chaya

לב פתוח ואור גדול

[ofrahaza]

Hi, I’m Chaya, 24. Half Sephardic / half Ashkenazi.

This blog is an eclectic mix of art and culture (art history, cinema, music), Jewish history and ritual (objects, prayer, study), fashion and beauty (makeup, perfume, style), and personal reflections.

@ofrahaza is an active record of what I love, what I’m learning, and who I’m becoming.

DNI: antisemites, bigots, TERFs, MAGA

אִֽם־אֶשְׁכָּחֵ֥ךְ יְֽרוּשָׁלָ֗͏ִם תִּשְׁכַּ֥ח יְמִינִֽי׃

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither;

תִּדְבַּֽק־לְשׁוֹנִ֨י ׀ לְחִכִּי֮ אִם־לֹ֢א אֶ֫זְכְּרֵ֥כִי אִם־לֹ֣א אַ֭עֲלֶה אֶת־יְרוּשָׁלַ֑͏ִם עַ֝֗ל רֹ֣אשׁ שִׂמְחָתִֽי׃

let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you, if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour.

[velvetcloak]

pomegranate bag @ chanel | fall/winter 2026

[gregor-samsung]

גט - המשפט של ויויאן אמסלם‎ [Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem] (Ronit Elkabetz, Shlomi Elkabetz - 2014)

[ofrahaza]

DOWN WITH THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC.

If you have anything to say about Iran, start there.

To everyone who suddenly claims to care about Iranian schoolgirls: where were you when schoolgirls were being poisoned during the Jina Mahsa Amini uprising?

Every civilian life lost is a tragedy, no matter who caused it. But the selective outrage is disgustingly hypocritical. Many leftists who speak loudly about Iran only seem to do so when it fits their existing narratives about the US or Israel, and I truly hate you all deep in my bones. Stop acting like you care about Iran. You guys DGAF about Iran or Iranians. Western leftists only talk about the schoolgirls who died to prove a point. They are simply their political props in a grand drama. If you really cared about Iranian schoolgirls, you would have AS MUCH to say about the regime’s crimes against humanity. They deserve to have their deaths be properly mourned, not exploited for your partisan politics.

You care about your Western superiority complex and abstract political theories. I know this might shock some of you, BUT THE US/THE WEST IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL THE EVILS IN THE WORLD. Western leftists have shown clearly they don’t understand the brutality of this regime and its deep ideological commitment to death, destruction, gender apartheid, and environmental collapse. I get it, you hate Israel, but your hatred has blinded you.

If Iranians suffer at the hands of the Islamic Republic, the same voices go quiet or parrot the same 3 talking points about “US imperialism” or “sanctions” while ignoring the realities of the regime’s imperialism and domestic repression apparatus. The REGIME helped kill 500,000 in Syria and created proxy warfare in Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen. The IRGC is like ICE on steroids. They grab women off the street when they’re “immodestly” dressed.

They killed, raped, and tortured 30,000+ protestors in January with military-grade weapons. Yes, 30,000+ IN TWO DAYS. There already was foreign intervention when the REGIME brought in terrorist groups from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan to murder these protestors. Imperialism doesn’t come with a color chart to tell you which kinds are valid and which are “resistance.” Western leftists are regurgitating regime propaganda. Stop carrying water for the regime. Stop explicitly or tacitly supporting the regime.

I know for A FACT you don’t know any Iranians FROM IRAN. The youth who died were some of the bravest, boldest minds of their generation - dreamers, artists, and thinkers no different from you. In 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa that women should wear the veil, thousands of Iranian women protested in the streets. One of their slogans: “Freedom is neither Eastern nor Western. Freedom is universal.” Stop falling into a dichotomy that pits East vs West. You are paralleling the discourse of the most ardent of racists and bigots. Freedom, democracy, dignity, and bodily autonomy are NOT Western ideas and impositions. Iranians don’t want to be Western; they want to be FREE. The international community in both the global north and south has silenced them for nearly 50 years. We did not have to be here.

If you’re going to be “anti-war,” I need to LOUDLY hear your solutions, not your moral posturing and privilege. I can think of a large number of solutions that don’t involve kinetic force, but all you guys do is preen and posture while offering nothing of value. Even as US BOMBS are falling, Iranians are still more scared of the IRGC than the US. Iranians are trapped between two repressive forces.

And you know what, if the US wants the oil, FINE, because it’s not like China and Russia were involved in Iran for the ghormeh sabzi and rice. If the US can support the people’s pursuit of regime change in return for oil, OK. It is not like the people see any of the benefits from their resource-rich country right now. And to be totally honest, fuck the oil. I only, only care about the people.

If you truly care about Iranians, your concern shouldn’t depend on which geopolitical argument it supports. You should mourn every single life lost.

And to be VERY clear, I don’t like or trust Trump or Bibi, and it is 100% valid to question or doubt the usefulness of this operation. I only, only care about the people trapped in this disaster, from Iran to Bahrain, the UAE, and yes, Israel. I don’t mourn Ali Khamenei or any of the top brass who got killed. Rest in piss.

I WILL NEVER FORGET, AND I WILL NEVER, EVER FORGIVE.

Update: if you’re MAGA and engaging with me, leave. I don’t like Trump. I am simply sharing what Iranians have shared with me.

[koenji]

A Yemenite Jewish woman engaged in the art of traditional basket weaving in Herzliyah, northern Tel Aviv District, Israel, ca. 1961. The style of basketry resembles that of the Tihamah region of western Yemen. Not only in Yemen but throughout the region, basketry has been a craft and an art form primarily practiced and passed down by women - with exceptions of course.

The remaining images show other examples of Yemenite Jewish basketry from the Yemenite Jewish Heritage Center in Rehovot and the Yemenite Art Museum by Ben-Zion David in Tel Aviv.

[ofrahaza]

Being Jewish in 2026 feels like living in a glass cage - hyper-visible, picked apart, judged, assessed, and scorned, while also shut in to the ghetto of your community and shut out from the world.

[ofrahaza]

the song careless whisper by George Michael is so sad to me because he was too hot to be feeling all that

[babushkahobbies]

The far left isn’t just “forgetting” about Ukraine and the people of Iran, they’re willfully ignoring them.

[shlufim]

Edouard Manet, "A Cat Resting on All Fours, Seen from Behind" & "A Cat Curled Up, Sleeping," Graphite on ivory-colored paper, 1861, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

[koenji]

Antique Jewish Hamsa amulets and other Jewish talismans from Morocco, Kurdistan and Israel. 🪬 (png)

[gatabella]

Catherine Deneuve, c.1970s

[ofrahaza]

full solidarity with the people of Iran protesting against their corrupt regime, full solidarity with the Israelis protesting against Bibi and Ben Gvir. May we all welcome a world of peace, security, and nonviolence

[ofrahaza]

einav zangauker, jina mahsa amini, women of peace, women of valor, women of light

[leroibobo]

the tomb of esther and mordechai in hamadan, iran. the site is believed by iranian jews and christians to house the bodies of the aformentioned biblical figures, and is an important site of pilgrimage for both. the earliest known account of it was made by the jewish traveller benjamin of tudela in the 11th century.

the interior has been renovated so many times throughout the centuries that the original hebrew inscriptions on the walls have been lost in several paint-overs. what we're left with today is practically gibberish.

[bobemajses]

Jewish amulet for a married couple with an inscription in Judeo-Persian, Iran, ca. 1900

[ofrahaza]

It really makes me sick how Ashkenazi history has been wielded and weaponized by antisemites. It makes me sad that I have become even somewhat ashamed of my Ashkenazi heritage over the past two years, since it was easy for me to "hide" behind my "odd" Sephardic surname. Ashkenazi history is beautiful and strong. It is a story of displacement and loss, but also incredible survival, brilliance, and creativity. Society and bigots taught me to feel ashamed of my own history. I refuse to ever again internalize the voices that erase Jewish history while pretending to speak in the language of justice, who prop up dead Jews to tell moral stories about themselves, while erasing or supporting violence against against living Jews. Bigots use our history as a tool against us, so that even in our most victimized moments, we are recast as oppressors, agents of war, imperialism, and capitalism.

It makes me angry that Israel is blamed for the destruction of Yiddish, as if a state killed a language. Yiddish was destroyed because the Nazis systematically murdered its speakers. Israel choose Hebrew because we needed a language to unify Jews from every corner of the Earth. To ignore this history is not simply ignorance; it's historical violence and a bat to bash living Jews with.

It makes me sad to see Yiddish reconceptualized as an “anti-Zionist language,” as if it were a political tool, rather than a langauge quilted together by diaspora and loss. An extraordinarily diverse population of Jews spoke Yiddish: religious and secular Jews, communists, dreamers, and Zionists alike. Also, Yiddish uses Hebrew letters.

Israelis are now recast as “colonizers” or “white Europeans,” when only a few decades ago their grandparents were rounded up, expelled, and murdered precisely because they were not considered white, European, or fully human enough. The European Jews who arrived in Israel-Palestine did not come as colonizers to expel the indigenous population from their land. They didn't even come, for the most part, as ideologues. They came as refugees. They were stateless, displaced, and often the sole survivors of their families. The Jews who propel this forward may be well-intentioned, but they have forgotten we are one people. Ending up in America was lucky. The difference between themselves and the Jews in Israel is a hair's breadth of a difference.

This rewriting of history doesn’t challenge power. Instead, it launders old antisemitic ideas in a new language. It demands that Jews flatten their past, deny their trauma, and accept a narrative in which bigots treat Jewish survival itself as suspect. And I’m tired of pretending that this distortion is harmless, or academic, or principled. It isn’t. It’s cruel, and it’s dishonest.

Ultimately, this line of thinking isn’t about advocacy or preventing violence. It’s a mental game that weaponizes Jewish history against the Jewish present, so that even in our darkest, most victimized moments, we are rendered culpable. Our dead are redeployed against us. For these bigots, the only Jews they like are dead ones - Jews who can't speak up for themselves, look visibly Jewish, or have the audacity to be born in the Jewish state.

[still-searching-for-something]

it’s my growing belief there is a specific kind of antisemitism/racism that especially and specifically targets Ashkenazi Jews. “Go back to Poland” is a very common attack line, and unfortunately a very common Jewish refutation of that phrase is “but most of Israel’s Jews are Mizrahi” which is true. But it does imply that Jews whose ancestors lived in Poland/Russia/America/Germany inherently lack the right to live in or be connected to the state. Being a Jewish person whose ancestors were indeed Polish Jews, I wish sometimes that we were the butt of less jokes about the food, the culture, history, etc of the community. Ashkenazi food slaps, and it is also a reflection of survival and innovation. 

Antizionists seem to relish particularly in harassing and spreading hatred against Ashkenazi Jews, painting us variably as evil sneaky Zionists complicit in the Holocaust (???), evil European colonialists who stole an independent Palestinian state (???), and so on.

I know it will never happen, but it would be nice if Ashkenazi culture were treated with dignity, respect, and frankly, just taken seriously as an ethnic identity and people. Obviously, the Jewish people are one and I don’t wish to promote separatism or erasure of the very real issue of Sephardic and Mizrahi specific racism, but Ashkenazi culture isn’t “European” or “White” and Yiddish isn’t a political device or a fetishized aesthetic. Ashkenazi culture is nuanced, ancient, and no less legitimate than any other identity in the world today. 

[ofrahaza]

Yes, I agree. If anything, the dominant form of anti-Jewish bigotry in the diaspora is anti-Ashkenazi in nature, because that is the standard or “normative” Jew to most of the world. This is partly because Ashkenazi Jews make up a large portion of the Jewish population. We see this in people belittling or mocking Haredi or otherwise hyper-visible Jews; using “Hava Nagila” on antisemitic social-media posts; playing bizarre eugenics-adjacent games about the genes and ancestry of Israelis of Ashkenazi descent; Jewish mother or grandmother jokes and characters in TV, movies, and mass media; fetishizing Yiddish; and turning Ashkenazi pain into abstract moral lessons for humanity rather than lessons about antisemitism itself. Even well-intentioned Jews sometimes play into this narrative by emphasizing that over half of Israelis are “brown,” that is, Sephardi or Mizrahi. This framing can erase how and why Ashkenazi Jews returned to the Levant and also reduces Jewish identity to a simplistic racial binary that does not fit. During Nazi Germany, non-Jews put up signs saying “Jews go back to Palestine,” and now we see the inverse. Anti-Sephardic bigotry in Israel was and is real, but that doesn't magically makes Ashkenazim "white."

[ofrahaza]

full solidarity with the people of Iran protesting against their corrupt regime, full solidarity with the Israelis protesting against Bibi and Ben Gvir. May we all welcome a world of peace, security, and nonviolence

[ofrahaza]

It really makes me sick how Ashkenazi history has been wielded and weaponized by antisemites. It makes me sad that I have become even somewhat ashamed of my Ashkenazi heritage over the past two years, since it was easy for me to "hide" behind my "odd" Sephardic surname. Ashkenazi history is beautiful and strong. It is a story of displacement and loss, but also incredible survival, brilliance, and creativity. Society and bigots taught me to feel ashamed of my own history. I refuse to ever again internalize the voices that erase Jewish history while pretending to speak in the language of justice, who prop up dead Jews to tell moral stories about themselves, while erasing or supporting violence against against living Jews. Bigots use our history as a tool against us, so that even in our most victimized moments, we are recast as oppressors, agents of war, imperialism, and capitalism.

It makes me angry that Israel is blamed for the destruction of Yiddish, as if a state killed a language. Yiddish was destroyed because the Nazis systematically murdered its speakers. Israel choose Hebrew because we needed a language to unify Jews from every corner of the Earth. To ignore this history is not simply ignorance; it's historical violence and a bat to bash living Jews with.

It makes me sad to see Yiddish reconceptualized as an “anti-Zionist language,” as if it were a political tool, rather than a langauge quilted together by diaspora and loss. An extraordinarily diverse population of Jews spoke Yiddish: religious and secular Jews, communists, dreamers, and Zionists alike. Also, Yiddish uses Hebrew letters.

Israelis are now recast as “colonizers” or “white Europeans,” when only a few decades ago their grandparents were rounded up, expelled, and murdered precisely because they were not considered white, European, or fully human enough. The European Jews who arrived in Israel-Palestine did not come as colonizers to expel the indigenous population from their land. They didn't even come, for the most part, as ideologues. They came as refugees. They were stateless, displaced, and often the sole survivors of their families. The Jews who propel this forward may be well-intentioned, but they have forgotten we are one people. Ending up in America was lucky. The difference between themselves and the Jews in Israel is a hair's breadth of a difference.

This rewriting of history doesn’t challenge power. Instead, it launders old antisemitic ideas in a new language. It demands that Jews flatten their past, deny their trauma, and accept a narrative in which bigots treat Jewish survival itself as suspect. And I’m tired of pretending that this distortion is harmless, or academic, or principled. It isn’t. It’s cruel, and it’s dishonest.

Ultimately, this line of thinking isn’t about advocacy or preventing violence. It’s a mental game that weaponizes Jewish history against the Jewish present, so that even in our darkest, most victimized moments, we are rendered culpable. Our dead are redeployed against us. For these bigots, the only Jews they like are dead ones - Jews who can't speak up for themselves, look visibly Jewish, or have the audacity to be born in the Jewish state.

[ofrahaza]

To be clear, non-Jews are the leading proponents of this narrative, but they use the few Jews who agree as cover.