Exh irseljruid

 It is often said by some “People criticize Christianity and Christians all the time but no one goes around calling them a racist for doing so. Jews aren’t a race-ethnitiy ,they are followers of Judaism. The twelve tribes of Israel were lost, not one person can directly trace their ancestry back to them. It is actually as believable that Christians today (sounds like a Christian version of the anti semetic Black Hebrewites mantra) are from those tribes of Israel as it is people calling themselves Jews today”

I will reply by pointing out that while Jews aren't a race per say, they are definitely composed of some distinct genetic and cultural ethnicities. In Germany the Jews thought of themselves as Germans who were happened to practice Judaism. Yet their demonic persecutors saw them as Jews who spoke German. 

Jewish Americans are in kind of a strange position since even though they are unquestionably white today within living memory the Jewish identity was sadly a mark of otherness. Even into the mid to mid late 20th century, Jews had a vaguely marginal relationship in relation to whiteness and weren't exactly integrated in all parts of polite society.

So Bernie Sanders is someone who grew up at a time when his own Jewish identity was in flux. At the same time, in contemporary America he is white and everything that comes with that

Instead of pretending Bernie isn't white, we need to ask questions about whether or not the white/POC dichotomy is actually that useful.

It’s bizarre to me the logical end of radlib pol-correct idpol is the same as racialism when it comes to Jewish people. Consistently the line was they weren’t white, actively trying to maintain that narrative instead of rightfully dismantling it nowadays is beyond harmful, it’s reactionary.

I do however think it's a tad dumb to claim that the idpol take is literally the exact thing as what racialists believe, yes both have come up with some arbitrary reason why they wrongly don’t consider Jews to be "white" yet one side has done that in a ignorant idpol-y attempt to interpret their situation as a group as being a minority (we how much idpollers "love" their minorities) and the other side do so becaz they are bigots. That's sort of an important distinction...

Counterpoint: If Jews being white makes them "like you Whites", does blacks being non-white make them "unlike you Whites”?

We need to be arguing for abolishing race altogether,  because only bringing specific groups into whiteness causes zero improvement to society and in the specific scenario of Jews (in addition to Slavs, Middle Easterners and Latin Americans to a lesser extent) is a mockery of the suffering they lived through at the hands of whites.

I mean, is it really helpful to tell Bernie Sanders "yes whites destroyed your family, but you're a white now and so you should go away and give space to other races-ethnicities in politics"?

In Israel, some prejudice anti zionists refer to Jews as "white colonizers" and even try to rationalize Muslim agitation against Jews as "fighting the colonizers".

Anti Irish conspiracy theories of JFK supposedly taking orders from the Pope was the bigoted birther movement of the 1960s, and just a few decades before Al Smith was destroyed in a presidential election for being a pro-booze Catholic. One reddit poster posted that their mom had to drop out of college for dating their dad, since he was an Irish Catholic. This was as late as 1975.

Oddly, this has stuck with the Irish more than Chapo and its lame fans give it credit for, as there’s some solid polling evidence that the majority of Irish Americans vote Democratic even to this day while Italians are solidly Right Wing . There’s a book on the history of Irish America with a page going on about how the Irish into the 1970s and 1980s were more inclined than other white ethnic groups to work in the public sector, even while taking education into account.

It's a pity that things have ended up this way, in some book on the history of Race and immigration to the US, they said that Italian immigrants were refreshingly far less racist towards African Americans for the longest time, being way more willing than Irish people or Germans and the like during the first few decades of the 20th century to do stuff like work with African American workers in trade unions or engage in radical for the time acts personally and actually accept that within the community. 

This was really seen as a really grave threat to the underpinnings of Jim Crow, there was violence that expanded out to Italian people particularly by Lynch mobs or the klanners if they were seen as being too friendly towards African Americans (like in 1899 Tallulah, Louisiana ehere five people hanged for not following the stupid rituals of Jim Crow).

It took several decades of pressure but ultimately Italians tended to engage in the quintessential attitude towards African Americans that were so typical of whites in 20th century America, most notably as they themselves were fast-tracked towards 'Whiteness'. So now it feels like the worst type of white reaction comes from Italian-Americans. It's a very sad story that shows better than the majority of things how utterly toxic these constructions truly are.