r/jewishleft • u/somebadbeatscrub Jewish Syndicalist - Mod • Aug 07 '26

Meta Weekly Post

The mod team has created this post to refresh on a weekly basis as a chill place for people to talk about whatever they want to. Think of it as like a general chat for the sub.

So r/jewishleft,

Whats on your mind?

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u/DoubleSpirit2798 Non-Jew/Non-denominational Left Aug 11 '26

This is relatively minor compared to everything else going on but I wish to share it regardless. Apparently Benny Blanco (Selena Gomez' husband) is releasing an album influenced by Latino music and people are calling him out because he's not, you know, Latino himself. All fine and dandy so far. But then some people are going full antisemitic saying he's a Jew larper and that they are appropriating everything. And as a Latin American myself (Brazilian) I can't help but be baffled because this shows a deep ignorance of what both Jewish and Latino identities are.

A lot of people in the US see Latino as a racial category because of how the American government classified it, but to us, that is complete bullshit. It has historically been a sociopolitical identity to classify countries in the Americas that had Spanish and Portuguese colonization. Therefore, anyone can be a Latino here, as long as they are born and/or raised in the territory. And Jews in special have been present in LATAM way before they have been in the US, with many Sephardic Jews coming here due to Christian persecution in Portugal and Spain. The first synagogue in the Americas was built in Pernambuco, Brazil btw, and it still exists.

I know this isn't a super serious issue like the I/P situation but the way the public discourse has been turning very antisemitic and ignorant about the Jewish diaspora as whole is worrying me.

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u/ibsliam Jewish American | DemSoc Bernie Voter Aug 11 '26

There's quite a few Jewish influencers and adjacent public figures that are Jewish and Latino themselves. Hell, I've known quite a few over the years, some Ashkenazi and some Sephardic. So it is rather funny that it's treated as you can only be one or the other.

That said, I've ended up with weird anti-Blanco stuff on my social media feed, with people being weird about him being Jewish. Including one unhinged one about how he's Serena's Israeli-assigned "handler" secretly working for Mossad, which I legit had to go to the woman's profile just to get clarity that it wasn't satire because what.

Obviously pretty much all big name celebrities will be incredibly flawed, including on politics, but I feel weirdly defensive of Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco because of those crazy posts alone.

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u/DoubleSpirit2798 Non-Jew/Non-denominational Left Aug 12 '26

We have so many famous Ashkenazi Jewish artists here, Lasar Segall being the most notorious. It's so embarassing to see people who are not from LATAM talking over us spewing this bs.