Yes, Oh God Yes!

I find good posts on the subject of European Jews and Israel as "colonial" to be way to exciting for my own good. Seriously though, Matt's post is precisely what I would say on the subject. The aggressive effort to identify Jews as merely a particularly mistreated European ethnic group (a) totally ignore the existence of non-European Jews, who make up a majority of Israel's Jewish population, and (b) ignore how European Jews thought of themselves, which by and large was not as a sub-group within the larger European community. The post Matt is critiquing also obliterates any sense of Jewish agency, as it documents our history solely with regards to what Europeans wished to do with us, once they could no longer find a "use" for Jews. Our own thoughts and desires are total non-factors.