Notices by jake lazaroff (jakelazaroff@mastodon.social)

great time to replace vercel with a hosting provider whose CEO won’t applaud fascists

@mekkaokereke conspicuously unasked: how many people of color and/or women might have gone on to be albert einstein’s intellectual equals had *they* been hired?

the answer is not clear

@JimmyB overt anti-semitism on the left often centers around the jewish diaspora's relationship to israel. what exactly that looks like depends on whom you ask. i think anti-semitism is when people expect us to support israel and deplatform jewish groups who don’t. the zionist left (who tend to be more center; "liberal" rather than "progressive”) think anti-semitism is BDS and calling israel an apartheid state. but we can all broadly agree that it exists.

@inthehands @raf @jdp23 @mekkaokereke

@raf i know, i have family members who experienced that. it was indefensible. but i can’t help but notice that we’re now talking about the past rather than the present. of course, one affects the other — university quotas live on through legacy admissions.

i’ll admit this isn’t a fully formed opinion. i’m not an expert on measuring these things. i don’t know what the ADL should do instead. the way prominent organizations tend to discuss anti-semitism just feels off to me.

@jdp23 @mekkaokereke

@inthehands oh i see — i didn't realize the two links @raf posted were related! thank you for clarifying

@jdp23 @mekkaokereke

@inthehands oh, that is interesting. would you mind linking to the PDF? i read through the topline findings link but i didn't realize that was a summary of a larger paper.

@raf @jdp23 @mekkaokereke

@raf i tend to be skeptical of studies like this — even jewish people can't agree on what anti-semitism is! i think it's anti-semitic when someone expects me to support israel just because i'm jewish, but plenty of other jews think it's anti-semitic for me to *not* support israel.

re: that last link, ADL is currently advocating that *jewish student organizations* opposed to the ongoing genocide be investigated by the IRS and FBI. so you can see where i'm coming from here

@jdp23 @mekkaokereke

@raf that's fair, but there are many other examples. ilhan omar gets accused of anti-semitism for accurately saying that AIPAC lobbies US politicians. people accused greta thunberg of anti-semitism for… having a plush octopus toy.

tbh the practice of measuring anti-semitism in terms of tropes has always felt fundamentally weird to me. with other groups, we can see actual discrimination (e.g. lower appraisals of black homes). why with jews is the foucs always on sentiment?

@jdp23 @mekkaokereke

@raf and to be clear, i know that anti-semitic discrimination and violence obviously does happen and we can see it and measure it. maybe sentiment is a leading indicator of that, idk. but the concepts often feel weirdly decoupled in our discourse.

@jdp23 @mekkaokereke