The Jews.

Actually, Zionism is not a terribly loaded word, and has a clear definition:

Main Entry: Zi·on·ism
Pronunciation: 'zI-&-"ni-z&m
Function: noun
Date: 1896
: an international movement orig. for the establishment of a Jewish national or religious community in Palestine and later for the support of modern Israel.

The bugbear is the whole Palestine thing.....even among Zionists, there is a rift. Radical Zionists support the annexing of Palestine by any means necessary. So....when referring to 'radical Zionism', we are indeed talking about a right-wing colonial movement, in the modern sense. I think it's safe to say that Jews in general regard having Israel a very important thing, but we don't all generally use the term Zionism with benevolence. Your presuppositions are fallacious, and seemingly based only on your own personal experiences, which doesn't count as research, no offence intended. Personally, when I think Zionist, I also think Israeli right wing settlers, but I don't support radicals on any side of the fence, so I hardly have any sympathy for the PLO either.

Another German Jewish cemetery vandalized

By Reuters



A Jewish cemetery in Germany was desecrated by
suspected neo-Nazis who painted swastikas and
anti-Jewish statements such as "You got what you
deserved" on gravestones, police in the town of
Beeskow said on Thursday.




This was the latest in a long
series of attacks on Jewish
cemeteries, and follows a
similar act of vandalism at a
cemetery in the central city of
Kassel last weekend, when 42
gravestones were painted with
Nazi greetings "Heil Hitler"
and "Sieg Heil."


The desecrations also follow the arrest last
month of several people with links to the far
right, who are suspected of planning a bomb
attack on a Jewish institution in Munich.

Police in Beeskow, a small town east of Berlin,
said the vandals also painted "Crap on the six
million lie," a reference to the six million
Jews killed by Germany in the Holocaust.

Please note this anti-semitism has not a thing to do with Israel.

Re the kinship between Lieberman and Falwell: Not so surprising, given the Christian Right's belief in the Second Coming being predicated on Jews living in Israel. It's a precondition, in their view, for Armageddon. Of course, it means that those Israeli Jews have to convert or perish, but in the meantime, Falwell et al support the Jewish state.

Strange bedfellows, indeed!

no doubt there are truely anti-semetic element out there and israel's policies help quell it about as much as the nation of islam helps to quell racism against blacks. but you're right that israel is not the cause of it.
however, out of fear of being labeled an anti-semite, the line between valid critisism of israel and anti-semitism has been pushed so far that in the minds of many the 2 are grouped together.

In the first few post-1989 years it was really interesting to see the change ... in Hungary, for example.

On the one hand, the new freedom of expression and political organisation gave Hungarian anti-semites the chance to pop up and out again. The extremist fringe is always just the extremist fringe, but they did mobilise, which brought a scare to the Jewish Budapest community.

Furthermore, politicians like the populist leader of the Independent Smallholders' Party, Jozsef Torgyan, and especially the populist writer Istvan Csurka, who was to break away from the transition-party Hungarian Democratic Forum (HDF) to establish his own "Party of Hungarian Justice and Life" (yes, really), took anti-semitic innuendo into the mainstream - and parliament. Csurka got over 5% of the vote, with further sympathisers in the parties of Orban's post-1998 center-right government, which on local level often worked together with his party.

The mood had already soured in 1990, when the two parties of the revolution, the HDF and the Alliance of Free Democrats, fought a bitter first election struggle. In it, the latter was insinuated by HDF supporters to be "the party of the Jews" - whereas AFD supporters spread all too alarmist stories abroad about the rise of Hungarian anti-semitism.

On the other hand, however, cultural Jewish life in Budapest bloomed. New kosher restaurants opened, Jewish shops likewise - I remember seeing one decrepit-looking facade in between the Koruts painted in bright, Israeli colours the next time I visited - the Jewish museum flourished as tourists started to flow in, and - well - freedom reigned, when it came to publications, research, arts and culture ...

Dunno how it is now, really ... settled into an average state, I'd guess ...

'Nother example is Vilnius, Lithuania.

After independence, interest in the rich Litvak (Jewish-Lithuanian) cultural heritage resurged - Vilnius was the "Jerusalem of the North", after all. The tiny, remaining Jewish population of the town experienced a brief bloom as well.

One has to remember that back in '45, the Soviets razed whatever landmarks the Nazis had left standing of Jewish Vilnius - including the great synagogue - they used the gravestones of the razed Jewish cemetery for sidewalks and pedestals of new statues, and clamped down on people commemorating the day the ghetto was liquidated in 1943. The few Jews who both survived and stayed on often decided to never to mention the Holocaust again. No wonder that prominent Jews had played an active role in Sajudis, the independence movement, fiftty years on.

In the years following independence, a Jewish museum opened, a Jewish library, and a Jewish Studies department at the university. Cemeteries were restored, as was the synagogue in Kaunas. In 1995, President Brazauzkas went to Israel and apologised for acts of Lithuanians in the Holocaust.

There's a very serious downside, too, though. First off, anti-semitism surged as well, as "anti-semitism without Jews" has across the region (and Europe as a whole, for that matter). The rehabilitation of victims of Soviet "justice" benefited some war criminals, too, and the spastic attitude of the Lithuanian government about the uproar that followed evidenced the continuation of a deep-seated distrust of Jews. After all, Lithuanians had played a particularly pernicious role in the Holocaust, with most Lithuanian Jews killed in sito, largely by Lithuanian collaborators, rather than far away by Germans in the camps.

But that's not all. The real problem was how this coincided with how freedom from communism came with freedom to travel - and emigrate. And Lithuania was a very poor country. In the mid-eighties, there were still (or only) 14,000 Jews left in Lithuania - ten years later, there were only 4,000, mostly elderly. Jewish tourists and interested gentiles, however, came to the city in ever greater numbers ...

Not anything as many as are coming to Czech Prague's former Jewish quarter, of course. It is sad to go to the looming Prague TV-tower, built in post-Stalinist times, and see the few remaining Jewish gravestones tattered on the edges of the surrounding park - this used to be the second great Jewish cemetery, but it was "razed for progress" by the communists. After that, it is touching (rather than cheesy) to see the immense interest for the old Jewish cemetery, always chockfull of tourists and travellers. Touching, too, is the memorial in one of the buildings there: all the names of the Jews killed in WW2 are written there, on the wall, one by one - as they actually had been, once before - until the communists literally whitewashed the memorial away. Restored now. Thats good. But just like (Eastern) Europe now has its "anti-semitism without Jews", this, again, is something of a "Jewish revival without Jews", as hardly any of those remain in the city.

It's the connection of devout Christianity and the notion of Jewish "sins" (as opposed to, say, "crimes by Jews") thats the crux of the problem here, I think.

I read an interesting article a few years ago, stating that christians were the first religious people to be massacred for thier beliefs - In other words, the christian faith was born in blood. While other religions were persequeted ie. slavery, deportment ect they were not killed strictly for or because of thier faith and most lived in relative harmony before the advent of christianity. Christians then carried on the tradition during the crusades slaugtering anyone who disproved of them and then used this blood thirst to turn on each other, up to and including the witch trials of the middle century. Some may argue it has never ended.



I totally disagree with you on this one. This is the same attitude every previous generation holds toward newcomers and eventually they assimilate only to make the fabric of north america culture (or wherever they end up) that much greater. Most muslims hold jobs, send their kids to school and baring language difficulties make themselves valuable parts of the community. They said it about the Irish, Ukrainian, Italians and most likely Jews too.
I took a tour of the new york tenement museum a couple of years ago. They said 1/4 of all jews in the united states can trace thier american origins to that specific area of NYC. I'm sure the previous residents of the lower east side had the same unfounded and unwarented complaints as well.

I was looking for a link ... There used to be this mailinglist, called EEJH (East-European Jewish History), but I cant find a webpage on it - one that I found lead to a 404, another that I thought I found turned out to be about a differently titled mailinglist on Jewish affairs in general. Perhaps it changed name/focus. The H-Net listserv page still gives these instructions to subscribe, though, so perhaps it still works:



An impressive and heartwarming portal of a source on all things Litvak (Lithuanian-Jewish), including online journal, is at LitvakSIG (does have a strong geneological-emigre angle, though).

A beautiful collection of essays on Litvak heritage is "La Lituanie Juive, 1918-1940" - there's a review here on the LitvakSIG site.

Here's a link with loads and loads of links on RUSSIAN JEWISH CULTURE AND COMMUNITY from the "Beyond the Pale" - the History of Jews in Russia website.

There's a (print) journal called "Jews in Eastern Europe" (or there was, in any case) - looked for a link but its not a practical phrase to google unless you are happy about finding all kinds of other resources as well ;-) - like this one - according to this extensive looking list of jewish periodicals it doesnt have a website.

A great archive of a site on East European minorities in general is MINELRES - frustratingly enough, it does not seem to have a search page but a google search on jew* within the minelres.lv site yields lots of links.

Since my point was that people's definitions for Zionism differ you've actually illustrated it nicely.

Well, they lied to you. Heck you can read about killing people only for their beliefs in the Bible in pre-Christ times.

What does Dr. Shimon Samuels mean by "anti-semitism" in his statement:

" . . . we've moved from where anti-Semitism was a crime to anti-Semitism being distasteful to it simply being another opinion."

He seems to be correlating the Holocaust with opinions.

Ceili,
I agree with what you said in reply:

"This is the same attitude every previous generation holds toward newcomers and eventually they assimilate only to make the fabric of north america culture (or wherever they end up) that much greater."

to au's statement:

"The previous generations of immigrants for the most part left the "old" country behind them and made every effort to assimilate. That does not unfortunately follow for many of the recent newcomers to these shores. I find that disturbing."

I was going to write a reply to au's, but after finding your reply, my reply would largely have been redundant.

au wrote,


Has Talmudic Judaism come to grips with its anti-Christianity and anti-goyism, and if so how?

Very true, Craven
In retrospect, I didn't say I agreed with it's premise I just said it was the article was interesting. Although... some of the ideas rung true to me. I mean Christianity made an artform of turture and bloodshed, its preferred method of conversion and of keeping its members under its thumb for centuries.
Ceili

au also wrote,


But prejudice and oppression was the Zionists approach to Israel. Zionism was very much a facet of nineteenth century European Nationalism from which they were attempting to escape. It was strident with fascistic features. "Conquest of the motherland by force!" was a rallying cry of the early Zionists. The thrust of the aim of Zionism was self-reliance based on exclusivist, separatist chauvinist ideology. The Arabs in Palestine were utterly ignored by the arriving Zionists immigrating from Europe, and the scant times when they were considered, they were frowned upon with contempt and loathing.

Yep, also relevant is that Christians really helped romaticize martydom. Now you've got me wondering who invented that.

InfraBlue



When have Jews killed Christians for there beliefs? Did you expect Jews to trust Christians after what was and is being done to them simply because of their religion and by Christians. As far as anti-Christianity[thats a new one] no such thing we simply do not believe that Jesus the pillar of Christianity was anything more than a man. And the rest is myth.
By the way what is anti-goyism.

Saul of Tarsus

Disclaimer: I agree with your overall sentiment. But Jews were killing Christians first. Not that I care in this weird "who's religion is more messed up" thing but for the sake of being factual ya gotta note that it has happened.

Infrablue
Quote:
.

. Can you dispute that statement knowing even a little history of the Jews in Europe.