Mamet has given us a fascinating insight into his thinking. The word ‘fear’ occurs only once, in the context of the Ten Commandments. Yet his piece is suffused with fear.
Fear is not a great ally of rational thought. He draws no distinction between the Cossacks and peasants who formed the Black Hundreds in the Russian Empire, and the overwhelming majority of Unherd readers. Which is, frankly, insulting.
In Mamet’s universe, there are the Jews and everyone else, where everyone else wants to kill the Jews. Not only is this not true, it can’t possibly be true. As a moment’s thought will confirm.
I agree with you in that the Unherd posts are extremely one-sided; the situation in Palestine/Israel is far too complicated to offer a facile solution one-sided solution.
People have been writing about these Arab/Jewish/Zionist issues since at least 1909 when the Young Turks revolt took place. Before, everything had been controlled by the Sultan in Constantinople but then came a vacuum.
The problem was that the western world (Britain and France) tried to train the (mainly) Muslim populations to be just like them. Political parties were created and they collapsed because Shar’ia law was considered to be fine as a government so why have political parties and elections?
The same is true today. You can’t just impose democracy if the people don’t want it. So who can negotiate for the Palestinians in a meaningful way? Of course, the Israelis know the answer to this question – they can’t negotiate a meaningful peace because it will not last. So, they have to demonstrate using more and more force – which is unacceptable to young minds, minds which haven’t had much education. So young people support the underdogs and the pro-Palestinian marches in the UK are mainly full of people who are not muslims – just people who support the underdogs.
And which side represents the ‘underdog’ depends on how far you go back in history.
Well-said about young people and their poor education. It’s not only history – obviously they lack basic arithmetic skills. When you compare how many Jews and how many Muslims live in the Middle East or in the whole world, it is easy to say who the “underdog” is.
Yes, you might also say that they lack reading skills. Why wade through a thick, ‘boring’ book if you can watch a 10 minute presentation on YouTube? As a bonus you learn to speak with a trendy American accent.
To be boring, as I say elsewhere in the stream discussing campus horrors, I recently read an interesting article about Palestine/Israel which presented the war as a series of media bulletins. The writer tried to say that getting the ‘correct’ media reaction (for the young, I think) was far more important than the truth. He predicted that the winner would be the one with the best media outlets.
To be deliberately provocative, it would not be surprising if comments on UnHerd were always labelled as far-right or reactionary because they (the comments) are not dressed for youthful media consumption. They we can be dismissed as ‘old fuddy-duddies’ and ignored.
I am in my 70s and literate but I would say that the comments on Unherd are largely quite far on the right of the political spectrum.
It is unreliable to suggest that if people disagree with opinions on the right the right, those people are uneducated and/or incapable of critical thought.
Well it’s not the shoot to kill with the most up to date weaponry supplied by USA ones who claim a God most of them don’t believe in wrote them title deeds in a work of Bronze Age literature. What would Jesus Do. He’d be healing PALESTINIANS
“can’t take care of themselves”
Yeah, if only those pesky Palestinians could learn from the righteous, independent, self-sufficient Israelis. Of course, $3.31 billion a year and $260 billion since WWII from the USA might make them quiver a bit less, no?
Let’s talk complexity only after a sincere condemnation of the depraved Hamas attack of 10/6. Then explain how an openly stated intent for genocide fits with “but on the other hand” reasoning. After all, complexity must excuse depravity?
I have two friends who went on that march – one a leftist of Jewish origin, one of Muslim origin but atheist. One of them told me that the greatest majority on the march comprised Muslim families.
Education, even when coupled with having reached biological maturity isn’t enough* though.
People need to have experienced significant failure, sorrow, doubt to develop humility necessary to learn, to gain insight, even common-sense.
—
* See Clare O’Neil, Australia’s Minister for Cyber Security & Home Affairs (no less). Ms O’Neil is 40+yo with stellar qualifications yet no insight, no common-sense, no conscience. Her proud displays of cluelessness would be hilarious, if the stakes weren’t so high.
The NYT? You must be kidding! A DNC agenda-driven propaganda sheet.
All I seek is balanced coverage and nuanced information from all perspectives not designed to whip up anger and hatred and to continue to divide us.
Hamas’s evil is our evil.
I look to Jonathan Cook ex Guardian who until recently lived in Israel, I appreciate Thomas Fazi, Chris Hedges and others.
I am not in the slightest anti-semitic (I utterly reject the false conflation with being anti Zionist that is now being invoked). Our son was at a Jewish montessori and many years on his girlfriend is a very spiritual Hebrew-speaking Jewish girl whose father was born iin Israel.
Zionist Bloodlust? You really let yourself down with a comment like that.
Before the war, most European Jews thought the idea of a Jewish State in Israel was laughable. The majority had no desire to travel to the Middle East to try and build a new life in a desert. But after several generations of European Jews were exterminated in the camps, many of the survivors realised that there was no other way of protecting themselves from the abiding and centuries-long hatred of Jews, than to build a nation that Jews, themselves, could defend. They could no longer pretend the era of pogroms was past – they could no longer rely on anyone but their own to protect them.
Genuinely, no decent human being, whatever their sympathies for Palestinian refugees and Gazan children, can look at the history and fail to see that the Jewish people faced (and still face) a unique and abiding hatred, and they have a right to protect themselves, a right to live. Any civilised person must be able to recognise that there is an inarguable, undeniable reason for a Jewish homeland to exist.
If you do not, then Shame on you.
The problem that Palestinians (and much of the wider Arab world) have with Israel is not about land. It is not about borders. It is not about resources. It is because it is a Jewish State. No amount of trading away land for peace would resolve the problem – it’s been tried by the Israelis many times – because the problem is with the very existence of Jews.
If Israel was a Christian state in the Holy Land, if that same piece of land had been set aside in 1948 as a Communist state, if it was given to Odin-worshipping Vikings, any other state than a Jewish state, the problem would have been resolved in short order. Displaced people from the land would have been incorporated into surrounding Arab lands and the hatred of whatever that country might have been called would not exist.
Anyone who talks about the disputed ownership of the land being the cause of the problem is either ignorant or is being dishonest. The problem is entirely because they are Jews.
Through the last 100 years who do you think has been the impediment to peace? Jews who want a homeland, or their neighbours who wished to see all Jews exterminated?
Terrorists are seemingly given a free pass in their desire to annihilate Jews, meanwhile Israel is condemned when they try and stop the terrorists from killing their people? It is unconscionable.
It falls to decent people everywhere to stand in solidarity with Jews, regardless of where any of us might be on the political spectrum.
Just be a mensch.
You are refusing to make a distinction between between being anti-Zionist and being anti Israel as a state. Zionism and Israel are two separate things. Many Israelis and many non-Israeli Jews abjure Zionism.
Perhaps, for the benefit of those of us that are ignorant of the distinction, you’d like to explain your understanding of what Israel is, if it’s not what Zionism represents, which I thought was a desire for a Jewish nation state. I’ve never received a cogent, consistent response to this question. Why are they at odds?
As a postscript, I absolutely support the rights of Jews to their own homeland, free from persecution, and I’m not Jewish.
Zionism has a long history but its essence is that Jewish people have the exclusive right to the area “between the Sea and the Jordan” as the manifesto of Likud, Netanyahu’s party, put it in 1977.
Supporting Israel’s right to exist does not make us Zionists. We long for a state that, after many hundreds of years of Jewish people suffering ethnic and religious intolerance and persecution, is a shining example to the world of ethnic and religious tolerance and conciliation.
That means finding a way to live with the Arab population who were there before the state of Israel was created. And we should remember that prior to Israel’s creation, by and large Arabs and Jews lived happily side by side (see for example https://www.972mag.com/before-zionism-the-shared-life-of-jews-and-palestinians/)
Unfortunately, however, and for many reasons, Israeli politics have moved relentlessly in the opposite direction. Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995 is perhaps the most dramatic example of the division in Israel between those who seek a state of tolerance and conciliation, and those who seek the opposite.
The religious-political term Zionist describes those who seek the opposite – those who espouse an absolutist doctrine whose longterm goal is the complete removal of the Palestinian people from “between the Sea and the Jordan.”
I am not in that camp.
But I am a supporter of the existence of the state of Israel and I nurture the hope it will liberate itself from Zionism’s fastening grip.
I hope this helps.
Too much Edward Said and Al Jazeera and Guardian for you. The Arabic speaking population of the FBMOP say they have the exclusive right…they said so in 1924 and say so in 2024. They are the fanatics. They are the racist. They practice apart hate.
Zionism has a long history but its essence is that Jewish people have the exclusive right to the area “between the Sea and the Jordan” as the manifesto of Likud, Netanyahu’s party, put it in 1977.
Supporting Israel’s right to exist does not make us Zionists. We long for a state that, after many hundreds of years of Jewish people suffering ethnic and religious intolerance and persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, is a shining example to the world of ethnic and religious tolerance and conciliation.
That means finding a way to live with the Arab population who were there before the state of Israel was created. And we should remember that prior to Israel’s creation, by and large Arabs and Jews lived happily side by side (see for example https://www.972mag.com/before-zionism-the-shared-life-of-jews-and-palestinians/)
Unfortunately, however, and for many reasons, Israeli politics have moved relentlessly in the opposite direction. Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995 is perhaps the most dramatic example of the division in Israel between those who seek a state of tolerance and conciliation, and those who seek the opposite.
The religious-political term Zionist describes those who seek the opposite – those who espouse an absolutist doctrine whose longterm goal is the complete removal of the Palestinian people from “between the Sea and the Jordan.”
Like many, many Jews in Israel and across the world, I am not in that Zionist camp.
But I am a supporter of the existence of the state of Israel.
Zionism is the Jewish right to self-determination within a Jewish state in their historical homeland. Within that there is a wide spectrum of beliefs regarding politics & religion as to how to implement this idea.
You have bought into an understanding of it which is tainted by Israel hate propaganda similar to the demonising way many antisemites define Jews or Judaism. You have evoked blood libel type rhetoric which associates Jews with evil. The vast majority of Jews are Zionist as per the definition I have provided.
Anyone who can write that is a liar or a fool, or possibly a bit of both.
You might suggest that that there’s a difference between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism … I’d struggle to believe you at this point, but there’s at least an argument to be made.
But you simply cannot suggest you can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Israel. It’s self-contradictory
Zionism surely is just the project to make a Jewish state in Palestine .in fact many of the early zionists considered other places for a state . Israel is a nation that came about out of the Zionist project . There are Arab Israelis too .
Note that Argentina, an island off of Niagara Falls and a plot of land in Kenya were all rejected because none of these places resonate with Jews as Historic Israel.
In 2024 to make the case that anti Zionism is not anti Israel (or antisemitic) is hollow and senseless. Denying the Jewish inalienable right…even if you’re a Jew or an Israeli Jew….and you’re correct some are this insane….does not give this anti Zionism cover for what it really is…Jew Hate.
I am not sure. The muslims were not that keen on a christian state in the Holy Land the last time there was one. Nor would they I think, considering what the Koran says about polytheistic idolaters, be heavily into an odinistic state.
Nobody knows,because they make as sure as they can that we don’t know,but historically and well into the early 20th century much of “Palestine” was Christian. There are many villages that were once wholly Christian and some have ancient mosaics and Christian art.
Due to violence,pressure and persecution,the numbers of Christian Palestine have dwindled but we are WRONG to ignorantly equate “brown skin + Arab” to Muslim.
Thank you Paddy, well put. As you say, shame on those who refuse to stand in solidarity with Jews and the Jewish State. David Mamet’s view is forthright and to some may appear one-sided but is evidently and horrifyingly justified. I am reminded of the distinguished Jewish historian Saul Friedlander, who focusses on Nazi Germany and formulated the term ‘redemptive antisemitism’ as unique to that period in history. He is a member of the Peace Now group in Israel promoting a two-state solution … is this really possible now, have Hamas even surpassed Nazis antisemitism?
There are so many different views. Everyone takes a particular piece of history and runs with it, whatever the comments.
I have just been reading about the year 1492 when tens of thousands of Jews were massacred in Spain, basically because they didn’t fit in. There is the constant reminder in history about Jews being selected as scapegoats, killed or enslaved, having property taken away. The Catholic Church persecuted the Jews between about 1830 and 1940, mainly because they (the Jews) were liberals and liberals were not popular with the Church. Then there was the holocaust.
So there is a lot of collective guilt hanging in the air. But I agree with you that this doesn’t mean that Israel can do absolutely anything. There is almost a palpable fear on UnHerd of saying anything apart from the straight anti-Hamas stuff.
So you openly admit to Jew hatred on a public platform? Seriously?
You don’t have to agree with the founding of Israel – but to suggest you don’t believe they have a right to a homeland, when you must surely recognise the history of Jew-hatred, makes you seem utterly callous.
After an horrific massacre, you won’t even offer them your support?
Fair enough that you didn’t want ‘a pat on the head’, but like it or not you have my contempt. Shame on you.
“_If Israel was a Christian state in the Holy Land, if that same piece of land had been set aside in 1948 as a Communist state, if it was given to Odin-worshipping Vikings, any other state than a Jewish state, the problem would have been resolved in short order. Displaced people from the land would have been incorporated into surrounding Arab lands and the hatred of whatever that country might have been called would not exist_”
People need to realize that no one really cares about your ethnic group except other members of your ethnic group. You either have your own nation that represents your group or you are at the mercy of strangers.
Jewish people of the liberal kind prove you wrong – there are more than a few dead in swamps in Mississippi because of their support or African American civil rights.
Of course they had also been targeted by the Klan – and still are.
WOW….what a great response. Let people in NYC and London actually read the hamas “covenant.” Even a non Jews on America’s largely very left leaning MSNBC, Joe Scarborough just said on his broadcast morning show that the Oct 7th atrocities are a war against the 15 million Jews of the World.
Your anti-Semitism is unwelcome here. Zionism is simply the belief that the Jews like every other ethnicity deserve a country of their own. It’s not a dirty word. Bloodlust, literally lust, was what we saw on October 7th.
Please see my earlier comments. And I find your phraseology “unwelcome here” peculiarly mob-like. That, of course, is a direct result of the bloodlust being whipped up among us as many, many thousands of Gazans (15,000?) perish in a campaign constituting illegal collective punishment and amounting to ethnic cleansing which is and always has bee expliciitly embraced by the Zionists including Netanyahu.
As a Jew I can tell you that your ignorance and perception of anything related to being Jewish and the experience of living as a Jew, is palpable even from far here in America, so you better off staying quiet. If you have a need to be heard and call attention , find something you have at least a tiny bit of culture in and leave the issue of our Jewishness and Jewish assimilation to for us to debate.
Jack, I live in the USA, my son attended a Jewish montessori and his girlfriend is a very spiritual Hebrew-speaking Jewish girl whose father was born in Israel.
I note the threatening tone in “you better off staying quiet”. Many Jews who disagree with your position are facing very unpleasant recriminations by people like you, which is very sad.
Simon, above, Andrea Vickers asked you to clarify your distinction between anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist that you seem so keen on but so far you haven’t done so. Could you do so now?
I’ll try.
Zionism was an aspirational philosophy. Now that the Jews have a defensible homeland (since 1948) the original philosophy is out-dated.
Marxism was also an aspirational philosophy. Once it became manifest, in the USSR, China, etc, it also became out-dated.
In both cases the original philosophy was overwhelmed by human nature. Marxism became totalitarianism and Zionism became a chauvanistic land grab similar to the settling of the American West. That form of “Zionism” is what some of us object to. Very few decent people object to the existence of the State of Israel. Many of us celebrate it and what it means to our Jewish friends and neighbors and their children.
Unfortunately many of the Arabs feel differently.
because Netanyahu intends to get all the Palestinians out of Gaza into surrounding Arab countries. It is that or be killed by IDF. He has exploited his poor command response to the Oct 7th atrocity to do this.
Anti Zionism is only antisemitic if you believe that every other ethnicity have a right to a state. If you believe that states in general should not be ethnical, it is quite logical to extend that idea to Israel, without there having to be any antijewish animosity.
I never said I had a problem with Jews having a state of their own. I merely clarified the point that denying an ethnic state to Jews is only antisemitic if you think every ethnicity has a right to a state.
You could for example believe that all states should be like the USA with birthright citizenship that doesn’t consider the citizens ethnicity. Or be an anarchist that is against states in general. Or believe that existing states have a right to exist due to already existing, without the ethnicities involved to matter. Or some other belief.
Being critical of Israel isn’t the sane thing as being antisemitic, and trying to conflate the two in an attempt to shut down discussion is simply lazy
You may be right that Unherd’s pieces since 7 Oct have been almost exclusively pro-Israel, as I would hope any decent outlet’s pieces would have been pro-Britain at the outbreak of WWII. It isn’t always necessary to balance pro- and anti-pieces since it’s a rare thing that blame can be equally apportioned. In fact I’d say that is never the case.
It also depends what you mean by even-handed. I would say that up until 7 Oct most mainstream news outlets (Guardian, NYT, BBC etc.) were pro-Palestine. Rather than trying to persuade these outlets to be more even-handed with their coverage (something that simply hasn’t worked), maybe it’s better for a different new to counter this general pro-Palestine bias with it’s own pro-Israel bias. After all, reading an article in Unherd doesn’t prevent you from reading another article in the NYT or the Guardian. This way you can get the alleged balance you crave.
There was a big distinction between the venomous antisemitism of Julius Streicher, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann, and the attitude of typical German citizens. And there was an enormous distinction between the Nazis and those Germans who fancied themselves as sophisticated rational thinkers, the Unherd readers of their day. But most of Europe’s Jews were murdered all the same. Mamet’s point is that no Jew is truly safe in a country run by non-Jews. They may want their creativity, enterprise and intellect for a while. But they always remember they are Jews, no matter how assiduously Jews may attempt to assimilate, and they always turn on them in the end. And when that happens, experience tells us that the only people who will fight for Jews are other Jews. There may be other minorities in a similar position, but that has been the experience of the Jewish diaspora, throughout history, and across the world. If you have much to fear, then fear is an ally.
Great post, but I would dispute your point that the only people who will fight for Jews are other Jews. Throughout Europe, there are so many instances of non-jews laying down or risking their lives Jews. Abbé Pierre in france, the danish government evacuating their Jews to Sweden, the Bulgarian foreign minister refusing to deport Bulgaria’s Jews and huge numbers of ordinary and elite Greeks who risked all for their Jewish neighbours (look up Jews if zakynthos and how hard the Greeks of Thessaloniki tried to save their Jewish population).
I agree with yours and mamet’s main point; Jews must always keep looking over their shoulder for the next moment of danger. However, I still think it should be looked into more why some countries and individuals in those countries in WW2 behaved so differently to others regarding protection of their Jewish citizens – religion, ethnic and national feelings, language, politics and culture all seem to play a part, but its hard to find a single answer.
Remind me, how many Jews were murdered during the holocaust? Yes, there were a few who saved Jews but the vast majority of people were complicit just as the vast majority of Gazans support Hamas.
6 million were murdered as we all know, although I’m sure you didn’t need reminding. There were many more than a few who saved Jews, as I pointed out, whole institutions in some countries either did or tried to save Jews.
In terms of complicity of Europeans, the vast majority were complicit in doing nothing and allowing evil to triumph. Considering the repercussions of aiding Jews, it is still incredible that so many Europeans risked everything to help their Jewish populations. My main point is that their are still many non Jews today who will fight for jews. Like in WW2, today there are many more who will do nothing.
Your last point about Gazans and Hamas and complicity does not to me appear to have any bearing on the points I made about Europeans fighting with or for jews- these are completely different topics. My main point, again, is that there are many non Jews who will fight/ have fought for Jews. I am interested in why this was the case in WW2 and why it is the case today (what encourages or compels people to take thay stand) , as it can shed light on how to fight antisemitism and ensure Israel is not left alone amongst a sea of hostile nations.
How many Israelis do you believe would fight for the (nominally) Christian countries of Europe if a major conflict broke out in the future? I’d wager not many so you can’t really complain about Europeans not wanting to risk execution to help Jews in the past
There’s a major difference. In the past, Jews were fellow citizens of those countries; they had demonstrated their loyalty by joining and building the institutions of their given country, they had fought for their countries and on average, gave more to those countries than their fellow citizens as they wanted to demonstrate their gratitude.
Synagogues in France declared loyalty during their services to Republican values and in the UK synagogues have had prayers for the royal family for hundreds of years. As loyal citizens, why should Jews not expect their fellow citizens to have done more to protect them, much as they should expect protection today from countries in which they are fellow citizens.
Israel is a separate country and therefore does not expect this type of reciprocal loyalty. However, as they have passed on much intelligence that has directly saved many lives throughout the West, they only expect allies to behave accordingly and understand that they are a tiny country surrounded by hostile elements.
A better question to ask is how many Jews in the diaspora would fight for the countries they currently live in. My bet, based on past events, would be equal to if not higher than the average of other ethnic groups.
Wasn’t the argument earlier that Jews can only depend on Jews to defend them . Now you say Israel is a small country and needs, if not depends on , the support of the west . Which is it ?
I haven’t argued that Jews can only depend on Jews to defend them. My first post disputed “that the only people who will fight for Jews are other Jews” and I argued that many Europeans have defended Jews in the past and still do so today. I also acknowledge that Israel does depend on countries like the USA – to me that is obvious, especially when you look at 1973 war and US ammunition deliveries.
Others argued that only Jews can rely on each other to defend each other – I did not.
In the post you’re referring to, I was discussing the question of loyalty and the difference in expectation Israel has from other countries and what the Jewish diaspora expects in their country of birth. As I said, they are two different, although arguably not wholly unrelated, issues.
At least the German people + others could claim they “didn’t know” even if they were lying. Now they tell us on TV and radio all the time and make us complicit.
I never said it changed the very long history of persecution, but I stand by my original point that large numbers of non Jews fought to protect Jews in the 20th century. Their political or spiritual descendants are still with us today, fighting tooth and nail against modern day antisemitism
I am an American of David Mamet’s generation. Although I’ve always accepted that antisemitism existed in individuals, I never dreamed I would see antisemitism resurrect itself as it has currently, in my lifetime (or ever). And it has been profoundly shocking to me. So, although I’m not Jewish, I can understand somewhat, I think, the tone of Mr. Mamet’s essay. Today’s political left is also profoundly and aggressively anti-Western and anti-feminist/misogynistic. Today’s young woman demonstrators offer themselves up as handmaidens to the largely male-driven, woman-despising trans-activist movement, and as disciples for the older misogyny of the Middle-Eastern Islamic countries that denies women both legal rights and any agency whatsoever. That these two streams of misogynistic hate have come together and joined themselves to a resurgent mass antisemitism is truly terrifying. And certainly evil. So, yes, I am profoundly shaken, and, not completely without hope, but fearful about the future.
As I said in my original post, I also agreed with Mamet’s tone, as I feels Jews must always look over their shoulders for any approaching danger. I always felt that antisemitism of this kind would come back, as the history if Jewish persecution suggested that Jew hatred would just evolve and manifest itself differently – in all the ways you have explained.
I disagreed with Stephen Walsh that only Jews will fight for Jews as the late 19th and 20th century have shown this not to be the case. For some hope, we have to look to the actions in the past and the actions today of non Jews who fought/ are fighting for Jews to find how that can help beat back this latest scourge of antisemitism. If we follow Stephen walsh’s logic of only Jews will fight for Jews, then Israel will find itself alone amongst a sea of hostile nations, and that cannot be allowed to happen
To an extent, yes, but I was more looking at those countries where the repercussions of saving Jews were much more severe. For a WW2 British perspective, it is more illuminating to look at what happened to the Jews on the occupied channel islands. There was little resistance to their deportations – there are arguments that many of the Jews were not locals but recent arrivals (so reducing the chance of people saving friends) or there were too many German soldiers. However, I would still point to zakynthos and the islanders brabe behaviour as a comparison.
Even if you argue nothing could have been done for the Jews of the channel islands, there were many examples of Europeans taking an arguably futile but courageously moral stand against nazi behaviour, which was notably absent on the channel islands from most people and institutions.
“No Jew is truly safe in a country run by non-Jews…”
I agree. But then, no one is truly safe, ever. Life is just like that. The answer is eternal vigilance. It is when we attempt to give ourselves absolute safety, that we end up making things very unsafe for everyone else.
It couldn’t possibly take the entire diaspora population – there isn’t the room.
Plus the existence of Israel depends for its international clout on America. Without the US, it is nothing and would be ignored.
Plus Jews are not safe from antisemitism within Israel because the pronounced tension between Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi and associated political allegiances.
If I far right gov came to power in the UK (something continually work against) I would rather take shelter like Anne Frank or join a resistance group here than go to Israel.
The rise of antisemitism in Europe recently has precisely nothing to do with the so – called far right . It is the confluence of mass migration of Muslims and of woke ideology spreading through the education system . Indeed left wing Jews have been extremely supportive of mass migration and are also mainstays of woke ideology
I see where you are coming from now, the classic internationalist left is right, anything else is wrong. You say you would ‘take shelter like Anne Frank’. How can you even frame what happened to Anne Frank in terms of ‘taking shelter’? Did Anne Frank have the option to join a resistance group as you say you would? Shame on you for bringing her name into this in such a way.
More recent Hebrew muck-raking press reports find NOT a failure of Military Intel gathering by Israeli state security agencies. Rather, a failure of Command.
Or, the elements of this rapacious radical right wing most fascistic Israeli political coalition and Bibi Netanyahu cabinet, blessed by Trumpf and Daddy Warbucks in the modern nation’s his\herstory failing to act or even mobilize with AMAN or Military Intel well in advance on Hamas plans to “Show them.”
“…the Intelligence Section”), often abbreviated to Aman (Hebrew: אמ״ן), is the central, overarching military intelligence body of the Israel Defense Forces. Aman was created in 1950, when the Intelligence Department was spun off from the IDF’s General Staff.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/israeli-military-had-warning-of-hamas-training-for-attack-reports-say
To your point, Peter Samson in replying to David McKee “As far as I know, David Mamet is a Reform Jew and lives in the U.S.”:
Hence Mamet’s over-compensating Neo-Con Daddy Warbucks boilerplate. Thanks for calling out his Chanukah Rubber Chicken attempt at Maccabee nee Chicago ward walking tough talk.
I recall the intramural bullying of Betar-nicks at plenty militant circa 1960’s street protests around UN in New Yawk. Betar bullies weren’t serving in the IDF or state security services either. Nor were they walking anti-crime gang, anti-drug Lower East Side streets as Guardian Angels would decades later, multi-ethnic Guardian Angels who were the street violence battle hardened and relentless organizers among screwed workers by corrupt city and Wall Street funded political machines. Political machines fine with the Wage Stag-Nation and Food Stamp Nation of the past century of quantified wealth concentration.
In major urban centers like Chicago or NYC these were primarily Democratic Corrupt Political machines that featured no shortage of often still Orthodox corrupt or blessed aldermen and machine functionaries in their nice shul suits complete with symbols of rabbinic hashgacha and stubborn resistance to the inevitable assimilation of being seen in a shleppers’ work clothes.
Many with sermons and banquet speeches like Mamet’s here went on to make tidy profits working or marketing within Daddy Warbucks. Always selling to anyone on any side of a shooting war. Brokers of footwear with army boots to sell for on-the-ground remote occupation of frigid, muck & mired terrain. Or, filing\filling the lobbying machinery to keep the profits humming as too many Jews did after WW I believing the fascist movement couldn’t live without including wealthy Jews within their Select Club of the Supreme Yiddishe Kupf.
All branded themselves kosher, strictly OU or Union of Orthodox Rabbis certified. I went to their day schools (yeshivoth) and see all the doctors and dentists produced filling the finer western gated communities visiting Israel faithfully. They that can support a failed coddled Philadelphia IDF wannabe soldier and self-styled Bid-Net success in retail furniture like Bibi Netanyahu. Not like his brother Yoni Netanyahu, truly a brother in arms who died in the IDF elite raid on Entebbe: https://www.timesofisrael.com/yoni-netanyahus-heroism-related-to-his-emotional-distress-researchers-say/
Seleucid Greek imperial revival in the Eastern Mediterranean, anyone? Jest askin’
Mitch RitterParadigm Sifters, Code Shifters, PsalmSong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of Atonement Seekers)
Media Discussion ListLookseeInnerEarsHearHere
And Mamet left the Democrat Party some time ago….for myriad good reasons, one of which is its intolerance for religion and religious peoples. It’s the party of ‘Atheism’.
According to an aggregate or simplified reckoning, sure. But the extreme right has many nihilists too. And of the last two presidents elected: Who is a more genuine Christian, Grandpa Joe Churchgoer or Donny Upside-Down-Bible?
I realize this is further off topic than your comment but given the totality of your posts, I wonder if you think that Donald Trump–the de facto head of the Republican Party–is anything but a materialist or nihilist.
Yes, but as has been demonstrated by the vile demonstrations in the US and especially at Harvard & other elite institutions, that situation is an endangered one. Jews, such as Mamet, need Israel to exist so they have a place to call their own.
He wrote a book in 2011, called “Secret Knowledge”, how he basically got disillusioned with “Liberal” America. It is a huge turn around in his life and he is also back attending his local Synagogue.
Yeah, sure, it’s very common to drag people into gas chambers, happens every day. No one is truly safe from the ovens. Gee Why didn’t I think of that? Your comment is one of the sickest things I have ever read. Your moral compass is off, by a lot. You give false equivalency a whole new meaning. Life is just like that, are you out of your mind!
Mr. Greco, from your phraseology, I would guess you are American. Beyond that, I can’t think of any other explanation for your intemperate reaction other than fear.
Rather than me guessing, would you care to explain, sir?
” … no one is truly safe, ever. Life is just like that. “
Really? You want to equate the chance that you might get mugged, or knocked down by a bus, with the existential danger that faces Jews, simply for being Jews?
If people were targetting you, David McKee, for no other reason than for your (presumably) Scottish heritage, I wonder if you’d be quite so sanguine.
I wonder if, in the face of a fatwah, you’d still say, ‘Well, life is just like that”
My test would be whether a country’s institutions would ‘allow’ a Jew to become its most senior politician. Ukraine passes this test with Zelensky, as did Britain in the 19th century with Disraeli.
It is notable that Disraeli was called Hebrew behind his back continually and that there has never been a Jewish premier since – in spite of many high level Jewish politicians. Ed Miliband was smeared by the Daily Mail and successfully sued them for articles they wrote about his father.
I completely disagree with your comment about only Jews fighting for other Jews. The irony is that today’s leftist, cultural Jews have become the most useful idiots in world history. The secular left has unveiled their hatred of Jews and it is the Christians who will fight for Jews, who are our predecessors. Despite Mamet’s unfounded belief that Christians hate Jews because of killing Christ, a biblical Christian only has reverence for the Jewish people Christ himself was Jewish for heaven’s sake!
It is one thing for the “liberal” Jewish diaspora to have sown the seeds of their own destruction by naively trying to assimilate with those who hate you, which Mamet clearly articulates above, it is quite another, however, to water, fertilize and nurture it!
One:they voted them in power. Two: in the 1960s Satire,biting funny cruel satire changed society,pulled down the rich and privileged and raised up the poor but able. Mockery destroys POWER. Just like the same sort of political satire brought down the Nazis in Weimar Germany. And now we’re not ruled by Eton boys anymore
Yeah,right.
There was a big distinction between the venomous antisemitism of Julius Streicher, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann, and the attitude of German citizens who considered themselves sophisticated rational thinkers, the Unherd readers of their day. But most of Europe’s Jews ended up murdered just the same.
Julius Streicher, loathsome as we was, played no executive role in the slaughter of the Jews.
Nor should he have been condemned at Nuremberg for what was essentially a ‘thought crime’.
Perhaps. But Streicher was undoubtedly guilty of inciting the Holocaust.
Incidentally, his name translates to “Strider” In English.
Which is the nickname given to Aragorn in Bree. Hence the clownish first translation of the Lord of the Rings into German, gave Aragorn the (unfortunate) nickname Streicher !
Interesting, exactly the same debate around antisemitism is going in US at the moment as principals of top three US universities were hauled before Congress and asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their rules on harassment and bullying. None of the principals could answer with a simple “yes.” Instead they argued, variously, that it depended on whether an individual was targeted, in which case it could be bullying and harassment. The principals also differentiated between “free speech” and whether calling for genocide translated into “conduct.” In other words, saying it was OK, doing it not so good. With this mindset, if Julius Streicher, were in the dock today in the US he would be acquitted. One wonders how the principals would would have reacted to genocidal statements about other minority groups, such as black people, Muslims, trans and LGBT, or indeed mis-gendering. Apparently, it seems that mis-gendering with wrong pronouns, although only speech, counts as harassment and bullying and is elevated to “conduct,” and is sanctionable, yet calling for the genocide of Jews is merely speech, and doesn’t reach the threshold. Explain that!
These mealy-mouthed women were just another ‘miss’ for women & feminism which are really chalking up misses as of late; Members of the so-called Squad were reluctant to condemn the use of rape & violence, a Hamas tactic, this week as well.
Same as the men, unfortunately. So much for the idea of a world being run by women being a better one. Women haven’t done as much evil in the world as men have because they haven’t had a chance to.
Yes, indeed. It was a violation of our collective human right to hear/witness some of those historically hypocritical comments. The woman from Harvard should be fired immediately.
By splitting hairs, the defenders of virulent antisemitism throughout the Left try to hide their extremism. Yes, theoretically discussing whether genocide can ever be justified is an exercise in free speech. Actually rallying to promote genocide is inciting terrorism, quite different. and is probably illegal. It’s certainly abhorrent.
I so agree Mr McKee. I cannot deny Mamet his fear. It is palpable. But I do not want to believe it all. Is it psychosis? Is it a condition rooted in a history? How can I make him less afraid when a) I support lots of other oppressed peoples around the world including the abused and slaughtered Palestinian civilians b) I admire clever Jewish leftwingers who resist c) I believe Jewish people have contributed brilliantly to every scientific, artistic and philosophical discipline d) I loathe Netanyahu and Ben Givr who are doing more to destroy Israel than Hamas ever did or could. e) the fact of the Holocaust and my study of it changed me – to make want to love and protect Jewish peoples. f) I find Iran’s oppression of its people and its executions of youngsters and rape of women for not wearing a scarf is insanely evil. Jihadism and Sunni politico-religious extremism is the most evil thing can think of next to Putin.
Your not wanting not to believe doesn’t make it not so. You can’t even try to make him or me less afraid by concentrating on us for one brief moment without singing your own praises for admiring left wing Jews who resist (what is that?), I guess other Jews don’t deserve your admiration, talking about your selective support for abused and slaughtered people you deem abused by Jews and no other peoples. Is it possible you are the problem? Are you really trying to make him feel safe?
Does it bother you to encounter people less afraid than you are? For Jews in particular, is the paralyzing “virtue” of fear some kind of situational duty?
Ms. Brocklehurst’s tone mightn’t be a model of humility, but neither is yours (or mine). Given that she concludes with a heightened condemnation of Jihadism, I don’t see how her comment confines the blame for civilian deaths in Palestine to Jews alone.
Fears may be understandable, even warranted, and serve as a first spur to action in a dangerous moment. Dwelling in fear, however–and making it one’s constant, tightly clutched companion–helps no one.
Words like alertness or preparation, even vigilance are not close synonyms for fear.
Your lack of empathy is unbelievable. There aren’t many Jews on this planet who are not afraid after the Oct 7th massacre and the world’s reaction to Israel defending itself and destroying Hamas, a terrorist organization. Just yesterday the presidents of America’s most distinguished education institutions could not answer the simple question. “Is calling for the genocide of Jews against their student conduct policies”, it was a context specific situation. Killing Jews and standing by while people slaughter Jews is an age-old tradition. Your nit-picking is frankly insulting.
“Not only is this not true, it can’t possibly be true.”
I would say 49% of the world population’s is happy to kill the Jews, the other 49% is happy someone else is doing it for them. Only 2% of the world really doesn’t care.
That said, Jews now have a homeland. They can all move to Israel. Or convert and become a Westerner (French Catholic, English Protestant, American Baptist, etc.)
Harold Pinter did it first.
Mamet(speech) said, “In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, based solely on our ability to speak the language viciously. That’s probably where my ability was honed.”[
That might be because he sees no distinction between the Cossacks and peasants who formed the Black Hundreds in the Russian Empire, and the overwhelming majority of Unherd readers an indeed defines himself in opposition to the Christian West
I don’t think that’s quite right. David Mamet is pointing out the historical truth that Jewish people have always been at risk from those that want to kill them. Not from everyone, as you suggest, but from enough quarters to leave Jews fearing for their safety. Even in “civilised” English-speaking countries the desceration of Jewish cemetaries, attacks on Jewish schools, daubing of swastikas and now the open and unrestrained calls for the killing of Jews by Palestinian supporters must leave every Jew considering emigration to Israel. And even there there is no safety, as October 7th makes all too clear.
When I was a teenager we lived next to an old Jewish couple. Very Mittle-european. They kept packed suitcases in the coat closet; ready to flee at a moments notice. After what they had been through, my older sister explained, they didn’t trust us (goyim) to protect them if things got ugly again. I found that terribly sad and, “…frankly, insulting.”
Now, after what happened since October 7, I finally understand.
That is not what he is saying. His point is that as Jews seek assimilation as a means of “protection” the leave themselves open to antisemitism in soft form which leads to antisemitism in hard form, ultimately unprotected. IN this state the only protection is maintaining the Jewish identify as distinct and prominent.
I don’t think Mamet is saying every single non Jew is anti Semitic. But the double standards applied to Israel compared to every other conflict in the world – often much more bloody, over which complete indifference is shown – show it to be extremely widespread – even if often self deluding and unconscious.
Tyler Durden
5 months ago
Rousseau used to refer to the noble savage as the primitive individual who had avoided the fall from grace brought about by technological life in moder society.
Now certain groups in the West simply celebrate the savage under the banner of what they take to be an appropriate left-wing cause.
That is how far we have regressed in our idea of innocence and morality. Too much alienation by virtual information technology has brought out the savage in too many, atomised out of ethical accountability.
Mr Sketerzen Bhoto
5 months ago
“ into an agricultural phenomenon, supplying much of Europe’s produce”
In my opinion, ‘The Spanish Prisoner’ was the very best Mamet film ever made, David. Thank you for your work! It denotes the futility of money, power, women, intrigue, fame, and so on, and tames man’s heart to ask himself, “What truly matters?”
Now to consider this article: ever since Abraham opened the four doors to his tent to give, and not to take, it has been a Jewish trait to focus almost exclusively on giving, rather than taking. Our own rights are small in our eyes, we weep over our enemies’ fate.
So why did God insist that the Jews conquer and keep the land promised to Israel? Perhaps because if not for this command, the Jews, ever mindful of others’ rights and feeling, would take no land at all, in any place. Kindness would be mistaken for placidity. No one compliments the sheep for its peaceful acts; they arise from its peaceful nature. A lion that is tranquil is to be admired, however; as it defies its own nature.
When the Jews remember the commands of God, ALL the commands of God, perhaps then the world will be at peace. May this happen in our day.
I am going to suggest James Howard Kunstler’s short, accessible essay “The Jewish-American Dilemma” as a complement, if not entirely a counter-point, to David Mamet’s essay. Both essays share some parallel constructions. https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-jewish-american-dilemma/
“If they really want to repair the world, it’s time for Jewish Americans to get out of the Democratic Party and re-assimilate into an American common culture — a consensus about reality — that is consistent with running a successful, orderly, and just society.”
Alex Carnegie
5 months ago
I could not work out what Mamet’s conclusion was. The piece was sub titled “the futility of assimilation” and ended stressing the importance of the Israeli army. Does he mean that all Jews should give up on the West and move to Israel? I hope not. As he points out, the Jewish contribution to Western culture has been immense. In any case, I am not sure that is what he really thinks even if his rhetoric seems to point in that direction. Maybe the essay just depicts his conflicting sentiments without coming to a conclusion.
So all foreigners should assimilate to the general population (something I agree with), but Jews should keep themselves seperate and maintain their own culture irrespective of the majority population
Christopher Chantrill
5 months ago
Nassim Nicholas Taleb helps us understand this with his notion of the “intransigent small minority.”
If you are a small minority you need to be instransigent, otherwise the majority will accidentally tread on you.
But then, of course, when the majority needs to unite the nation, it needs an enemy (see Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt). And the easiest enemy to fight and defeat is a small minority.
Not really true.
Judaism is a revolutionary religion (there is only 1 god and the Jews are the chosen people). Jesus and all the early followers were Jews. They became Christians. Simply put, Christianity (Judaism+Rome+Athens) is the most successful Jewish sect ever.
Jews (if you believe in 1 god and that you are the chosen people) always produced crazy sects that turned on each other.
Christians turned on the Jews…and we know the history.
Jerry Carroll
5 months ago
Satan’s greatest triumph in the modern age is promoting the line he doesn’t exist.
Chris Oliver
5 months ago
BCE?
What’s wrong with just BC? It worked well enough for several hundred years.
‘Jews even wrote the world’s greatest Christmas songs: “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” by Mendelssohn, a converted Jew (a “Jew”), and “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin.’
Nonsense. Everyone knows the greatest Christmas song is ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’ by Shakin Stevens, aka the Welsh Elvis.
How can there be a greatest Christmas song when they’re all such unalloyed sentimental childish drivel? Not counting ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’, which has nothing to do with Christmas.
Burke S.
5 months ago
Please start by telling that dwarf Bloomberg to stop sponsoring anti-2nd Amendment gun control legislation. Jews should have a right to defend themselves from a pogrom in America, no matter what liberal Jews say!
Really it’s a fascinating time in Jewish history: the contradiction between the western “renter” Jews and the eastern “landowner” Jews has come fully to the fore! From “always remember the stranger at the door” to “shoot them if they breach our wall.”
David Mamet was on Real Time with Bill Maher this week – and gave a similarly ‘eh? Meh’ performance. Like he was resorting to the PR tactics of many a contemporary artist – making gnomic, iconoclastic statements that can sound pretty cool, if you don’t look too closely. Not to say he’s a fraud- he’s magnificent as a drama writer, director and deserves all the praise he’s got – it’s just that talent in one area very rarely generalises out; and the pressure and desire for writers, artists to be a renaissance polymath is great.
Rafi I think he’s ill and they’ve exploited him by publishing an incoherent ramble. I don’t like Mamet but this piece shows signs of disintegrated thinking.
I would think most people 1) left 2) right 3) center and even 1) sensible 2) intemperate 3) somewhat unhinged–many of us are a mixture, of both trios–could agree on that.
Gordon Arta
5 months ago
Sounds like a call to Jews to adopt theological ‘occasionalism’, and abandon reason and intelligence. It worked out well for Islam, didn’t it, so what could possibly go wrong?
We were meant to be people of the book. Mamet would prefer it if we were people of the machine gun.
Keith Merrick
5 months ago
I agree with David Mamet. You can pare down your whole identity to suit those who want to harm you but in the end it does you no good. Hiding in the shadows and trying to pass as straight only made gay people more persecuted. In attempting to pare down your Jewishiness you signal to others your fear and vulnerability. However, as a minority living among non-Jews I can understand the impulse to blend with the crowd, especially when the majority don’t seem that bothered about coming to your aid when needed.
Last edited 5 months ago by Keith Merrick
UnHerd Reader
5 months ago
Mamet doesn’t say it here, but he skirts the edges of the thought I’ve heard repeated often in the past 2 months since the Hamas barbarians committed their atrocities: that there is something unique about how Hamas is being given a pass to slaughter Jews. That the same people calling Hamas “freedom fighters” would be singing a different tune if it had been Britain or America or Australia that was so brutally assaulted. They point to the reaction after 9-11, for example, when America and its allies did retaliate and sought to eradicate the enemy from the globe. But I am sadly convinced that we no longer live in a world of that moral clarity. At least not for the very powerful and essentially violent fringe Left in the West, I promise you that the reaction would have been, and will be the same when civilians in own countries are brutally targeted. Whoever thinks this talk of “decolonization” is reserved for Jews knows very little of the ideology these lunatics cling to. Jews, Americans, Brits, all free peoples….wake up because what is coming for us all is the same evil ideology with many heads: Political Islam and Marxism reborn as Woke are coming for us. We unite, or we lose.
Charles Stanhope
5 months ago
During the days of Apartheid were the Jews treated as White, Black or Coloured can anyone recall?
Only ashkenazi of course – Mizrahi would have been classed as black or coloured, perhaps some Sephardi Jews too. Mizrahi Jews would not have settled in SA for obvious reason.
What qualifies you to spout such bigoted rubbish? Apartheid was crime against humanity but there is much beauty and sophistication in the Afrikaans language.
During the days of Apartheid in South Africa, when the country had a functioning economy, full employment, and a modern healthcare system, the Jews were considered “white” and enjoyed all of the privileges that classification afforded them. In spite of that, many in the Jewish community, and even Jews who did not consider themselves members of that community opposed the apartheid system. Helen Suzman was the sole member of the Progressive Party in the SA parliament, and she was a tireless opponent of Apartheid. The head of the underground SA Communist Party was Joe Slovo, a Jew from Lithuania who kept that underground party following Moscow’s orders to agitate against the SA state in the black townships. After the fall of the white government, violence and lawlessness increased rapidly both in the previously all-white cities like J’burg and Pretoria, and even in the all-black townships. The South African economy slid into chaos (today the “official” unemployment rate in the country is 40%, although it is observably much higher. The government has slipped into chaos, corruption and incompetence. A large part of the Jewish community has emigrated overseas to Great Britain, Israel and the United States to escape the non-racial paradise they so longed for. Some people never learn, do they?
Should that not read : When South Africa had an economy, healthcare system and full employment that functioned principally for the benefit of white people including assimilated Jewish people? It certainly did not work for black people. (Of course that part of Africa belonged to Africa before the British and the Boers came.) Yes. Notable corruption since Mandela and even then it was not great. SA is not isolated from world downturns either. We only put up with our own government and corporate corruptions so far in the UK because we have a stronger system and financial resilience for it not to have gone completely belly up yet. But it is heading that way. (Food banks. homelessness, Evictions. Social Care -what a euphemism-even the indicative height of poorer children is shrinking. Almost Victorian). Your opinion speaks to me of pots and kettles.
Well, hopefully the people of SA are now pleased that they have rid themselves of those oppressive institutions and have returned to the conditions that existed before the Boers showed up.
They mostly weren’t there eg (without checking the exact timeline) I remember that the Zulus were expanding into SA at about the same time as European settlement was happening.
Yes, he is defending and celebrating Apartheid South Africa, and getting robustly upvoted for it. This particular comment board has an attention-getting blend of hypervigilant antisemitism detectives and proud old-school bigots* who’ve learned a few new rhetorical tricks.
*in updated cloaks of familiar, dishonest analysis or pseudoscience flavored with cherrypicked data, robbed of context.
I’m not saying there aren’t, Rupert/Alex, but an article like this attracts swarms of fringe-dwellers. And the fringe crowd is drowning out both old-style liberals and true conservatives (my definitions) more and more often here at UnHerd.
*Downvoters: If you have been at this website for a year or more, tell me why you disagree. Or perhaps, you just dislike how I say things or who you think I am which is fine.
Granted, the radicalization and hardening of hearts occurring on this website has been happening everywhere, or just about.
Not quite as tasteless Mr Stanhope as calling Julius Streicher’s pornographic hate cartoons ‘thought crimes’ that didn’t merit due justice. I’ll give you one thing – you never bothered to deny you’re an antisemite because there’s more honesty in you than some of the other racists on here.
Praise indeed!
As you may have gathered I am quite anti a lot of things.
I did describe JS as “loathsome” did I not? Even the N*zi Party found him so, and quite correctly fired him. But revolting as his “cartoons” were, they did NOT warrant a capital charge. If did they we would have run out of rope years ago.
The idea of a party that carried out mass genocide, grotesque medical experiments etcetera finding Streicher too much for their sensibilities belongs in a J G Ballard or Kurt Vonnegut novel.
Go on, Charles, Deny you are an antisemite. A simple grammatically clear sentence. I am not an antisemite. I know you won’t.
Why don’t you know the facts Ms Davis, they’re easy enough to find???
JS was made Gauleiter of Nuremberg and North Bavaria in 1925. In February 1940 the Supreme Party Court found him to be “unsuitable for leadership” and he was summarily fired from all his Party and Government positions! February 1940…’do the maths ‘ as they say.
Please define antisemite for me, I found the whole thing rather confusing.
Hi Chris, plenty of people who don’t agree with me are not antisemites – in fact a lot of people on here who disagree with me a lot fancy that they might be great pals to Jewish people. This is merely because at the moment, they see us as the enemies of Muslims who they stereotype and hate.
As far as I’m concerned Hamas are total scum …but the Palestinians do have a just cause.
Thinking Hamas or Isis or Osama Bin Laden represent the whole of Islam is like thinking the Ku Klux Klan represent all Christians.
Netanyahu is a corrupt disgusting fool who couldn’t keep his people safe and he will lose the next election.
The last thing Netanyahu wanted is for the Palestinians to be led by a non Islamist organisation that might work towards a two state solution. He is over.
Even the right-leaning Zionist Jews on here mostly see Mamet’s post is incoherent gibberish – because it is.
As anti semites go, having recourse to only one vituperative phrase seems rather unimaginative, Charles.
And if this is your real name, I certainly will have Hope not Hate look into you and any other activities you might be involved in.
So better hope you don’t know any real nasties, Charles because you might find yourself confronted with genuine hate crime charges.
Think of going into a police station and having to mingle with the other unwashed hoi polloi.
don’t push me because I bite
Are you feeling alright JD?
That is the most extraordinary THREAT that I have ever read on UnHerd! Perhaps some other commentators can recall something similar, but I can’t.
And this when two hours later in another post to me you describe yourself as “a sad old hippy”!? And imply that you are a champion of human rights.
Incidentally what is ‘Hope not Hate? I have never heard of it.
As to Streicher were his cartoons any worse than those of Charlie Hebdo? I think not, yet both seem to have provoked an extreme reaction don’t you think?
Sentiment beings and ‘beasts’ ( your later post again.)set me thinking and I wish I could agree you but the ‘science’ seems to say otherwise.
In conclusion excellent use of hoi polloi, and NO use of the definite article.
Would like to have continued this conversation but the blasted boiler has packed up! And it’s like Stalingrad here!
Are you trying to destroy free expression here? I thought the whole attraction of sites like this would be the freedom to discuss all matters, without threats to drag in illiberal progressives like HNH. Why not go elsewhere if you don’t like something, rather than try to destroy what others might value?
Mr Barrow, Mr Stanhope has published defamatory, hate inducing material that I assume another Jewish forum member complained about to the moderators – I didn’t. They removed it but it appears to be temporary.
As for calling Hope Not Hate ‘illiberal progressives’, that is nonsense. They oppose racists of all stripes, including those on the left, and they have successfully prevented at least one MP from being murdered by white supremacists. By the use of the same informant, they also prevented an attack on a synagogue where there would have been women and children,.
When I came to Unherd, I was curious to see whether it lived up to its remit of being a contrarian, iconoclastic publication which can accommodate right, left, liberal, feminist and other dissident voices.
But what I have found is a lot of knee jerk unthinking ‘anti wokery’ and truckloads of fairly dire racism and misogyny. Admittedly there are some thoughtful and decent people on here who do vote down the more hateful comments but posts from those who come from a more classically progressive position are usually downvoted even if they are more informative.
Marshall donates to GB news which is obviously the UK equivalent of Fox news.
Unfortunately, I mostly agree with you. It was always right-leaning here, but less one-sided and more fair-minded just a year ago.
For my part I have limited patience for extremists on the far-left or far-right. The former are superabundant at the NYT, the latter here. And there is a dwindling group of moderates–among whom I place myself–at both places too.
I think the absurdities of the left are coming under more internal challenge than is the case on the right at present, at least here in the States.
Be careful ‘calamity’ Jane that is a prima facie case of criminal libel. Additionally saying someone has “a swastika on their tweed’ is tantamount to saying that they are a N*zi and clearly contravenes the 2006 Hate Crime Act.
As an entitled Jewess you do NOT have have the right to scream antisemite at anyone you disagree with, as Mr Chris Wheatley makes abundantly clear.
As to HNH it sounds like a ‘coven’ attempting to replicate both the Spanish Inquisition and or the NKVD/Gestapo or have I got that wrong? I would be interested to hear the details of how they/you saved the life on a MP.
Certain keywords–think Germany and Russia in the mid-20th century–trigger an automatic “quarantine” of about 12 hours, after which most comments will post, with a time stamp that misleadingly suggests it’s been posted all along.
Or in the terminology of Quantum Physics, the measurer affects the measured.
I remembered enough of my state school Latin to understand your post.
Too clever for my own good.
You are going to get an extremely detailed, multiple part definition Charles when I’m less tired at the weekend. Then you will be able to see which category you fit into.
No – not thanks. There was a goodish piece on how SA declined after Mandela’s death. A lot to do with corruption in the ANC and a very negative leadership from Zuma.
You don’t have to be a communist to oppose racism but the international communist party, as contrasting to the Soviet travesty of communism, often did as a matter of principle.
As I read this piece by Mr. Mamet, I reveled in my esteem for David, his work, and that we are of the world in the same era; but then, I wondered if I really know David. Could be that he’s prodding us in a new place today and I must “go off” to do the difficult: think.
Last edited 5 months ago by 0 0
AJ Mac
5 months ago
In my estimation this opinion piece is the most disjointed neurotic thing Mamet has written for UnHerd so far, and that’s no small achievement.
Given his overall (former?) secular intellectualism, the ending paragraph constitutes a sort of psychotic break.
He seems to have found a very ancient and selective version of YHWH: A jealous and wrathful God who desires retributive bloodletting in His holy name, maybe prepared to order the indiscriminate slaughter of entire peoples whose leaders make war against Israel. But the Ancient Law also commands an eye for an eye, not three or ten for one. And Mamet’s rhetorical trick of noting that ancient Jews were not called to “worship” fairness ignores the fact that they surely were called to practice fairness and “righteous judgment” and to have mercy for the poor, stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the outcast. All of them. (Not while they’re shooting at you or plotting mayhem, of course).
Even persecution from time immemorial cannot erase that sacred calling. It is an undemolished wall in the crumbling edifice of Judeo-Christian civilization–one worth repairing and defending.
None of this removes Israel’s right to defend itself, free its captives, seek justice for wrongs suffered, and kill terrorists. Nor does it remove the right of any observer–however well or ill-informed–to observe or comment on the proportion and severity of Israel’s response, whether in support or opposition. But urging more violence, anger, or enemy-making than we already have, from any quarter, is sometimes a crime, and always a god-awful mistake.
That’s just silly. Mein Kampf is much shorter and has no significant counterweight of good to redeem it. By the way, the answer to your previous question (on another board) “have I read ALL of the Bible” is yes, pretty close. (Parts of books like Leviticus and Chronicles only skimmed, Job and the Gospels etc. read multiple times. It is a decidedly mixed bag, from the highest to the lowest). And I read much of Mein Kampf for a required essay on Holocaust Denial. No need to ever read more.
There is an extensive, malevolent rant against the JEW as the supposed chief villain of all human history (“For five thousand years, he has arrived without being welcomed and skulked in the shadows, infecting society with his crafty, underhanded ways…”–something like that). The German word for “vermin” gets used a lot. Sound familiar? Echoes of it it occurred in the Rwandan ethnic massacres and the term is in the mouth of a current candidate for POTUS.
I did read it, AJ years ago. I was being sarcastic which many will see as poor taste. But I often resort to graveyard humour in these circumstances – a frequent Jewish defense. Yes I do remember the antisemitic ranting but it occurs later in the book. In the early part he could have been any aimless, insecure, artistically inclined bloke looking for something to anchor him. I think that was one of the most depressing aspects of reading it.
I thought maybe but was responding in my earnest mode just in case. Thanks for clarifying, Jane.
Iris C
5 months ago
It should be emphasised (but never is until stated in this article) that “the Israelis transformed the wasteland between the river and the sea into an agricultural phenomenon, supplying much of European produce”.
We, who are old enough, remember that the area was largely desert – under Turkish rule until after WW1, then a British Protectorate until after WW2 when the European Jews claimed it as their homeland. If I remember correctly, it had been promised to them after support in WW1
“This is a myth and I can supply you information to prove that.”
There were several statements in Iris’ comment. If you wish to dispute “the myth” please specify which one.
Then provide your information.
I eagerly await your reply, with appropriate citations that permit everyone to see easily the documentation for your “information”.
Since you only posted your comment a few hours ago, I hope you will read this so you can act promptly.
Nancy Kmaxim
5 months ago
To me what this article points to is the existential danger of replacing religion, where God is in charge, with stand alone human reason, with all its attendant human weakness. If you think about it, it’s consequences can be seen across religious divides. Freedom of religion allows moral reasoning to inform political thinking.
Andrew Boughton
5 months ago
David Mamet is a brilliant playright.
William Edward Henry Appleby
5 months ago
Israel exports a lot of agricultural products to Europe, but I don’t think Israel “supplies much of Europe’s produce”.
Nicholas Taylor
5 months ago
As I understand it, this article is about Judaism, not Israel-Palestine. However, if you must …
AJ Mac – An eye for an eye is from the Code of Hammurabi. The implication is proportionality. How would you define it? The Palestinians hand over 40 of their babies to be burned alive or beheaded? Suppose your nest is destroyed by a predator. What is the proportionate response? It appears that Hamas is prepared to sacrifice a small percentage of its population.
Charles Stanhope – The Bible was written at least 2000 years ago. Another country where they do things differently. It’s history, of a sort, but nothing more.
Chris Oliver – What’s wrong with BC is it makes a tendentious and unjustified assumption.
If you think I am thoughtlessly pro-Israel, consider how it would look if 1948 had never happened.
You are correct about the Babylonian antecedent, but the saying occurs in the book of Exodus too. Also, it seems implausible that all the rules contained in Hammurabi’s code were new when written down.
It’s a very ancient rule of proportion, sometimes called the lex talionis, that almost certainly pre-dates any known record.
I won’t pretend to have a perfect, let alone inspired idea of proportion in this horrific situation. But proportion, scale, discernment, and mercy are not rendered null and void in times of great outrage and crisis. And they should not be cast aside. There are too many innocent or at least un-culpable Gazans to make any desert tent or jihadi suit (or whatever) fit them all.
Mamet’s wild opinion piece most certainly references the historical and present-day situation of Jews, and the Israel-Palestine conflict and current war hover over and suffuse the whole thing, in my admittedly non-authoritative reading of Mamet’s strange text.
*It was not until I was researching a university essay on the death penalty that I realized that, at one time, the lex talionis was a instrument of restraint, not severity in societies in which escalating bloods feuds–two enemy clan members for one, an so on–were common. (A bit obvious to me now–in retrospect). This is supported by the known practices of pre-modern Native Americans and European “barbarians”, like pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons.
** A profoundly unfair and inaccurate take on Judaism as a “world view frozen in space and time”, given its robust tradition of questioning and re-interpretation across centuries and millennia, particularly in the Talmud but also among practicing Jews more generally.
***In reviewing your agglomeration of generalities above, I find individual things to agree with. Yet they seem to bend toward some attempt to dismiss religion as a mere idiotic farce, and to present yourself as history’s grand interpreter or something. What are you trying to argue?
Go slowly as I may not have read all the books you have (and vice versa).
Lex talionis was indeed a restraint principle – its purpose was to reduce the incidence of one person being assaulted and then their whole village and so on being destroyed
Looking at the numbers -roughly 1,200 killed or kidnapped and mistreated.
Coming up to 20,000 now being killed.
As for the poster who claimed that civilians, women and children are always ‘collateral damage’ – yes, usually true now, which wasn’t the case in the 1st World War .
That is why it is so unacceptable to go to war except under the most pressing circumstances – and if Brits like Stanhope hadn’t appeased Hitler along with plenty of deluded right wingers funding him (including some Jews until it dawned on them) and of course a typically narcissism of small differences left failing to oppose him, we may never have had the Second World War.
Informative details and intriguing counterfactual or “retro-speculation” about WWII. The name Stanhope was new to me outside the frequent poster here screen-named Charles and a provocative American stand-up comedian called Doug. (Now, I have an preliminary idea of who James Stanhope was, thanks to Wikipedia).
Even when Someone Else started or escalated it, responding to bigotry and homicidal aggression with re-escalation–group associating whole populations with their most violent factions and wielding the broadest brush to paint them as a monolithic enemy it is acceptable to kill due to their collective blood guilt–is, of course, less than ideal. Yet it runs blood and bone deep in part of our tribe-minded nature. I think the relenting and merciful streams, which flow back and forth from our backyards to the wider world run deep and ancient too, even if we draw less water from those purer sources.
We try to fast forward and make ourselves at once a kinder and more rational creature than we are; instead we inch forward, subject to backsliding. Our better natures are likely to emerge, I think, only when seek and follow them in face-to-face human engagement, mindfully and often with great struggle.
Despite the certitude of some hyper-rationalists and fundamentalists, people are not reliably reasonable or conclusively “re-born and saved”–not that I can confirm. If you’re still here on Earth you can still go in either direction.
In another contingent reality the Axis powers could have prevailed–the Allied victory was kind of a squeaker–and then we’d be in a still greater mess. Ach, du lieber!
I hope you’ll forgive me for rattling as I tend to do. Thanks for the engagement.
Matt Sylvestre
5 months ago
What is entirely missed here is to believe in something, anything for any other reason than it is true, fact, is a farce. Did it ever occur to the author that the reason many Jews don’t believe in avoiding ham and shrimp is because there is no divine restriction on consuming them because there is no divine. No sky god at least?
Why must it be that some Jews are not devout only as a means to assimilate to non-Jews vs simply coming to their own conclusions, thoughts, and ideas that do not involve magical thinking?
This is not to say there is no value in cultural traditions and values only that the author seems to take the religious mumbo jumbo as so self-evident that to avoid it must be for some extrinsic desire to conform.
I have great respect for my fellow Jewish citizens and I stand with them but no one has to buy the religious dogma of any religion (traditional or secular).
Ms Baker if you ever happened to hang about in a few metropolitan cities, you might meet some Jews who are not distinguished by their mental powers. We are human beings – some of us are clever, other middling, others not so bright. Just like everyone else on the planet.
If on the other hand, you are saying that Jews suffer from tall poppy syndrome – what with Freud, Oppenheimer, Einstein, many Hollywood directors and stars, writers etc, then you are surprisingly accurate.
But the Irish are equally extraordinary in their number of high achievers yet they were often labelled stupid by racists.
Max Rottersman
5 months ago
A thousand jumps, summersaults and backflips and still he stands in the same place–I’m one of the chosen people and you’re not.
First, you don’t know what I am. Second, I don’t believe most Jews reading his essay would agree he’s including converts. He’s not excluding them. The Torah says to accept them. The Torah says a lot of things and no two Jews agree 100% on what one should believe. Answer me this, if the 10 commandments says “do not kill”, and indeed haredi and hasidic Jews do not kill, what are all those Jews doing killing people in Gaza? What Torah are they reading from? Anyway, I’m sorry I offended you. As much as I love Mamet, he’s ultimately making excuses for Jews murdering children.
Max, if you know anything about the Jewish People’s religion, the details are in the commentary on the Torah. “Thou Shalt Not Kill” cannot come at the expense of one’s own life. Jews don’t “murder” children. Assuming you’re referring to Gaza, intent is the key to understanding – Hamas intended to murder, torture, rape, and kidnap Israelis. Israel has no intent to kill Gazans, except Hamas terrorists, and does more than any army to avoid civilian casualties. Calling that “murder” reveals your bias, or your simplistic understanding of the situation. Or both.
Why do you think an excuse is required?
Did the allies wring their hands over the deaths of Japanese and German children in WWII? No, it was necessary, to end the war and prevent millions more deaths and subjugation under totalitarianism. Many more children now will need to die to eliminate Hamas and prevent this repeating yet again and again. The Gazans are not innocent, they are enablers, they are the enemy, just like the civilian populations of Germany and Japan. War is ugly but you better be the winner or its even worse. The Palestinians would kill every Jew if they won and from the ashes would rise a Fascist Islamic Theocracy. From there they would next target the West, they are already preparing for that.
The more children and entire families die, the more recruits you create for Hamas and similar organisation. Stop conflating all Palestinians with Hamas and go inform yourself of the Palestinians who, while wanting liberation, do not support them.
Kat L
5 months ago
Where does the malevolent Soros family fit in here?
Oh those evil underhand bankers – fond of a cliché, aren’t you both?
Hans Daoghn
5 months ago
.
Last edited 5 months ago by Hans Daoghn
M. Jamieson
5 months ago
This was pretty close to unreadable.
Ryan K
1 month ago
Mr. Mamet , you wrote the Jews will march on behalf of the whales befor they march for themselves. After Oct. 7th, a few more Jews were able to muster their Jewishness to rally on Central Park West for Israel. the usual fanatic Haredi cult were the only counter protesters I saw. And kept far away by heavy police presence through barriers to the actual rally. And bag checking. Are they checking bags for the massive pro hamas disruptions? St. Patrick’s on Easter Sunday. The Thanksgiving Day Parade. The tunnel and bridge blockades. The cancer ward?! Mr. Mamet you write of Jewish assimilation. Even in Israel there is “assimilation” of a kind. The secular Israeli. I’m secular, too. When asked, I am a Jew. Not a Pole. Not Russian. Although the Palestinians tell me I am. That the Diaspora is my “homeland.” That the Arab Muslim colonial settler invasion was a “liberation” of Arabs by Arabs. Talk about myth making. We are the only people who others get to tell us who we are. And what brand of Jewishness that they will tolerate of us. Yes, what a horror to some of the commentators on UNHERD that the Jews in their mania should image they could return to their ancestral homeland and build that nation with the crematoria still smoldering. And let me remind the anti Jews here that Israel was too late to save the Jews of Poland but it rescued the dispossessed Jews of the Mid East and North Africa…all of whom predate the Muslim Arab invasion as the Jews predate this settler colonialism by thousand of years in Historic Israel. The Spanish won back their nation centuries ago. Now they hate Israel and are jumping to recognize the Arabic speaking people called “Palestinian” as a state.
Ryan K
1 month ago
One further comment: The Germans mocked the “civilized Jews” of Germany…Jews who attempted to ape Aryan ways and hide their true Jewish filth….they told the Germans just look at the real Jews of Poland….and filmed staged mock Jewish rituals with hordes of flies or rats to show how Jews love filth and vermin and are in fact vermin. So much for Reform Judaism’s attempt to remake the Jewish service as a Lutheran service minus Jesus…no taliths….no kippot. No Hebrew. Now contemporary Reform Judaism in America has reclaimed all these particularlist Jewish trappings of identity and worship. If only I could drape myself in a talith the way the Palestinianists make a fetish of the keffiyah that John Pasha Glub designed for the Arabic speakers west of the river Jordan.
Robert
5 months ago
“Indeed, a devotion to God and the Word of God is the sole protection we poor weak humans have against doing evil.”
Yeah? The ‘Word of God’ as in the Old Testament? Have you read the book of Joshua? You don’t have to be a ‘religious scholar’ to understand a lot of people were slaughtered by the followers of the God you reference to take the land their God ‘promised’ them. But, I suppose it’s how you define ‘doing evil’ since that depends on which book you adhere to. Having read both the Old Testament and the Quran, and listening to many true believers and ‘holy men’ of both religions, I have come to the conclusion that this fight over that land will never end for Jews and Muslims as long as they maintain THEIR book is the true Word of God (capital W as Mamet claims). A pox on both your houses (and your books).
I am fond of the Society of Friends too. The members I have met over the years have all been clever, reflective, peaceful and open-minded, all things we should aspire to. My only issue is that they’re pacifists, and I couldn’t stay passive if, for example, our country was invaded and we needed to fight.
Another Quaker fan here. Isn’t it ok for some to refuse arms if they are sincere pacifists? Should monks that won’t strap on M-16s and go to battle go to prison?
It’s absolutely fine to be a sincere pacifist and I don’t object to that. It’s just that I’m not a pacifist so don’t think I could be a sincere Quaker, despite all the appeal.
Fair enough. I’m a pacifist in principle but did say to some friends yesterday that, if Farage became Prime Minister, I’d have to emigrate to Scotland and if it came to a war, I’d paint my face blue and put on a kilt.
My post was flip but the Quakers are people who might not have embarrassed the historical Christ as much as some of his other adherents.
Amusing image (lady kilt-warrior!) and provocative concluding thought. To use a slightly different word used in English translations of the Bible: I’d venture that Jesus would not be ashamed of the better sort of Quaker. Doubt he’d dig the thee this and thou that though. Do they still use those “legacy pronouns”?
My own belief is that Jesus of Nazareth was a singular and powerfully inspired human being who became more insightful and awakened while on Earth. By the time he was well into his ministry, I doubt he would have still experienced real embarrassment. Given the fullness of his unsurpassed humanity and the limits of my understanding, however, I could easily be wrong.
Yes. And yet, without it , we seem to descend into chaos.
Nicholas Taylor
5 months ago
“My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” These are words ascribed to Jesus on the cross. They are the first words of Psalm 22. Then there’s Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Daniel, even Genesis itself. A whole literature of victimhood, extending to the time of Jesus himself where the story comes to an abrupt end with the failure of a Messiah to expel the Romans from Judah, of the Apocalypse to materialise, and finally the destruction of the Temple.
It’s not all gloom, indeed many of the Psalms are joyful, ramblings not unlike the nonsense I had to endure at Christian school assemblies. Every nation has its persistent culture, French, German, Russian, Italian (maybe not English after capitalism and industrialisation dismembered it to be replaced by commercial fakes).
But no culture, as far I know, is so wedded to its Munchausen relationship to a tribal deity whose main achievement, at least since the probably mythical Exodus from Egypt to the ‘Promised Land’ meant taking over land already belonging to someone else, has been betrayal. Christianity is rooted in the same mentality, which becomes evident whenever it seeks to return to that root, stripping away the hierarchy, manufactured dogma and emperor-worship.
The article is honest in harking back to events 2000 years ago, but it ascribes to them an immediacy as if the history since were meaningless or a bad dream. Judaism is a world view frozen in space and time, both of very limited extent. That a least renders it ‘mostly harmless’. Moving first to Christianity and then Islam, doctrinal extremism and aggression inevitably increased if only to ensure the survival of each new cult, as it sought to distance itself from its predecessors while banking on the perceived legitimacy of their claims.
Apart from exceptionalism that is toxic wherever it arises, the situation in Palestine today can hardly be blamed on a people who have been peaceful and creative for two millennia, and whose most orthodox adherents refuse military service. The parallel between settlements and Manifest Destiny, and the prevalence of British, American and South African accents among spokespersons for the State of Israel can hardly go unnoticed.
(Post-)Christianity has dominated the sea in which Judaism floats. I don’t think it makes any more sense, but the baggage it has picked up over the centuries and even before its foundation has been deposited in the present like a glacial moraine. With its idea or illusion of progress, it is at least able to look back objectively on the past 2500 years and see that there has been real change.
Much change has been good, and there has been much evil too, but no evidence of a war between good and evil. Some things that were believed and considered important in the past have been shown to be false, irrelevant or contingent, and conversely. Reason and research can make of that what they will.
Graeme Archer
5 months ago
Sublime. Thank you.
Paddy Secretan
5 months ago
As, superficially/nominally (or any other word that indicates I was lumbered with a Religion by birth), a Christian, I find the above Article “unfathomable”. I think that “Religions” are a major and disastrous curse on Society. I think Society would be far better off without them, which doesn’t mean that I don’t subscribe to decent behaviour towards my fellow human beings. If there is a god, I have a message for him/her – please retire and let human beings get on without you – in all your forms and whatever you are! And stop your adherents forcing their ideas/customs on the rest of us. Having said all that, I think the Israelis reaction to the assault by Hamas (which I condemn absolutely and utterly!!!!) is grossly “over the top”. If they think they are solving any problems between them and the Palestinians, I can tell them – they are utterly wrong!!
Alastair Chapman
5 months ago
‘- and that’s why we have armies.’ I would add, victorious armies. Or be lucky and live on an island. But as the Britons and Saxons discovered that was no guarantee.
So Israel will last until the next empire takes a liking to the land. It will be what it will be. Ask the Kurds and the Rohindra and Uighurs about that. More importantly why have people hated the Jews, whilst being indifferent to the others? Is it just that the more recent Jewish cults of Christ and Islam never overcome their inadequacy? Is it the lack of coherence for the Christians and the intellectual dead-end of Islam? Or just a visceral jealousy of God’s attention to his chosen people? Or coupled with the perception of wealth, success, a secret language and and and valuing learning and enquiry. Or is it because they conquered the land, not for the empire, but for themselves… to stay. No fine Englishman them Jews, drinking tea and bringing justice and cargo and leaving a legacy, but leaving. They’re like the Normans, taking. Doing what it takes, or are they? As Memet seems to be arguing, there is a tension in the Jews, that the British didn’t feel whilst building empire or the Europeans in the Americas or any other empire, it seems. Maybe when the Christians and Muslims left the land of Abraham they took with them the certainty of purpose God had given the Jews. Christ! The English are still singing about building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. Maybe God has given that certainty back to the Jews, and it is not agreeable to the Mensch. Or to survive and thrive we remake the empire when it sweeps over us. But that’s if you are still there to change it. The Saxon lords that couldn’t tolerate Norman rule fled to Constantinople and then to the sea of Azov, built a Saxon land. Where are they now? Except for a few latinised saxon names on old maps. If they had stayed their offspring would have survived. If the Jews had been more agreeable maybe they wouldn’t have been expelled from the land and cast into the wilderness and their offspring forever hunted when they couldn’t fail but to thrive. The Rabbits of Watership Down, the allegory, forever marked to be hunted, poisoned, gased. The better you do, the worse it becomes. The Jews have found their free draining airy downlands and they are still marked and hunted, and that’s why these bunnies have Nukes.
Mark Carpenter
5 months ago
I think people like Kathleen Stockton are good for LGBTQ. People like Glenn Loury, John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes good for race relations in America. The podcaster Chris Williamson has been interviewing female scientists speaking honestly about female competition. All good. Honest self-critique is sign of maturity and necessary for leadership. Oppression theory victimology does not work anymore. It comes off as political manipulation.
I am waiting for someone to be honest about Jewish power. After being called racist, misogynist, homophobic and transphobic so much in recent years, being called anti Semitic feels like crying wolf anymore.
What Jewish power specifically? Over the media, banks? Newsflash, Paul Marshall who funds Unherd is expanding his media base – and is a Christian. As is that very powerless individual, Rupert Murdoch.
Believing that Jews are more powerful than other ethnic groups is one of the soft markers of antisemitism.
John Dewhirst
5 months ago
Is it really so difficult to be Jewish or do Jews make it difficult for themselves? Given all the self-anguish and strictures that appear to burden their lives it seems hardly surprising so many have been dissatisfied.
R Wright
5 months ago
Oh brother, another tiresome piece on this subject. Substitute the word jewish for black and you have another racially divisive segregationist screed about how mixing different groups is evil.
Last edited 5 months ago by R Wright
Jane Davis
5 months ago
right wing near fascist gibberish. Reform Judaism has nothing to do with ‘assimilation’. It is about being more inclusive of women and acknowledging that to follow a religious service having services in the language of the country you live in helps. Not everyone has money for a Hebrew tutor, Mr Mamet. As for liberal synagogues, their tolerance of female rabbis and gay rabbis is probably an affront to Mr Mamet’s undoubted misogyny – whether he’s a homophobe as well, I don’t know. But these people are believing Jews as are the Masorti movement who also promote progressive values for women while retaining most of the ritual traditions.
Mr Mamet doesn’t like Leftist Jews because they don’t share his right wing values. Attempting to smear them as making the world safer for antisemitism is a total misunderstanding. Liberal progressive Jews who worked for black civil rights and other causes did not do it to make themselves ‘popular’. They did it on principle and on the understanding, an understanding I also possess, that racism in general has to be fought in order for antisemitism to diminish. Yes some leftists show antitsemitic attitudes but so, and just as or more frequently, do Mr Mamet’s pals on the right.
What this piece resembles is the ranting of an evangelical Christian or Jihadi Muslim who cannot recognise that some of their co-religionists have a different take on the religion or indeed on basic identity.
Attributing antisemitism to the devil? He is barking mad.
Het again as hiv upticked a comment and the system either disnae register it or gies the opposite result aa wanted. In yr case it wrongly registered a doonvote.
It’s just how te counters work. Sometimes they appear to stick however many times you ‘push the button’ and others you get a huge jump – often in the direction you just pushed once. I don’t think there’s any malice or bias involved however infuriating it may seem at the time.
Yes, but is it accurate? There seems to be no justification for it not registering at all. I wonder how Unherd’s powers that be, can be persuaded to go to a simple up-down vote?
If a version of Judaism leads you to side with vicious anti-semites who excuse the murder and rape of Jews, and would probably kill you and all other Jews if given the chance, I’d have to ask if that’s a Jewish sect, or a radical left-wing social club.
What do you know?…unbelievable, you are totally wrong. Religion expert, but as a Jew I can confirm you are clueless, just absorbing the feminist woke influences.
As a jew who has actively fought antisemitism all my life and actually worked with Jewish antiracist charity (one that promotes dialogue with Muslims, People of Colour and other groups) then I am certainly not clueless. Mamet appears to dislike any Jew who doesn’t support the current scorched earth policy in Gaza. Now that is a lot of Jews -not to mention the Orthodox Jews who never recognised Israel in the first place because they believe a homeland has to wait for the messiah. Nothing feminist or woke about them.
All the comments here seem to take it for granted thta the Palestinians should just suck it uo: being driven off their land and their homes, being subjected to arbitrary violence on a regular basis, paying the price for Europe’s crimes against Jews.
Look at what Israel is doing. How many children must die before Israel’s bloodlust is sated. And defenders of Israel wonder why the Palestinians hate them and why a majority of the world is appalled by what they are doing in Gaza, and what they have done against the Palestinians since 1948.
On the othe rhand, while a minority, there are thousands of Jews who decry this, and say not in my name. These are the bravest and the only faint glimmer of hope in a situation beyond appalling.
Unfortunately we are in a loop. If you don’t support the Trans movement you are transphobic (implying hatred). If you don’t think women should have quotas in jobs, you are a misogynist. If you don’t agree with every single thing done by Israel, you are antisemitic.
Playing word games instead of discussing things to find solutions.
A loop indeed but also a spiral of heightening misunderstanding on both sides of an ideological divide, simplistically drawn. In this case the specter of genocide is raised by the flamethrowers on both ides of the Gaza Strip border, literal and figurative.
[I still think the majority–or a least robust plurality–dwells somewhere in no-man’s-land. But we are trending toward an ever more unhinged zeitgeist, with competing idiocies: “we must use corrective injustice to achieve numerical proportion in every good job (but not soldier or sanitation worker)” or “women had it fine in 1960–let’s go back to that”].
More and more people are becoming blinder to their own reflected extremism, blaming all of their hostility or narrowness of understanding on the Other Side.
You can not any peace deal that will satisfy the Palestinians. It was tried again and again and again. Depending on how you measure it the Israelis offered between 90-97% of what Palestinians wanted (land wise).
Even if you create a new united country the Jews will dominate the economy, technology, art, sciences etc (shocking right?!). Palestinians (aside from a tiny minority – the every high IQ) will be stuck in low wage, low skill jobs…and they will always resent their economic/cultural positions in the new country. And that resentment will not lead to happy politics.
Think of Malaysia/Singapore where the Chinese population outcompetes the Malays. Even aggressive affirmative action in Malaysia has not closed the achievement gap. In Singapore – a more meritocratic society – the gap has only expanded.
That is the reality of life.
The Palestinians and various allied Arab states have been trying to destroy Israel since day 1 of its existence. The Palestinians had a state, but decided they rather try and kill Jews. Every Palestinian leader since has decided they’d rather pursue maximalist, eliminationist goals, rather than have a state.
How is Israel supposed to respond to a people when 100% of their leaders (who have mass popular support) support the destruction of Israel and the genocide of Jews?
“driven off their land” – because they declared genocidal war on their neighbours, and most left voluntarily because invading Arab armies told them to vacate the war zone until they finished off the Jews. Bloodlust? That’s unhinged. Literally every action Israel has taken is in direct response to Palestinian violence. Whenever they stop, it’s quiet. When they attack, Israel responds, eventually but not always. It’s that simple and stupidly obvious. Your last sentence is about idiots who would be the first ones Hamas would kill if they had the chance. Those Israelis murdered on Oct. 7 were virtually all lefty peaceniks who helped Gazans daily. That kind of nice but naive ideal is gone now. Every liberal Israeli I know says “I was wrong to hope for peace with Palestinians.”
Their land? Sure, Islam won the land in the 7th century through conquest and violence (read the Siege of Jerusalem 636). Before Israel, it was the Ottoman Turks, Britain, Egypt, and Jordan (Palestinians never existed, a creation of the 60’s, no such people, no such land, they are simply Arabs, but we will use the term Palestinian because of common usage). They lost that land when Israel defeated the Arab armies in no less than 6 wars (1948–49, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006).Land is gained and lost most commonly in wars or treaties to prevent wars. Given how Islam got the land in the first place, it’s reasonable to say the West Bank and Gaza belong 100% to Israel. Israel has the right to eliminate the Arabs on THEIR lands in response to Palestinian violence and stated policy to eliminate all Jews. Enough of this tolerance for an ugly and vicious Islam and its people (read the laws of Sharia anyone?). The Palestinians are not cuddly Teddy Bears.
Problem? None of the other states want the Palestinians and I can’t blame them. Palestinians attempted to overthrow the Jordanian government (Black September 1970) and stir insurgencies in Egypt for decades. They arguably have destroyed Lebanon. NO ONE WANTS THEM. The leadership in many of these countries hope Israel will eliminate them, not just Hamas either. Simply put, Palestinians are the enemy.
I would rather spend several hours in the company of a few Palestinian refugees I taught in London than a minute with you. You know why the other Arab states didn’t want them – because at the time of their insurgence their values were left and feminist, completely at odds with those of the surrounding states. Things are very different now, of course. They have not destroyed Lebanon. What destroys the Middle East in general is religious sectarianism of the internecine Islamic kind, and the ongoing battle between Muslims, Jews, and Christians. That plus feudal exploitation on the part of the ruling families of several states.
P Branagan
5 months ago
As an objective fact, Israel is a racist Apartheid terror state.
What exactly are you talking about. IS that why Arabs who are Israeli citizens have the same rights in Israel as anybody else including serving in the Knesset, the Supreme Court, and now even the IDF. As for Gaza and claiming it was an outdoor prison, that’s simply nonsense. Gaza has been wholly run by the Palestinians since 2005 and by Hamas since 2007. If you were Israel, would you allow open borders with such an entity that regularly lobs rockets into Israel and commits terrorist attacks. Somehow I don’t think so. And it’s the same reason that Egypt closed the borders on the other side. Egypt, if you haven’t cottoned on, is an Arab country so perhaps they know something that you don’t. As for Gaza itself had they used all those billions in foreign aid to build infrastructure and help their citizens, the place would be the Singapore of the Middle East; but Hamas used that money to (a) enrich their leaders many of whom are billionaire, and (b) purchase arms, rockets and construct a massive network of tunnels for the sole purpose of conducting terrorist attacks, all the while hiding behing the skirts of palestinian women and children.
What a load of rubbish. Another whinging Jew desperately trying to maintain their victim status when the whole world is fed up with that schtick.
This assumption that if you own a piece of land but you don’t develop it,wring every last ounce or penny of value out of it,make it super profitable to the nth degree then you don’t deserve to have it,thats a horrible argument. It’s the argument of political thieves all through history. It’s a natural human reaction to feel appalled at seeing people have their land taken off them,even if they’ve been finagled into “selling” it. And it’s natural to scoff at anyone who tells you a book of Bronze Age literature is their title deeds to your home. The Palestinians are stupid but so what if they liked living simple lives in a low key way. The Jews are too clever by half and no one likes the crafty wise guy who they know just pulled a fast one on them but they dont know how they did it. I was a kid in the 1960s and.as I didn’t live in a Jewish area the Jews I saw were on tv lovely people like David Kossoff,kind,gentle and charming then as we got into the 1970s the disarmingly lovely Jews we saw on tv contrasted more and more with the ruthless “we won’t let it happen again” Jews of Israel. Over the last 80 years or so we’ve been observing a bound to fail experiment ,how to fit a pint of water in a jug that only has the capacity for half a pint. The simplest and logical solution is to discard half the water and I have a horrible notion that in the guise of extirpating Hamas,this is what is being done.
Well, yes, anti-Semitism is always bitter. But Jane Baker’s post is rational compared to some of the comments emerging into public view on the streets and in the universities of Britain, Europe, America and Australia (“Gas the Jews!”). As a more-or-less assimilated Jews (converted to Catholicism years back), I find it terrifying,
Ah, yes, those finagling, too-clever-by-half Jews. I think ‘logical solution’ rather gives the game away. Fairly obvious which half a pint you would extirpate.
A little over the top, but then again, so is David Mamet.
And yes, the war with Hamas is cover for the execution of Israel’s ‘final solution’ to the problem of Palestinians.
A couple of hundred years ago, it would have been internationally acceptable for Jews to invade Palestine, kick out the existing inhabitants, and claim to own the place. After all, that is what America did west of the Mississippi. But those days are gone; the Zionists have missed the opportunity to invade, colonize, and extirpate the locals scot free. Yet that is what the Zionists have been attempting, ever since the Balfour Declaration. It’s just that, until this war, they maintained the fiction that they sought peaceful coexistence with Palestinians.
And I make a clear distinction between Zionist Jews and other Jews. A distinction which David Mamet would claim not to exist.
Palestinians aren’t stupid, Ms Baker – merely depressed and desperate . Nice lovely Jews who never complain and allow themselves to be exterminated. There you go, Charles – here’s a wonderful example of antisemitic thinking.
Mamet has given us a fascinating insight into his thinking. The word ‘fear’ occurs only once, in the context of the Ten Commandments. Yet his piece is suffused with fear.
Fear is not a great ally of rational thought. He draws no distinction between the Cossacks and peasants who formed the Black Hundreds in the Russian Empire, and the overwhelming majority of Unherd readers. Which is, frankly, insulting.
In Mamet’s universe, there are the Jews and everyone else, where everyone else wants to kill the Jews. Not only is this not true, it can’t possibly be true. As a moment’s thought will confirm.
Thank you. I am absolutely fed up with Unherd’s tireless one-sided Zionist bloodlust.
I agree with you in that the Unherd posts are extremely one-sided; the situation in Palestine/Israel is far too complicated to offer a facile solution one-sided solution.
People have been writing about these Arab/Jewish/Zionist issues since at least 1909 when the Young Turks revolt took place. Before, everything had been controlled by the Sultan in Constantinople but then came a vacuum.
The problem was that the western world (Britain and France) tried to train the (mainly) Muslim populations to be just like them. Political parties were created and they collapsed because Shar’ia law was considered to be fine as a government so why have political parties and elections?
The same is true today. You can’t just impose democracy if the people don’t want it. So who can negotiate for the Palestinians in a meaningful way? Of course, the Israelis know the answer to this question – they can’t negotiate a meaningful peace because it will not last. So, they have to demonstrate using more and more force – which is unacceptable to young minds, minds which haven’t had much education. So young people support the underdogs and the pro-Palestinian marches in the UK are mainly full of people who are not muslims – just people who support the underdogs.
And which side represents the ‘underdog’ depends on how far you go back in history.
Well-said about young people and their poor education. It’s not only history – obviously they lack basic arithmetic skills. When you compare how many Jews and how many Muslims live in the Middle East or in the whole world, it is easy to say who the “underdog” is.
Yes, you might also say that they lack reading skills. Why wade through a thick, ‘boring’ book if you can watch a 10 minute presentation on YouTube? As a bonus you learn to speak with a trendy American accent.
To be boring, as I say elsewhere in the stream discussing campus horrors, I recently read an interesting article about Palestine/Israel which presented the war as a series of media bulletins. The writer tried to say that getting the ‘correct’ media reaction (for the young, I think) was far more important than the truth. He predicted that the winner would be the one with the best media outlets.
To be deliberately provocative, it would not be surprising if comments on UnHerd were always labelled as far-right or reactionary because they (the comments) are not dressed for youthful media consumption. They we can be dismissed as ‘old fuddy-duddies’ and ignored.
I am in my 70s and literate but I would say that the comments on Unherd are largely quite far on the right of the political spectrum.
It is unreliable to suggest that if people disagree with opinions on the right the right, those people are uneducated and/or incapable of critical thought.
Well it’s not the shoot to kill with the most up to date weaponry supplied by USA ones who claim a God most of them don’t believe in wrote them title deeds in a work of Bronze Age literature. What would Jesus Do. He’d be healing PALESTINIANS
Palestinians seem to be animals that can’t take care of themselves and that makes you white saviors quiver with sympathy.
“can’t take care of themselves”
Yeah, if only those pesky Palestinians could learn from the righteous, independent, self-sufficient Israelis. Of course, $3.31 billion a year and $260 billion since WWII from the USA might make them quiver a bit less, no?
Let’s talk complexity only after a sincere condemnation of the depraved Hamas attack of 10/6. Then explain how an openly stated intent for genocide fits with “but on the other hand” reasoning. After all, complexity must excuse depravity?
Organised,planned, funded and enabled by the CIA.
I have two friends who went on that march – one a leftist of Jewish origin, one of Muslim origin but atheist. One of them told me that the greatest majority on the march comprised Muslim families.
OK. I hear you.
Education, even when coupled with having reached biological maturity isn’t enough* though.
People need to have experienced significant failure, sorrow, doubt to develop humility necessary to learn, to gain insight, even common-sense.
—
* See Clare O’Neil, Australia’s Minister for Cyber Security & Home Affairs (no less). Ms O’Neil is 40+yo with stellar qualifications yet no insight, no common-sense, no conscience. Her proud displays of cluelessness would be hilarious, if the stakes weren’t so high.
So go back to reading the New York Times and viewing RT.com and al jazeera on the web. I’m sure you will be quite happy there.
The NYT? You must be kidding! A DNC agenda-driven propaganda sheet.
All I seek is balanced coverage and nuanced information from all perspectives not designed to whip up anger and hatred and to continue to divide us.
Hamas’s evil is our evil.
I look to Jonathan Cook ex Guardian who until recently lived in Israel, I appreciate Thomas Fazi, Chris Hedges and others.
I am not in the slightest anti-semitic (I utterly reject the false conflation with being anti Zionist that is now being invoked). Our son was at a Jewish montessori and many years on his girlfriend is a very spiritual Hebrew-speaking Jewish girl whose father was born iin Israel.
I’m sure some of your best friends are Jews.
Yes, why even Virginia Wolfe married a Jew… good to have Jewish cover for one’s hate.
Zionist Bloodlust? You really let yourself down with a comment like that.
Before the war, most European Jews thought the idea of a Jewish State in Israel was laughable. The majority had no desire to travel to the Middle East to try and build a new life in a desert. But after several generations of European Jews were exterminated in the camps, many of the survivors realised that there was no other way of protecting themselves from the abiding and centuries-long hatred of Jews, than to build a nation that Jews, themselves, could defend. They could no longer pretend the era of pogroms was past – they could no longer rely on anyone but their own to protect them.
Genuinely, no decent human being, whatever their sympathies for Palestinian refugees and Gazan children, can look at the history and fail to see that the Jewish people faced (and still face) a unique and abiding hatred, and they have a right to protect themselves, a right to live. Any civilised person must be able to recognise that there is an inarguable, undeniable reason for a Jewish homeland to exist.
If you do not, then Shame on you.
The problem that Palestinians (and much of the wider Arab world) have with Israel is not about land. It is not about borders. It is not about resources. It is because it is a Jewish State. No amount of trading away land for peace would resolve the problem – it’s been tried by the Israelis many times – because the problem is with the very existence of Jews.
If Israel was a Christian state in the Holy Land, if that same piece of land had been set aside in 1948 as a Communist state, if it was given to Odin-worshipping Vikings, any other state than a Jewish state, the problem would have been resolved in short order. Displaced people from the land would have been incorporated into surrounding Arab lands and the hatred of whatever that country might have been called would not exist.
Anyone who talks about the disputed ownership of the land being the cause of the problem is either ignorant or is being dishonest. The problem is entirely because they are Jews.
Through the last 100 years who do you think has been the impediment to peace? Jews who want a homeland, or their neighbours who wished to see all Jews exterminated?
Terrorists are seemingly given a free pass in their desire to annihilate Jews, meanwhile Israel is condemned when they try and stop the terrorists from killing their people? It is unconscionable.
It falls to decent people everywhere to stand in solidarity with Jews, regardless of where any of us might be on the political spectrum.
Just be a mensch.
You are refusing to make a distinction between between being anti-Zionist and being anti Israel as a state. Zionism and Israel are two separate things. Many Israelis and many non-Israeli Jews abjure Zionism.
Perhaps, for the benefit of those of us that are ignorant of the distinction, you’d like to explain your understanding of what Israel is, if it’s not what Zionism represents, which I thought was a desire for a Jewish nation state. I’ve never received a cogent, consistent response to this question. Why are they at odds?
As a postscript, I absolutely support the rights of Jews to their own homeland, free from persecution, and I’m not Jewish.
Zionism has a long history but its essence is that Jewish people have the exclusive right to the area “between the Sea and the Jordan” as the manifesto of Likud, Netanyahu’s party, put it in 1977.
Supporting Israel’s right to exist does not make us Zionists. We long for a state that, after many hundreds of years of Jewish people suffering ethnic and religious intolerance and persecution, is a shining example to the world of ethnic and religious tolerance and conciliation.
That means finding a way to live with the Arab population who were there before the state of Israel was created. And we should remember that prior to Israel’s creation, by and large Arabs and Jews lived happily side by side (see for example https://www.972mag.com/before-zionism-the-shared-life-of-jews-and-palestinians/)
Unfortunately, however, and for many reasons, Israeli politics have moved relentlessly in the opposite direction. Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995 is perhaps the most dramatic example of the division in Israel between those who seek a state of tolerance and conciliation, and those who seek the opposite.
The religious-political term Zionist describes those who seek the opposite – those who espouse an absolutist doctrine whose longterm goal is the complete removal of the Palestinian people from “between the Sea and the Jordan.”
I am not in that camp.
But I am a supporter of the existence of the state of Israel and I nurture the hope it will liberate itself from Zionism’s fastening grip.
I hope this helps.
Too much Edward Said and Al Jazeera and Guardian for you. The Arabic speaking population of the FBMOP say they have the exclusive right…they said so in 1924 and say so in 2024. They are the fanatics. They are the racist. They practice apart hate.
Zionism has a long history but its essence is that Jewish people have the exclusive right to the area “between the Sea and the Jordan” as the manifesto of Likud, Netanyahu’s party, put it in 1977.
Supporting Israel’s right to exist does not make us Zionists. We long for a state that, after many hundreds of years of Jewish people suffering ethnic and religious intolerance and persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, is a shining example to the world of ethnic and religious tolerance and conciliation.
That means finding a way to live with the Arab population who were there before the state of Israel was created. And we should remember that prior to Israel’s creation, by and large Arabs and Jews lived happily side by side (see for example https://www.972mag.com/before-zionism-the-shared-life-of-jews-and-palestinians/)
Unfortunately, however, and for many reasons, Israeli politics have moved relentlessly in the opposite direction. Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995 is perhaps the most dramatic example of the division in Israel between those who seek a state of tolerance and conciliation, and those who seek the opposite.
The religious-political term Zionist describes those who seek the opposite – those who espouse an absolutist doctrine whose longterm goal is the complete removal of the Palestinian people from “between the Sea and the Jordan.”
Like many, many Jews in Israel and across the world, I am not in that Zionist camp.
But I am a supporter of the existence of the state of Israel.
I hope this helps.
Zionism is the Jewish right to self-determination within a Jewish state in their historical homeland. Within that there is a wide spectrum of beliefs regarding politics & religion as to how to implement this idea.
You have bought into an understanding of it which is tainted by Israel hate propaganda similar to the demonising way many antisemites define Jews or Judaism. You have evoked blood libel type rhetoric which associates Jews with evil. The vast majority of Jews are Zionist as per the definition I have provided.
very concise response that sums this matter up….if only a few more people disposed to hate Israel could actually let your comment sink in.
Anyone who can write that is a liar or a fool, or possibly a bit of both.
You might suggest that that there’s a difference between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism … I’d struggle to believe you at this point, but there’s at least an argument to be made.
But you simply cannot suggest you can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Israel. It’s self-contradictory
Zionism surely is just the project to make a Jewish state in Palestine .in fact many of the early zionists considered other places for a state . Israel is a nation that came about out of the Zionist project . There are Arab Israelis too .
Note that Argentina, an island off of Niagara Falls and a plot of land in Kenya were all rejected because none of these places resonate with Jews as Historic Israel.
?
In 2024 to make the case that anti Zionism is not anti Israel (or antisemitic) is hollow and senseless. Denying the Jewish inalienable right…even if you’re a Jew or an Israeli Jew….and you’re correct some are this insane….does not give this anti Zionism cover for what it really is…Jew Hate.
I am not sure. The muslims were not that keen on a christian state in the Holy Land the last time there was one. Nor would they I think, considering what the Koran says about polytheistic idolaters, be heavily into an odinistic state.
Nobody knows,because they make as sure as they can that we don’t know,but historically and well into the early 20th century much of “Palestine” was Christian. There are many villages that were once wholly Christian and some have ancient mosaics and Christian art.
Due to violence,pressure and persecution,the numbers of Christian Palestine have dwindled but we are WRONG to ignorantly equate “brown skin + Arab” to Muslim.
As it happens I went to a concert of Christian Arabic music at St Martin in the Fields last year. It is an ignored demographic.
Thank you Paddy, well put. As you say, shame on those who refuse to stand in solidarity with Jews and the Jewish State. David Mamet’s view is forthright and to some may appear one-sided but is evidently and horrifyingly justified. I am reminded of the distinguished Jewish historian Saul Friedlander, who focusses on Nazi Germany and formulated the term ‘redemptive antisemitism’ as unique to that period in history. He is a member of the Peace Now group in Israel promoting a two-state solution … is this really possible now, have Hamas even surpassed Nazis antisemitism?
I’ll take that SHAME.
You mean the “Suicide Now” group in Israel. They seem to be a bunch of self-loathing leftists.
I don’t care. I don’t want to STAND WITH THE JEWS just to get a pat on the head from the likes of you.
There are so many different views. Everyone takes a particular piece of history and runs with it, whatever the comments.
I have just been reading about the year 1492 when tens of thousands of Jews were massacred in Spain, basically because they didn’t fit in. There is the constant reminder in history about Jews being selected as scapegoats, killed or enslaved, having property taken away. The Catholic Church persecuted the Jews between about 1830 and 1940, mainly because they (the Jews) were liberals and liberals were not popular with the Church. Then there was the holocaust.
So there is a lot of collective guilt hanging in the air. But I agree with you that this doesn’t mean that Israel can do absolutely anything. There is almost a palpable fear on UnHerd of saying anything apart from the straight anti-Hamas stuff.
So you openly admit to Jew hatred on a public platform? Seriously?
You don’t have to agree with the founding of Israel – but to suggest you don’t believe they have a right to a homeland, when you must surely recognise the history of Jew-hatred, makes you seem utterly callous.
After an horrific massacre, you won’t even offer them your support?
Fair enough that you didn’t want ‘a pat on the head’, but like it or not you have my contempt. Shame on you.
“_If Israel was a Christian state in the Holy Land, if that same piece of land had been set aside in 1948 as a Communist state, if it was given to Odin-worshipping Vikings, any other state than a Jewish state, the problem would have been resolved in short order. Displaced people from the land would have been incorporated into surrounding Arab lands and the hatred of whatever that country might have been called would not exist_”
As long as it was not an apartheid state
People need to realize that no one really cares about your ethnic group except other members of your ethnic group. You either have your own nation that represents your group or you are at the mercy of strangers.
Jewish people of the liberal kind prove you wrong – there are more than a few dead in swamps in Mississippi because of their support or African American civil rights.
Of course they had also been targeted by the Klan – and still are.
WOW….what a great response. Let people in NYC and London actually read the hamas “covenant.” Even a non Jews on America’s largely very left leaning MSNBC, Joe Scarborough just said on his broadcast morning show that the Oct 7th atrocities are a war against the 15 million Jews of the World.
Your anti-Semitism is unwelcome here. Zionism is simply the belief that the Jews like every other ethnicity deserve a country of their own. It’s not a dirty word. Bloodlust, literally lust, was what we saw on October 7th.
Please see my earlier comments. And I find your phraseology “unwelcome here” peculiarly mob-like. That, of course, is a direct result of the bloodlust being whipped up among us as many, many thousands of Gazans (15,000?) perish in a campaign constituting illegal collective punishment and amounting to ethnic cleansing which is and always has bee expliciitly embraced by the Zionists including Netanyahu.
As a Jew I can tell you that your ignorance and perception of anything related to being Jewish and the experience of living as a Jew, is palpable even from far here in America, so you better off staying quiet. If you have a need to be heard and call attention , find something you have at least a tiny bit of culture in and leave the issue of our Jewishness and Jewish assimilation to for us to debate.
Jack, I live in the USA, my son attended a Jewish montessori and his girlfriend is a very spiritual Hebrew-speaking Jewish girl whose father was born in Israel.
I note the threatening tone in “you better off staying quiet”. Many Jews who disagree with your position are facing very unpleasant recriminations by people like you, which is very sad.
And still you haven’t got a clue.
Simon, above, Andrea Vickers asked you to clarify your distinction between anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist that you seem so keen on but so far you haven’t done so. Could you do so now?
I did please see above
I’ll try.
Zionism was an aspirational philosophy. Now that the Jews have a defensible homeland (since 1948) the original philosophy is out-dated.
Marxism was also an aspirational philosophy. Once it became manifest, in the USSR, China, etc, it also became out-dated.
In both cases the original philosophy was overwhelmed by human nature. Marxism became totalitarianism and Zionism became a chauvanistic land grab similar to the settling of the American West. That form of “Zionism” is what some of us object to. Very few decent people object to the existence of the State of Israel. Many of us celebrate it and what it means to our Jewish friends and neighbors and their children.
Unfortunately many of the Arabs feel differently.
How is it that there are Arabs living freely in Israel, yet you talk of ethnic cleansing?
because Netanyahu intends to get all the Palestinians out of Gaza into surrounding Arab countries. It is that or be killed by IDF. He has exploited his poor command response to the Oct 7th atrocity to do this.
Amen to that! Anyone who can’t perceive the difference is simply not worth wasting time on.
Anti Zionism is only antisemitic if you believe that every other ethnicity have a right to a state. If you believe that states in general should not be ethnical, it is quite logical to extend that idea to Israel, without there having to be any antijewish animosity.
Do you have a problem with Arabs, Chinese and Japanese for example having nation states? Or is it just the Jews you have a problem with?
I never said I had a problem with Jews having a state of their own. I merely clarified the point that denying an ethnic state to Jews is only antisemitic if you think every ethnicity has a right to a state.
You could for example believe that all states should be like the USA with birthright citizenship that doesn’t consider the citizens ethnicity. Or be an anarchist that is against states in general. Or believe that existing states have a right to exist due to already existing, without the ethnicities involved to matter. Or some other belief.
Being critical of Israel isn’t the sane thing as being antisemitic, and trying to conflate the two in an attempt to shut down discussion is simply lazy
Facilitated by America. USA.
You may be right that Unherd’s pieces since 7 Oct have been almost exclusively pro-Israel, as I would hope any decent outlet’s pieces would have been pro-Britain at the outbreak of WWII. It isn’t always necessary to balance pro- and anti-pieces since it’s a rare thing that blame can be equally apportioned. In fact I’d say that is never the case.
It also depends what you mean by even-handed. I would say that up until 7 Oct most mainstream news outlets (Guardian, NYT, BBC etc.) were pro-Palestine. Rather than trying to persuade these outlets to be more even-handed with their coverage (something that simply hasn’t worked), maybe it’s better for a different new to counter this general pro-Palestine bias with it’s own pro-Israel bias. After all, reading an article in Unherd doesn’t prevent you from reading another article in the NYT or the Guardian. This way you can get the alleged balance you crave.
Yeah, we should get Hamas to write a few articles here explaining October 7th.
What has the Muslim/Arab World done to reduce violence since the late 1930s?
“Zionist bloodlust”. How utterly ludicrous. Talk about one sided!
There’s no bloodlust. There is, however, the age-old blood libel spewing from your vile mind.
There was a big distinction between the venomous antisemitism of Julius Streicher, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann, and the attitude of typical German citizens. And there was an enormous distinction between the Nazis and those Germans who fancied themselves as sophisticated rational thinkers, the Unherd readers of their day. But most of Europe’s Jews were murdered all the same. Mamet’s point is that no Jew is truly safe in a country run by non-Jews. They may want their creativity, enterprise and intellect for a while. But they always remember they are Jews, no matter how assiduously Jews may attempt to assimilate, and they always turn on them in the end. And when that happens, experience tells us that the only people who will fight for Jews are other Jews. There may be other minorities in a similar position, but that has been the experience of the Jewish diaspora, throughout history, and across the world. If you have much to fear, then fear is an ally.
Great post, but I would dispute your point that the only people who will fight for Jews are other Jews. Throughout Europe, there are so many instances of non-jews laying down or risking their lives Jews. Abbé Pierre in france, the danish government evacuating their Jews to Sweden, the Bulgarian foreign minister refusing to deport Bulgaria’s Jews and huge numbers of ordinary and elite Greeks who risked all for their Jewish neighbours (look up Jews if zakynthos and how hard the Greeks of Thessaloniki tried to save their Jewish population).
I agree with yours and mamet’s main point; Jews must always keep looking over their shoulder for the next moment of danger. However, I still think it should be looked into more why some countries and individuals in those countries in WW2 behaved so differently to others regarding protection of their Jewish citizens – religion, ethnic and national feelings, language, politics and culture all seem to play a part, but its hard to find a single answer.
Remind me, how many Jews were murdered during the holocaust? Yes, there were a few who saved Jews but the vast majority of people were complicit just as the vast majority of Gazans support Hamas.
You got downvoted. I wonder what part of your answer triggered the Jew hate bone.
this is the most salient post I’ve seen on this subject
6 million were murdered as we all know, although I’m sure you didn’t need reminding. There were many more than a few who saved Jews, as I pointed out, whole institutions in some countries either did or tried to save Jews.
In terms of complicity of Europeans, the vast majority were complicit in doing nothing and allowing evil to triumph. Considering the repercussions of aiding Jews, it is still incredible that so many Europeans risked everything to help their Jewish populations. My main point is that their are still many non Jews today who will fight for jews. Like in WW2, today there are many more who will do nothing.
Your last point about Gazans and Hamas and complicity does not to me appear to have any bearing on the points I made about Europeans fighting with or for jews- these are completely different topics. My main point, again, is that there are many non Jews who will fight/ have fought for Jews. I am interested in why this was the case in WW2 and why it is the case today (what encourages or compels people to take thay stand) , as it can shed light on how to fight antisemitism and ensure Israel is not left alone amongst a sea of hostile nations.
How many Israelis do you believe would fight for the (nominally) Christian countries of Europe if a major conflict broke out in the future? I’d wager not many so you can’t really complain about Europeans not wanting to risk execution to help Jews in the past
There’s a major difference. In the past, Jews were fellow citizens of those countries; they had demonstrated their loyalty by joining and building the institutions of their given country, they had fought for their countries and on average, gave more to those countries than their fellow citizens as they wanted to demonstrate their gratitude.
Synagogues in France declared loyalty during their services to Republican values and in the UK synagogues have had prayers for the royal family for hundreds of years. As loyal citizens, why should Jews not expect their fellow citizens to have done more to protect them, much as they should expect protection today from countries in which they are fellow citizens.
Israel is a separate country and therefore does not expect this type of reciprocal loyalty. However, as they have passed on much intelligence that has directly saved many lives throughout the West, they only expect allies to behave accordingly and understand that they are a tiny country surrounded by hostile elements.
A better question to ask is how many Jews in the diaspora would fight for the countries they currently live in. My bet, based on past events, would be equal to if not higher than the average of other ethnic groups.
Wasn’t the argument earlier that Jews can only depend on Jews to defend them . Now you say Israel is a small country and needs, if not depends on , the support of the west . Which is it ?
I haven’t argued that Jews can only depend on Jews to defend them. My first post disputed “that the only people who will fight for Jews are other Jews” and I argued that many Europeans have defended Jews in the past and still do so today. I also acknowledge that Israel does depend on countries like the USA – to me that is obvious, especially when you look at 1973 war and US ammunition deliveries.
Others argued that only Jews can rely on each other to defend each other – I did not.
In the post you’re referring to, I was discussing the question of loyalty and the difference in expectation Israel has from other countries and what the Jewish diaspora expects in their country of birth. As I said, they are two different, although arguably not wholly unrelated, issues.
At least the German people + others could claim they “didn’t know” even if they were lying. Now they tell us on TV and radio all the time and make us complicit.
Yes, it is fired at us day and night and we don’t question it. Only the young don’t feel the collective guilt and they join the marches.
The young hate the West they grew up in. They’ll live in a dictatorship.
Albanians saved all their Jews…
That still doesn’t change the very long history of Jewish persecution.
I never said it changed the very long history of persecution, but I stand by my original point that large numbers of non Jews fought to protect Jews in the 20th century. Their political or spiritual descendants are still with us today, fighting tooth and nail against modern day antisemitism
I am an American of David Mamet’s generation. Although I’ve always accepted that antisemitism existed in individuals, I never dreamed I would see antisemitism resurrect itself as it has currently, in my lifetime (or ever). And it has been profoundly shocking to me. So, although I’m not Jewish, I can understand somewhat, I think, the tone of Mr. Mamet’s essay. Today’s political left is also profoundly and aggressively anti-Western and anti-feminist/misogynistic. Today’s young woman demonstrators offer themselves up as handmaidens to the largely male-driven, woman-despising trans-activist movement, and as disciples for the older misogyny of the Middle-Eastern Islamic countries that denies women both legal rights and any agency whatsoever. That these two streams of misogynistic hate have come together and joined themselves to a resurgent mass antisemitism is truly terrifying. And certainly evil. So, yes, I am profoundly shaken, and, not completely without hope, but fearful about the future.
As I said in my original post, I also agreed with Mamet’s tone, as I feels Jews must always look over their shoulders for any approaching danger. I always felt that antisemitism of this kind would come back, as the history if Jewish persecution suggested that Jew hatred would just evolve and manifest itself differently – in all the ways you have explained.
I disagreed with Stephen Walsh that only Jews will fight for Jews as the late 19th and 20th century have shown this not to be the case. For some hope, we have to look to the actions in the past and the actions today of non Jews who fought/ are fighting for Jews to find how that can help beat back this latest scourge of antisemitism. If we follow Stephen walsh’s logic of only Jews will fight for Jews, then Israel will find itself alone amongst a sea of hostile nations, and that cannot be allowed to happen
THIS!!!!! Yes, a weird convergence of women hating men are driving this.
I have to concur. Which is again why peace will depend on Palestinian and Israeli women pushing for it.
From Only Fans to Isis Brides. That would be an interesting story.
what a piece of work you are, Sir
Could I also add the Battle of Cable Street in London.
To an extent, yes, but I was more looking at those countries where the repercussions of saving Jews were much more severe. For a WW2 British perspective, it is more illuminating to look at what happened to the Jews on the occupied channel islands. There was little resistance to their deportations – there are arguments that many of the Jews were not locals but recent arrivals (so reducing the chance of people saving friends) or there were too many German soldiers. However, I would still point to zakynthos and the islanders brabe behaviour as a comparison.
Even if you argue nothing could have been done for the Jews of the channel islands, there were many examples of Europeans taking an arguably futile but courageously moral stand against nazi behaviour, which was notably absent on the channel islands from most people and institutions.
“No Jew is truly safe in a country run by non-Jews…”
I agree. But then, no one is truly safe, ever. Life is just like that. The answer is eternal vigilance. It is when we attempt to give ourselves absolute safety, that we end up making things very unsafe for everyone else.
As far as I know, David Mamet is a Reform Jew and lives in the U.S.
It sounds like he’s a work-in-progress, like many people.
Mamet, in the tradition of Judaism and the study of The Talmud, is a learned and questioning person.
and therefore?
He’s somewhat of a hypocrite. He trashes Reform Judaism and seems to say that the only place Jews can be safe is in Israel.
Have you not looked around and noticed what is going on in both the US and the UK?
Israel is the big safety net for Jews. Every Jew in the World can have Israeli citizenship.
It couldn’t possibly take the entire diaspora population – there isn’t the room.
Plus the existence of Israel depends for its international clout on America. Without the US, it is nothing and would be ignored.
Plus Jews are not safe from antisemitism within Israel because the pronounced tension between Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi and associated political allegiances.
If I far right gov came to power in the UK (something continually work against) I would rather take shelter like Anne Frank or join a resistance group here than go to Israel.
The rise of antisemitism in Europe recently has precisely nothing to do with the so – called far right . It is the confluence of mass migration of Muslims and of woke ideology spreading through the education system . Indeed left wing Jews have been extremely supportive of mass migration and are also mainstays of woke ideology
I see where you are coming from now, the classic internationalist left is right, anything else is wrong. You say you would ‘take shelter like Anne Frank’. How can you even frame what happened to Anne Frank in terms of ‘taking shelter’? Did Anne Frank have the option to join a resistance group as you say you would? Shame on you for bringing her name into this in such a way.
More recent Hebrew muck-raking press reports find NOT a failure of Military Intel gathering by Israeli state security agencies. Rather, a failure of Command.
Or, the elements of this rapacious radical right wing most fascistic Israeli political coalition and Bibi Netanyahu cabinet, blessed by Trumpf and Daddy Warbucks in the modern nation’s his\herstory failing to act or even mobilize with AMAN or Military Intel well in advance on Hamas plans to “Show them.”
“…the Intelligence Section”), often abbreviated to Aman (Hebrew: אמ״ן), is the central, overarching military intelligence body of the Israel Defense Forces. Aman was created in 1950, when the Intelligence Department was spun off from the IDF’s General Staff.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/israeli-military-had-warning-of-hamas-training-for-attack-reports-say
To your point, Peter Samson in replying to David McKee “As far as I know, David Mamet is a Reform Jew and lives in the U.S.”:
Hence Mamet’s over-compensating Neo-Con Daddy Warbucks boilerplate. Thanks for calling out his Chanukah Rubber Chicken attempt at Maccabee nee Chicago ward walking tough talk.
I recall the intramural bullying of Betar-nicks at plenty militant circa 1960’s street protests around UN in New Yawk. Betar bullies weren’t serving in the IDF or state security services either. Nor were they walking anti-crime gang, anti-drug Lower East Side streets as Guardian Angels would decades later, multi-ethnic Guardian Angels who were the street violence battle hardened and relentless organizers among screwed workers by corrupt city and Wall Street funded political machines. Political machines fine with the Wage Stag-Nation and Food Stamp Nation of the past century of quantified wealth concentration.
In major urban centers like Chicago or NYC these were primarily Democratic Corrupt Political machines that featured no shortage of often still Orthodox corrupt or blessed aldermen and machine functionaries in their nice shul suits complete with symbols of rabbinic hashgacha and stubborn resistance to the inevitable assimilation of being seen in a shleppers’ work clothes.
Many with sermons and banquet speeches like Mamet’s here went on to make tidy profits working or marketing within Daddy Warbucks. Always selling to anyone on any side of a shooting war. Brokers of footwear with army boots to sell for on-the-ground remote occupation of frigid, muck & mired terrain. Or, filing\filling the lobbying machinery to keep the profits humming as too many Jews did after WW I believing the fascist movement couldn’t live without including wealthy Jews within their Select Club of the Supreme Yiddishe Kupf.
All branded themselves kosher, strictly OU or Union of Orthodox Rabbis certified. I went to their day schools (yeshivoth) and see all the doctors and dentists produced filling the finer western gated communities visiting Israel faithfully. They that can support a failed coddled Philadelphia IDF wannabe soldier and self-styled Bid-Net success in retail furniture like Bibi Netanyahu. Not like his brother Yoni Netanyahu, truly a brother in arms who died in the IDF elite raid on Entebbe:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/yoni-netanyahus-heroism-related-to-his-emotional-distress-researchers-say/
Seleucid Greek imperial revival in the Eastern Mediterranean, anyone? Jest askin’
Mitch RitterParadigm Sifters, Code Shifters, PsalmSong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of Atonement Seekers)
Media Discussion ListLookseeInnerEarsHearHere
And Mamet left the Democrat Party some time ago….for myriad good reasons, one of which is its intolerance for religion and religious peoples. It’s the party of ‘Atheism’.
According to an aggregate or simplified reckoning, sure. But the extreme right has many nihilists too. And of the last two presidents elected: Who is a more genuine Christian, Grandpa Joe Churchgoer or Donny Upside-Down-Bible?
I realize this is further off topic than your comment but given the totality of your posts, I wonder if you think that Donald Trump–the de facto head of the Republican Party–is anything but a materialist or nihilist.
Well said.
Yes, but as has been demonstrated by the vile demonstrations in the US and especially at Harvard & other elite institutions, that situation is an endangered one. Jews, such as Mamet, need Israel to exist so they have a place to call their own.
He wrote a book in 2011, called “Secret Knowledge”, how he basically got disillusioned with “Liberal” America. It is a huge turn around in his life and he is also back attending his local Synagogue.
Yeah, sure, it’s very common to drag people into gas chambers, happens every day. No one is truly safe from the ovens. Gee Why didn’t I think of that? Your comment is one of the sickest things I have ever read. Your moral compass is off, by a lot. You give false equivalency a whole new meaning. Life is just like that, are you out of your mind!
Mr. Greco, from your phraseology, I would guess you are American. Beyond that, I can’t think of any other explanation for your intemperate reaction other than fear.
Rather than me guessing, would you care to explain, sir?
” … no one is truly safe, ever. Life is just like that. “
Really? You want to equate the chance that you might get mugged, or knocked down by a bus, with the existential danger that faces Jews, simply for being Jews?
If people were targetting you, David McKee, for no other reason than for your (presumably) Scottish heritage, I wonder if you’d be quite so sanguine.
I wonder if, in the face of a fatwah, you’d still say, ‘Well, life is just like that”
My test would be whether a country’s institutions would ‘allow’ a Jew to become its most senior politician. Ukraine passes this test with Zelensky, as did Britain in the 19th century with Disraeli.
It is notable that Disraeli was called Hebrew behind his back continually and that there has never been a Jewish premier since – in spite of many high level Jewish politicians. Ed Miliband was smeared by the Daily Mail and successfully sued them for articles they wrote about his father.
They can always go to Israel – they have a country now…if they feel unsafe in USA/Europe…etc.
The Unheard readers are not going to here this. They think surely you jest. They won’t get it because they can’t get it.
How do you know what Unherd readers get and don’t get, and you might want to spell check.
I completely disagree with your comment about only Jews fighting for other Jews. The irony is that today’s leftist, cultural Jews have become the most useful idiots in world history. The secular left has unveiled their hatred of Jews and it is the Christians who will fight for Jews, who are our predecessors. Despite Mamet’s unfounded belief that Christians hate Jews because of killing Christ, a biblical Christian only has reverence for the Jewish people Christ himself was Jewish for heaven’s sake!
It is one thing for the “liberal” Jewish diaspora to have sown the seeds of their own destruction by naively trying to assimilate with those who hate you, which Mamet clearly articulates above, it is quite another, however, to water, fertilize and nurture it!
An excellent comment; thank you.
I am constantly amazed how few people know that Christ was killed by the Romans.
One:they voted them in power. Two: in the 1960s Satire,biting funny cruel satire changed society,pulled down the rich and privileged and raised up the poor but able. Mockery destroys POWER. Just like the same sort of political satire brought down the Nazis in Weimar Germany. And now we’re not ruled by Eton boys anymore
Yeah,right.
There was a big distinction between the venomous antisemitism of Julius Streicher, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann, and the attitude of German citizens who considered themselves sophisticated rational thinkers, the Unherd readers of their day. But most of Europe’s Jews ended up murdered just the same.
Julius Streicher, loathsome as we was, played no executive role in the slaughter of the Jews.
Nor should he have been condemned at Nuremberg for what was essentially a ‘thought crime’.
Dehumanising other people has real life consequences.
Perhaps. But Streicher was undoubtedly guilty of inciting the Holocaust.
Incidentally, his name translates to “Strider” In English.
Which is the nickname given to Aragorn in Bree. Hence the clownish first translation of the Lord of the Rings into German, gave Aragorn the (unfortunate) nickname Streicher !
Incitement is one thing, execution another.
I have always believed in “sticks and stones may break my bones………….etc”.
Did JRRT see that initial translation? I can’t decide whether he would have laughed or cried.
….”but words and names won’t hurt me”. Perhaps not you, Charles, but that certainly doesn’t apply to most people.
Interesting, exactly the same debate around antisemitism is going in US at the moment as principals of top three US universities were hauled before Congress and asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their rules on harassment and bullying. None of the principals could answer with a simple “yes.” Instead they argued, variously, that it depended on whether an individual was targeted, in which case it could be bullying and harassment. The principals also differentiated between “free speech” and whether calling for genocide translated into “conduct.” In other words, saying it was OK, doing it not so good. With this mindset, if Julius Streicher, were in the dock today in the US he would be acquitted. One wonders how the principals would would have reacted to genocidal statements about other minority groups, such as black people, Muslims, trans and LGBT, or indeed mis-gendering. Apparently, it seems that mis-gendering with wrong pronouns, although only speech, counts as harassment and bullying and is elevated to “conduct,” and is sanctionable, yet calling for the genocide of Jews is merely speech, and doesn’t reach the threshold. Explain that!
The mealy-mouthed equivocation of those smirking women being questioned in Congress was truly disgusting.
These mealy-mouthed women were just another ‘miss’ for women & feminism which are really chalking up misses as of late; Members of the so-called Squad were reluctant to condemn the use of rape & violence, a Hamas tactic, this week as well.
I’m coming to the conclusion that 95% of women holding positions of power are either worthless or utter failures.
And your 5 per cent are?
Many are clamouring to hire women, regardless of their merit, so they can be DEI.
Same as the men, unfortunately. So much for the idea of a world being run by women being a better one. Women haven’t done as much evil in the world as men have because they haven’t had a chance to.
Have to agree with you on this. I’m furious about it.
Yes, indeed. It was a violation of our collective human right to hear/witness some of those historically hypocritical comments. The woman from Harvard should be fired immediately.
By splitting hairs, the defenders of virulent antisemitism throughout the Left try to hide their extremism. Yes, theoretically discussing whether genocide can ever be justified is an exercise in free speech. Actually rallying to promote genocide is inciting terrorism, quite different. and is probably illegal. It’s certainly abhorrent.
How was a disarmed Europe supposed to do this fighting back?
I so agree Mr McKee. I cannot deny Mamet his fear. It is palpable. But I do not want to believe it all. Is it psychosis? Is it a condition rooted in a history? How can I make him less afraid when a) I support lots of other oppressed peoples around the world including the abused and slaughtered Palestinian civilians b) I admire clever Jewish leftwingers who resist c) I believe Jewish people have contributed brilliantly to every scientific, artistic and philosophical discipline d) I loathe Netanyahu and Ben Givr who are doing more to destroy Israel than Hamas ever did or could. e) the fact of the Holocaust and my study of it changed me – to make want to love and protect Jewish peoples. f) I find Iran’s oppression of its people and its executions of youngsters and rape of women for not wearing a scarf is insanely evil. Jihadism and Sunni politico-religious extremism is the most evil thing can think of next to Putin.
thanks, Rosie, that is appreciated
Your not wanting not to believe doesn’t make it not so. You can’t even try to make him or me less afraid by concentrating on us for one brief moment without singing your own praises for admiring left wing Jews who resist (what is that?), I guess other Jews don’t deserve your admiration, talking about your selective support for abused and slaughtered people you deem abused by Jews and no other peoples. Is it possible you are the problem? Are you really trying to make him feel safe?
Does it bother you to encounter people less afraid than you are? For Jews in particular, is the paralyzing “virtue” of fear some kind of situational duty?
Ms. Brocklehurst’s tone mightn’t be a model of humility, but neither is yours (or mine). Given that she concludes with a heightened condemnation of Jihadism, I don’t see how her comment confines the blame for civilian deaths in Palestine to Jews alone.
Fears may be understandable, even warranted, and serve as a first spur to action in a dangerous moment. Dwelling in fear, however–and making it one’s constant, tightly clutched companion–helps no one.
Words like alertness or preparation, even vigilance are not close synonyms for fear.
Your lack of empathy is unbelievable. There aren’t many Jews on this planet who are not afraid after the Oct 7th massacre and the world’s reaction to Israel defending itself and destroying Hamas, a terrorist organization. Just yesterday the presidents of America’s most distinguished education institutions could not answer the simple question. “Is calling for the genocide of Jews against their student conduct policies”, it was a context specific situation. Killing Jews and standing by while people slaughter Jews is an age-old tradition. Your nit-picking is frankly insulting.
we aren’t going to get anything else, left or right. It’s back to the future, same as it ever was.
“Not only is this not true, it can’t possibly be true.”
I would say 49% of the world population’s is happy to kill the Jews, the other 49% is happy someone else is doing it for them. Only 2% of the world really doesn’t care.
That said, Jews now have a homeland. They can all move to Israel. Or convert and become a Westerner (French Catholic, English Protestant, American Baptist, etc.)
India, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam etc included in this world?
What a jaded outlook you have.
Then why does it ring true? Do your best to avoid anti semitism in your response.
Harold Pinter did it first.
Mamet(speech) said, “In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, based solely on our ability to speak the language viciously. That’s probably where my ability was honed.”[
That might be because he sees no distinction between the Cossacks and peasants who formed the Black Hundreds in the Russian Empire, and the overwhelming majority of Unherd readers an indeed defines himself in opposition to the Christian West
Mamet’s is not ‘fear’ but rather ‘resignation’.
I don’t think that’s quite right. David Mamet is pointing out the historical truth that Jewish people have always been at risk from those that want to kill them. Not from everyone, as you suggest, but from enough quarters to leave Jews fearing for their safety. Even in “civilised” English-speaking countries the desceration of Jewish cemetaries, attacks on Jewish schools, daubing of swastikas and now the open and unrestrained calls for the killing of Jews by Palestinian supporters must leave every Jew considering emigration to Israel. And even there there is no safety, as October 7th makes all too clear.
When I was a teenager we lived next to an old Jewish couple. Very Mittle-european. They kept packed suitcases in the coat closet; ready to flee at a moments notice. After what they had been through, my older sister explained, they didn’t trust us (goyim) to protect them if things got ugly again. I found that terribly sad and, “…frankly, insulting.”
Now, after what happened since October 7, I finally understand.
That is not what he is saying. His point is that as Jews seek assimilation as a means of “protection” the leave themselves open to antisemitism in soft form which leads to antisemitism in hard form, ultimately unprotected. IN this state the only protection is maintaining the Jewish identify as distinct and prominent.
I don’t think Mamet is saying every single non Jew is anti Semitic. But the double standards applied to Israel compared to every other conflict in the world – often much more bloody, over which complete indifference is shown – show it to be extremely widespread – even if often self deluding and unconscious.
Rousseau used to refer to the noble savage as the primitive individual who had avoided the fall from grace brought about by technological life in moder society.
Now certain groups in the West simply celebrate the savage under the banner of what they take to be an appropriate left-wing cause.
That is how far we have regressed in our idea of innocence and morality. Too much alienation by virtual information technology has brought out the savage in too many, atomised out of ethical accountability.
“ into an agricultural phenomenon, supplying much of Europe’s produce”
I’d need a fact check on that one.
Yes, that claim is utterly risible!!!
Spain (and Italy, France) are the great fruit/vegetable producers of Europe.
Look at the difference in sizes of the countries and then read the comment again. It said much and not most.
So if we did, then you would like us? Oh, please like us.
Who is this is we you speak of? Are we supposed to treat all Jews as a homogeneous bloc, irrespective of class and nationality?
The problem is that they ARE treated like a homogenous bloc.
Quite
Comments like Charles’ would imply they want to be treated as a homogeneous bloc however
I think Charles was being sarcastic.
In my opinion, ‘The Spanish Prisoner’ was the very best Mamet film ever made, David. Thank you for your work! It denotes the futility of money, power, women, intrigue, fame, and so on, and tames man’s heart to ask himself, “What truly matters?”
Now to consider this article: ever since Abraham opened the four doors to his tent to give, and not to take, it has been a Jewish trait to focus almost exclusively on giving, rather than taking. Our own rights are small in our eyes, we weep over our enemies’ fate.
So why did God insist that the Jews conquer and keep the land promised to Israel? Perhaps because if not for this command, the Jews, ever mindful of others’ rights and feeling, would take no land at all, in any place. Kindness would be mistaken for placidity. No one compliments the sheep for its peaceful acts; they arise from its peaceful nature. A lion that is tranquil is to be admired, however; as it defies its own nature.
When the Jews remember the commands of God, ALL the commands of God, perhaps then the world will be at peace. May this happen in our day.
He’s responsible for ‘The Spanish Prisoner’? I was roped into going to see that, and I was totally hooked! I loved it.
David, if you’re reading the comments, thank you for that movie!
Shalom: may God have victory over his enemies in your life.
“The futility of women?”
I am going to suggest James Howard Kunstler’s short, accessible essay “The Jewish-American Dilemma” as a complement, if not entirely a counter-point, to David Mamet’s essay. Both essays share some parallel constructions.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-jewish-american-dilemma/
“If they really want to repair the world, it’s time for Jewish Americans to get out of the Democratic Party and re-assimilate into an American common culture — a consensus about reality — that is consistent with running a successful, orderly, and just society.”
I could not work out what Mamet’s conclusion was. The piece was sub titled “the futility of assimilation” and ended stressing the importance of the Israeli army. Does he mean that all Jews should give up on the West and move to Israel? I hope not. As he points out, the Jewish contribution to Western culture has been immense. In any case, I am not sure that is what he really thinks even if his rhetoric seems to point in that direction. Maybe the essay just depicts his conflicting sentiments without coming to a conclusion.
“I could not work out what Mamet’s conclusion was.”
To be.
I think most of us would prefer “to be” rather than the alternative. It is possible, however, to be a little more specific.
Funny!
So all foreigners should assimilate to the general population (something I agree with), but Jews should keep themselves seperate and maintain their own culture irrespective of the majority population
Nassim Nicholas Taleb helps us understand this with his notion of the “intransigent small minority.”
If you are a small minority you need to be instransigent, otherwise the majority will accidentally tread on you.
But then, of course, when the majority needs to unite the nation, it needs an enemy (see Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt). And the easiest enemy to fight and defeat is a small minority.
Not really true.
Judaism is a revolutionary religion (there is only 1 god and the Jews are the chosen people). Jesus and all the early followers were Jews. They became Christians. Simply put, Christianity (Judaism+Rome+Athens) is the most successful Jewish sect ever.
Jews (if you believe in 1 god and that you are the chosen people) always produced crazy sects that turned on each other.
Christians turned on the Jews…and we know the history.
Satan’s greatest triumph in the modern age is promoting the line he doesn’t exist.
BCE?
What’s wrong with just BC? It worked well enough for several hundred years.
Exactly
‘Jews even wrote the world’s greatest Christmas songs: “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” by Mendelssohn, a converted Jew (a “Jew”), and “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin.’
Nonsense. Everyone knows the greatest Christmas song is ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’ by Shakin Stevens, aka the Welsh Elvis.
That’s not true; as you well know, Christmas song merit is in the eye, or ear, of the Noddy beHolder.
No, you’re wrong. Roy Wood and Wizzard produced the best Christmas Song of all time: “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday”.
Wlvys Presili ?
Perhaps we all have a favorite. Who’s to say what is the greatest?
Greg Lake. I believe in Father Christmas. The Christmas you get you deserve. Magnificent. anti war pessimism with echoey jangly icy landscape sounds.
Pogues is my personal favourite
How can there be a greatest Christmas song when they’re all such unalloyed sentimental childish drivel? Not counting ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’, which has nothing to do with Christmas.
Please start by telling that dwarf Bloomberg to stop sponsoring anti-2nd Amendment gun control legislation. Jews should have a right to defend themselves from a pogrom in America, no matter what liberal Jews say!
Really it’s a fascinating time in Jewish history: the contradiction between the western “renter” Jews and the eastern “landowner” Jews has come fully to the fore! From “always remember the stranger at the door” to “shoot them if they breach our wall.”
Good luck with that!
As circumstances have shown, Israel could use its own 2nd Amendment.
I’m Jewish, Orthodox, Zionist and Israeli and I was wincing as I read this. Not sure what the point was of writing this piece.
and I’m Jewish, secular, a Zionist and nor can I.
I’m neither Jewish or a Zionist and I’m glad I’m not the only one that was confused.
Thanks to both you and Mike Fraser for commenting.
As a white, secular, Israel-supporting Englishman of Irish diaspora lineage, i fully agree.
David Mamet was on Real Time with Bill Maher this week – and gave a similarly ‘eh? Meh’ performance. Like he was resorting to the PR tactics of many a contemporary artist – making gnomic, iconoclastic statements that can sound pretty cool, if you don’t look too closely. Not to say he’s a fraud- he’s magnificent as a drama writer, director and deserves all the praise he’s got – it’s just that talent in one area very rarely generalises out; and the pressure and desire for writers, artists to be a renaissance polymath is great.
So true.
Rafi I think he’s ill and they’ve exploited him by publishing an incoherent ramble. I don’t like Mamet but this piece shows signs of disintegrated thinking.
I would think most people 1) left 2) right 3) center and even 1) sensible 2) intemperate 3) somewhat unhinged–many of us are a mixture, of both trios–could agree on that.
Sounds like a call to Jews to adopt theological ‘occasionalism’, and abandon reason and intelligence. It worked out well for Islam, didn’t it, so what could possibly go wrong?
We were meant to be people of the book. Mamet would prefer it if we were people of the machine gun.
I agree with David Mamet. You can pare down your whole identity to suit those who want to harm you but in the end it does you no good. Hiding in the shadows and trying to pass as straight only made gay people more persecuted. In attempting to pare down your Jewishiness you signal to others your fear and vulnerability. However, as a minority living among non-Jews I can understand the impulse to blend with the crowd, especially when the majority don’t seem that bothered about coming to your aid when needed.
Mamet doesn’t say it here, but he skirts the edges of the thought I’ve heard repeated often in the past 2 months since the Hamas barbarians committed their atrocities: that there is something unique about how Hamas is being given a pass to slaughter Jews. That the same people calling Hamas “freedom fighters” would be singing a different tune if it had been Britain or America or Australia that was so brutally assaulted. They point to the reaction after 9-11, for example, when America and its allies did retaliate and sought to eradicate the enemy from the globe. But I am sadly convinced that we no longer live in a world of that moral clarity. At least not for the very powerful and essentially violent fringe Left in the West, I promise you that the reaction would have been, and will be the same when civilians in own countries are brutally targeted. Whoever thinks this talk of “decolonization” is reserved for Jews knows very little of the ideology these lunatics cling to. Jews, Americans, Brits, all free peoples….wake up because what is coming for us all is the same evil ideology with many heads: Political Islam and Marxism reborn as Woke are coming for us. We unite, or we lose.
During the days of Apartheid were the Jews treated as White, Black or Coloured can anyone recall?
Officially Jews were designated “white” or “European” in apartheid South Africa.
Thank you.
Only ashkenazi of course – Mizrahi would have been classed as black or coloured, perhaps some Sephardi Jews too. Mizrahi Jews would not have settled in SA for obvious reason.
There were darker skinned Jews who were classified as white.
That’s interesting. Political whiteness.
Reason for asking?
Given the ‘Teutonic’ element of Apartheid I thought it may have been different.
No, they just were/are Dutch peasants (hillbillies – like in USA). Don’t expect intellectual sophistications from the Boers.
What qualifies you to spout such bigoted rubbish? Apartheid was crime against humanity but there is much beauty and sophistication in the Afrikaans language.
Yah they are doing so well now…
His reason for asking was to make a point. He already knew the answer. He’s a know-it-all all.
Gosh CK you can be an unredeemable old scold when you want to!
During the days of Apartheid in South Africa, when the country had a functioning economy, full employment, and a modern healthcare system, the Jews were considered “white” and enjoyed all of the privileges that classification afforded them. In spite of that, many in the Jewish community, and even Jews who did not consider themselves members of that community opposed the apartheid system. Helen Suzman was the sole member of the Progressive Party in the SA parliament, and she was a tireless opponent of Apartheid. The head of the underground SA Communist Party was Joe Slovo, a Jew from Lithuania who kept that underground party following Moscow’s orders to agitate against the SA state in the black townships. After the fall of the white government, violence and lawlessness increased rapidly both in the previously all-white cities like J’burg and Pretoria, and even in the all-black townships. The South African economy slid into chaos (today the “official” unemployment rate in the country is 40%, although it is observably much higher. The government has slipped into chaos, corruption and incompetence. A large part of the Jewish community has emigrated overseas to Great Britain, Israel and the United States to escape the non-racial paradise they so longed for. Some people never learn, do they?
Should that not read : When South Africa had an economy, healthcare system and full employment that functioned principally for the benefit of white people including assimilated Jewish people? It certainly did not work for black people. (Of course that part of Africa belonged to Africa before the British and the Boers came.) Yes. Notable corruption since Mandela and even then it was not great. SA is not isolated from world downturns either. We only put up with our own government and corporate corruptions so far in the UK because we have a stronger system and financial resilience for it not to have gone completely belly up yet. But it is heading that way. (Food banks. homelessness, Evictions. Social Care -what a euphemism-even the indicative height of poorer children is shrinking. Almost Victorian). Your opinion speaks to me of pots and kettles.
Jist tae let ye ken Aa upticked yer excellent comment …Fr some reason the system didnae register it.
It tends not to do that.
Well, hopefully the people of SA are now pleased that they have rid themselves of those oppressive institutions and have returned to the conditions that existed before the Boers showed up.
They mostly weren’t there eg (without checking the exact timeline) I remember that the Zulus were expanding into SA at about the same time as European settlement was happening.
Are you claiming that Apartheid was a Good Thing ?
Even though it was responsible for creating the ANC ?
Yes, he is defending and celebrating Apartheid South Africa, and getting robustly upvoted for it. This particular comment board has an attention-getting blend of hypervigilant antisemitism detectives and proud old-school bigots* who’ve learned a few new rhetorical tricks.
*in updated cloaks of familiar, dishonest analysis or pseudoscience flavored with cherrypicked data, robbed of context.
Oi! There are a fair number of old style liberals (UK definition) here as well.
I’m not saying there aren’t, Rupert/Alex, but an article like this attracts swarms of fringe-dwellers. And the fringe crowd is drowning out both old-style liberals and true conservatives (my definitions) more and more often here at UnHerd.
*Downvoters: If you have been at this website for a year or more, tell me why you disagree. Or perhaps, you just dislike how I say things or who you think I am which is fine.
Granted, the radicalization and hardening of hearts occurring on this website has been happening everywhere, or just about.
Thank you, I had no idea about either Suzman and Slovo. and as you so rightly say “some people never learn”.
Having good, clean antisemitic fun, Mr Stanhope?
Good grief Ms Davis! No tasteless ‘Swastika’ jokes?
Are you feeling unwell?
Not quite as tasteless Mr Stanhope as calling Julius Streicher’s pornographic hate cartoons ‘thought crimes’ that didn’t merit due justice. I’ll give you one thing – you never bothered to deny you’re an antisemite because there’s more honesty in you than some of the other racists on here.
Praise indeed!
As you may have gathered I am quite anti a lot of things.
I did describe JS as “loathsome” did I not? Even the N*zi Party found him so, and quite correctly fired him. But revolting as his “cartoons” were, they did NOT warrant a capital charge. If did they we would have run out of rope years ago.
The idea of a party that carried out mass genocide, grotesque medical experiments etcetera finding Streicher too much for their sensibilities belongs in a J G Ballard or Kurt Vonnegut novel.
Go on, Charles, Deny you are an antisemite. A simple grammatically clear sentence. I am not an antisemite. I know you won’t.
Why don’t you know the facts Ms Davis, they’re easy enough to find???
JS was made Gauleiter of Nuremberg and North Bavaria in 1925. In February 1940 the Supreme Party Court found him to be “unsuitable for leadership” and he was summarily fired from all his Party and Government positions! February 1940…’do the maths ‘ as they say.
Please define antisemite for me, I found the whole thing rather confusing.
May I? An antisemite is someone who doesn’t agree with every single thing that Ms Davis says.
Thank you!
How silly of me not to have noticed that.
Hi Chris, plenty of people who don’t agree with me are not antisemites – in fact a lot of people on here who disagree with me a lot fancy that they might be great pals to Jewish people. This is merely because at the moment, they see us as the enemies of Muslims who they stereotype and hate.
As far as I’m concerned Hamas are total scum …but the Palestinians do have a just cause.
Thinking Hamas or Isis or Osama Bin Laden represent the whole of Islam is like thinking the Ku Klux Klan represent all Christians.
Netanyahu is a corrupt disgusting fool who couldn’t keep his people safe and he will lose the next election.
The last thing Netanyahu wanted is for the Palestinians to be led by a non Islamist organisation that might work towards a two state solution. He is over.
Even the right-leaning Zionist Jews on here mostly see Mamet’s post is incoherent gibberish – because it is.
Perhaps you just need to look at the material you posted that the moderators banned. They don’t intervene like that very often.
The Censor only bestirs himself/herself when someone complains or ‘flags’ to use the technical term.
I presume it was you who complained because you had made such an ass of yourself? Is that not so?
No matter it’s back now.
No, I did not
I’m very glad to hear it. Then some other members of Kosher Nostra must have been the culprits.
How very feeble!
As anti semites go, having recourse to only one vituperative phrase seems rather unimaginative, Charles.
And if this is your real name, I certainly will have Hope not Hate look into you and any other activities you might be involved in.
So better hope you don’t know any real nasties, Charles because you might find yourself confronted with genuine hate crime charges.
Think of going into a police station and having to mingle with the other unwashed hoi polloi.
don’t push me because I bite
In fact I might just get Unherd investigated for allowing the material you posted back – once I’ve looked at it.
Are you feeling alright JD?
That is the most extraordinary THREAT that I have ever read on UnHerd! Perhaps some other commentators can recall something similar, but I can’t.
And this when two hours later in another post to me you describe yourself as “a sad old hippy”!? And imply that you are a champion of human rights.
Incidentally what is ‘Hope not Hate? I have never heard of it.
As to Streicher were his cartoons any worse than those of Charlie Hebdo? I think not, yet both seem to have provoked an extreme reaction don’t you think?
Sentiment beings and ‘beasts’ ( your later post again.)set me thinking and I wish I could agree you but the ‘science’ seems to say otherwise.
In conclusion excellent use of hoi polloi, and NO use of the definite article.
Would like to have continued this conversation but the blasted boiler has packed up! And it’s like Stalingrad here!
Are you trying to destroy free expression here? I thought the whole attraction of sites like this would be the freedom to discuss all matters, without threats to drag in illiberal progressives like HNH. Why not go elsewhere if you don’t like something, rather than try to destroy what others might value?
Mr Barrow, Mr Stanhope has published defamatory, hate inducing material that I assume another Jewish forum member complained about to the moderators – I didn’t. They removed it but it appears to be temporary.
As for calling Hope Not Hate ‘illiberal progressives’, that is nonsense. They oppose racists of all stripes, including those on the left, and they have successfully prevented at least one MP from being murdered by white supremacists. By the use of the same informant, they also prevented an attack on a synagogue where there would have been women and children,.
When I came to Unherd, I was curious to see whether it lived up to its remit of being a contrarian, iconoclastic publication which can accommodate right, left, liberal, feminist and other dissident voices.
But what I have found is a lot of knee jerk unthinking ‘anti wokery’ and truckloads of fairly dire racism and misogyny. Admittedly there are some thoughtful and decent people on here who do vote down the more hateful comments but posts from those who come from a more classically progressive position are usually downvoted even if they are more informative.
Marshall donates to GB news which is obviously the UK equivalent of Fox news.
Unfortunately, I mostly agree with you. It was always right-leaning here, but less one-sided and more fair-minded just a year ago.
For my part I have limited patience for extremists on the far-left or far-right. The former are superabundant at the NYT, the latter here. And there is a dwindling group of moderates–among whom I place myself–at both places too.
I think the absurdities of the left are coming under more internal challenge than is the case on the right at present, at least here in the States.
Be careful ‘calamity’ Jane that is a prima facie case of criminal libel. Additionally saying someone has “a swastika on their tweed’ is tantamount to saying that they are a N*zi and clearly contravenes the 2006 Hate Crime Act.
As an entitled Jewess you do NOT have have the right to scream antisemite at anyone you disagree with, as Mr Chris Wheatley makes abundantly clear.
As to HNH it sounds like a ‘coven’ attempting to replicate both the Spanish Inquisition and or the NKVD/Gestapo or have I got that wrong? I would be interested to hear the details of how they/you saved the life on a MP.
I can’t figure out the moderators at UH. Some quite harmless comments of mine also disappeared. No clue why…
Certain keywords–think Germany and Russia in the mid-20th century–trigger an automatic “quarantine” of about 12 hours, after which most comments will post, with a time stamp that misleadingly suggests it’s been posted all along.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Or in the terminology of Quantum Physics, the measurer affects the measured.
I remembered enough of my state school Latin to understand your post.
Too clever for my own good.
you are an anti semite. We can’t define it but we know it when we see it. Are you proud of it?
If YOU can’t define it how I am I expected to answer you?
You are going to get an extremely detailed, multiple part definition Charles when I’m less tired at the weekend. Then you will be able to see which category you fit into.
If you can’t define it how can you accuse somebody of it?
Wer a antisemitisch ist, das bestimme ich! To paraphrase Karl Lüger.
which people. Charles Stanhope is in the database.
What are you wittering about?
thanks for this.
No – not thanks. There was a goodish piece on how SA declined after Mandela’s death. A lot to do with corruption in the ANC and a very negative leadership from Zuma.
You don’t have to be a communist to oppose racism but the international communist party, as contrasting to the Soviet travesty of communism, often did as a matter of principle.
Like you didn’t know or couldn’t have looked it up.
Sorry I missed that, in reference to what?
As I read this piece by Mr. Mamet, I reveled in my esteem for David, his work, and that we are of the world in the same era; but then, I wondered if I really know David. Could be that he’s prodding us in a new place today and I must “go off” to do the difficult: think.
In my estimation this opinion piece is the most disjointed neurotic thing Mamet has written for UnHerd so far, and that’s no small achievement.
Given his overall (former?) secular intellectualism, the ending paragraph constitutes a sort of psychotic break.
He seems to have found a very ancient and selective version of YHWH: A jealous and wrathful God who desires retributive bloodletting in His holy name, maybe prepared to order the indiscriminate slaughter of entire peoples whose leaders make war against Israel. But the Ancient Law also commands an eye for an eye, not three or ten for one. And Mamet’s rhetorical trick of noting that ancient Jews were not called to “worship” fairness ignores the fact that they surely were called to practice fairness and “righteous judgment” and to have mercy for the poor, stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the outcast. All of them. (Not while they’re shooting at you or plotting mayhem, of course).
Even persecution from time immemorial cannot erase that sacred calling. It is an undemolished wall in the crumbling edifice of Judeo-Christian civilization–one worth repairing and defending.
None of this removes Israel’s right to defend itself, free its captives, seek justice for wrongs suffered, and kill terrorists. Nor does it remove the right of any observer–however well or ill-informed–to observe or comment on the proportion and severity of Israel’s response, whether in support or opposition. But urging more violence, anger, or enemy-making than we already have, from any quarter, is sometimes a crime, and always a god-awful mistake.
Exactly and I do believe a little item called ‘Thou shalt not kill’ appeared in the Decalogue.
Amen to that.
Yet the Bible calls for a capital sentence for at least 36 ‘crimes’. In fact worse than Mein Kampf!
That’s just silly. Mein Kampf is much shorter and has no significant counterweight of good to redeem it. By the way, the answer to your previous question (on another board) “have I read ALL of the Bible” is yes, pretty close. (Parts of books like Leviticus and Chronicles only skimmed, Job and the Gospels etc. read multiple times. It is a decidedly mixed bag, from the highest to the lowest). And I read much of Mein Kampf for a required essay on Holocaust Denial. No need to ever read more.
I on the the other hand have read NEITHER, nor have any wish to do so.
What a proud and arrogant fool you can be. Your sneers at the Bible, however,, make more sense now. They emerge from literal ignorance.
The main crime I recall being castigated in Mein Kampf is the Viennese art establishment not recognising Mr Hitler’s genius.
There is an extensive, malevolent rant against the JEW as the supposed chief villain of all human history (“For five thousand years, he has arrived without being welcomed and skulked in the shadows, infecting society with his crafty, underhanded ways…”–something like that). The German word for “vermin” gets used a lot. Sound familiar? Echoes of it it occurred in the Rwandan ethnic massacres and the term is in the mouth of a current candidate for POTUS.
I did read it, AJ years ago. I was being sarcastic which many will see as poor taste. But I often resort to graveyard humour in these circumstances – a frequent Jewish defense. Yes I do remember the antisemitic ranting but it occurs later in the book. In the early part he could have been any aimless, insecure, artistically inclined bloke looking for something to anchor him. I think that was one of the most depressing aspects of reading it.
I thought maybe but was responding in my earnest mode just in case. Thanks for clarifying, Jane.
It should be emphasised (but never is until stated in this article) that “the Israelis transformed the wasteland between the river and the sea into an agricultural phenomenon, supplying much of European produce”.
We, who are old enough, remember that the area was largely desert – under Turkish rule until after WW1, then a British Protectorate until after WW2 when the European Jews claimed it as their homeland. If I remember correctly, it had been promised to them after support in WW1
This is a myth and I can supply you information to prove that.
“This is a myth and I can supply you information to prove that.”
There were several statements in Iris’ comment. If you wish to dispute “the myth” please specify which one.
Then provide your information.
I eagerly await your reply, with appropriate citations that permit everyone to see easily the documentation for your “information”.
Since you only posted your comment a few hours ago, I hope you will read this so you can act promptly.
To me what this article points to is the existential danger of replacing religion, where God is in charge, with stand alone human reason, with all its attendant human weakness. If you think about it, it’s consequences can be seen across religious divides. Freedom of religion allows moral reasoning to inform political thinking.
David Mamet is a brilliant playright.
Israel exports a lot of agricultural products to Europe, but I don’t think Israel “supplies much of Europe’s produce”.
As I understand it, this article is about Judaism, not Israel-Palestine. However, if you must …
AJ Mac – An eye for an eye is from the Code of Hammurabi. The implication is proportionality. How would you define it? The Palestinians hand over 40 of their babies to be burned alive or beheaded? Suppose your nest is destroyed by a predator. What is the proportionate response? It appears that Hamas is prepared to sacrifice a small percentage of its population.
Charles Stanhope – The Bible was written at least 2000 years ago. Another country where they do things differently. It’s history, of a sort, but nothing more.
Chris Oliver – What’s wrong with BC is it makes a tendentious and unjustified assumption.
If you think I am thoughtlessly pro-Israel, consider how it would look if 1948 had never happened.
You are correct about the Babylonian antecedent, but the saying occurs in the book of Exodus too. Also, it seems implausible that all the rules contained in Hammurabi’s code were new when written down.
It’s a very ancient rule of proportion, sometimes called the lex talionis, that almost certainly pre-dates any known record.
I won’t pretend to have a perfect, let alone inspired idea of proportion in this horrific situation. But proportion, scale, discernment, and mercy are not rendered null and void in times of great outrage and crisis. And they should not be cast aside. There are too many innocent or at least un-culpable Gazans to make any desert tent or jihadi suit (or whatever) fit them all.
Mamet’s wild opinion piece most certainly references the historical and present-day situation of Jews, and the Israel-Palestine conflict and current war hover over and suffuse the whole thing, in my admittedly non-authoritative reading of Mamet’s strange text.
*It was not until I was researching a university essay on the death penalty that I realized that, at one time, the lex talionis was a instrument of restraint, not severity in societies in which escalating bloods feuds–two enemy clan members for one, an so on–were common. (A bit obvious to me now–in retrospect). This is supported by the known practices of pre-modern Native Americans and European “barbarians”, like pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons.
** A profoundly unfair and inaccurate take on Judaism as a “world view frozen in space and time”, given its robust tradition of questioning and re-interpretation across centuries and millennia, particularly in the Talmud but also among practicing Jews more generally.
***In reviewing your agglomeration of generalities above, I find individual things to agree with. Yet they seem to bend toward some attempt to dismiss religion as a mere idiotic farce, and to present yourself as history’s grand interpreter or something. What are you trying to argue?
Go slowly as I may not have read all the books you have (and vice versa).
Lex talionis was indeed a restraint principle – its purpose was to reduce the incidence of one person being assaulted and then their whole village and so on being destroyed
Looking at the numbers -roughly 1,200 killed or kidnapped and mistreated.
Coming up to 20,000 now being killed.
As for the poster who claimed that civilians, women and children are always ‘collateral damage’ – yes, usually true now, which wasn’t the case in the 1st World War .
That is why it is so unacceptable to go to war except under the most pressing circumstances – and if Brits like Stanhope hadn’t appeased Hitler along with plenty of deluded right wingers funding him (including some Jews until it dawned on them) and of course a typically narcissism of small differences left failing to oppose him, we may never have had the Second World War.
Informative details and intriguing counterfactual or “retro-speculation” about WWII. The name Stanhope was new to me outside the frequent poster here screen-named Charles and a provocative American stand-up comedian called Doug. (Now, I have an preliminary idea of who James Stanhope was, thanks to Wikipedia).
Even when Someone Else started or escalated it, responding to bigotry and homicidal aggression with re-escalation–group associating whole populations with their most violent factions and wielding the broadest brush to paint them as a monolithic enemy it is acceptable to kill due to their collective blood guilt–is, of course, less than ideal. Yet it runs blood and bone deep in part of our tribe-minded nature. I think the relenting and merciful streams, which flow back and forth from our backyards to the wider world run deep and ancient too, even if we draw less water from those purer sources.
We try to fast forward and make ourselves at once a kinder and more rational creature than we are; instead we inch forward, subject to backsliding. Our better natures are likely to emerge, I think, only when seek and follow them in face-to-face human engagement, mindfully and often with great struggle.
Despite the certitude of some hyper-rationalists and fundamentalists, people are not reliably reasonable or conclusively “re-born and saved”–not that I can confirm. If you’re still here on Earth you can still go in either direction.
In another contingent reality the Axis powers could have prevailed–the Allied victory was kind of a squeaker–and then we’d be in a still greater mess. Ach, du lieber!
I hope you’ll forgive me for rattling as I tend to do. Thanks for the engagement.
What is entirely missed here is to believe in something, anything for any other reason than it is true, fact, is a farce. Did it ever occur to the author that the reason many Jews don’t believe in avoiding ham and shrimp is because there is no divine restriction on consuming them because there is no divine. No sky god at least?
Why must it be that some Jews are not devout only as a means to assimilate to non-Jews vs simply coming to their own conclusions, thoughts, and ideas that do not involve magical thinking?
This is not to say there is no value in cultural traditions and values only that the author seems to take the religious mumbo jumbo as so self-evident that to avoid it must be for some extrinsic desire to conform.
I have great respect for my fellow Jewish citizens and I stand with them but no one has to buy the religious dogma of any religion (traditional or secular).
Too clever by half,that’s their tragedy.
Ms Baker if you ever happened to hang about in a few metropolitan cities, you might meet some Jews who are not distinguished by their mental powers. We are human beings – some of us are clever, other middling, others not so bright. Just like everyone else on the planet.
If on the other hand, you are saying that Jews suffer from tall poppy syndrome – what with Freud, Oppenheimer, Einstein, many Hollywood directors and stars, writers etc, then you are surprisingly accurate.
But the Irish are equally extraordinary in their number of high achievers yet they were often labelled stupid by racists.
A thousand jumps, summersaults and backflips and still he stands in the same place–I’m one of the chosen people and you’re not.
If you want to be Jewish, convert. Since you don’t, shut up.
First, you don’t know what I am. Second, I don’t believe most Jews reading his essay would agree he’s including converts. He’s not excluding them. The Torah says to accept them. The Torah says a lot of things and no two Jews agree 100% on what one should believe. Answer me this, if the 10 commandments says “do not kill”, and indeed haredi and hasidic Jews do not kill, what are all those Jews doing killing people in Gaza? What Torah are they reading from? Anyway, I’m sorry I offended you. As much as I love Mamet, he’s ultimately making excuses for Jews murdering children.
Max, if you know anything about the Jewish People’s religion, the details are in the commentary on the Torah. “Thou Shalt Not Kill” cannot come at the expense of one’s own life. Jews don’t “murder” children. Assuming you’re referring to Gaza, intent is the key to understanding – Hamas intended to murder, torture, rape, and kidnap Israelis. Israel has no intent to kill Gazans, except Hamas terrorists, and does more than any army to avoid civilian casualties. Calling that “murder” reveals your bias, or your simplistic understanding of the situation. Or both.
If they have no intent, they are doing spectacularly badly at avoiding it.
Exactly. Thank you Jane.
Wrong. Murder is very different than killing.
Is it?
Sure, self defense vs. death for fun or convenience.
Of course. That’s why in the original Hebrew the Sixth Commandment means: “You shall not commit murder“.
Nonsense, that’s just splitting skulls.
Why do you think an excuse is required?
Did the allies wring their hands over the deaths of Japanese and German children in WWII? No, it was necessary, to end the war and prevent millions more deaths and subjugation under totalitarianism. Many more children now will need to die to eliminate Hamas and prevent this repeating yet again and again. The Gazans are not innocent, they are enablers, they are the enemy, just like the civilian populations of Germany and Japan. War is ugly but you better be the winner or its even worse. The Palestinians would kill every Jew if they won and from the ashes would rise a Fascist Islamic Theocracy. From there they would next target the West, they are already preparing for that.
The more children and entire families die, the more recruits you create for Hamas and similar organisation. Stop conflating all Palestinians with Hamas and go inform yourself of the Palestinians who, while wanting liberation, do not support them.
Where does the malevolent Soros family fit in here?
Where do YOU think?
Oh those evil underhand bankers – fond of a cliché, aren’t you both?
.
This was pretty close to unreadable.
Mr. Mamet , you wrote the Jews will march on behalf of the whales befor they march for themselves. After Oct. 7th, a few more Jews were able to muster their Jewishness to rally on Central Park West for Israel. the usual fanatic Haredi cult were the only counter protesters I saw. And kept far away by heavy police presence through barriers to the actual rally. And bag checking. Are they checking bags for the massive pro hamas disruptions? St. Patrick’s on Easter Sunday. The Thanksgiving Day Parade. The tunnel and bridge blockades. The cancer ward?! Mr. Mamet you write of Jewish assimilation. Even in Israel there is “assimilation” of a kind. The secular Israeli. I’m secular, too. When asked, I am a Jew. Not a Pole. Not Russian. Although the Palestinians tell me I am. That the Diaspora is my “homeland.” That the Arab Muslim colonial settler invasion was a “liberation” of Arabs by Arabs. Talk about myth making. We are the only people who others get to tell us who we are. And what brand of Jewishness that they will tolerate of us. Yes, what a horror to some of the commentators on UNHERD that the Jews in their mania should image they could return to their ancestral homeland and build that nation with the crematoria still smoldering. And let me remind the anti Jews here that Israel was too late to save the Jews of Poland but it rescued the dispossessed Jews of the Mid East and North Africa…all of whom predate the Muslim Arab invasion as the Jews predate this settler colonialism by thousand of years in Historic Israel. The Spanish won back their nation centuries ago. Now they hate Israel and are jumping to recognize the Arabic speaking people called “Palestinian” as a state.
One further comment: The Germans mocked the “civilized Jews” of Germany…Jews who attempted to ape Aryan ways and hide their true Jewish filth….they told the Germans just look at the real Jews of Poland….and filmed staged mock Jewish rituals with hordes of flies or rats to show how Jews love filth and vermin and are in fact vermin. So much for Reform Judaism’s attempt to remake the Jewish service as a Lutheran service minus Jesus…no taliths….no kippot. No Hebrew. Now contemporary Reform Judaism in America has reclaimed all these particularlist Jewish trappings of identity and worship. If only I could drape myself in a talith the way the Palestinianists make a fetish of the keffiyah that John Pasha Glub designed for the Arabic speakers west of the river Jordan.
“Indeed, a devotion to God and the Word of God is the sole protection we poor weak humans have against doing evil.”
Yeah? The ‘Word of God’ as in the Old Testament? Have you read the book of Joshua? You don’t have to be a ‘religious scholar’ to understand a lot of people were slaughtered by the followers of the God you reference to take the land their God ‘promised’ them. But, I suppose it’s how you define ‘doing evil’ since that depends on which book you adhere to. Having read both the Old Testament and the Quran, and listening to many true believers and ‘holy men’ of both religions, I have come to the conclusion that this fight over that land will never end for Jews and Muslims as long as they maintain THEIR book is the true Word of God (capital W as Mamet claims). A pox on both your houses (and your books).
A pox on religion, period.
I am fond of quakers myself. Their breakfast biscuits are good too.
I am fond of the Society of Friends too. The members I have met over the years have all been clever, reflective, peaceful and open-minded, all things we should aspire to. My only issue is that they’re pacifists, and I couldn’t stay passive if, for example, our country was invaded and we needed to fight.
Another Quaker fan here. Isn’t it ok for some to refuse arms if they are sincere pacifists? Should monks that won’t strap on M-16s and go to battle go to prison?
It’s absolutely fine to be a sincere pacifist and I don’t object to that. It’s just that I’m not a pacifist so don’t think I could be a sincere Quaker, despite all the appeal.
Understood and I admit I’m the same: rather wouldn’t fight , but will.
No, as long as they’re willing to pack their bags and move to whichever country their compatriots are fighting – and dying – for.
Fair enough. I’m a pacifist in principle but did say to some friends yesterday that, if Farage became Prime Minister, I’d have to emigrate to Scotland and if it came to a war, I’d paint my face blue and put on a kilt.
My post was flip but the Quakers are people who might not have embarrassed the historical Christ as much as some of his other adherents.
Amusing image (lady kilt-warrior!) and provocative concluding thought. To use a slightly different word used in English translations of the Bible: I’d venture that Jesus would not be ashamed of the better sort of Quaker. Doubt he’d dig the thee this and thou that though. Do they still use those “legacy pronouns”?
My own belief is that Jesus of Nazareth was a singular and powerfully inspired human being who became more insightful and awakened while on Earth. By the time he was well into his ministry, I doubt he would have still experienced real embarrassment. Given the fullness of his unsurpassed humanity and the limits of my understanding, however, I could easily be wrong.
Ha! Do they make good furniture, too?
Yes. And yet, without it , we seem to descend into chaos.
“My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” These are words ascribed to Jesus on the cross. They are the first words of Psalm 22. Then there’s Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Daniel, even Genesis itself. A whole literature of victimhood, extending to the time of Jesus himself where the story comes to an abrupt end with the failure of a Messiah to expel the Romans from Judah, of the Apocalypse to materialise, and finally the destruction of the Temple.
It’s not all gloom, indeed many of the Psalms are joyful, ramblings not unlike the nonsense I had to endure at Christian school assemblies. Every nation has its persistent culture, French, German, Russian, Italian (maybe not English after capitalism and industrialisation dismembered it to be replaced by commercial fakes).
But no culture, as far I know, is so wedded to its Munchausen relationship to a tribal deity whose main achievement, at least since the probably mythical Exodus from Egypt to the ‘Promised Land’ meant taking over land already belonging to someone else, has been betrayal. Christianity is rooted in the same mentality, which becomes evident whenever it seeks to return to that root, stripping away the hierarchy, manufactured dogma and emperor-worship.
The article is honest in harking back to events 2000 years ago, but it ascribes to them an immediacy as if the history since were meaningless or a bad dream. Judaism is a world view frozen in space and time, both of very limited extent. That a least renders it ‘mostly harmless’. Moving first to Christianity and then Islam, doctrinal extremism and aggression inevitably increased if only to ensure the survival of each new cult, as it sought to distance itself from its predecessors while banking on the perceived legitimacy of their claims.
Apart from exceptionalism that is toxic wherever it arises, the situation in Palestine today can hardly be blamed on a people who have been peaceful and creative for two millennia, and whose most orthodox adherents refuse military service. The parallel between settlements and Manifest Destiny, and the prevalence of British, American and South African accents among spokespersons for the State of Israel can hardly go unnoticed.
(Post-)Christianity has dominated the sea in which Judaism floats. I don’t think it makes any more sense, but the baggage it has picked up over the centuries and even before its foundation has been deposited in the present like a glacial moraine. With its idea or illusion of progress, it is at least able to look back objectively on the past 2500 years and see that there has been real change.
Much change has been good, and there has been much evil too, but no evidence of a war between good and evil. Some things that were believed and considered important in the past have been shown to be false, irrelevant or contingent, and conversely. Reason and research can make of that what they will.
Sublime. Thank you.
As, superficially/nominally (or any other word that indicates I was lumbered with a Religion by birth), a Christian, I find the above Article “unfathomable”. I think that “Religions” are a major and disastrous curse on Society. I think Society would be far better off without them, which doesn’t mean that I don’t subscribe to decent behaviour towards my fellow human beings. If there is a god, I have a message for him/her – please retire and let human beings get on without you – in all your forms and whatever you are! And stop your adherents forcing their ideas/customs on the rest of us. Having said all that, I think the Israelis reaction to the assault by Hamas (which I condemn absolutely and utterly!!!!) is grossly “over the top”. If they think they are solving any problems between them and the Palestinians, I can tell them – they are utterly wrong!!
‘- and that’s why we have armies.’ I would add, victorious armies. Or be lucky and live on an island. But as the Britons and Saxons discovered that was no guarantee.
So Israel will last until the next empire takes a liking to the land. It will be what it will be. Ask the Kurds and the Rohindra and Uighurs about that. More importantly why have people hated the Jews, whilst being indifferent to the others? Is it just that the more recent Jewish cults of Christ and Islam never overcome their inadequacy? Is it the lack of coherence for the Christians and the intellectual dead-end of Islam? Or just a visceral jealousy of God’s attention to his chosen people? Or coupled with the perception of wealth, success, a secret language and and and valuing learning and enquiry. Or is it because they conquered the land, not for the empire, but for themselves… to stay. No fine Englishman them Jews, drinking tea and bringing justice and cargo and leaving a legacy, but leaving. They’re like the Normans, taking. Doing what it takes, or are they? As Memet seems to be arguing, there is a tension in the Jews, that the British didn’t feel whilst building empire or the Europeans in the Americas or any other empire, it seems. Maybe when the Christians and Muslims left the land of Abraham they took with them the certainty of purpose God had given the Jews. Christ! The English are still singing about building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. Maybe God has given that certainty back to the Jews, and it is not agreeable to the Mensch. Or to survive and thrive we remake the empire when it sweeps over us. But that’s if you are still there to change it. The Saxon lords that couldn’t tolerate Norman rule fled to Constantinople and then to the sea of Azov, built a Saxon land. Where are they now? Except for a few latinised saxon names on old maps. If they had stayed their offspring would have survived. If the Jews had been more agreeable maybe they wouldn’t have been expelled from the land and cast into the wilderness and their offspring forever hunted when they couldn’t fail but to thrive. The Rabbits of Watership Down, the allegory, forever marked to be hunted, poisoned, gased. The better you do, the worse it becomes. The Jews have found their free draining airy downlands and they are still marked and hunted, and that’s why these bunnies have Nukes.
I think people like Kathleen Stockton are good for LGBTQ. People like Glenn Loury, John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes good for race relations in America. The podcaster Chris Williamson has been interviewing female scientists speaking honestly about female competition. All good. Honest self-critique is sign of maturity and necessary for leadership. Oppression theory victimology does not work anymore. It comes off as political manipulation.
I am waiting for someone to be honest about Jewish power. After being called racist, misogynist, homophobic and transphobic so much in recent years, being called anti Semitic feels like crying wolf anymore.
What Jewish power specifically? Over the media, banks? Newsflash, Paul Marshall who funds Unherd is expanding his media base – and is a Christian. As is that very powerless individual, Rupert Murdoch.
Believing that Jews are more powerful than other ethnic groups is one of the soft markers of antisemitism.
Is it really so difficult to be Jewish or do Jews make it difficult for themselves? Given all the self-anguish and strictures that appear to burden their lives it seems hardly surprising so many have been dissatisfied.
Oh brother, another tiresome piece on this subject. Substitute the word jewish for black and you have another racially divisive segregationist screed about how mixing different groups is evil.
right wing near fascist gibberish. Reform Judaism has nothing to do with ‘assimilation’. It is about being more inclusive of women and acknowledging that to follow a religious service having services in the language of the country you live in helps. Not everyone has money for a Hebrew tutor, Mr Mamet. As for liberal synagogues, their tolerance of female rabbis and gay rabbis is probably an affront to Mr Mamet’s undoubted misogyny – whether he’s a homophobe as well, I don’t know. But these people are believing Jews as are the Masorti movement who also promote progressive values for women while retaining most of the ritual traditions.
Mr Mamet doesn’t like Leftist Jews because they don’t share his right wing values. Attempting to smear them as making the world safer for antisemitism is a total misunderstanding. Liberal progressive Jews who worked for black civil rights and other causes did not do it to make themselves ‘popular’. They did it on principle and on the understanding, an understanding I also possess, that racism in general has to be fought in order for antisemitism to diminish. Yes some leftists show antitsemitic attitudes but so, and just as or more frequently, do Mr Mamet’s pals on the right.
What this piece resembles is the ranting of an evangelical Christian or Jihadi Muslim who cannot recognise that some of their co-religionists have a different take on the religion or indeed on basic identity.
Attributing antisemitism to the devil? He is barking mad.
Hear, hear, Jane – and thank you, you have saved me trying to find my own words as you have said it all so well.
Thanks, Alice. But I do believe he has slightly lost the plot. Calling a practising Jew ‘secular’ is just bizarre.
Het again as hiv upticked a comment and the system either disnae register it or gies the opposite result aa wanted. In yr case it wrongly registered a doonvote.
It’s just how te counters work. Sometimes they appear to stick however many times you ‘push the button’ and others you get a huge jump – often in the direction you just pushed once. I don’t think there’s any malice or bias involved however infuriating it may seem at the time.
Yes, but is it accurate? There seems to be no justification for it not registering at all. I wonder how Unherd’s powers that be, can be persuaded to go to a simple up-down vote?
yes, the voting system has a mind of its own.
If a version of Judaism leads you to side with vicious anti-semites who excuse the murder and rape of Jews, and would probably kill you and all other Jews if given the chance, I’d have to ask if that’s a Jewish sect, or a radical left-wing social club.
Your misuse of the word “f$c#ist” is all anyone has to read to understand your peculiar worldview and solemn adherence to your personal religion.
What do you know?…unbelievable, you are totally wrong. Religion expert, but as a Jew I can confirm you are clueless, just absorbing the feminist woke influences.
As a jew who has actively fought antisemitism all my life and actually worked with Jewish antiracist charity (one that promotes dialogue with Muslims, People of Colour and other groups) then I am certainly not clueless. Mamet appears to dislike any Jew who doesn’t support the current scorched earth policy in Gaza. Now that is a lot of Jews -not to mention the Orthodox Jews who never recognised Israel in the first place because they believe a homeland has to wait for the messiah. Nothing feminist or woke about them.
Well said.
All the comments here seem to take it for granted thta the Palestinians should just suck it uo: being driven off their land and their homes, being subjected to arbitrary violence on a regular basis, paying the price for Europe’s crimes against Jews.
Look at what Israel is doing. How many children must die before Israel’s bloodlust is sated. And defenders of Israel wonder why the Palestinians hate them and why a majority of the world is appalled by what they are doing in Gaza, and what they have done against the Palestinians since 1948.
On the othe rhand, while a minority, there are thousands of Jews who decry this, and say not in my name. These are the bravest and the only faint glimmer of hope in a situation beyond appalling.
Unfortunately we are in a loop. If you don’t support the Trans movement you are transphobic (implying hatred). If you don’t think women should have quotas in jobs, you are a misogynist. If you don’t agree with every single thing done by Israel, you are antisemitic.
Playing word games instead of discussing things to find solutions.
A loop indeed but also a spiral of heightening misunderstanding on both sides of an ideological divide, simplistically drawn. In this case the specter of genocide is raised by the flamethrowers on both ides of the Gaza Strip border, literal and figurative.
[I still think the majority–or a least robust plurality–dwells somewhere in no-man’s-land. But we are trending toward an ever more unhinged zeitgeist, with competing idiocies: “we must use corrective injustice to achieve numerical proportion in every good job (but not soldier or sanitation worker)” or “women had it fine in 1960–let’s go back to that”].
More and more people are becoming blinder to their own reflected extremism, blaming all of their hostility or narrowness of understanding on the Other Side.
You can not any peace deal that will satisfy the Palestinians. It was tried again and again and again. Depending on how you measure it the Israelis offered between 90-97% of what Palestinians wanted (land wise).
Even if you create a new united country the Jews will dominate the economy, technology, art, sciences etc (shocking right?!). Palestinians (aside from a tiny minority – the every high IQ) will be stuck in low wage, low skill jobs…and they will always resent their economic/cultural positions in the new country. And that resentment will not lead to happy politics.
Think of Malaysia/Singapore where the Chinese population outcompetes the Malays. Even aggressive affirmative action in Malaysia has not closed the achievement gap. In Singapore – a more meritocratic society – the gap has only expanded.
That is the reality of life.
The Palestinians and various allied Arab states have been trying to destroy Israel since day 1 of its existence. The Palestinians had a state, but decided they rather try and kill Jews. Every Palestinian leader since has decided they’d rather pursue maximalist, eliminationist goals, rather than have a state.
How is Israel supposed to respond to a people when 100% of their leaders (who have mass popular support) support the destruction of Israel and the genocide of Jews?
“driven off their land” – because they declared genocidal war on their neighbours, and most left voluntarily because invading Arab armies told them to vacate the war zone until they finished off the Jews. Bloodlust? That’s unhinged. Literally every action Israel has taken is in direct response to Palestinian violence. Whenever they stop, it’s quiet. When they attack, Israel responds, eventually but not always. It’s that simple and stupidly obvious. Your last sentence is about idiots who would be the first ones Hamas would kill if they had the chance. Those Israelis murdered on Oct. 7 were virtually all lefty peaceniks who helped Gazans daily. That kind of nice but naive ideal is gone now. Every liberal Israeli I know says “I was wrong to hope for peace with Palestinians.”
Well maybe you need to read some history books. Did they leave or were they driven off with guns? A key question .
Their land? Sure, Islam won the land in the 7th century through conquest and violence (read the Siege of Jerusalem 636). Before Israel, it was the Ottoman Turks, Britain, Egypt, and Jordan (Palestinians never existed, a creation of the 60’s, no such people, no such land, they are simply Arabs, but we will use the term Palestinian because of common usage). They lost that land when Israel defeated the Arab armies in no less than 6 wars (1948–49, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006). Land is gained and lost most commonly in wars or treaties to prevent wars. Given how Islam got the land in the first place, it’s reasonable to say the West Bank and Gaza belong 100% to Israel. Israel has the right to eliminate the Arabs on THEIR lands in response to Palestinian violence and stated policy to eliminate all Jews. Enough of this tolerance for an ugly and vicious Islam and its people (read the laws of Sharia anyone?). The Palestinians are not cuddly Teddy Bears.
Problem? None of the other states want the Palestinians and I can’t blame them. Palestinians attempted to overthrow the Jordanian government (Black September 1970) and stir insurgencies in Egypt for decades. They arguably have destroyed Lebanon. NO ONE WANTS THEM. The leadership in many of these countries hope Israel will eliminate them, not just Hamas either. Simply put, Palestinians are the enemy.
I would rather spend several hours in the company of a few Palestinian refugees I taught in London than a minute with you. You know why the other Arab states didn’t want them – because at the time of their insurgence their values were left and feminist, completely at odds with those of the surrounding states. Things are very different now, of course. They have not destroyed Lebanon. What destroys the Middle East in general is religious sectarianism of the internecine Islamic kind, and the ongoing battle between Muslims, Jews, and Christians. That plus feudal exploitation on the part of the ruling families of several states.
As an objective fact, Israel is a racist Apartheid terror state.
No, it isn’t.
Or is that your mind?
As an objective fact this is pure Trumpery.
What exactly are you talking about. IS that why Arabs who are Israeli citizens have the same rights in Israel as anybody else including serving in the Knesset, the Supreme Court, and now even the IDF. As for Gaza and claiming it was an outdoor prison, that’s simply nonsense. Gaza has been wholly run by the Palestinians since 2005 and by Hamas since 2007. If you were Israel, would you allow open borders with such an entity that regularly lobs rockets into Israel and commits terrorist attacks. Somehow I don’t think so. And it’s the same reason that Egypt closed the borders on the other side. Egypt, if you haven’t cottoned on, is an Arab country so perhaps they know something that you don’t. As for Gaza itself had they used all those billions in foreign aid to build infrastructure and help their citizens, the place would be the Singapore of the Middle East; but Hamas used that money to (a) enrich their leaders many of whom are billionaire, and (b) purchase arms, rockets and construct a massive network of tunnels for the sole purpose of conducting terrorist attacks, all the while hiding behing the skirts of palestinian women and children.
Wow aa hit the doonvote and ye got extra upvotes. Jist tae let ye ken that yer contribution originally got twa votes.
Ma uptick jist kncreased the red total. The system’s .. makin aa bourach ae the votin.
That is neither objective nor is it factual.
What a load of rubbish. Another whinging Jew desperately trying to maintain their victim status when the whole world is fed up with that schtick.
This assumption that if you own a piece of land but you don’t develop it,wring every last ounce or penny of value out of it,make it super profitable to the nth degree then you don’t deserve to have it,thats a horrible argument. It’s the argument of political thieves all through history. It’s a natural human reaction to feel appalled at seeing people have their land taken off them,even if they’ve been finagled into “selling” it. And it’s natural to scoff at anyone who tells you a book of Bronze Age literature is their title deeds to your home. The Palestinians are stupid but so what if they liked living simple lives in a low key way. The Jews are too clever by half and no one likes the crafty wise guy who they know just pulled a fast one on them but they dont know how they did it. I was a kid in the 1960s and.as I didn’t live in a Jewish area the Jews I saw were on tv lovely people like David Kossoff,kind,gentle and charming then as we got into the 1970s the disarmingly lovely Jews we saw on tv contrasted more and more with the ruthless “we won’t let it happen again” Jews of Israel. Over the last 80 years or so we’ve been observing a bound to fail experiment ,how to fit a pint of water in a jug that only has the capacity for half a pint. The simplest and logical solution is to discard half the water and I have a horrible notion that in the guise of extirpating Hamas,this is what is being done.
Calm down, friend. This is more rant than reason. You’ll make more sense if you take a deep breath and rest your thoughts from their heated haze.
Yikes
Wow, this comment alone is illustrative of the blind hatred that drives this conflict.
Wow. Just wow. That’s all I have to say.
There is a stream of bitterness running through your post which makes me wonder if your soul is withering because of it.
Well, yes, anti-Semitism is always bitter. But Jane Baker’s post is rational compared to some of the comments emerging into public view on the streets and in the universities of Britain, Europe, America and Australia (“Gas the Jews!”). As a more-or-less assimilated Jews (converted to Catholicism years back), I find it terrifying,
Ah, yes, those finagling, too-clever-by-half Jews. I think ‘logical solution’ rather gives the game away. Fairly obvious which half a pint you would extirpate.
A little over the top, but then again, so is David Mamet.
And yes, the war with Hamas is cover for the execution of Israel’s ‘final solution’ to the problem of Palestinians.
A couple of hundred years ago, it would have been internationally acceptable for Jews to invade Palestine, kick out the existing inhabitants, and claim to own the place. After all, that is what America did west of the Mississippi. But those days are gone; the Zionists have missed the opportunity to invade, colonize, and extirpate the locals scot free. Yet that is what the Zionists have been attempting, ever since the Balfour Declaration. It’s just that, until this war, they maintained the fiction that they sought peaceful coexistence with Palestinians.
And I make a clear distinction between Zionist Jews and other Jews. A distinction which David Mamet would claim not to exist.
Palestinians aren’t stupid, Ms Baker – merely depressed and desperate . Nice lovely Jews who never complain and allow themselves to be exterminated. There you go, Charles – here’s a wonderful example of antisemitic thinking.