cabinetofotherthings

[cabinetofotherthings]

Night one! Chag Chanukah Sameach!

[cabinetofotherthings]

forever thinking about that part in people love dead jews about how it's a myth that the workers on ellis island forcibly changed people's last names and most jews just petitioned in court to have their names changed because of all the antisemitism that came with being identifiably jewish.

specifically, i'm thinking of this one guy called louis goldstein who was talking about how his name is a curse and it's impossible to live a good life in the united states while being called louis goldstein, except the judge was also called louis goldstein and was like "hey excuse you what the fuck"

[cabinetofotherthings]

"You think you're informed just because you read a bunch of grainy PDFs?"

Yeah man. Reading scholarly works on a topic informs you on that topic. That's how this works.

[cabinetofotherthings]

with nearly every piece of christmas-related media being about somebody not celebrating christmas who then ends up learning to celebrate it, is it any surprise that people in real life take it so personally when being told that somebody doesn't celebrate it?

so many christmas movie plotlines revolve around someone not wanting to celebrate christmas, and somebody else taking it upon themselves to make that person enjoy christmas at all costs. the plotline resolves by showing that person's actions as being totally justified because just look at how much happier and joyful everyone is now that they know the *magic* of christmas!

like hellooooo the grinch? arguably one of the most recognizable christmas characters of all time? he's all sad and bitter and lonely up in his cave without christmas, he gets bombarded with christmas things all day so he devises his sneaky evil plan to destroy christmas for everyone, but then reforms himself and learns to love christmas just like everyone else, happily ever after.

we are inundated with this message that people who don't like or celebrate christmas are spoilsports and buzzkills and just need to be reformed from their bitter ways. so naturally when people in real life discover someone doesn't want to celebrate christmas, well... it just doesn't occur to them that in reality, it's just a christian holiday that some people don't celebrate. that's all.

(this is something I've been thinking about for a few days and I needed to get it out, so forgive me if this reads as a barely legible stream of consciousness lmao)

[cabinetofotherthings]

'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.

[cabinetofotherthings]

i love watching how a post about judaism gets passed between all of us so I can find all the jews here. it’s jewish geography virtual style.

[cabinetofotherthings]

downside of studying the stalinist period is that about 60% of the time the follow up question is whether it's analogous to [insert contemporary geopolitical issue]. which is still wildly preferable to the other time people ask me weigh in on contemporary geopolitical issues, which is immediately after finding out i'm jewish

[cabinetofotherthings]

There is no good way to be a Christmas-hater. The only social scripts we have for a Christmas-hater is someone being converted into a Christmas-lover through the power of magic or love or terrifying ghosts. Also, people assume you are just the most unfun guy in the world.

I need a cool fun guy Lover social script for being a Christmas-hater where we learn the lesson of being ourselves and true to our most genuine inner life. Which is hating the holiday so so much.

[cabinetofotherthings]

When I was in kindergarten I saw a painting of the American Revolutionary War. I asked my mom, “Who were the good guys and who were the bad guys?” And she said, “That’s not really how war works. It’s not like a TV show. Both sides thought they were right, otherwise they wouldn’t have been fighting.” And my seven year old ass went “Oh ok”

Anyway having internalized that fun fact in literally kindergarten? It surprises me how many college-educated adults still don’t seem to know about it.

[cabinetofotherthings]

there is an old jewish joke/saying from the pale of settlement that i once read as an epigraph to a history book, whose title i forget: if someone says they're right more than half the time, we say he is an educated man; if he's right two thirds of the time, then we praise the lord, he is wise, he is knowledgeable, he is a prophet; if he says he's right any more than that, he is a charlatan, a crook, a cheat, and a swindler

[cabinetofotherthings]

american christian hegemony and chauvinism are so strong that a person can celebrate every major christian holiday every single year of their life and arrange all their social and professional calendars and homes around those holidays and still say that they're like, totally not christian at all, they literally see themselves as somehow a "neutral" type of nonreligious person, that's how much cultural christianity is seen by them as the default

[cabinetofotherthings]

Tis the season to remind anyone who might need the reminder, nobody is saying non-Christians shouldn't be allowed to celebrate Christmas, or that it somehow makes them Christian if they do.

What we are saying is that Christmas is a religious and cultural holiday, rooted in a specific religious and cultural context, and people from other cultural and religious backgrounds shouldn't be forced or pressured into celebrating it, and we should acknowledge the amount of societal pressure brought to bear on non-Christian people who don't celebrate Christmas to try to force them to celebrate it.

There is a whole genre of beloved Christmas story where the whole point is that a character's not celebrating Christmas is treated either as a moral failing in an itself or as a reflection of a character's moral failings, and this character must be brought into the Christmas celebrating fold to make them a good and happy person. It shouldn't be that hard to acknowledge that this is a strong social pressure in many places, or that this pressure might be hard on people who, for whatever reason, don't celebrate or participate in Christmas.

Whether you are Christian or not, nobody is trying to take Christmas away from you. Those of us who do not celebrate would just like people to stop trying to make us celebrate.

[cabinetofotherthings]

i thought i'd reached a state of resigned equanimity but my work is really into celebrating christmas and every day i feel myself drifting back towards jewish rage

[cabinetofotherthings]

From Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin:

[ID: The victims were people; a true identification with them would involve grasping their lives rather than grasping their deaths. By definition the victims are dead, and unable to defend themselves from the use that others make of their deaths. It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of the victims. It is less appealing, but morally urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might be a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. Outstanding politicians and intellectuals — For example, Edvard Beneš and Ilya Ehrenberg — yielded to this temptation during the war. The Czechoslovak president and the Soviet Jewish writers were justifying revenge upon the Germans as such. People who called others subhuman were themselves subhuman. Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible.

To yield to this temptation, to find other people to be inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.

To dismiss the Nazis or Soviets as beyond human concern or historical understanding is to fall into their moral trap. The safer route is to realize that their motives for mass killing, however revolting to us, made sense to them.]

[cabinetofotherthings]

Friendly reminder that Jesus Day has nothing to do with Jesus and therefore non-Christian religious people have no excuse not to particupate in Jesus Day, the totally not-Jesus-affiliated celebration of Jesus' birth. If you say this holiday, where people commonly put up decorations depicting the birth of Jesus and sing songs about his role in the Jesus religion, might have something to do with Jesus, you are actually oppressing us Smart Enlightened People who don't believe in your fairy tales and are definitely not culturally Christian even though we come from Christian backgrounds, view every non-Christian religion as either Christianity Lite or the same kind of barbaric superstition that the more bigoted Christians reduce other religions to, and write mile-long essays about why not only is it justified for me to celebrate Christian holidays, non-Christians are not allowed to opt out of those holidays either

Tone can be hard to convey over text but all of the above was sarcasm.

[cabinetofotherthings]

everyone look what i got

[cabinetofotherthings]

"i'm glad people are having fun. it's nice to have some colourful decorations to break up the dreariness of winter even though i don't celebrate" i say through gritted teeth with seething annoyance as the christmas decorations go up