But you two are simply totally out of touch with reality if you think that Esatern European antisemitism is mythology on the level with vampire stories, and describing the situation of of Russian and Polish Jewry as "richly symbiotic" with the broader cultures is offensive as well as wrong. Try: "black American culture was broadly symbiotic with the wide culture of the American South." Well, sort of, but you are sort of missing the fucking point. Pogroms, schmograms, you say. That's not how it seemed to my grandparents. And stop with this "USers" crap, W, when you talk to me about this stuff, I'm a Jew. I actually hate it that you make me come out that way, normally I think of myself an an internationalist, sort of vaguely culrurally Jewish. But comments like these make me bristle.
--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Chris:
> > Yes. This is why I get so annoyed at the "Russian
> anti-Semitism is a
> great
> > threat" trope. There is no social basis for
> anti-Semitism in Russia
> today.
> > Jews are very low-profile. If scapegoating goes
> on, its at the expense
> of
> > Caucasians. But since there is no Caucasian lobby
> in the West, unless
> you
> > count Zakayev, this is not widely known. In my
> opinion most Westerners
> think
> > of Russia using a weird jumble of steretypes
> gained from Cold War
> propaganda
> > and 19th-century novels.
>
> The notion of Eastern European anti-semitism is
> mainly a product of
> Western imagination, similar to that of the myth of
> the vampire.
>
> The concept of vampire is etymologically derived
> from Slavic languages
> (cf. upyr, wapierz, vypyoor) denoting something
> "washed out" i.e. a
> human being deprived of its "primary" soul by his
> death but having his
> "secondary" soul keeping him alive and wandering
> through earth (hence
> to the wooden stake to kill that "secondary" soul).
> "Vypyoors" were
> pretty much harmless, perhaps a bit scary, but not
> the blood sucking
> creatures in the Western imagination. Blood sucking
> was the domain of a
> different set of mythical creatures (the
> "stshyghas") which usually took
> the animal form (a mouse, a bat, a cat, a bug,
> e.t.c. but never a
> wandering ghoul) and sneaked during the night to
> human dwelling to suck
> blood or suffocate their victims).
>
> The Western "vampire", clearly influenced by Eastern
> European mythology
> as described above mixed with historical figures
> (Vlad the Impaler),
> basically reflects the fears and nighmires of
> Westerners - that of
> Festung Europa, the beacon of light, with the forces
> of darkness at its
> gate - as skillfully reflected in Werner Herzog's
> film _Nosferatu_.
>
> The concept of Eastern European anti-semite belongs
> to a similar genre.
> The Jewish and Gentile communities symbiotically
> coexisted in Eastern
> Europe for centuries - each one separate and rift
> with its own
> prejudices against each other, but also interacting
> with each other at
> various levels (business, inter-marriages, culture)
> and with very
> permeable boundaries and in-between areas populated
> by colorful
> characters - as skillfully reflected in novels by
> Isaak Bashevis Singer
> (cf. _The magician of Lublin_, _The satan of Goray_)
> or Bruno Schulz
> (_The cinnamon stores_). Not to mention the urban
> Jewry, without which
> there would be no Eastern European cities with their
> sweatshops,
> merchants, and, for that matter socialists. (BTW, I
> see myself as a
> heir to that tradition, both ethnically, as my
> ancestors were Polish,
> Jews, and Czechs, and more importantly culturally -
> as Eastern European
> culture is an amalgam of Russiam Jewish, Polish,
> Czech, Hungarian, Roma
> etc. but also German influences that gives it
> distinctively unique
> flavor).
>
> Pogroms were but one aspect of that rich Jew-Gentile
> universe of Eastern
> Europe, undoubtedly horrifying events, but certainly
> not defining that
> relationship (as for example racism and slavery
> defined the white -black
> relationship in the US). However, the Western
> concept of anti-semitism
> is a projection of the dark side of Western
> civilization - the
> civilization that brought death, genocide and
> destruction to four
> continents, but also feared the "eastern hordes"
> (the Ottoman empire) at
> its gates. The western notion of Eastern European
> anti-semitism is a
> cognitive exercise of attributing one's own faults
> to a perceived enemy,
> or perhaps to a scapegoat. Jews are in Eastern
> Europe because they fled
> the Inquisition and extermination in Western Europe,
> and it is Western
> Europeans, the Nazis and their puppets in France,
> Austria, the
> Netherlands etc. who dealt the final blow to Yiddish
> communities, just
> as they wiped out the native Americans, the
> Australian aborigines,
> Africans etc. By projecting its own sins on the
> "second class
> Europeans" (the Russian, the Poles, the Ukrainians,
> etc.), Western
> Europeans and the US-ers try to come out with
> "clean hands."
>
> It is not that I am anti-Western, but the Westerners
> calling Eastern
> Europeans "bigots" is a classic example of a midget
> calling a dwarf
> "short." Anyway, these are my two groschen.
>
> Wojtek
>
>
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