It’s so exhausting having to constantly prove antisemitism. People will believe someone is racist or homophobic based on the flimsiest hearsay but anytime someone is accused of hating jews we’re expected to pull out detailed receipts dating back decades like some kind of IRS audit
After having watched the internet collectively stan graham platner for months, i hate to say i told you so, but the problem is never *just* the nazi tattoo. I have never once encountered a person who did not like jewish people but everything else about their beliefs was totally fine for someone running for office
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.
The Mamdani cult of personality is fascinating because 80% of his achievements thus far have been things that were either already in motion by the time he was elected (the rideshare lawsuits) or done in collaboration with the Democratic state government (balancing the city budget) but any post about it acts like Sexy Internet Campaign Man did it all by himself with One Weird Trick and the Corporate Neoliberals Hate Him meanwhile it wouldn’t be possible if he didn’t have support from other Democrats, who it turns out actually are in alignment with him and not the villains that his base thinks he is.
pet peeve is when you look up fashion references from a specific era and you keep getting modern day '[era]-inspired' fashion like NO i want authenticity damn it. i can see your 2020 photo quality and your 2020 hair and your 2020 makeup. youre not fooling me.
hello i'm a historical fashion researcher and i have a lot of experience looking up things! this is a very widely experienced irritation and you're definitely not alone in this, but i am here to share everything i know!
so, ways to get around this:
turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us
don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace
a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)
instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian
including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too
including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue
for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend
when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!
if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache
some online resources and museum collections:
fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples
the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates
costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)
v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece
lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces
nypl digital collection for photographs
national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art
national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific
stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource
wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain
auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!
anyway, i hope this has been a good place to start for anyone interested! there are probably some i've missed because there are so many museums across the world and i don't know about all of them or can't remember them. but these are the ones i've used the most! (my specialisation/jobs i've had to research for have only really been in western fashion, so my resources reflect that)
Wikipedia has a list of fashion museums. Unfortunately, the page itself is only available in German, but the introductory paragraph is very short and after that, it's organised by country, and then it's a simple list. If you click on a museum's article, the website is usually linked in the overview table.
The fact that "involuntary drug treatment" has become a mainstream policy point is terrifying if you think this is a good idea idk how to help you like fentanyl is scary but so is forced medical care and legal loss of bodily autonomy
The European Union already forced Apple to abandon its proprietary charging port and adopt USB-C across its entire iPhone lineup. It just did something bigger. A new EU mandate requires every smartphone sold in Europe including Apple devices to feature a battery that can be replaced by the user without specialist tools, without voiding a warranty, and without sending the device to a manufacturer approved service center. Batteries must maintain a minimum capacity threshold after a set number of charge cycles and replacement parts must remain available for up to ten years after a model goes on sale.
The consumer electronics industry built its current business model around batteries that degrade, cannot be replaced at home, and create a natural upgrade cycle every two to three years. The EU just legislated that model out of existence in the world's largest regulatory market.
Apple, Samsung, and every other manufacturer now faces a choice between redesigning their devices for the European market or accepting that their current hardware architecture is no longer legally sellable there.
Given that no company walks away from European consumers voluntarily the phones are going to change and once they change for Europe the rest of the world will ask why theirs still do not.
Not that I think all marriages are doomed but when deciding who to marry you should ask yourself “is this someone I’d want to divorce?” As in, is this someone I believe would be mature and fair, even when they’re upset and don’t particularly like me at the moment. Is this someone I could continue to trust while going through an adversarial process? And if the answer is no, don’t marry them.