This is a tiny blog. I joined tumblr in 2022 because there were like four people who had tumblrs that I was checking daily to see if they had posted anything, and it was pointed out to me that if I just joined tumblr and followed them my life would be a lot easier.
Over the course of my first year on tumblr I decided I liked it here. I followed some more people, which lead to following some more people. I mostly reblogged lots of different things – sometimes fandom stuff, sometimes interesting facts, sometimes stuff about Judaism and frequently politics (and there’s a big overlap between the last two.) As of October 1st, 2023, I had about 15 followers, two of whom are friends in real life.
In the last two months my follower count has almost tripled, and like 8 of you have shown up in the last 24 hours (what the hell did I post? This feels weird). Given that the focus of this blog has taken a decidedly Jewish turn in that time, I’m assuming that’s what you guys are here for? To anyone who was here before that, I’m sorry if you were here for the other stuff and I’m just flooding your dash with stuff about antisemitism. My hope is that a year from now this blog will be back to griping about antisemitism only occasionally as opposed to multiple times a day.
Anyway, for anyone who is new around here, here’s a little about me: I live in Minnesota, I have two young kids, and my profile pic is my dog. I’m Jewish, and a Zionist (depending on your definition). Politically I’m too far left to be liberal and not left enough to be a true leftist, and I’m fine with that. I like nerd stuff – fantasy and sci fi, Star Trek and Star Wars. I currently work in the medical tech industry, but before that I worked in publishing, and before that I worked in manufacturing and before that I worked in fast food. My educational background is in linguistics and the history of the English language, but it’s been a while, so don’t quote me. My ask box is open, and I’ll reply to just about anything that seems in good faith. I want a better world, I’m just not sure who is going to help me get there anymore.
Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:
This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.
And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?
She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.
I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.
Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.
At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.
I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.
“What… did you do?”
“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”
She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.
My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”
And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.
TDLR; Library Card Charged $4,000 of Garlic Bread.
A picture is worth a thousand words, a library card is worth $4000 worth of garlic bread, if we can figure out how many words the average library card can check out at once, we can probably work out a picture-to-garlic bread conversion here, too.
A trans girl I know from turkeye just posted "debunking zionist propaganda" and the "propaganda" it was debunking was Being Jewish with Jonah Platt. I'm so sad. I don't want to unfollow all my friends. My face feels hot. I don't know how to react. Do I unfollow her? I love Jonah Platt. How are we ever going to fight back if our best speakers are smeared as zionist propaganda
“How are we ever going to fight back if our best speakers are smeared as zionist propaganda” this is the point, sadly. it’s the point of utilizing the word as a slur, it’s the point of degrading and dismissing any Jew that can be targeted with it. it’s a silencing and delegitimization tactic. if our best and most effective and educated speakers can be instantly dismissed with shorthand for evil, genocidal, fascist, inhuman (which is what the usage of “Zionist” has become), then of course there’s no point in listening to them. in fact, paying them any attention at all, unless it’s to send them hate, is tantamount to a thought crime, and punishable by ostracization from the in-group as a traitor to the cause. it’s a very easy, very effective way to make sure Jewish creators will not be heard or taken seriously (unless, of course, they’re the ones who can be tokenized). making sure that it’s widely accepted that anyone who can be called (((Zionist))) is discredited is the best way to make that a reality, and it’s why we’re seeing it happen across every spectrum - the arts, academia, publishing, medicine, politics, and so on. we are not supposed to be able to fight back.
gender essentialism is soooo funny bc it's like "this is what women are like" and you're like "I've met women and many of them, if not the majority, have not been like that" and it's like "well women SHOULD be like that" and you're like "why should women be like that" and its like "because that's what women are like"
I really don't like voting yes on the amendment "to send a message to Netanyahu and his government" because the message is "we'll give you what you want and not even realize it or think about it"
Removing restrictions on Israel's offensive and defensive capabilities *and* cutting/removing all aid to Palestinians? Tell me the part where the Israeli right is supposed to feel chastised or rethink how they operate?
Also, what happens if/when the current opposition win and there's different policies and staff in place? Because a lot of people sure seem to appreciate being able to hide behind Netanyahu and the Israeli right when making statements (when they aren't writing of Israel entirely).
Jonathan Frakes got hit with a part of his quarterstaff when it was smacked with a sword and had to go to the hospital dressed in his Q-pid Robin Hood rags.
Tracy Scoggins didn’t have to go to the hospital, but while she was filming “Destiny” in full Cardassian makeup, she “took the opportunity to walk around the lot at Paramount and scare the schoolchildren on buses. Until finally Security called the stage at DS9 and said, ‘Could ya’ll do something about keeping your aliens contained over there?’”
Robert Duncan McNeill had an episode of Voyager where his first major make-up day gave him the appearance of gnarly burns all over his face & hands and he said he then ‘gleefully skipped off to the nearest 7-11 to bask in the horrified looks as he casually shopped’. XD
I remember when Nana Visitor told us a story about going to the hospital in her Star Trek outfit (I cant remember what for) one of the interns there was freaking out until it was explained to him that it was just makeup and that her nose did not, in fact break and crumple like an accordion, and that she was there for something else.
Andy Robinson also went home after that earthquake in full Garak makeup and the traffic lights weren’t working so people had to make eye contact at the intersections and he says everybody always let him go first
many women are excited to get old and weird, but i have great news that it's fully possible to become weird now, before you get old. just imagine the heights of weirdness you will be able to reach in fifty years if you get started now. that's what I think
franz kafka’s writings are often analyzed in a trans lens the person who wrote that was almost definitely a trans person who related. people who call kafka a trans woman are almost entirely trans women. there is also a huge subset of literature shitposter girls who use kafka and the metamorphosis specifically to talk about their experiences with womanhood. so while i agree that the trope you are talking about is antisemitic i don’t think that applies here. he’s not being called a woman in a disparaging way.
It. Literally. Doesn't. Matter.
Spoiler alert: trans people can be antisemitic!
Franz Kafka was a real person who died not too long ago, and just because a trans person relates to his writings doesn't mean they can claim he's trans. It's not the same as relating to a fictional character. You can't 'headcanon' an actual person. I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman. He was an actual person, not a fictional character you can project on. An treating Franz Kafka like a fictional character you can project any label onto and separate him from his actual life is dehumanization and *also* antisemitic.
It's no different than queer people co-opting Anne Frank's memory and erasing her story to just herald her as a "bi icon" when she never had the chance to live long enough to label herself. Queer gentiles need to stop dehumanizing Jewish people and turning them into blank slates they can project onto.
Kafka's Metamorphosis and writings about his depression are from the viewpoint of a disabled Jewish man who was watching as antisemitism was slowly escalating around him and Jews were becoming insects in the minds of society. And "he's not being called a woman in a disparaging way" is the dumbest excuse ever- antisemitism is antisemitism. I've seen trans people infantilize Jewish men, calling them "different breed of man" or "scrunkly" and then insist they meant it positively. Intent doesn't matter. Calling a Jewish man, who never ever indicated having any gender identity otherwise, a woman, or implying he's somehow not a full man, is antisemitic.
I hope I'm not derailing here (please tell me if I am and I'll delete this), but I'd like to especially call attention to this line (which I love, btw):
I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman.
At some point relatively recently, people seem to have come to the conclusion that you can't empathize with a character (or real fucking person, in this case, and I cannot stress how gross that is) unless you're just like them. "Oh, I, a nonbinary person can identify with this cishet man? He must actually be nonbinary!" "Oh, I, an autistic person, can identify with this Ambiguously Quirky™ person? She must actually be autistic!"
Being able to relate to a person--real or fictional--who isn't just like you is a good thing. It's good that you see yourself in the writings of a cisgender man! Maybe it will teach you that cis people aren't the enemy. It's good that an autistic character resonates with NT people! Maybe they'll gain new insight into their autistic friends and family!
It's called empathy, and it's so important to understand that you are going to see your experiences reflected in people who are unlike you. Those connections are important. Deciding that Kafka must be a trans woman because you're a trans woman is missing the entire fucking point. It means that you do, in fact, have some things in common with a cisgender man, and conversely, it means that cisgender men have things in common with you. To flatten them out so they're just like you is missing out on so much of what they have to say.
People are beautiful and rich and layered and the fact that we can connect with other people and share experiences despite how different we are? That's the whole fucking point. That's what makes life worth living.
OP, I'm sorry I only spoke on being transgender and autistic. Those are the only two points that I could speak on from experience. Talking about real people like they're fictional pisses me off, and I sort of... got off on a thing.
I'm not OP, but one thing that's frightening about this from a Jewish perspective (especially in the context of discussing someone who was alive in the interwar period) is the recurring idea that Jews only matter as lenses for other people's stories. That we can be empathized with, but only if our narratives can be twisted to someone else's.
Because we've seen that before. We see it very often because it's a fundamental premise of some incredibly antisemitic forms of Christianity, and when it turns out that we're real people with real opinions and real beliefs and real feelings who don't just exist to validate someone else's perception of who and how we could be, people don't just abandon their pretense at allyship, they get violent.
It's also a common failing in how the Holocaust is taught. People like to present this lens of "it was random violence that came out of nowhere and could've happened to anyone. It could've happened to you! Imagine if you'd been one of the victims! That would've been a tragedy wouldn't it?" And the thing is, that's bullshit. If you were just a random German citizen at the time? You would've been one of the perpetrators. And it was a tragedy in and of itself; it doesn't become a tragedy by imaging a scenario in which people who were perfectly safe would've actually been potentially in danger (never killed, of course, because Holocaust education is also commonly sanitized, which is a different rant).
Edited to take out a rant that was in drafts and got added to this by mistake, but. Well, the Tl;dr, since that's been reblogged
Well. I'm a cis woman. GNC, perhaps, but cis. And I get misgendered (and degendered) a lot because of how people read Jewish features. And... when friends insist that any discomfort I have with feminine stuff is because I'm an egg... I get that they're trying to be helpful for a journey of self-discovery. But I've done that introspection. I check in with myself periodically just in case. And "oh, you're really nonbinary/a trans man because you're [insert list of stereotypically Jewish features//personality traits commonly ascribed to Jews [whether or not I have them]" -it hurts. Because not only are they minimizing my actual identity and my self-knowledge, and deciding that they're the experts on my life, rather than me, they're doing it in a way that's constantly used to hurt me.
another thing! Jewish men are (pretty often) seen as feminine/unmasculine and like they could never be 'true men'. In a lot of media they're the awkward nerds, the virgins, the weirdos. Point is this is not just misgendering anybody (which would be awful enough), this is misgendering a group that's known to be seen as less masculine than a white man for example
*this is a bit of derailing but it reminds me of how black men face the opposite issue of being seen as hyper masculine & in turn hyper violent. None of us can win in this racist ass society my g-d
I don't want to take away from @terulakimban's excellent point centering actual empathy. That is a BIG trend I see when taking about anything Jewish in popular culture (I cannot tell you how many times as a theater person I've heard "Fiddler on the Roof is a story about all of us, tradition vs modernization" NO! IT IS ABOUT A JEWISH COMMUNITY IN VERY ANTISEMITIC RUSSIA AT A TIME WHEN POGROMS WE'RE SO COMMON PLACE 250,000-300,000 JEWS FLED OR WE'RE KICKED OUT over the course of 40 years. The tradition aspect is uniquely Jewish - how do we maintain our identity when we keep getting scattered and settled elsewhere? It lasted this long but HOW do we keep doing it? Can it continue?)
But in the Kafka conversation there is an element I think so many non-Jews just straight up refuse to understand. That is the fact that Jews have our own culture.
The societal gender ideals non-Jews in the West grow up with ... Aren't really in Jewish communities the same way. (Though cultural osmosis means we've picked up a lot along the way).
ALL our masculine role models, the ones we're told to admire, are shepherds. That's important bc shepherds lead the heard from behind, not in front. It speaks to a different leadership mindset. Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Solomon, etc. we're soft spoken, humble, slow to action, intellectually inclined. Even when they have tempers or are warriors, those aspects are critiqued or minimized. (It's why when Jews depict King David, he's playing his harp or herding sheep. When non-Jews depict him, he's fighting Goliath.)
Compared to the very Roman/Western ideal of masculine power might-makes-right, Jewish masculinity is inherently softer.
That's not to say we DON'T value male strength. But it's just one factor and mostly understood that physical prowess has a time and place. It's not the ultimate standard for our masculinity.
Especially when you consider femininity in Jewish communities. Our matriarchs were all outspoken, all defied their husbands/men at key moments without punishment (some were even rewarded by God.) Some were prophets, judges and leaders (Miriam, Judith, Devorah, Hannah) in their own rights. Jewish women certainly do not fit the mold of a Roman/Western quiet, docile, submissive woman.
And don't forget, while there very much is misogyny in Jewish communities, our traditions often challenge it. Men are expected to praise their wives every Friday night in front of the family (Eshet Chail), men are halacically responsible for their wives' physical pleasure, Rabbis have denounced marital rape as a sin far longer than it's been illegal in MOST modern nations and women are excempt from time based religious obligations as they are considered closer to God (though that comes with it own problems).
In short, religious or not, Kafka would have grown up with that different understanding of gender norms and what it means to perform gender. He would have understood gender completely different to how a modern non-Jew in the West would.
To erase his Jewishness from the conversation - to ignore the cultural difference between how you see gender and how he likely would have - is a pretty severe historical distortion. And makes this weird history AU even more problematic.
Its exactly why historians always say "there's evidence of this type of attraction/relationship/behavior but we cannot assign an identity to a dead person who would not have had our cultural understanding." We need to bring that back.
Antizionist critics of Israel often do a fun little thing where they get into high dudgeon where they claim they don’t hate JEWS, they just hate Israel…in a way that indicates that they feel like Israelis are genetically or culturally evil in some way. And then they act confused as to why diaspora Jews, who share genetics and culture with Israelis, are getting mad at them!
On Saturday, my phone showed me Ro Khanna, standing in the West Bank, announcing that the IDF had detained him. I study attention for a living. The Tel Aviv Institute exists because my colleagues and I believe you can learn more about antisemitism from engagement data than from statements of concern. So when the Khanna story landed, I did what I always do. I scrolled back a week.
On Monday, Khanna was calling on Graham Platner to quit the Maine Senate race. He had rallied with Platner during the campaign. Platner is the candidate with a tattoo widely understood to be a Nazi symbol, which he says he never recognized as one and has since covered, and who was accused last week of rape by a former girlfriend. He calls the allegation categorically false. The Maine Democratic Party’s executive director called it credible. By Wednesday, Platner had suspended his campaign, and Khanna was standing in Khirbet Zanuta. By Saturday, Khanna was posting that settlers with American-made rifles had held him and that soldiers had sided with them. A fundraising email went out shortly after the post. He told The New York Times it was unwise to detain long-shot presidential candidates, and told Reuters the trip had left him more resolved to consider running in 2028.
Parts of his account are contested. The IDF says its soldiers dispersed the settlers and reopened the road. Israeli police say the group had entered a closed military zone. But masked, armed men did block a congressman’s bus; a New York Times photographer witnessed it. Settler violence in the West Bank is real and deserves condemnation from anyone who claims to care about Israel’s future. The incident happened. What interests me is the week that led up to it. Khanna began it tied to a collapsing campaign and ended it as a wronged man with a viral clip and a donation link.
Once you see the shape of that week, you see it everywhere.
I had never heard of Kneecap until footage surfaced of a band member holding a Hezbollah flag while, prosecutors said, chanting “up Hamas, up Hezbollah.” The terror charge collapsed before trial, thrown out because it was filed a day late and without the required sign-off. The career did the opposite of collapsing. Hundreds of fans stood outside a London courthouse for the hearings, and one woman told a reporter she took a day off work just to be there. In the week the charge was announced, the band advertised a surprise London club show with tickets they said would be gone in minutes. They were. A courtroom is an expensive thing to book as a promoter, and they got theirs free.
I did not know Bob Vylan existed until June 2025, when the duo’s frontman led a Glastonbury crowd in chants of “death, death to the IDF,” live on the BBC. The punishment arrived fast: dropped by their agency, US visas revoked, pulled from a festival, a police investigation. Then it evaporated. The investigation closed in December for insufficient evidence. The frontman said in October he would do it again tomorrow, “twice on Sundays.” This week, the duo announced a defamation suit against the BBC, represented by the same Belfast solicitor who won a case for Kneecap. Eighteen months ago, they were a footnote. Today, they are an international free-speech cause with a High Court docket, and the scandal is the only reason anyone outside their scene knows their name.
Greta Thunberg owned 2019. By 2025, the climate movement had slipped out of the news cycle and taken its most famous face with it. Then she boarded a boat to Gaza, was intercepted by Israel, and was deported in front of the world’s cameras. She has been in the headlines ever since. Susan Sarandon’s agency dropped her in November 2023 after she told a rally that Jews were getting “a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country,” remarks she later called a terrible mistake. The apology drew a fraction of the coverage. The relevance stayed. Lizzo spent 2023 and 2024 fighting harassment lawsuits brought by her own dancers, allegations she denies. In March 2024, she posted that she quit, a statement she later softened. Six weeks after that post, she was back on camera thanking the activists working against what she called genocides in Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo, and crediting them with pulling her out of a depression. The redemption arc wrote itself, and the lawsuits fell out of the conversation.
Every one of these stories turns on the same hinge word: until. A career was over, or a name meant nothing, until. And what sits on the far side of that hinge is never an album or a film. It is Israel.
Anecdotes can be cherry-picked, so here is the case where someone counted. Jackson Hinkle, a commentator who has been thrown off YouTube, Twitch, and Instagram, had 417,000 followers on X on the morning of October 7, 2023. Six months later, he had 2.5 million. The New York Times documented the surge. An Israeli research firm that sampled his new followers found he gained 1.2 million of them in the first nineteen days of the war, and that roughly 40 percent were inauthentic accounts. The Anti-Defamation League tracked five influencers in his orbit and found their combined engagement rose more than 1,070 percent in the six months after the massacre. Hinkle had already explained the business model himself, on a livestream, before any of it happened: “I do everything for the clout,” he said, adding that no one would ever see him do anything without that motive.
Or take an even more unlikely musical comeback. Macklemore had not placed a solo song on the Hot 100 since 2017. In May 2024, he released Hind’s Hall, a protest track against Israel, and within a week reached new solo career peaks on three Billboard sales charts. Forbes covered it as a comeback, in those words. He donated the proceeds to Palestinian refugees. The donation does not change the market data. Attacking Israel was the first thing in seven years that returned him to the charts.
The honest objection is sincerity. Greta may believe every word. Lizzo may be sincere, and Khanna may have been genuinely shaken. I will grant all of it, because it changes nothing. A market never asks whether the seller believes in the product. It asks whether the product sells. What the last three years have demonstrated, in the follower counts and the chart positions, is that anti-Israel positioning is the most reliable comeback vehicle in Western public life. The same vehicle carried a MAGA communist, a progressive congressman, a punk act nobody had heard of, and a pop star everyone had forgotten. Its passengers share no ideology and no audience. The one thing they share is a need for the spotlight.
I will not accuse Ro Khanna of sitting in a minibus calculating engagement. He did not need to. The calculation was finished long before he landed, and every public figure in decline can read the results. The exit from irrelevance runs through Israel, and it stays open because it keeps paying. Platforms reward the rage with reach. Institutions fold after a single news cycle, and audiences keep accepting each conveniently timed awakening as conversion rather than commerce. At the Tel Aviv Institute, we have started logging these comebacks, with dates, follower counts, and revenue. Somewhere out there is a fading name none of us could guess today, someone about to discover the Palestinian cause at the exact moment a career requires it. When that awakening is announced, it will land in our log as one more entry, right on schedule.
According to a source for the New York Post, Ro Khanna was invited to meet freed hostages and survivors of October 7th.
Khanna's team didn'
According to a source for the New York Post, Ro Khanna was invited to meet freed hostages and survivors of October 7th.
Khanna's team didn't even bother to respond.
His team was also offered an opportunity to meet with Druze civilians in the Golan Heights and a briefing on how aid is currently getting into Gaza. They didn't take it.
Now, if Ro Khanna genuinely believes that aid is not properly getting into Gaza, why not go to the briefing? If he thinks Israel is lying, wouldn't that be the perfect time to get proof?
But he didn't go, because those aren't his intentions. He didn't want to meet with victims of Hamas or those trying to get as much aid into Gaza as they can because they contradict his narrative.
And the narrative is all that matters.
Netanyahu Says It's 150 Delinquents. Ok. Arrest Them.
I can’t read this whole piece because he has it locked, but here is his video addressing it and talking about settler violence:
In 2020, when Donald Trump was President, *Democrats* stole the presidential election. They also compelled the FBI, which Donald Trump’s employee controlled, to run a false flag riot to attack the US Capitol.
Meanwhile, in 2024, when Democrats controlled the White House, they were unable to steal the election.
I have to fucking defend Israel from wacko antisemitism and conspiracy theories like "no there are no spy dolphins, no they don't train dogs to rape people"
But NOW I have to be like "yeah the one where they keep Palestinian prisoners in a complex surrounded by a moat filled with alligators is real" ?????
The thing is, I could definitely believe that in the heat of post-10/7 the IDF could have been sloppy applying its purported high moral standards to its battlefield decisions. Combined with having heard that frontline infantry units (the kind of units most likely to come into physical contact with random Gazans, etc.) have a tendency to disproportionately be filled with right-wing nationalist types who would be the most likely to be indifferent or hostile to the rights of said Gazans etc., as well as Israel’s history of being reluctant to punish those who are caught violating said moral standards (because the ruling coalition is counting on the votes from that sector) and there’s a real issue of potential unpunished or even uninvestigated war crimes, something that pressure from allies like the US or European countries could have helped with.
But that sort of pressure was instead given over to much broader assertions that Israel is intentionally committing systemic wrongs like genocide, which sucks all the oxygen out of any more specific accusations because now both sides are arguing back and forth over whether genocide has occurred.
