Police are investigating a deaf and mute Orthodox woman’s claims that she was raped while celebrating the High Holy Days early Tuesday.

shark vs the universe
art blog(derogatory)

No title available

No title available

JVL

titsay
wallacepolsom
styofa doing anything

Love Begins
No title available
dirt enthusiast
Today's Document
h
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
hello vonnie
cherry valley forever

ellievsbear

#extradirty
One Nice Bug Per Day
Show & Tell

seen from Italy

seen from Indonesia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Singapore

seen from South Korea

seen from Malaysia

seen from United States

seen from Germany

seen from Germany

seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Ukraine

seen from Canada
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
@juifemme
Police are investigating a deaf and mute Orthodox woman’s claims that she was raped while celebrating the High Holy Days early Tuesday.
An Orthodox leader should be advocating for awareness of rape and sexual abuse, not dismissing its victims, writes the executive director of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance.
My Jewish feminism is not allowed to be intersectional because of your bullshit.
A friend asked me to serve as a match-reference—that is, to attest to the virtues of a prospective bride—for her older (Torah-learned, black-hat-wearing) brother. My friend, apparently, had discovered, through other references, that the young woman in question did not always wear appropriate hos...
The moment Leah Paretzky got divorced, she lost her status as part of the ruling class of her ultra-Orthodox community.
Child marriage and forced marriage are more of a problem in the U.S. than you’d expect.
As a writer and the wife of an Orthodox rabbi , I stand out as a strange, misfit creature in a world of rules
Dear Mr. Schama,
Recently, I watched your documentary series, The Story of the Jews. Overall, I felt you captured the essence of the Jewish faith and culture. I thought you did a particularly good job of handling the issue of Zionism and the delicacy of the current political dynamic. However, as comprehensive as your documentary series was, there was one glaring, disappointing, oversight. In five, one hour episodes, you neglected to mention a single female contribution to the founding and development of the Jewish faith.
I am a Jewish woman and have been the beneficiary of the equalizing force of modern Reform Judaism. I had an equal, integrated Jewish education, that culminated in a Bat Mitzvah, performing the same rights and rituals my father and older brother performed me. I am proud to be Jewish, and even more proud to follow in the footsteps of the extraordinary Jewish women who have come before me. Now, I run a blog called Badass Jewish Women. I was so excited to watch your documentary series. You are an intelligent man, particularly adept at presenting information in a relatable, lucid, yet comprehensive fashion. I had no doubt in my mind that you would present the story of the Jews in the same way. But as I watched the program, I grew more and more confused. You were covering every stage in the development of Jewish culture, but without ever mentioning the women who contributed to those developments. Our religion is decidedly matrilineal, but hour after hour of the series passed and women didn’t even make the footnotes. How can you discuss Jews and socialism without mentioning Emma Goldman? You spent an entire episode on Zionism without once mentioning Golda Meir. You spoke about the success of the Jewish people in America but failed to acknowledge Emma Lazarus, whose words are inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. How can you discuss Jewish innovation in entertainment and vaudeville without mentioning Fanny Brice? What about Sarah Schenirer, founder of the Bais Yakov movement? What about our biblical matriarchs: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Ruth, Esther, and Miriam? What about Judith Butler or Hannah Arendt or Hannah Senesh? Needless to say, I should not have to give you a list of important Jewish women. You should know who they are. You should know that they deserve to be mentioned and respected as innovators and icons next to their male peers.
Simply put, Mr. Schama, women are 51% of the world’s population and 50% of the Jewish population. You have done our community a great disservice in only telling half our story. I cannot say that I will recommend your documentary to other people because it is not what it claims to be. You cannot call your series “The Story of the Jews” when it is really just the story of Jewish men. And I don’t want to hear that “you are a Jewish man” and you designed the documentary from your perspective. Those responses aren’t good enough. You have a mother, do you not? You are married? It is doubtless there are Jewish women in your life. Where were they in your series?
Honestly though, the lack of women in your documentary should have been no surprise to me. The contributions of women are frequently erased from history, Jewish or otherwise. Every day, I remind myself how lucky I am that both my family and the teachers responsible for my Jewish education made sure I learned about important Jewish women. However, I know that many others were not– and are not– so lucky. You had a unique opportunity with The Story of the Jews. Airing on a platform like the BBC, it reached millions of viewers worldwide. That’s millions of people who could have learned about the accomplishments and contributions of Jewish women. Shame on you for wasting that opportunity.
I can not demand anything from you. I don’t expect you to remake the series. I can ask you to do better next time. I ask you to consider that 50% of the population of our people deserves to be acknowledged and celebrated. As a student of Jewish history, you should know what happens to a people when they are marginalized and erased from history. I hope you remember this when you write your next book or film your next series. Think on this and do better.
Sincerely,
Rebecca
Explore Jewish Life and Judaism at My Jewish Learning, a trans-denominational website of information about Judaism. Visit us today!
Please dress appropriately and modestly at all times. Modesty is the mark of a man – your beauty is within. You are like a prince, a jewel, a diamond, and just like a precious gem, we want to protect you and keep you safe.
Trouser length: some men are not aware that when they sit down their trouser leg might rise up revealing a glimpse of ankle. There are special devices you can use when you try on clothes to ensure that this does not happen.
Please take special care with your shirt collar; there is a fashion to undo the top button and this could inadvertently reveal a glimpse of chest hair.
Although it is halachically permitted for men to light Shabbat candles, it is not really in keeping with the dignity of the community for men to do so. We suspect too that many men who try to do this are doing it for the wrong reasons.
Similarly with baking challah. This is simply a provocative act aimed at stretching boundaries. If we let men bake challah, where will it lead? Before we know it, they will be wanting to make the cholent too.
Photos of boys (including toddlers) should not be published in newspapers or advertisements. This should be the case even when they are dressed modestly as it is not deemed appropriate for women to see photos of small boys.
We urge all men to increase their adherence to laws of modesty. The current rise in terrorism in Israel and indeed, anti-Semitism around the world, is entirely due to the fact that some men are wearing revealing clothes, trousers that are too tight, or have shirt sleeves rolled up too high.
Please dress appropriately when collecting your children from school. If you must drive (and we believe it is immodest for men to drive) then take care getting out of the car lest your trousers rise up and reveal an ankle. Please make sure that arms are covered to the wrist even in summer – we are seeing more and more hairy wrists on display and this is not acceptable (and probably causes terrorism).
I don't know if you read or heard about this but Ben Carson (a GOP presidential candidate) had an interview with Wolf Blitzer today and talked about gun control. Carson said if the Nazis didn't take away guns then Jewish people would have been able to defend themselves during the Holocaust. Is this true? Is this Antisemitism? I feel like it is but.. I'm not 100% sure.
It’s blatantly historical revisionism, and such a common bit of revisionism that it has its own Wikipedia article. However, that’s to be expected from Ben Carson, who lives in a worldview that touches upon reality much like the bar-tailed godwit touches upon solid ground–infrequently, lightly, and and far apart between points.
Carson’s viewpoint rests upon the American-centric mythologized view of WWII, with America The Savior of the Passive Jews from the Brutal Nazis. Needless to say, this viewpoint is grossly simplistic and inaccurate. Jews did not just sit there and be slaughtered, but instead did fight back. Here, have a Wikipedia article on Jewish Resistance under Nazi rule. For one example of Jewish resistance, it took the Nazis almost as long to reconquer the Warsaw Ghetto than it did for them to conquer Poland in the first place. This required a saturation artillery barrage that left no building standing and nothing of worth left behind for the Nazis to plunder.
This viewpoint also glosses over the fact that the majority of the Jewish victims were Polish, not German, who, for some reason, were not bound by German gun laws prior to the Nazi conquest of Poland, so the argument essentially automatically fails as a comparison, because the argument presupposes that the Nazis imposed iterative restrictions on the entire populace before moving on to genocide. To draw a comparison on how inane this argument is in that light, he might as well have asked, “How will the Canadians be able to protect themselves from tyranny if the US government takes away the guns of US citizens?”!
Furthermore, the personal armament realities between 1938 Germany and 2015 America are vastly different. Hitler signed a law weakening the previously strict gun control laws in 1938; before that, guns in Germany were rare. In the USA, however, there are as many or more guns than there are people.
And, poking a different hole into Carson’s argument, how, exactly, is civilian-level armament going to protect against military grade ordinance? I’m sorry, Dr. Carson, but your followers’ gun fetish is only good for killing their fellow citizens in fits of pique, attention-seeking, or hatred, not for shooting down a drone loaded with bunker busters.
And, finally, damn straight is it antisemitic. As usual, our dead are being used as rhetorical devices, without agency, respect or consideration, and I’m sick of it. Adding icing to this cake of disrespect is that Wolf Blitzer’s parents are Holocaust survivors. So he basically just said to the man interviewing him, “I’m going to use your dead grandparents, dead aunts, dead uncles, dead cousins, and traumatized parents to make an breathtakingly inaccurate point for my own political purposes.” What amazes both myself and @agnellina is that Blitzer just sat there and took it. The man’s composure is admirable–and my regard for Carson has hit rock bottom and started to dig.
Using Jewish Women As Argument Points
So, briefly, this is what's going on. The Canadian government has been trying for some time to ban Muslim women from covering their faces at citizenship ceremonies. Last spring, they were told they couldn't do so, and now they have said they will go to the Supreme Court to demand the right to make ladies show their faces while they become Canadian citizens.
Additionally, Stephen Harper has stated that the niqab is rooted in an 'anti-woman' culture. So you can imagine how well that's going over.
On Twitter, the argument against Harper took an unfortunately familiar turn: argue that Jews are being privileged over Muslims.
First, no, they probably don't, but secondly, the Canadian government has, insofar as I know, not objected to head coverings worn by Muslim women, only to the niqab. But the question instantly arises: why this question instead of, for example, whether the Canadian government objects to head coverings worn by conservative Christian women? There are traditional Catholic nuns in Canada, and a community of Amish.
The tweeter probably doesn't intend to be anti-Semitic in any way, but her question leads directly into the trope of 'Jews vs. Muslims'. If this was all that was brewing on Twitter however, I probably wouldn't be writing this piece at all.
Multiple tweets asserted that face-covering is, in addition to a custom of some Muslim groups, a Jewish tradition. The point, generally implied rather than openly stated, once again remains that Jewish women are, in some manner, permitted to do this, while Muslim women are prohibited or criticized for it.
The problem here, besides pitting two minority groups against one another, is that veiling the face is not a Jewish custom. Most of the pictures used to prove this non-fact were of an incredibly small, fringe group that has emerged in Israel in the last decade, the Nashot ha-Shalim. This group is permitted to veil in Israel, where Muslim women also veil their faces without controversy. They have also been condemned by haredi authorities, and their leader has been jailed for child abuse.
A few pictures simply seemed to be of Muslim women asserted to be Jewish, and once again, nowhere near Canada.
There is nothing in this photograph, even after extensive reverse searches, that would suggest that it was of Jewish women, much less Jewish women living in Canada.
The most disturbing for me was a photograph showing Yemenite Jewish women who recently made aliyah to Israel.
This outfit is not a traditional Yemenite Jewish one. Some women from the very small remaining Yemenite Jewish community have arrived in Israel wearing niqab after the fashion of Yemenite Muslim women. It is safer for a woman to cover in Yemen, and the community has acted accordingly.
Once again: these women are not in Canada. They are in Israel, where Muslim women are free to wear niqab. Stephen Harper is not permitting Jewish women to wear niqab in Canada while persecuting Muslim women. Jewish women in Canada do not wear the niqab.
So what's the logic here? Does it actually make any sense to repeatedly insist that a Jewish custom that doesn't exist except under a few abnormal conditions, which has been condemned by rabbis, and which is practiced in countries where niqab is noncontroversial, can be used to point out the hypocrisy of the Canadian government's treatment of Muslim women?
Yes, it makes sense, not to defend Muslim women, but to attack Jews.
This is the core of what's going on here. I don't know where the concept of asserting that Jewish women veil their faces as a counter to Harper began from, but the weird, improbable seizing on fringe groups nowhere near Canada, and the rapid devolvement of the conversation into open anti-Semitism is significant.
When I responded, pointing out that the examples being used were inaccurate at best, and that the niqab had not been chosen by Yemenite Jewish women, one of the tweeters above responded:
In other words, Jewish women and Jewish practice were important enough to invoke against Stephen Harper, no matter how inaccurate the information spread about them might be. As soon as anyone was asked to take Jewish existence seriously, or get the facts about it correct, though, the issue became 'insignificant'.
It makes sense to many progressives on a deep level to assume that Jews are directly privileged over Muslim communities. Even if this requires making things up. Even if it requires bringing Jewish women into a discussion where they had no place previously. Even if this involves a convoluted argument that basically turns into "Jewish women in Israel are allowed to cover their faces, therefore they are getting special treatment in Canada". And all too easily, this assumption progresses to classic anti-Semitism as it does above. Ultimately, these arguments position Jewish women as unfairly privileged, closely linked to Islamophobic conservatives, arrogantly avoiding the censure of the press, and, therefore, to be attacked.
This is anti-Semitism. It's anti-Semitism even if you pretend it's not about Jews at all.
Gal Gadot photographed by Marian Sell for Vogue Russia, September 2015
Great Articles: "Why This Hasid Was Right to Flip the Bird to Kapparot Protester"
So this happened, in Borough Park. The faces of the children tear at me a little. They're there for kapparos with their families, and they're confronted, as Jewish children are too often, in too many inappropriate contexts, with protesters. Loud, aggressive, self-righteous adults, willing to invade this ritual and stand there filming, with no respect or concern for the consequences of their actions. Over at the Forward, Jay Michaelson has an excellent piece up, "Why This Hasid Was Right to Flip the Bird to Kapparot Protester", which pretty much sums up my longstanding feelings about animal rights activists who target small ethnic enclaves over issues like live food in Chinatown markets and kapparos. Best article on the subject I've seen to date. Read it.
Jews and Gaming
I'm not a gamer. Never have been. It's one of the many ways I completely fail at geek girl. But I am married to a gamer, and a friend to many more, and it's something that is in the air in the circles I travel in. I spend a lot of time thinking about Jews and Jewishness in pop culture, though, and it occurred to me a while back to see if there was any Jewish representation out there in gaming. This is something that came up while I was reading some excellent articles on people of color in games (I think one of them was at N.K. Jemisin's site, but alas, I can't find it now.) I Googled, and this article from last year by Jason Schreier at Kotaku is what I found first. Truly, this is one of those "I suspected it might be bad, but I never imagined it could be this bad in this day and age" kinds of moments. Part of the article centers around a pitch at an Ubisoft retreat for designers, for a game called "So Jew Wanna Be A Thief", about a kleptomaniac Chasid. The game did not get made. "I won't pretend I'm offended," Schreier writes, which is fine, I can be offended enough for both of us, plus several other Yidden to be identified later. But it's a bit of a challenge for me. As a teacher, I've gotten to see up close the extent to which video games are not merely a pastime, but a new form of literature. I've been able to explain literary concepts to students solely by referencing their favorite games. I've had students walk into my U.S. history class knowing as much about Mohawk history and culture as they would from reading a well-researched novel, or a nonfiction book. Gaming teaches, and engages heart and mind. That's why people address representation in gaming. I'm not going to swear to drop everything in my life and become a game designer, but I can say that if I find out about people portraying Jews and Jewishness in games, I'll be playing that same day just as soon as I can figure out which buttons to press. I may come to this as an outsider from a games perspective, but I can see how important an artistic and cultural issue this should be.
Since the now-iconic "Miley, what's good?" moment last week, feminist media has been letting me know how important Nicki Minaj's work is, as well as her determination to stand up for herself. As far as I'm concerned, Nicki can do whatever she wants, but I'm not going to call her any kind of an icon for social justice or feminism until I hear more than a throwaway apology for releasing a lyric video where she presided over a slightly edited Nuremberg Rallies.
Ratatouille and the European Ethnic Minority Experience
I have a soft spot for the Disney/Pixar film Ratatouille. The story of a young French rat who dreams of haute cuisine, and the young human he propels to culinary stardom is quirky and fun, and expresses a love of Paris I can appreciate, even if I don't share it, and is a damn sight better than the princess films, which I can barely stand in very small doses. OK, I HATE the princess films. Hate them. Hate them. There, I said it. HATE THE PRINCESS FILMS. But I watched Ratatouille again, recently, with a small person who needed to have it fast-forwarded past the scary parts, and the thing that has always struck me about it struck again--that on some level this is a movie about being Jewish or Romani in Europe, and that on that level it's a frustrating, challenging text. Allow me to say that I am about to read FAR too much into a jolly children's movie. If this bothers you, please stop reading right now. I am about to take a really long and cynical look at a perfectly nice animated feature. Continue reading at your own discretion. Next, let me say that as a Jewish writer, I respond to the themes in Ratatouille as Jewish themes, but I think that in many ways the rats may be even more explicitly coded as Roma. While there are overlapping stereotypes here, the explicit emphasis on the rats as thieves seems to me to speak more to the way Roma have been vilified in Europe, and Remy's father, the chief rat of their little family group, is given the explicitly Romani name of Django. I'm going to bounce back and forth a little here, since I don't think this is explicitly an allegory...except for the moments when it is. Let's just say that I think the rats of the movie are treated in a way that is remarkably, hauntingly, similar to the ancient stereotypes and recent history of Jews and Roma in Europe. So what's the problem with Ratatouille? First there's the problem of how very seldom Jews are allowed to exist in cinematic Europe, outside of movie after movie on Shoah themes, and how seldom Roma are allowed to exist in cinematic Europe at all. And then there is the fact that representation of Jews and Roma in popular animation hardly exists at all. Esmeralda, of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is the only Roma I can think of, and I'm given to understand by Romani bloggers that there are...issues...with the way she is portrayed. (I can't imagine why. Surely a hot girl in an off-the-shoulder blouse shaking a tambourine is the ideal sole representative of an oppressed people.) Aside from Dreamworks' Prince of Egypt, which is actually very good, and will be addressed some other time, the only animated movie I can think of offhand that covers Jewish themes is...An American Tail, featuring the Mouskowitz family's flight to America from the persecution of Cossack cats. So this rodent thing is...already a thing. Jews as mice and our oppressors as cats, invoking and subverting as it does the images of Nazi propaganda, worked fine for Maus. Maus is, first, a much more serious piece of art than either An American Tail or Ratatouille, and second, was created by Art Spiegelman, who is a genius, and third, would have used human Jews if Spiegelman had decided that was more effective for what he was trying to do. In An American Tail, the conceit is ripped off from Maus, (which had been released only six years previously), and it primarily functions to distance the viewer from the actual human Jews whose feet are glimpsed briefly in the movie's opening scene. The tendency for people of color to be conveniently turned into animals for most of movie's duration in the Disney canon has been well noted. An American Tail doesn't even bother with transformation...there are human Jews and mouse Jews, it seems, and it's safer to go with the mice. They are cuter and less likely to be offensive to viewers in Peoria. And so the reasoning seems to go for Ratatouille as well. To begin with, Remy, the representative of the European minority group, is, well, an animal. Not just an animal, a rat. It's not an optimistic start. Fundamentally, Remy is a sort of furry Asher Lev. Raised by a culture which steals everything it eats from the trash of humans, and regards food as fuel for survival (Django is clear about this), he has somehow become entranced by French human food culture, and learned he has the gift of a fine palate. He sneaks into the house the rats scavenge from to read cookbooks, sample spices, and watch cooking shows. He also clashes with his father about the morality of stealing what they eat, something that will become something of a theme as the movie progresses. Long story short: Remy manages to get his entire clan evicted from their hole, lands himself in Paris, helps a young man become a respected chef and claim his birthright, finds the rats again, helps them gain access to high-quality French cooking, and lives happily ever after. It's pretty fun. One issue that keeps coming up again and again is the issue of the morality of theft. Remy will be scolded by the ghost of his favorite TV chef when he tries to help himself to a morsel of bread as he creeps through a party in a Paris apartment. "You are not a thief!" Gaston (who openly identifies as a figment of Remy's imagination) chides him. And so Remy, nearly poisoned in the first scene, starving, and recently shot at by a panicked householder, washed through the gutters of Paris, and pretty sure he will never see his family again, gives up the grape-sized hunk of bread that's probably going to get swept into the trash at party's end. For morality's sake. The scriptwriters keep going. After Remy meets Linguini, the young man finds some eggs missing (Remy is making them breakfast) and chides himself for trusting a rat. When he finds that Remy has helped himself to some herbs from a nearby roof garden, Linguini tells him he will buy some...'but don't steal any more'. The moralizing is starting to seem really out of place here. Remy is a rat. They scavenge food. I mean, not to get too carried away here, but the word 'mouse' itself comes from a old Indo-European word meaning 'thief'. Rodents have been doing this a long time. What is this, a movie about rats learning human morality? Maybe. If this isn't really about rats. When Remy nearly collapses from hunger in the pantry at their workplace, Linguini gives him food, but later, when Remy offers his newly-relocated family access to the food, Linguini explodes, calling him a thief. When Linguini fed Remy, he is an employee of the restaurant, but by the time Remy is feeding his relatives, Linguini is the owner. Not the chef, mind you. That position is held (secretly) by Remy, and it is only through his hard work and genius that Linguini's doors have stayed open. There is no indication, either, that Remy is getting paid a fair share, or any share, of the profits. Linguini seems to figure that it's perfectly fine to take his own employer's food because 'the little chef' is hungry, but when Remy decides to throw open the pantry of the restaurant he keeps afloat so that his family can have a decent meal for once, he's a thief. Someone I bounced this off suggests that all this is simply a way of teaching children not to steal--a small moral lesson threaded into the plot--but it seems more emphatic than that. And if you see Remy as representing not the rodents of the world but the ethnic minorities of Europe, a nasty set of ideas start to emerge. 1. The rat culture is accepted as being based on theft. Trust, for a rat, has to be earned over and over. 2. Remy's journey toward artistic fulfillment and partial acceptance by the human world depends on his becoming civilized, and abandoning his culture and his scavenger ways. (Even though that background is clearly the origin of his unique take on food.) 3. Only rats have to change. People do not. People try to kill Remy several different times because he is a rat, but the moral lesson is not to steal food for yourself or your family. 4. All the food belongs to the humans. It's stealing if they say so, even if the restaurant would have been shuttered for months without you. 5. If you're a rat, there's really no way to win. People try to kill you on sight, and then scold you for being outside of society, and a thief. Is this starting to sound vaguely analagous to the Jewish and Romani experience in Europe, or is it just me? Worse, really, since Remy, even before he encounters humans on a personal level, has completely internalized the idea that there's something deeply wrong with the way his people live. Never, as far as I can recall, does it occur to him that the humans might have some share of the blame for the situation. Django knows all of this, of course. When he realizes how deep Remy has gotten himself into the human world, the rodent Magneto drags his son to a shop window full of traps, poison and dead rats, reminding him that they can't live in safety with humans. (This is one of the things the small person needed me to scroll past.) It's a stark scene in the middle of a farcically cute movie, a reminder that the rats are, in fact, the intended targets of an ongoing genocide. It's a scene that I suspect more than a few Jewish viewers bit their lips over. Yes, in Paris, they've been killing us for a long time, and it continues today...it felt remarkably bleak to me, and weirdly honest. There's no way to pull these ideas together into anything satisfactory, of course. The movie ends happily, with the rats seated at an (apparently human-approved rodent bistro), and Remy cooking his heart out. I doubt that the creators of the film set out to make a movie about a European ethnic minority with a great talent, compromising to survive and save his family in an environment that, while culturally and materially richer than the world he comes from keeps trying to kill him. But that's effectively what they produced.
On For Such a Time by Kate Breslin and Writing the Holocaust
You might not be aware but a few weeks ago, a book called For Such a Time by Kate Breslin was up for a RITA from the Romance Writers of America. It’s an Emmy or an Oscar of romance writing. The book was published in 2014 and I had personally never heard of it prior to reading the Smart Bitches review of it. That is what I’ve linked to as I’d rather not link to its Amazon or Goodreads profiles.
In short, the book is a retelling of the Book of Esther (a Jewish story about a strong Jewish woman, who saves her people, and keeps her faith, and is not a romance) in which a Nazi camp commander saves a Jewish woman from Dachau and takes her to Theresienstadt in then-Czechoslovakia. There, they fall in love, and through a magically appearing Bible, find Jesus, and save Jews. At the end, the woman converts to Christianity because that’s her redemption arc.
There are multiple factors at play here. First, the author, Kate Breslin, co-opted the horrific, unimaginable tragedy that happened within living memory to other people to promote her own agenda (evangelical/inspirational Christianity). Second, her agent, her publisher, and multiple RWA judges, not to mention the HUNDREDS of reviews on retail sies and Goodreads, did not think this was problematic. Third, the way we, across religions, have begun to approach the Holocaust is problematic and dangerous.
I could tell you about the microaggressions I experience as a Jewish woman regarding the Holocaust. I can tell you that people told me so often that I was “lucky” to have blonde hair blue eyed (like the heroine of Breslin’s book) because I “would have probably survived the Holocaust.” I began to adopt it as my own line, a way of deflecting the comment before it came. I can tell you that people have told me to “stop playing the Holocaust card.” And I can tell you that while I wish the Jewish national identity did not have to cling so tightly to its tragedies, it is a privilege the rest of you experience that you do not.
Over at Smart Bitches, the review is absolutely on point. Here, Rose Lerner goes through the problematic five star reviews of the book. Here, Smart Bitches’ Sarah Wendell wrote a brave and important open letter.
And I, KK Hendin, India Valentin, Dahlia Adler and others have been on Twitter. I’m adding my long form response here in hopes that Breslin, her publisher, RWA, the judges, and the readers and reviewers consider Jewish voices that they co-opted, stole from, offended, undermined and erased through the publication and award of this book.
In the book, the commander is the head of Theresienstadt. For those who don’t know, Theresienstadt was the ‘model camp’ used to show the Red Cross that things weren’t “so bad”. In reality, 140,000 people were interned there and just over 17,000 people survived it and the deportations to Auschwitz. The commander of that camp made people stand out in freezing temperatures until they literally dropped dead. He killed thousands of children. He oversaw the deportations to Auschwitz where a small percentage survived. He watched tens of thousands of people die of disease and starvation in his ‘model camp’. And Breslin, her publishers, her readers, and RWA judges found that person worthy of redemption. Not only worthy of, but exceptional. Romantic.
If that’s your definition of a romantic hero…I have no words for you. I didn’t realize that genocide turned so many people on, but there you go.
Part of this is the glorification of forgiveness and the idea that every person is redeemable. There was a good conversation I had on Twitter about this and I understand these are religious and fundamental differences between people. I don’t think mass genocide is a forgivable thing. Kate Breslin, her publishers, her readers, and RWA does.
Part of this is evangelical Christianity’s relationship with Jewish people (not with Judaism, let’s be clear) and Israel. Let’s be clear: we are people. We are not anyone’s tickets into heaven. We are not your Chosen people.
Part of this is that anti-Semitism in America wears many masks, and one of them is silence. It is as violent as the others. Silence is not neutrality. Silence allows, if not fosters, oppression, aggression, and erasure. If you are silent on this book, please take a moment to examine why you are silent.
In Kate Breslin’s book, there is an unequal power dynamic. There is no consent. What you are celebrating is rape, and it happened to many women during the Holocaust. He has all the power. She has none of it. Her life is in danger. She cannot consent in this case. That is rape. What happened is rape and rape is not romantic. And it’s certainly not inspirational.
What happened here is that Kate Breslin stole a tragedy that wasn’t hers to promote her own personal agenda. And in doing so, she contributed to the erasure of both victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Her book is anti-Semitic, violent, and dangerous. It glorifies and redeems a Nazi, while removing all of the Jewish woman’s agency and forcing her to convert to Christianity in order for her arc to be considered redemption. It is, in fact, exactly what has been done to the Jewish people throughout history. For longer than Christianity has been a religion, Jews across the world have been forced to convert or to hide their Judaism to save their lives. That is violence. That is erasure. Kate Breslin’s book is violence and erasure.
And as a Jewish woman who writes romance, I feel betrayed. Betrayed by my fellow romance readers. Betrayed by the people who published this. Betrayed by the judges who allowed it to get past the first round much less onto the ballot. Betrayed by the organization whose silence was support. Betrayed by everyone who has remained silent on this, who hasn’t called it out.
It is not easy to be Jewish in America. Many think it is because of stereotypes, but when push comes to shove, especially online, we turn toward our own and huddle close. It’s a collective memory safety measure. We have only ever been safest in communities made entirely of Jews. There are places in America where I am safer to say I am queer than I am Jewish. I talk more about queerness than Jewishness because of the backlash I’ve received for my Judaism. When discussions of diversity and racism come up, we are excluded.
But, as Justina Ireland and I were saying on Twitter yesterday, the Venn Diagram of racists and anti-Semites is a circle.
The discussion last night on Twitter was draining and exhausting. It is hard to shout about this for weeks. I admire Sarah so much for that open letter and my fellow Jewish writers and readers who were speaking up. I’m grateful for our allies who signal boosted.
I asked during the discussion when non-Jewish people learned about the Holocaust as I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know about it.
The responses were illuminating. Most people learned in late elementary school, some as late as high school and into college. Some learned in units during history or social science classes. But most learned because they read books like Devil’s Arithmetic, Night, The Diary of Anne Frank, Number the Stars in English/Language Arts classes. I worry that by teaching nonfiction right next to fiction, we’re subconsciously distancing the Holocaust from real life. From ‘truth’. That it’s being filed away in minds as fiction.
I know that the Holocaust is hard to wrap our heads around. 6 million Jews, and roughly 5-6 million other victims, including Roma, disabled people, gay people, political prisoners, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. That’s more people than any of us have ever seen standing in one place. That’s more people than live in New York City. That’s an incomprehensible number of lives and stories that went up in smoke. And there are more victims than we will ever know: there are mass graves and bodies all over the forests of Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, France. Not everyone made it to camps. I know this is hard to comprehend and I know that books and movies are increasingly our only access point for information about the Holocaust as survivors pass away.
But it’s alarming to me the number of people who learned late in life. Or who considered late elementary school to be early. For Jews, the Holocaust is something we carry with us everywhere. It is always with us. It informs our identity, our way of moving through the world, our holidays, our grandparents’ experiences, how we interact with food and triggers. My father won’t buy German cars. I won’t drink Fanta. There are ways the Holocaust lingers because it fundamentally changed Jewish identity, even in the wake of previous genocides and ethnic cleansings.
I am the granddaughter of a camp liberator. I am the great-granddaughter of pogrom survivors. I have stood on the edge of Babi Yar and wondered if the dirt beneath my feet was made from the bones of my relatives who died there.
The Holocaust is more than a single story. It is more than a book read in a classroom or Schnidler’s List. It is millions and millions and millions of stories extinguished. That we will never know. That’s what the Holocaust is. Not was, but is. History is present tense for some things.
Writing about the Holocaust is not something to do lightly.
As a white American, I wouldn’t touch a romance involving an African-American slave because there is no way—none—that I could handle that properly. Because you can research so many things, but you can’t research collective memory and the way that affects you personally. You can’t. I can’t access that certain empathy, that certain feeling, that way of being and feeling in a world that isn’t your own that I would need to in order to tell that story.
Just because you have the idea of a story doesn’t mean that you should, or have the right to, write it.
And if you decide to write about the Holocaust, and you are not Jewish, I recommend going to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Go slowly. Listen. Watch. Read. And when you get to the shoes, stand there until you realize that’s a fraction, maybe a 1/1000th, of the volume, from one camp. Just one camp.
When you write about another group’s tragedy, your goal should be First, do no harm. Kate Breslin, Bethany House publishers, her agent, the readers, the judges, and in allowing this to be nominated, Romance Writers of America, failed that critical first step.
Please, for the generations that come next who will have no survivors to speak to them, no survivors who saw evil walking around in leather boots and not in the pages of their books as romantic hero, do not do what Breslin and her people did. Do no harm.
What happened here is that Kate Breslin stole a tragedy that wasn’t hers to promote her own personal agenda. And in doing so, she contributed to the erasure of both victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Her book is anti-Semitic, violent, and dangerous. It glorifies and redeems a Nazi, while removing all of the Jewish woman’s agency and forcing her to convert to Christianity in order for her arc to be considered redemption. It is, in fact, exactly what has been done to the Jewish people throughout history. For longer than Christianity has been a religion, Jews across the world have been forced to convert or to hide their Judaism to save their lives. That is violence. That is erasure. Kate Breslin’s book is violence and erasure.