Michael Sappir
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m.sappir.net
Michael Sappir
@m.sappir.net
2K followers 1.2K following 830 posts
Jewish-Israeli, against apartheid and genocide. Co-host parallelweltpalaestina.info (in German), co-founder @thediasporist.bsky.social
📍Chicago
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m.sappir.net
lol tell me you're lying about reading marx without saying you're lying about reading marx
A: "I've read Marx it's all very pretty in his books isn't it" B: "? What" A: "They're very pretty ideas, but everywhere someone tries to force communism to magically "happen" it always ends in a bloody tyrannical takeover Bc everyone can't do everything all the time! Best we can do is elect someone we know will fight for our collective interest & if they don't we vote em out"
November 4, 2025 at 5:05 PM
m.sappir.net
Wish I had known of this sticker (h/t @rabinova.bsky.social in Berlin) when I wrote this... 😳
Sticker reading "Antizionism is a Neo-Nazi Movement" with an antifascist action logo
October 15, 2025 at 3:39 PM
m.sappir.net
טיפה חדשות טובות, כמה שזה נחוץ עכשיו 🥹
טראמפ: אליזבט צורקוב, שהוחזקה בידי מיליציה פרו־איראנית בעיראק, שוחררה ונמצאת בשגרירות ארה"ב בבגדאד נשיא ארצות הברית דונלד טראמפ הודיע כי אליזבט צורקוב, שהוחזקה בידי מיליציה פרו־איראנית בעיראק, שוחררה ונמצאת בשגרירות ארה"ב בבגדאד. צורקוב, בת 38, היא אשת אקדמיה ומומחית לענייני סוריה והמזרח התיכון, ובעלת אזרחות רוסית. היא נכנסה לעיראק בעזרת דרכונה הרוסי לצורך עבודת דוקטורט ומחקר אקדמי מטעם אוניברסיטת פרינסטון שבארה"ב, ונחטפה במרץ 2023.
September 9, 2025 at 8:39 PM
m.sappir.net
Disturbing footage: Berlin police violently assaulting peaceful protestors for Palestine, today (July 24, 2025.) Credit: Unpublished.de (found on Instagram)
July 24, 2025 at 7:51 PM
m.sappir.net
Respectfully, this official IDF website is full of these:

www.idf.il/%D7%90%D7%AA...
Screenshot of idf.il website
July 6, 2025 at 7:14 PM
m.sappir.net
The question of antisemitism in political violence directed against support for Israel can seem impossibly tangled, even distasteful.
I'm so grateful to Daniel May at @jewishcurrents.bsky.social who waded into it nonetheless, and teased it apart with such nuance.
jewishcurrents.org/the-tangled-...
Article quote: I understand why some find the distinction irrelevant. Jews are being killed and attacked for their views; this is undeniably upsetting. "The very conversation-is this antisemitic or not— trivializes the issue," Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, said on a recent podcast. "We Jews who support Israel are now being targeted by acts of violence. Does it matter whether somebody calls it antisemitism or not?" In a sense, Kurtzer is correct. The severity of the violence should, on its own, offer sufficient grounds for condemnation. Yet for American Jewish leaders and politicians, it clearly matters a great deal whether or not this violence is called "antisemitism." Article quote: But if one's interest is the safety of Jews, then it's imperative to examine the motivation of the violence as stated by those that committed it. Doing so makes plain the uncomfortable but increasingly obvious fact that when associated with Jews as a whole, Israel's annihilatory campaign of indiscriminate bombing and starvation in Gaza puts Jews around the world in danger. Those committed to preventing such attacks should be working to stop that destruction and to refute that association. Article quote: This knot - in which Zionism and Judaism merge so completely that opposition to Zionism becomes indistinct from opposition to Judaism - was tied at the birth of Zionism as a political program in the late 19th century. The early political Zionists were not only interested in creating a Jewish refuge, but in transforming what it meant to be Jewish. Leon Pinsker, whose 1882 pamphlet Auto-Emancipation is often considered the first text of political Zionism, argued that legal equality in Europe was inherently unable to end discrimination against Jews because it couldn't make others see Jews as equal. Article quote: ...there are clear reasons for hostility to Zionism. And if support for Israel is essential to being Jewish, then hostility to Israel necessarily entails hostility to Jews. The dynamic feeds on itself like an ouroboros: The hostility proves to Jews that antisemitism is a malignant and eternal force, which reinforces the idea that a militarized ethnostate is essential for Jewish safety, which increases support for that state's security, which leads to justifications for Israel's ongoing campaigns of dispossession, which increases the hostility. Rinse, repeat. This is why those that warn of an increasing threat to Jews are right to do so, even if they misattribute the reasons. Studies have long shown that as Israeli violence increases, so too does violence against Jews.
June 12, 2025 at 9:30 AM
m.sappir.net
Da sich Tom mit Begriffen ein bissl schwer tut, habe ich freundlicherweise ein illustratives Beispiel für "Eternalismus" gefunden.
Aus: Uhlig und Potter, "Israelhass und Antisemitismus", in: Judenhass Underground, Hrsg. Potter und Lauer, 2023, S.24
Auszug aus einem Text: "Israelbezogener Antisemitismus ist nicht etwas gänzlich anderes als die sonstigen Formen des Judenhasses. Im Gegenteil: Er bedient sich derselben Motive und Argumentationen wie der offene Antisemitismus. Monika Schwarz-Friesel beschreibt in ihrem Buch Judenhass im Internet das „Chamäleon Antisemitismus". Dessen Kern bleibt immer gleich, doch seine Erscheinungsform ändert sich und passt sich historisch an die jeweilige Umwelt an. Israelbezogener Antisemitismus bedient sich klassischer antisemitischer Motive wie dem Vorwurf der Verschlagenheit, Unmenschlichkeit, Gier und illegitimen Macht."
June 7, 2025 at 9:21 AM
m.sappir.net
Oh doch
Bild von einer Google Suche, die den Artikel bei der JA zeigt
May 30, 2025 at 7:56 AM
m.sappir.net
80 Prozent gegen "Israels militärisches Vorgehen gegen die Hamas"! Man kann sich nur vorstellen, wie die Zahlen ausfallen würden, wenn das Framing etwa die Menschen vor Ort in den Mittelpunkt stellen würde.
May 23, 2025 at 1:23 PM
m.sappir.net
Israels eigene Linkspartei begrüßt den Linke-BPT-Beschluss
Tweet von Hadash: „We support the decision by @dieLinke to adopt the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, and encourage other parties to do the same. The fight against antisemitism is critical, but it must not be used to silence necessary left criticism of Israel and its violent policies.“
May 12, 2025 at 11:59 AM
m.sappir.net
Zum Vergleich, die IHRA-Arbeitsdefinition, mit der Erweiterung, den die Bundesregierung daran hängt.
Lest sie hier im Bild oder auf der offiziellen Website: www.antisemitismusbeauftragter.de/Webs/BAS/DE/...

Wer definiert hier den Antisemitismus politisch um? Die Wissenschaftler oder die BuReg?
Die internationale Arbeitsdefinition von Antisemitismus lautet: "Antisemitismus ist eine bestimmte Wahrnehmung von Juden, die sich als Hass gegenüber Juden ausdrücken kann. Der Antisemitismus richtet sich in Wort oder Tat gegen jüdische oder nichtjüdische Einzelpersonen und/oder deren Eigentum sowie gegen jüdische Gemeindeinstitutionen oder religiöse Einrichtungen." Die Bundesregierung hat außerdem folgende Erweiterung verabschiedet: "Darüber hinaus kann auch der Staat Israel, der dabei als jüdisches Kollektiv verstanden wird, Ziel solcher Angriffe sein."
May 12, 2025 at 7:54 AM
m.sappir.net
Obszön der Vorwurf, mit der Annahme der Jerusalemer Erklärung definiere man den Antisemitismus um.
Lest einfach deren Definition: "Antisemitismus ist Diskriminierung, Vorurteil, Feindseligkeit oder Gewalt gegen Jüdinnen und Juden als Jüdinnen und Juden (oder jüdische Einrichtungen als jüdische)."
Antisemitismus ist Diskriminierung, Vorurteil, Feindseligkeit oder Gewalt gegen Jüdinnen und Juden als Jüdinnen und Juden (oder jüdische Einrichtungen als jüdische)
May 12, 2025 at 7:54 AM
m.sappir.net
Looks like this, in the settings
Image of the Apple Intelligence & Siri screen in macOS Settings
May 7, 2025 at 4:30 PM
m.sappir.net
If he’s pausing tariffs on most countries but raising them further on China, we’re still in very deep shit. Why are markets reacting as if this is an actual change of course?
April 9, 2025 at 6:52 PM
m.sappir.net
Fascinating and illuminating discussion of knowledge, technology, deskilling, and power (from Why We Fear AI @hagenblix.bsky.social )
A world dominated by such hypothetical tools would seem to have little room for humans to act purposefully on the world, or derive any meaning from life at all. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once said: "Al will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies. "18 If the aim seems absurd, we must remember that it represents the logical endpoint of one of capitalism's tendencies, the drive to deskill, to transfer knowledge from workers to machines, from humans to capital. Speculations about AGI are, in this sense, speculations about the endpoint of the drive to deskill: ultimately targeting all human knowledge. That is not to say that this is a plausible outcome; there are many countervailing forces (not least the fact that we continually generate new knowledge and new tasks). Indeed, capitalism's relationship to knowledge is rather paradoxical: on the one hand, there is a tendency to universalize certain kinds of knowledge, to make sure everyone is in possession of it-since that, too, is a form of deskilling. That is, if everyone knows a thing, then no group of workers can gain special bargaining power from possessing that knowledge. We can take reading and writing as an example, and we could look at many lobbying efforts and political arguments over what should be included in school curricula through that lens. Even the investments that many big tech companies have been making into their own kind of schools, so-called coding academies, can be understood in the light of these universalizing pressures: make everyone into a programmer, and programmers can no longer demand higher-than-average wages. The story of the transistor illustrated the changing nature of our tools: technological developments have increasingly severed our relationship to our tools' internal functioning. We suggested that we experience this as an increase in complexity. But what is that increasing and mysterious "complexity" other than knowledge that is purposefully embedded in the machine or the managerial apparatuses, in order to make it unnecessary for workers and users, for us, to understand it. After all, for every complex aspect of our technology, there is someone who understands, who does know. Complexity is decidedly not the same as genuine incomprehensi-bility. That is not to say that the scale and differentiation of new scientific and technological knowledge have not played a part. But under capitalism, new knowledge, and in particular knowledge of tools and labor processes is continually and systematically put on a need-to-know basis, and often sealed off, as an effect of deskilling. The vanishing of our tools' comprehensibility is not simply an accidental byproduct of technological development. The closing off of our tools from view serves a particular purpose—to increase the power of one class, the owners of those tools, over the other one, those who work with them. These economic pressures and developments end up affecting all kinds of tools, whether they are capital or consumer goods. From computers to DNA testing services, many things do, after all, transition from one domain to the other, as their prices fall, and new uses are invented. If the backs of our smartphones are literally and figuratively glued shut, then this is not simply an inevitable side effect of technological development, but about locking knowledge behind closed doors, and sealed backs, about putting knowledge on a need-to-know basis. In other words, it is the fact that knowledge is power-the power to bargain for higher wages, and better working conditions, or the power to decrease wages, and increase capital's profit and control over work-that made our tools into what they are: objects whose complexity enables us to be ever more productive, but that also continually shift power from workers to capital. The vanishing of our tool's internal functioning went hand in hand with a rise of innumerable and ever larger bureaucracies, even as we lived in times dominated by a neoliberal self-justification of capitalism that perpetually claims to be opposed to bureaucracies. Such justifications even claim … …in productivity economically feasible, that's what it will do-and wherever deskilling is economically feasible, that's what it will do. Deskilling, however, requires that knowledge be put on a need-to-know basis, transferred away from workers and embedded in managerial and specialist bureaucracies. At first, this may only create managerial bureaucracies. But soon, even engineers that started out as purely technical specialists are more and more involved in the planning of production processes, in gathering knowledge to exercise control. Wherever oversight is transformed into a technological property of tools (from the steam engine to the Amazon Al), engineers become techno-managers. Nowhere are engineering departments concerned solely with productivity, they are concerned with costs per piece, and hence they turn into techno-bureaucracies. Management and technical specialists start forming mixed bureaucracies: technology and management, tools and control are ever more deeply intertwined. And whenever those bureaucratic structures get big enough, the same principles of deskilling are applied internally as well. A process of recursive deskilling and bureaucracy creation unfolds, and is unfolding every day. The managerial pyramid turns into a professional-managerial pyramid. It grows incessantly, as long as it can keep overall wages down and make sure that the ever increasing productivity is turned into profit-and never into social wealth, into more interesting and engaging workplaces, or into simply more free time.
April 8, 2025 at 2:57 AM
m.sappir.net
Yeah I refuse to believe this shit is in earnest
April 4, 2025 at 1:14 AM
m.sappir.net
“for a language model, text does not represent anything; a model does not know that text represents something for people. You cannot even tell it that the world exists, since it would mistake the telling for merely more words.” 👏🏻 👏🏻👏🏻
A language model is Kafkaesque by design and from the moment of its random initialization. A human-staffed bureaucracy can devise ways of checking and re-tooling the match between its symbols and the real world; it is, at least in principle, capable of knowing that the world exists and is not identical to its symbolic representations (even if the structure doesn't know, certainly the people inside can, be they fellow victims of the system or not). In contrast, for a language model, text does not represent anything; a model does not know that text represents something for people. You cannot even tell it that the world exists, since it would mistake the telling for merely more words. Like a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, a model's only reality is text itself. The bureaucracy may have forgotten that its forms represented something, a language model has never been able to know it in the first place.
March 21, 2025 at 12:31 AM
m.sappir.net
I have been tearing through Why We Fear AI, by @hagenblix.bsky.social & Ingeborg Glimmer. I feel like this passage gets to something fundamental and uncanny language models: They feel like they are someone and no one, familiar and alien, all at once. And it’s because they kind of are!
Photo of a book page, reading: Labor now is not just copied, but wholly metabolized by the machine, taken in, digested, dissolved, rebuilt into rewired circuitry. The ghost labor in the Al that haunts our imagination today, appears not as human-shaped, but as incomprehensible, not as our past labor, but as a force that is wholly alien. Vonnegut imagined the ghost labor that underlies the automatic lathe as a conspicuous gap, recognizable as an absence, something we could miss, but today's real ghost labor has become invisible and unrecognizable, part of the "inside" of the black box. It disappears not merely from view but from our imagination as well, camouflaged in a machine that eats up people's labor, and excretes faux autonomy. The gap becomes a shapeless void, indistinguishable from the machine itself, animating it from within. And precisely because ghost labor is no longer recognizable in the Al as our own past labor, because it makes that very past labor invisible, we are pushed to imagine that the past human agency that Al recycles must really be the Al's own agency. It is the systematic lack of comprehensibility and the invisibilization of human labor that mark the contrast between the imagination of the 1950s and today, in how we relate to these objects, and consequently how we imagine the object as object-as player piano, or as piano Player, a ghost of past labor, or simply a ghost, as an object or a subject, as like us, or alien to us, as a part of us or apart from us.
March 16, 2025 at 10:36 PM
m.sappir.net
The state of Israel sure has a funny way of protecting Jewish people around the world from antisemitism 🤔
Jan. 23, 2025 tweet from Netanyahu defending Musk against the “smear” of calling out his Hitler salutes, citing Musk’s support for Israeli violence
January 23, 2025 at 2:51 PM
m.sappir.net
Great day to remember to turn off autoplay. Taking control of what goes into your brain is kindness and self-defense.
January 20, 2025 at 9:57 PM
m.sappir.net
Aus gegebenem Anlass: lest doch bitte (wieder) einmal Yossis Kolumne vom Juni @yossibartal.bsky.social
www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1182...
Wagenknecht ist nicht allein. Tatsächlich wird in den Medien oft die Vorstellung verbreitet, mein migrantisch geprägter Bezirk sei eine No-Go-Area für Schwule, Juden oder sogar für Frauen ohne Kopftuch. Einmal, als ich zu Recherchezwecken in Greifswald war, wo die AfD soeben mehr als ein Drittel aller Stimmen bekam, wurde ich von einem Barkeeper besorgt gefragt, ob ich keine Angst hätte, so nah an der Sonnenallee zu wohnen. Der süße blonde Mann hatte bis zu unserer Begegnung zwar noch nie einen Juden in echt getroffen, war aber fest davon überzeugt, mein Viertel, wo ich ständig auf Hebräisch-Sprechende und knutschende Queers stoße, sei für mich extrem gefährlich.
November 19, 2024 at 10:08 AM
m.sappir.net
November 8, 2024 at 7:21 AM
m.sappir.net
The discord between these two lines 😧
November 8, 2024 at 7:04 AM
m.sappir.net
A couple of great passages from @buerubner.bsky.social ‘s text that I snapped along the way
December 28, 2023 at 8:52 AM
m.sappir.net
Hervorragendes Interview. Ich finde diese Passage über die Singularität besonders treffend. Eine glasklare Artikulierung des universalistischen „Nie wieder“s, wie dieses häufig verstanden wird unter progressiven Juden.
December 16, 2023 at 9:08 AM