Israel Against Me

Published by

Clarissa

August 7, 2013

Courtesy of reader el (this is a slightly edited Google translation):

Millions transferred to prevent assimilation
In spite of cuts and decrees, the Israeli government, particularly the Ministry of Religious Services – continue to transfer funds abroad campaigns and projects, whose aim is to prevent assimilation.

Imagine, millions invested into preventing the existence of people like me. As representatives of the racist Sokhnut explained to me 20 years ago*, the greatest tragedy of assimilation is that Jews have children with non-Jews (or, rather, Jewish men waste their precious seed on non-Jewish women.) Color me stupid (yes, I definitely deserve that today) but I had no idea this was an official policy of the Israeli government**. I thought that a bunch of fanatical idiots were just being holier-than-thou as a result of their new-found post-Soviet Jewishness.

Imagine the government of a country investing tons of money overseas with the goal of preventing more Jewish people from being born in other countries. What would we call that? So what shall we call the practice of investing money into preventing the existence of people like me?

* These were the same people who tried to measure my nose. This isn’t a metaphor. There was an actual attempt at nose-measuring. I was underage at that time.

** Yes, it was willful blindness. Like you are always 100% self-aware.

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5 responses to “Israel Against Me”

maitreyi1978

August 7, 2013

How exactly would money like that be spent?

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  August 7, 2013
  
  Back in Ukraine, these organizations created youth camps, charitable organizations to help the lonely senior citizens, educational groups, sociability clubs. This all sounds really amazing until you discover that a kid wouldn’t be allowed to bring in her best friend to the youth group meeting because the friend didn’t have a nose that looked Jewish enough, a senior citizen would be refused help because it would come to light that his mother might have been Ukrainian, little kids at the summer camp would be taught that assimilation is the greatest tragedy of the Jews and would be asked to write compositions on the topic of “What Makes Me Proud to be a Jew.”
  
  As a result of these activities, real problems would begin in actual families where people would suddenly discover that some family members were “more Jewish” than others. I lost friends because of this, there were tensions with my ex-husband. The marriage was lousy anyways but it definitely didn’t help that he was suddenly a “better Jew” than I was because his Jewish parent was his mother and mine my father. (Nobody practiced any religion at all; this was not a religious issue for anybody.)
  
  It’s been 20 years and it still rankles.
  
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Tim

August 7, 2013

Turkey does something somewhat similar. They constantly urge Turks living elsewhere, particularly in Europe, to not abandon their culture, not forget their tradition or religion in favor of assimilation and do military service in Turkey. There are encouragements for Turks living elsewhere to keep Turkish as their primary language and only use their host nations language when necessary and to only attend religious service held by leaders that were trained in Turkey and at facilities that are sponsored by the Turkish government.

Couple of years ago, we had Erdogan himself come to Germany to tell Turks living here to not assimilate because that would amount to cultural deprivation.

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cliff arroyo

August 8, 2013

Well Judaism is a middle eastern religion and (as with Islam) the more fundamentalist versions

a) tend to be horribly nasty, anti-life and drained of spirituality

b) tend to be horribly xenophobic, turning questions of spirituality into questions of gang loyalties

c) are big sexual hypocrites (good orthodox jews and prostitutes and start reading)

Fundamentalist Christians are also a dreadful lot but more mainstream, blander versions are much quicker to disassociate from them publicly.

What I always say, is that some level of religion can be very good for a society but there’s a sweet spot (enough and not too much) because too much religion makes a society stupid and dysfunctional. Similarly I believe the highest service theologians of all faiths can render is to water down and dilute the contents of holy texts, the more seriously a holy text is taken the worse the society.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  August 8, 2013
  
  I agree completely.
  
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