Dr. Mara Lee Grayson explains that proximity to whiteness and privilege can often perpetuate antisemitic tropes and ideas.
In the first episode of the 2026 Daniel & Marisa Klass USC Shoah Foundation #LectureSeriesOnAntisemitism, host Dr. Brian Hughes speaks with Hillel International’s Dr. Mara Lee Grayson on the “myth of Jewish whiteness” and how it affects academic and cultural spaces.
Back in the day I worked at a certain very famous and very high caste art museum in the US as a junior curator. Part of my job was to catalog the objects in the museum database. This includes details like provenance, measurements, and a visual description of what the object looked like.
Like I said, the museum was a pretty snotty institution. It’s got a LOT of objects it’s way famous for possessing, but nobody knew about the absolutely massive collection of Moche erotic pottery it had because the curators were totally embarrassed by this stuff.
Some examples:
Pretty hot shit, right? They never, ever put any of this stuff on public view or published it in any catalogues but - we legit had like several hundred pieces of Moche ceramics in the “dirty pots” category. Anyway, I was left alone to just do my job with regard to the database for several years, ok? And I figured, well, these’re accessioned objects in the museum’s collection - better get down to bidness.
I catalogued every goddamn bestiality, necrophiliac, cocksucking, buttfucking, detached penis, and giant vulva drinking cup in that collection. I’d be like,
A drinking vessel in form of a standing man wearing a tunic and cap. He holds an oversized erection in his hands and stares into the distance (note I did not say “like he’s hella-constipated”). The vessel has a hole at both the tip of the penis as well as around the rim of the figure’s head, thus forcing the drinker to drink only from the penis or risk spilling wine all over themselves from the top of the vessel. Red and orange slip covers the surface of the piece.
Pretty straightforward, right? Apparently the deep seated fear of these objects that the curators exhibited was meant to spread to me as well, but - no one ever gave me that memo, because I guess Midwesterners reproduce asexually. When the curators understood that I had catalogued all of these objects in addition to the other, non-sexy pieces in the collection, they were apparently livid, but knew they had no legs to stand on in terms of getting pissed at me for it.
I visited the museum’s online public access database a few years back and - every single description I wrote of these pieces has been totally neutered to say something like Male figural vase.
Long story short? Just call a dildo a fucking dildo. It’s all gonna be ok, I swear.
Museums should have sections dedicated to artifacts like these with a warning that says “There’s a lot of private parts in here but we’re dedicated to displaying history so we won’t censor these. Enter at your own risk” or something. It’s prudish to deliberately hide history because of some ding dongs.
i don't really want to weight in on the "using big words in your writing is ableist" discourse happening on tiktok because i'm like 90% certain it's an anti-intellectual psyop to stir up drama in online circles to promote the use of ai to summarize literally everything and thus feeding the LLMs and lowering the populace's mistrust of such tools but i also have to say: dictionaries and thesauruses are the most accessible they've ever been. if you use an e-reader of any kind you can look up a word without leaving the page. there's a plethora of online dictionaries and if you just type a word + "meaning" into google it'll usually give you a definition. we used to have pocket dictionaries we used when reading in class. i have two on my shelf right now that i used in high school. stop letting the fascists purposefully misuse anti-ableism rhetoric to trick you into never thinking again.
People act like Duolingo has uniquely failed people when they have 1000 day streaks but can’t speak the language but that’s the natural outcome of treating language acquisition as an extensive vocab lesson rather than as a casual lowkey request to rewire your entire brain
The thing is that if you’re learning Spanish* in a classroom, the audios are all one specific accent speaking clearly with no background noise, and when you’re conversing you’re learning from other Spanish Second Language speakers who are mentally translating English sentences into Spanish ones. But in real life Spain people mumble and have a bunch of different accents, talk in noisy environments, and also aren’t turning English thoughts into Spanish ones, they’re turning Spanish thoughts into Spanish language. If you want to be fluent in a language, don’t expect to have a mental google translate going. You have to literally think differently brick by brick.
*”Spanish”, “English”, and “Spain” can be replaced with any language/country, I’m just using an example from my own life
There’s nothing problematic about this post. I’m just singling it out as an example of how much of the the English language my English first language speakers are thinking about really *thinking* about:
Firstly, you understand what’s missing in the broken phrases. Who is “starting to make sugar”? Grammatically, it’s an orphaned phrase, so why do you understand that the asterisks mean that eategg has started talking in the third person? Why do you understand that “go back to sleep puppy” is referring to “general you” as the puppy, despite missing the comma before it? Why do you know that someone on tumblr is referring to a person at all if they say “puppy” and not a literal baby dog?
Why do you know that chlorophyll/chloroform might be a switch up that an English speaker might make? Why do you know what both of those things are if they aren’t involved in your everyday life (perhaps some botanists follow me, hopefully no kidnappers do)?
Secondly, when reefshark says they are holding chlorophyll [sic] over your face, did you picture a cloth? Because no cloth is ever mentioned. You only know that there’s a cloth involved from prior cultural knowledge.
And that’s not even getting in to how comfortable you are assuming the sentences all go *subject—predicate—object*, which is not the case in all languages (in Spanish this is only sometimes the case)
So, if you’re fluent in Tumblr English, your brain just did a lot of work really quickly that you didn’t pay attention to. Your brain knows how and where to take shortcuts!
Hi! To my understanding, lawers are supposed to defend the interests of the client, right? What do you do when the interests of your client are unethical? For example, what do you do when your client has been accused of abusing their ex (and probably did) and that client tells you that they don't care much about winning or losing, they just want to drag out the process as long as possible (to fuck with their ex)
Very interesting question! The short answer is: I'd say no, we're not doing that.
The reason that's interesting, really, is in its juxtaposition with yesterday's ask about defense attorneys and rape survivors. How can I say that I have no choice in that matter but so clearly reject this one?
That boils down to how decision-making is divided between lawyer and client. Technically, ethically, a lawyer is allowed to make all the decisions about the representation, except for the most very important ones.
The lawyer cannot decide/the client must decide what their plea would be -- whether they will say to the court 'guilty', 'not guilty', or 'no contest.' I can advise them of the consequences of that plea ("if you say 'not guilty' we're going to trial, if you say 'guilty' you can take the prosecution's offer") but ultimately it is their choice.
(Now, in the real world, clients ask me what they should plead all the time, or say that they'll do whatever I tell them or whatever I think is best. Things get complicated, but an ethical attorney will always take the time to explain that this is 100% the client's choice.)
The lawyer cannot decide/the client must decide, if they go to trial, whether they will invoke their right to a jury trial or take a trial before a judge.
The lawyer cannot decide/the client must decide, if they do go to trial, whether or not they testify. They have the right to remain silent and I can't override that; necessarily, that must also mean that they have the right to speak and I can't override that either.
The lawyer cannot decide/the client must decide, if they lose at trial, whether or not they appeal the case.
Beyond that, the rules of ethics that we follow say that we're in charge of literally all the rest. Tactics, what motions to file, what witnesses to call, what hearings to have. Now, that's not how I do things, because I'm not okay with playing god with my clients' lives.
In this instance, though, your hypothetical client is trying to make decisions that have no relevance for me and that I'm very not interested in doing. I'm there to defend them on the criminal case. I literally can't even guarantee them a continuance to delay the matter because my judge hates continuances. So I get to say, no, and you better make some choices sharpish or you won't get the benefit of my extremely good advice.
In the example from yesterday, if the client decides to opt for a not guilty plea and a jury trial, I ethically must give them the best defense possible.
It's also worth noting, no abusive client considers themselves abusive. They often are angry at the complaining witnesses involved and feel some need for revenge; usually this manifests in asking about taking out reciprocal charges, which is also not my problem because I am not involved in making criminal cases happen (also I usually recommend against it unless I think I can get victim/witness on my client's side, it's a bad look and the prosecutors will consider it retaliation and drop it).
Touching on different scenarios: If a client intends to use my services to help themselves engage in criminal conduct, I have the choice to withdraw from the case as a conflict of interest. If they are imminently putting life in danger, I have, again, a choice to potentially disclose confidential information in order to prevent direct harm. The first has happened to me, the second has not. (The first scenario led me to call the ethics hotline to ask them how I should handle it, and the ethics hotline fucking weaseled out of it on me; they were like, but do you know for sure that your client still wants to do criminal conduct now that you've advised them against it?)
And also note that someone has to be about to die in order to justify an attorney breaking confidentiality. If they're doing some bullshit and I know about it and can't ethically or legally act on their behalf, my remedy is to withdraw from the case. Judges unfortunately are the ones who grant motions to withdraw, and sometimes they have a hard time telling if I'm making this motion because my client is being a pain in the ass and I don't need withdrawing or if I Really Need Withdrawing Right Now Your Honor Thank You. This is where a little judge telepathy works wonders.
Happy to answer questions about any aspect of this if I've brought up anything unfamiliar or that doesn't make sense.
Hey, I’m not anon, but I’ve been enjoying your blog and your legal insights, so thank you for taking the time!
To follow up on something you mentioned in this one- if you do end up withdrawing for ethical reasons, what happens then? If/when the client gets a new lawyer, I can’t imagine that the ethical dilemma disappears just because a different lawyer is representing them now. Or is withdrawing from the case usually enough of a signal to the client that they should not be doing whatever the thing is?
The people who say they can’t utter the charge are saying it from the biggest stages on earth. The people who actually can’t speak don’t get
I have written that the Israeli government is failing us and that the settlement project is a moral and strategic disaster. I have said harder things than that in public, under my own name, more than once.
Nobody called me an antisemite for it.
I bring this up because the claim of the season is that you cannot criticize Israel. It is a serious claim, and I am a useful test of it, because criticizing Israel is a big part of what I do in public. If the accusation were really triggered by criticism, I would be its most obvious target. I am not. So something else is going on.
Let me concede the real part first. Sometimes claims of antisemitism are thrown in bad faith. People have been smeared over ordinary political speech, and Jews who oppose the occupation or the war have been called nasty names by other Jews. That is wrong every time it happens. Anyone who reaches for this word to win an argument cheapens it for the day a real antisemite walks into the room.
Then there is the part almost nobody wants to look at.
This week, Britain barred streamer Hasan Piker and his uncle, commentator Cenk Uygur, from entering the country. The Home Office said that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good.” Both men went straight to audiences of millions and said the same thing: they were being silenced for criticizing Israel. Piker said it was done at Israel’s command.
But when you look at the facts, you get a different story. Besides saying that America deserved 9/11, Piker has also said he prefers Hamas to Israel, that he loves Hezbollah’s flag, and has no issue with them. Both are banned terror organizations under British law. He has compared Zionists to Nazis, said Israelis are Nazis, and called Orthodox Jews inbred. That is not criticism of a government, if you couldn’t tell. It is contempt for a people and admiration for the men who murder them. And the UK Home Secretary who signed off, Shabana Mahmood, is a British Muslim who has publicly criticized Israeli conduct in Gaza. Calling her a servant of Netanyahu is ridiculous.
Susan Sarandon tells a version of the same story. She says Hollywood blacklisted her for calling for a ceasefire. What actually happened is that she stood at a rally and said American Jews were getting a taste of what Muslims endure. She apologized for the line herself and called it a terrible mistake. Her agency dropped her over what she said at that rally. In the telling she gives now, the offense was the ceasefire comment. The blacklist did not keep her off the stage at Coachella two months ago, where Sabrina Carpenter cast her in what became the most talked-about moment of the festival's opening night.
The pattern holds every time you check it. The criticism of Israel is the alibi. The bad conduct is the actual offense. Everyone involved knows the difference and agrees to pretend they don’t.
Take the bad conduct away, and you are left with Ms. Rachel.
She is the biggest children’s entertainer in the world. Eighteen million YouTube subscribers and a Netflix show, and the Washington Post calls her the Mister Rogers of our era. For two years, she has used that platform to talk about Gaza without pause, in front of the most brand-skittish audience there is, the parents of toddlers. She is still doing it now. She has said she would risk her whole career to keep going. The career keeps growing. Netflix signed her up in the middle of it.
Which brings me to the strangest venue for a silencing campaign in history.
At Cannes last month, a member of the jury used the opening press conference to announce that Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem, and Mark Ruffalo had been blacklisted by Hollywood. Hannah Einbinder, fresh off a standing ovation for her new film, told a packed panel she was not afraid of being blacklisted because the cost of staying quiet was higher. Months earlier, she had closed her Emmy speech with “Free Palestine,” on live television, to applause.
I want to be fair to her. She may actually believe that she is taking a risk. But a blacklist you can describe from a stage at Cannes, to a room of journalists who will quote you admiringly, is not a blacklist. The Hollywood Ten could not publish essays about being blacklisted. That was the entire point of the thing. The test of silence is whether you can still be heard, and every name on this list is heard constantly, by millions, with a publicist setting it up.
There is an actual, organized refusal-to-work list in film right now. It is called Film Workers for Palestine, and more than five thousand people have signed it, pledging not to work with Israeli film institutions they accuse of complicity in Gaza. Javier Bardem signed it. The man named at Cannes as a victim of blacklisting helped build one. The targets are Israelis and Zionist Jews.
The people who took a real risk in that room were the ones who refused. Debra Messing and Mayim Bialik put their names to a letter calling the boycott what it is, and got called McCarthyists for objecting to McCarthyism. They are not on Hollywood’s magazine covers for it.
And then there is the kind of silence that does not come with a profile.
On a Sunday last June, a group of mostly older people walked through Boulder, Colorado, the way they did every week, carrying signs for the hostages still held in Gaza. A man threw firebombs into them while shouting, “Free Palestine!” He told police he wanted to kill every Zionist there. A dozen people were injured, the oldest in their eighties. One woman later died of her burns.
A few weeks before Boulder, two young Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead as they left a museum in Washington. The man who did it chanted the same words.
Those people were criticizing nothing. They stood in public as Jews who would not disown Israel, and that was enough. None of them will be asked by a magazine how it feels to be silenced. They already have been, in the older sense of the word.
So here is where I land. I criticize Israel constantly, and the sky stays up. The settlements and the men running the war are fair game, and saying so has never once cost me the thing these people insist it costs. Being argued with is not being silenced.
There is a harder question under all of this, and I think we keep avoiding it because the answer stings. You would believe every word of this if it were any other group. If a minority said its elderly were being burned at a weekly vigil and its kids shot leaving a museum, the response would be grief and alarm. When Jews say it, the response is a request to see our work. We are asked to prove that we are not exaggerating and that the dead were killed for the reason we name. I just spent this whole essay doing that. For any other group, the dead would have been enough.
The ones who say they cannot criticize Israel are speaking from the loudest rooms we have. The ones who truly cannot speak are the people who were set on fire for showing up. One of those groups is on a stage at Cannes. The other is in the ground.
there are some ships out there that do not speak to me personally but i am an understander for. like i see what you are seeing. it just doesn't personally intrigue me. but i support you. you're right. we don't need to fight, let us hold hands.
I don't need the chatgpt random algorithm to write emails for me because I already have a custom and 100% flawless algorithm called "writing the exact same three emails with the names changed"
#1: "hi [landlord], hope you're doing well! [apartment thing] is [broken/a problem]. we need it [fixed/replaced/handled] by [date]. let us know when you'll send someone over so we can be here to let them in. thanks so much, [op]"
#2: "hi [professor], hope you're doing well! unfortunately, I'm [sick/stuck at work/dead] and won't be able to submit [assignment] by [due date]. could I please have an extension? if not, is there anything else I could do to make up this credit? thanks so much, [op]"
#3: "hi [customer service person], hope you're doing well! unfortunately, [product] [didn't arrive/is broken/wrong color/gave me a rash/poisoned my crops] and I'd like to receive a [refund/replacement]. here is the documentation of the order and photos of [broken thing/wrong thing/my rash/dead crops]. thanks so much, [op]"
Writing an email is so easy and I will tell you how it's done. This is the advice is for everyone with an email job, but you can apply it to normal human interaction.
The FIRST SENTENCE is the thing you want the recipient to do. Do not make them guess.
I want to let you know about ... (This email is to inform someone of something not to ask them to do anything)
Could you please do ... (This is a request. You want them to do something).
I'm looking into x and wondering if you can help me (this is also a request but for information instead of an action).
People do not want to read an email and even if they do read it, most people are skimming and not interested. Tell them what you want first, then provide context or other information (when you need a thing is often key). If the email is informational, you can even add "you don't need to do anything, this is just to keep you informed!" People will appreciate not having to figure out what you want from them.
If you can't articulate what you want the recipient to do with the message, you are not ready to email them. I read too many emails where I have no idea what the person wants from me.
Put the most important thing first and everyone will be impressed! AI cannot do this for you because it can't tell what's important! Only you know that, which is why you must write your own emails.
to everyone who wants help with emails: go through the notes of this post. there are ideas I've never thought of and plenty of scripts for all kinds of situations/jobs
If you struggle writing descriptive details when you're using third-person omniscient, it becomes much easier when you switch to a "tighter" POV, like third-person limited or first person. You can come up with descriptive details by imagining what your POV character would notice and find most relevant in the scene.
Here are three different people looking at the same tree:
Gary, who hates the outdoors and resents being forced to leave the house: There was a tree. Whatever. I've seen them before. I was more concerned with the giant wasp nest up in the branches. We hadn't even unpacked our camping gear and our weekend was already ruined. I waited for Rachel, itching to tell her "I told you so." No, wait, that itching was mosquitoes. God, I hate it here.
Dave the arborist: I found the tree and immediately realized what was wrong. The canopy was thinning, woodpecker holes, S-shaped larva tunnels under cracked bark... The emerald ash borer. This poor thing was infested.
Zenith the witch: The tree was more twisted than a maze, with more knots than a hangman's noose. A staff carved from this tree could warp a knight's bones and bend a castle wall until it fell to bits. But first, you had to straighten it. And I had just the spell.
Terry the Tree: I looked across the clearing and saw another tree, and immediately realized that it didn't have eyes. In fact, none of the other trees did. Why am I the only one with a face? Am I a monster? Oh god oh god oh god...
As you can see, the descriptive details become filtered through their point of view, and reveal the character and the scene at the same time.
we have dandelions EVERYWHERE, they are basically our State Weed, it is absolutely impossible that my mom has never interacted with a dandelion before, this requires further investigation
So after extensive interrogation I have an update:
my mom is in fact aware that dandelions exist. she temporarily forgot the name and there was some miscommunication.
the truth is actually weirder
she’s aware dandelions look like this
she is familiar with this flower. she knows the name of this flower. she declines to believe, however, that these are also dandelions
she does not believe these are the same plant. I tried to explain, and she thought I was either misinformed or lying. so I asked her what exactly did she think the yellow ones were called?
she answered, with complete confidence: Daffodils.
For context: this came out in 2011 in Australia. Same-sex marriage would not be legalized until December 2017.
It was only legalized in 8 US states (the 8th only a few months before), and wouldn’t be legalized nation-wide until 2015.
It was only legal in TEN COUNTRIES in 2011. We wouldn’t hit 20 countries until 2017. (Australia was 23rd)
As of today (April 14, 2026), I believe only 38 countries have fully legalized same-sex marriage. Out of somewhere around 200 countries in the world. That’s only ~19% of countries.
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