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Comment by noworriesnate | Hacker News Reader

I mean, in a broad sense this is true. But do you really think Sam Altman wouldn’t be in the news if he wasn’t Jewish? What about SBF? Or go back further, do you think people know about Einstein or Karl Marx only because they were Jewish?

Like it or not, Jews have been involved at a high level in a lot of pivotal developments in the west.

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I don't think that "No Jews No News" hints that Altman is in the news only because he's Jewish. It means that people care about _bad things_ more when they're done by Jews. The fact that Einstein is Einstein and Marx is Marx is only relevant if you're claiming that the reason people like blaming Jews is due to jealously of their relative success.

I don‘t think that is special about jews.

Just look at the news after a knife attack or a shooting or assault with a car or rape.

The religion and the nationality (of the parents or grandparents) is important to know how it stays relevant in the news.

People like it when bad things are done by people who have a characteristic that distinguishes them from themselves.

We prefer to think bad things are mostly done by strangers

The idea as I understand it (and I'm not expressing personal agreement with it) is that similar things can be done by non-Jews and they will not be newsworthy. For example, Assad murdered around 500k Syrians and yet Google searching for "Genocide Syria" yields 1/4 of the results "Genocide Israel" gives, even though the number of deaths in Gaza is 1/10. Similar story for "Famine Yemen" vs "Famine Gaza". Or the fact that the UN has condemned Israel more times than the rest of the world combined. No Jews No News means that bad things are happening everywhere all the time, but they have higher likelihood of reaching the news if the one to blame is Jewish. In other words it's not about how you phrase the story, it's about which stories are told more than others.

No, the “No Jews, No Jews” saying doesn’t have anything to do with the perceived negativity of the news item. It has to do with the fact that Jews were involved in some way (good or bad).

I’m pointing out is that maybe that’s because Jews are just more involved in pivotal developments than are non-Jews.

Making this about “bad news” implies that there’s systematic racism against Jews in the news industry, and I’m sorry but that seems a bit far fetched.

Look at this headline, it's framed as an Israeli company spying on European journalists. Obvious negative connotation.

Meanwhile it's actually the government of Italy that spied on the journalists.

> Jews are just more involved in pivotal developments than are non-Jews.

What? That’s either some exceptionalism or scapegoating. Or both.

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