Since it's Jewish American Heritage Month I'm sharing some of my favorite pieces connected to my culture 🫣 I love being on here n I love sharing my world with you and I'm lucky y'all enjoy my world too ❤️
I think part of what is so upsetting about some people's participation in activism related to I/P is that many have framed the conflict as a binary choice between two opposing teams.
What if I genuinely want the best for everybody involved? What if I believe violence against anybody on the basis of their nationality/ethnicity/religion is wrong? What if I see both Israelis and Palestinians as fully human, worthy of dignity and respect, undeserving of violence directed at them?
Then you play into the oppressor’s narrative of holding themselves as equal to the people they’ve oppressed.
Maybe the best thing Zionists could do is stop the process of colonisation, which they actively support by EXISTING in Palestine, and go back to the countries where their grandparents still own properties 🥰
I've blocked them but holy shit... where their grandparents still own properties is so antisemitic....
Their grandparents are very often victims of the Holocaust, and the many efforts to displace Jews across the Middle East.
Jewish people experienced displacement at the hands of Europeans and Middle Easterners.
I've heard this so many times. That after the Holocaust Jews were supposed to move back in? To the homes where their neighbors ratted them out? The properties that were confiscated from them?
And none of this horrific bullshit is helping Palestinians, who, again, are being deeply harmed on basically all sides. This rhetoric harms Palestinians and appropriates the symbols and movements that are supposed to be part of making them more safe and free and misuses them for antisemitic purposes.
My grandparents were warned not to return because others who’d done so had been murdered. I don’t know anyone who “owns property” in the countries we were expelled from.
This is Targowa 67, in Lodz, Poland. It was my paternal grandmother's family bakery and apartment.
My great-uncle was sent to the gulag by the Soviets when he tried to reclaim it after the Holocaust, and when we tried to reclaim it in the 1990s--as we had the paperwork still--the city government, which owns it now, threatened our lives. "You would have to come here to press the suit, and we would not be able to guarantee your safety" was what they said.
But hey, ignoring all of the history and stuff stolen from the Jews who then had to flee to other countries, while their oppressors got rich off of what they stole is just easier and gives a better sense of superiority, doesn't it?
Approximately 40+% of Baghdad was Jewish before the Iraq government (with the gleeful participation of the Muslim citizens) ethnically cleansed the country of Jews, seizing the modern equivalent of billions of dollars in property, businesses, and bank accounts. Much of the modern state of Iraq is built on that economic seizure.
The French embassy in Baghdad resides, rent free, in such a property. France’s official stance is that such “abandoned property” is forfeit to “finder’s keepers”. But only if the owners are Jews.
I think most people don’t realize how much of Jewish diaspora history consists of our being used as a sort of ‘break in case of emergency’ slush fund by whoever controlled the territory.
Like, I didn’t fully understand this either until fairly recently! But it is so convenient for a ruling power to have a population of people who are literate, exempt from religious prohibitions on certain kinds of financial transactions, and incredibly easy targets for resentment and hatred.
So much of the last 2000 years of Jewish history involves Jews being 1) allowed to move to a region, 2) barred from most occupations, 3) steered (or forced) into fields that allow them to build up some degree of wealth and success while 4) serving as an involuntary meat shield between the peasantry and the ruling class.
And then when there’s famine or war or plague or social unrest or revolution, it’s so easy to aim all the blame at the Jews, who were doing pretty okay for themselves up to that point.
We take the fall for whatever has gone wrong, get killed or expelled, and conveniently are forced to leave behind the homes and businesses and wealth that we’d managed to build despite our deliberately limited options. Whoever’s now in charge gets the spoils, and those of us who survived have to go start over somewhere else.
This is an old, old pattern. It has happened to someone in the family of just about every single Jewish person alive, usually more than once. In my direct family tree, it happened to all my great-great grandparents, who left the Pale in the midst of the 1880s wave of pogroms. Hell, I have an uncle by marriage who had to flee Iran as a teenager in the 70s — that’s the 1970s, to be clear — and his family left behind homes and farms and bank accounts. Everything but what they could carry.
I feel like we talk a lot about how antisemitism persists in a culture and manifests in individuals across the political spectrum. But it’s also helpful, sometimes, to take a higher-level view of why antisemitism is useful to ruling powers in a given region, because that usefulness is also a big part of why it persists.
seconding the last uh... 2-8 additions on this post, and peer-reviewing @nonasuch's tags
but ALSO, it cannot be understated that the existence of the state of Israel is a rare example of a successful decolonization project on the world stage.
Jews are indigenous to Israel. This is not a statement about the indigeneity or lack thereof of any other group that lives there or claims to have roots there. I am not speaking about anyone else's experience here. I am just saying: Jews are indigenous to Israel. This whole discussion about anti-semitism and expulsions and pogroms throughout 2000 years of Jewish diaspora exists because for 2000 Jews have been living in diasporic communities after our homeland, where we had been existing in for approximately 1500 uninterrupted years prior to that, was colonized by Rome and most of its Jewish inhabitants forced into exile. It changed hands from Rome to various other colonizing powers, down to the Ottoman Empire and then the British Empire, before successfully decolonizing and gaining independence and Jewish self-determination in 1948.
That's the thing. Decolonization for all can only be a thing as long as decolonization includes peoples that most of the world demonstrably hates. If Jews aren't allowed to decolonize, then who the hell is safe, exactly? Where do we draw the line? Or is all the talk about decolonization just jerking off while really preferring an imaginary map that reunifies the Soviet Union and creates yet another Arab state where Israel is currently? (I didn't want any empires!)
People in colonies like the Americas, Australia, Sweden, South Africa, New Zeland, etc. Are calling an intifada to OUR home, makes me feel like they dont care. Makes me feel like they are willing to hand our land to another colonial population, we have no right in or any say over the land our tribes (and others) lived before white people stepped on our shores . You must know just as well as I do, if not more, how people shut down our "land back" movement and have been for at least my entire life. There is no line, they dont want any indigenous population that would affect their way of life, or make them feel guilty for taking land. Canada silently lets aboriginal sit in poverty, have apartheids, anti-native propaganda in schools, the population is extremely racist and even dare I say "hateful", and misunderstand the entire "free North America movement". In reality the Hamaskins have made it harder for any colony to decolonize, now that for example decolonization = violence and terrorism to almost every government world wide. Hamaskins have sullied and blackened the free america movement and have falsely applied it onto the Palestinians. As we have seen/heard, to be indigenous is to be poor, to be recognizeable, to be another race lower than them on the totem poll. This narrative now carries "land back = a bloody war" which makes governments pretty happy to further oppress indigenous peoples, and even take more rights away. If any of these people actually wanted decolonization, they would listen to the aboriginal peoples living there and not pretend we do not exist all over the world. The fact they dont even care about their own neighbors, how can we expect them to truly care about anything or anyone?
We were forced into one empire with horrible genocidal consequences, and colonizers want to put it in the hands of terrorist groups, that will finish the job.
There's also basically a "noble savage" trope that decolonisation must involve violence. But generally the people of the "pro-Palestine movement", who are also self-proclaimed leftists and descended from European settlers, just want to project their guilt on Jews and Israelis and have the Palestinians do the bloody work.
I know plenty of these white leftists who really feel guilt about staying in Canada and the US, but just project that on Jews, whom they claim are so privileged, especially to "conveniently wield the victim card", especially the Holocaust, to "oppress natives". I actually once asked them in a server if they are so guilty about Columbus and all, why don't they just go back to where they came from? (using their argument when they always talked about Jews) I got warned by an admin for "being racist".
That said, are we saying all that to justify Palestinian expulsions? No, we said we want co-existence! But everyone just think there can be no peaceful coexistence between the colonisers and natives. If there isn't, then, to the idiot reblogging that "Zionists must go back to Europe", why not you also go back to Europe?
Actually I think I'm going to make my own post about this because I'm feeling outraged right now
"the solution to oppression is to encourage toleration within your own society, not decide 'let’s pack our bags and go live someplace else' "
What the fuck.
"encourage toleration within your own society" AFTER THE HOLOCAUST? YOU WANTED THE JEWISH PEOPLE WHO HAD JUST SURVIVED THE FUCKING HOLOCAUST TO "encourage toleration"?? FUCK YOU. YOU WANTED JEWISH PEOPLE TO GO BACK TO THEIR "NORMAL" LIVES IN THEIR DESTROYED HOUSES AND BUSINESSES WITH THEIR NEIGHBORS WHO TURNED THEM IN AND PARTICIPATED IN THAT VERY HOLOCAUST?
The amount of naivete presented in that statement blows me away completely. "Encourage toleration" WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK THEY WERE DOING BEFORE THAT? "Encourage toleration" maybe you should stop putting it on the minorities to fix everything and make the damn racists responsible for fixing their racism. "Encourage toleration" like they didn't try. "Encourage toleration" like the countries that refused to host Jewish refugees actually welcomed them with open arms. Like mass antisemitism disappeared after Hitler died. Like no countries after WW2 Germany were antisemitic ever, in their politicians and leaders, their policies, their laws, their actions, anything.
"encourage toleration"
You don't understand a damn thing about this if you're saying shit like that.
sudden realization while contemplating the conflicting rhetoric of "go back to poland" and "we just need to show jews they don't need israel"
there are a lot of reasons that jews make aliyah (move to israel). but yeah: violence against jews is a pretty big reason. and then, of course, there's constant violence against jewish civilians there too. because the roots of the "jews shouldn't be there in the first place" movement is in the lunatic fringe of hamas and PFLP and palestinian islamic jihad. and their collective goal has always been to drive jews out by force, because the land belongs to arab muslims forever by right of conquest 1,400 years ago.
oh.
The reason that the Pro-Palestine movement in the West so passionately identifies with what it thinks of as ~Palestine~, and so systematically ignores, silences, and speaks over Palestine's actual activists, isn't just that its activists hate Hamas's dictatorship over Gaza.
Or have nuanced, complex takes.
Or that the progressive movement has a very fucking serious Western paternalism problem.
The core reason is that progressive Westerners think of Palestinians as doing Morally Correct Violence to Force Out Jews.
And this fucked-up idea resonates with them on a deep level that they aren't ready to recognize.
In 1948, a disproportionate number of Israeli Jews had been violently forced out of Eastern Europe. Which then killed 90% of the ones remaining.
And how do white people respond to that fact?
They project their white guilt onto the Jews that survived by fleeing.
Those Jews are now the Bad European Colonizer Genociders. Actual white Europeans are off the hook; the people they tried to wipe out are the real bad guys.
They also resent having that guilt in the first place. So they project their resentment onto the same Jews, and call for them to be driven back to the lands that yeeted them.
(Which still don't want them! if someone can find me a sign in polish that demands israeli jews go back to poland, i'll pay you $20.
countless jews have been kicked out of businesses or beaten up in public for speaking hebrew, lately. not just in europe, but especially in europe. there's no fucking way anyone in the EU is yelling, "come back here.")
White people imagine Palestinians as this bewildered majority who have been exploited and brutalized by Jews.
It's an image that just makes sense. It sparks a feeling of kinship.
I am convinced that this is why it's so easy for people to believe the propaganda that Hamas & Co. put out there.
People have a collective social memory, going back millennia, which tells them Jews are sus.
If you want to find out if you, too, have bought into the Jews Are Sus thing on some deeply unconscious level - whether you are Jewish yourself or not! because everyone can buy into shit about a group, even if they're a part of it - try this!
Take a second. Get in touch with your gut. Your intuition. Your feelings or whatever.
And then imagine realizing a friend is Jewish. Or that the author of some political article you're reading is Jewish. Or some new person who comes to your GSA or whatever is Jewish.
Is your first response that little flinch that says, "Ohhhhhhhhh. I really fucking hope they're not a BAD Jew?"
(I don't care what word you use for this. If you think "Zionist" instead, but you're ready to come at me with some shit about how #NotAllZionistsAreJewishSoIt'sNotAntisemitic, I invite you to now imagine that you realized a friend, an author, or a random newbie to your org is Christian. Just like, a random everyday Christian.
Is that usually normal to you? Or do you actually approach every owner of a cross pendant with "shit, is this a Genocidal Maniac?" Have you ghosted Jewish friends, but never even approached this topic with Christian ones? Have you ever heard of anyone protesting outside of, shooting at, spray-painting swastikas on, or firebombing a church "for Palestine"?)
because let me tell you, I've been seeing Jews talk about getting the "What's Your Opinion On Israel" litmus test since like. 2016??? Since I started following Jews on Tumblr. Which means it's probably been happening for even longer.
And the longer it's happened, the more obvious it's become that people are mentally dividing Jews into The Good Ones (Who I Like! And Support! And Have No Problem With!) and The Bad Ones.
And WE KNOW THAT'S FUCKING GROSS. EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO IS DOING IT KNOWS, INTELLECTUALLY, THAT DIVIDING A MARGINALIZED GROUP INTO THE GOOD ONES AND THE BAD ONES IS A BAD FUCKING SIGN! But every single person who is doing it has a mental exception for at least the Jews!
i'm very calm, shhhhh. i'm not going off YOUR going off. i didn't just misspell YOU'RE. YOURR CHOPPING ONIONGSSSS
I mean "I'm not antisemitic, just antizionist" was going around in 1913. So this shit has been going on since Jews were originally exiled lol. The thing about it is,
"we just need to show jews they don't need israel"
Except they never actually bother to do this. No one who advocates for Palestine ever actually says "Hey, Yemen, you need to repatriate your entire Jewish population and enact laws that make them safe in their communities."
It's all "a curse on the Jews" and "death to Israel" after deporting all their Jewish people there. Not one of these people has ever actually bothered to be like "hey, what's making Jews feel unsafe in my community" and actually doing jack shit to make it safer.
No one actually gives a fuck about showing Jews we don't need Israel it's all "Jews are just whiny victims and antisemitism doesn't even exist *blows up a synagogue*"
If you don’t understand Hebron and Safed 1929, you don’t understand the conflict.
Reminder: In 1929, the Grand Mufti's Arabs massacred pious, vocally anti-Zionist Jews who'd been living in Hebron for centuries. Albert Londres interviewed ten of the ringleaders afterwards. You know what they said? "We don't have a problem with Jews. Just the Zionists moving to Tel-Aviv. The pious Jews who've been living here for centuries can stay."
Yet, it was the pious Jews they'd killed.
Tale as old as time: "I don't hate Jews, just Zionists," yet they kill and drive out Jews living outside of Zion, forcing them to move to Zion, ironically proving Zionist Jews correct: we're not safe outside of Zion.
At a time where jewish groups are being banned from pride events, you do not get to use Anne Franke, a dead jew murdered for being jewish before she could ever come out, as a puppet for whatever queer rights message you want to share.
You do not get to profit, financially or attention wise or another way, off of a *potentially* queer jew whilst we are banned from pride events.
We do not know if she was questioning her sexuality but ultimately straight or if she was actually queer because she was killed for the crime of existing as a jew before she could come out. Queer rights obviously matter. Anne Franke is not the person you should be using.
You need to protect alive queer jews. You need to love all jews, not just the dead ones.
sometimes abuse victims will think they were/are not being abused. sometimes abuse victims will think it's okay they were/are being abused for whatever reason.
sometimes abuse victims will insist to others that they were/are not being abused. sometimes abuse victims will insist to others that it's okay they were/are being abused for whatever reason.
in fact, leading a victim to believe that what is happening is normal and fine and even good or righteous for whatever reason is a common feature of abuse, whether the abuser did it on purpose or not.
if an abuse victim in your life...
questions whether they were abused
goes back and forth about whether they think they were abused
tells you they weren't being abused, and then later says they were
...these can all be very normal parts of living with abuse trauma and don't mean someone is lying or exaggerating about being abused.
abused kids reaching late teenage years: it seems I have trauma symptoms, which is odd because nothing traumatic had ever happened to me... sure I don't have many memories of my childhood but I am sure that everything that happened was 100% my fault and also normal and I am supposed to be strong enough to be over that and it was a long time ago so. That's all good. Now. I need to hide these trauma symptoms or my parents will kill me.
"Kill your local sex offender!" Oh, you mean the guy who went streaking at his local college football game on a dare one time? That's a sex crime.
"No, I mean-"
Oh, maybe the woman who had to pee in a public park that only had pay toilets, so she tried to hide behind the bushes but got caught? Public urination is a sex crime.
"What? No, I mean-"
Oh, maybe you mean the homeless guy who had to strip down to get his clothes in the laundromat to clean them for the first time in weeks? He tried being subtle, but someone called the cops on him, and now he's on the sex offender registry for public nudity.
"Rapists and pedophiles! Kill rapists and pedophiles!"
Oh, like the trans woman who got called a pedophile groomer for helping a trans kid escape her abusive parents?
Or maybe the black man who got labeled a rapist because he came on to another man's wife, and he decided to get back at him by charging him with rape?
How about the 17 year olds who were fooling around, fully consensually, in one of their bedrooms? That's still technically underage sex and thus rape of a minor.
Oh, or maybe you're talking about the doctor who performed genital reconstructive surgery in a state that just voted to get that classified as rape?
People will do everything they can to get you convinced rape and pedophilia are the worst crimes possible, then accuse whoever they like the least of being either a rapist, a pedophile, or both, counting on you turning on them just for being accused of the crime.
"Oh, so you're saying you don't want to kill a serial rapist?"
That's exactly what I'm goddamn saying.
Once we decide a group is okay to kill, the government will do everything they can to convince you that their political enemies are either part of that group, or just as bad as that group, to get you to kill their enemies for them.
The only way out is to accept every life as worth saving.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
When leftists talk about putting Zionists in internment camps and castrate them (for being pedophiles), I think we're playing the same word substitution game as the far-right. It doesn't matter if they don't identify as Nazis, because the essence is the same. It doesn't matter if they don't think Zionists equate to Jews, because the essence is the same. It doesn't matter if the castration is, on paper, an anti-pedophile effort, because the essence is the same as Nazis castrating imprisoned Polish men to make better slaves. Exact wording gets in the way of meaning. We're about to King Lear ourselves into a second Holocaust.
So far, in response to this post, one self-identified leftist has strongly reaffirmed the message that Zionists should be interred in camps (and implies that I would be one of them), two have used exact definition quibbling to argue that no leftists support it (only liberals), one was bewildered by my suggestion that leftists are saying this anywhere, and two have said "fuck you" without an actual argument or condemnation of the original suggestion that Zionists be put in camps because any support of Zionists even at the level of human rights equates in their mind to saying Israel should genocide Palestine and are ultimately in support of the idea that Zionists should be put in camps (and that I would be one of them). Meanwhile, dozens of Jews of varying political stripes agree with my post that this is Nazi behavior regardless of identification and is concerning.
one was bewildered by my suggestion that leftists are saying this anywhere
Hi, that was me. You do realize not everyone is keyed into the exact same new outlets as you all the time, yes? You do also realize that misinformation on social media is rampant, yes? You can argue your point without demonizing people who demand evidence for extreme claims.
I've noticed you have done this seemingly every single time you want to talk about current events. If you're referencing something specific, link it in the post instead of vagueing about it. That is not an unreasonable thing to ask.
‘‘There’s a kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust. . .’’
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
"accusations and false accusations of antisemitism are wielded against people of color and women of color by bad-faith political actors, and weaponizing antisemitism is used to divide us.”
Cori Bush?
"Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) is under fire from Jewish groups and her opponent in the upcoming Missouri Democratic primary for fundraising and associating with an antisemitic activist who once said she wants to burn “every Israeli” alive."
Perhaps you mean commentators like Hasan Piker?
Or maybe you want to get into how modern leftist antisemitism is largely the result of Soviet propaganda?
no see the problem is BOTH people here should be allowed a testosterone prescription no questions asked.
if a cis woman needs T to alleviate sexual dysfunction then that's a valid treatment for a medical issue. "sexual kicks" is... certainly a way to describe a legitimate medical issue!!!! definitely no internalized sex-negativity here!!! (sarcasm)
I agree 100% that trans people have a RIGHT to HRT. HRT is life saving care for dysphoria and life changing for trans people who want HRT for their transitions.
but this framing to me feels the same as when people are like "why do junkies get free narcan when my insulin costs me $800???"
like. the problem is not the free narcan, your insulin should be free too.
I'm shouting into the void here but I need to get it out.
I don't label my politics, but I'm what someone would call on the left. I spent my teenage years when Tumblr social justice was at its height. I learned things, checked my own biases, and I would like to think became a more empathetic person because of what I learnt from online progressive spaces.
The way these spaces have treated Jewish communities over the past 2.5 years has been nothing short of fucking appalling.
The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust was minimised, denied, justified, or outright celebrated.
Jewish people were immediately told to put their grief and trauma over this to away, because Palestine's pain was more important to talk about.*
Jewish and Israeli people were told they needed to try and understand why armed men raped, tortured, and killed members of their community. Because, you know, the murderous rapists are who we need to have sympathy for here. Anyone can be pushed to the point of, I don't know, murdering a young woman and parading her corpse around a street for men to spit on her dead body. If you really think about it, isn't that actually kind of an understandable thing to do?
When raising concerns over the rising antisemitism that was starting to look a lot like the build-up to that little historical tidbit called The Holocaust, Jews were told they were selfish for raising the issue.
When asking people not to call for intifadas that have historically resulted in thousands of dead Jews, they're told they're taking it all the wrong way.
When Israeli victims spoke of the abuse they received on Oct 7 and in captivity, they're told they need to stay silent because otherwise they risk justifying the genocide of Palestinians.
When 15 people were murdered at a Hannukah festival, there were no social media icons, no surge from progressive groups to find out what support they needed.
To be clear here, progressive groups seem more concerned with antisemitism in the Harry Potter books than they are about the actual, you know, string of dead Jews that have been murdered over the past few years. If you condemn antisemitic representations in diction and then turn around and completely ignore real-life fucking murder, then I'm sorry I genuinely do not think you ever gave a shit about fighting antisemitism, you just wanted to fight Jk Rowling. **
Absolutely fuck everyone who has justified or denied what happened on Oct 7th. There were ways to advocate for both Israeli and Palestinian victims, but the people who should have known better have ensured that Oct 7th wasn't just one day of hell for Jewish communities, but that its been currently 2.5 years of hell that seems to just be getting worse.
And the most infuriating part is the people who did justify Oct 7th will never admit they were wrong, because that would mean admitting they argued that the murder rape mutilation torture and kidnap of a Jewish community was acceptable, and that would break their brains. I mean it. The cognitive dissonance between believing you are someone who cares for human rights, whilst also being someone who justified all of that, is too great. The brain will always protect itself. Its why people are currently doubling down on there being no rapes on Oct 7th. Rape is not resistance, it is not self defence, it is not landback, it is not right of return, it is not decolonisation, it is not any of the shit people tell themselves Oct 7th was. Rape is just rape. It is just men torturing people (mainly women) for no other reason than because they enjoy it. You will never see these people admitting rape occurred, because the second they do is the second they realise just how horrifically they have behaved.
And it's not getting better. Hate crimes and murders of worldwide Jewish communities are rising. Jewish people are looking to leave places like the US, UK and Australia, which were once considered some of the safest places for them to live. A KKK slur (zio) is now common online usage. Jewish people are expected to sever any connection to an important part of their culture (Israel/Hebrew) in order to be treated somewhat civily. The more IDF crimes are uncovered in Gaza, the more worldwide Jewish communities bear the brunt of the anger. Typing 'Jewish' into any social media brings you into an absolute clusterfuck of the most horrific things you can possibly see people say about their fellow human beings.
I am just sick and exhausted and furious and it feels like I'm hitting my fists against a brick wall that is not knocking down. How do you even get people to realise how bad this is????
I am not Jewish. I know full well that Jewish people talking about all of this get ignored. I know full well that a Jewish person standing up for Palestine gets thousands of notes, and a Jewish person standing up for their own people barely breaks 100. I know full well that Jewish people are being smeared as paranoid or crazy or selfish. I know full well that non-Jewish people speaking up about antisemitism is taken more seriously than Jewish people talking about their own experiences.
Can you all just start fucking having some fucking empathy for Jewish and Israeli communities who have been facing the worst 2 years of their lives. Fucking please. It is not that fucking hard to feel empathy for lots of groups at once. To empathise with both Palestine and Israel, Muslims and Jews. Empathy for all is part of what brings us away from just being animals and makes us human.
If you can't do it, it is not an issue with Jews or Israelis or Zionists or the IDF, it is an issue with you.
*I am not saying Palestinian pain isn't important to raise awareness of, and the people fearing what the IDF would do immediately after Oct 7th were right to raise it. I'm saying asking Jewish communities to take on the trauma of Palestinians, when they were still reeling from their own inter-community trauma, was wrong and unhelpful. I wouldn't ask Palestinian communities to have centered the trauma of Oct 7th either. Trauma is not a competition and everyone deserves to have their respective pain treated fairly.
**also not saying that Rowling shouldn't be criticized, because she is awful, but that real-life massacres and rapes of Jews is sort of a bigger priority than bad representation in the Harry Potter books, and that if you can't understand that then...yeah. you didn't actually care about jewish people at all.
So is it a racially diverse state where everyone is accepted or is it a Jewish ethnostate? If it protects Jews then why is it constantly provoking retaliation from its neighbors? If it was bad when Jews were rounded up and murdered why is it acceptable when Israeli Jews do it to Gazans?
Thanks for asking! Israel is in fact an incredibly diverse country where Jews only make up around 70% of the population and the rest enjoy full rights as Israeli citizens. Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, make up around 20% of the population, which I bet is more than whatever pasty country you’re from. Arab Muslims hold seats in the parliament, there are Arab judges in the highest courts, and the Arab population is disproportionately represented in healthcare (about a quarter of doctors in Israel are Arabs).
The rest of your questions are answered by the fact that our kindly neighbors keep trying to murder us with bombs knives and missiles.
"provoking retaliation" is a funny way of saying "why don't Jews just let people kill them instead of trying to protect themselves and purposefully lose wars they never start 🤨"
There are ways in which Ashkenazi Jews are closer to Caucasian Europeans than to Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews (physical characteristics like skin color) and we need a way to discuss that
We can discuss it, but for what purpose? What does it change? What does it matter?
This is such bs. All jews are more alike to one another then we are to ANY goyim. We share the same names, traditions, language, calander, holidays, and homeland.
People like anon just want to seperate and racialize and also seemingly hate ashkenazim.
Here’s an idea how about we actually drop race science and stop caring about skin color and instead examine the cultural and historical context of people which is a much more meaningful metric
reminder yet again that the minhagim have nothing to do with race/skin color, can we please stop this? even saying there are Black and Middle Eastern Ashkenazim (which there are!) isn’t helpful at this point because it’s still implying that somehow light skinned Ashkenazim whose families lived in European diaspora (the demographic that was overwhelmingly wiped out by the Shoah) somehow aren’t “legitimately” Jewish and don’t have ties to the Levant. it’s factually incorrect and a form of erasure.
while the United States in particular has visibly had more Ashkenazi representation (because that’s the majority of American Jews), saying things like this isn’t the way to uplift Mizrahim and Sephardim. the entirety of am yisrael, the Jewish people, is linked.
we need ways to talk about colorism within the jewish community, which is why i have talked extensively about the terms "jews of color" and "white jews" specifically referring to dark-skinned and light-skinned jews respectively, even though any jew can be seen as non-white to the general populace by virtue of being jewish.
we need ways to talk about racism within the jewish community, especially the way many lighter skinned jews will look down on Black, brown, or Hispanic jews, whether they converted or were born jewish.
ashkenazi does not mean light-skinned, and sephardi and mizrachi do not mean dark-skinned. jews are jews. stop separating us.
look, as I have repeatedly said, I view white jew as an intracommunity term. all jews are nonwhite by the broader meaning of white. however there absolutely has to be a way to address that pale skinned, genetically jewish or mixed jewish + white people mistreat Black, Hispanic, and asian jews, especially converts who are not genetically jewish.
im not gonna say all that shit about ethnically genetically pale skinned white passing etc etc every time. white jew is my shorthand, for intracommunity use. plus most ppl whose family are pale-skinned jews (or a mix of pale-skinned jews and white goyim) in the us tend to call themselves white, *especially* in jewish spaces. [I know plenty of people who look Very Jewish to anyone who knows anything about jewish features but are pale-skinned who call themselves white. honestly almost everyone like that ive met has called themselves white while in jewish spaces.]
jews as a group are not white by virtue of being jewish, and I respect the right of any jew to call themselves non-white. but I identify jews who easily pass for white, or hold colorism privilege over jews of color, as white jews for the purposes of identifying racism and colorism within the jewish community, not because I believe them to be white [the race]. i make a distinction between the terms "non-white" and "person of color" for that reason.
a pale skinned but visibly jewish person, or even a jew who is completely white-passing but a racist finds out they're jewish, is at risk for violence from police or white supremacists. that is not the same struggle that Black and Hispanic people, and especially Black and Hispanic jews because they do get it from both inside the jewish community and out, face.
to expand on the places where I mentioned it above, the answer to do white jews have privilege to the police/ICE is so so so dependent.
they have privilege over non-white jews and especially Black & Hispanic jews, who are majorly targeted by the police and ICE even without being jewish.
white jews' privilege is of course conditional--a racist cop who profiles them as being jewish isn't gonna treat them like they're white. but other cops might. or a judge might.
and honestly sometimes the comfort of white jews w police rather than private security as a safety measure is scary to me. yes police have the legal power, but getting to synagogue and seeing like 4 cop cars outside is kinda unsettling.
we've already seen that white privilege doesn't always protect protesters or bystanders when it comes to ICE operations, but they're certainly more protected than people who "look like immigrants".
privilege especially for white passing people is never cut-and-dry.
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