On 2010-02-02, at 12:32 AM, Joanna wrote:
> In Russia and eastern europe, a jew is a jew first and foremost.
>
> It's just the way it is. Grew up with it. Am the issue of a scandalous marriage between an Ashkenazy Jew and a Greek Orthodox Xtian. Grandparents refused to talk to one another.
>
> Eventually it will change, but last time I was in Romania (1985) this type of sorting was still very much in force. The commies damped it down a bit for a while -- it was not PC to talk in those terms; but now it's back.
>
> Sometimes Chris is right, though I find myself wishing he wouldn't revel in it so. I don't mean being right; I mean these distinctions.
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Of course, this discussion has not been about the historical existence of antisemitism in Russia or elsewhere, nor that the Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe had the attributes of nationhood before they were slaughtered with their co-religionists elsewhere, nor that the Judeocide subsequently strengthened the "Jewish" self-identity of their thorougly assimilated but highly traumatized descendents in the West who would otherwise have little connection to that culture or any attachment to a "Jewish state" which they cling to as insurance against again being murderously viewed as Other.
The controversy has turned on not on whether Jews were a persecuted national minority unlike any other, whose ostensible refusal as an aloof "chosen people" to participate in the national life of the countries where they resided contributed to the Holocaust which engulfed them. That's been a classic antisemitic trope, not unrelated to a fixation on ethnicity as the driving force in human affairs.
I've argued that nationalities aren't uniform but varied and class-divided. There have always been antisemitic Russians and those who are not, the proportions varying in different periods and circumstances. You need to look no further than modern German history for a more striking confirmation of this proof. There are Jews, by the same token, who have a parochial sense of themselves as a "chosen people" and others who are resolutely internationalist, the mix again changing in accordance with historical circumstances and giving the lie to to uniform and unchanging national stereotypes. Chris' narrow preoccupation with ethnicity leads him to centrally (mis)understand Trotsky as a "Jew" rather than as the revolutionary leader of a multinational working class party having next to nothing to do with his Jewish ancestry. This is how Trotsky defined himself and how others, excepting for antisemites and confused innocents like Chris, have properly contextualized his behaviour.