love peace and chase after peace.

stay strong. survive. 💛 🧡 ✡️ 🪬 this is a sideblog run by Jewish women with disparate backgrounds.🪬✡️ jumblr and allied friends, we love you 💙 am yisrael chai

[palominojacoby]

Cara Drook, Reclaiming La Belle Juive, (2022 –).

'"La belle Juive" translates to "the beautiful Jewess." It is an archetype of Jewish women that is repeatedly shown in paintings and media throughout history. "La belle Juive" is rooted in antisemitism and misogyny. My goal with this collection is to have Jewish women take control of their narrative and reclaim "La belle Juive." I want to return dignity to the subjects and show what truly makes Jewish women beautiful.'

[jewish-vents]

A trans girl I know from turkeye just posted "debunking zionist propaganda" and the "propaganda" it was debunking was Being Jewish with Jonah Platt. I'm so sad. I don't want to unfollow all my friends. My face feels hot. I don't know how to react. Do I unfollow her? I love Jonah Platt. How are we ever going to fight back if our best speakers are smeared as zionist propaganda

.

[chutzpahchesed]

“How are we ever going to fight back if our best speakers are smeared as zionist propaganda” this is the point, sadly. it’s the point of utilizing the word as a slur, it’s the point of degrading and dismissing any Jew that can be targeted with it. it’s a silencing and delegitimization tactic. if our best and most effective and educated speakers can be instantly dismissed with shorthand for evil, genocidal, fascist, inhuman (which is what the usage of “Zionist” has become), then of course there’s no point in listening to them. in fact, paying them any attention at all, unless it’s to send them hate, is tantamount to a thought crime, and punishable by ostracization from the in-group as a traitor to the cause. it’s a very easy, very effective way to make sure Jewish creators will not be heard or taken seriously (unless, of course, they’re the ones who can be tokenized). making sure that it’s widely accepted that anyone who can be called (((Zionist))) is discredited is the best way to make that a reality, and it’s why we’re seeing it happen across every spectrum - the arts, academia, publishing, medicine, politics, and so on. we are not supposed to be able to fight back.

[judai-sm]

I’m going to say it actually. It’s insane to call Israel genocidal for defending themselves against a terrorist group founded with the intent to kill Jews. Also insane to say you’re against genocide while advocating for the destruction of the country that houses half the Jews in the world.

Do you think the Jews in Israel will be allowed to stay in Palestine if Israel is dissolved? You’d do well to learn the history of what happens to Jews in Muslim countries.

[gliklofhameln]

Remembrance, Marc Chagall, 1914.

[edithsweetithh]

can we stop with the "epstein class" bullshit. if you mean billionaires say billionaires. if you mean child predators say child predators. if you mean corrupt men in power say corrupt men in power. you sound like an edgy 13yo who just discovered communism trying to sound more politically educated than they actually are

[failure-artist]

if you mean jews, step off a cliff

[maimonideznuts]

New Jewish students apprehensive about being on campus, commission hears

The president of a Jewish student body tells antisemitism royal commission that he had a relatively untroubled childhood until he went to un

A Jewish physics professor at Melbourne University has described his fear after finding 20 masked people occupying his office.

A year later, a death threat against him was graffitied on a university noticeboard. Professor Steven Prawer today told the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion the University of Melbourne failed to adequately respond.

James Oaten reports.

Professor Prawer also told the commission a death threat had been graffitied on a university noticeboard, but he did not learn about it until weeks later. "They had removed the graffiti and didn't think it was appropriate to tell me that this had been posted," Professor Prawer said. He said he was "deeply disappointed in the university", and it was hard not to think management had tried to hide it from him.

[afurioushawk]

The left are calling them "low info voters" again.

[chutzpahchesed]

[femalegothic]

also Argentina's ties to Israel are that they refused to extradite Nazis after the holocaust so Mossad agents had to covertly capture and smuggle them out of Argentina to stand trial

[starg2zerlion]

Argentina. One of THE football countries. On the continent that dominates football. Three time winner of the world cup. Of course they won its what they do. I dont follow sports at all and I knew this! The fact that people are blaming the Jews for this is insane (although unfortunately expected)

Also I dont think Messi means anything in Hebrew anyways, the closest word I can think of is Masi (my tax) but also my Hebrew sucks so idk

[chutzpahchesed]

GOP primary debate goes off the rails

The GOP candidates for governor offered conspiracy theories, unverified heroic stories and a prayer in their only appearance together.

Scott Bottoms being an unhinged antisemite, Victor Marx (the nominee) being…unhinged as a whole. great choices happening in US politics right now. none of these candidates have a chance at winning in Colorado, but the fact that the men here were serious choices in any way is concerning.

Victor Marx, a self-described ‘high-risk humanitarian,’ will win GOP nomination for Colorado governor, CNN projects | CNN Politics

Marine veteran Victor Marx, whose wild claims – including saying he was forced to kill a man at age 7 – have drawn widespread attention and

Ministry founder Victor Marx wins Republican primary for Colorado governor

Marx, who has gained notice due to a claim he killed a man when he was a child, will advance to the general election against state Attorney

Victor Marx, the Republican nominee for Colorado governor, has an unusual backstory. Here’s what to know.

First-time political candidate Victor Marx pulled off a narrow win in the Republican primary for Colorado governor. Here’s a look at the uno

[jewish-vents]

I take antisemitism so personally and I can’t stop. Idk how jews in the public eye do it

.

[mariacallous]

I think it’s kind of insane to think that blocking defensive aid like Iron Dome would mean that Israel would be *less incentivized* to engage in military offenses, or be more restrained in what it does.

[mariacallous]

[inlowearthorbit]

It's born of a severe lack of understanding of what motivates Israel and Israelis.

[imyourbadjew]

They really do believe that if not for the iron dome and bomb shelters Israel would just steamroll all over the Middle East and create the grand judean empire…

The only thing that will happen is that more innocents will die and Israel will be incentivised to more aggressively eliminate threats. The iron dome is what allows it to have MORE restraint.

But I guess it’s too much to ask AOC to actually understand geopolitics.

[chutzpahchesed]

In seismic shift, more than 100 House Democrats vote to end Israel aid

The amendment to block military assistance failed, but partisan split cemented the increasingly polarized view of the U.S. ally.

[chutzpahchesed]

saw this really horrible comment today about how “Jewish women love to lie about rape,” and yesterday I saw what’s basically the inverse, “Jewish men love sexual assault, the majority of them are predators and rapists” along with the “61% of Israeli men” disinformation, and none of this is new - both are actually very, very old, both Jewish women being portrayed as liars and “harlots,” and Jewish men being portrayed as innately predatory - but it’s so disturbing seeing the way it’s gaining traction, and knowing that quite a bit of it in these awful posts is stemming from denial of the atrocities of 10/7 and of what was inflicted on the hostages (and those crimes were perpetrated against Israeli victims regardless of gender).

I was looking something up the other day and got a result from the 1930s subreddit, and there was a comment that had been removed by the moderators, but to which someone had replied (and that was still up) telling them they were an antisemite for saying that Jews are the cause of all the abuses in Hollywood and that they’d never generalize like that about any other group of people. this doesn’t mean there haven’t been abusive Jewish men, especially in positions of power, there certainly have been, and we know who they are, and the Jewish community as a whole overwhelmingly condemns them, but their individual behavior is used to smear and demonize world Jewry in a particular way. it’s scary seeing the stereotypes and suspicions and vitriolic attitudes continue to grow.

I’m not really going anywhere useful with this, but it occurred to me how often we mention that Jews are only 0.2% of the world population, and how few people ever really know or even interact with Jewish people. sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be more useful to point out that the majority, 99.8% of the world is non-Jewish. of course it’s easy to believe such terrible things and to scapegoat such a small group, and of course it’s almost impossible to combat it or to remove it from centuries’ worth of ingrained culture.

[chutzpahchesed]

Truth Hurts: Ro Khanna Just Copied Lizzo’s Move

Has Free Palestine become reputation rehab?

On Saturday, my phone showed me Ro Khanna, standing in the West Bank, announcing that the IDF had detained him. I study attention for a living. The Tel Aviv Institute exists because my colleagues and I believe you can learn more about antisemitism from engagement data than from statements of concern. So when the Khanna story landed, I did what I always do. I scrolled back a week.

On Monday, Khanna was calling on Graham Platner to quit the Maine Senate race. He had rallied with Platner during the campaign. Platner is the candidate with a tattoo widely understood to be a Nazi symbol, which he says he never recognized as one and has since covered, and who was accused last week of rape by a former girlfriend. He calls the allegation categorically false. The Maine Democratic Party’s executive director called it credible. By Wednesday, Platner had suspended his campaign, and Khanna was standing in Khirbet Zanuta. By Saturday, Khanna was posting that settlers with American-made rifles had held him and that soldiers had sided with them. A fundraising email went out shortly after the post. He told The New York Times it was unwise to detain long-shot presidential candidates, and told Reuters the trip had left him more resolved to consider running in 2028.

Parts of his account are contested. The IDF says its soldiers dispersed the settlers and reopened the road. Israeli police say the group had entered a closed military zone. But masked, armed men did block a congressman’s bus; a New York Times photographer witnessed it. Settler violence in the West Bank is real and deserves condemnation from anyone who claims to care about Israel’s future. The incident happened. What interests me is the week that led up to it. Khanna began it tied to a collapsing campaign and ended it as a wronged man with a viral clip and a donation link.

Once you see the shape of that week, you see it everywhere.

I had never heard of Kneecap until footage surfaced of a band member holding a Hezbollah flag while, prosecutors said, chanting “up Hamas, up Hezbollah.” The terror charge collapsed before trial, thrown out because it was filed a day late and without the required sign-off. The career did the opposite of collapsing. Hundreds of fans stood outside a London courthouse for the hearings, and one woman told a reporter she took a day off work just to be there. In the week the charge was announced, the band advertised a surprise London club show with tickets they said would be gone in minutes. They were. A courtroom is an expensive thing to book as a promoter, and they got theirs free.

I did not know Bob Vylan existed until June 2025, when the duo’s frontman led a Glastonbury crowd in chants of “death, death to the IDF,” live on the BBC. The punishment arrived fast: dropped by their agency, US visas revoked, pulled from a festival, a police investigation. Then it evaporated. The investigation closed in December for insufficient evidence. The frontman said in October he would do it again tomorrow, “twice on Sundays.” This week, the duo announced a defamation suit against the BBC, represented by the same Belfast solicitor who won a case for Kneecap. Eighteen months ago, they were a footnote. Today, they are an international free-speech cause with a High Court docket, and the scandal is the only reason anyone outside their scene knows their name.

Greta Thunberg owned 2019. By 2025, the climate movement had slipped out of the news cycle and taken its most famous face with it. Then she boarded a boat to Gaza, was intercepted by Israel, and was deported in front of the world’s cameras. She has been in the headlines ever since. Susan Sarandon’s agency dropped her in November 2023 after she told a rally that Jews were getting “a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country,” remarks she later called a terrible mistake. The apology drew a fraction of the coverage. The relevance stayed. Lizzo spent 2023 and 2024 fighting harassment lawsuits brought by her own dancers, allegations she denies. In March 2024, she posted that she quit, a statement she later softened. Six weeks after that post, she was back on camera thanking the activists working against what she called genocides in Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo, and crediting them with pulling her out of a depression. The redemption arc wrote itself, and the lawsuits fell out of the conversation.

Every one of these stories turns on the same hinge word: until. A career was over, or a name meant nothing, until. And what sits on the far side of that hinge is never an album or a film. It is Israel.

Anecdotes can be cherry-picked, so here is the case where someone counted. Jackson Hinkle, a commentator who has been thrown off YouTube, Twitch, and Instagram, had 417,000 followers on X on the morning of October 7, 2023. Six months later, he had 2.5 million. The New York Times documented the surge. An Israeli research firm that sampled his new followers found he gained 1.2 million of them in the first nineteen days of the war, and that roughly 40 percent were inauthentic accounts. The Anti-Defamation League tracked five influencers in his orbit and found their combined engagement rose more than 1,070 percent in the six months after the massacre. Hinkle had already explained the business model himself, on a livestream, before any of it happened: “I do everything for the clout,” he said, adding that no one would ever see him do anything without that motive.

Or take an even more unlikely musical comeback. Macklemore had not placed a solo song on the Hot 100 since 2017. In May 2024, he released Hind’s Hall, a protest track against Israel, and within a week reached new solo career peaks on three Billboard sales charts. Forbes covered it as a comeback, in those words. He donated the proceeds to Palestinian refugees. The donation does not change the market data. Attacking Israel was the first thing in seven years that returned him to the charts.

The honest objection is sincerity. Greta may believe every word. Lizzo may be sincere, and Khanna may have been genuinely shaken. I will grant all of it, because it changes nothing. A market never asks whether the seller believes in the product. It asks whether the product sells. What the last three years have demonstrated, in the follower counts and the chart positions, is that anti-Israel positioning is the most reliable comeback vehicle in Western public life. The same vehicle carried a MAGA communist, a progressive congressman, a punk act nobody had heard of, and a pop star everyone had forgotten. Its passengers share no ideology and no audience. The one thing they share is a need for the spotlight.

I will not accuse Ro Khanna of sitting in a minibus calculating engagement. He did not need to. The calculation was finished long before he landed, and every public figure in decline can read the results. The exit from irrelevance runs through Israel, and it stays open because it keeps paying. Platforms reward the rage with reach. Institutions fold after a single news cycle, and audiences keep accepting each conveniently timed awakening as conversion rather than commerce. At the Tel Aviv Institute, we have started logging these comebacks, with dates, follower counts, and revenue. Somewhere out there is a fading name none of us could guess today, someone about to discover the Palestinian cause at the exact moment a career requires it. When that awakening is announced, it will land in our log as one more entry, right on schedule.

Hen Mazzig (@henmazzig)

According to a source for the New York Post, Ro Khanna was invited to meet freed hostages and survivors of October 7th. Khanna's team didn'

According to a source for the New York Post, Ro Khanna was invited to meet freed hostages and survivors of October 7th.

Khanna's team didn't even bother to respond.

His team was also offered an opportunity to meet with Druze civilians in the Golan Heights and a briefing on how aid is currently getting into Gaza. They didn't take it.

Now, if Ro Khanna genuinely believes that aid is not properly getting into Gaza, why not go to the briefing? If he thinks Israel is lying, wouldn't that be the perfect time to get proof?

But he didn't go, because those aren't his intentions. He didn't want to meet with victims of Hamas or those trying to get as much aid into Gaza as they can because they contradict his narrative.

And the narrative is all that matters.

150 Juvenile Delinquents

Netanyahu Says It's 150 Delinquents. Ok. Arrest Them.

I can’t read this whole piece because he has it locked, but here is his video addressing it and talking about settler violence:

[chutzpahchesed]

poster from Spain that definitely should have gotten more criticism as one of the most egregious examples of modern day blood libel. I don’t know what’s worse, the mobile above the crib with bombs dangling from the Magen David, or the Nazi style armband with the Israeli flag on the Grim Reaper. the fact that these types of posters have made such a comeback with zero pushback or sense of recognition that they’re echoing literal Nazi and Soviet genocidal antisemitic imagery/propaganda is surreal to witness.

[chutzpahchesed]

this is so bizarre (and also inaccurate) that I can’t even decipher what they’re trying to say by putting it up there.

[chutzpahchesed]

Babka King Chris finds food for thought in Israel

Jewish Telegraph, July 2026

WHEN social media influencer Chris Caresnone made his first trip to Israel just over a year ago, he knew very little about the country — including nothing about the events of October 7.

But he is a fast learner and has embraced all aspects of Israeli society, including Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze, on his quest for good food.

“About a year ago, I was invited by a group called Reality to go to Israel,” the Chicago-based food blogger told me. “A lady named Debra Feinberg reached out and was like, ‘Chris, I’ve been following you for a while, and I think you’d be great for this organisation that gets people to Israel’, because my Jewish audience was starting to grow.

“I was thinking that I need to get to Israel because it would be good for the energy, ethos, brand, and content.”

Chris, who has hundreds of thousands of followers across social media, continued: “I’ll be honest, I had heard stuff about Israel and Palestine, but I was ignorant. I didn’t know much about anything until I was in Israel. I was wet behind the ears. I didn’t know about the bombs or October 7. All I knew was, I’ve got to get to Israel.”

Chris, whose real surname is Campbell, said the first thing that struck him about Israel was that it wasn’t all Ashkenazim.

“We ignorantly think that all the Jewish people on Earth are eastern European,” he told me.

“It’s not from a place of hate, just that we don’t know. But then when I went to Israel, I’m like, man, there’s people my colour who are Jewish and Israeli.

“As far as food, I would say excellent. It all felt fresh, even the fried food.”

Chris, who is known as the Babka King, was a little surprised about the lack of babka in Israel.

“There’s some, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not really Sephardic, Mizrahi,” he said.

There was another aspect of Israeli life which surprised him — the driving.

“It’s a little hectic,” he laughed. “I don’t know if I want to drive over there. I personally thought the vibe of Israel was super cool, and I plan on going back as often as I can.”

Despite being a six-foot two-inch black man with a beard, Chris said he has never encountered any problems getting into Israel, apart from being stopped constantly by people who recognise him.

“The reach is getting so big now, so many people notice me in the airport, and it’s not even just Israel, it’s back home too, New York, Chicago,” he smiled.

“I have to stop and take pictures every few minutes, so that’s not really a problem, but it’s something that’s a slight disruption.”

Although it was never his original intention, Chris’ social media feed is now heavily Jewish, leading to many Jewish dinner invitations, including from rabbis for Friday night dinner.

“I’m kind of Jewish now,” he joked, “I’m embedded and I see what’s going on, but my first time in Israel? I heard that this is apartheid, but I see all kinds of people there walking freely. I’m a black America dude, clearly not Israeli, clearly not Jewish and not only do I walk perfectly fine, people come up to me and show me love.”

Chris, who says he grew up Christian but is not very religious, had his babka obsession started by a Muslim.

“And that turned into this movement, so to speak, of humanity, which I think is the most beautiful thing ever,” he explained.

“I started making culture content, showing love to different cultures. I did like 50 cultures. I didn’t even make any Jewish or Israeli content for seven or eight months.

“I feel like I get so much love within the community, and I’m just treating y’all normal like how I treat everyone else.

“I was told the way you have to look at it is, imagine if someone gives you a glass of water every single day.

“Eventually, it’s just another glass of water. But imagine you’re walking through the desert for four months, and then someone gives you a glass of water, it’s a bigger deal. And it’s not because the glass of water is any different, it’s because the context of the situation.

“It’s so big and powerful, yet it’s a matter of just being human and showing humanity.

“And the whole food, the babka was really just life’s way of Hashem, the universe, God, whatever we wanna call it, it was the Trojan horse to get my energy amplified.

“It’s more than food. I don’t feel like a food guy at all. I feel more like a bridge builder.”

During his trips to Israel, he has also spent time with Ethiopian and Druze communities.

He described Ethiopian food as “ridiculously good”, adding: “I have tried other cultures that are mixed within Israel. That’s what makes Israel’s food scene so unique. It’s almost like the opposite of what people are trying to say.”

The 42-year-old was raised around the North Shore of Chicago, which, he said, has one of the largest Jewish populations in America.

“I didn’t really have a lot of Jewish cuisine outside of matzo ball soup,” he explained. “When I got a little older, I started working in restaurants in different areas, and sometimes affluent areas.

“I started trying things that I probably would not have tried had I not worked in a restaurant. So my horizons got expanded because of that.”

He said what he realised about kosher food was that the food was still good despite the restrictions (apart from gefilte fish, which he has never been fond of).

As expected, his videos from Israel, while garnering mainly positive comments, do receive a number of hateful comments.

He had changed his name to Caresnone to reflect the fact that he wasn’t letting hate get to him, but it is a situation that has provoked a lot of thought.

“Here’s something I’ve been asking myself a lot recently,” he said. “Am I trying to be right or am I trying to solve the problem? I have learned that a lot of times I was trying to be right, not trying to generally solve the problem.

“On my birthday, February 2, I went out with some people and I had a buddy bring a girl he had met like once or twice.

“He should not have invited some girl he had just met to my intimate personal birthday dinner, but it is what it is. So we’re all sitting there at this restaurant and it’s a good 10 of us. We were talking about food and I’m like one of my new favourite cuisines is Israeli food. I’ve been going to a lot of Israeli restaurants.

“And this girl who’s sitting next to me, she goes, ‘oh, excuse me, what did you say?’

And I’m like, ‘I like Israeli cuisine, it’s fire, I love it’. And she says, ‘there’s no such thing as Israeli cuisine, it’s all stolen, they steal everything’.

“She invited this new energy when we were just talking about food.

“I’m with my buddy Kareem KWOE Wells, who’s considered King of the Mitzvahs, a black Christian in Chicago who’s known for doing the most epic and powerful mitzvahs in the country. Me and Kareem went at her. We weren’t rude or ignorant, but I was starting to feel myself losing composure, because I’m part of the humanity tribe, but I’m also very entrenched in the Jewish community and Israel.

“Then she made a comment along the lines of ‘I should be able to say whatever I want to say’ and then I matched her with that.

“I’m a pretty intimidating figure. And I looked at her, and I’m like, ‘well, I can say what I want to say, too’. I was giving her energy that wasn’t welcoming. I didn’t cuss her out or anything. And everyone else at the table thought I handled it well.

“But I was trying to be right. I wasn’t trying to solve the problem. So much so that she said, ‘maybe I should get out of here’. And I looked at her and go, ‘yeah, maybe you should’.”

He continued: “Fast forward. I’m on the way to Israel, on a 10-hour flight. I get a DM: ‘F*** Israel, f*** you, you black monkey’.

“I was immediately reminded of my birthday. I thought about that moment and I asked myself, do I want to be right or do I want to solve the problem?

“Being right would be to either call that person a racist or antisemite, or to ignore the person, or to call them an idiot, that you’re wrong, you don’t know anything about nothing. Or am I trying to solve the problem genuinely?

“So I typed to that person ‘I love you, brother’. Then we’re going back and forth, but I’m always bringing it back to humanity. I’m trying to solve the problem.

“And instead of looking at this person as a racist and antisemite, which he’s showing himself to be, I saw him as this person who’s hurt, who believes a narrative, who thinks he understands something, he obviously doesn’t know me, and that’s what I saw now.

“So I was able to not take it personally because I want to solve the problem. I don’t care about being right. I don’t care that he thinks I’m this. I’m trying to solve this.”

He added: “That guy who called me a black monkey. He equated me being aligned with Israel as equal to hating Muslims.

“I know Jewish people for a fact do not hate Muslims. But this person believed that all Jews and all Israel, or anyone who stands for that, hates Muslims. I’m like, brother, a Muslim sent me my first babka.

“A Muslim has created a lot of this, you know what I’m saying? He was the one who sent me the babka.”

The guy eventually apologised for his ‘black monkey’ comment.

Chris has also received death threats because of his Israel content.

He joked: “How you gonna hate me because I’m eating the babka? I’ve never once come out and said I’m pro-Israel or pro-Jewish. I said I’m pro-humanity, which includes Israel.

“I don’t think that’s controversial. I’m looking at a Jewish person, you got arms, you got a head, you got feet, you’re one of us. If the aliens come down, I don’t care if you’re Jewish, Muslim, green, yellow, it’s us versus the aliens?

“Like I said, people coming at me crazy for eating the food, which is interesting, because whoever’s throwing out that slur or that energy, I’ve probably done their culture too.”

Chris describes his job as to move “in a light, which is very Jewish! Very tikkun olam, from what I’ve been learning. And I feel like before I even knew what tikkun olam was, and before I even knew what being chosen people was, and before I knew any of the core premises of Judaism, I align with a lot of this stuff.”

Chris is hoping to spread his wings more. He is keen to “get my butt out to Europe, I know there’s a lot of people telling me I need to go to Australia and Mexico City, where there’s a big Jewish population.”

One of his favourite restaurants in Israel is called Pitmaster.

“I have learned that the Israeli community loves to dance,” he said. “Pitmaster is an experience. Everyone’s dancing. They stop between the meals and they dance and it’s like a vibe. They are gonna bring two more to the United States. And in America, you’re gonna have to make alcohol more of a thing, because these people weren’t dancing because they were drunk, they were dancing because they were joyful. In the States, you’ve got to get people drinking.”

He added: “So when you ask me, am I aware of how what I do affects the Jewish community and the people of Israel specifically. I want to be clear and say I’m not a Jewish content creator. I am not an Israeli content creator.

“I’m a humanitarian creator who happens to also include Jewish and Israel on the humanitarianism, and also, I just happen to be really cool with them like anyone else.”

In one of his newer videos, Chris talks about volunteering in Jerusalem with Colel Chabad.

“It reminded me that sometimes the best part of travelling isn’t just what you experience. It’s what you can give back. If you’re visiting Israel, I genuinely recommend adding this to your itinerary.”

You can follow Chris on all social media platforms @chriscaresnone

[chutzpahchesed]

what she says: I’m fine

what she means: just sobbed over this because so many musicians are catastrophically failing us by increasing hatred and division, indulging in useless performative boycott lists, and helping (whether purposefully or not) to isolate and dehumanize Israeli and Jewish artists and listeners alike, when if they wanted to use their artistry to foster peace and understanding, they could, and it would be so much kinder and more beneficial than what we’ve seen happening

(ironically some of the rest of this paper is framed very poorly and has a clear, specific bias against Judaism, but that’s irrelevant to the way this introduction resonated)

the bias in pieces like this is actually worth analyzing in itself but it’s depressing, for example:

Israel is framed only as the cause of oppression and strife, and the trauma felt by Israeli children due to the conflict and terrorism is never mentioned, even though this is a broadly humanistic piece:

I think the reason for this disconnect is because the papers are researched and written by people who are entirely outside of the conflict, so the default critical perception (Judaism being regarded as inherently more violent and exclusionary, Israel not being diverse, Israel being the constant aggressor and at fault, Palestinians’ actions are denied agency) is never questioned. this is an ongoing issue with peace advocacy, the acknowledgment of shared pain, shared responsibility, and thus a need for actual change and constructive dialogue towards peace from both sides for it to even be possible isn’t considered, because only one half is held accountable. I’m not sure how we can take even very earnest hopes for peace-building seriously when the perspectives are held in that ideological lock.

the only time there’s more balance on this is when it’s coming from the region itself:

all that said, the arts, and especially music, are most beautifully realized when they’re treated as a way to bring people together, to unite and uplift. instead we’re seeing things like the film boycott list and “no music for genocide” and the PEN America report about Israeli and Jewish authors facing discrimination being met with rage that they were allowed to speak about antisemitism at all and this:

it just feels so hopeless when even the humanities, the artists, aren’t centering humanity, compassion, and togetherness at all.