By: Yoseph Leib Needelman-Ruiz (Ibn Mardachya)
Cannabis (kaneh bosem) is one of the only spices in the ancient anointing oil, as described in the Torah, along...
The cultural gaslighting of the Jewish community is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore in the cannabis industry, as young cannabis activists are publicly calling for the death of Zionists and the destruction of the state of Israel on social media.
During this open season of antisemitism when ancient resentments have mixed with modern revisionism to create a potent new version of anti-Jewish hatred circulated in the media and sanctified by academia, it feels like allies are hard to find.
“Anti-Jewish bias? But there are so many Jews in cannabis.” I never know if someone says this as a complaint or as an observation, but it always makes me uncomfortable because the observation is a potent source of implicit, anti-Jewish bias.
If the aim is to empower students to improve the cannabis industry, then we need to teach Philosophy of Cannabis to question and disrupt the reproduction of systemic inequalities that characterize every industry in our late-stage capitalist economy.
Coates refuses to consider what it means to exist as a remnant of our people, violently removed from the world in the European-wide effort to achieve a “final solution” to the problem of Jews—an existential threat to the white race.
The reason we expected more support and empathy from the cannabis community relates to the pivotal role that Israeli Jews have played in the history of cannabis research and advocacy, supported by a culture that values life over politics, guided by the Jewish effort to reduce suffering to repair the world (tikkun olam).
