If the only Jewish thing you could name in the past week is your bagel; if you understand that racists use "inner city" when they really mean Black but unironically carp about "AIPAC dark money" even when it rankles Jews; if you have the "antizionism isn't antisemitism" card at the ready for the next attack against a Jew or synagogue; then I'm not sorry - I don't trust your politics and I don't trust you, no matter how blue your ballot is. And when you complain in the future about how your Jewish acquaintances no longer talk to you, I'm giving you a mirror so you can see exactly who cashed in those tokens.
The problem with giving advice to angry and suffering people is that rather frequently the thing they need to know to improve their position is the last thing they want to hear and not something they have the capacity to internalize or accept
Unfortunate truths you can tell people that would help if they could hear what it means and not just what it sounds like
You were the victim, and it wasn’t fair, but it’s over now. Nobody came to save you, and I’m sorry, but it’s too late for anyone to go back and do it different.
You’re suffering over something that cannot be resolved. You’re allowed to feel angry, or outraged, or betrayed, but there will eventually come a time that you don’t feel that so violently anymore, and you’re going to want to have something good left to go back to.
You can’t make anyone love you the way you need to be loved. That’s how a lot of good things end. Not with a clear sign, something blocking the road that says “do not proceed”, just a splitting of the path that’s still moving somewhat in the same direction.
You can’t fix them. Nothing you can do will fix them. And if they fix themselves, they can’t do it for you- they have to do it for themselves as well, because otherwise a day may come when they’re alone, and as long as they live, they are their only true constant. So you can support, and you can encourage, but the hardest part is up to them. And sometimes they can’t do it even with your help.
Sometimes letting go of someone feels like mourning at their funeral before they’ve died, and every time you see them after it’s like talking to a ghost that doesn’t know it’s dead. Sometimes that happens. You’ll both still wake up tomorrow anyways.
I understand that you’re afraid, and that you’re afraid for good reasons. And I understand that being brave isn’t as easy as just turning that fear off, and you would if you could in a heartbeat. But the thing is, as long as that fear is able to dictate your choices, it will have power over you. If you don’t believe you can try to fight it, if you accept that it will always be in charge, you let the frightening thing stay present in your life. It will exist as long as you stay paralyzed. And that sounds cruel, but it isn’t something anyone can fix for you.
The person you may let yourself become after experiencing the terrible thing may very well grow into a much bigger, much more terrible thing, and someday it will swallow the first terrible thing whole. And all that will be left is something far worse for someone else. And you will not be able to shrink it down by explaining where it came from, because terrible things that are dead and gone are never as terrible as terrible things that are alive right now in front of you.
No matter how much or how little I love you, I still do not have the ability to help you the way you need to be helped. I might be the helper you want, but I am not a helper you can get. If you are to be helped at all, you will need to accept that it will come from someone else.
If anyone goes out of their way to find this user and harass them, please know that’s shitty behaviour and I will be deeply disappointed, but I think they really helped to underline number 8 in a way I wished I’d known to consider of others years ago
If you read this whole thing and found yourself angry, if you thought to yourself ‘I know that, and it doesn’t help. I know that, and I’m still suffering. I know that, I’ve heard that, I’ve been told that before, over and over and over again, by people who aren’t listening who don’t understand, who don’t get it, and I’m still hurting, still tired, still in pain, still suffering, and this isn’t something a handful of pithy words from some asshole who isn’t here and present and walking in my shoes suffering what I’m suffering from can fix. I know all of this and it changes nothing”, I want you to know:
Yeah. That was me, too. I sat at the bottom of a miserable pit that I didn’t even dig while a bunch of detached, emotionally unavailable jackasses who weren’t helping even a little yelled all this down at me, like just saying it hard enough or making me hear it as though I wasn’t already a hundred percent aware and still hurting anyways would magically solve all my problems and it didn’t. Like I was some whiny little rat with a victim complex looking for the easy way out and not the survivor of something awful doing their goddamn best to keep going, scraping by on the skin of their fucking teeth.
Every single note on this list is something someone told me at the exact wrong time, that made me want to scream and cry and smash a goddamn brick over their head because ‘I already know that, you fucking asshole, and it doesn’t change anything, so fucking help me or piss the hell off.”
That’s why I wrote the list.
It’s everything I needed to know that I already knew, that only made me feel worse, and didn’t help me improve anything at all even a little bit until I experienced the exact right circumstances that made them click the exact right way and allowed me to say it to myself and feel only a sense of, “okay yeah, I get it now.”
It’s not something I would ever directly say to someone in a time of crisis, but it’s all stuff I learned and needed to learn while I was that person.
You get what I mean?
The difference between knowing and internalizing, the difference between hearing the pain is temporary when you’ve broken a bone and KNOWING the pain is temporary after its healed, is that you KNOW, but you’re still not done experiencing the part that makes it true and real and meaningful.
learning that providing people with food when they're experiencing a huge life change has really revolutionised my supportive gift-giving techniques and it works every single time. you've just moved house? takeaway gift card. you have a new baby? takeaway gift card. you're suffering a bereavement? guess what. takeaway gift card. have one evening of not having to think about cooking or groceries or meal planning. take a little breathing space.
#this is why my first instinct when someone asks to come over is MAKE FOOD #you had a huge life event that SUCKED? don't worry about dinner. don't worry about being bad company #come #share a table with us. let us shoulder with you
#[Redacted] panick baked 5 dozen fucking cookies and the birria is in the pressure cooker cuz she heard thru the grape vine #before you had the chance to mention it yourself and has been chomping at the bit to invite you to dinner or us over to cook/clean #the depression den kitchen in a BOGO
#the village is coming- it's just fuckong me with a hotdish and tea to brew with intent to be a safe space to not be okay enough to cook #for yourself
#my friends say this is my most endearing yet infuriating quality because in the moment life is fuckong cooked and they wanna be left alone #but me showing up at the door as a one person hug squad who wasn't gonna go away due to too many people asking if they were okay #and electing me the one to check/voting me the one they'd want sent... in retrospect they tell me to never listen to them when #life has them THAT stressed and unwell. death in the family. rough break up. quit/lost job? just a shitty day and the menty B any day now? #idc- i'll show up. with intent to leave leftovers and let someone sit so dishes aren't their problem either. i don't care how boring #or negative they are. that's my friend going thru it. and I simply MUST make lasagna about it...
LISTEN UP IF YOU'RE THE LAST PERSON I AM ABOUT TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE
When I was younger, etiquette dictated that a dish taken to someone's house for a form of bereavement (death, divorce, job loss, etc.) should be nice but understated--china, but no loud or overly cheerful patterns. There were no limits on dishes taken for celebration, but it was generally accepted that you shouldn't use plastic because of the risk it would stain in the recipient's dishwasher, and then joy would turn into stress. (Dishes that stained that way were also a lot more common back then.) It wasn't rude to use plastic, but it was considered nice to think ahead.
THAT WAS THEN.
THIS IS NOW.
Ain't nobody got time to wash a fucking casserole dish when they have two jobs and a funeral to plan and the days of most of your friends being Right Next Door are gone.
These are cheap as fuck and you can get them everywhere. Walmart. Amazon. I get mine at the local grocery store. They fold directly into the trash. If you want to get fancy you can rinse it and it recycles (in a lot of places--check your local rules). If you have a friend with special dietary needs these can double as a prep space because they're not already cross-contaminated.
I recommend these for bereavement. For celebrations, I keep what I call pass-forward plates--I'll find a couple of cute mismatched plates at Goodwill, and when celebratory food is called for I use those plates with the instruction that you can return it to me if you're really that pressed about it, but you're more than free to keep it...and pass it forward with the same instructions.
I have only ever had one pass-forward plate come back to me. People love them and they love knowing they can just...toss it in the dishwasher when they get to it.
GOOD DISHES FOR BEREAVEMENTS:
--soups
--casseroles
--one-pan dishes (e.g. pot roast, chicken and potatoes in sauce)
--pasta with sauce (make Alfredo for your friends, it's five ingredients and fifteen minutes)
I strongly recommend doing in-home foods. Sometimes you don't have the strength for an app. When my sister's FIL died the family was sitting shiva and I called a restaurant literally across the country that did catering, and got them soup. My sister had insisted it wasn't necessary until the soup came and everyone went "oh thank G-d, none of us wanted to face picking food." They didn't even have leftovers, and that was with me ordering extra on purpose. Everyone was just glad someone else had made the decision and they didn't have to think.
The thing with Ta-Nehisi Coates saying he wouldn't have been able to stop himself from participating in 10/7 if he had lived in Gaza and Darializa Avila Chevalier attending a celebratory rally right after 10/7 is I think it's a good idea to believe people when they say they want to do violence against Jews. These are not statements and actions that are up for interpretation or debate. They are positioning the slaughter of Jews as justifiable and even morally good.
One of these people is a prominent public intellectual whose work appears in major publications. The other is running for Congress and is endorsed by the mayor of New York.
I don't know what will come of giving these people huge platforms. As a Jew, I don't think it's good. It's as bad for the general population as it is for Jews, but the fact that it's bad for Jews should be enough for morally upstanding people to resist their presence in public life.
From a luxury campaign to a UN report read aloud to toddlers, the oldest hatred still picks the prettiest channels.
Last week, Prada named the musician Saint Levant one of its global ambassadors. He is gifted, the campaign is gorgeous, and a fashion house is free to choose any face it likes. But in much of the campaign’s imagery, a gold pendant rests on his chest in the shape of the land from the river to the sea, the whole of it, with no Israel anywhere inside the outline. It is a map of a country drawn directly over the living country it means to replace.
Saint Levant did not stumble into that pendant. In November 2024, days after gangs in Amsterdam ran Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer fans down with cars and chased others through the streets with knives, in what the city’s own officials called a pogrom, he stood on a stage there holding a Palestinian flag and thanked the people who did it. He sent a shoutout to his “Moroccan brothers” for “taking care of business,” and told his fans that Israelis had come to “a land that’s not theirs.” Saint Laurent built a campaign around him anyway. Now Prada has handed him an ambassadorship. The necklace is the courteous version of what he says with a microphone in his hand.
The same photograph reversed tells the story. An Israeli model, same Prada lighting, wearing a gold map of that same strip of earth with no Palestine inside it and no Gaza, the outline filled to its edges with a single Star of David. That campaign would not last the afternoon. The pendant would be called genocidal and supremacist, the model would be dropped by sundown, and every outlet that is silent today would find its voice. In this hypothetical, the shape is identical and the erasure is identical, but the verdict flips. The metal did not change between the two photographs. The neck did. And it is not only a hypothetical. The Israeli actress Noa Tishby, who lives in Los Angeles, has worn a pendant in the shape of that same land, and pro-Palestinian activists have attacked it as a symbol of supremacy and genocide.
That inversion explains the rest of the week.
On to Rachel Accurso, the children’s educator whom the internet calls Ms Rachel. This week, she posted a tearful video(s) about the children of Gaza, anchored on a report she called undisputable evidence that Israel deliberately targets them. Her tenderness toward children is real, and her fans are right about that much. The death of a child in Gaza is a horror and not a point to debate.
The trouble is that the word “undisputable” is sitting on top of a document that almost nobody who shared it has read past the headline. The report comes from the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry. As the name suggests the United Nations itself handed down a verdict. The media coverage, including CNN and BBC, were careful enough to add they “do not speak for the UN.” What it actually describes is a standing panel of three appointed commissioners, set up by the Human Rights Council, holding a distinction no other inquiry in the body’s history has: an open mandate with no expiration date and exactly one permanent subject: Israel. Its finding of genocide is the finding of those three. It has never been the finding of a court.
That gap is the whole story, and it is the part Ms Rachel’s audience is never given. No court has found Israel guilty of genocide. The case that uses the word, South Africa’s, sits at the International Court of Justice, which has issued interim orders and said in plain language that it has reached no conclusion that genocide occurred, with a judgment on the merits still years away. The other court, the International Criminal Court, is no ally of Israel. It indicted the sitting prime minister. And when its prosecutor drew up the charges, he left genocide off the list entirely. The gravest accusation in international law is being narrated to millions of parents and children as a closed question, and the only institutions treating it as closed are the ones built to reach that answer.
Her video is constructed to prevent one question. But that question is not whether children in Gaza suffer, which we know is true and which is terrible. The question underneath is why this report, and why this war which ended, of all the wars killing children on earth right now. In Sudan, the United Nations has verified more than four thousand children killed or maimed. UNICEF says outright that the world has looked away, and the appeal to keep those children alive is funded at sixteen percent. There is no studio lighting for them, and no tearful video. The grief is selective, and it keeps arriving at the same address.
We know why the people who built this report aim it where they aim it. The open question is whether the woman handing it her face and her enormous audience understands what she has been folded into. At her own press event, she gave the microphone to one of the three commissioners himself. Maybe she has never wondered who he is, or why a panel with a single country in its sights would be so grateful for her reach. I wonder if she has.
Which brings me to a state senator in San Francisco named Scott Wiener.
Wiener is Jewish. For years, he held a careful liberal-Zionist line, hard on Netanyahu and unwilling to use the word genocide. In January, the activists in his own primary cornered him on it at a candidates’ forum, his rivals lifted their YES placards, and the room jeered him as a sellout. Within days, he folded. He posted the video and said the word, and he paid for it by resigning as co-chair of the California Jewish Caucus while his own community’s organizations put out statements against him. He spent the most expensive thing a Jewish politician owns. Last week, a man filmed himself looming over Wiener at a bar, calling him a Zionist and ordering him out of the neighborhood, pounding the wall behind his head for half an hour. The word he paid for bought him nothing.
Just today, another video showed Wiener being accosted at a Pride event. His attempts to leave are thwarted as he is surrounded and screeched at.
Side by side, the three show the same pattern. A map that erases a country reads as heritage on one neck and as hate speech on another. A politicized panel’s verdict counts as indisputable when it indicts a Jewish state and turns invisible when the dead children are Sudanese. The label built to describe a foreign policy becomes a mark of shame that no amount of compliance can scrub off, the instant it is pinned to a Jew. In every case, the symbol holds still, and the meaning swings, and the thing that moves it is the same thing each time. Whose hand is on it? Whether he is one of us or one of them.
None of this began with Prada. The practice of carrying hatred of Jews on a culture’s most admired channels is old, and it is deliberate, because beauty and warmth travel where a pamphlet cannot. They reach the young and the many before an argument can begin.
I grew up the grandson of Jews who were pushed out of the Arab world, out of the very map Saint Levant now wears as jewelry, and I have spent my adult life being told that my existence is the provocation. So I know the pattern when I watch it work. The necklace, the report, and the name belong to one story, and this week it ran in the open while most people applauded the parts of it they found beautiful.
Coco Chanel is the cleanest case fashion has. Under the occupation, she lived at the Ritz alongside German officers and took an Abwehr officer as her lover. In May 1941, she wrote to Nazi authorities to seize full control of her perfume house from the Wertheimers, the Jewish brothers who had bankrolled it, on the argument that Jews had forfeited the right to own it. Declassified French files name her as an agent. The house came through all of it, and the name still sells. The glamour did what glamour is for, which was to make the woman behind it impossible to picture as a villain.
The same logic walked straight into the nursery. Julius Streicher, later hanged at Nuremberg, ran Der Stürmer for grown men and also published a children’s picture book called The Poisonous Mushroom, bright and simple, teaching small Germans to spot a Jew the way a parent teaches a child to spot a toadstool in the grass. The aim was reach. A boy raised on a friendly cartoon needs no argument for his hatred years later. It becomes as instinctual as washing his hands, brushing his teeth, and looking before crossing the street.
No one is calling a musician or a children’s educator a Nazi. What I am writing about is much older than Nazism. Antisemitism has always understood distribution better than the people it targets do, and it picks the runway and the playroom on purpose, the channels that arrive without tripping the alarm, because an idea wrapped in style or in tenderness is already past the gate before anyone thinks to name it. We have watched this story before, and we know how it ends. The only open question is whether we name it faster this time.
I really hate the "Jerusalem is very important to three religions why would Judaism get full control of it" because its only important because thats where the JEWISH TEMPLE was and where the JUDEAN KINGS lived. just because people made religions out of fanficing Judaism means we have to give them equal slices of our own cultural history?
Ohio immigration attorney Shayan Parsai said in a June 5, 2026 Friday sermon at the California Usuli Institute that Jews use the Wailing Wall as a pretext to "sneak closer and closer to the Al-Aqsa Mosque" and are trying to remove it. He asserted that the Wall was never important in Jewish history, and that Jews pray and "wail" there because they are digging beneath it in an effort to enter the Al-Aqsa compound.
Parsai said: "These are not believing Jews. These are psychopaths" who have engaged in the "rituals of child sacrifice and child cannibalism" for centuries, both in the United States and "back home."
On April 25, 2024, Shayan Parsai, an American-Iranian resident of Columbus, Ohio, was arrested during an anti-Israel demonstration at Ohio State University.
Shayan Parsai: " They sneak closer and closer to the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Wailing Wall is nothing in Jewish tradition.
"They wail and they kiss that wall because they are digging under it, they are going over it, and they are going inside it. When they crush the Al-Aqsa Mosque... And I pray that Allah never allows this to happen, I pray that He intervenes by whatever miracle necessary. But they are trying to remove it and they will desecrate it. I promise you.
"These are not believing Jews. These are psychopaths who engage in the same rituals of child sacrifice and child cannibalism as we have clearly seen for the last hundred years and has been made plain as day to you, here in the United States and back home in our holy sites."
video (I don’t like this account nor agree with its politics and don’t follow it, but to preserve this for the record):
fun historical fact: the libel that the Jews would destroy Al-Aqsa started with Hitler’s ally, Grand Mufti Husseini. it was also a pretext Hamas used for the October 7th massacres.
The claim that the Jews were scheming to destroy the Al-Aksa and build the Temple, was started by Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini
the child eating blood libel is, of course, medieval.
Blood libels were false allegations that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish children in rituals. Learn about this antisemitic myth and how Na
The absolute derangement of going on a hysterical medieval screed about Jews digging Shawshank-style into al aqsa mosque -- the mosque that was literally built and plopped directly over our most sacred cultural site as a deliberate act of intentional desecration -- as if any Jew on Earth has any fucking obligation to give a single solitary fuck about your shitty fucking mosque lmao.
Awww it must be so rough having people destroy all of your sacred cultural objects :-( Quite frankly the Shawshank Jews would have every fucking right. I said what I said. if u cared that much about it maybe u should have used it for something besides trying to humiliate and deliberately harm other people lmao
Its AWFULLY convenient that somehow Al Aqsa is just The Most Sacred Place Everrrr when they built this shit on purpose to harm jews and then cry huge crocodile tears about how sacred it is when we rightfully demand access to our native fucking heritage that was there thousands of years beforehand.
Its like building a church on top of a native burial ground called the Fuck Indians Forever Church and then screaming and pissing and shitting and vomiting that its MY MOST SACRED TEMPLE when natives are like "what the fuck" lmao. Then ofc followed up by "oh yeah also indians eat babies." Sir I somehow get the impression that u are not a serious human being!
Muslim sacredness is apparently inviolable while our own, in our own homeland, on our own native cultural grounds is treated as fake, colonial and demonic. We built the Fuck Indians Forever Church, how DARE u disrespect our sacred church! Also, you eat babies.
Its grotesque as fuck to accuse us of cannibalism and child sacrifice while demanding total deference to a site built over Judaism's holiest place - again - on purpose, specifically to harm us. Im sick and tired of having to tiptoe around everybody else's feelings about the shit that they stole from us lmao.
You dont get to pave over our heritage, call us baby-eating demons for remembering it and then demand infinite tenderness for your fee fees. If it were REALLY sacred you would have built it in YOUR home, not ours.
anyway...I can't believe I'm getting anon hate for the idea that, yes, it is bad to selectively interrogate people of a specific ethnic group about the actions of a country they do not live in. like you can either ask everybody about their stance on an issue or don't ask at all. and if you're literally voicing your opinions as "i only dislike people of [ethnic group] if they believe in--" then just do not use an ethnic qualifier. just say you don't like people with X political stance if that's what you actually mean.
it should not be this difficult to understand with respect to jewish people, we all collectively get that if somebody were introduced to a chinese person and their eyes light up and they're like "Oh! Hello Chinese man. How do you feel about the Chinese government's treatment of the Uyghur people? Do you support that?" and they're literally not asking anyone else in the space and they do not behave like that around white people then they're definitely the asshole
what I want most in this world to instill in people who have had "shameful experiences" and who feel like "failures" is that shame is a technology of the powerful to displace the ways in which institutions and systems fail people back onto those who were failed.
if you need to read that a few times go ahead sometimes it takes a while to sink in.
ok.
now gather up all the self loathing that this has generated in you over the years (this also takes time no need to rush) and put it in a box.
I understand that this is largely rhetorical, but genuinely the answer to "if it wasn't my fault, what can I do to prevent failure?" is organize. build solidarity with other failed people. once you see yourself as part of a class of people whose experiences map onto many, many other people's, you will be empowered. you will be able to see other people more clearly. you will be able to see where your experience fits into the broader societal narrative more fully. you will be better positioned to work with others in coalition to discuss ways to prevent people from Being Failed and work for things to be more fair. I am fully serious. this is what it's all about. something something James Baldwin quote about how my pain is only important inasmuch as it allows me to connect with the pain of others.
also, if you're white, which I am, and which I know many users of this webbed site also are, my genuine best advice for understanding and navigating being a "failed" member of society is LISTEN TO BLACK PEOPLE* ABOUT WHITE SUPREMACY. read the discussions they're having about the construction of a "successful" or "failed" person. see where you fall on that map. recognize that where you fall on that map, as a "failed" person, puts you in a place where you have more in common with Black people, people in extreme poverty, institutionalized and incarcerated people, unhoused people, etc, than you have in common with the people who are "successful" under white supremacist capitalism.
like genuinely? reading Black disabled thinkers made me understand my life, my story, my experience, and see EXACTLY where it fit into the map that countless activists and thinkers before us have done the hard work of drawing for us. it's easy if you're white to see ""racial issues"" as ""not your lane"" and obviously in some ways it's true in terms of not your place to SPEAK on (exceptions exist obviously but the biggest problem w white people in racial justice spaces is we TALK TOO MUCH) but if you are queer and disabled and a drop out and having trouble holding down a job and traumatized and etc? and you're only reading stuff about queerness or disability from white people who are not informed about racial justice and white supremacy? you will Not get the full picture. you will Not fully understand the society that failed you and therefore Not fully understand your own failure and therefore Not understand your entire self.
#Helios was declawed by his former owners so he doesn't just slap things he dislikes like most cats#he really only feels confident in hissing at them#Especially because a lot of the thing he doesn't like are bugs and those are sharp sometimes :(#Selene has figured this out and now when she hears him hiss she sprints over the kill the fuck out of the bug#Helios has learned she will do this so he'll hiss at stuff louder and louder until she hears him#A nervous old man and his emotional support homicidal maniac
tags by @gallusrostromegalus
I couldn't reblog without the tags because the context is hilarious
A Nervous Old Man (right) and his Emotional Support Violence Machine (Left)
Yes, he is more than twice her size.
Yes, he is five times her age.
Yes, he cries like a big baby until she kills Unacceptable Scary Things (earwigs) for him.
You can support imprisoned people by sending them letters of support and money to use for the commisary and phone calls. Being in prison is expensive. Don't write anything that would get them in trouble. Prisoners' mail is read by guards.
yeah, they did. I wrote up a big long post about the Trevor Project and the 12 hour charity livestream I'm participating in right now, and they deleted it. twice. We've raised over $50,000 for a legitimate charity but because it helps trans kids it gets deleted from the site
imagine we make contact with an alien species that’s like, vastly technologically superior, they could fucking kill us in a single shot if they really wanted to
and this species has never eaten salad before. and we show them salad and they eat it and they’re like holy living fuck this is tasty. and suddenly they’re offering us huge houses with all kind of advanced technological shit and incredible medical care and all the amenities and everything, with the only condition that we keep making salad for them.
and like, salad isn’t even hard to make. grab some plants, dump em in a bowl. it doesn’t have to be fancy salad, they’ll fall all over themselves for the most mediocre salad in the world. we can make so much salad that we’re practically drowning in it, even if we eat some of the salad ourselves. and in exchange we’re protected from danger, we have great living conditions, it’s basically paradise compared to life on earth
