Well that was depressing. Unsurprising, but depressing. A few years ago I was listening to The Great Mortality, and when he gets to the "blame the Jews " section I thought, well, of course. Never mind they were also dying of plague. I sometimes wonder if it's partly their resilience that pisses people off.
I've been trying to stay on task (and I will) with my ongoing Muslim Nazis/Balkan Inferno series, but that deep question--"why the Jews?"--is really starting to itch my brain. Hannah Arendt has written good stuff about it that I've cited before (namely in the Affirmative Action and Making of a Token episode I did), but I think we need an even more extensive exploration of it. I honestly don't know where to start, though there is a HUGE book by Robert Wistrich called A Lethal Obsession (it's like 1200 pages) that I'll probably tackle one day. I still maintain that bigotry and ideology are pre- and post-hoc justifications for petty grudges and ill-gotten material gain, but anti-Semitism is so persistent over time that it's developed a strange codification that other racism hasn't. MAYBE anti-black racism in the U.S. at least for a while, but I just don't think that persisted long enough to take on the same character. Jewish resilience likely does piss a lot of people off especially once they decide that Jews are a "problem"; it's pretty clear when you hear people going so far as to roll their eyes at the Holocaust.
The only groups I can think of that might be a bit similar are the Kurds and the Roma, though I don't know enough about either to really say. I'm not Jewish but my dad's best friend is (they are 82 now), so I grew up close to his family and wrote his German mother-in-law's autobiography (writing the family tree was really hard, she lost all her relatives in the war), and I've had a lot of Jewish friends over the years (plus spent half of 1982 on a kibbutz). My experience is of generally warm, hard-working, smart, lefties with strong, loving families. So the hatred has always puzzled me, especially since I'd bet a lot of the most antisemitic people don't actually know any Jews. I do keep coming back to that resilience - if any group of people could lay claim to intergenerational trauma it's them, what with the many historical efforts to wipe them out.
Well that was depressing. Unsurprising, but depressing. A few years ago I was listening to The Great Mortality, and when he gets to the "blame the Jews " section I thought, well, of course. Never mind they were also dying of plague. I sometimes wonder if it's partly their resilience that pisses people off.
I've been trying to stay on task (and I will) with my ongoing Muslim Nazis/Balkan Inferno series, but that deep question--"why the Jews?"--is really starting to itch my brain. Hannah Arendt has written good stuff about it that I've cited before (namely in the Affirmative Action and Making of a Token episode I did), but I think we need an even more extensive exploration of it. I honestly don't know where to start, though there is a HUGE book by Robert Wistrich called A Lethal Obsession (it's like 1200 pages) that I'll probably tackle one day. I still maintain that bigotry and ideology are pre- and post-hoc justifications for petty grudges and ill-gotten material gain, but anti-Semitism is so persistent over time that it's developed a strange codification that other racism hasn't. MAYBE anti-black racism in the U.S. at least for a while, but I just don't think that persisted long enough to take on the same character. Jewish resilience likely does piss a lot of people off especially once they decide that Jews are a "problem"; it's pretty clear when you hear people going so far as to roll their eyes at the Holocaust.
The only groups I can think of that might be a bit similar are the Kurds and the Roma, though I don't know enough about either to really say. I'm not Jewish but my dad's best friend is (they are 82 now), so I grew up close to his family and wrote his German mother-in-law's autobiography (writing the family tree was really hard, she lost all her relatives in the war), and I've had a lot of Jewish friends over the years (plus spent half of 1982 on a kibbutz). My experience is of generally warm, hard-working, smart, lefties with strong, loving families. So the hatred has always puzzled me, especially since I'd bet a lot of the most antisemitic people don't actually know any Jews. I do keep coming back to that resilience - if any group of people could lay claim to intergenerational trauma it's them, what with the many historical efforts to wipe them out.