From Sam Altman (OpenAI) on Anti-Semitism

for a long time i said that antisemitism, particularly on the american left, was not as bad as people claimed.

i'd like to just state that i was totally wrong.

i still don't understand it, really. or know what to do about it.

but it is so fucked.

— Sam Altman (@sama) December 8, 2023

(Apropos The Lesson and the value of free speech; see "Moral Rot": Rude Awakenings, Lessons, and Being Not Sure How to Cope.)

Comments

[Jerry B.]

And the bigger surprise is that much of the antisemitism is from the Left.

Well, not really.

[Abdul Abulbul Amir]

Well national socialism does need to define who is in the nation and who is not.

[SRG2]

The Nazis were not on the left, brand name notwithstanding. Do you think that North Korea is a democracy or that East Germany was?

[Squirrelloid]

Why are you so convinced all leftist governments are democracies?

The term 'left' originates during the French revolution to refer to socialists, not pro-democracy advocates. Socialist autocracies are still 'left'.

'Right' originally meant royalist (which was non-existent in the US, even at the time the terms first arose in France).

The liberals were in the center, and they're the ones that are pro-democracy.

[Dr. Ed 2]

I, personally, have been fighting it for over 30 years and it (a) IS that bad and (b) is part of something worse.

I am trying to thresh out but would like to ask the Jewish people reading this if they can agree (in a generic sense) that *not* being antisemetic long was an American cultural norm.

I realize that is a double negative, and I'm not getting into what Nixon (*and* FDR) said in private -- but at least post WWII, it was not socially acceptable in polite academic culture to be a virulent antisemite.

My thesis is that ALL American norms are being rejected and that is the root of the antisemitism that we've been seeing for the past 30 years.

They hate the Jews not because they are Jews per se (although most wont realize this. Instead it is the family structure == husband/wife, child, grandparent -- the intergenerational family unit that you see so much of in Jewish celebrations
Instead it's the value of education -- which Jewish culture has LONG stressed, starting with learning a 2nd language (Hebrew).
Instead it's being a culture of life rather than death, and a culture that values the individual rather than the group.

Is there any merit in the above?

[NOVA Lawyer]

No.

[Smith1]

I disagree. I think he said it accurately. Jealousy breeds hatred as does looking for a scapegoat for ones own lack of success. "I am unsuccessful because those [insert detested group] took all the jobs/money/education. Pushing education and family stability coupled with hard work results in success. But NOOO, it can't be that. It has to be because they have an unfair advantage. Rather than emulate the positive behavior, they seek to tear down those that are successful.

[Abdul Abulbul Amir]

"they seek to tear down those that are successful."

In the Sharpton school of antisemitism acting white fills that bill.

[Randal]

That explains a lot of the antisemitism on the right, sure.

We're talking about supposed antisemitism on the left.

[Don Nico]

It is sad that you cannot see value in the behavior that Mr. Ed cites. He proved that even a stopped clock has the correct time twice a day.

[Sarcastr0]

It's sad you don't see Mr. Ed is no friend of Jews in this post, and seeks to turn that cause into generic conservative anti-left grievance.

[Don Nico]

It's sad that S_0 has another meaningless comment

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

As sad as an ostensible adult believing (or at least claiming to believe) that childish fairy tales are true stories, clinger?

[Sarcastr0]

I think my meaning was quite clear.

Care to engage with it, or just gonna throw out insults like you're possessed by the spirit of BCD?

[Ed Grinberg]

re: *not* being antisemitic long being an American cultural norm + ALL American norms are being rejected

I am a Jewish immigrant from the Soviet Union. I remember commenting to a friend of mine, during the Obama administration -- there was something in the news about Jews being excluded from (talk of them being excluded from?) national security positions -- that I had never heard of governmental antisemitism (of which there was plenty in the Soviet Union) in the U.S. until then.
Look, Obama did say: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." It's not like he didn't warn us...

[Ed Grinberg]

re: They (those who reject American norms, i.e., leftists) hate Jews because Judaism is "a culture of life rather than death, and a culture that values the individual rather than the group."
I think there's something to this.
compare (source):
[Dennis] Prager makes the case that one of the major reasons that the Torah was written was to counteract the values of Egyptian culture. Ancient Egypt loved death. Their holy book was the Book of the Dead and their pyramids were monuments that were merely tombs for their dead kings. The Torah, in contrast, was a Book of Life that told the nation of Israel that they had a choice between death and life and exhorted them to choose life. Priests were not allowed to enter a cemetery or be in the presence of a corpse. Many other laws were given to keep death and life separate.
If people are not ascribed the dignity of being creatures made in the image of God, it opens the floodgates of death in our culture with abortion, euthanasia and infanticide.

[Ed Grinberg]

If you’ve read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, you’ll recognize the concept of leftists (who reject American norms) having / worshipping “a culture of death” that rejects the notion of inherent human dignity.

[SRG2]

The Book of the Dead is not a celebration of death. It's basically a guidebook on how to trick gods into getting to the good place after death.

Do you know what the penalty for abortion was in the Torah? Or when, according to the Mishnah, a fetus was recognised as human?

[Commenter_XY]

A mark of high intelligence is humility and the ability to say: I was wrong. It is rare for someone to speak with that degree of self-introspection. I would not have thought Altman would have that. Interesting.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

I was wrong to underestimate my own intelligence. There, I'm humble!

[Michael P]

I thought I was wrong once, but it turns out I was mistaken.

[SRG2]

As I have said elsewhere, I am humble in the face of my own ignorance. I am not humble in the face of other people's, because typically the latter's is significantly greater than mine.

[Peter Gerdes]

The problem here is vagueness as to what is meant by antisemitism.

Lots of what we are seeing at universities has nothing to do with traditional anti-Semitism. If it was Jews claiming bad treatment at the hands of white European christians they'd be on the Jewish side no question.

Rather, the issue here is the tendency to adopt the simplistic nobel oppressed victim group vs evil oppressor group narrative and do that against a us identity politics background. Since the Israelis are more powerful than the Palestinians and Jews have fewer oppression points in us politics than Palestinian Muslims the left leans towards a certain narrative.

It's anti-Semitic in that it allows for treating Jews unfairly and worse because of their identity but it's not motivated by the traditional dislike of Jews but by something else entirely.

[Randal]

Which means it's not antisemitic.

[SimonP]

This whole debate has helped me to better empathize with white conservatives who feel like they've been unfairly accused of being "racist."

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Don't feel so bad for them. Plenty of right-wingers are among our vestigial, deplorable racists, transphobes, homophobes, misogynists, Islamophobes, antisemites, and/or xenophobes.

[ReaderY]

I don’t think it’s different at all. The same factors that made Christian white racists automatically assume Jews aren’t real members of the majority white community, they’re really more like black people, are causing members of the minority communities to automatically assume that Jews aren’t real minority people, they’re really more like white people.

That said, I think the willingness of white racists to readily assume that black people are innately inferior savages, and if given power will inevitably use it to oppress people deserving of sympathy (themselves), translate readily to Jews. Indeed, even black people who only a couple of generations ago were readily aware that claims the Redeemer Klans types had spread about black fomented genocide on white people during Reconstruction, raping, looting, murdering willy-nilly, seeen to be all too ready to buy similar claims made about Jews without scrutinizing them too closely.

Nobody likes living under military occupation. Nobody likes a despised, inferior minority gaining power over them. Nobody likes people perceived as allies and toadies of their oppressors, as blacks, especially blacks in Reconstructionist governments were perceived by ex-Confederates, after the Civil War. And certainly the Israelis have not administered their occupation with perfect justice (the Union armies and Reconstructionist regimes didn’t exactly administer the former Confederate territories with perfect justice either).

A desire for an independent state and dislike of foreign rule is certainly understandable. So is a dislike of living under military occupation. Nobody has a right to expect people living under such a regime to like it. But I think the more extreme claims, that the Israelis are fomenting genocide, they are toadies of White supracist colonial powers etc., and the other more extreme claims, more resemble traditional anti-semitism, and for that matter the Redeemer Ku Klux Klan’s view of blacks under Reconstruction, than anything more recent.

I don’t think Israel has oppressed the Palestinians any more than the Union Armies or Reconstructionist governments oppressed the Confederates (although I readily concede the amount of oppression in both cases was not zero). I think it’s traditional racism and anti-semitism that led to the propaganda of organizations like Hamas being so readily believed, just as it was traditional racism that led to Ku Klux Klan Redeemer propaganda about extreme oppression and atrocities black people supposedly fomented on them during Reconstruction being so readily believed by typical white Americans.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

I hadn’t thought about that comparison before; I’ll have to contemplate it.

[Roger S]

He is right. There really are people who say that Jews run Hollywood, and various other tropes.

[Randal]

Not from "the American left" though.

[David Nieporent]

You may actually believe that.

[Randal]

Do you think Dave Chapelle speaks for the left or something?

[SRG2]

Well, we used to run Hollywood, and we're still over-represented in Hollywood and the professions.

But the implications of the trope are that we're running things behind the scenes with a hidden agenda involving world domination, and, more recently, space lasers 🙂