Zach is not a historian. He's an ideologue. The difference is that the former tries to understand whereas the latter mines through history's vastness for the tiny trickle of anecdotes that validate his preconceived prejudices. What he cites here as Zionist "antisemitism" are those texts in which Zionists raged against the perceived weakness of Jewish elites and diasporic life - because they were convinced, in Herzl's words, that a "catastrophe" was coming, and the simpering cowardice of those Jewish elites who refused to see it would prevent the rescue of the Jews from that looming destruction. Even the worst imaginable insults that Zionists ever hurled at those Jewish elites or at diaspora Jewish culture, it's nothing compared to the anti-Jewish screeds produced by anti-Zionist and assimilationist Jews -- by Zach's people. These fine folks actually created a great deal of the vocabulary of antisemitism that non-Jewish antisemites would later adopt. Arthur Trebitsch, for example, so hated his fellow Jews that he offered the nascent Nazi party to help draft their antisemitic pamphlets. As the historian and writer Amos Elon put it, "One of the most prominent Austrian anti-Semites [in the 19th century] was Otto Weininger, a brilliant young Jew who published 'Sex and Character', attacking Jews and women." Jewish self-haters were key to the growth of German-speaking antisemitism, Elon explains. "[Weininger's] book inspired the typical Viennese adage that anti-Semitism did not really get serious until it was taken up by Jews." You can trust Elon: He was an anti-Zionist Israeli. Zionists hated something specific about diasporic Jewish life in Europe: its catastrophic vulnerability. Some Zionists, being 19th-century Europeans, were also rabid and embarrassing racists. So were anti-Zionists. But here's the thing: The anti-Zionists were always worse, in every way, then and now. Where Zionists hated Jewish weakness, anti-Zionists campaigned against Jewish survival. Zach knows all this - probably. I honestly don't know if he actually knows the material beyond a Google search. I've asked him in past exchanges about the millions of Jewish refugees who moved to Israel and without whom Zionism could never have succeeded, about how he understands the moral calculus of their survival. He never answered. Like Weiniger and Trebitsch and others, he's a Jew building a case for Jewish perfidy for those who would erase half the world's Jews; he's not remotely interested in the great and difficult questions of actual lived Jewish history and experience. There's a tragic irony here. The anti-Zionist, intellectual Jewish antisemites that Zach now copies hated one kind of Jew more than the Zionist: They hated the East European Jewish peasant. Where Zionists usually (though not always) blamed the central-European Jewish elites for failing to recognize the dangers that loomed, those elites usually blamed the East European Jewish peasant for the abuse that peasant suffered. These elites spent the fin-de-siecle era mostly ignoring the catastrophic pogroms and oppression faced by the Jewish peasantry in the East. These elites, who could always adapt or move as oppression grew steadily worse from 1881 on, almost never left Europe. It was the peasantry, the small tradesmen of the western Ukrainian countryside, who would flee in their millions because they had no other choice. So it was that it was the peasantry, not the anti-Zionist intellectuals, who would enter America in their millions and become the vast demographic bulk of American Jewry. As Arthur Hertzberg writes in "The Jews in America," in the year 1906, 200,000 Jews landed in America, more than in any year before or since. And only 50 - 50! - registered as professionals. American Jews are the great-great-grandchildren of the East European Jewish peasant class, and almost from their first encounter with American culture, they began to set aside their culture and religion, and even their study of their own history. They did this not because they hated themselves, but because they hated the very same assimilated don't-rock-the-boat Jewish elites, the representation of "organized Jewry," so to speak, that the Zionists hated. That had abandoned and even betrayed them when Europe began to turn on them. Zach refuses to learn Zionism's story, and so doesn't really know his own. Which is kind of sad for a "historian," if you think about it. And just like other anti-Zionist Jewish antisemites, he won't talk about the last century's Jewish vulnerability and suffering, the very thing that produced Zionism and made it successful, about the fact that three continents emptied of Jews into a new polity that was literally the only place outside the English-speaking world (closed to Jews by immigration quotas from the 1920s) where they could survive and thrive in the 20th century. Like Weininger and Trelisch and the rest, he doesn't care if Jews live or die in their millions, as long as he doesn't have to feel the ideological discomfort of being judged a bad dog by the antisemites he so loves. True, Zionists loathed such self-abnegating Jews. And those antisemites loathed the Zionists in return for ruining their perfectly good and stable and definitely safe in perpetuity status of ideological whipping boy and underdog. Both called the other "self-hating." Only one was right. Some complex cultural questions became awfully simple in the fires of the 20th century. This is one of them. The Zionists were right, then and now. https://bird.makeup/@_zachfoster/1872721594881310954
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