May 6, 2017

(Jewish Group) This day in history: May 5th: Blame the Jews Day (1881)

THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP!

Four years of pogroms against Jews in Ukraine and southern Russia were set in motion on this date in 1881 by mobs of peasants who attacked Jewish stores and homes in the Ukrainian villages of Konsky-rosdor, Popiko, Andreyevka, and the city Orekhov, after Jews were incorrectly blamed for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by Narodnaya Volya on March 13th. Through the spring and summer the rioting would spread to Odessa and other sites, large and small, and after a brief remission, to Warsaw on Christmas Day and to Balta on Easter, 1882, with increasing ferocity and casualties, including many rapes and deaths. “In Belorussia and Lithuania,” according to Jewish Virtual Library, “where the local authorities adopted a firm attitude against the rioters, large fires broke out in many towns and townlets; a considerable number of these were started by the enemies of the Jews.

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The Pogroms were just starting, and eventually end up with the displacing, raping, and murdering of thousands of Jews in Ukraine, Russia, and the Settlement of the Pale. It also was the start of the Jews fleeing to other parts of Europe, which would prove fatal for many, and more fleeing to the US and Canada.

(Didn't get a single comment in GD, only one recommend, and only 209 reads.)

May 5, 2017

This day in history: May 5th: Blame the Jews Day (1881)

Four years of pogroms against Jews in Ukraine and southern Russia were set in motion on this date in 1881 by mobs of peasants who attacked Jewish stores and homes in the Ukrainian villages of Konsky-rosdor, Popiko, Andreyevka, and the city Orekhov, after Jews were incorrectly blamed for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by Narodnaya Volya on March 13th. Through the spring and summer the rioting would spread to Odessa and other sites, large and small, and after a brief remission, to Warsaw on Christmas Day and to Balta on Easter, 1882, with increasing ferocity and casualties, including many rapes and deaths. “In Belorussia and Lithuania,” according to Jewish Virtual Library, “where the local authorities adopted a firm attitude against the rioters, large fires broke out in many towns and townlets; a considerable number of these were started by the enemies of the Jews.

more...

The Pogroms were just starting, and eventually end up with the displacing, raping, and murdering of thousands of Jews in Ukraine, Russia, and the Settlement of the Pale. It also was the start of the Jews fleeing to other parts of Europe, which would prove fatal for many, and more fleeing to the US and Canada.

May 1, 2017

(Jewish Group) Trump-era anti-Semitism changed my family we started going to synagogue

THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP!!

My grandmother took a bunch of photo albums and boxes down from a closet and told me about how her mother’s family name was shortened — Americanized — after they passed through Ellis Island. I sifted through the photos, examining each one and listening to the stories my grandmother remembered about the people staring back at me in shades of black and grey, chins and noses pronounced, hair dark.

--snip---

Suddenly, the relative safety and privilege that I grew up with as a white American Jew has cracked wide open, revealing the rotten underbelly that’s always been here, the one I have chosen not to see. Anti-Semitic hate crimes are at their highest levels in years. Jewish Community Centers around the country are getting bomb threats at an alarming rate. Steve Bannon, an anti-Semite, is in the White House. Swastikas appear like hideous confetti, decorating walls and buildings all over the country. Jewish cemeteries have been vandalized. This hatred is not new; it has been here all along. But its brashness is something new. It is meaner, darker, more ominous. It is more urgent. It is knocking on my door, begging to come in.

And while President Trump may have reminded us about his Jewish family members, and assured us at a recent press conference that we’re “going to see a lot of love” under his administration, so far, I don’t see it. And using his family to prove he isn’t anti-Semitic is about as effective as using one’s black friend to prove they’re not racist. It’s empty, hollow, a silencing tactic. Of course, there are other communities that have much more to be afraid of under Trump’s reign, marginalized people whose fears are more urgent and are already playing out in devastating ways via ICE raids, deportations, and imminent threats of violence. People of color in America who have been afraid their entire lives, for whom this kind of fear is not new. A fear that my grandparents and their parents felt, that my own children may, too. A fear that has turned walking into synagogue with my family into an act of bravery.

---snip---

We come from the oppressed and, mostly, we have become privileged through the assimilation of many Jews into whiteness. But with assimilation and privilege can come complacency, which is something that many white Jews like myself and the people I grew up with can fall into all too easily. It is through complacency that we forget even the recent past, the Holocaust of only two generations ago. It is through complacency that we can become perpetrators of the oppression we were once victims of via a vote for Trump or a belief in marginalized people’s ability to “bootstrap” their way to success.

---snip---

Our existence is resistance in and of itself, but it’s time to do more. Today I teach my children to assert our faith and become part of a Jewish community when once again the world tells us that we don’t deserve to exist. But we do deserve to exist, and we will fight for that right, just like we always have.

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There exists a battle within our community but also exists outside of it in alleged and supposed "allies."