that Jew who cooks

proudly, loudly Jewish • big foodie • hobbiest woodworker • y'all need to stop defining Jewish words for us. They're not for you.

[jewreallythinkthat]

Welcome to my side blog where I can talk about Jewish things in peace. I'm gonna be tagging things as best I can - specifically using "I/P" for anything about the current ongoing middle east war with Hamas.

I'm a left wing Jew, pro-two state solution, and just fucking exhausted with finding out more and more of my left wing friends have descended fully into full blown Nazism with their views on Jews. It's so easy not to be an antisemite and yet... Well... Yeah.....

So stick around for politics and the Jewish food I make (babka, sfinj, challah, blintzes, hummus & falafel - we've got it all)

ANON asks currently off as y'all can't seem to read and I'm not dealing with the fall out of what you guys mis-interpret. I'm responsible for what I say, not what you misrepresent me as saying.

[cantotallyeven]

Jewish Space Laser flag color picked from the the sun is a deadly laser image

[jamangobirb]

I love Tumblr sometimes

[yviisxo]

rest in peace to this diva

[jewreallythinkthat]

I'm really hoping a couple of my American followers are happy to engage with ek on this topic as I know it can be one that gets a lot of people worked up (although given that most of you guys came to me through jumblr, I like to think you understand nuance).

Now I live in the UK and our police force have plenty of their own issues (if you have seen the news out of the UK recently, you'll be fully aware of yet another scandal) but I have always found the whole ACAB thing very difficult to stomach and I think I've worked out why.

It feels like yet another jargon slang word thrown around by, again, people who want to show that they are Good and Virtuous and On The Right Side Of History without having to do any work or actually put any thought into the fact society is complex. I'm very aware of the systemic racism within the police in US society but the issue I have realised I see from the ACAB crowd is a refusal to engage with what happens if there is no police.

It would be a joy to live in a society where no one commited crime and everyone loved happily together however this is the real world and we all know that this is simply not how it works (and boy oh boy am I familiar with being on the recieving end of death threats and hate speech). So if we had no cops, there would be no one to stop someone wandering into my house, stabbing me and stealing my stuff - other than me of course and I would obviously fight back. There would be no one to enforce the rules of society unless suddenly we went back to mob rule where different groups run protection rackets. Personally, rather than paying some mafioso to keep me safe, I'd prefer to pay a centralised group who are accountable to the entirety of society and have to enforce our shared laws rather than inflict their own personal laws on us. But this is just recreating the police.

So surely, if you want to live in an actual functioning society, you do actually need a police force and the refusal to acknowledge that from many in the ACAB crowd seems completely unhelpful to the desire to actually improve the police.

But then again, this comes from the point of view of a Brit and I know our relationship to the police is very different to that in the US which is why I'd hugely appreciate it if someone of jynUS followers would be willing to share their views/experience on the topic?

[pusheenthenerdcat]

From the perspective of an immigrant from the US to the UK, I sort of expected that since the police force/how it functions is entirely different the rhetoric and talking points would be different too but its been the same and its sort of bothering me?

the ACAB people here talk about the unarmed traffic cops here in the exact same way as people back in the states talked about the guys who'd show up to a mental health emergency with guns drawn. and i am really not a fan of that because it feels like it minimises the shit BIPOC/disabled folks go through in america, as well as is defeatist in a way that makes me worry we'll lose some of the rights we have because it treats "room for progress" as the same as a crisis so nobody bothers trying to protect/expand the things that work.

like yeah they still have issues but some ppl have not even tried to understand what it was like for me to go from "taught when i was a kid if i ever got lost/had an emergency to go find a mum with young children because that was my safest bet for help" to "watching a telly character who was a cop need an introductory lesson in how to shoot when she became a special alien ops agent because she'd never done it before". it feels like a different plane of existence.

i am a bit less sympathetic to the idea that the system is so broke it must be entirely destroyed instead of fixed when we are SO MUCH CLOSER to where we need to be already.

[jewishtransdyke]

I've lived in the US my whole life. The cops here do suck. I essentially agree with the basic premise of the whole ACAB thing, at least as it applies to the US - that [US] police forces are hopelessly corrupt, violent, and racist, and that when a cop tries to do the right thing, they don't last very long and almost never manage to change things for the better.

But yeah, people are stupid about it. Like, sure, the situation is very bad, and it might be that the only way to really fix it in a way that sticks is to tear down our current system of law enforcement and start from scratch (unlikely to ever happen, but sure, hypothetically).

But you do have to replace it with something. Corruption and brutality and racism are not inherent to the concept of 'law enforcement personnel', and mob rule is not a solution.

There have to be people whose job it is to enforce the law, who have the training to do so properly, and who can be held accountable if they act unethically or break the law themselves.

Ideally they'd do it very differently than it's done now (and they'd actually do that last part consistently), and they don't have to be called 'police', but somebody does have to do that job.

[jewreallythinkthat]

Thank you so much to both of you (and @rosefyrefyre on a separate thread) for your perspectives. It's really interesting hearing them as someone who grew up in and lives in a country where the police simply are not armed. Like firearms officers are a huge deal here because it's so rare to see legit guns on the street - to put it into perspective, I used to be an award winning target shooter and despite not having touched a gun in well over a decade, I still have fired a gun more recently than most police officers in this country.

I am very familiar with the issues in the police service, and not just because the UK is so small that when there is a police scandal, it makes national news. One of the biggest scandals of my life involved a serving London police officer picking up a woman during covid (they think he used his badge to get her to get into his car), kidnapping, raping and murdering her. She was from my university and kidnapped about 100/200m from where two of my closest friends lived so it was very close to home that one.

I guess my biggest issue with the ACAB thing is that it doesn't actually deal with the crux of the problem: how do you actually rebuild a group of people who are paid to protect us, and put guardrails in place to keep out the extremists and minimise corruption.

I agree that pretty much everything I know about the US police leads me to the view that it would quite possibly need to be started from scratch as it's so institutionally toxic but the actual way to do that is beyond me - especially as I do think incredibly aggressive reform might work if you actually tried hard enough.

Also, to be completely honest, I think the 2nd amendment makes it very difficult to have a police force where people aren't trigger happy as when there is every chance literally anyone could be wandering around with a gun, it must be fucking terrifying when you're an obvious target. Like I don't want it to sound like I'm excusing the police as I am fully aware of the probabilities of being shot if your white Vs black but I don't know how you could remove the guns from the police (which would at least mitigate the situation although not solve the underlying racism) without removing guns from the general population?

Anyway, this has been a very long winded way of saying that I find the whole ACAB thing very jargonistic and unhelpful to any sort of conversation and it's used more as a moral purity test to avoid having to think about the world

[jewreallythinkthat]

I'm really hoping a couple of my American followers are happy to engage with ek on this topic as I know it can be one that gets a lot of people worked up (although given that most of you guys came to me through jumblr, I like to think you understand nuance).

Now I live in the UK and our police force have plenty of their own issues (if you have seen the news out of the UK recently, you'll be fully aware of yet another scandal) but I have always found the whole ACAB thing very difficult to stomach and I think I've worked out why.

It feels like yet another jargon slang word thrown around by, again, people who want to show that they are Good and Virtuous and On The Right Side Of History without having to do any work or actually put any thought into the fact society is complex. I'm very aware of the systemic racism within the police in US society but the issue I have realised I see from the ACAB crowd is a refusal to engage with what happens if there is no police.

It would be a joy to live in a society where no one commited crime and everyone loved happily together however this is the real world and we all know that this is simply not how it works (and boy oh boy am I familiar with being on the recieving end of death threats and hate speech). So if we had no cops, there would be no one to stop someone wandering into my house, stabbing me and stealing my stuff - other than me of course and I would obviously fight back. There would be no one to enforce the rules of society unless suddenly we went back to mob rule where different groups run protection rackets. Personally, rather than paying some mafioso to keep me safe, I'd prefer to pay a centralised group who are accountable to the entirety of society and have to enforce our shared laws rather than inflict their own personal laws on us. But this is just recreating the police.

So surely, if you want to live in an actual functioning society, you do actually need a police force and the refusal to acknowledge that from many in the ACAB crowd seems completely unhelpful to the desire to actually improve the police.

But then again, this comes from the point of view of a Brit and I know our relationship to the police is very different to that in the US which is why I'd hugely appreciate it if someone of jynUS followers would be willing to share their views/experience on the topic?

[jewreallythinkthat]

I don't have a question I just wanted to say the chanukiah in your banner is beautiful

Sorry for completely missing this at the time. Thank you so much!!!!! I'm thinking of trying to make more wooden Judaica but I need to work out how to do it it first. I'm wondering about an olive Seder plate or maybe something like that could be cool but I'm happy to take suggestions

[jewreallythinkthat]

Today I went to the Nova exhibition in London.

It was overwhelming. They said it would take 60-90 minutes to go around it. I was there for two and a half hours, and I didn't see everything.

The design of the exhibition invokes the carnage and chaos of the day - it's a masterclass in exhibition/museum design.

Some of the clips of footage shown in it I remember seeing, lying in bed, on the 7th October 2023 as I tried to work out what was happening in Israel where one of my best friends was currently visiting for a wedding.

I stood by the burnt out husks of cars wondering if this was where people had died, or had they managed to miraculously escape and get away without being mowed down by gunfire.

I started to read the Dinah Project report before realising I couldn't do that in a museum - I needed to be somewhere I felt safe if I wanted to expose myself to that level of horror.

It's been 14 years since I was last in Israel.

I'd never seen a roadside bomb shelter before today but they had either bought with or built one at the exhibition to talk about what Hamas did to those inside. They aren't big. I cannot imagine being trapped there, pinned behind 40 others as terrorists fire bullets and grenades inside. I spent most of the exhibition on the edge of tears, or actively crying.

That was just the first room.

The memorial wall for the hostages has a video of an interview with Rachel and Jon, the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. They're wearing masking tape with the number 165 written across it. Rachel speaks with such optimism about her son - they've already seen a hostage release so why would Hersh who was confirmed to be alive not be coming home. I watched that video knowing what those two incredible people would have to go through again just five months later.

The memorial room for the dead had images and words written for almost all those killed at Nova.

I read every name across the three walls.

The interviews with survivors tell of stories of luck. Luck, and deep unadulterated horror at the way so many survived while hearing their friends' final moments. The bar littered with the bodies of all those who tried to hide behind it; the portaloos riddled with bullet holes; the woman who hid in a skip under bags of garbage to survive while others died all around her.

The processing room where we learnt of the foundations set up to help provide heal included videos from the creators of the Nova festival on how they have danced again. I'm proud that Glastonbury in the UK (despite everything) had had memorials for Nova for the past two years and are planning this year's one at the moment.

I was privileged to be there when a Nova survivor was visiting and he shared his testimony. We must bear witness and refuse to let people rewrite the history of this slaughter, this massacre. We know in horrifying detail what inhumane actions were inflicted on innocents that day and this exhibition refuses to let them be forgotten.

To be remembered is to live forever and we will never forget what happened.

If you are UK based, I urge you to go. It's not easy, but it's important.

[tarannonfalastur]

The British Museum has been forced to postpone a lecture on Ancient Israel and Judah, as part of a newly established Jewish culture month, after finding that "a significant proportion of registered attendees were individuals intending to deliberately disrupt the event".

What exactly are we to believe motivated this 'significant proportion' to plan to travel to the British museum (in central London, presumably at their expense), to disrupt an educational lecture?

It seems unlikely that any would-be protestors cared much about the content or veracity of the lecture. Likewise for the speaker: Dr Paul Collins is a well-regarded scholar and curator in ancient Near-Eastern studies, and to my knowledge all his previous talks, including on Iraqi, Syrian and Kuwaiti history and archaeological heritage, proceeded uneventfully.

So, what then about this particular event provoked a response?

The key is the symbolic aspect of the lecture - namely, the fact that the British museum chose Ancient Israel and Judah as a topic to mark Jewish Culture Month.

The prospective demonstrator finds the association of Jewish culture and history with Jewish sovereignty and self-governance entirely unpalatable.

The reason for this is self-evident; they are opposed to Israel in the present, and so they extrapolate an ahistorical and pathological opposition to 'Israel' in the past.

To be charitable, the intended message of the planned protest is that British institutions should limit themselves to certain acceptable topics when discussing Jews - coincidentally, the times and places when Jews were powerless and vulnerable. (Less charitably, the message is that institutions in Britain should refuse to acknowledge Jews at all).

But the unintended message is much more revealing. The ideology that instigates and drives actions like this one is hollow, reliant on ignorance, and unable to hold up when faced with the truth. If the arguments of antizionism are valid, they would be no less valid for encountering and incorporating history. Only by censoring and restricting what history is permissable to teach, can antizionism dogma preserve itself.

The choice now facing the British Museum, and wider British society is simple: to give in and allow the ideologues to have their way, leaving us all more ignorant and intellectually poorer for it, or to rise to meet the challenge by raising the priority of teaching about Jews and Jewish history to the public. It's clear enough now that Britain is in dire need of it.

Statement on the Jewish Culture Month event

A statement from the British Museum regarding the Jewish Culture Month event.

[jewreallythinkthat]

UPDATE:

It has been rescheduled to next month. They are just sorting out specifics and will be releasing the date and booking links soon. The BM is expecting a huge surge in people trying to get tickets because of the publicity of what's happened so they are also organising a live stream for those unable to attend in person.

Security is also being increased working with the police and other groups but obviously they aren't going to go into too much detail on that as they don't want to give away loopholes.

I, for one, had no interest in this lecture other than it would be cool to do Jewish Culture Month at the BM however I will now be fighting tooth and claw to get myself a ticket to support this.

Fuck the antisemites and thank you to the BM for prioritising reorganising this

[homunculus-argument]

A fantasy story starting with the protagonist minding her own business gathering firewood, when a demon appears out of nowhere announcing that she belongs to him now. The protagonist demands to know on what grounds, she's never signed no damn contract. The demon is kind of baffled by this, and awkwardly explains that just now her father had promised his firstborn for something, and she is his firstborn.

The protagonist digs her heels in and says no, she never knew her biological father and by the way the demon explained the situation, evidently her father also doesn't know that he already has a daughter, so therefore the man who had made no contribution to her life after he bred and fled has no claim to her as something he could barter.

Not giving a shit about the fact she's gambling her life in doing so, the protagonist makes contact with the local woodland fae, asking them to negotiate on her side. The fae think that this is fucking hilarious and go with her. So, having lawyered up and with a reluctant demon in tow, the protagonist heads off on a quest to find her father and do whatever it takes to wrangle everyone involved into unmaking the contract.

[maimonideznuts]

Convene the Beit din, we have a matter to settle.

[greatmountainfloofsquatch]

I imagine if the fae existed, Jews and especially rabbis would have a lot easier time dealing with them than gentiles.

[homunculus-argument]

If you need an exorcism you find a catholic priest. If you need to get fae contract divorced, you find a rabbi.

[tryingtobecoollikeyou]

I am not Jewish, but I would buy every book of a series featuring a rabbi who has a side job dealing with the Fae.

[maimonideznuts]

The Exorcist and the Rabbi are partners... When the problem is talkative the Rabbi takes the lead, when the problem is violent the Exorcist is in their element.

[redrook]

Great news, everyone

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

A Jewish peasant girl turned moneylender, Miriam, ends up stuck married to the fae king of winter. The daughter of a duke gets stuck married to the emperor, who is possessed by a demon.

The plot is the two of them trying to survive, get divorced through any means necessary, and save their respective people.

[acidtheater]

Most annoying online emotion is "I have a funny personal anacdote to add to this but it doxxes like all of my personal information"

[jewreallythinkthat]

I know there are non-cheesecake Shavuot treats out there but actually a proper homemade baked cheesecake with a solid base and a financially concerning quantity of vanilla is hard to beat. None of these shitty bought ones but a proper dense. Fudgy and tangy cheesecake

[jewreallythinkthat]

I have just booked tickets to the Nova exhibition in London and I'm already getting emotional just thinking about it. I'm gonna be a wreck by the end 😬

I'm glad it's coming but the security measures the website is outlining just showcase how horrific the level of protest aimed at silencing us talking out and atrocity is. They can't even put the location of the exhibition online because of the fear of protest. It's heart wrenching

[golem-brigadier]

Sorry, but what's the point that Jewish organizations and individual Jewish sponsors should fund goyische LGBT organizations and events? Why should we waste money on them when they constantly backstabs our Queer Jews and Allied Jews themselves? We should be organizing and helping out only for Queer Jews.

[jewreallythinkthat]

Despite all their issues, I do want to say that the UK government does actually take antisemitism seriously. I will admit that it helps that our prime minister has a Jewish wife and their kids were raised Jewish so he has a unique perspective on the situation, but genuinely I do think Kier Starmer is trying to help.

The problem is, money for security and more policing can only go so far. The government can try to fight antisemitism but without British society admitting it has a racism problem, it's very hard to make meaningful change. The government aren't the ones picking up knives and stabbing us, setting our synagogues on fire, or trying to run us over and in a way, they're caught in the same catch 22 that we are.

If we Jews say we feel (and are) unsafe, we are accused of playing the victim.

If we are killed, it's a false flag.

If we advocate for antisemetism training, we are brainwashing people.

If the government points to publicly available statistics showing Jews are more likely to be attacked than any other minority, they're giving into their Zionist overlords.

If the government raises the issue of antisemitism at all, they're on the pay roll of Bibi.

The cults of the far left and far right have indoctrinated their people to blame us for everything to avoid facing their own deep, toxic failings.

There's an election this week in the UK and the far right and left populist parties are about to do very well because people are so blinded by their own hate and desire for instant gratification and vengeance that they can't even see that they're signing their own futures along with the futures of those who live around them over to ideological zealots with no intention of trying to benefit society.

[mistflarden-deactivated20200816]

“In Europe they–”

WHERE in Europe??!? WHERE??? You mean Iceland?? Azerbaijan? The Netherlands? Liechtenstein???? THERE ARE 50 COUNTRIES IN EUROPE. ALL WITH DIFFERENT CULTURES. SO PRAY TELL ME, WHERE IN FUCKING EUROPE.

[eldriitchmurmurs]

in europe they got antisemitism

[number-one-malloc-appreciator]

[jewreallythinkthat]

I have NEVER seen British Jews this angry. Even after Heaton Park, we were pissed but pragmatic but I'm seeing people full of rage in a way I've never seen before.

And good for them.

[jewreallythinkthat]

Jewish News went off with this one and we love to see it