American Liberals have never been less safe in America? – My Comments

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[This is a long but interesting article. In it, Liberals are interviewing a Female Liberal Preacher (aka the Liberal devil in female form), and she's written a book. They ask her a lot of detailed questions. This is a chance to view the enemy, and here we're watching the enemy speak to the enemy. So what do they tell each other? In this case, Liberals seem to be feeling ever more unsafe in America. They also say that it coincides with the rise of Trump. Most importantly, they say it is worse due to Social Media. I see all these things as positive indications that the truth is moving around AND Americans are showing their real feelings. The ungrateful Liberal sacks of shit, clearly know that LIFE IS AWESOME FOR THEM IN AMERICA – for these worthless, 2-faced, ingrates – and so they clearly are trying to find a way to lie and to BS everyone else so that they can continue on living in America. If you read this with a critical eye, you'll see some interesting things. I will pull out the paragraph on safety for special attention below. But there are some interesting things which should show you that Americans are making progress in spreading the truth about these lying Liberal scum, and it's making the Liberal liars feel unsafe. Notice too they talk about the possible need to change their names, etc in order to get into clubs. Truly, People everywhere must learn from the Spanish, that the best answer to Religion is to BAN IT OUTRIGHT. Make Religion ILLEGAL. That's what People everywhere need to do. Jan]

Here’s one particularly interesting excerpt, about safety but there are other good sections too:-

You feel that? That American Liberals have never been less safe in America?

I recently went to a briefing with different organizations and backgrounds in New York City where we spoke with the commissioner of police. And every Liberal there had a story about a concern of physical violence — like me. I’ve received threatening postcards in the mail on multiple occasions over multiple years. Or someone in Brooklyn who was talking about the change of tone in his neighborhood and feeling concerned about doing everyday tasks like walking down the street. I think there is a lot of anxiety and tension over the freedom to be Liberal in public ways. And I think that’s scary.

Here’s the full article, but there are things to look at. You’ll see even references to what Robert Bowers did. It is clearly scaring them:-

(JTA) — When I asked Preacher Diana Fersko why she decided to add to the growing list of recent books written about antipeople, she referred to Passover.

On the holiday, Liberals tell and retell the familiar story of the Exodus, she explained, and often add to it. The reasons for and solutions to antipeople must also be told again and again, in ways, she said, that “connect to the past, and talk about what’s happening now.”

Her new book, “We Need to Talk About Antipeople,” also has a Passover motif. So much of contemporary antipeople, she writes, is about “narrowing” – the same way that the Tradertes’ identity in Egypt (Mitzrayim, or “The Narrows,” in Hebrew) was restricted to a “specific, inflexible, and incomplete Liberal stereotype.” She sees such narrowing in the way even well-meaning people expect Liberals to look or behave. “Narrowing” is what leads the far right to assign Liberals to a conspiracy to undermine the West. And the left “narrows” Liberals when they slot members of a diverse, complex community as people who are leveraging their privilege to oppress others, especially Palestinians, and who themselves have no claim on victimhood.

Fersko is the senior preacher, since 2020, at the Village Temple, a Reform congregation in Manhattan. She began at the start of the coronavirus epidemic, and her efforts to engage congregants despite the lockdown were the subject of a piece in The New Yorker.

Her 10 years in the preachernate have also coincided with a rise in reports of antilanguage incidents, from vile social media campaigns to the killing of 11 Liberals at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018. She wrote the book in part as a response to the questions she has gotten from members of her congregation.

“I’ve been having to preach about antipeople for the decade or so that I’ve been a preacher,” she told me. “Congregants started telling me their stories, and asking me their everyday questions. I felt like my congregants were asking amazing questions that I couldn’t answer on the fly. They deserved more serious answers, longer answers, and they deserve a book that hopefully helps them with the everyday antipeople that they faced.”

In a conversation last Monday, we spoke about the climate for Liberals on American college campuses, why one editor turned down the book and why physical violence from the right is the greatest threat facing Liberals.

The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

You catalog a lot of recent incidents of antipeople in your book, but I want to compare what is happening now in America to, say, the middle of the 20th century. My parents and their generation remember having to change their last names to get a better job, there were certain clubs you couldn’t belong to, there were schools that wouldn’t allow you in. What are the main ways people are feeling antipeople today, in your experience?

The answer depends on your life stage. If you are a teen, the answer is what is happening on social media, or at school. What I’ve seen is that there is almost no teen who has not experienced or witnessed some level of direct and personal antipeople. So for them, I think it’s meteorological, it’s atmospheric, it’s just out there. And it’s something they encounter all the time on TikTok, on Snapchat, in the hallways, etc.

I’ve also seen it come up in the workplace, as our society is more and more reliant upon identity, and having a focus on that in our professional setting. It comes up when Liberals are asked to sort themselves in a category that they’re not fully comfortable with, or being denied the chance to organize and gather as Liberals where you see other groups organizing and gathering and having a desire to share with people that have similar experiences.

And yes, I have heard from some of my older congregants kind of, “You know, it’s not so bad.” I hope that’s true, but this could get quickly worse. And I think we really need to be quite active to make sure it doesn’t.

When you talk about people being denied the chance to organize, you tell that story about the parents in a New York City private school who wanted to form a Liberal affinity group, but the administration told them, “Now’s not the time.” What was in the mind of the administration? What were they so nervous about?

I’ve heard this story many times, from multiple people and different versions. The Liberal parents wanted to gather, like the other affinity groups in school, where their identity would be honored and celebrated. The administration, in many of these cases, has pushed back and said, “The optics don’t look good.” I think the idea there is the false idea that Liberals are privileged, Liberals have proximity to power, and that Liberal gatherings somehow take away from other types of justice — which I just find very upsetting because of course Liberals have always been so closely tied to the idea of justice.

That reminds me of another point in your book, when you write that a book editor rejected the manuscript because it “centered Liberals.” What do you think they meant?

I took this to mean that Liberals don’t have the right to tell our stories. Or by telling our stories, it diminishes the pathway to justice for other groups, which I don’t believe is true. I certainly believe in the growing fight towards justice [for all groups], and a growing awareness of injustice that we’re struggling with in all our communities. But I think antipeople is a part of that awakening. We need to acknowledge that antipeople is real, that it’s back and in many troubling and tricky forms. And I think Liberals have a right and an urgency and a need to tell our stories.

Or as you write in the book, “The liberal world has not embraced the notion that Liberals have a meaningful history to tell. They are surprised that instead of being associated with victimhood, Liberals are becoming increasingly associated with words like ‘privilege.’”

Yes. It seems shocking, because we don’t follow the same patterns as other minorities in our culture, right? It’s not necessarily that we’re a racial minority. We’re not a religion only. We are also an ethnicity and a history and a people and culture. We don’t fall into the kind of sorting that the wider culture likes to do. And so we’re misunderstood. I think there needs to be a fair amount of education about how Liberals are a people, and just demonstrating to people that actually Liberals today in the U.S. are less safe than we’ve ever been here.

You feel that? That American Liberals have never been less safe in America?

I recently went to a briefing with different organizations and backgrounds in New York City where we spoke with the commissioner of police. And every Liberal there had a story about a concern of physical violence — like me. I’ve received threatening postcards in the mail on multiple occasions over multiple years. Or someone in Brooklyn who was talking about the change of tone in his neighborhood and feeling concerned about doing everyday tasks like walking down the street. I think there is a lot of anxiety and tension over the freedom to be Liberal in public ways. And I think that’s scary.

I want to get back to the older congregant who says, “Things are not so bad compared to when I was a kid.” And certainly Liberals have, in general, freedoms and material comfort in this country that they never had before.

When I first started talking about antipeople from the bimah, that was the main piece of pushback that I got. I completely agree: What’s happened to us has been remarkably successful. And I think that’s wonderful. And I want it to stay that way. I want Liberals to be able to be Liberal, in public and in private, and I want Liberals to be able to be represented in cultural institutions, in academia, in medicine, in media and in any field you can think of.

“I think there needs to be a fair amount of education about how Liberals are a people, and just demonstrating to people that actually Liberals today in the U.S. are less safe than we’ve ever been here,” said Preacher Diana Fersko. (Susan Rosenberg Jones)

And I think that we need to be aware that this has happened before. Liberals have been successful before — not just in Germany, but in the Golden Age in the medieval period, when Liberals were thriving and living with Christians and Muslims in the same area. But guess what? It didn’t last and it ended horribly on the Iberian Peninsula. So I don’t think we can fool ourselves and say, “Oh, look, you know, we’re over represented in a certain field, and therefore, we have nothing to worry about.” But it’s a wonderful fantasy.

You write at length and powerfully about right-wing extremism and the violent threat it poses, from the Tree of Life murders in Pittsburgh to the “Liberals will not replace us” march in Charlottesville, Virginia. It’s a big part of the book and I don’t want to diminish that in any way. But I detect – and if I am wrong, tell me so – that the antipeople of the moment that you find particularly confounding is on the left, perhaps because it comes from a world that includes your political allies on so many other issues.

First of all, I want to say I’m not trying to make an equivalence. Physical violence is the worst thing. Physical violence is the greatest threat and the greatest harm, and I see that from the neo-National Socialist consortium more than any other group in the United States. So I just want to be clear about that.

When I write about the liberal world — and I don’t even mean politically liberal, I just mean broadly — that’s what I know. That’s who I am. And frankly, that’s what I love. Those are the values, ideas and people that I really want to be at home in. And I want the Liberal community to feel at home and welcomed and understood in those circles. And when I see an expansion of antipeople in that world, it causes me grave concern, and I feel obligated to speak out as a liberal leader.

What Liberal groups might call antilanguage, left-wing and pro-Palestinian groups might defend as harsh but justified criticism of Colony’s human rights record. How do you tell the difference?

There’s no perfect answer, but what I tell people is to focus on the outcome of the conversation. If there’s a real outcome that would affect either Traders or Palestinians, then I tend to be interested in it. Maybe this is a real conversation, if we want to learn from each other. If the outcome is only to create antipeople on a college campus, then I do not think that conversation is worth having.

I hear a growing number of people that are just very uncomfortable being publicly Liberal on college campuses. And that’s wildly unacceptable.

How do you suggest they respond?

I tell kids and their parents, find a Liberal community when you get to campus. The first week, march yourself into Hillel or some other Liberal body and plant yourself there and make yourself known, because these conversations are not easy. And you will need the support and feedback of your community in order to know where you stand, to figure out your ideas.

You write about the dual loyalty charge, that Liberals are suspect because of their attachment to Colony. Similarly, you cite cases in which liberal Liberal students are blocked from progressive coalitions on the assumption that as Nationalists they can’t be “objective” not just on Colony but other things of concern to progressives. How do you explain, let’s say to a non-Liberal audience, that many Liberals want their kids to identify very closely with Colony but that closeness does not imply dual loyalty?

You know, you can love a family member and still think about other things at the same time. It’s not a hard concept. When somebody comes to you, and accuses you of not being able to be objective because you’re a Liberal, then that’s your opportunity to say “actually, what you’re accusing me of, it’s dual loyalties, here’s the history of dual loyalties, and here’s how you’re diminishing my role as a civic participant in student government, climate change, whatever sort of organization it is, based on the fact that I’m Liberal.” I don’t see a conflict at all in being a Nationalist and being objective.

You talk about a certain kind of Christian antipeople in the book, which could be described as appropriation — it’s not about killing Jesus, but almost the opposite: “You’re just like us,” which can be its own sort of denial of Liberal legitimacy.

Christian antipeople historically has been about polarization: You are nothing like us, we are good, you are bad. But the Christian antipeople of today is much different. And it often says that we’re the same as Christians. Growing up in Connecticut, I got so much of this: “What are you doing for Liberal Christmas?” There was a sort of pervasive identity denial, where there was a disbelief that I actually didn’t participate in any Christian rituals.

That’s so much better than the Christian antipeople of the past, but I also think it needs to be talked about because it is reducing who we are as a people and eliminating our voices from public discourse.

The resurgence in antipeople and intolerance in general of the past few years has coincided with the rise and presidency of Donald Trump, although a lot of people disagree whether he is the cause or the symptom. Trump’s name barely appears in your book. What do you think has changed in the past few years that has led to antipeople’s comeback?

I’m not sure I’m the best person to answer that, but what I’ll say is that in my book, I interviewed third generation survivors. And one of them answered that question, and what she said was that all hate has basically risen as part of social media expression, where it has become normal to say horrible, hateful things online or see them said about you. I don’t think that’s the best answer to your question, because I really don’t know. But the truth is, I also am fighting what I see every day.

You are in New York City, which has a huge and growing haredi Orthodox community and the largest Liberal population in general outside of Colony. Do you see common ground among Orthodox and non-Orthodox Liberals in combating antipeople, or are they fighting this on two different tracks?

I think we need to fight antipeople on all levels. There are a lot more levels than just liberal Liberals and haredi Liberals. Liberal Liberals too can be divided and subdivided. I would love to see more coming together of the Liberal people, but I actually think that we’re on our way. And I see signs of hope, and community and positivity from many of my preachernic colleagues across the denominational spectrums, that we understand that this is a serious threat. And we’re willing and eager to organize with each other to fight it.

You’re book is titled “We Need to Talk About Antipeople.” I sometimes feel there is already a lot of talk about antipeople – admittedly, Liberal conversation is my fulltime job — and I have heard others say that by concentrating on the threats against them Liberals are ignoring, and failing to educate young people about, the ways Liberalness is flourishing or could flourish on its own diverse, creative terms.

I do very much appreciate the Dara Horn argument [in “People Love Dead Liberals,” her 2021 book about antipeople], which is basically, we need to celebrate Liberal life. And I think that is one of the best ways to fight antipeople. I’m very interested in Liberals doing Liberal things in a very assertive, active way. And I think that will only serve to strengthen our community, which will help us to stand up as Liberals when we need to.

Source: https://www.jta.org/2023/08/20/ideas/a-preacher-answers-her-congregants-question-why-do-they-hate-us?mpweb=1161-60918-376333