Nevertheless, as America gets more Christian, Jews do experience it. That is part of the reason why there is a renewed emphasis in Jewish cultural circles to re-identify as Jewish - from more conservative cultural projects emphasizing "Jewish continuity" sponsored by the Bronfmans, to extremely progressive publications ranging from Heeb to Jewschool.com and radicaltorah.org .
Separate these kinds of phenomena out from the growth of left-wing Jewish organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews Against the Occupation . Sometimes reaching back to tradition - or reinvoking it in pcultural terms - is frequently a response to an objective discernment of growing cultural sectarianism, the Christian version of which is more commonplace in America today.
This is why when I hear third parties who are not Jewish taking such a deep interest in my culture and my politics make such generalizations, it makes me bristle, like I'm being examined through a tourist's eyes. I'm not an advocate of the "you gotta walk in my shoes to know what its like" ethos, but I feel like that when i hear such crazy statements in an increasingly Christian political environment.
Prejudice doesn't have to be an instrument of state policy to exist, or have the capacity to worsen. Even when the leadership of minority communities like mine can get too close to people who truly hate them. It just means you have to be sensitive to nuance and subtleties, and make sure your critical faculties are as sharp as they can be.
If the religious right does succeed in finally closing the gap between church and state, you can be absolutely certain that by default, more traditional forms of institutional discrimination against religious minorities will return, along with a banning of abortion, and the adoption of legislation that actively discriminates against gays and lesbians. its part of the same logic - to deny the existence of one is to deny all of them.
that's the problem with the logic of observations such as "anti-Semitism doesn't exist anymore." and by the way, anti-Semitism, as any of my Islamic colleagues will remind you, includes anti-Muslim racism.
On May 6, 2006, at 2:57 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> What America -- including leftists -- suffers from is anti-Muslim
> prejudice, not anti-Semitism, the latter of which is largely
> non-existent except among fascists and (ironically) Christian
> Zionists.
>
> One of the main reasons why the United States has two perpetually
> warring "anti-war coalitions" is an attitude toward Muslim
> organizations. One has nothing to do with Muslim organizations; the
> other is friendly to them, but its structure is impervious to
> democracy and thus ineffective.
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
>
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