Ireland's Jewish community

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

That's probably the un-funniest joke I've seen on this website in a long time, and I'm the author of a fair few in that category myself.

Visitors of this website love regurgitating old jokes and ideologies. That poster in particular could do with visiting some of the sites where the Nazis committed their atrocities. It might teach him not to be so flippant.

My favourite Jewish joke is, (fingers off the trigger Mods!) from Groucho Marx.

He was trying to get into a pool at a country club and was told there were no Jews allowed. He said, "My wife is only half Jewish, can she go in up to her waist?"

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

Your summary of the situation might be too kind. Corbyn has praised a book about Jews being in charge of international finance as "brilliant".

Maybe Corbyn didn't really read the book whose foreword he wrote, but when you add it to all of the other genuine concerns about his stance on anti-semitism, there are legitimate concerns about him.

This is a bigger issue in the UK than it is in Ireland, because we have almost no Jewish population.

But the only Jewish people I know live in London, this is a real issue for them and their families. It's not nice to reflect on the fact that your next leader might object to your existence. I'm on the left, maybe further to the left than Corbyn says he is, but even I couldn't tolerate him.

Yet there's no evidence Corbyn is antisemetic, certainly not enough to cause legitimate fear should he become Prime Minister. In fact we've had decades of bigoted Tories and things haven't gone too far off track until pretty recently and from the far right not left.
There is a smear campaign though. Case in point, a thread on the Irish Jewish community warning us about Jeremy Corbyn.

I've met two in Ireland, a German exchange student who turned out to be great craic after I thought her to be very humourless for the first 6 months we were in the same year. Lost touch a year or two after she went back home.

The other was a friend of a relation we met at a house party a good while back. He had a very dry sense of humour and we had great hopballs off each other all night. He got married in London a while after and moved over as the community seems too small to be self sustainable now.

My Uncle would know quite a few in Dublin as he used do a lot on business with Israel and they seem a great people for networking. It's a great pity the community seems to be dying out now, there are a great number of interesting characters here down the years.

There's a small but very well integrated Jewish population in Ireland that goes way back. I think some people sometimes make sweeping assumptions that absolutely everyone in Ireland's Catholic or protestant (and usually they define that as C of I). Ireland was fairly homogeneous but I think it's a lot more diverse than we give it credit for. I'd know a few families who were from more obscure religious backgrounds like Society of Friends / Quakers and I even have some indirect Indian connections in my family from the 19th century.

One of my great aunts was married to a Jewish guy (both long since passed away as she was way older than my grandparents). Their kids were raised more agnostic than Jewish or Catholic, but they'd be well aware of their Jewish and continental European heritage on one side - absolute Dubs to the core. My grandmother's GP (long retired) is Jewish, again old-school Dubs and one of those really warm characters who would bend over backwards to help.

I'd also know a few Jewish people in Cork City who are very much part of the old City Centre community and as Corkonian as a pint of Beamish.

I also shared a house with a gay couple in Boston who were both Jewish, and spent my time comparing Irish mammies and Jewish-American mammies - they're remarkably similar in terms of patronising behaviour.

I'd say you're seeing a growing community because more people are moving to Ireland to work in all sorts of sectors and it's actually a fairly open-minded kind of place with very little antisemitic issues.

There's a lot nonsense being whipped up by people conflating being Jewish with the dominant political parties in Israel. That's really unfair as one's a religious and cultural identity and the other is a group of political parties that are only representing the people they voted for. It would be like trying to blame every Irish person or Christian with connections to Ireland on the DUP's policies or something like that. Or, trying to claim every American supports Donald Trump. Or that every British person is somehow responsible for the far right of the Tories or every french person is somehow responsible for Le Pen.

While you can't generalise about any community, for the most part, I found American and British Jewish communities mostly very socially progressive, warm, friendly and open. It's a terrible shame that all this antisemitic bile is bubbling up.

Hurrache wrote: »

There's a forum and many other threads for this type of stuff.

There’s a clear agenda here though.

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

I'd love to be a supporter of Corbyn. I have UK voting rights, so have waited all my life to find a political leader like him, especially one on the radical left. It's just that Corbyn makes me really uncomfortable. I'm not sure how radical-left he is, but am pretty assured of his tolerance of anti-semitism.

Well then the propaganda has worked on you.

Here’s a question: do people think that Labour was always anti Semitic or that it has only become so recently. If so what mechanism was used to allow anti semites into the party. If Corbyn is anti Semitic then why wasn’t this mentioned when he was a backbencher ?