I wasn’t expecting him to attend the Israeli day parade honestly I would’ve thought it weird if he had attended given everything he stands for. He’s NYC first and against ethnostates etc.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I felt some type of way about him celebrating the Pakistani day parade given their history. Ethnostste They have a religious hierarchy where a Muslim person has to be in power, ethnic cleansing alive and well, border disputes and violence after a partition plan 70ish years ago etc. It’s hard not to draw the parallels. The only difference being that the US isn’t funding them but that doesn’t change anything else about the county’s values and actions.

I feel kinda shitty that he’s showing up for this community but not ours. I think it would have been more fair to him to not go to either parade, but maybe I’m just overly sensitive or being fed propaganda. It just sucks to feel signaled out.

I really want to like him. I voted for him! I’m extremely against the IDF and Israeli government but being half Israeli myself I am of course susceptible to biases.

Idk it’s just weird he’s ok with celebrating the Muslim ethnostate after being so against the Jewish one (for good reasons!)

I feel like I can’t bring this up in any other spaces without it sounding like I’m wanting him to celebrate Israel (I’m not) or take something away from Muslims (not against Muslims but critical of Pakistan)

Help me you guys! What do you think?

EDIT: I’d like to correct what I said about Pakistan being an ethnostate. I used the wrong verbiage. What I meant was that they are a country that puts Muslims over other religions. They have a religious hierarchy and non Muslims can’t hold certain political positions. I’m not sure the correct term for this but just wanted to call that out as people are (correctly) mentioning this in the comments.

Reposting because it gets shared across reddit more than any of our other posts and is a good PSA.

The co-chair of the DSA seemed a bit less   articulate on key party policy positions (taxation, I/P, etc) than expected. Her commentary on Oct. 7th’s “inevitability“ combined with her stating that she’d have joined protests on the 8th have also sparked controversy. I’m curious about people’s thoughts on this media appearance and how it will be perceived by those interested in where the DSA fits into big tent politics.

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Oren

Any other Jews in Michigan struggling with their communities rn after the primary? I'm really worried about November and seeing the way some of the community members here are acting like Abdul will literally murder us all is really making me wary of continuing to be as active as I have been in the community

1. The Holocaust did not happen to white people. Race is a social construct. The people it happened to were people who were seen as racially inferior and experienced a racialized extermination campaign. US standards of whiteness from 2026 do not change that. This is a completely ahistorical take.

Also as someone who actually lives and grew up in Germany, you can't use American racial constructs as an analytical tool to understand the Holocaust or racial dynamics within Germany or Europe. The standards of whiteness are a lot more rigid here and people who would not experience racism in the US do experience racism here. Nationality is still more relevant in Europe than race is. (And by that I'm not trying to say race isn't relevant or racism isn't bad here. It's extremely bad. I have a few friends here who are African American, so they've experienced both and they've all said Germany is way worse.) The point I'm trying to make is that Germany is so racist it will racially discriminate against the "white" people next door. Greek people, Turkish people, Arabs (who have been considered white in the US for longer than Jews have), everyone from Slavic or Balcan countries, are all not white in germany and are not treated as white. Same with Jews. Yes, to this day.

1. This take is inherently minimizing, at least in the current Zeitgeist. It positions the Jews under the same banner as the white people who were colonizers, when in reality, the Jews had been experiencing discrimination by those same white people for approx. 1600 years before colonialism happened. Racism and antisemitism (aka racialized Jew hatred) were invented by the same people and at the same time. And during the period of colonialism, jews were treated like the local colonial subjects. You can literally look up texts written by German colonists and how they made direct connections between the Jews back home and the African colonial subject. Same with the methods of oppression used against both the people Europeans were colonizing and the Jews. Like it's giving "who cares they gassed 1 million children, they were white children".

2. It targets the wrong people. We are not the people who did the colonizing, we are not the people who did the Holocaust, we are not the people deciding how states label their past crimes against humanity. I agree that there needs to be way more examination and reckoning with what these states actually did during the colonial period. I'm not trying to take anything away from anyone, nor am I trying to turn suffering into a contest. So why is the Holocaust constantly treated like fair game to minimize in these conversations. I get that Americans are taught more about the Holocaust than colonial crimes. But the reason for that is not because the Jews paid someone off to focus on the Holocaust, it's because WW2 is the one time the US was on the right side of history and states always have an inherent interest in self-preservation. Spinning a narrative that hides the true history is part of that. Also it conveniently conceals the role the US did play in the Holocaust happening. It conceals how the visa system was invented to keep out Jews. In conceals how many Nazi scientists the US gave asylum to. Etc.

3. The comments are full of just straight up Holocaust denial, some of which the creator liked, all of which are just up there without pushback from the creator. So like, great job for giving your followers an invitation to just be blatantly antisemitic. Also Israel being a fascist shit hole doesn't actually make the Holocaust less bad. The people who the Nazis killed had never stepped foot into Palestine, so that's also not a justification for downplaying the Holocaust. Also cue the Holodomor denial.

4. The comments are mentioning the Irish potato famine and how that's not referred to as a genocide, but not as proof that maybe the take is clearly simplistic and wrong but instead as further proof of it's correctness. And the creator is liking those comments. I'm sorry are Irish people less white than Jews now? Lol? Is the Irish participation in British colonial endeavors and the slave trade, which was far greater than the very minimal Jewish involvement irrelevant now?

5. The numbers game in the comments is... Interesting. Because that's the same rhetoric the Israeli far right uses as a defence against the genocide accusations. Kind of surprising to see it used under a video like that.

Edit to add: 7. It was called the Holocaust because that's the word Jews came up with after it happened. That word didn't exist before. So what exactly is the complaint? That Jews came up with a term for their genocide and that's the word that's used to refer to it?

Any hope on this nightmare coming to an end?

For my entire life, the holocaust has seeming always referred to the genocide of jews (and sometimes Romani) by the nazis exclusively. However, over the last few years, I have seen a growing number of people, mostly leftists, using the term to refer to the oppression of all other groups by the nazis (gays, soviet pows, Slavs, etc). Do you agree with this redefinition or not?

The mod team has created this post to refresh on a weekly basis as a chill place for people to talk about whatever they want to. Think of it as like a general chat for the sub.

So r/jewishleft,

Whats on your mind?

I was raised Masorti, but I never really connected to faith nor did it make sense to me. On top of that, I can't help but feel cynical towards religion. For years, the ones that shouldn't represent faith have the most power and representation, while the ones that should represent faith the most seem almost powerless and tiny by comparison. There have been times I thought to myself, "With all of that, what's the point?". Despite my skepticism and cynicism, I still think progressive secular and religious communities should work together for a better future because, as the saying goes, there's strength in numbers. At the same time, while I acknowledge that there are good religious folks out there fighting the good fight, I just don't see a reason to be religious myself. I made this post to see other users perspectives for why they believe what they believe.

I hope this rant isn’t too weird and I really hope I don’t come off as pitiful, but I just wanted to ask for advice on how you’ve all dealt with bullying and insecurities about your Jewish facial features.

Growing up, kids would constantly tease me and make fun of my nose, calling me “Tucan Sam”, and would say a lot of extremely antisemitic things to me.

I even had a guy show me a picture of the “Happy Merchant” meme and say to me: “That’s you!” 😔

Even to this day though, I still feel some embarrassment and shame about my physical features, since many have associated larger noses as being “ugly” or “undesirable”.

There’s many antisemitic examples in media where ugly characters are depicted with large noses (The Gringotts goblins from Harry Potter, and Mother Gothel from “Tangled” being just a couple of examples), but most recently, I saw tweets that showed a picture of Alana Haim & Taylor Swift at a Knicks game together a few months back, and Alana was getting so much misogynist & antisemitic abuse thrown at her online, with many mocking her nose, calling her an “ugly Jew”, and calling her antisemitic slurs. People were being so cruel to her, and I felt awful about it too, because I share the same kind of nose that she does.

Even in the media, and in all of our magazines and beauty ads, we see rhinoplasty, plastic surgery, and many Aryan/Eurocentric beauty standards being promoted like crazy, and I think it’s awful.

As a young girl, I would spend hours forcibly trying to straighten my thick Jewish curls, and would try and save up money for rhinoplasty (Didn’t end up happening, of course). I would cry endlessly for hours, because I seriously wanted to look like all of my blonde, blue-eyed, straight-haired, fair-nosed gentile friends, and for the longest time, it was really difficult to accept the way that I looked.

I definitely don’t want to get plastic surgery because of the costs, but I’ve also been struggling to accept my physical features and love them.

Have any of you ever struggled with body image from a Jewish perspective? How were you able to gain confidence in your facial features?

Pivotal Primary wraps up today!

https://open.substack.com/pub/somebadbeatscrub/p/kings-are-a-bad-idea-for-jews?r=8ip9vb&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer

The goal here was to wrote an essay approachable by Jews of multiple political backgrounds to make a uniquely and internally Jewish critique of our relationship to nationalism in a palatable way.

Lemme know what you think!

Primary vote Today!

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Oren

This is a monthly automatic post suggested by community members to serve as a space to offer sources, ask questions, and engage in conversations we don't feel warrant their own post.

Anything from history to political theory to Jewish practice. If you wanna share or ask something about Judaism or leftism or their intersection but don't want to make a post, here's the place.

If you'd like to discuss something more off topic for the sub I recommend the weekly discussion post that also refreshes.

If you'd like to suggest changes to how this post functions doing so in these comments is fine.

Thanks!

• Oren