User talk:Levivich

Back home

I'm back home now (remember how I said I wouldn't be able to really edit JW stuff for a week?) and I have access to my personal library again, so I'm good whenever you're good to provide feedback. I figured I should let you know. If you're curious, I went on vacation to Victoria, BC. I've never really been on a plane or seen the ocean before so that was exciting. I had a fun time, particularly when it felt like like the universe was giving me signs... I came across an intersection of Clover Ave and Moss Street on a walk out to Clover's Point. I didn't choose the locale knowing of these potential destinations so it was a nice surprise. :) Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 16:00, 24 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Congrats on your first flight and seeing the ocean! I hope you snapped a pic of the intersection sign. They have yet to rename any streets after me ☹️ Nevertheless, I'll prob get back to JW this weekend or Monday. Levivich (talk) 04:22, 25 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

No worries! We all do what we can when we can. And I did get a photo of that intersection with me by the signs because how could I not? :) Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:43, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Just sayin'. Cullen328 (talk) 22:41, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I know you had the most support votes at the time, but most admins just get a t-shirt, isn't having an entire court a bit much? What's next, calling you King? Levivich (talk) 03:39, 29 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I prefer to think of Cullen Court as an informal suburban court of truth, justice and the American way, with proceedings conducted in really cool antique and classic cars that I cannot afford, but will post photos of on Facebook. Cullen328 (talk) 08:02, 29 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Disgrace!

With regard to Special:Diff/1220885464, I think at this point the most universal Jewish experience on all sides of the conflict is being called a disgrace to Jews by another Jew. _signed,Rosguill ^talk 14:42, 26 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sad but true. Levivich (talk) 15:19, 26 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Is this a special case, unique to the experience of being Jewish? I doubt it. An erstwhile Japanese girlfriend was stopped at the airport after some years abroad and roundly upbraided for what a pair of customs officers considered her unJapanese behaviour (her speech patterns lacked the appropriate feminine style of humility before superiors/officials/men), and one often read novels et., where people were taken to task for falling short putatively of living up to some abstract concept of Japaneseness. The point is, to what degree can anyone in a community defined ethnically, religiously, culturally or all three, make claims about who 'we' are, and rail at others in the community who fail to live up to this perceived standard? (Self-hating Jew, is a case in point). There are powerful historic grounds for ethnic solidarity, whatever the circumstances among Jews, and the Irish to name but a few, but it takes little to have this communitarian defensiveness slip into a 'my (=our) ethnos right or wrong' , thereby transforming fellowship into a kind of emotional coercion. Sorry for the intrusion, but. . .Nishidani (talk) 22:34, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A few times in foreign countries I've found myself in a serious 'existential fix' which was, on these occasions, resolved by going to an Italian restaurant and, asking for advice, and got the help I needed. (Once, short of funds when a university that hired me to lecture said there were bureaucratic issues that meant I wouldn't be paid before my departure, and thus couldn't buy a ticket for my flight back home, a waiter I consulted at a nearby restaurant arranged for a truck coming from Poland back to Latina which regularly passed that way to give me a lift from Germany to Rome. In the end it wasn't needed since the payment came through in time, unfortunately since hitchhiking is always a more interesting way to travel). All that was needed was fluency in the language which indicated virtually a shared identity.Nishidani (talk) 22:49, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This is a serious discussion (or at least a discussion about serious things) so I hope Levivich will forgive a bit of Levivity: does 'no true Scotsman' apply here? Girth Summit _(blether) 23:06, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There is nothing more serious than laughter. Anyway, I thought there was no true Scotsman because they all wear skirts?

Levivich (talk) 04:09, 29 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, as another example, what it means to be "a real American" divides the US. Just ask Obama, who had his citizenship questioned. And I know from firsthand experience just how genuine such feelings can be. I'm not a Trump supporter and one of the reasons is that I do not believe Trump supports the US, loves the US, is what I'd consider a patriot, he's not what I'd call a "real" American, but of course that's just because we hold very different ideas about what kind of country the US should be. Meanwhile, neither of us are real Americans, as in indigenous people. The arrogance of colonization: people from Europe travel to America, kick out the people who are living there, rename it, and then for generations argue with each other about who is more of a real American. LOL

But with Israel it's different this time. I don't recall there ever being as much vocal dissent within the Jewish community, or at least not in the American Jewish community, as there is now. And maybe I just never noticed it before, and I kind of can't believe I'm about to write something along these lines, but these past few months I've been shocked at how pro-Israeli the mainstream US media seems to be. I'm one of those people that reads a bunch of different newspapers every day and I can't believe how often I read a mainstream outlet publishing something that just seems like a Likud press release. Anti-Zionism = antisemitism seems to be the official editorial stance of certain outlets. And there's always this kind of variation in the reporting from different outlets, but you'd expect that from outlets on opposite sides of the political spectrum, like CNN and Fox News. But now I see a split within left-of-center outlets, I think more than ever in my lifetime. Today, for example, I was slackjawed at how differently NBC News and NPR News wrote about the same thing. NBC: "As antisemitic incidents mushroom on college campuses, some Jewish leaders and lawmakers from both parties are accusing President Joe Biden’s administration of taking a lax approach toward enforcement of civil rights laws, exposing Jewish students to continued harassment." NPR: "Universities across the country turned to forced removal of pro-Palestinian protests and encampments this weekend as more and more students mounted organized opposition to Israel's handling of the war in Gaza." NBC doesn't even mention the counterpoint to the protests-are-antisemitic line of argument, and NPR barely mentions that line of argument except as attribution to Bibi and a couple US Congressmen. I guess I'm not used to hearing so much dissonance from within my echo chamber :-) Levivich (talk) 04:06, 29 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It’s not unique, but the universality is contingent on there being an active war being waged where both the pro-war and anti-war camps see the other side within their community as having betrayed fundamental values central to their understanding of the community identity _signed,Rosguill ^talk 05:39, 29 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As I understand it, the abiding danger of this mainstream skewing of the narratives, with the automatic conflation of public criticism of Israeli policies with antisemitism is twofold. In ignoring the dissent within Jewish communities - from which some of the strongest analyses, as one would expect, are emerging - there is a real danger of creating what Merton called a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that many non-Jews will come away with the impression that every Jew thinks the same way, and that tacitly reinforces a fundamental premise in the antisemitic tradition, by disindividualizing the 'other' as a cypher in a lockstep monochrome mindset. Even worse, the caricature cannot help but play into another staple of classical antisemitism - that 'Jews' control the media (which would be news to figures like Rupert Merdehock).

The other side of the coin is that the soi-disant 'philosemitic' mainstream endorsement of, for want of a better term, the general 'Likud' narrative - in which demonstrators are all bundled up as 'pro-Palestinian' agitators hostile to the very existence of Israel - works to set an extremely parlous precedent in the vigorous crackdown on the specific outcries of the new student generation at universities over what is going on in Gaza. That is only a step away from criminalizing any future form of public dissidence, as is occurring most distressingly in Germany itself, a form of generalized discursive intimidation that undermines one of the core pillars of democracy. Over this issue, unwittingly or otherwise, the 'West', in making an exception of what can or cannot be said apropos Israel, risks losing its vaunted (and often inflated) institutionally moralised value system as a 'unique' locus of tolerance. Or to adopt Rosguill's allusion, a civilisation ordered on a fundamental acceptance of universal principles over the particularism of pre-modern social ideas where any appeal to logical consistency is lost. Regardless of background, we should all be worried. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 07:55, 29 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]