Stranger Things
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Mike Driver
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Janaina Medeiros
cherry valley forever
sheepfilms
roma★
Origami Around
titsay
h
will byers stan first human second
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
JBB: An Artblog!
art blog(derogatory)
Xuebing Du
Peter Solarz
d e v o n
Misplaced Lens Cap
KIROKAZE
seen from Germany
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@magen-ruth
One glance at any random comment section on any Holocaust memorial post on social media is like a really grim crash course on exactly the kind of rhetoric that led to such a horror in the first place and precisely why education and a zero tolerance approach to antisemitism is so desperately needed.
i can’t express in words what julian k jarboe’s statement on god creating transsexuality means to me and the profound way it changed my outlook on my own transness. it took me past the finish line firmly into loving myself and loving being trans, where before i still wondered if there was something wrong with me for being trans. thanks julian.
“god blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason he made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine: so that humanity might share in the act of creation.”
my existence as a transsexual man is divine. if god wanted me to be cis then i would’ve been cis.
funny how Jews are the only minority that are accused of weaponising their own oppression. funny how we are expected to denounce Israel at every turn and if we don’t we are genocide apologists. funny how our indigenous status is constantly questioned. funny how we are getting hatecrimed every day and the progressive left still finds a way to make it about everyone but us. funny how we are harassed out of queer spaces, fandom spaces, universities, workplaces, our friend groups, and worst of all we are harassed out of our own ancestral homeland. funny how the so called minority solidarity goes down the drain the minute they find out you’re Jewish. funny how goyim steal our words and twist them into something they’re not. funny how they appropriate our trauma and then turn around and say it’s not ours to begin with. funny how there is nothing funny about any of this, yet it has become a universal Jewish experience and we are so fucking tired
So I have a bit of an odd question about Judaism...
See, I've read and thoroughly enjoyed the various posts on the debates and conclusions reached by Jewish people about fantasy subjects and creatures, so that has me wondering...
Does Judaism have any stance on extraterrestrial intelligent life?
I believe this is one of those things that sums to "ask two Jews, get three answers" and "so long as they don't bother us, we'll treat them like any other people outside of our tribe".
We're not Christians, with the whole fixation on "saved souls" and all that (and I have seen stances from Christians on aliens, ranging from "Jesus died for their sins too and we need to convert them too" to "aliens can't exist because Jesus only saved mankind").
But for Jews? Non-Jews' status is their own business.
This is true, but it is worth noting--if only for sheer comedic value--the absolute shitstorm this will kick up when we inevitably encounter aliens, if one of them should decide it wants to convert.
If you’re curious about this question, I highly recommend reading the sci-fi short story “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi!“, which, in addition to just being a fantastic read in general, is also a fairly realistic depiction of what probably would happen if Jews had to definitively answer the question of the halachic status of extraterrestrial intelligent life.
[ID: a tweet from Hamza Howidy (@HowidyHamza), showing a balcony decorated with four flags: Ukranian, Palestinian, Israeli, and pride. The caption says "That should be a normal political viewpoint, not an unusual one."]
dark/gothic judaica: an aesthetic that could be an artistic goldmine
Torah Ark Curtain from 20th century North Africa // Scene from a production of The Dybbuk by Vilner Trupe, 1910s // art by E.M. Lilien just in general // veil & style by Mirjam on wrapunzel // Jewish Henna by Bella Ríos // 1910s Jewish dress from Galicia // "Hebrew Dark Academia" pin posted by jewish_opinion on pinterest // Marissa Nadler - a gothic folk musician who is Jewish // Rosh Hashana card from CJH Museum Collections // Art from Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins by Eric Kimmel, Illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman. Scholastic, 1990 (this book was an essential part of my childhood) // "Schemajah Hillel," page 18 from the book "Der Golem", illustrations by Hugo Steiner-Prag // The Praying Jew (Rabbi of Vitebsk) by Marc Chagall, 1914 // Yemenite-Israeli dancer Rachel Nadav lighting the Shabbos candles // Tefillin Bag, c.1930, Eretz Yisrael. belonging to a Shmuel Yankovitz // Lili Liliana in "Der Dybbuk", 1937 // The Tzadik’s Son, 1912, by Lazar Krestin // Marrakesh Mezuzah // Pomegranate photo from unsplash
Once the property owner worked out that Yoni Birnbaum was a rabbi, he quizzed him on whether he was opposed to Israel
There is a peculiar human instinct to believe that certain things happen only to other people. Until they happen to you, prejudice or discrimination can feel like distant problems – possible, certainly, but not immediate.
When I booked a summer holiday rental for my family in eastern France at the start of May, I thought nothing of using my personal email address. I had used it countless times before. The address happens to contain the word “rabbi”, but it had never caused an issue. The correspondence with the property owners was entirely routine: emails were exchanged, the booking was accepted, and we paid the required 50 per cent deposit. Then, just under a month later, an email arrived from the owners that transformed our ordinary family holiday booking into something else entirely.
“We hesitated for some time whether to present or not the following to you, as it concerns a very sensitive and painful matter,” it began.
“We are always curious about who our guests are. In your case, our curiosity was piqued by your email address, from which we gather that you are a rabbi, and we quickly found some more information on the internet.
“Can you confirm to us that you are a member of a progressive, liberal Jewish movement and that this movement condemns the violent actions of the Israeli army, on orders from the Israeli government, in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and recently in Lebanon?
“We are against every form of terrorism, such as that of Hamas and Hezbollah, and also believe that every country and people has the right to defend themselves, whether Israeli, Palestinian, or Lebanese, regardless of their faith or beliefs. However, we completely disagree with the violent and, in our view, inhumane and criminal actions of the Israeli army in the areas mentioned; we also consider the boarding of ships and the imprisonment of, among others, our compatriots in international waters to be highly reprehensible and unacceptable.
“We would like to hear whether you belong to the ones who likewise disapprove of this and speak out against it, and whether you are opposed to the violent and criminal actions of the Israeli government and army.
“If that is not the case, we are unfortunately unable to offer you accommodation, as this conflicts too strongly with our principles. In that case, we will have to cancel the reservation and, of course, refund the deposit.
“We are curious to know your position on these matters; it is very unusual for us to present such matters to our guests, but it is also a very unusual situation taking place in that region, which we could not reconcile with providing hospitality to persons who supports these inhumane and criminal practices. We would present the same question to a guest from Lebanon, Gaza, or Iran, insofar as they distance themselves from terrorism towards Israel.”
The moment I finished reading the email, I felt that deep sadness grip me, which is familiar to so many Jews. Having discovered that I was a rabbi, the owners of the property had decided that before my family could spend a week in their holiday home, I would first have to satisfy them about my views on the war in the Middle East. They are, of course, entitled to their opinions. They are entitled to condemn the actions of the Israeli government in the strongest of terms. They are entitled to support whatever political cause they wish. Their email was carefully considered and polite. Yet beneath the courtesy lay a proposition that should trouble anyone who values a genuinely liberal society: that no Jew is beneath suspicion.
I sent the following reply: “I have spent the past few days reflecting on the contents of your email with great sadness. Let me begin by sharing a few details about my background. I am a British Jew. My great-grandparents were raised in this country, their parents having fled persecution in Russia in the 19th century. I also have the privilege of serving as senior rabbi of Finchley United Synagogue, one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. My community is diverse in every respect, and it consists of over 2,000 good, upright citizens of the United Kingdom. Every one of us is a proud British Jew.
“At no stage in our correspondence to date did I ever mention my Jewish faith. It wasn’t relevant. We are simply a British family like any other, seeking to rent a property from you for a summer holiday in France. But noticing that my email address contained the word ‘Rabbi’, you decided that it would be appropriate to interrogate my political position and affiliation. On the basis of my response, you will now decide whether to reject our confirmed booking for the summer.
“In other words, you wished to subject me to a purity test. Am I one of the ‘good Jews’ or one of the ‘bad Jews’? Because while some Jews might be welcome at your property, others will be turned away. Let me ask you a simple question: You say that you would ask the same question to any ‘guest from Lebanon, Gaza or Iran’.
But I am from the United Kingdom. My grandfather fought in the British Army in World War Two, risking his life countless times so that you and your compatriots could build the so-called ‘liberal, progressive’ society which you say you value so highly. Would you insist on a similar purity test from a British citizen who had some reference to their Muslim faith or their Persian heritage in their email address?
“Perhaps I can illustrate the problem in a slightly different way: I note from your website that you are of Dutch heritage, now living in France. You may be aware that 70 per cent of Dutch Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, a higher proportion than any other country in Western Europe. In May 1941, the Nazis created a detailed map of Amsterdam, containing thousands of small dots. Each dot on the map represents ten Jews.
“In order to create this map, and support their subsequent efforts at locating and then forcibly deporting these Jews to mass extermination camps, the Nazis relied on thousands of local Dutch collaborators, both within the administrative system and in general society. In fact, last year, the Netherlands published a list of some 425,000 suspected Nazi collaborators.
“How would you feel if I asked you what your Dutch grandparents did during the war, before deciding whether to rent from you? Did they have Jewish neighbours, perhaps? What did they do when the Nazis came for those neighbours? Did it ‘conflict too strongly with their principles’? Or did they keep their heads down, choosing to turn a blind eye at the murder of their fellow Dutch citizens?
“I imagine you would consider such a question to be unconscionable, and you would be correct. I have no right to make any judgment about you based on what I think I may know about those I associate with you, let alone to refuse to enter into a rental agreement with you because of it.
“You might know that at the time, those who collaborated with the Nazis did not necessarily view themselves as bad people. They allowed themselves to believe a warped narrative. They did not view the Jews as their fellow citizens or their equals. Instead, they saw them as foreigners, aliens, different. No doubt, you wrote your email to me out of some kind of twisted sense of virtue. But it seems clear to me that what lies at the heart of your demand for me to declare my views on the conflict in the Middle East, is that to you, before anything else, I am a Jew. Therefore, at the very least, you feel you have to test me and family.
“I hope the above makes it abundantly clear just how morally blind I believe you have been. It should also be very clear that we no longer wish to spend the summer at your rental house. I would be grateful, therefore, if you would cancel our booking and refund our deposit as soon as possible.
“I very much hope that you will reflect on what I have said and on the implication of what you have written here. If you can do that, I would welcome an honest dialogue with you.”
As you might expect, their reply did not contain an apology. It doubled down. They insisted that they did not discriminate on the basis of “origin, religion, skin colour, etc”. They assured me that they had “family and friends in both Muslim and Jewish circles”. They explained that they had asked me for my position “as an individual, not as a Jew, not because you are Jewish”. They merely “refuse to provide shelter to anyone who expresses or supports racist or fascist behaviour”. Therefore, they stood by their decision to cancel our booking.
The contradiction at the heart of their position was impossible to miss. They claimed they were not judging me because I was Jewish. Yet had my email address not contained the word ‘rabbi’, this exchange would never have happened. They had said themselves how unusual it was to ask their guests about these issues. They asked me because they knew I was Jewish.
Many people imagine antisemitism only in its crudest forms: swastikas daubed on walls, abuse shouted in the street, threats and violence. Those forms are far too prevalent, and they are rightly and routinely condemned. But the prejudice we face today as Jews often presents itself in more subtle ways. It arrives wrapped in the language of human rights and social justice. It insists that it has nothing against Jews as such. It simply posits that all Jews must be regarded as suspect until they have proven their purity.
This is very familiar to us.
In medieval Europe, Jews were forced to prove their religious purity through conversion, baptism or public renunciation of their faith. The Nazis demanded a certain racial purity. Under oppressive regimes of various kinds, Jews had to demonstrate their political purity – that they were not either capitalist conspirators or communist subversives. In every case the perpetrators believed they were standing on some noble principle or cause.
That is why the lesson from this episode extends far beyond one holiday rental in France. It is a reminder that antisemitism, and indeed prejudice of any kind rarely announces itself as prejudice. It almost always arrives convinced of its own virtue. That can make it harder for people to see it in themselves.
But a society has crossed a dangerous line when a Jew cannot simply be a customer, a neighbour, a colleague, a student or a holidaymaker. The moment a Jew is first required to explain, justify or distance themself before being accepted, equality has already been abandoned. And when that happens, those who claim to oppose prejudice should have the courage to recognise it for what it is.
“It’s always impressed me that Judaism mandates that goodbyes be said with a certain amount of hope. We end Shabbat with havdalah, a beautiful ceremony concluded by extinguishing a twisted candle in sweet wine and singing a song asking for a week of peace and a time of redemption for humankind. Seders end with the promise ‘Next year in Jerusalem’. On Simchat Torah, we conclude the reading of the Torah by rolling back to its beginning. Funerals end with Kaddish, a prayer not about death but about the generous gift of life and God’s goodness. At the completion of shiva, the rabbi often takes the mourners out of their homes for a brief stroll that enacts literally what is meant symbolically – walking them back into life. Somehow Jews trust that every ending is also a beginning, that the broken hearted will again feel loved, and the sun will rise no matter how long or dark the night.”
— Rabbi Steven Z Leder (via ma3ayan)
european white gentile cottagecore enthusiasts when someone mentions the percentage of the eastern european countryside that used to be jewish before wwii.........
this is the michael chabon essay i mentioned in tags (this is also the origin story for his book The Yiddish Policemen's Union
In this Europe the millions of Jews who were never killed produced grand-children, and great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. The countryside retains large pockets of country people whose first language is still Yiddish, and in the cities there are many more for whom Yiddish is the language of kitchen and family, of theater and poetry and scholarship. A surprisingly large number of these people are my relations. I can go visit them, the way Irish Americans I know are always visiting second and third cousins in Galway or Cork, sleeping in their strange beds, eating their strange food, and looking just like them. Imagine. Perhaps one of my cousins might take me to visit the house where my father's mother was born, or to the school in Vilna that my grandfather's grandfather attended with the boy Abraham Cahan. For my relatives, though they will doubtless know at least some English, I will want to trot out a few appropriate Yiddish phrases, more than anything as a way of reestablishing the tenuous connection between us; in this world Yiddish is not, as it is in ours, a tin can with no tin can on the other end of the string. Here, though I can get by without them, I will be glad to have the Weinreichs along. Who knows but that visting some remote Polish backwater I may be compelled to visit a dentist to whom I will want to cry out, having found the appropriate number (1447), eer TOOT meer VAY! What is this Europe like, with its twenty-five, thirty, or thirty-five million Jews? Are they tolerated, despised, ignored by, or merely indistinguishable from their fellow modern Europeans? What is the world like, never having felt the need to create an Israel, that hard bit of grit in the socket that hinges Africa to Asia? What does it mean to originate from a place, from a world, from a culture that no longer exists, and from a language that may die in this generation? What phrases would I need to know in order to speak to those millions of unborn phantoms to whom I belong? Just what am I supposed to do with this book?
There should be 20 to 35 million Jews in Europe. On top of the 15 million Jews wandering around earth period. And until there are 35 million Jews on earth? Everyone can shut the fuck up.
Shabbat Shalom
Have a wonderful weekend. Stay safe, everyone.
Parashat Chukat-Balak
Numbers 19:1–25:9
A second police officer is in critical condition.
Victim's rabbi tells JTA he was having coffee with a friend when the attack started.
I didn’t want to say this in the tags on the original post, but regarding how bad the antisemitism has gotten, op (very rightly) asks, “I don’t understand what echo chamber they are so deeply entrenched in that they believe they can decide someone’s entire moral frame just from their ethnicity.”
something I think we unfortunately need to understand here is that it’s not an echo chamber anymore. if it were an echo chamber, you would not encounter it in every fandom, every comment section, any given subreddit on any conceivable topic, directed at anyone visibly Jewish (from famous people to random Jews on the street), and so on. this is no longer an echo chamber problem, it’s a systemic societal mainstream problem. there was a clip I saw shared from The View today where some of the women had to call one of the others out because they felt she was blaming Jews as a whole for the war with Iran (this woman has been antisemitic on air many times before), and the default response was to defend her. I was reading something else today and someone said they enjoyed getting a push notification from the New York Times that was about gossip and not about “genocidal Zionists,” and this was said by probably some totally normie American woman. a Jewish man running for Congress was banned from a coffee shop in Brooklyn and people are wholly on the side of the coffee shop and delighted he lost. these examples are recent, of course, there are much worse ones to cite (ie: championing murderers when the victims are Jews).
seeing this as a somehow limited issue is sadly not going to work to combat it. the reason everyone in the Jewish community is experiencing it to one degree or another is because it’s pervasive. it’s been wholly absorbed into the current thoughts and politics and academia and media and ideologies of this moment. they believe this is the correct moral framework.
A second police officer is in critical condition.
Outfit Check with tallit and tallit bag
Leslie Feinberg, Judith Butler, Kate Bornstein, and Riki Wilchins are all Jewish nonbinary people who have paved the way for trans and intersex rights and transfeminist action in the United States over the last several decades and you should know their names and what they've done.
There is a reason why there is a more modern antisemitic caricature of "the college educated coastal elite trying to erode at western masculinity and femininity" and it's literally, in part, because of Jewish led transfeminist action. It is a caricature that exists in dialogue with longer standing antisemitic stereotypes, but we're talking specifically about the modern iteration of it.
It's because of Leslie Feinberg's action, mobilization, and writing in the late 70's through the early 00's as a vocally Jewish transgender feminist. It's because of Judith Butler's essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution" and their book Gender Trouble in the 90's. It's because of Bornstein's books Gender Outlaws and Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, the second of which was worked on in collaboration with Jewish trans man S. Bear Bergman. It's because Riki Wilchins has been an active part of trans and intersex feminist action for decades despite you probably not knowing hir name.
Wilchins co-founded Camp Trans with Feinberg. S/he co-founded Transsexual Menace with Denise Norris. Wilchins coined the term "genderqueer" and s/he also helped lead to the foundation of Intersex Awareness Day thanks to hir work with intersex activist Cheryl Chase and the Hermaphrodites With Attitude! protest group. Wilchins has been a backbone of trans and intersex activism since the 90's.
All Jewish nonbinary people from different assigned gender backgrounds working towards trans liberation and solidarity. For decades.
If you ever question why my own politics are aimed so pointedly towards liberation and solidarity, particularly across the lines of sex and gender, it's because it is a legacy that I'm very proud to follow in the footsteps of as a nonbinary Jewish person.
Mattilda bernstein sycamore belongs on this list too.
Shes a Jewish genderqueer trans woman* that has contributed a lot to the conversations surrounding: the gentrification of San Franciscos gay neighborhoods, sex work, hiv activism, disability, abuse, and incest.
If youve read the anthology, Thats Revolting! Queer strategies for fighting assimilation! Or, why are faggots afraid of faggots? Or The end of San Francisco then youre already familiar with her work.
Her work is particularly important, because she’s talked a lot about doing survival full service sex work during the 90s, and there just isnt a whole lot of people who have documented those experiences publicly for obvious reasons.
This also ties in to what op is talking about-a lot of the anti sex work conspiracy theories that go around are about Jews forcing goy in to a life of “depravity” and “pulling them away from god in to a life of sin” etc
So, when you, as a jewish genderqueer queen faggot* talk openly and publicly about doing sex work people are quick to go straight to all of that.
But anyways, yeah, shes part of this legacy too.
*Im using her own words here, these are the ways she describes her own identities
Random no-nuance poll thought time:
You know that another person is queer - that they use the word queer for themselves - and that is the only thing you know about them. On the most basic level, would you trust them to not be immediately hostile or hurtful to you?
(Tell me about yourself a bit in the tags!)
Do you trust the other queer?
Yes
No
i wish. People were normal. About Jews.
