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No I'm not frum anymore but I will NEVER shut up about the complete lack of orthodox representation in media. THERE. IS. NONE.

I've never seen an orthodox character in a movie, or book, or tv show, outside of the very niche genre produced BY us, FOR us.

"But what about Unorthodox--" No. That's about someone who used to be frum. That's a completely separate thing.

Do you have any idea how much that would have meant to as me a kid? To see or read about even ONE character in mainstream media who was like me? To know that someone even knew people like me existed?? And accepted it??? It would have meant the world.

And so, to the authors and screenwriters and character designers and podcasters and animators and EVERYONE working in the entertainment industry, I say:

Give me Chaya's and Perel's and Basya's and Devorah's. Baruch's and Chaim's and Avi's and Tzvi's.

Give me girls wearing long-sleeved shirts and skirts that go past the knees.

Give me boys with yarmulkes and tzitzit.

Give me characters saying "Do you wanna come over for shabbos/yuntif?"

Or, "hang on, I need to go daven shachris."

Or, "Is it Kosher?"

Give me bubbes and shuls and cholent and tehillim.

Give me explicitly orthodox representation.

And if you won't do it for me, then do it for all the others who feel invisible.

We're in the theaters and the bookstores and spread across all the internet, and we see you.

Why can't you see us, too?

animatedamerican

When I wrote stories as a kid, if they were set in the real world and not in some fantasy setting, the characters always, always had English names.

I grew up Orthodox. I went to private religious schools. The people I knew personally almost all had Hebrew names, including me and both of my siblings.

But the characters I wrote didn't, because nobody did in any of the books I read or the TV shows I watched or the movies I saw, and little me wanted to write like a real writer. And that meant English names.

Coming to understand this as an adult was painful. It still is. I don't know if I'll ever be over it.

(I am still grateful to @seananmcguire for naming a character after me in one of her horror novels, and making that character cover her hair. It matters, and she understands why it matters.)

koshercosplay

@animatedamerican you genuinely just blew my mind.

I also grew up Orthodox, going to all-girls Orthodox schools, in an entirely Orthodox community. Nearly everyone I interacted with on a day-to-day basis was an Orthodox Jew.

But I never, NEVER, wrote Orthodox characters, and I still haven't. I had that same mentality - I wanted to write something real. Writing an orthodox character like myself would have been weird and cringey, and I wanted to write something like the media I was consuming.

I never realized this was something I had to unlearn until this very moment. Even now, when I write Jewish characters, they're almost never orthodox, even though I myself am orthodox. I'll write secular jewish characters occasionally, because they just feel like they fit into the story better.

but that's probably only because I've never SEEN an orthodox character in a story like the ones I write. Of course it doesn't feel right. I have nothing to base it off of.

This is also probably why the book Spinning Silver felt like such a revelation, to the point where I'm still thinking about that story months later. It affected me so much because I had never read anything like that before. This mentality has been affecting me for my whole life, and I didn't even consciously realize it.

Representation matters so so much.

ignorethisatyourperil

mixmangosmangoverse

The thing still gets me about the "levant/middle east was all Arab" idea is that... even setting aside Jews. You have to ignore every other people in the area to say this. You have to ignore the Copts and Beduoin and Kurds and Yezidi and Assyrian and Druze and Persians and even fucking Greeks to go with the idea that this entire area was just Arab. In order to deny Jewish origin here, you have to deny everyone else. Because you can go "the levant was Arab and also Persian and also Assyrian before the Jews arrived" because that's not really a united identity destroyed by the Zionists, is it? You'd have to acknowledge all of history and that's just not acceptable. So the area was entirely Arab. That's how it was. Don't question it

zaprowsdower27

They think of "Arab" as meaning "Middle Eastern".

To an unfortunate number of aggressively ignorant westerners, "Arab" is a skin color/regional identity like "Black" or "Asian", and Kurds, Copts, Bedouin, Yazidi, Druze, Assyrians, and Persians are all subcategories of Arab. I have literally seen them claim that Sepharadi and Mizrahi Jews who fled to Israel from the MENA region are "Arab Jews" who are misled by Evil European Invaders.

And if you try to explain that Arabs are actually a particular tribe in the Middle East rather than synonymous with the whole of it, and what they are saying is the regional equivalent of claiming all Europeans are subcategories of German and any European who doesn't identify as German is either deceived or really from somewhere other than Europe, they insist that you're lying and propagandizing and cannot be trusted.

It all comes down to thinking the American racial caste system is globally and historically universal rather than unique to the United States in this very particular moment.

wyf-of-bathe

Quick note: This isn't really accurate, especially the statement about Arabs being a tribe. That's a very outdated perspective relying on an old definition of Arabs being descended from tribes of the Arabian Peninsula and Syria. Pan-Arab nationalism effectively widened the definition to anyone whose native language is Arabic and identifies as Arab, which includes Bedouin, Druze, Alawites, Maghrebis, Egyptians, Iraqi Arabs, Gulf Arabs etc. A major difference between, say, Maghrebi Arabs and Iraqi Arabs is their specific dialect of Arabic because, again, Arab identity heavily revolves around language.

Kurds and Yazidis speak Kurdish, which is linguistically closer to Persian than to Arabic, so they were never Arab. Copts and Assyrians generally speak Arabic but still use Coptic and Aramaic respectively in their liturgies, and as groups consider themselves to be the Coptic and Assyrian nations that predate the arrival of Islam, so they don't consider themselves Arab. But notable is that being Christian (or Muslim) does not necessarily have an impact on whether someone is Arab or not.

As far as identities go, 'Arab' is great for demonstrating how subjective and internal-focused ethnicity and nation are. Who counts as an Arab? Whoever speaks Arabic and considers themselves Arab. This is really weird and confusing to Europeans and especially Americans given our definition of ethnicity is usually externally applied rather than internally defined. In most cases, though, it's also just flat out ignorance that there are groups in the Middle East who do not natively speak Arabic. Hence, yes, our definition of ethnicity, race, and nation are not universal.

not-a-smartass-just-a-nerd

new favorite reaction image just dropped

zac-oyama

iliothermia

The Morning After

a-state-of-bliss

Reem Acra Fall/Wint 2015

king-shit-thembo

Considering how much goyim complain about what they see as outsized focus on Holocaust education, so many goyim know absolutely jackshit about the Holocaust

phoukanamedpookie

Because the Holocaust was meant to be some sort of self-improvement lesson about man's inhumanity to man or something universal like that, not specifically about us pesky, whiny Jews.

astoundingbeyondbelief

Denae Benites becomes the first WPBL catcher to throw out a base stealer, despite some incredible acrobatics from Denver Bryant.

blumineck

How to dodge an arrow (if you have the requisite training and safety procedures!)

wiisagi-maiingan

You've gotta think for yourself. Like you actually have to do research and talk to people and learn different perspectives and come to your own conclusions instead of basing your opinions and politics solely on what the people you follow online say. You've gotta form your own thoughts and not buckle the moment one of your mutuals gets mad at you for disagreeing with them.

"My mutual told me I was wrong about this extremely complex topic and I should shut up forever so I immediately deleted all my posts about it and made several apologies and I'll never ever disagree with my mutuals again and even after all that they still blocked me and are talking shit about me but I deserve that, I just have to be better" please stop this.

wiisagi-maiingan

It's actually very sad and kinda embarrassing how often I post about my opinion on something and people in the notes will be like "wow you're right this thing that I loved until this exact moment is actually evil and disgusting and I need to make a formal apology for ever thinking about it in any positive way" like hello? Do you not have a spine?? Are you so incapable of thinking for yourself that you're letting strangers online do it for you instead???

wiisagi-maiingan

Thinking for yourself also means recognizing when you're tokenizing other people and using them as an excuse to not examine your own internalized beliefs and biases btw.

wiisagi-maiingan

Also this is gonna be mean but sometimes people on this site refuse to give their own opinions on anything because they don't feel like they're educated enough about the topic, which is totally fair and I think more people need to learn that their voice is not always needed. . . but then those same people turn around and repeat whatever their mutuals say, even when those mutuals aren't really educated on it either!

People online often mistake passion for education and facts, but just because someone says something loudly and repeatedly does not mean they actually know what they're talking about. Maybe stop getting your opinions on complex geopolitical issues across the world from 20 something year old American communists who have never personally experienced anything worse than a Trump presidency and whose only experiences with war are hypotheticals and tiktoks.

rowark

(X)

@holdwine @evergrove is this accurate?? 🤣🤣

mythicmayhemcomic

@niuniente

ruffboi-mags

#fjsdfs #when i studied in denmark #they spent an entire class showing us simple words and how similar they were across danish #norwegian #etc. for the express purpose of ragging on how different the finnish word was #the teacher literally said ‘we can more or less understand across these languages. if you see one that sticks out like a sore thumb it’s finnish #also the delivery on this video is just delightful (via @destinyandcoins)

I find it hilarious that denmark has to stoop to ragging on the finns (instead of doing it for I guess shits and giggles like the others), because all the other nordic languages rag on them for sounding like they’re mumbling with a mouth full of marbles. XD

mzminola

Oh! Oh! That’s because Finnish is from a different language family! The Uralic languages!

ruffboi-mags

Yup! The roots of the majority of European and many nearby languages is Indo-Eropean, which is the root of everything from English to Russian to Hindi to Persian and more!

Finnish however, as you said, has its roots in a different branch than Indo-European, the Uralic languages. There aren’t many of them - Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian are the most widely spoken, but there’s a handful of others as well, mostly spoken by local ethnic groups in northern Scandinavia and Siberia.

jeza-red

Poles and Lithuanians eying one another across the table xD

bassacaglia

Every time I come across posts like these I’m just reminded of the beautiful infographics made by Minna Sundberg

lacetulle

Zuhair Murad | Fall/Winter 2026 Couture

wiisagi-maiingan

Generally speaking, if you haven't been in a war zone, been at risk of being murdered by soldiers when in your home or walking down the street, been forced to huddle in a bomb shelter as missiles fly overhead or buildings collapse around you from bombings, or any of the other horrific and dangerous and deeply traumatizing experiences that come with war happening in your home country, then I don't think you should be cheering on any war ever.

I think the reason why Americans are so comfortable treating war in other countries as a game or a sports match to spectate is because we're so utterly disconnected from the realities of it and we don't even realize most of the time because our country is so obsessed with war. It's just that all the wars we're obsessed with are happening in other peoples' homes.