hello! i'm orion, i also go by עמיחי (amichai/amijai) you can call me either! i'm 24 and my pronouns are as follows:
english - any/all
español - él/elle
עברית - הוא/היא
for all these, please switch between each pronoun set freely (even within the same sentence!) if that's not feasible for you, just pick one and stick with it :)
i used to be shut-your-loomp and lt-cmdr-titties until i got nuked by tumblr for being trans. my new star trek blog is @cantorpike
i also have a dc blog at @nightwings-puphood
annnnd a pitt blog at @puppydogdennis
ao3 is dyllpickless
currently i'm spending much of my free time reading, and i like to post excerpts to discuss! me posting a quote does not mean i inherently agree with it, simply that i think it could provide a good launching off point for a conversation. i will link my reading list here
i am fluent in english (native) and spanish (advanced, distinct influence by argentinian dialect), and i am currently learning ancient and modern hebrew. next i want to learn levantine arabic, yiddish, ladino, and quechua—not necessarily in that order. i tag my posts in spanish as español, those in hebrew as עברית, and so on
i am in the process of getting my masters in religious and peace studies
omari is my service dog
i'm definitionally transmasculine but i don't personally identify with anything other than "queer." if you call me a man you are misgendering me
Hi, I am sorry for circling back so late, I just lost track of the month. I hope you found a roommate. My friend wasn't interested, she's just used to a fully kosher and shomer home.
hi, no worries. we didn't find a roommate and because of rhat we're losing the apartment, so we're no longer looking. thanks anyways!
Hi hello white tumblr user, over there is a transgender Muslim. I want you to be normal about them for 5 minutes. If you make a comment about fantasizing about them getting executed, wishing about them leaving their religon, or them detransitioning. I'm putting you in a saw contraption and letting you die. Good luck <333
is Jewish Voice for Peace actually Jewish? I've heard a couple different things about that but no sources
@gryphistheantlerqueen also asked:
Whooo boy. So this has been sitting in the inbox for a few months, I wrote up a draft, and then it just sat... until this past week, when some new JVP BS hit the fan and gave me the kick to finish it.
Sooooo...
Verdict: Not Actually Jewish
(updated verdict after finding out about the “self-managed conversion” and “teacup mikvah”) Jewish, technically, and that "technically" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and is actively debatable without access to a detailed breakdown of JVP’s actual membership rolls.
In general summation, JVP is a far-left radical antizionist group that is headed by a few visibly antizionist Jews and whose membership rolls are either a strong minority or outright majority of non-Jews, based on variable statistics that they've released. Although they claim that the “majority of their members and staff are Jewish”, this seems to be both statistically unlikely and actively suspicious due to their noted tendency to instruct even non-Jewish members to speak #AsAJew on social media, and their instructions to do “self-managed conversions”. However, due to their title, they are very popular with people who want a Jewish Stamp Of Approval for demonizing Israelis and Zionist Jews as a result. In effect, they are Jewish in the same way that people like Candace Owens and Hershel Walker are Black—as self-tokenizing minorities who throw the rest of their ethnic group under the bus in exchange for power and political access.
And despite the claims that they are “inspired by Jewish values and traditions” (as put on their website) and “oppose anti-Jewish hatred,” JVP routinely engages in antisemitic rhetoric, up to and including blood libel and antisemitic conspiracy theories, and acts as a shield against non-Jews who also engage in antisemitic rhetoric so long as the non-Jews in question remember to shout "For Palestine!" first. This is not an exaggeration.
The primary example of their in-house antisemitic rhetoric is their "Deadly Exchange" program, where they explicitly and conspiratorially blame Israel as being responsible for American police brutality and militarization. However, for all of their fearmongering and blame-casting on the subject—as if American cops needed outside help in brutalizing minorities or gaining military-grade handmedowns from the Pentagon, both of which are explicit claims of the "Deadly Exchange" program—they have a hard time actually identifying specific deaths associated with the international training seminars they're holding up as responsible.
One of the the closest they've come to a specific allegation is claiming that "former St. Louis County police chief Timothy Fitch trained with the Israeli military three years before Michael Brown’s killing and the Ferguson uprising." (Note: this was in a video that appears to have since been made private.) But Darren Wilson worked for the Ferguson PD, not the St. Louis PD, and Fitch retired months before the killing. So he was in a completely different police department, and this is the closest JVP comes to pointing to specific deaths or acts of brutality that they blame on Israel. Everything else is literal fearmongering--up to and including the classic conspiratorial tropes of "secretive Jewish governmental influence".
JVP has also happily supported the words of white supremacists like Richard Spencer, taking his “You could say that I’m a white Zionist in the sense that I care about my people," statement at face value, using it as the basis for entire articles where they compared Zionism to White Supremacy as a deliberate misrepresentation of the ideology that is common on the extreme political Left (you can compare that treatment again with how Candace Owens treats the word "Woke" on the Right). Even when the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" march happened, JVP wasted no time in comparing Zionism with the very ideology fueling the people chanting "Jews Will Not Replace Us," saying that Zionism is "Jewish racial supremacy" and calling for a universal condemnation of the ideology as a form of White Supremacy... which was the exact sort of message that many of those same White Supremacists would have happily agreed with. So JVP is essentially siding with literal White Supremacists, even as they claim that "Jews are not the primary victims of White Supremacy."
JVP also engages in Holocaust revisionism, such as with this lovely quote from Cecilie Surasky, the deputy director of JVP, “I believe it is critical to situate the genocide of Jews in a broader context, and not as an exceptional, metaphysically unique event. Some 6 million Jews died, but another 5 million people were also targeted for annihilation.”
(another quote, from an article by Surasky, which compares Netanyahu to Hitler.)
This is just straight revisionism of the entire Holocaust and the unique fixation the Nazis had on the Jews. Literally, even when they were losing, they were diverting resources from the war just to kill more Jews. Quote Hitler himself, "Jews must be prevented from intruding themselves among all the other nations as elements of internal disruption, under the mask of honest world-citizens, and thus gaining power over these nations." The very basis of the Nazi ideology paints Jews as an existential threat to the human race's peace and security—a far cry from JVP's claim that the Jewish suffering in the Holocaust wasn't unique or exceptional.
Additionally, JVP ignores or re-envisions Mizrachi Jewish history. They call the very term Mizrachi “Zionist rhetoric,” and refer to Mizrachi “immigrants,” (“Deadly Exchange,” pg. 16-17), and claim “the Israeli government facilitated a mass immigration of Mizrahim” (“Our Approach to Zionism”) as though those weren’t the direct result of the mass expulsion of and violence against Jews in MENA countries. These weren’t immigrants, these were refugees.
And as for the question of “Are they Jewish?”, well...
Statistically, they are not representative of the Jewish population as a whole, 90% of whom identify as some degree of Zionist in the sense of “Supporting Jewish self-determination.” One does not need to be Jewish to join JVP, as they proudly state on their website. Their membership rolls are also extremely obfuscated, and the fact that they encourage their followers, whether Jewish or not, to post and speak “as Jews” on social media makes it even more difficult to figure out what percentage of their membership is actually Jewish. Furthermore, they have instructions for their members to engage in “self-conversions” that are not acceptable to Jewish law or tradition, and misuse/appropriate other sacred Jewish traditions to the point that “blasphemy” is an accurate description, with their instructions on the mikvah (a sacred bath) being outright offensive.
(note that one has to be completely nude and bare of any adornment or makeup to use the mikvah, which is a pure pool of collected rainwater to be immersed in, for context on the above... misuse. Trying to claim this as being “in line with sacred Jewish tradition” is like trying to claim to be Catholic while also saying that the Pope is the Antichrist and that using beer and a doughnut for the Eucharist is acceptable. For more information on mikveh, see: The Jewish Virtual Library, Aish, myjewishlearning, or Chabad.
There's also no altar.
The irony of asking people not to appropriate while doing this is astonishing.)
It’s also telling that they straight up say they are “claiming” the practice as their own.
Furthermore, JVP has hosted panels on “antisemitism” in the past... headed by people who are not only not Jewish, but who have been credibly accused of antisemitism in the past.
JVP has also endorsed The Mapping Project Boston, which was a Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) subsidiary, listing every “Zionist” organization in Boston, Mass. This included Jewish schools, elder homes, community centers, disability centers, and more; all of them painted with scary and misleading “links” to non-Jewish organizations to insinuate Jewish control of the state and city governments, invoking age-old antisemitic tropes of a conspiracy of Jews as they did so:
(first image is the Mapping Project, the second is a 1938 Nazi political cartoon)
The Mapping Project also, and this is my personal favorite, accused Harvard University of doing “racist science” for engaging in archeological and genetic studies of Jews and Jewish history. Tellingly, BDS actually disavowed The Mapping Project (albeit for bad optics, not for the rank antisemitism they were promoting)... but JVP has not, even though the Mapping Project’s entry for the ADL reads as follows:
Masquerading as a “civil rights” group, the ADL is a counterinsurgency and espionage organization whose mission is to protect the mutual interests of the US and Israeli governments, and to eliminate solidarity among oppressed peoples, especially concerning Palestine. The ADL spies on and criminalizes activists (using its connections to governments, police, schools, and corporations) while undermining their work by pushing its own state-sanctioned, pro-“Israel” agenda. And while the ADL claims to represent Jews and to fight “antisemitism” on their behalf, the organization has supported anti-Jewish state violence and sanitized Nazis. The ADL cannot be reformed: it must be dismantled and whatever resources it has should go towards repairing the many harms it has done. (Emphasis added.)
Of course, JVP has also engaged in similar conspiracy-toned antisemitic dogwhistles, such as this fun bit from their first Deadly Exchange video:
So clearly (to me at least), they have no problems with The Mapping Project’s tone and presentation.
And this isn’t even going into JVP’s routine promotion of blood libel, their egregious double standards, their approving of pogroms, their active support for Hamas terrorists and demonization of Hamas’ victims, their attempted revisionism of Jewish history, their abject rejection of Jewish culture, and their other actions that show not just bias, but outright hatred for 90% of the world’s Jews.
As one commentator put it, JVP as an organization is very much like Autism Speaks is to Autistic people--a thinly disguised hate group that views the people they’re supposedly speaking for as the problem, and themselves as promoting the Solution. To this moderator, they’re the equivalent of the Association of German National Jews, who were also known as the Jews for Hitler; they wanted to abandon Judaism and embrace Naziism... and they got sent to the gas chambers anyway.
(and also just... a general experience/exposure to them on social media, where even the most progressive actions taken by Israel, such as the recent ruling regarding queer Palestinians being able to claim sanctuary in Israel, being labeled as “pinkwashing”)
it kind of bugs me how the discussion of agoraphobia always assumes the hypothetical agoraphobic is coming from a baseline of middle/upperclass privilege and that their isolation has always been consensual and self-inflicted. this ignores the huge demographic of people suffering from agoraphobia who developed it specifically because they were confined by an external force for a large portion of their lives and are now unused to open public areas, whether they were sent to prison at a young age, grew up disabled in the system, have spent a long time admitted to a mental health facility, were confined by abusive or neglectful guardians, etc. which are much more complex circumstances in terms of treatment and recovery.
Israel called it a terror attack. But is that really what happened?
Settlers set Palestinian fields ablaze and the owners try to douse the flames, two villagers are shot to death. The police are calling the incident a Palestinian terror attack. Eyewitness accounts tell a different story.
Settlers set Palestinian fields ablaze and the owners try to douse the flames; two villagers are shot to death. The police are calling the i
Lying on a bed on a balcony with a view of the valley, the olive grove and mountain across the way, is a man whose stomach is punctured, stitched and bandaged across its whole width. He was seriously wounded below, in the valley, in his own wheat fields, which can be seen from here.
Also visible from the balcony, across the way, is the settler farm-outpost of Derech Avraham: four or five ill-intentioned structures. For about a year they have been threatening the quiet in the area. On the other side of the hill is the farm's "mothership," Elon Moreh; on the mountain behind us is Itamar, another long-established, violent settlement, which has also sent its tentacles into the area.
We are east of Nablus en route to Beit Furik. The trip took longer early this week due to huge lines at gas stations, brought about by a fuel shortage which is apparently the fault of the Palestinian Authority.
Maaruf Hanani, 43, an officer in the Palestinian police and a farmer with three children, lives in a house on the edge of the valley. On July 23 he was on weekend leave from a police course he was taking in Jericho. In the morning he went to Nablus to buy medication for the three thoroughbreds he is raising as a hobby; afterward he returned to his spacious home.
That Thursday, he and his farming partner, Firas Shahin, 55, were sitting on the balcony, where a pleasant breeze could be felt this week, when suddenly they saw white smoke rising from the direction of their fields. The two jointly cultivate 55 dunams (almost 14 acres) of wheat in the valley. They rushed to the site.
It was the day before the attack on the Palestinian farmers in the village of Tell, during which four local residents and two Israeli soldiers were killed. The proximity of the dates raise the suspicion that these could have been previously planned actions by the settlers, not spontaneous outbursts.
Salma a-Deb'i, the Nablus-area field researcher for B'Tselem – the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories – says that she has noticed an escalation of such acts in the past few weeks.
"Lately it looks as though the settlers are planning their attacks," she tells Haaretz. "And when there is resistance on the part of local residents, the army intervenes and the residents lose their land. In Kafr Tell there are now mobile homes where the four residents were killed."
Ahmed Abu Siam, 32, heads a group of 12 volunteers in Beit Furik who offer support to their community whenever there is trouble, in the absence of functioning municipal institutions. He too received a report about a fire in Hanani and Shahin's fields, immediately summoned local firefighters and led his volunteers into the burning valley.
The fire had sprung up in a number of places. No one present had any doubt that it was yet another malicious assault by the settlers – not the first and certainly not the last. Since Derech Avraham was established, on August 10, 2025, acts of arson, theft and the vandalizing of water pipelines and farming equipment have been rampant.
Beit Furik's farmers are no longer able to access their land, a predicament shared by nearly all the villages of the West Bank. A week before the incident in question – in coordination with the army – the Palestinians had brought a combine to their fields to harvest the wheat, but settlers blocked their path and threatened to set the combine ablaze.
Soldiers arrived at the scene and declared the area a closed military zone. When one of the troops discovered that Hanani is an officer in the Palestinian police, he told him, "Let Abu Mazen [Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas] harvest the wheat."
Hanani says the officer aimed his rifle at him and threatened that if he did not leave immediately with the combine, the army would call in the settlers. A few minutes later, settlers arrived aboard an all-terrain vehicle. The Palestinians decided to back off. What remains of the wheat has yet to be harvested.
When Hanani tried to explain to the officer that this was his land, the latter retorted, "You don't have land here. This land belongs to the State of Israel."
The family in at least one of the houses near the farm is afraid to go outside these days. Meanwhile, Abu Siam's volunteers and other local residents organize nighttime patrols to protect their families and property. A man named Arafat Nasasara recently moved to land abutting the outpost with his family and flock of sheep after settlers had forced him out of his previous home, in Khirbet Tana, east of Beit Furik.
According to Hanani and Abu Siam, on July 23, local villagers started to put out the flames – which ultimately swept across 270 dunams, they say – with fire extinguishers and buckets of water, until the firefighters could arrive. They also called in a tractor to dig a trench in an effort to isolate the blaze and prevent it from spreading further, but video footage shot at 10:33 A.M. shows the flames spreading fast because of the heat and the wind.
Then, according to the testimonies of the villagers, while a few dozen people were busy trying to put out the fire, five vehicles arrived from the Derech Avraham farm, carrying dozens of settlers who started shooting in the air and beating the Palestinians, in order to force them to leave their fields. Some of the intruders were armed with rifles and pistols, others carried clubs and hoes. Some were masked. Chaos reigned, with dozens of settlers confronting dozens of villagers. Much shouting and many shots are audible in the footage.
The first killed was 17-year-old Mohammed Malitat who accompanied his father Hamed, 43, an owner of land in the area, in an attempt to douse the flames. The young man clashed with a settler and knocked him down. Hanani and Abu Siam later related that the settler, whose first name they know, got up and shot the teenager in the neck at point-blank range – with an M16 rifle. After Mohammed collapsed and lay bleeding, the settler continued to shoot, the two Palestinians say, in order to "confirm the kill." Why did you kill the boy? the locals cried out.
Hamed was seriously wounded and is still in Rafidia Hospital, in Nablus.
The shooting intensified the chaos. The settler with the M16 shot Hanani in the stomach; the farmer managed to get away but the man kept firing at him.
Mahmoud Hanani, 20, a distant relative of Maaruf's, was killed by gunfire; he was initially wounded in the leg and tried to crawl away when a settler shot and killed him as he inched his way forward.
Six soldiers were at the site when the event began to unfold. None of them lifted a finger to assist the villagers. A second army unit subsequently arrived on the scene. Hanani tells us that as long as the soldiers apparently saw that the settlers were safe, they didn't intervene – but when they saw the Palestinian farmers and other villagers attacking settlers, they started shooting in the air to disperse them. The forces broke up the brawl within 15 minutes.
The soldiers put the bodies into two black plastic bags and left with them. Residents of Beit Furik suspect that they did so because so many bullets were fired at them. The 1,700 bodies that Israel has grabbed and held onto in the past three years were thus augmented by two, which haven't yet been returned to the families, for whatever reason.
For his part, Maaruf Hanani managed to run about 150 meters, while under fire. "I wanted to live," he says now, with a smile. Badly wounded in his gut, he was first evacuated by motorcycle and afterward transferred to a private car that took him to the medical clinic in Beit Furik. After getting first aid, he was taken in an ambulance, along with the other wounded man, to Rafidia where he was hospitalized for eight days and underwent a complicated four-hour operation.
This is the Israel Police's account of the incident in the killing fields of Beit Furik, as provided to Haaretz this week: "Contrary to what you claim in your query, in accordance with the findings that were seen on the ground when the forces arrived, the event has been categorized by all relevant security bodies as a terrorist attack, since a number of Palestinians attacked and stabbed Israeli citizens by means of a knife, while they [the Israelis] were trying to put out the fire that erupted at the site, and seriously wounded one of them [one Israeli]. An investigation of the event is ongoing in the HTA [Hostile Terrorist Activity] department of the Central Unit in the police's Shai [Samaria and Judea] District."
In the village of Tell the settlers were simply out on a "hike," while here they ostensibly came "to put out the fire." The police investigation may be continuing, but none of the eye-witnesses with whom we spoke this week in Beit Furik had yet to be questioned by them, almost three weeks after the event. There's probably no need for that, since the police and "relevant security bodies" immediately determined that this was an HTA event.
The Israel Defense Forces' Spokesperson's Unit stated this week: "During efforts to extinguish the fire two terrorists stabbed an Israeli citizen. Upon witnessing the attack, another citizen who was in the vicinity killed both of the terrorists. Subsequently IDF forces conducted searches throughout the village of Beit Furik and imposed a siege on it."
Yes! From the Kaifeng and Ningbo Jews to the Baghdadi Jewish communities which settled in China as traders and businessmen in the Early Modern period, China has its own vibrant and oft-forgotten Jewish history which I will be posting about in the near future :) stay tuned!
(If you're wondering why I posted this @themoroccanjewess like six times, I'm still new to Tumblr and the reblog feature is a little confusing, so I chose to go with this format instead. Thanks and big credit for pointing this out =))
the reblog feature is confusing to you? If you need any help feel free to ask. There's two buttons (reblog and reblog now) reblog now reblogs it, well, now. And reblog let's you type as I'm doing rn! And post it so everyone can see
I did eventually figure this out. It was very late and for some god-forsaken reason I kept hitting "reblog now" instead of "reblog" and I was in a total daze while doing so, which, to be frank, is how I make most of my posts. Thank you so much for the explanation =) I do very much enjoy this site so far and the #jumblr community has been incredibly welcoming. Love you all!
[Mountains of Daxiangshan, Xindian District, Taiwan (大香山村新店區中華民國/臺灣) Taken 2026 by Yours Truly]
Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.
He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"
"What?"
He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"
"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."
Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.
Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.
