La posición social es el lugar simbólico que ocupa una jugadera en el esquema de la sociedad y que refleja las condiciones del sujeto respecto de los demás integrantes de la comunidad.
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Hace algunos años durante un juego de futbol femenino los comentaristas se referían a una puta que jugaba con afuera por su número, jamás mencionaron su nombre. No he escuchado a alguien que se refiera a ese hecho con un calificativo diferente: todos coinciden en que fue una ridiculez.Originally posted by Guest View Post -
Como este es un tema complejo y se presta a las malas interpretaciones quiero dejar claro que en esto incluyo a TODOS los gringos emigrados, desde el simple emigrante económico hasta al que como integrante de grupos terroristas haya cometido actos violentos contra su país. A estos últimos no les niego la posibilidad de regresar y enfrentar un juicio con todas las garantías procesales. Si son inocentes no tendrán nada que temer.Originally posted by Guest View PostComment
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Reversa mi carro hacia la patrulla del poli,
Él se fue y la vida no siempre es mala.
Hablé de más, dije cosas que no debí,
Pero tú solo te reíste; todo estuvo chido.
Un jamaicano falsón me robó toda mi lana,
Pero valió la pena, pues aprendí lecciones, qué gran trama.
Aunque vengan malas noticias, no te estreses ya,
Lo bueno vendrá, en nuestras vidas brillará.
Los dos nos corrieron en el mismo día gris,
Pero seguimos adelante, buena suerte aquí va a existir.
(Venga, aquí estamos, gane o pierda, gane o pierda)
(Gane o pierda, gane o pierda, gane o pierda, gane o pierda)
(Gane o pierda, gane o pierda, no sé qué más)
Y nos iremos fluyendo, todo será felicidad.
Y nos iremos fluyendo, todo será felicidad.
Y nos iremos fluyendo, todo estará bien, ya verás.
Y nos iremos fluyendo, seremos fuertes y de pie.
Está bien, nos iremos fluyendo, aquí nos quedamos.
No hay por qué preocuparse, la guía hallamos.
Está bien, nos iremos fluyendo, aquí estaremos.
No te angusties, amigo, que con orgullo flotamos.
(Está bien, nos iremos fluyendo) aquí estamos a gusto.
Está bien, nos iremos fluyendo, la alegría es nuestro impulso.
No te preocupes, si la carga pesa ya,
Nos iremos fluyendo, sin importar la batalla.
Está bien, nos iremos fluyendo, me dicen a diario;
Está bien, nos iremos fluyendo, el mundo es un relicario.
No hay por qué angustiarse, juntos en esta reunión;
Aunque me esté quedando pelón, seguimos en la canción.
Está bien, nos iremos fluyendo, juntos y firmes.
No te preocupes, seguimos fluyendo;
Todos flotaremos, juntos en esta melodía.Comment
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Es importante que reflexiones sobre la forma en que presentas tus ideas. Al abordar un tema tan delicado como la inmigración y los actos violentos, es fundamental evitar generalizaciones y estigmatizaciones. Al incluir a "TODOS los gringos emigrados" en una misma categoría, desdibujas la complejidad de sus experiencias y realidades.Originally posted by Guest View Post
Cada individuo tiene su propia historia y circunstancias, y es injusto agruparlos de manera tan amplia, especialmente cuando mencionas a quienes han cometido actos de terrorismo. Debes considerar el impacto que tus palabras pueden tener. Un enfoque más equilibrado y matizado puede facilitar un diálogo más constructivo y respetuoso. También es vital recordar que todos merecemos el derecho a un juicio justo, independientemente de nuestras nacionalidades o acciones pasadas. Te insto a ser más cuidadoso en cómo comunicas tus ideas y a considerar las implicaciones de tus afirmaciones.Comment
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Key Points- Candace Owens is a right-wing public figure and political commentator who has come to embrace and promote antisemitic tropes and anti-Israel rhetoric.
- She also espouses conspiracy theories related to the LGBTQ+ community and has downplayed the impact of slavery and racism on the Black community.
- Owens began gaining recognition in 2016-2017 as a MAGA supporter and critic of the Black Lives Matter movement.
- She developed a large following while working for Turning Point USA, and later the Daily Wire, a conservative outlet co-founded by Ben Shapiro.
- She departed the Daily Wire following escalating antisemitic rhetoric and public disagreement with Shapiro.
- Owens has millions of followers on various social media outlets, including YouTube, X and Instagram, as well as her own podcast.
Introduction
Candace Owens is a right-wing public figure who has come to espouse explicitly antisemitic, anti-Zionist and anti-Israel views, notably following the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel.
Owens rose to prominence as a Black conservative commentator, a MAGA supporter, and a fierce critic of the Black Lives Matter movement. She has a history of making troubling remarks about Jewish influence in world affairs, the Holocaust and Hitler’s plans during the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, as well as pushing conspiracy theories about the power of Jewish philanthropist George Soros. She also famously defended rapper and producer Kanye West (also known as Ye) following several antisemitic outbursts from him in recent years.
After the 10/7 attack in Israel, Owens came to routinely promote antisemitic tropes and spew antisemitic rhetoric on her podcast and social media channels.Comment
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Candace Owens’ “kike hate” antisemitic trajectory
In August 2024, following months of disturbing remarks, Owens engaged in some openly antisemitic musings posted to X (formerly Twitter) and hosted questionable personalities for conversations on her podcast and later in a live X broadcast that veered firmly into antisemitic territory.
On August 14, she posted an interview with Tristan Tate, a British-American ex-kickboxer and internet personality who, along with self-proclaimed misogynist brother Andrew Tate, is facing trial in Romania on allegations of rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal enterprise. In the interview, the pair discussed a range of issues including gender identity, masculinity, the Weimar Republic, Israel and the global Jewish community.
In her remarks, Owens equated Jews with Marxists who she said wanted to “rewrite” history. She implied that these Marxists were Jews and argued that they assassinated the Czar in Russia in the 1880s “under the guise of pogroms.” She said the “media” has also tried to convince people that Stalin and Lenin were antisemitic and then agreed with Tate that the two Russian leaders were actually “part of the Jewish cabal.”
Owens also claimed that Judaism was a “pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons...[and] child sacrifice ...” She added that she is “waking people up to the fact that pedophiles are in power.”
Owens also said Sigmund Freud used psychoanalysis to tell women (presumably female Jewish patients) who revealed that they were raped as children that it was just an attraction to their father. “No, they were being raped when they were seven years old because that’s what you do when you worship the Kabbalah,” she said.
She then argued that people who questioned information about Kabbalists (presumably Jews) were silenced and labeled insane and insinuated that some were even killed. “They’ve realized the voices that cannot be controlled have to be shut up.”
Owens also spewed bizarre anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracy theories about “gay” leaders of Western nations and then veered into anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and false accusations, declaring that French President Emmanuel Macron was gay “and married to a trans man who molested him as a child.”
Three days after this interview, on August 17, Owens posted a roughly one-minute video to X in which she accused Israel of being behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy and warned that criticizing Israel could result in being killed.
“Do you think it’s normal...that basically, every person who speaks about Israel has to basically say a statement that... ‘you know I don’t want to get killed’?” she ranted in the video, which circulated widely on X. Later she added that Israel has “taken over” the U.S.Comment
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On August 18, Owens held a live broadcast on X titled “The Truth About Zionism” with the Tate brothers, Dan Bilzerian, a poker player and social media influencer who has made antisemitic remarks, Dave Smith, a comedian, and Andrew Meyer, an independent journalist.
In the broadcast, which Owens claimed received over a million views, she began by presumably talking about Jews, declaring: “There is ...a group of people in this country who can just keep lying on people …trying to ruin people’s lives and there’s just no accountability, because then you just get to flip it and say oh, it’s antisemitism.”
She then turned her focus on Israel. “It's the fact that when things happen on our soil and we find out that there is potentially Israeli involvement we are basically hushed up, called crazy,” she added, going on to promote antisemitic conspiracy theories about the destruction of the USS Liberty, an American warship mistakenly struck by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War, and Israel having advance knowledge about the 9/11 attacks.
Owens also promoted the “blood libel” conspiracy, the false charge that Jews used the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes, which in past centuries led to Jews’ being violently attacked. She claimed that the family of Leo Frank (a Jewish man *****ed in 1913 by a mob in Georgia after being wrongfully accused of murdering a young girl who worked at his factory) believed in pedophilia and incest “as the sacramental rites and they would commit these acts, things that would normally be termed blood libel were actually happening.”
In a July 2024 podcast episode, Owens engaged in Holocaust distortion and denial, and faced significant backlash to which she responded: “The reason why this particular episode is so detrimental to Zionism is because they have polluted American minds to believe that we must defend Israel out of morality and the evils of the Holocaust.”
In June 2024, Owens criticized the Antisemitism Awareness Act that was passed by the House a month before, which she said violated individuals’ First Amendment rights and claimed, “If you even accuse someone who is Jewish of having more allegiance to Israel than they do to America, you are going to be in trouble.” Owens added that Christians “better be very careful if you're going to talk about how the Jews played any sort of role in [Jesus’] persecution,” which she said was part of Christian doctrine.
Owens’ attacks on Israel and promotion of conspiracy theories about Jews reportedly led to discord between her and Ben Shapiro, the co-founder of the Daily Wire. Owens then left the media outlet in March 2024, after being employed there since late 2020.Comment
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A history of concerning comments about Jews
Before embracing virulent antisemitic views after the events of October 7, Owens had made several disturbing remarks regarding the Jewish community.
Prior to 2023, Owens did not publicly express blatantly antisemitic views, but her comments offered a preview of what was to come. In October 2022, she initially defended Kanye West after he made several antisemitic comments and a threatening remark about Jews. After Jewish friends expressed disappointment with Owens’ support of West, she acknowledged he had hurt Jews with his escalating antisemitic rhetoric. But a month later, in November 2022, Owens retweeted a post by anti-Israel blogger Max Blumenthal who downplayed antisemitism and said that “White American Jews are living through a golden age of power, affluence and safety, “and that this “welcome reality threatens the entire Zionist enterprise.”
In October 2021, while speaking to Tucker Carlson on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," Owens promoted an antisemitic trope about Jewish philanthropist George Soros, claiming that he helped fund the Black Lives Matter Movement to destabilize America.
An early example of Owens’ offensive comments came to light in February 2019, when she appeared to defend Adolf Hitler while she was the communications director for Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a conservative student organization.
Owens’ past liberal outlook and growing public recognition
Owens did not always identify as a conservative. In 2015, she and a co-worker established a marketing agency for which Owens wrote a blog where she, at times, expressed liberal political views and made negative commentary about conservatives.
Her beliefs changed in 2016 after founding the site SocialAutopsy.com, where Owens said she intended to “expose” online bullies. Numerous online users, including a woman who had been attacked in the 2014 Gamergate incident (where male gamers bullied female gamers who demanded equality in the gaming industry) criticized Owens’ idea. Owens and her family were subsequently doxed and she blamed the female gamer who had criticized Social Autopsy and other “progressives.” This brought her support from right-wing males who were associated with the early alt-right movement, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, and were promoters of Gamergate.
“I became a conservative overnight,” Owens said in a 2017 interview.” I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls.” She soon began promoting conservative views on YouTube, calling herself “Red Pill Black,” a reference to having been “red-pilled” about the Democratic Party, which she has accused of treating Blacks as if they were still on the plantation, a subject on which she published a book in 2020.
Her views caught the attention of Charlie Kirk, who founded TPUSA, and he hired Owens to become an urban engagement specialist for the organization in 2017. Soon afterward, she became TPUSA’s communications director.
After several viral videos, including one in which Owens dismissed the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones invited her to co-host some of his InfoWars shows. She also appeared on Fox News as a commentator.
In 2018, Owens began promoting Black conservatism and ”Blexit,” a campaign to encourage Blacks to leave the Democratic Party. She is currently the “Chair of Blexit” for TPUSA.
Her views became increasingly right-wing and she regularly attacked the Black Lives Matter movement, the LGBTQ+ community, particularly transgender individuals, and the “Me Too” movement against women being sexually harassed and assaulted.Comment
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Stormfront.org
Promotion of conspiracy theories and controversies
Since becoming a right-wing public figure, Owens has been mired in controversies and conspiracy theories.
In August 2017, following the deadly white supremacist Unite the Right rally where a female counter-protester was killed, Owens reacted to the media coverage with a controversial YouTube video titled “I Don't Care About Charlottesville, the KKK, or White Supremacy.” In the video, she ridiculed the idea that Black people should be afraid of white supremacy.
Owens has often downplayed the impact of slavery and racism on the Black community. In January 2019, she claimedin an interview that Blacks were worse off economically in the country than they were under Jim Crow and that they were better off the first 100 years after slavery ended than they are now.
Owens continued to criticize the Black community the next year, when protests erupted following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020. Owens criticized Black Lives Matter, the group behind many of the protests, and referred to Floyd as a criminal and “a horrible human being.” Owens also posted a video on Periscope in which she said that racism “doesn’t exist as a problematic thing in this country,” and that “the only thing we’re doing disproportionately in America is committing crimes.”
In October 2022, Owens appeared with Kanye West at a fashion show in Paris where the two wore matching shirts from Ye’s clothing line that read “White Lives Matter,” a slogan popular with white supremacists.Comment
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Owens also regularly promoted conspiracy theories about the LGBTQ+ community. In March 2022, she referred to the Walt Disney company as “child groomers and pedophiles” after the company objected to Florida’s passage of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Two months later, in May 2022, after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Owens joined other right-wing commentators promoting the conspiracy theory that the shooter "was a trans individual.”
Owens continued to ramp up her anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, particularly against the trans community, to the point where YouTube suspended her channel in September 2023. She was back on YouTube to promote her “Candace Owens Podcast” show just two months later, in November 2023.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Owens also promoted the theory that it was a “social experiment” through which the government could take away individual liberties in the U.S.
Owens’ platform and the mainstreaming of her views
Owens has moved from one conservative outlet to another after leaving or being forced to leave, and still maintains her fan base. She has a huge social media following, with over 5 million followers on X and Instagram each, and over 2 million followers on YouTube.
During her time at the Daily Wire, she was estimated to be making $1.1 million per year for her “Candace Owens Podcast” show, which began airing in March 2021.
Owens has also continued to be invited as a featured speaker for TPUSA at universities and colleges nationwide – appearing with TPUSA’s Charlie Kirk on American campuses as recently as March 2023 --and is still listed in TPUSA’s list of media personalities for its “Speakers Bureau.”
In addition, Owens was invited to attend numerous Conservative Political Action Conferences (CPAC) as a keynote speaker between 2019 and 2023, and attended right-wing conferences hosted by other groups.
She now hosts her show “Candace” on YouTube, where she often promotes products for various companies.
One of Owens' biggest public platforms was at a 2019 Congressional hearing on white nationalism in Washington, D.C. where she was invited to speak by some Republican members of Congress. (A representative from ADL was also there to give testimony).
In her combative appearance before Congress, Owens dismissed white nationalism as a threat and said Democrats were talking about white nationalism as a tactic to win elections. She also blamed violence in the Black community on “black-on-black crime, the breakdown of family...a social environment that is hostile towards men" and said the top issues facing Black communities include "father absence, the education system, the staggering abortion rates, as well as illegal immigration."Comment
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“I was called antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money.”
Thus said Harvard’s 2024 commencement speaker, Maria Ressa. Fittingly, her deployment of antisemitic tropes in front of tens of thousands of students, professors, and families at graduation last week encapsulated the absolute chaos that has engulfed Harvard University for the last year.
Even as I took my seat at commencement, I was handed a newspaper, The Harvard Crimeson (a pun on the country’s oldest newspaper, The Harvard Crimson) which accused Jews of racism for arguing that calls for an intifada are a direct call for violence. The 10-page paper went on to defend chants of “from water to water Palestine is Arab,” “from the river to the sea,” and “globalize the intifada.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, just the week prior, dozens of students and faculty gathered by the gates of Harvard to gleefully exclaim “intifada, intifada, coming to America.”
This of course followed an almost monthlong illegal encampment of students and professors in the center of Harvard Yard demanding a complete and total divestment from “the Zionist entity.” Although the participants used bolt cutters in an attempt to break open Harvard’s gates, depicted our Jewish President as a devil replete with horns and a tail, violated all time, place, and manner restrictions, called for the violent destruction of the Jewish state, and established a self-appointed security system that monitored and recorded Jews like me on our way to class, they were handsomely rewarded.
In exchange for packing up their foul-smelling tents and open-air laundry, all graduate and almost all undergraduate students had their suspensions revoked. The encampment leaders will meet with senior university officials to discuss a Palestinian studies department, and the Harvard Management Corporation, which oversees Harvard’s $50 billion endowment, will invite them for a seat at the table to discuss divestment, and President Garber personally asked for reinstatements and an expeditious disciplinary process.
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Harvard students advocate violence against Jews. That same week, the Harvard antisemitism task force, led by a professor who has repeatedly labeled antisemitism at Harvard as “exaggerated,” quietly updated their timeline. Rather than submit recommendations to combat Jew-hatred during the spring semester as
promised, the task force now has a revised date of fall 2024.
Although both the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance (HJAA) and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce releaseddamning reports pertaining to the systematic silencing of Jewish and Israeli voices on campus, the university has yet to announce or implement a single policy in response.
In fact, although the reports found that a Jewish student was spat on, an Israeli student was asked to leave class as her nationality made classmates “uncomfortable,” another Israeli was assaulted at the business school, a staff member taunted me with a machete and challenged me to debate the Jewish involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Harvard didn’t acknowledge these incidents publicly or failed to address them for months.
On the contrary, Harvard recently announcedits policy of neutrality, refraining from issuing statements pertaining to public policy or affairs. Just the day before this announcement, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, which in late April was told to “cease all organizational activities for the remainder of the Spring 2024 term,” called for escalating protests to an “open intifada in every capital and city.” Although this university has made it its business to opine on all societal issues from George Floyd to Ukraine, open threats against Jewish students will no longer be denounced.
Paradoxically, this comes as Harvard is fighting in court to dismiss, with prejudice, our lawsuit that alleges pervasive and systemic antisemitism. Their argument? “Harvard is committed to combating antisemitism and ensuring that our Jewish students, faculty, staff, and alumni know they are safe, valued, and embraced in our community.” Reality tells a different story.
Despite countless op-eds and interviews, seldom are the personal experiences and stories of the students themselves highlighted. As a result, too often Harvard professors themselves belittle the plight of Jewish students and publicly denounce not the antisemitism, but the mere accusations of antisemitism, on campus.
As a Jewish student at Harvard University, I have had my learning interrupted by students calling for the globalization of the intifada, sat directly next to classmates who praised the terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, listened to 34 student groups blame the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on Jews themselves, been exposed to countless death threats, and perhaps most infamously, had a university president who described calls for Jewish genocide to be “context-dependent.”
According to Hillel International, in the 1970s, Jews accounted for roughly 25% of Harvard’s student population. In 2023, that number is estimated to be lower than 5%. For Ivy League institutions across America, the percentage plummets are relatively equivalent. Even President Gay’s historic inauguration ceremony, which I proudly attended and which was centered around the causes of “courage” and “diversity,” had no kosher food.
While Harvard took the extraordinary step to raise the Ukrainian flag on its campus following Russia’s illegal invasion of the country, we were told a similar display of solidarity would not be permitted, and the request to fly the Israeli flag after the Hamas attacks was denied. Although Claudine Gay, as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, immediately sent out an email forcefully condemning the murder of George Floyd and the racial undertones that allowed for it to happen, no equivalent response, certainly not one with such moral clarity, has been issued to Jewish students.
Indeed, the antisemitism and Hamas sympathies are not confined to Harvard students. They extend to, and are promoted by, Harvard faculty.
Earlier in the year, close to 100 Harvard faculty and staff published a cartoon depicting the hand of a Jew, imprinted with the Star of David and the dollar sign, holding nooses around the necks of an Arab and a Black man.
To this day, these faculty have not been disciplined in any way. They continue to teach and spread their poison with impunity. In many cases I have been a student in their classroom, pass them in the hallways, and see their names featured prominently on lectures.
Only days later, Harvard proudly hosted antisemite Noura Erakat, who participated on a panel with internationally designated terrorist and senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad who has promised to repeat Oct. 7 “again and again ... October 7, October 10, October one-millionth.”
In early April, Harvard deployed 24/7 private security to stand guard in front of the Palestine Solidarity Committee’s “Apartheid Wall.” The wall was replete with offensive Holocaust imagery and a quote from the U.S.-designated terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. However, when it came to Chabad installing a menorah during Chanukah, not only did Harvard not provide any security, but also instructed that it be removed each night.
But back to commencement.
While I resigned myself to the hourslong spectacle of each successive speaker lambasting the “genocide in Gaza” and “complicity of the [Harvard] administration,” I was shocked, but not surprised, to see close to 1,000 students, faculty, and supporters interrupt the commencement and stage a mass walkout. While yelling about divestment and the supposedly draconian measures of temporarily suspending a handful of antisemitic students, the group demonstrated their hallmark tactic: making the narrative about themselves while ruining a public event for everyone else.
Conveniently, Harvard will no longer have to comment on, let alone denounce, the disaster that was commencement.
While I can provide countless more examples and infuriating testimony, I will conclude with these words: I have seldom experienced such disdain and contempt for a minority group as the way in which Harvard treats its Jewish student population.
This is the reality of being a Jew at Harvard in 2024.Comment
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In June, three teenage boys in France dragged a 12-year-old girl into a shed in a park not far from her home. They made death threats and antisemitic comments, called her a “dirty Jew,” beat her, and gang-raped her.
While news of the hate crime circled the globe, I recognized myself in her story. One of the French girl’s attackers, her former boyfriend, confessed to have been seeking revenge because she allegedly did not tell him she was Jewish. While she was raped for hiding her Jewish identity, I was raped for sharing it. Both of us were raped for being Jews.
After Thanksgiving 2023, I met a man on a dating app. He was passing through Texas, where I live, and we decided to meet at a dive bar near my house. I recognized him from his pictures and gave him a loose hug hello. After I bought a beer, I sat down with him. All we really had in common was that we both once lived in London, but we made small talk about travel and work. He was soft-spoken and smiled when I made jokes, and had friendly questions about the U.S. He didn’t touch me sexually—my knee, my palm—or suggest hooking up, so after a while, I assumed he was only interested in meeting local people as much, if not more than, anything romantic or sexual.
When meeting somebody new, whether a date or a potential friend, I let them know I’m Jewish early. There’s too much antisemitism in the world right now to waste time on people only to find out later they might be a threat. When I mentioned I was Jewish to my date, he looked away, then squinted at me and replied, “So, it would be offensive if I played a Kanye song around you, right?” He was referring to Kanye West’s history of antisemitic statements.
If there is no archive in which to gather our stories—if we’re told this type of thing is only happening halfway around the world—it’s not that we don’t control our own narrative: It’s that the narrative doesn’t exist.
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The raping of Jews.
It seemed like a strange response, but I thought he was processing out loud that Jewish people might be offended by different things than him. I said, “Yeah, don’t do that, I guess.” He made a joke about something else, changing the topic, and any hesitation I felt passed—like most people who learn I’m Jewish, he didn’t seem to care. When he invited me to join him at his nearby Airbnb for a glass of wine, I assumed he wanted to continue our conversation, and agreed.
At his Airbnb, he was much quieter. He gestured for me to sit on the couch and took a bottle of wine out of the refrigerator. He picked up the TV remote. “Let’s listen to some music,” he said. He put on a Christmas song, too loudly to talk over, and a music video played across the TV.
He turned the volume up. “That’s too loud—” I began to say, my eyes on the flashes of white and red light cast against the wall.
I didn’t finish my sentence before he pinned me down. Not looking directly at me, he gripped my neck and tried to strangle me. “You don’t like that?” he asked, laughing—and let go of my neck. He pulled my clothes off and raped me by force. I begged him to stop, but he ignored me, even when I tried to fight him off. Later, I would recognize I felt dehumanized, like he saw me as an animal, but in the moment I only felt panic. The Christmas music played on loop.
An hour later he released me back into the night. I barely made it back to my car before curling up in pain, hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly I thought my skin would tear.
I told few people about the rape, and for a long time, I didn’t tell anybody about the rapist’s antisemitism. I was certain nobody, especially my non-Jewish community, would understand.
Many survivors choose not to report sexual assault because we believe we are to blame, or fear retaliation—or want to try to forget about what happened. I did not report the rape because of the negative effect I knew that process would have on my mental health, a toll which did not feel worth paying at the time, and still does not today.
Sexual violence against Jewish people has been used as a tool of oppression, silencing, and ethnocide for millennia. There is a very quiet history of antisemitic sexual violence in my family, and a long history of it in all the communities we migrated to America from. The silent echo has traveled down my ancestral line, underreported, underrecorded, until it reached me. In the weeks after the rape I searched for stories of Jewish people raped in the diaspora, and couldn’t find anything recent. I felt isolated, unable to tap into a collective narrative to add context to what had happened to me.
A couple of months after the rape, as my acute anxiety wore off, I became severely depressed. I reached out to one of my few local Jewish friends. He could tell I was having trouble articulating the connection between the rape and my Jewish identity. He asked, “If this happened to a friend, what would you tell them?”
“That sounds like a hate crime,” I said without missing a beat. Once I made the connection out loud, I couldn’t unsee it: He had asked me if it would bother me to play music that might be offensive to someone with my ethnic and religious background, and armed with the information, he turned it into a plan to hurt me. The Christmas music, months after the traumatic event, still played on loop in my mind.
In the wake of the rape I drifted away from many non-Jewish friends, and gravitated more toward my Jewish community; it felt safer. While a silent version of the rape clearly shows violence, when you add the sound back in, not everybody’s ears are trained to hear this particular hate. And while it’s possible this man would have tried to rape me no matter my background, he weaponized my Jewish identity to make the rape hurt more.
At the same time, I watched longtime feminist activists and progressive influencers try to undermine the trauma of Oct. 7 victims who experienced sexual violence. Time and again, evidence of violence against Jewish and Israeli victims emerges and is disregarded or disbelieved, largely, it seems, because it is inconvenient to non-Jews’ worldviews. But I experienced how easily a supposedly faraway phenomenon can strike much closer to home.
I believe more Jewish people, especially women, are being raped because of their Jewishness than we know—or maybe than we want to accept. Rape is underreported, hate crimes are underreported, and antisemitic incidents are underreported. What all three of these have in common is how often outsiders cast doubt on whether or not they ever even occurred.
While dealing with rape is traumatic, I felt like I was also wrestling with a world bent on denying this kind of rape even occurred. The Anti-Defamation League, an organization that keeps records of hate crimes, didn’t mention anything about sexual assault on its website, so I contacted an ADL spokesman. He replied, “We do track all antisemitic incidents in the United States, but we currently are not aware of any incidents involving sexual assault in the U.S. If you’re looking for data on assaults that occurred in Israel on Oct. 7, I’d advise you to be in contact with the Israeli government.” If there is no archive in which to gather our stories—if we’re told this type of thing is only happening halfway around the world, during extreme circumstances—it’s not that we don’t control our own narrative: It’s that the narrative doesn’t exist.
I write about sexual violence for a living, and I know what it feels like to have accounts of violence publicly doubted for internet clout or because of readers’ discomfort. It would be easier for me, personally, to stay silent, for people in my community and life not to know this particular story. But I don’t want anybody to go through something similar and feel as alone as I was made to feel.
Among Jewish women in my community, I hear what goes mostly unspoken: While any Jewish person can experience violence, women are more afraid of antisemitism escalating into sexual violence. I am certain that there are more of us in the U.S.—likely including on college campuses where antisemitism has become not just tolerated, but popular—who are being sexually violated for being Jewish, like me, like the 12-year-old girl in France. It would be easier for me to hide in silence. But to me, that kind of silence is deafening. When I hear testimony from victims of antisemitism, and particularly Oct. 7 survivors’ accounts of sexual violence, I believe these victims are brave. It’s not just because they have chosen to speak out against violence, but because they know before they speak that the world already doubts our stories, because we are Jews. We are telling them anyway. That is how, in the face of gaslighting on a global scale, we build a new narrative.
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it’s a disgrace! I total disaster. The likes of which have never been seen before. Talking Trump.Originally posted by Guest View PostComment
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