Jewish Identity as a Protest against Christian Identity. The Annual Christmas Op Ed

Quite often around Christmas time the NYT or other major publication will run an op ed protesting against Christmas and remarking that Christmas is a big imposition on Jewish people. 

The author of this year's NYT contribution to this genre states very clearly that she sees her Jewish identity as a statement of difference from Christianity. For example, she writes, "I have always associated my identity with not having Yule decorations ... Growing up, I considered not having a Christmas tree ... not wearing red and green in December, and not decorating our front lawn in lights as much a part of my Jewish identity as celebrating Passover and going to Hebrew school on Thursdays." 

In other words, she defines herself as not something else. Not Christian, not a celebrator of Christmas, rather than as something. 

That's not the only way to look at being Jewish. Rather than protesting Christmas, she could be celebrating Jewish identity. 

Her stance, that her Jewish identity is defined against Christianity, is described in Bieganski. The Brute Polak is important to some not all Jews as a way to define oneself as Jewish, in an era when many Jews eat pork, intermarry, and do not believe in God. Yes, I'm Jewish. See? I am different from those Bieganskis. You can find examples in the book of this position. 

I attempted to post a comment. I wrote, 

I taught English in a remote village in Nepal. I was encouraged to participate in Hindu, Buddhist, and local Pagan customs. I did so enthusiastically and joyfully. I love dress-up, I love bright colors, I love folklore and traditions. 

People threw red powder on me on Holi. I chewed sugar cane on Shiva Ratri. I worshiped my Nepali "brothers" on Bhai Tika. I was spellbound at a Tibetan Buddhist Mani Rimdu ceremony that lasted several days. 

I could go on and on. 

 I was the only Christian around. Everyone around me spoke a different language and followed different customs and religions. 

It never bothered me. 

Just saying. 

Update: New York Times commenters agree with me. Here's the currently most popular comment: 

I have to admit being very confused with defining yourself by what you don’t do.  You shouldn’t have to apologize for not getting into the Christmas spirit but the disdain for the pleasure others take in it seems misplaced.

DOJ Attorney v Auschwitz Museum. New York Post: Poland "Operated" Auschwitz, No Poles Imprisoned or Died There.

McKay Smith, a US DOJ attorney, is sending threats to the Auschwitz Museum. The  Museum was hit with false info on twitter and it blocked the  senders. Smith felt he would stand up for victimized Jews against bad, bad Poles. He was not aware that the specific blocked accounts were disseminating false info and that the bad, bad Poles are the curators of the Auschwitz legacy, a legacy that their nation shares. Auschwitz was first built and operated by the Nazis as a camp to imprison and kill Poles, and

In its coverage, the New York Post says that Poland "operated" Auschwitz and the Post refuses to mention the Poles who were imprisoned and died there. See here

This is Bieganski, the Brute Polak Stereotype writ large. 

"A US Department of Justice attorney got into a bizarre dispute with the Auschwitz Museum this week, going so far as to publicly and privately threaten them on Twitter.

DOJ attorney McKay Smith accused the museum of blocking accounts belonging to Jewish women and harassing several of his followers.

“@AuschwitzMuseum if you ever intimidate my followers via DM again, or you try to intimidate strong Jewish women who lost family members at Auschwitz, I will confront you. Personally. That’s a promise,” Smith said in a tweet Wednesday.

“Don’t ever test me again, @pawel_sawicki Ever again,” he added, tagging the museum’s press officer who runs the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum’s Twitter account. Smith also sent Sawicki a number of private messages where he additionally threatened to “come after” him.

“He deleted one of his tweets where he accused me of siding with Holocaust deniers,” Sawicki told The Post. “I have been working at the memorial for over 12 years and I think I was never disrespected with such a personal false accusation.”

The spat began after the museum moved to block the account of @WoMenFightAS, which posted a sarcastic tweet accusing the museum of being a front for Polish revisionism, which downplays the country’s role in operating the infamous death camp."

New York Post story here

NYP says "The overwhelming majority of victims were Jews." NYP chooses not to mention Polish victims. The New York Post staff are the Holocaust deniers. 

Thanks to Jerzy for sending  this in. 

In Wake of Anti-Semitic Jersey City Shooting Rampage, School Board Member Posts Anti-Semitic Post

story here

The Speedy Malinowski Radio Show by Michal Karski

Michal Karski has been kind enough to contribute many interesting blog posts and comments to this blog. I hope you will consider supporting his new venture, the new book, The Speedy Malinowski Radio Show and Other Stories. 

Please consider buying a copy and leaving a review on Amazon. Writers need reviews! And thank you for considering this. 

Perhaps Michal would like to contribute an excerpt as a blog entry here. 

You can purchase Michal's new book on Amazon here

Bieganski, again, on Saturday Night Live

Saturday Night Live on December 7 featured a sketch depicting the cool NATO countries, Canada, France, and the UK, and eventually Germany, dissing the uncool NATO countries, Romania and Latvia, both Eastern European, Bieganski countries. 

Romania, scram! Brexit out of here, dweeb! they say. 

I love your economies, Romania whimpers. 

Donald Trump approaches. The cool countries don't want to hang out with him. 

Why don't you sit over there, Donald, with Latvia? they say. 

Latvia is plainly uncool. Latvia is playing with a child's toy. 

Latvia introduces himself as "Egg." His real name is Egils, pronounced "Ailes" He's eating something disgusting, pickled squid. He tells a joke about feeding a bull schnapps. 

Oh my God I'm at the losers' table, Trump says 

Funny Bieganskis in "Last Christmas" 2019

As you can see from the review, below, I very much liked "Last Christmas." But I was totally aware of the stereotyping going on.

"Last Christmas" is a funny, heartwarming, ultimately profound movie. It's being marketed as a romantic comedy but it's more of a dramedy. There are funny lines throughout, but "Last Christmas" deals with some tough issues, and towards the end it sends a beautiful message.

Emma Thompson co-wrote the script. Thompson previously won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for "Sense and Sensibility." "Last Christmas" traffics in unflattering stereotypes of Eastern Europeans and it tries to hard to be politically correct, but its wit, warmth, and the chemistry of its stars, Emilia Clarke and Henry Golding, won me over.

The movie opens in the former Yugoslavia, in an Orthodox church, of all places. Petra (Emma Thompson) is watching her daughter Katrina sing a George Michael song.

Fast forward decades later, and move to London. Kate (Emilia Clarke) is an unlikeable mess. She works as an elf / clerk in a year-round Christmas store run by Santa (Michelle Yeoh). Kate is homeless and couch surfs, sleeping with friends and one-night stands. She dresses in clothes that are a little bit slob and a little bit tramp. She's hard to like.

One day she looks out the window of her Christmas store and sees Tom (Henry Golding.) He's a very nice guy. Charming, handsome, and kind. Kate is suspicious.

Eventually Kate and Tom get close enough that Kate confesses her dark secret to him. She had been ill for a long time. Her mother seemed to enjoy too much having a chronically ill daughter, so Kate had to move out of the house. A year earlier, Kate had had a heart transplant, and she hasn't felt like herself since. Tom encourages Kate to get her life together.

Kate returns to her natal family, now living in London. Petra, Kate's mother, is a stereotypical Eastern European. She is always sad, she sings mournful songs, she uses outlandish curses – "I will nail you to my p----" – and she refers to a dessert brought by a gay guest as "lesbian pudding."

The TV broadcasts coverage of Brexit protests and Petra bemoans that people dislike her because she is an immigrant. But she is a bigot herself, albeit a comical one. "I blame the Poles," she says, about current anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK. All this is played for laughs. Otherwise, the movie bends over backward to be politically correct. Four relationships are highlighted in the film, and all four are biracial, and one is a lesbian couple. The one group this politically correct film recognizes it is okay to make fun of is Eastern Europeans. Even so, I loved the movie.

There are no spoilers in this review, so I can't tell you how the movie handles Kate's transformation, from a total mess at the beginning of the film, to someone we can take to heart at the end, but I found the plot device to be quite poignant, and I left the theater with tears rolling down my face. The critics who have given this film a low score need to have their credentials revoked and their minds and hearts opened. Emilia Clarke and Henry Golding have terrific chemistry, and I'd love to see them reunite in a more traditional romantic comedy.

Poland, Land of Xenophobia and Conspiracy Theories: WNYC's Brooke Gladstone

Brooke Gladstone Source

Leah Feder Source

Picture illustrating WNYC's story Source

WNYC is the NPR affiliate in New York City. "On the Media" is a show on WNYC. 

WNYC is hyper liberal. White skin is bad. All black people in America are suffering horribly under the boot of racism. 

A few years back, WNYC broadcast "Q Is a Boy," that argued that a little girl from a broken home was actually a boy and anyone who said otherwise was an evil transphobe. 

On Flag Day, Arun Venugopal broadcast an attack on the American flag. 

It's not at all surprising that WNYC would broadcast an episode of "On the Media" that depicts Poles as uniquely hateful and irrational. 

Brooke Gladstone and Leah Feder entitle their episode "We Need to Talk about Poland." They take their title from a book about a child mass killer, "We Need to Talk about Kevin." Poland = Kevin. Childish and irrationally murderous. 

The music sets the mood. The broadcast begins with bizarre, Bohunkiana, accordion music. Then there is klezmer in the background. 

I've lived in Poland and spent plenty of time with Poles. I've never heard that kind of accordion music in Poland. You can hear the piece, "Taniec Kikimory," by OldNova, here

Poland is so exotic, so in the past. 

Fourteen minutes into the broadcast. Jan Tomasz Gross' book Neighbors and the Jedwabne massacre are invoked. Poles are too weak and venal to acknowledge that Poles have done bad things. You know the drill. 

Poles choose to imagine that Poles fought against the Nazis. This is a romantic Polish fantasy. 

Poles choose to imagine that Poles rescued Jews during the Holocaust. 

Anyone working on the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype needs to remember a few things. 

Thing one: stereotyping is often not about lies. It's often about twisting of truths. 

Thing two: you don't attack your enemy's weakness. You attack your enemy's strengths. 

"On the Media" is sure to highlight and emphasize the Jedwabne massacre. 

It's a fact. That massacre happened. Poles did do horrible things. 

It's also a fact that Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, and Bernard Madoff are all Jews. Want to stereotype Jews? Just emphasize these bad men's Jewish identity. And twist any facts that might cause your audience *not* to conclude that all Jews are bad men. 

"On the Media" attacks WW II era Poland's strengths. Poland was the only country under Nazi occupation that began a resistance group, Zegota, whose only purpose was to help Jews. "On the Media" does not mention Zegota, unless I missed it. 

Poland was the only occupied country where Poles, their families, neighbors, and friends were all murdered for any help offered to any Jew, including something so simple as a glass of water. And yet Poles make up the largest number of Righteous Non-Jews at Yad Vashem. 

"On the Media" does not mention that. 

But "On the Media" does not lie just by exclusion. It lies even more cleverly. It quotes a bizarre quote, one I've never heard, that Poles rescued a statistically impossible number of Jews. Clearly this number is made up by extremists. 

So. If you mention that Poles rescued Jews, "On the Media" implies, you are a crazy extremist. "On the Media" renders any talk of Poles rescuing Jews suspect. 

Clever, no? 

There is much discussion about the controversy over the Museum of the Second World War. Pawel Machcewicz, whose name Lean Feder repeatedly mispronounces, is quoted at length. 

Feder compares Polish efforts to educate the public about Polish resistance to the Nazis to Japanese refusal to confront war crimes against the Chinese. 

Poles = Jedwabne

Poles = a child mass killer, the incarnation of evil 

Poles = Japanese who committed mass war crimes against the Chinese and  others. 

Anne Applebaum alleges that Law and Justice "creates threats" like "Syrian refugees" and Law and justice "invented" stories of Muslims killing Christians. Well, I'm happy to learn that Muslims never kill Christians. The fatal stabbings and fake suicide vest on London Bridge yesterday were no doubt all part of a dispute over parking. 

Thank you, WNYC! 

Feder preaches on. "Poland is not unique" and Poland faces no threats. 

WNYC, the station that insists that gay and black and Muslim Americans writhe perpetually under the boot of oppressive American fascists, tells us that Poland is not unique and Poland faces no threats. 

WNYC calls on Fareed Zakaria, a Muslim from India, who lectures us about how Poland typifies the new threat to democracy. 

Leah says that is "value in reclaiming the Communist past." 

I don't have a problem with any of the facts presented here. I'm not a supporter of Law and Justice. I do support gay rights. I do think abortion has to be legal. I do not support the interweaving of Church and state. I reject conspiracy theories. I acknowledge that Poles have done bad things, including at Jedwabne.

What I'm objecting to here is this.

WNYC doesn't broadcast representational material about Poles or Poland. I listen to WNYC and NPR all day every day. I know.

This show is all about the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype. Poles are scary. Fareed Zakaria will explain to you why. And if you ask why the son of a Muslim scholar from India has a right to judge Poland, while not critiquing the Hindu caste system or gender apartheid in Islam, you are an Islamophobe.

If you'd like to hear that narrative, click here.