To: Rochel Auerbach (21 Aug)
Please see:

"still a Jew" (nyc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/102148/index.php): "The comment by the unamed poster [not unnamaed: Joseph Anderson] in the cross-reference, however, that "Jews are not an oppressed minority... to say that Jews are oppressed in America is anywhere from an insult to a joke to those traditional minorities of color" is not only beside the point of the debate but potentially offensive."


But, you also said, "Blankfort's letter makes sense to me."

Let me give you some additional information about Blankfort: Blankfort and many other Jews also believe that it is sheer nonsense and ridiculous to say that Jews are oppressed in America. NYC resident and a foremost history of Zionism & Israel scholar and author of numerous books, Lenni Brenner, also thinks it is 'total hogwash' (as I could imagine Brenner saying) to say that Jews are oppressed in America. No critically serious and emotionally balanced person could believe that Jews are oppressed in the U.S. (with Israel getting 6-10 billion dollars every year - at least that we generally know of - from the U.S. taxpayer).

For you to equate mostly random symbolic incidents and individual personal sentiments of anti-Semitism (which I've sadly heard my share of mostly from whites) in America with sytematic oppression lacks intellectual or moral integrity. I'm sorry to be blunt and impatient (I've lost my youthful patience over the years), but you waste everyone's intellectual time with such silly comments and compelling me to spell it out for you.

Former Chrysler chairman Lee Iococa claimed that some Anglo-American auto execs were racist against Italians. Does that mean that *Italians* are oppressed in America? I've heard Polish jokes all my life (moreso when I was younger). Are *Poles* oppressed in America? Now the French are being denegrated because they didn't want to follow U.S. folly into Iraq? Are *French-Americans* oppressed in America? Hitler documentaries - which morally (almost genetically) scapegoat Germans are shown almost every night on some or another cable tv channel for evils that Anglo-Americans perpetrated first - in Native American genocide (still ending as Hitler was rising to ascendancy in the 1920's) and American slavery and "Jim Crow" apartheid. Are German-Americans being oppressed?

Furthermore, when was the last time you ever heard of white-supremacists dragging some Jew to their death behind some redneck pick-up truck? When was the last time you ever heard of some Jew being chased down in a white ethnic neighborhood and killed? When was the last time you ever heard of or saw a Jew being shot at 41 times and hit some 17 or more times in front of his own apartment building by a New York City cop, or beaten 'Rodney King' style on the road? How many Jews were lynched at the hands of white-supremacists in America?

Get real. As we say in the ghet-to, "You must be on crack!!"

Excerpt from OPEN EMAIL TO OAKLAND "ANTI-SEMITISM" CONFERENCE! - by Joseph Anderson
(Did you actually *READ* this link? - www.indybay.org/news/2004/08/1692588.php
):

"There are no Jewish underclass ghettos in strewn across the country in every American city and town with a significant Jewish population; there are no innumerable federal, state, and county prisons filled with Jews; Jewish children are not relegated to the worst schools; brutal white cops don't beat or kill Jews on a weekly, if not daily, basis in America; no Jews have been dragged to their deaths behind rural pick-up trucks or chased to their deaths in white ethnic neighborhoods; Successive American presidents didn't run for office playing 'the anti-Semite card' whenever they wanted to garner a boost in the polls: they don't even dare insinuate false blame for the nation's numerous financial scandals on the Jews."

Or, as the famous Black writer James Baldwin said:

"One does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro's suffering. It isn't, and one knows that it isn't from the very tone in which he assures you that it is."

And it's not "potentially", but *actually* "offensive" to Blacks and traditional minorities for many Jews, indeed, to falsely and ridiculously - and for what ulterior motive/purpose? - claim that Jews do face oppression in America.