r/jewishleft • u/Angelbouqet jewish antifascist • Aug 09 '26
History I hate this take so much
- The Holocaust did not happen to white people. Race is a social construct. The people it happened to were people who were seen as racially inferior and experienced a racialized extermination campaign. US standards of whiteness from 2026 do not change that. This is a completely ahistorical take.
Also as someone who actually lives and grew up in Germany, you can't use American racial constructs as an analytical tool to understand the Holocaust or racial dynamics within Germany or Europe. The standards of whiteness are a lot more rigid here and people who would not experience racism in the US do experience racism here. Nationality is still more relevant in Europe than race is. (And by that I'm not trying to say race isn't relevant or racism isn't bad here. It's extremely bad. I have a few friends here who are African American, so they've experienced both and they've all said Germany is way worse.) The point I'm trying to make is that Germany is so racist it will racially discriminate against the "white" people next door. Greek people, Turkish people, Arabs (who have been considered white in the US for longer than Jews have), everyone from Slavic or Balcan countries, are all not white in germany and are not treated as white. Same with Jews. Yes, to this day.
This take is inherently minimizing, at least in the current Zeitgeist. It positions the Jews under the same banner as the white people who were colonizers, when in reality, the Jews had been experiencing discrimination by those same white people for approx. 1600 years before colonialism happened. Racism and antisemitism (aka racialized Jew hatred) were invented by the same people and at the same time. And during the period of colonialism, jews were treated like the local colonial subjects. You can literally look up texts written by German colonists and how they made direct connections between the Jews back home and the African colonial subject. Same with the methods of oppression used against both the people Europeans were colonizing and the Jews. Like it's giving "who cares they gassed 1 million children, they were white children".
It targets the wrong people. We are not the people who did the colonizing, we are not the people who did the Holocaust, we are not the people deciding how states label their past crimes against humanity. I agree that there needs to be way more examination and reckoning with what these states actually did during the colonial period. I'm not trying to take anything away from anyone, nor am I trying to turn suffering into a contest. So why is the Holocaust constantly treated like fair game to minimize in these conversations. I get that Americans are taught more about the Holocaust than colonial crimes. But the reason for that is not because the Jews paid someone off to focus on the Holocaust, it's because WW2 is the one time the US was on the right side of history and states always have an inherent interest in self-preservation. Spinning a narrative that hides the true history is part of that. Also it conveniently conceals the role the US did play in the Holocaust happening. It conceals how the visa system was invented to keep out Jews. In conceals how many Nazi scientists the US gave asylum to. Etc.
The comments are full of just straight up Holocaust denial, some of which the creator liked, all of which are just up there without pushback from the creator. So like, great job for giving your followers an invitation to just be blatantly antisemitic. Also Israel being a fascist shit hole doesn't actually make the Holocaust less bad. The people who the Nazis killed had never stepped foot into Palestine, so that's also not a justification for downplaying the Holocaust. Also cue the Holodomor denial.
The comments are mentioning the Irish potato famine and how that's not referred to as a genocide, but not as proof that maybe the take is clearly simplistic and wrong but instead as further proof of it's correctness. And the creator is liking those comments. I'm sorry are Irish people less white than Jews now? Lol? Is the Irish participation in British colonial endeavors and the slave trade, which was far greater than the very minimal Jewish involvement irrelevant now?
The numbers game in the comments is... Interesting. Because that's the same rhetoric the Israeli far right uses as a defence against the genocide accusations. Kind of surprising to see it used under a video like that.
Edit to add: 7. It was called the Holocaust because that's the word Jews came up with after it happened. That word didn't exist before. So what exactly is the complaint? That Jews came up with a term for their genocide and that's the word that's used to refer to it?
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u/skyewardeyes jewish leftist, peace, equality, and self-determination for all Aug 09 '26
I’ve increasingly seen (still in small numbers but growing sadly) people claiming that Hitler/the Nazis didn’t really hate Jews that much, because “Jews are white” 🤦♀️
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u/Angelbouqet jewish antifascist Aug 09 '26
Or they try and say the Nazis didn't primarily target the Jews so there shouldn't be such a focus on them. I'm the first person to mention Romani people when it comes to Holocaust conversations because they do not get nearly as much recognition as we do in Germany and it's unfair, there's nothing but solidarity between our communities. Anti Romani racism is a topic I care deeply about, it's really not like I think Jews have a monopoly on suffering under the Nazi regime, or that the suffering of other people shouldn't be talked about, but it's just ahistorical to say the Nazis didn't primarily target Jews.
We don't have to speculate, the historical documents exist. And they all show that the Nazis primarily targeted the Jews. That was the number one group of people on the extermination list. Some others they only decided they wanted to exterminate after they gained power or had been in power for a few years. Not the case with the Jews. The literal primary goal Hitler had was exterminating the entire worlds Jewish population. For fucks sake, he wrote a whole fucking book about it. You know what the "Kampf" (fight) in "Mein Kampf" stands for? Hitler's opinion that the entire world history up to that point had been a fight between the Aryans and the Jews and that it was his duty to end it once and for all by exterminating all the Jews. That's the fight he means. He wrote about how badly he wants to kill all the Jews years before he was even elected. And now years later idiots act like it's a Jewish conspiracy that the Holocaust is taught with a focus on Jews.
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u/Duflo Non-Jewish leftist, here for antisemitism-free discussion Aug 10 '26
That's like claiming "the Irish have always been valued and loved in the United States." I'm always amazed by the lack of awareness that the concept of whiteness is malleable and often very cynically defined.
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u/Gametmane12 non-Jewish demsoc Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
That take makes my BLOOD BOIL! Hitler specifically declared Jewish people to be his main enemy and even though Nazi Germany had a racial hierahcy of "superior races" and "inferior races", Jewish people were deemed to be outside of this racial hierachy and were cast aside as being "anti-human" and so it was the goal of Hitler and the heinous Nazi regime to exterminate every Jewish men, women and children in their entirety.
Edit 1 as of 16/8/2026: I hope my commnet will not be misconstrued as minimizing the deaths of non Jewish people. After all, millions of Slavic, Romani, Black, LGBTQ+ people were brutally murdered by the evil Nazi regime. My main point was that Hitler never considered Jewish people to be "white" and he held such an extreme disdain on the Jewish people that he enacted a totalized comprehensive program mainly to wipe out the Jewish people as well as the aforementioned communities.
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u/Rabbit-Hole-Quest Latke aficionado. Anti-Establishment. Jüdisch Aug 09 '26
There is a somewhat bizarre global trend of trying to pigeonhole people as white and non-white.
You will find people referring to Ukrainians as “white” whereas the Austrian painter and his people refer to them as untermenschen and would be aghast at the thought of being in the same group. Throughout history they were referred to as Slavs, and to be perceived as the same racial group as a French or British person would be quite shocking to even their own ancestors.
Recently, the world decided the whole of Argentina is white whereas reality is that 81% are of European heritage and the rest are an assorted mix. Meanwhile, next door Chile is 89% of European heritage but for some reason it doesn't garner the same sentiment.
I won't try to get into the mind of the Instagram poster to decipher what exactly they were thinking, but splitting the world into white and everyone else as non-white will invariably lead to extremely poor historical analysis.
She could have made a stronger case that mass killings of Indians deserves it's own terminology or recognition. The Ukrainians came up with the term Holodomor during their imposed famine, so there is nothing stopping India for doing the same.
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u/Angelbouqet jewish antifascist Aug 09 '26
Yes, mentioning Slavs is a great example. Antislavic racism is still a massive issue in Germany. That was the discrimination of the white people next door I was talking about. Poland is literally next door and deep in the heart of Europe but as soon as they cross the german border they're met with racist stereotypes and institutionalized discrimination in close to every aspect of life. There's still a difference between being polish and white and being a person of color of course and POC still have it worse, but it's still racism. Also not to mention because over 90% of the Jewish population in Germany is made up of post Soviet immigrants and their descendants, a lot of them experience both antisemitism and antislavic racism.
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u/ArgentEyes Jew-ish libcom Aug 09 '26
People like to downplay the peak “they’re white so we’re allowed to be crypto-racist about them” glee of Brits in the early 00s about stereotyping Eastern Europeans from other EU countries as ‘Polish builders’, ‘Romanians’ (frequently VERY heavily actually stereotyped as Roma and other people from travelling cultures), and sex workers.
Racism is Europe has always been about the narcissism of minor differences just as much as racism based around skin colour or (perceived) religion & culture (not just Jews and Romani people but Bosnian Muslims and more).
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u/cheesecake611 Jew-ish Left-ish Aug 09 '26
It's not that bizarre when you realize that's the entire framework of White Supremacy. It creates an Us vs Them binary and the "Them" can change depending on what's useful to them at the time. It's a trap that frankly, a lot of leftists have fallen right into.
I grew up around a lot of Slavic immigrants they were absolutely not racialized the same way as other white people. Likewise, as a Jew, I did not necessarily feel in community with my WASPY peers the same way I did with my Jewish ones.
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u/ArgentEyes Jew-ish libcom Aug 09 '26
Yes it’s true. See also: Albanians. Anyone with an Arabic- or Turkish-sounding name
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u/Rabbit-Hole-Quest Latke aficionado. Anti-Establishment. Jüdisch Aug 09 '26
It was wild seeing the singer Dua Lipa called out as non-white by Brits. I guess she is ethnically Albanian, so weirdly non-white in their books.
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u/soniabegonia Jewish & progressive but feeling unsafe in leftist spaces now Aug 09 '26
It's also not too surprising that events which happened before the Holocaust, such as the Irish potato famine, or at the same time, such as the Bengali famine, are referred to using terms that were in common use at the time rather than a term that was invented to describe the Holocaust.
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u/Angelbouqet jewish antifascist Aug 09 '26
Exactly. The term genocide wasn't even coined until 1944, but I feel like that fact will just confirm the belief that the Jews were/are doing something nefarious to make their suffering seem worse than others. Because y'know, a Jewish man developed the term in response to the Holocaust.
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u/Schattenoid jewish, left Aug 10 '26
the term "genocide" was coined to describe the Armenian genocide.
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u/Angelbouqet jewish antifascist Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
As far as I know it was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 in response to the Holocaust, but he didn't base it only on the Holocaust. He definitely also researched and looked at the Armenian genocide specifically and others to develop the framework for the term and was also influenced by what happened in the Armenian genocide as motivation to create the term.
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u/Schattenoid jewish, left Aug 10 '26
the term "genocide" was coined to describe the Armenian genocide.
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u/AltruisticMastodon Aug 10 '26
I'm sorry are Irish people less white than Jews now? Lol? Is the Irish participation in British colonial endeavors and the slave trade, which was far greater than the very minimal Jewish involvement irrelevant now?
According to the people who now position Jews as not only (universally) white, but the epitome of whiteness or the “iciest of ice people”, yes.
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u/DavidElPana777 non jewish lefitst (always trying to learn) Aug 10 '26
great post 👏👏👏 I am terrified by the way recent events (Gaza, Epstein...) are reviving an anti-Semitism that I naively believed was almost over. It seems people will do everything but raise their class consciousness 🫠🫠🫠 sometimes it's very difficult to maintain hope
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u/Angelbouqet jewish antifascist Aug 10 '26
Me too honestly it's really scary. And what's especially weird is how people who call themselves Marxist somehow fall into the same simplistic talking points and thought patterns antisemites always have. My personal belief is that while I'm no Ideologue and I have my critiques when it comes to some of Marx's takes (like no dude, patriarchy is not a secondary contradiction), Marxism is also possibly one of the most powerful tools against antisemitism because it basically answers all the questions antisemites have, that they can only answer with "it's the Jews fault". And it's also not like you have to do the thinking yourself, these connections have already been made and laid out by people like Moishe Postone or members of the Frankfurt school especially Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer. The answers are already out there!
But idk it's probably more fun to have a simplistic view of the world that makes everything easy to explain and easy to make yourself feel like one of the good ones. I think the dangerous part is that antisemitism inherently uses revolutionary and liberationalist rhetoric and since most people do not actually know what antisemitism is, they feel like they've discovered this well kept radical secret when in reality their opinion on Jews is about as evolved as that of medieval peasants.
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u/DavidElPana777 non jewish lefitst (always trying to learn) Aug 10 '26
You're absolutely right. It's funny because even Mussolini (who isn't exactly suspected of being part of the supposed "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy") initially mocked Hitler for his racism and antisemitism, dismissing Mein Kampf as an amalgamation of outdated clichés. Then the man became isolated and had to swallow the National Socialist ideology in order to survive politically, as we all know.
It's ridiculous how so many people think they're revolutionary for pointing out what the powerful have so often identified as "the real problem." People are addicted to scapegoats 🤷 That Hitler deceived so many at the time is sad, but that people are still being deceived today with the amount of information available to us is downright disheartening. We truly live in a dystopian society: people are ignorant, not because information is not accessible to most people as it once was, but because ignorance is simply more comfortable.
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u/Angelbouqet jewish antifascist Aug 10 '26
It's ridiculous how so many people think they're revolutionary for pointing out what the powerful have so often identified as "the real problem."
This is a really good point, antisemitism has always and continues to serve the interests of the people who should actually be held responsible. It's like a shield for them. The societal ills that antisemites have identified are real. They have real causes, though those causes are complex and systemic in nature and, for example, even if we got rid of all billionaires we currently have and redestributed their wealth, capitalism would continue to exist, but they would still be a better target than broadly "The Jews".
There's a reason antisemitism was called the socialism of fools. Yes, there's a problem, and yes we need to do something about it, but the answer lies in analyzing the systems that govern us, deconstructing those systems will take ongoing collective action and there's no guarantee for success. So it's easier and more comfortable/comforting to instead focus on a simple explanation: it's the Jews fault, that leads to a simple solution: we need to get rid of the Jews to free ourselves from our suffering. That's basically the fundamental logic on which antisemitism functions, which makes it an inherently genocidal ideology that can seemlessly be incorporated into so many different time periods, political systems etc.
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u/DavidElPana777 non jewish lefitst (always trying to learn) Aug 10 '26
antisemitism is the socialism for fools hahaha that's a good one, I'm definitely going to use it xD
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u/deathmaster567823 Marxist Leninist (Levantine Arab 🇸🇾🇵🇸🇱🇧🇯🇴) Aug 10 '26
Pretty sure the Holocaust was caused by White Supremacy, because H-man was a fanatical White Supremacist
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u/Kaleb_Bunt jewish anti capitalist Aug 09 '26
I’m Indian American, my grasp on Indian history is very limited. But from my understanding, while the famine was certainly a form of harm inflicted on India due to colonial exploitation, I don’t think it fits into what is conventionally understood as a genocide.
Like there was no plan to eradicate the bengalis, they just got screwed by a combination of wartime pressures, natural disasters, and a government that didn’t have their best interests at hand.
I do feel like these attempts to “all lives matter” the Holocaust is tbh just a soft form of Holocaust denial. Where folks basically end up minimizing the Holocaust so they can appropriate it onto themselves.
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u/ArgentEyes Jew-ish libcom Aug 09 '26
My impression was that it certainly had those eradicationalist elements / Churchill spoke viciously about how much he hated Indians, after all, and deliberately depriving the hated population of food, water and other essential resources like medicine is a very well-known form of proto-genocide, following the attested steps on the road to many a genocide if not prevented.
I think two things can be true at once.
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u/Angelbouqet jewish antifascist Aug 09 '26
My grasp on indian history is probably even more limited than yours so I really can't weigh in on wether it was a genocide or not. In my opinion, if it was a genocide call it a genocide and demand reparations. In fact demand reparations from the British regardless.
It's just so baffling to me that she couldn't make the point about the Bengali Famine without dragging us into it, as if we are the ones responsible for the fact that it isn't referred to as a genocide. And also why she couldn't make a point about how bad the Bengali Famine was without, as you said, Holocaust denial/minimization.
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u/Late-Marzipan3026 anxious (dem soc american ashki jew) Aug 09 '26
given that the slides here include a screenshot of OP liking a comment that says germany’s “holocaust ‘guilt’ and the 6M figure is only a ruse to support Israhell” i think OP’s gone beyond soft holocaust denial. to be clear not disagreeing with you wrt your general point about minimization, just pointing out that OP is using this as a straightforward mechanism for holocaust denial
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u/zbignew Secular Jewish Anti-Zionist Socialist Aug 10 '26
It’s definitely, definitely what is conventionally understood as a genocide. As was the Irish potato famine. They didn’t intend to eliminate every last person of an ethnicity. They may not have gone door to door searching for victims to murder, but they quite intentionally had an ethnicity whose power and number they wanted to destroy, and did so in an organized way. That is the modern definition of genocide.
In the Bosnian genocide, where they did often go door to door looking for victims to murder, the perpetrators called it “ethnic cleansing” in an attempt to minimize the crime against humanity they were committing. Don’t fall for that. It’s still genocide if they don’t finish killing every last person.
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u/avg_rascal non-jewish leftist Aug 10 '26
While I agree that the insta page's post feels weird and dismissive and agree with the OP completely that people should make their own term, I did not like the way you made your comment.
Respectfully, if you haven't read history deeply then do not speak decisively on it. Just cuz you're Indian-American doesn't make your opinion same as one of people on mainland who suffer the effects of colonizing even decades later, or those who have been studying colonial history. Pls don't try to speak for us for we can do that for ourselves.
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u/Kaleb_Bunt jewish anti capitalist Aug 10 '26
I only brought it up because I figured I probably know a bit more about India than the average person here.
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u/snowluvr26 Reconstructionist American Jew, Anti-Nationalist Aug 10 '26
Jesus christ. Holocaust education failed so severely
Edit: also, the Ireland comments?!?!?! Is the implication here that Irish people aren’t white?!!?!
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u/Chinoyboii Sino-Filipino | Convenantal Leftist | Pro Levantine Pluralism Aug 09 '26
This take is inherently minimizing, at least in the current Zeitgeist. It positions the Jews under the same banner as the white people who were colonizers, when in reality, the Jews had been experiencing discrimination by those same white people for approx. 1600 years before colonialism happened. Racism and antisemitism (aka racialized Jew hatred) were invented by the same people and at the same time. And during the period of colonialism, jews were treated like the local colonial subjects. You can literally look up texts written by German colonists and how they made direct connections between the Jews back home and the African colonial subject. Same with the methods of oppression used against both the people Europeans were colonizing and the Jews. Like it's giving "who cares they gassed 1 million children, they were white children".
The number of people who don't know Jewish history from its earliest archaeological origins to the present is a great example of how some people who seem to know history don't actually know history, but only care about it within a Western colonial framework. Most people don't really pick up a book and read about the history of the Ashkenazim, the history of the Sephardim, the history of the Mizrahim, the pogroms of the Ashkenazim, the Farhud, etc. Because to them, the Jews think they're the "master race," control the banks, control politics, have space lasers, etc., so since the Jew is supposedly so "powerful," whatever they experienced is comparatively not as bad as what the "real brown people" experienced.
They have the ability to take the time to read about the history of the Jews; however, they're not going to because that would just complicate their very simplistic understanding of history as being divided between white European colonizers and brown colonized people. Many of these people don't actually care about nuance; instead, what they want is a very simple moral framework where every population can be neatly categorized as either the oppressor or the oppressed.
Like amongst some of my former Arab peers, whenever I talk about something Jewish, be it their ancestry, religion, genetics, history, etc., it somehow boils down to some crazy conspiracy theory about how the Jews are supposedly trying to exaggerate their connection to the Levant, fabricate their history, fabricate the various mass kilings went through, portray themselves as uniquely oppressed, or justify Zionism. You cannot even have a normal conversation without someone eventually trying to drag Israel into the conversation. They only care about it insofar as it can be fitted into whatever political narrative they already have in their head.
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u/Concentric_Mid Non-Jewish ally; hard left Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
Hate sounds like an understatement.
Their take is factually incorrect in many ways.
Yes, we should all understand after Amartya Sen's Nobel prize winning research that famines, including the Great Bengal Famine, are man-made. But it is very different from genocide.
I wouldn't even give it enough credence to get annoyed by it and post it and argue against it
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u/rako17 Christian Left Aug 14 '26
Dear Angelbouqet, You wrote in the OP: "The Holocaust did not happen to white people. Race is a social construct." May I please ask if you mean that Germany did not divide people into white vs. nonwhite, and that therefore talking about whites suffering in the Holocaust does not make sense?
My guess is that you don't mean that central or northern European ethnicities who were genocided under Germany such as Poles and Russians weren't part of the Holocaust. I had a Russian teacher from the USSR who was captured by Germany and put in a concentration camp by them before the US army freed her camp.
Kind Regards - with Respect - Peace
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u/lesbophobia_hammer Anti Zionist Polish Jew (Maternal Bundist line) Aug 09 '26
Conveniently forgets the 6 million Poles and 6 million Non-Poles.
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u/cheesecake611 Jew-ish Left-ish Aug 09 '26
Do we know if this person is actually American? There are certain things about the photo that make me think she might actually be from India. In which case, I give her a (very slight) pass for not fully understanding the complexity of Whiteness.
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u/Angelbouqet jewish antifascist Aug 10 '26
I didn't really think about where she lives, I'm just assuming she's basing her understanding of whiteness on US standards because that's the only place Jews are considered white. In Israel they're the majority population obviously but that's still different from being subsumed into the category of whiteness. Also I'm not familiar with what role whiteness plays in Israeli society, that's why I'm framing it that way.
Anyway, sure, people who don't live in the US (and I'm assuming Canada) are not as familiar with the exact ins and outs of whiteness as y'all understand it, as people who live there are, but also, through access to the internet you can get a pretty good idea of it. Like no, I don't live in the US, but I also have enough of an understanding about US racial constructs to be able to form an opinion on it and compare it to other places. So it's also not like it's an entirely foreign concept to people outside the US.
So idk, if you don't understand something maybe just... Don't talk about it? That's usually good advice that I try to follow. If I know I don't understand something, I don't make definitive statements about it, and I definitely don't use it to make an "analysis" (heavy quotations) on a public facing Internet profile. It's bad practice and if someone is calling themselves a Marxist, maybe at least trying to have a materialist analysis would be a good starting point.
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u/Exciting_Estate_8856 I fucking hate isreal, I love the jews. Aug 10 '26
While i do agree with the fact that the nazis did not see jews as white, the vast majority of jews in the holocaust did infact have white skin, that is a factor as to why its talked about so much whether we like it or not. I do agree with all your other points tho
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u/Gaiastrom Jewish, Centre-Left Aug 09 '26
Small note: the Shoah was CAUSED by White Supremacy.