thing is possible. It's the same kind of thing as "the blacks" Whether it's intended as a slur or by, it subsumes individual differences into a vague intellectual construct of "The Jew" and it's usually capitalized.
Yes, I'm Jewish. And yes. It's scary as hell.