Reply to Turns out the Falls Church school board guy from the Koch thinktank, Ilya Shapiro, really is toxic

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Bizarrely xenophobic vibe to many comments in this thread . . . .[/quote]

Agree.  Seriously.

Ilya was born in Russia as a Jew.

Do most of you have any clue what that was like back then?

Along with the rest of his family, they were required to carry their “internal passport” whenever they set foot outside their apartment.  The police/military could, and often did, demand:  “your papers please!” (yeah, Nazi-style).

Only Ilya’s internal passport didn’t list him as “Russian;” only as a “Jew.”

Here:  I’m posting this link in light of the obvious ignorance of many of you when it comes to anti-Semitism:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Union[/quote]

I think you are blurring the line between authoritarianism in general and antisemitism. You are also blurring the line between Soviet antisemitism and Soviet nationality policy.

Everyone had to carry an internal passport, and anyone could be asked to provide it at any time. That's the authoritarianism talking, not the antisemitism. Now, Jews may have been asked to produce their papers more often, but the presence of an internal passport policy is not inherently antisemitic. It's bad and repressive policy, but not antisemitic.

Similarly, everyone had their nationality (ethnicity) listed in their passport. So, I would have a passport that said USSR on the front but was written in both Russian and in the national language of my country. Then, my nationality, address. marital status, military history, etc. are also referenced. So, they could look at my passport and know that I was a married ethnic Kazakh living in Ukraine who served in Afghanistan. That is again not great but it's not on its face evidence of antisemitism.

There were antisemitic policies like quotas on Jews at the best universities and in the Party. There was (and is) overall just generalized cultural antisemitism with a long history of violence. But citing the internal passports and nationality policy as evidence of antisemitism is muddying the issue and not convincing to anyone who grew up in that region or just knows about it.

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