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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31624 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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You may at times despise a member of your family, think their ideas or values are terrible, have had awful experiences with them... but a bridge remains despite the gaps.

And yet, there's nothing quite so terrible as the hatreds caused by family splits. The heathen is combatted less fiercely than the heretic or apostate.

This is without mentioning the massive religious elephant in the room

What, the elephant that most Americans are blindingly philosemitic? Or is the elephant that religion is less and less important in most people's lives, particularly the young?

So the Jewish ethny remains separate

72% of non-Orthodox Jews who married since 2010 married a gentile.

as such it's members pursue their ideological goals

Which ideological goals? The goals of insular hasidic sects in NY? The goals of deracinated "cultural jews" scattered all over? The goals of Reform Jews (basically the same as Unitarian Universalists at this point, including the whole "god" thing being pretty much metaphorical)? The Jews that support Israel or the Jews that oppose it? There is no uniform "Jewish" ideology.

without any concern for the damage these impose on the host society.

Nope. Jews are more charitable, on average, than gentiles, and jewish charitable fund money goes overwhelmingly to non-sectarian causes.

What's a non-sectarian cause?

'Helping everybody move to the USA' would clearly be a non-discriminating type of charitable act, but also very clearly politically-slanted.

There's probably a lot of Jews working for and supporting NGOs helping refugees move to the USA but how many of them support helping refugees move to Israel, or to their own neighborhood (Martha's vineyard anyone?)?

What's a non-sectarian cause?

Presumably one not identified with a particular (religious) sect.

There's probably a lot of Jews working for and supporting NGOs helping refugees move to the USA

Well, the House GOP just told three NGOs to preserve documents in connection with the southern border, and the three are each overtly religious. One Catholic, one Lutheran, and one Jewish. Just because of the religious affiliation of the migrants in question, I would naively expect the Catholic group to have an easier time networking, but who knows?

how many of them support helping refugees move to Israel

Jews in the U.S. care more about US politics than Israeli politics, for the sensible reason they live here, not there.

or to their own neighborhood

Jews tend to live in the biggest American cities, like LA and NYC. Aside from border areas which directly process new arrivals, those cities have the highest foreign-born population in the country.

jewish charitable fund money goes overwhelmingly to non-sectarian causes.

That article seems to dispute this, describing Jewish philanthropy as heavily weighted towards "non-religious but ethnic Jewish" causes and organizations. A rich doctor donating to the ADL is not quite a counterpoint.

This is the section I was referring to:

For the past year and a half, I have been studying the giving patterns of North American Jewish grant-making institutions.

These include nearly 150 Jewish federations. There are also thousands of Jewish community foundations, family and corporate foundations and donor-advised funds, such as the Jewish Communal Fund, which pools giving by about 6,000 affluent people.

I found that many of these U.S. and Canadian institutions actually give more to non-Jewish causes than to Jewish ones. In fact, my preliminary findings suggest that despite differences between distinct categories of grant-makers, at most an average of 25 percent of this money backs Jewish causes.

There is also a link in the article to this 2013 piece from the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

I think the op is saying it's a vicious cycle where nobody/everybody is at fault. Some Jews feel distrustful of gentiles and some gentiles distrust Jews, and those people will act in ways that hurt them, which will then cause other gentiles/jews to defend them and other Jews/Gentiles to be suspicious and on and on.

I...do not think the OP is interested in such a game-theoretic interpretation. He is asserting, in spite of historical evidence, several patterns of human behavior. Then assuming the Jews fit all of them at once.

Antisemitism as Marxist class struggle.

Possibly! A lot of things do happen because of misunderstandings! But a lot of the object-level claims are inaccurate, which makes me distrust the meta-level conclusions/narratives.

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