Sometime in 2015 I wrote an answer about how I quit learning Hebrew because my home life was too chaotic and hostile for me to focus. I ended up deleting this answer a few weeks later.
Around February of 2018 I started to go into detail about my upbringing being raised by a volatile and negligent single parent with a personality disorder.In those answers, I elaborated on how many of those experiences colored my life into adulthood. In writing these answers, I imagined that these were the kind of struggles foreign to those of a different background. That May, I scrolled through my Quora feed to find a woman with a similar answer across the computer screen,
Odd, but I brushed it off as a coincidence. Not many people were discussing self-sabotage at the time, but I expected there to be occasional overlap between the wording and content that was shared in my answers and in others'.
Although I assumed it was a coincidence, at that moment I already knew she was lying. Self-sabotage is a phenomenon that occurs exclusively to adults who experience sabotage on behalf of their parents as children. They do to themselves, as adults, what was done to them, because that's all they know. Hence it doesn't make any sense for a child to sabotage themselves unless the individual making the claim was making a short-sighted attempt to lie about their background. This woman had also written at length about how close she is to her parents, particularly her mother. Later she stated that she needed a “family of choice”. Exactly what “family of choice” did she need when she was close to her family of origin?
At this point I'd already unfollowed this woman. We had so many major disagreements that were fundamental to our worldview that I wasn't interested in what she had to say anyways. But at this point I was also convinced there was something very, very wrong.
It was also around this time that I dove deeper into overcoming the circumstances that I was a product of, and my confidence in myself and in my experiences started to take shape. I would no longer ignore minor slights, major abuses, discrimination towards me on the basis of class or ethnicity, and general tyranny. Learning to reframe my personal history, also taught me to reframe my upbringing. Previously, when looking back at the environment I grew up in, I would blame myself for near anything that happened to me. I would justify, rationalize, and minimize blatant discrimination and I would reason away why others deserved things that I didn't. In my teens and early twenties I found myself developing mental maps of justifications why I didn't deserve common courtesy that others did and all these maps led to the same place: lowered self esteem.
When Donald Trump was elected President many were shocked that it was done with the aid of "progressive" and "liberal" Israeli supporters, however the conservatism, racism, and classism of Israelis, and their supporters was all I'd ever known. I've never had a reason to believe that this movement was anything but a socially acceptable white power movement, because I had long known that they prioritized the fact that I was of mixed descent over the fact that, I, too was maternally Jewish. Over the past year of coming to terms with my abuse and accepting it for what it was, I have also come to accept that the community I grew up in (Zionist American) too, was equally as toxic.
It became even easier for me to draw parallels to the abuse I experienced and the ideology and implementation of Zionism, as I began to educate myself on the subject, and as Zionist Americans have quickly established their place in the Conservative sphere of politics.
Within the coming weeks, I noticed that this woman was rapidly trailing the content that I was following, the questions and answers I upvoted, and anything I associated with. Eventually I started to report it, every time it happened. Since the moderation were doing absolutely nothing to help, on September 28th, 2018, I decided to call out what was happening myself.
Despite this, she continued to appropriate my material. On August 17. 2018, I wrote an answer about the proposition that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez received from Ben Shapiro to debate.
As you can see she imitates minor elements of my statements in the beginning of her answer.
I wrote a post about this, which was later deleted by Quora: The Post that was Deleted by Quora
Later, on August 23rd of 2018, I opened up about the sexual assault I experienced by a former IDF solider at my High School.
Janelle Alicia Monroy's Answer to "What's something you've never told anyone?"
After my ban, this would later be imitated and published October 7th, 2018 by her. Never have I felt more disgusted and violated. This woman chose to take a story that was extremely personal to me and use it as her own, again. This was her disgusting way of saying, "I have power over you, you untermensch! Look how I can do whatever I want with your most personal story.”
Elke Weiss's answer to "What is your "me too" story?"
It’s not a coincidence that, as an Israel Government Fellow (1), she chose to stalk and harass one of the few, if not the only, self-identifying Mexican-American Jews on Quora. Much like the movement this woman supports, she operates with no boundaries, no care or concern for anyone that isn't her or part of her cause, and predatory towards those who are perceived as weak.
She's used to taking whatever she wants, when she can, because that’s the foundation of her worldview- supremacy.
Now, this woman has a history of taking any situation, even the situations where she outright exploiting others, and calling herself the victim. Forcibly removing Palestinians from their homes and bombing them? Her response would state, "I'm the victim of these terrorists!"
This was seen when she was accused of racism, and she managed to get away with it because people can’t see past her confidence and charm.
This woman is well aware that within the context of the U.S., Mexican Americans are held in contempt and she took full advantage of this by appropriating my stories, mimicking my content, and using the information I posted on psychology and abuse that took my hours, months, and years to accumulate. There is absolutely nothing progressive about this, no matter how she tries to spin it. This is a blatant abuse of power and of the sympathy she has garnered for past injustices against Jewish people (which she has no right to use to defend Zionism in the first place) and her knowledge that the mainstream public is often too ignorant or preoccupied with their own lives to do their own research on the subject, has given her a window of opportunity to do whatever she wants towards me.
What she'll do is look at this and claim some sort of "anti-semitism" is at play. Someone like me must be "anti-semitic" for pointing out her outright theft from me and harassment towards me. Mind you, she'll do this while completely ignoring that I, too, am Jewish. Now I ask, why is what she's doing to me not characterized as antisemitism or Hispanophobia for that matter?
But this is where White Power and Nationalism come into play. Without the silent support of ethnocentrists, White supremacists, conservatives, and nationalists, this woman would have no ground to stand on and people would see no right for her interests and needs to be prioritized over my own.
None.
So she can all herself "liberal" all day, but the kind of "liberalism" she possesses and goes out of her way to benefit from, is the same liberalism that believes it's necessary to characterizes non-whites, non-white Ashkenazim, all other non-White Jews, and Muslims as animals, criminals, and unevolved. Without those conservative pedestals holding her up, her arguments would have nothing to stand on. Her version of Liberalism is dependent on the support of the Right Wing chiming in to her defense and on some level she knows it. The fact alone that she and her supporters would likely be willing deny my Jewishness is indicative of their racism as well.
Recently she even went so far as to say Jews who don't support Israel aren't real Jews. Mind you this is the same woman who claimed to be victimized when someone asked, "Is Elke Weiss a real jew?" She might as well come out and say, "The rules are for thee, but not for me!" She's made it clear that she believes she has the authority to characterize others any way she likes, but others can not call her own behavior what it is.
Elke Weiss's Answer to "As a Jew do you agree that Israel shouldn’t exist until the Messiah/Prophet comes?"
Over a month after I was banned, she went on to name an Israeli man with second degree connections to the Daily Stormer as a “hero”. https://www.quora.com/Is-Ari-Fuld-who-was-recently-murdered-by-an-Arab-terrorist-a-well-known-Israeli-activist/answer/Elke-Weiss
At this point, the suspicions I had been confirmed, it’s the same use of ethnocentrism, imperialism, and appropriation which caused this woman to deny the suffering of Palestinians, that was now being used against me.
I can go on and on providing examples that evidence that her values are purely conservative and the the enormous amount of lies she has presented, but that’s not the main problem. The biggest issue here is that Quora has chosen to stand on the side of oppression and hate. Whether their reasoning be due to external pressures or be it embedded in their own belief system, they are standing on the wrong side of history.
1. As indicated in her biography: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/elke-weiss/
So she can all herself "liberal" all day, but the kind of "liberalism" she possesses and goes out of her way to benefit from, is the same liberalism that believes it's necessary to characterizes non-whites, non-white Ashkenazim, all other non-White Jews, and Muslims as animals, criminals, and unevolved. Without those conservative pedestals holding her up, her arguments would have nothing to stand on. Her version of Liberalism is dependent on the support of the Right Wing chiming in to her defense and on some level she knows it. The fact alone that she and her supporters would likely be willing deny my Jewishness is indicative of their racism as well.
Recently she even went so far as to say Jews who don't support Israel aren't real Jews. Mind you this is the same woman who claimed to be victimized when someone asked, "Is Elke Weiss a real jew?" She might as well come out and say, "The rules are for thee, but not for me!" She's made it clear that she believes she has the authority to characterize others any way she likes, but others can not call her own behavior what it is.
Elke Weiss's Answer to "As a Jew do you agree that Israel shouldn’t exist until the Messiah/Prophet comes?"
Over a month after I was banned, she went on to name an Israeli man with second degree connections to the Daily Stormer as a “hero”. https://www.quora.com/Is-Ari-Fuld-who-was-recently-murdered-by-an-Arab-terrorist-a-well-known-Israeli-activist/answer/Elke-Weiss
At this point, the suspicions I had been confirmed, it’s the same use of ethnocentrism, imperialism, and appropriation which caused this woman to deny the suffering of Palestinians, that was now being used against me.
I can go on and on providing examples that evidence that her values are purely conservative and the the enormous amount of lies she has presented, but that’s not the main problem. The biggest issue here is that Quora has chosen to stand on the side of oppression and hate. Whether their reasoning be due to external pressures or be it embedded in their own belief system, they are standing on the wrong side of history.
1. As indicated in her biography: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/elke-weiss/
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