this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2024
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"Modern Hebrew" is a Zionist invention:

  1. It was created by Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman, a notorious Zionist and a founder of "Hebrewism", a notion that Hebrew should be the only language that Jews should use, not Aramaic or Yiddish. (As opposed to Yiddishism)
  2. It is mostly spoken by "Israelis"
  3. At the time of Hebrew revival, most Jews opposed using holy language for discussing everyday things and preferred Yiddish as a national language of Jewish people

But can a language by itself be Zionist? It is a Zionist invention, it is used by Zionists, but does speaking it make you a Zionist? Should Jews worldwide learn and use Yiddish and Aramaic as a national language instead of "Modern Hebrew"? I mean, "Modern Hebrew" is so artificial, it didn't have curse words at the beginning, so Zionists sweared at Yiddishists in Yiddish!

P.S. Apologies to many smart people here bothering you with my midnight thoughts

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[–] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 11 points 3 weeks ago

Zionism is all of that, by all means, but I'd rather define Zionism by its causes than its acts: what's the bourgeoisie of a diaspora group to do to consolidate its power and advance its interests in the same manner as the bourgeois dictatorships that surround itself, when the said diaspora group exists as a disparate minority everywhere, with no clear lines to be drawn on a map? — Settler-colonialism, simply put, carried out under the auspices of the major empires and leveraging the persecution and discrimination against the minority group in question, to encourage class collaborationism.

We call this phenomenon "Zionism" when we refer to the particular project that utilizes Jewish aesthetics and tries to recruit among Jews — which is after all the only extant form of this phenomenon, by the quirks of history — but the exact same phenomenon can really show its ugly face among absolutely any stratified diaspora group for which the stars happen to align, and I think this is worth remembering: a bunch of Jews didn't just suddenly decide one day to become genocidal maniacs for no particular reason, there are rather material causes behind everything that's happened.

Not that I'm an expert on the topic, anyways.