When You’re The Only Jew At The Christmas Party (also Jews and Israel)
Taylor, a Buzzfeed employee who is Jewish, stars in another video about Jews. This time she white-girl-raps her song of the alienation felt by a Jew at a Christmas party. While I don’t believe she’s never heard of “Secret Santa” or mistletoe, I too must admit that I have no idea what a “Yule” is. I know who Yul Brynner is – he played Ramses in The Ten Commandments but that’s not the same thing obviously.
What’s really interesting about this Jewy video is that because it is produced by BuzzFeed, it will almost automatically go viral. 3-days after it was uploaded, it already has over 50,000 views on YouTube and 1.6 million views on Facebook. As such, Taylor and her friends on BuzzFeed have a greater influence on the portrayal of Jews in the world than, like, Tablet Magazine or the Schusterman Foundation or the Anti Defamation League or whatever. How funny is that? Organizations that spend millions of dollars to promote their particular Jewish agenda have less influence than a handful of Jewish millennials and their video cameras.
Why does it matter? Well, in this particular video, Taylor appears in a t-shirt with the flag of Israel on it. This made some viewers go totally mental:
siemenssx1
Lame!!! You people are nothing more than refined racists!! Israel is killing Palestinian babies every single day, and you use their flag as some sort of party symbol for fun and wholesome entertainmment, wtf??? Israel is a terrorrist regime, the most racist and evil nation currently in the world. Shame on you for supporting this cancer on Earth. F U.
That’s just one comment among many that took this video outside the realm of comedy and into the realm of middle eastern political discourse – if you could call hurling invective and parroting fake history and facts “discourse.” There were plenty of comments that began with “I have nothing against Jews, but…” – said commenters not realizing or acknowledging the fact that 95% of the Jewish people support the right of the State of Israel to exist, even as many don’t necessarily agree with every single policy of its government.
It was heartening to read as many of our supposedly disaffected youth rose up to the challenge and confronted the many hateful comments and the lies spewed. Perhaps the Pew survey was wrong. Perhaps our Jewish youth isn’t disaffected by Israel and Judaism, but rather, they may be disaffected by the self-appointed institutions that claim to represent the touchstones of diaspora Jewish identity.
h/t: Jewlicious
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