#jews

[dynamicity-keysmash]

'Tis the season to unpack some stuff about Christmas from a minority perspective:

Christmas is a Christian holiday. The fact that many celebrate it in an irreligious way (which is valid!) does not change its origins, connotations, symbolism, nor what it has historically meant for religious minorities.

The idea that Christmas is "secular" (read: neutral) is a product of Christian hegemony and the blindness of many in Christian countries to the permeation of Christianity as "default" culture.

When someone says they don't celebrate Christmas since it's a Christian holiday, it is not actually reassuring or helpful to say something along the lines of "oh well it's just a secular day of family & presents for everyone! So you can celebrate it too!"

Though the above statement is usually well-intentioned, it is often distressing to hear because it is untrue and is erasing our lived experiences. The reflexive effort to make Christmas universal is a cultural reverberation of the millennia-old evangelizing effort to make Christianity universal, and as such, can be very uncomfortable for religious minorities.

[mysharona1987]

[h4ganah]

I don't ever want to hear the disgusting and vile genocide libel again. It's infuriatingly fucking pathetic at this point.

If you, after seeing this, still continue to claim that Israel commited genocide, you just hate jews. Die mad about it, I don't care.

[wearenotjustnumbers2]

Important for people who are still stuck accusing people of antisemitism when they say genocide is actually not right.

[disfiguredgrace]

i think the pro palestine movement is dealing in actual collective psychosis. like is the ongoing genocide in the room with us right now

[humusboii2thereturnoftheking]

In the USSR there was an organization called the “Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public.” If a Jew (ie someone with “Hebrew” nationality in line 5 of their ID papers) wanted to get beyond a certain point professionally, he/she had to join the committee and denounce Israel. The parallels between the current situation and the Soviet Union are remarkable (including the need for Jews to ritually disavow Israel, Zionism and Jewish peoplehood in order to advance).

In western countries, the biggest threat to Jews isn't street level violence (although it's real) or being rounded up, rather it's a rapidly developing situation where admission to elite institutions for Jews will be subject to a political litmus test. And as the Overton window on Israel/Palestine has shifted significantly on the left in recent years, the nature of the litmus test gets more stringent.

There was a time when dissociating from the settlement movement and the Israeli right was sufficient for just about all possible needs in elite institutions. We're rapidly approaching a situation where that simply isn't true any more. Even democratic single statism isn't enough. Even opposing violence against Israeli Jews, or having ostensibly non-political connections with Israel, is becoming disqualifying.

[kolejnylangblr]