This isn’t a huge kerfuffle, because the morons espousing the thesis in the title aren’t numerous. And the kerfuffle was popularized by the “scandal site” TMZ. Nevertheless, it shows how crazily woke some people are. Here’s the TMZ tweet which directs you to a clickbait-y article based entirely on tweets. (What would journalism do without Twitter? It would have to be more serious and do investigative reporting beyond scanning Twitter for faux controversies.)
The hellscape of Twitter is at it again … this time arguing over whether Anne Frank, a girl killed in the Holocaust for being Jewish, actually had 'white privilege.' https://t.co/wgGWcyYHO2
— TMZ (@TMZ) July 9, 2022
Here are a few tweets and refutations of some of them. The crazy is heavy here (second tweet):
Anne Frank was murdered for not being white
Six million Jews were murdered for not being white
Twitter isn’t the problem, #antisemitism is. pic.twitter.com/WiwFwRieWx
— Emily Schrader – אמילי שריידר (@emilykschrader) July 10, 2022
Another tweet and refutation. I don’t think Anne Frank hid behind her “whiteness”; she hid from the Jew-hating Nazis in the annex of an Amsterdam pectin factory.
It’s time for our bi-annual garbage Holocaust take featuring Anne Frank and Jews as ‘white people’. pic.twitter.com/3vbyZDysud
— Claire (@Claire_V0ltaire) July 9, 2022
Here’s someone observing a wider discussion in the UK:
The Jews have ‘white privilege’ debate is still running by Novarra/Corbyn crowd. My entire life in UK,my child’s life in UK – I’ve never been to a single Jewish school arts centre place of worship without barbed wire, security guards, search .Constant death threats. Priviledge?
— Tracy-Ann Oberman 🇺🇦 (@TracyAnnO) July 1, 2019
Here’s a rabbi—a rabbi!—who pays lip service to “visible” Jews, but at the same time has to show her virtue, asserting that Jews “grabbed white privilege” (allowed to do so only because of anti-black racism) and thus are “conditionally white.” Grabbed white privilege? How do you do that?
Us dead? Yep, that’s why we talk about conditional whiteness.
But white Jews were still nonetheless able to start grabbing white privilege a few generations ago and the only reason we could was because of antiblackness. We can only be allies in the fight against racism +
— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@TheRaDR) June 7, 2020
As you see below, even Hannah Nikole Jones of the 1619 Project can see the fallacy of this claim! And that fallacy is simple: in Nazified Europe, Jews were not seen as white–as “Aryans”, the “master race”. Rather, they were an inferior “race”, more or less the equivalent of blacks in the post-bellum South before civil rights came around. (I would disagree with Jones’s claim, though, that “race is a fiction”, as that needs severe qualification.)
I think you made to do a bit more reading in Nazism.
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) July 9, 2022
But as I’ve said before, there is no object, no concept, no organization, and no activity that cannot be demonized by some crazied Wokesters. Anne Frank, for crying out loud!
Related to sneaky anti-semitism, I watched a neat takedown of the BDS movement, one of Jonathan Sacks’ whiteboard series. I’m not Jewish, and I’m an atheist, but I still miss him.
https://youtu.be/K_pQfsi437A
“…it shows how crazily woke some people are.” It’s a contest now to out-woke everyone else.
Yup, the purity spiral in action: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d70h
What an interesting podcast, knitting of all things! At first I thought it was satire….
If the Purity Spiral is anything to go by, Nikole Hannah-Jones may soon be in deep trouble….
I think the real game to be played here is to capture the minds of the semi-woke and maybe steer them back to a path of reason.
You could point at this bilge and say “If Anne Frank had white privilege, what does that say about the whole concept of white privilege? Or at least how it is so egregiously applied?”
I think the Rosetta Stone here is convincing liberals that Wokeism is as much an attack on them as it is on the right. Wokeism represents a radical perspective on society, not a liberal one, and it is saying that all of the hard work liberals put in over the last 60 years to combat societal racism actually not only had zero impact, but made society more racist, not less.
I find the woke soporific…
This sort of thing was dealt with definitively a dozen years ago in the Forward:
https://forward.com/culture/103587/elders-of-zion-to-retire/
That’s a hilarious piece! Retiring to Florida!
Any thing which the West values is wrong. They have developed a vocabulary just to define how.
An innocent teenaged girl with her whole life ahead of her—killed by the Nazis because she was a Jew. Dying in squalor in the Bergen-Belsen death camp was no privilege.
Why not? We already had the Helen Keller had white privilege discussion.
I’m pretty sure they are miscalculating intersectional vpoints with regards to Anne Frank. Clearly, you cannot stowaway in a tiny annex without having a ton of ableist privilege. I ran the numbers personally, three times, with the same results: 63% ableist, 28% white, and 7% other
And I know they do not add to 100% – my hunch is intersectional friction loss between nodes.
Yes, getting rounded up in ‘Vernichtungslager’ & being murdered in a gas chamber is typical white privilege.
Is there no end to woke/intersectional depravity?
“Rather, they were an inferior “race”, more or less the equivalent of blacks in the post-bellum South before civil rights came around.”
That’s not accurate. The short answer is genocide. The chief reason why the Holocaust is mentioned and known specifically, though it only was a subset of incarceration and killing — eastern europeans, disabled, gays, political opponents, roma and other minorities, war captives were murdered by millions, too — is due to the unique intent to persecute Jews.
This distinction is also a most important high ground western allies stood on, and which allows us to hold the Holocaust in focus, in stark contrast to other atrocities, million-death starvation of Indians in the British Empire for instance. The genocidal intent is generally elevated so much, because it provides a clarity other situations lack. That is, blacks in post-bellum South before the civil rights were treated significantly different from Jews during the 1940s in Nazi occupied territories.
Ummm. . . just because the Nazis acted on their notion of racial inferiority through mass killing does not negate my thesis that Jews, like blacks, were held to be an inferior “race.”
I’m not sure what you’re on about, but there’s a difference between how you regard a group as inferior and what you do about it.
Yes, blacks and Jews were viewed as inferior, but blacks were regarded as valuable to keep around still, even if they were dehumanized as working animals. Jews on the other hand, were equated with vermin in Nazi propaganda, i.e. not only useless, but harmful creatures to get rid of. I think this is a significant difference.
> blacks in post-bellum South before the civil rights were treated significantly different from Jews during the 1940s in Nazi occupied territories.
I strongly recommend the journals of Victor Klemperer, a German-Jewish linguist in Nazi Germany. He describes in detail the evolution of disenfranchisement and persecution.