#“they can for the jews and i did not speak out for them because i was not one” yeah that poem

[magnetothemagnificent]

Hoarding and Learning to be Free

This week's Parsha is Parshat BeShalach. My B' Mitzvah parsha is Parshat BeShalach, so I've been very familiar with the Parsha for as long as I can remember. Of course, as a kid we usually focused more on the first part of the Parsha; the miraculous exodus from Egypt, the splitting of the sea, and Miriam's tambourine and song. The rest of the Parsha; the bitter waters, the manna, and the war with Amalek all seemed overshadowed by the grandeur of the Exodus. The nitty gritty details about how the people ate and drank or the all-too-real perils that befall a nomadic nation in the wilderness just don't make for an inspiring Dvar Torah for a 12 year old to proudly share.

When I would learn about the "other parts", I never really connected with them, and sometimes I would object to them. I found it unfair that G-d would give the Israelites the manna every morning, but not allow them to save any for the next day (except on Fridays). I knew that G-d promised the Israelites that He'd replenish the manna every morning, but it seemed unnecessary and even cruel to prevent them from exercising the natural instinct to save. Especially when saving for the future, both knowledge and material possessions, is so important for the continuation of the Jewish people today. I never really saw the significance of the manna in the otherwise foundational origin story of Judaism.

Then the Simchat Torah massacre happened, and the whole world watched as masses of Jews were taken into captivity once more.

This past Sunday, I had the privilege of listening to an Israeli psychologist describe her work in rehabilitating those hostages that had been freed within the last 15 months. Among many harrowing testimonies, one thing she said stuck with me. She said that many of her clients who had been freed in the November 2023 hostage "deal" more than a year ago still displayed acute survival behaviour that they had picked up in their captivity, such as speaking in a whisper, agoraphobia, and, most poignantly for me- hoarding food and resources.

It makes sense, of course. I know how the human body can react to trauma, and how even once a person is out of a dangerous environment, the body can still behave as though it is still in grave danger. Indeed, hoarding tendencies, though not of food specifically, is something that I see in my own family going back generations. I know many other Jews who either struggle with hoarding themselves or have a family member who does. It's one of the unmistakable hallmarks of generational trauma, especially the trauma of captivity and displacement, both situations that Jews have known all too well throughout history.

It hadn't really occured to me that the newly freed Israelites would have the same struggles, or that the Torah would even record how they expressed and copied with them. Now, in the story of the manna, of the compulsion the Israelites had to hoard their food to the point where G-d had to command them not to, I see the manifestations of Jewish trauma today. I see it in my Bubby nibbling on the last scraps of meat from a chicken carcass. I see it in freed Israeli hostages hiding food because they remember that not so long ago they had none. I see it in newly liberated Concentration Camp prisoners dying because of their desperation to eat after being starved for so long.

If the book of Bereishit is the story of G-d teaching humans how to be human, the book of Shemot isn't just a story of freedom. It's the story of G-d teaching the Jewish people how to be free.

It's not enough that G-d physically freed the Israelites from slavery and bondage- it would have been enough had He done only that- we sing it in the Pesach song, after all. But He also taught us how to be free, in the same way psychologists and counselors are gently teaching the traumatized former captives among us the same.

Of course, as a nation we still struggle with the same maladaptive patterns our ancestors did. We still struggle with getting used to freedom, as evidenced by the generational expressions of anxiety, obsessive compulsive tendencies, and what is derisively called "Jewish neuroticism". It would be easy to say that we should just learn to be free the way the Israelites slowly did, but we aren't really all that free, are we? We aren't as autonomous as we might think or hope ourselves to be, and every day is a stark reminder of how our very lives are in constant dependence on the good graces of whatever outside force is in power.

I don't really have a message of assurance here for that. Like I said in the beginning, the story of the manna doesn't make for as uplifting a Dvar Torah as Kriyat Yam Suf does. But perhaps the knowledge that our ancestors have always struggled and nevertheless persisted can be a comfort in these times. Perhaps knowing that our ancestors were not only physically freed but guided into living as a free people will give us the hope that we can not only be free, but know how to be free.

[naquey]

Even if you persecute those they hate and turn on those you love, their accusing finger will fall on you alone.

We are better together, better united.

[kocch]

ngl i'd be more excited about st if thinking about n**h wouldn't make me think of zionism and how uncomfortable it makes me feel

[menderash]

did you guys know that the mother fucking UN's humanitarian and legal experts have been saying israel's occupation of palestine territories is and has always been illegal, as it violates the FUCKING GENEVA CONVENTION? did you know it was britain that 'gave' the land that wasn't theirs to give to found the state of israel as a tactic to get more jews to join the british army in their already-active war against the ottoman empire? did you know that just between 2008 and 2022 the idf killed almost SEVEN THOUSAND palestinians, as opposed to the 308 israelis by palestinians in the same time period? did you know that israel itself admits to 'forcefully evacuating' palestinians from their homes over the course of their annexation of the country? did you know the british army helped them? did you know that any palestinian who didn't want to have their house taken from them and given to american immigrants being shipped in to populate britain's pet project was killed on their spot? did you know that back in 2018 palestinians did nothing but MARCH in protest of their occupation and in response, the idf is CONFIRMED to have killed almost 400 of them, including FIFTY FIVE CHILDREN? did you know palestinians are not allowed to build anything on the land they have left? did you know they aren't ALLOWED TO LEAVE?? did you know over HALF of christian evangelicals support israel solely because the bible says israel has to exist in order to bring about the second coming? did you know that in 2021, over 88% of us congress were evangelical christians? did you know israel is confirmed to have knowingly bombed palestinian hospitals and the idf had been caught targeting journalists? did you know israel is committing another war crime at this very moment by dropping white phosphorus on gaza civilians? did you know the israeli press was just confirmed to have completely fabricated an account of palestinian war crime right after their own got caught on film? did you know the defense minister of israel openly called all palestinians 'animals' to justify the deaths of their civilians? did you know holocaust survivors are presently speaking out against the israeli state's ethnic cleansing of arabs?

why, in the united states, is criticizing a settler colony's active attempts at extermination labeled antisemitic because of the religion the settlers happen to practice, but rooting for the complete eradication of a muslim country that was already there and is barely still there not islamophobia?? why is religion being used as a shield to justify genocide?

when a sudden act of politically charged violence occurs, like the hamas attack a few days ago, i ask WHY? i ask WHY until i get as far back as i can. i read accounts written by all sides. i try to find out why this is happening in the first place. half of these facts have come from the israeli government itself. all of them are easily found and easily confirmed by reputable sources. a lot of them are caught on film. all of these facts lead me to know that the state of israel was created by britain in order to gain an advantage in an unrelated war. i know the state of israel has caused unimaginable harm to the country it's slowly eating, and has suffered just a fraction in return. i know religion justifies none of it.

palestinians deserve to live in their own country. palestinians deserve to not be forced to give their homes to americans. palestinians deserve to live, to leave, to stay, to wave their own fucking flag. they do not deserve to have another country plopped on top of them and then have their settlers ask 'don't WE have a right to exist?' as their own right to exist is being extinguished.

fuck the idf, fuck israel, fuck manifest destiny, fuck all settlers who think they deserve someone else's home enough to kick them out of it. literally, in israel's case. indigenous americans, indigenous canadians, chicanos, pacific islanders, filipinos, mestizos, we should all be standing with palestine, because we KNOW how colonial violence goes and what it looks like. solidarity between all colonised peoples. free palestine.

[xclowniex]

I have seen multiple posts going around making fun of, or minimizing, what happened in Amsterdam from antizionists. So I want to give a timeline of what happened.

Pre the attack:

Before people arrived in Amsterdam for the football match, there were people organizing the pogrom. Stuff like wanting to steal jews passports, were shared on social media. Yes, the word used on social media was jews not Israelis. The main people organizing the attack were arab and muslim. We do not know at this point if all the attackers were arab and muslim, but we do know that at least a majority were. This fact does not mean that all Muslims and arabs want to harm all jews, however the extremism which lead to the attack and antisemitisms place in it can and should be talked about.

The Israeli government got wind of this attack and warned the Netherlands Police, who decided to not do anything to protect jews.

This did not happen because the Israeli team lost, despite what certain people are saying.

Day before or of the attack (unconfirmed which day it was):

Once in Amsterdam, there were some fans who did tear down Palestinian flags and chant a racist anti arab chant. Whilst this is still very much racist and should be labeled as such as viewed as bad, it's not out of character for for European football culture, and has happened before with other fans which have not lead to them being hunted down. The pogrom was pre planned and still not a proportional response.

The attack:

Jews were hunted down, beaten, run over, and many more things. They were also forced to say "free gaza" and "free Palestine"

The attack harmed far more than just those who were racist. They attacked jews and anyone they perceived as Jewish indiscriminately.

Jews were saved by an Arab Israeli football player speaking to them loudly in Arabic so people assumed they were arab Israeli or just Arab.

A Greek man was attacked because he could not prove to the attackers that he wasn't jewish and was in fact Greek.

A brittish man was punched because he helped save jews. And when he told his attackers that he was brittish and not israeli or jewish (not sure if he wasn't, but he told his attackers he wasn't), he was told "but you helped a jew"

Jewish businesses were also broken into.

How and why it is antisemitic:

If at this point, you still cannot see why it was an antisemitic attack, let's recap.

• It was a planned attack on jews, not Israelis, jews. And it was planned before any racist things happened.

● jews were spared if they were perceived to be non jews, including being perceived as arab Israeli and non jews were attacked for being perceived as jews and for helping jews

• Jewish businesses were broken into. If it was about breaking into zionist businesses, ones own by non Jewish zionists also would've been broken into, but they were not.

• Non Israeli jews were attacked

It is antisemitic, as the targets of the attack were specifically jews. It was not revenge for palestine or for racist comments.

Israel intervened and flew people out of Amsterdam as it was no longer safe for jews in the city. Not because they lost the match.

[vaspider]

Hi there! Hope you’re having a good day mama spider. Just dropping by to ask for some info on an addition to a post about Judaism you made. I chose to ask you and not op because i’ve sent you an ask before and know that you answer them. So real quick, why did you type out G-d rather than God or god? Does it have something to do with Judaism? Is it just for the faithful to follow and not goyim? As an atheist who was formerly Catholic i just wanna learn more and be respectful of others’ religions whenever i can. I know next to nothing about Judaism, even though they’re a good portion of my county’s population. Hope this ask isn’t insensitive in any way, and thanks for taking the time to read this <3

This isn't insensitive to ask. It's actually a great question, and I'm glad that you asked if you're curious.

Since those articles cover your asks pretty well, I'm gonna give you some free bits of info to help your quest for respectfulness, which is pretty rad, btw: we don't really use phrases like "the faithful" bc Judaism doesn't require faith in G-d. There is no conflict between Judaism and atheism & there are a lot of Jewish atheists and agnostics. Judaism is an ethnoreligion and a people in a way that a lot of religions aren't, and in fact, the symbolism for one of my favorite holidays emphasizes that we are not complete without all kinds of Jews:

The functions of the four species are defined by both their smell and taste, or lack thereof, along with some interesting imagery from the Midrash (Vayikra Rabbah 30:12): The etrog has both taste and smell, representing people who both perform good deeds and have Torah (knowledge). The lulav has taste but no smell, representing those who do not use their knowledge to perform good deeds. The hadass (myrtle) has smell but no taste, representing those who perform good deeds but lack the knowledge to excel at them. The aravah (willow) has no taste and no smell, representing those who lack both.

"Good deeds" here doesn't just mean "being nice to your neighbors" but refers directly to performing mitzvot/mitzvahs, the 613 commandments that observant Jews observe to varying levels of specificity and intensity.

It's not offensive to use a phrase like "the faithful," just isn't ... correct, you know? Instead, you'd just say Jews or Jewish people. If you're trying to refer specifically to Jews who are religious or believe in G-d... there isn't exactly a phrase for that, I guess you'd say "observant," because there are a lot of Jews who are observant but also atheists, since observant Jews may be observing mitzvaot for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with belief in the existence of G-d.

Anyway, there you go, with some bonus info. As always, I don't speak for everybody, 2 Jews 3 Opinions, etc.

[matan4il]

I am at a loss for words.

A Jewish woman in Paris was kidnapped, held for several days, and raped for being a Jew, and her mother was psychologically taunted and tormented, as "revenge for Palestine."

And while the perpetrator is the main person responsible for this horrific crime, every single person denying or justifying the Oct 7 sexual violence is guilty of contributing to this normalization, making this antisemitic terrorist think his excuse is in any way an acceptable justification for this atrocity. Every single person who didn't believe Jewish victims, every single person who demanded proof, but turned a blind eye to the visual evidence Hamas terrorists themselves provided, every single person who called the films and pictures and testimonies from countless Israelis "propaganda," every single person who justified it and claimed that "rape is resistance." They're all complicit. They all have to know they've helped make Jews everywhere in the world less safe.

Speaking of complicity, even though a UN report found credible evidence for the sexual crimes committed by Hamas on Oct 7 and against Israeli hostages since, the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, has personally decided to leave Hamas out of the annual report on sexual violence in conflicts around the world. Israeli commentators expressed their belief that this was done, because had it been included, then the UN would have no choice but to finally recognize that Hamas is a terrorist organization. The UN is complicit. Guterres is complicit. Hold them accountable.

Speaking of the UN's known anti-Israel bias, what a surprise, their report on UNRWA, their own agency, claimed not to support the charges against it, though they did find that UNRWA has "some issues" maintaining its neutrality...

Just to make it clear, "staff publicly taking sides" refers to UNRWA employees being openly anti-Israel, antisemitic and pro anti-Jewish violence, and the "problematic content" in UNRWA textbooks is incitement to terrorism and educating Palestinian kids to be antisemitic. This alone constitutes more than "some issues with neutrality." But there's more. Out of the 12 Gaza UNRWA employees first identified by Israel as having participated in the Hamas massacre, at least three were killed inside Israel on Oct 7 itself, and at least one more was captured on film while helping to kidnap an Israeli young man's body from an Israeli kibbutz into Gaza using a vehicle with UN license plates. I'd say that's a bit more than "difficulties with neutrality". In fact, the UN itself implicitly recognized the evidence was damning, or it would not have fired nine of the twelve right away, and admit a tenth UN worker was dead following the invasion and attack on Israeli communities, while claiming they're still "clarifying" the identities of the other two killed employees who participated in the Hamas massacre. BTW, it's been about 3 months of the UN "clarifying" the identities of those other two dead employees (screenshot below is from the article published 2 days ago, link with same claim on "clarification" is from Jan 27).

UNRWA is complicit. There are other humanitarian aid NGOs, which can do better. Dismantle UNRWA. But we know the UN will not be dismantling the cash cow that this agency is, even though no other refugee group gets an equal treatment to that. At what point do we say out loud, that if more and more UNRWA employees are found to be complicit in a massacre or being embedded with Hamas, if Hamas terrorists have continuously used UNRWA infrastructure to store weapons and shoot at Israelis, if UNRWA was found to be providing a terrorist organization with internet and electricity, and if the UN can't hold its own agency accountable, then the UN is also complicit in UNRWA's collaboration with Hamas?

In Israel itself, as the biggest Jewish community in the world is celebrating Passover, attacks on Israeli Jews continue.

Two days ago, on the Eve of Passover, a combined terrorist attack took place in Jerusalem, in an ultraorthodox neighborhood, with two Palestinian terrorists driving their car into a group of visibly Jewish young people, then the attackers left their car and tried shooting at their victims, but the weapon thankfully malfunctioned. Three people were lightly wounded. (the vid below shows most of the attack, but not the graphic parts of the car hitting the young Jewish men)

Yestrday, the Lebanon-based terrorist organization Hezbollah launched three suicide drones at Israel's northern communities, along its Mediterranean shore. This attack comes on the heels of the news that out of 18 Israelis wounded in a previous Hezbollah drone attack on an Israeli Arab Bedouin town, one has died from his injuries, after fighting for his life for 5 days. It's 27 years old Dor Zimel, an officer who was stationed in that town to protect it. Dor was set to get married next month, and he had proposed to his fiancee with a ring donated by a bereaved father (his son, 23 years old Addir Messika, was a jewelry designer, and the ring was one he designed before he was murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival on Oct 7). Dor's organs were donated and saved the lives of 7 people, including an injured soldier, who's also the father of a girl. May Dor and Addir's memory be a blessing.

And today, on the second day of Passover, an attempted stabbing attack was stopped before the Palestinian female terrorist managed to harm anyone. She was neutralized at the scene.

I'm sure all those who decried Israel having to continue its war against Hamas during Ramadan are being extra loud about this wave of anti-Jewish violence during Passover, which is actually just a partial list of the on going attacks on Israeli Jews during this holiday.

In other news, the preparations for the IDF's ground operation in Rafah have actually already started. Reports suggest 250,000 Palestinians who have come to the southern city as they left other war zones in Gaza, have already left Rafah, and that Israel has already started building encampments to house those it will evacuate from the city before the ground operation begins.

Trying to remember when have I ever seen an army building an entire camp city for the enemy's civilian population. I'm coming up blank.

This is Miri Gad Mesikka.

She lives in kibbutz Be'eri, together with her husband Eli and their 3 kids. On Oct 7, they locked themselves in the bomb shelter from the invading Hamas terrorists. They were in there for 12 hours, fighting for control of the bomb shelter's door, until the terrorists set their house on fire, and the Gad Messika family had to make an impossible choice: stay and maybe suffocate to death from the smoke (or worse if the fire got in), or jump from their second floor window, probably be injured and maybe be shot to death by the terrorists. Eventually, they chose to jump out. They all got injured, and one of her sons got his leg broken, but the terrorists didn't spot them, and this decision saved their lives. During the time they were locked inside the bomb shelter, Miri recounts how she would see some of her friends and neighbors not responding anymore, and she couldn't know why. She kept hoping it was because their phone batteries ran out. "Today I know some of them were being kidnapped, while others were being murdered. It was a massacre, happening in countless different spots at the same time." One of her friends told Miri, that her daughter, a baby who was less than one years old, was shot in the head right in front of her. Then the friend's husband was murdered as well, and despite being shot with a bullet in her lungs herself, the friend somehow managed to get herself and her two other kids away.

Never forget.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[jewreallythinkthat]

One of the most important things I wish a lot of non-jewish leftists understood is that those of us who are Jews who don't live in Israel - especially Ashkenazim - understand that we are only not based there because of a few tiny, sometimes not even chosen moment in our history.

I see what happened on October 7th and since and I see myself there had my family been the strand that went to Israel rather than heading to America and being stranded in the UK. I have family who did go to Israel and only avoided the massacre because they were on holiday in Crete. Their closest friend played dead on the steps of his house, a bullet in his leg, lying beside the corpses of his wife and daughter in law.

It's personal because it literally could have been me, it could have been any of us. When we see people braying for the deaths of Israelis, we see them calling for our personal demise if not for one twist of fate. That's why so many Jews are invested and want peace. It affects us, it could have been us.

It would not have been a random white lefty in the West with 0 connection to the Levant.

I can't speak for Palestinians in the west but I'm sure they feel a similar way when they see the destruction in Gaza and the violent settlers in the West Bank. I've seen Palestinians talk about how Hamas would have killed them because of their sexuality or gender identity etc. and I can feel through the articles and the posts that they understand the "it could have been me" & "that WOULD have been me" mindset that so many Jews have experienced the past few months.

The majority of Jews and Palestinians (that I've seen) in the West want lasting peace and everyone to live in safety. The people making it violent and calling for the deaths of Jews, and often shutting down Palestinians who speak out for peace which doesn't include genociding 50% of the world's Jews are random white people and others who have 0 connection to any actual people involved and have decided to make a war on the other side of the planet their entire personality.

So this is a message to those with 0 skin in the game - if you are not Jewish or Palestinian or have family living in Israel and what will hopefully become Palestine - please understand this:

For you, this is a way to show your political opinion and score moral points and take out your frustrations on those you seem worthy of abuse. For me, for us, this is our history, our family, our future and safety. If your words are not designed to try and move towards a peaceful solution, keep them to yourself and stop being part of the problem. Listen to the people actually affected by this (and watching videos and feeling horrified simply doesn't count in this case.)

[thrashkink-coven]

anyways guys so the hot take of the week is that religious people are offended by demonolatry.

I can’t believe I have to say this but yes, Jews, Christians , Muslims, and all other people from organized monotheistic religions are probably going to be offended by you worshiping demons in general. Crazy concept but yes. Religious people get upset when they see people worshipping or working with demons they believe are evil. If you are concerned with the negative opinion of religious people, keep your practice a secret. It’s what we’ve been doing for centuries. The worship of these demons has never been popular or encouraged. That’s how demons work. They have specifically been demonized, working with them is more controversial than working with pagan Gods who have not been demonized. No it is not fair, that’s simply the way it is.

Regardless of who you are working with or where they come from, you will always be practicing an alternative form of spirituality if you are working with demons. You will always be subject to ridicule for it.

In the last couple posts I’ve made about this, people gotten so over consumed with the logistical claims I was making about the religions of Judaism, Christianity etc. that my main point was completely lost. It’s not my place to speak as a Jewish person, so I’m going to speak only as a demonolater and my experience. I’m still debating deleting that post because the point seems to have flown over everyone’s heads.

So I’m just going to be as direct as possible. Yes. Religious people have always and likely will always be offended by demonolatry regardless of what demon you’re working with.

If you’re using a name that was used by a religion to identify a negative spirit, you are very likely going to offend that religion by using that name and seeking them out. It’s up to you to decide if you care that your practice is offensive to others, because it always will be. The only way to work around actually appropriating any of these religions is to make these demons your own. Just as they encountered and documented these spirits, pagans and demonolaters can do the same, discover their own names, and use them to identify these spirits. In the very short conversation I had with (L*lit) on this subject, she was very excited about the idea. Many goetic demons don’t even use the names documented in the Lesser Key because they were recorded by people who did not respect them. Prince Cerberus never allows me to call him Naberius.

Of course these spirits don’t give the slightest bit of a shit whether your practice offends the church. Nor do they care if you use a Hebrew name. But humans care, and if a religion is asking us not to use the word they invented then okay. That’s easy to work around. We’re still going to be worshiping these demons.

Satanists, Luciferians, and all those who walk the left hand path have never been regarded positively by Christianity. They will never understand why we do what we do and how we benefit from it. This has always and likely will always be the case.

Lucifer isn’t going to abandon his cult because Catholics have a problem with his worship. Nor are the followers of Asmodeus going to stop worshiping him because Jews don’t like it. This is what demonolatry is.

At the end of the day, you will offend someone. That’s the reality of the left hand path. You will be hated and you will be used as a negative example. These energies have been demonized and so will you. If that’s too anxiety inducing for you, demonolatry might not be the path for you. This has never been a popular path for a reason. Demonolatry has never been about pleasing the church.

There’s 1000 other things that I do that are offensive to religious people. I find the accounts of ancient Christian magis and other religious people to be valuable because of the information they provided on these spirits. They were the only accounts of these spirits that have actually survived. But I have no interest in appeasing the beliefs of these magis, or really anyone else but myself.

So yeah. I can’t believe “demon worshippers are offensive to religious people regardless of which demon they are worshipping” was my most controversial take of 2025 so far, but yeah. It is what it is.

[fromgoy2joy]

I have been… biting my tongue from saying things. 

Partially because I’m not “really Jewish” (on the way to it via conversion), and because I didn’t want this blog to be political. 

But I realize I want this page to be a safe space. If anyone takes issue with what I’m about to say, I don’t want them on this page. 

I joined the college jewish community very shortly after 10/7 and was immediately welcomed in. There was no separation between me and the girl who had gone to orthodox shul all her life and was the head of the state youth group. I was told explicitly  “you are one of us. And together, we are mourning. We have lost our people and so have you.” 

Still I felt no authority to speak on things as insidious as antisemitism until recently. But how many times do you have to experience an antisemitic incident until you get to stand up? 

Six. The answer is six. 

Since explicitly aligning myself with Jewishness, I have lost friends who told me I have “dual loyalties” in so many words. I’ve been ostracized in events because we were singled out . I’ve been followed back to my dorm room from events by people hurling genocide accusations at me- white girls wearing keffiyahs who don't know anything about the Nakba when I try to connect with them about how awful it was.

My face was used in a local “fight jew hate” campaign” where I’m in a group of people with clearly middle eastern descent. But what circulated around my campus was my blonde hair and blue eyes, with people using laughing emojis.

“This is who we’re supposed to be defending!? Bitch please! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣” 

(Which is perfectly ironic because they singled out the person who wasn't ethnically Jewish and focused on her. )

Campus security and the disciplinary office knows me quite well from all the reports I've filed whether for me or other people.

I leave campus for breaks. Even though I’m returning to my highly Catholic conservative family, I breathe a sigh of relief. I don't have to look over my shoulder constantly or check myself in the surroundings I'm in. I already feel the dread about returning in January.

What hurts is the blindness- the lack of nuance- that is being given. Every single Jewish person at my school is not a self described zionist, other than that they acknowledge Jewish indignity to the land, and that there was a reason for the creation of Israel- not even justification in the current state or the matter it came about.

But they- and we- shouldn't have to prove ourselves. We shouldn't be debating if we should fundraise for Gazans (we are) in case someone accuses us of "lying about our intentions" or if we'd be pointed out as "the good jews!" They shouldn't have to have a tab open on their computer for Israeli passports, even though they desperately don't want to leave the United States. I shouldn't have to wonder whenever I'm at a synagogue "If I get killed here in a terrorist attack before being immersed in the mikvah, will I get a Catholic or Jewish funeral?"

But that never mattered. Our voices never did. Unless the antisemitism came from a high school dropout neo-nazi with a shaved head and swastika jacket, it's never going to matter.

I will never forget- even as I advocate for Palestinians, call for a ceasefire, and donate. Or any other cause where I'll be marching besides these activists I can never call well meaning.

I could go on and on about it. But I won't be able to write it out in this post.

All I know is when the counsel of rabbis ask me if I'm ready to be apart of an unpopular group, I'm going to have to fight myself from laughing at the question

[etz-ashashiyot]

Chapter 4: Executed Jews

By Dara Horn, excerpted from People Love Dead Jews

ALA ZUSKIN PERELMAN AND I HAD BEEN IN TOUCH ONLINE before I finally met her in person, and I still cannot quite believe she exists. Years ago, I wrote a novel about Marc Chagall and the Yiddish-language artists whom he once knew in Russia, all of whom were eventually murdered by the Soviet regime. While researching the novel, I found myself sucked into the bizarre story of these people's exploitation and destruction: how the Soviet Union first welcomed these artists as exemplars of universal human ideals, then used them for its own purposes, and finally executed them. I named my main character after the executed Yiddish actor Benjamin Zuskin, a comic performer known for playing fools. After the book came out, I heard from Ala in an email written in halting English: "I am Benjamin Zuskin's daughter." That winter I was speaking at a literary conference in Israel, where Ala lived, and she and I arranged to meet. It was like meeting a character from a book.

My hosts had generously put me up with other writers in a beautiful stone house in Jerusalem. We were there during Hanukkah, the celebration of Jewish independence. On the first night of the holiday, I walked to Jerusalem's Old City and watched as people lit enormous Hanukkah torches at the Western Wall. I thought of my home in New Jersey, where in school growing up I sang fake English Hanukkah songs created by American music education companies at school Christmas concerts, with lyrics describing Hanukkah as being about "joy and peace and love." Joy and peace and love describe Hanukkah, a commemoration of an underdog military victory over a powerful empire, about as well as they describe the Fourth of July. I remembered challenging a chorus teacher about one such song, and being told that I was a poor sport for disliking joy and peace and love. (Imagine a "Christmas song" with lyrics celebrating Christmas, the holiday of freedom. Doesn't everyone like freedom? What pedant would reject such a song?) I sang those words in front of hundreds of people to satisfy my neighbors that my tradition was universal — meaning, just like theirs. The night before meeting Ala, I walked back to the house through the dense stone streets of the Old City's Jewish Quarter, where every home had a glass case by its door, displaying the holiday's oil lamps. It was strange to see those hundreds of glowing lights. They were like a shining announcement that this night of celebration was shared by all these strangers around me, that it was universal. The experience was so unfamiliar that I didn't know what to make of it.

The next morning, Ala knocked on the door of the stone house and sat down in its living room, with its view of the Old City. She was a small dark-haired woman whose perfect posture showed a firmness that belied her age. She looked at me and said in Hebrew, "I feel as if you knew my father, like you understood what he went through. How did you know?"

The answer to that question goes back several thousand years.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The teenage boys who participated in competitive athletics in the gymnasium in Jerusalem 2,200 years ago had their circumcisions reversed, because otherwise they wouldn't have been allowed to play. In the Hellenistic empire that had conquered Judea, sports were sacred, the entry point to being a person who mattered, the ultimate height of cool — and sports, of course, were always played in the nude. As one can imagine, ancient genital surgery of this nature was excruciating and potentially fatal. But the boys did not want to miss out.

I learned this fun fact in seventh grade, from a Hebrew school teacher who was instructing me and my pubescent classmates about the Hanukkah story — about how Hellenistic tyranny gained a foothold in ancient Judea with the help of Jews who wanted to fit in. This teacher seemed overly jazzed to talk about penises with a bunch of adolescents, and I suspected he'd made the whole thing up. At home, I decided to fact-check. I pulled a dusty old book off my parents' shelf, Volume One of Heinrich Graetz's opus History of the Jews.

In nineteenth-century academic prose, Graetz explained how the leaders of Judea demonstrated their loyalty to the occupying Hellenistic empire by building a gymnasium and recruiting teenage athletes — only to discover that "in uncovering their bodies they could immediately be recognized as Judeans. But were they to take part in the Olympian games, and expose themselves to the mockery of Greek scoffers? Even this difficulty they evaded by undergoing a painful operation, so as to disguise the fact that they were Judeans." Their Zeus-worshipping overlords were not fooled. Within a few years, the regime outlawed not only circumcision but all of Jewish religious practice, and put to death anyone who didn't comply.

Sometime after that, the Maccabees showed up. That's the part of the story we usually hear.

Those ancient Jewish teenagers were on my mind that Hanukkah when Ala came to tell me about her father's terrifying life, because I sensed that something profound united them — something that doesn't match what we're usually taught about what bigotry looks or feels like. It doesn't involve "intolerance" or "persecution," at least not at first. Instead, it looks like the Jews themselves are choosing to reject their own traditions. It is a form of weaponized shame.

Two distinct patterns of antisemitism can be identified by the Jewish holidays that celebrate triumphs over them: Purim and Hanukkah. In the Purim version of antisemitism, exemplified by the Persian genocidal decrees in the biblical Book of Esther, the goal is openly stated and unambiguous: Kill all the Jews. In the Hanukkah version of antisemitism, whose appearances range from the Spanish Inquisition to the Soviet regime, the goal is still to eliminate Jewish civilization. But in the Hanukkah version, this goal could theoretically be accomplished simply by destroying Jewish civilization, while leaving the warm, de-Jewed bodies of its former practitioners intact.

For this reason, the Hanukkah version of antisemitism often employs Jews as its agents. It requires not dead Jews but cool Jews: those willing to give up whatever specific aspect of Jewish civilization is currently uncool. Of course, Judaism has always been uncool, going back to its origins as the planet's only monotheism, featuring a bossy and unsexy invisible God. Uncoolness is pretty much Judaism's brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening — and why Jews who are willing to become cool are absolutely necessary to Hanukkah antisemitism's success. These "converted" Jews are used to demonstrate the good intentions of the regime — which of course isn't antisemitic but merely requires that its Jews publicly flush thousands of years of Jewish civilization down the toilet in exchange for the worthy prize of not being treated like dirt, or not being murdered. For a few years. Maybe.

I wish I could tell the story of Ala's father concisely, compellingly, the way everyone prefers to hear about dead Jews. I regret to say that Benjamin Zuskin wasn't minding his own business and then randomly stuffed into a gas chamber, that his thirteen-year-old daughter did not sit in a closet writing an uplifting diary about the inherent goodness of humanity, that he did not leave behind sad-but-beautiful aphorisms pondering the absence of God while conveniently letting his fellow humans off the hook. He didn't even get crucified for his beliefs. Instead, he and his fellow Soviet Jewish artists — extraordinarily intelligent, creative, talented, and empathetic adults — were played for fools, falling into a slow-motion psychological horror story brimming with suspense and twisted self-blame. They were lured into a long game of appeasing and accommodating, giving up one inch after another of who they were in order to win that grand prize of being allowed to live.

Spoiler alert: they lost.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was in graduate school studying Yiddish literature, itself a rich vein of discussion about such impossible choices, when I became interested in Soviet Jewish artists like Ala's father. As I dug through library collections of early-twentieth-century Yiddish works, I came across a startling number of poetry books illustrated by Marc Chagall. I wondered if Chagall had known these Yiddish writers whose works he illustrated, and it turned out that he had. One of Chagall's first jobs as a young man was as an art teacher at a Jewish orphanage near Moscow, built for children orphaned by Russia's 1919-1920 civil war pogroms. This orphanage had a rather renowned faculty, populated by famous Yiddish writers who trained these traumatized children in the healing art of creativity.

It all sounded very lovely, until I noticed something else. That Chagall's art did not rely on a Jewish language — that it had, to use that insidious phrase, "universal appeal" — allowed him a chance to succeed as an artist in the West. The rest of the faculty, like Chagall, had also spent years in western Europe before the Russian revolution, but they chose to return to Russia because of the Soviet Union's policy of endorsing Yiddish as a "national Soviet language." In the 1920s and 30s, the USSR offered unprecedented material support to Yiddish culture, paying for Yiddish-language schools, theaters, publishing houses, and more, to the extent that there were Yiddish literary critics who were salaried by the Soviet government. This support led the major Yiddish novelist Dovid Bergelson to publish his landmark 1926 essay "Three Centers," about New York, Warsaw, and Moscow as centers of Yiddish-speaking culture, asking which city offered Yiddish writers the brightest prospects. His unequivocal answer was Moscow, a choice that brought him back to Russia the following year, where many other Jewish artists joined him.

But Soviet support for Jewish culture was part of a larger plan to brainwash and coerce national minorities into submitting to the Soviet regime — and for Jews, it came at a very specific price. From the beginning, the regime eliminated anything that celebrated Jewish "nationality" that didn't suit its needs. Jews were awesome, provided they weren't practicing Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism. The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not antisemitic, merely anti-Zionist. (In the process of not being antisemitic and merely being anti-Zionist, the regime managed to persecute, imprison, torture, and murder thousands of Jews.) What's left of Jewish culture once you surgically remove religious practice, traditional texts, Hebrew, and Zionism? In the Soviet Empire, one answer was Yiddish, but Yiddish was also suspect for its supposedly backwards elements. Nearly 15 percent of its words came directly from biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, so Soviet Yiddish schools and publishers, under the guise of "simplifying" spelling, implemented a new and quite literally antisemitic spelling system that eliminated those words' Near Eastern roots. Another answer was "folklore" — music, visual art, theater, and other creative work reflecting Jewish life — but of course most of that cultural material was also deeply rooted in biblical and rabbinic sources, or reflected common religious practices like Jewish holidays and customs, so that was treacherous too.

No, what the regime required were Yiddish stories that showed how horrible traditional Jewish practice was, stories in which happy, enlightened Yiddish-speaking heroes rejected both religion and Zionism (which, aside from its modern political form, is also a fundamental feature of ancient Jewish texts and prayers traditionally recited at least three times daily). This de-Jewing process is clear from the repertoire of the government-sponsored Moscow State Yiddish Theater, which could only present or adapt Yiddish plays that denounced traditional Judaism as backward, bourgeois, corrupt, or even more explicitly — as in the many productions involving ghosts or graveyard scenes — as dead. As its actors would be, soon enough.

The Soviet Union's destruction of Jewish culture commenced, in a calculated move, with Jews positioned as the destroyers. It began with the Yevsektsiya, committees of Jewish Bolsheviks whose paid government jobs from 1918 through 1930 were to persecute, imprison, and occasionally murder Jews who participated in religious or Zionist institutions — categories that included everything from synagogues to sports clubs, all of which were shut down and their leaders either exiled or "purged." This went on, of course, until the regime purged the Yevsektsiya members themselves.

The pattern repeated in the 1940s. As sordid as the Yeveksiya chapter was, I found myself more intrigued by the undoing of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, a board of prominent Soviet Jewish artists and intellectuals established by Joseph Stalin in 1942 to drum up financial support from Jews overseas for the Soviet war effort. Two of the more prominent names on the JAC's roster of talent were Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, and Ala's father Benjamin Zuskin, the theater's leading actor. After promoting these people during the war, Stalin decided these loyal Soviet Jews were no longer useful, and charged them all with treason. He had decided that this committee he himself created was in fact a secret Zionist cabal, designed to bring down the Soviet state. Mikhoels was murdered first, in a 1948 hit staged to look like a traffic accident. Nearly all the others — Zuskin and twelve more Jewish luminaries, including the novelist Dovid Bergelson, who had proclaimed Moscow as the center of the Yiddish future — were executed by firing squad on August 1952.

Just as the regime accused these Jewish artists and intellectuals of being too "nationalist" (read: Jewish), today's long hindsight makes it strangely tempting to read this history and accuse them of not being "nationalist" enough — that is, of being so foolishly committed to the Soviet regime that they were unable to see the writing on the wall. Many works on this subject have said as much. In Stalin's Secret Pogrom, the indispensable English translation of transcripts from the JAC "trial," Russia scholar Joshua Rubenstein concludes his lengthy introduction with the following:

As for the defendants at the trial, it is not clear what they believed about the system they each served. Their lives darkly embodied the tragedy of Soviet Jewry. A combination of revolutionary commitment and naive idealism had tied them to a system they could not renounce. Whatever doubts or misgivings they had, they kept to themselves, and served the Kremlin with the required enthusiasm. They were not dissidents. They were Jewish martyrs. They were also Soviet patriots. Stalin repaid their loyalty by destroying them.

This is completely true, and also completely unfair. The tragedy — even the term seems unjust, with its implied blaming of the victim — was not that these Soviet Jews sold their souls to the devil, though many clearly did. The tragedy was that integrity was never an option in the first place.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ala was almost thirteen years old when her father was arrested and until that moment she was immersed in the Soviet Yiddish artistic scene. Her mother was also an actor in the Moscow State Yiddish Theater; her family lived in the same building as the murdered theater director Solomon Mikhoels, and moved in the same circles as other Jewish actors and writers. After seeing her parents perform countless times, Ala had a front-row seat to the destruction of their world. She attended Mikhoel's state funeral, heard about the arrest of the brilliant Yiddish author Der Nister from an actor friend who witnessed it from her apartment across the hall, and was present when secret police ransacked her home in conjunction with her father's arrest. In her biography, The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin, she provides for her readers what she gave me that morning in Jerusalem: an emotional recounting, with the benefit of hindsight, of what it was really like to live through the Soviet Jewish nightmare.

It's as close as we can get, anyway. Her father Benjamin Zuskin's own thoughts on the topic are available only from state interrogations extracted under unknown tortures. (One typical interrogation document from his three and a half years in the notorious Lubyanka Prison announces that the day's interrogation lasted four hours, but the transcript is only half a page long — leaving to the imagination how the interrogator and interrogatee may have spent their time together. Suffice it to say that another JAC detainee didn't make it to trial alive.) His years in prison began when he was arrested in December of 1948 in a Moscow hospital room, where he was being treated for chronic insomnia brought on by the murder of his boss and career-long acting partner, Mikhoels; the secret police strapped him to a gurney and carted him to prison in his hospital gown while he was still sedated.

But in order to truly appreciate the loss here, one needs to know what was lost — to return to the world of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, the author of Benjamin Zuskin's first role on the Yiddish stage, in a play fittingly titled It's a Lie!

Benjamin Zuskin's path to the Yiddish theater and later to the Soviet firing squad began in a shtetl comparable to those immortalized in Sholem Aleichem's work. Zuskin, a child from a traditional family who was exposed to theater only through traveling Yiddish troupes and clowning relatives, experienced that world's destruction: his native Lithuanian shtetl, Ponievezh, was among the many Jewish towns forcibly evacuated during the First World War, catapulting him and hundreds of thousands of other Jewish refugees into modernity. He landed in Penza, a city with professional Russian theater and Yiddish amateur troupes. In 1920, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater opened, and by 1921, Zuskin was starring alongside Mikhoels, the theater's leading light.

In the one acting class I have ever attended, I learned only one thing: acting isn't about pretending to be someone you aren't, but rather about emotional communication. Zuskin, who not only starred in most productions but also taught in the theater's acting school, embodied the concept. His very first audition was a one-man sketch he created, consisting of nothing more than a bumbling old tailor threading a needle — without words, costumes, or props. It became so popular that he performed it to entranced crowds for years. This physical artistry animated his every role. As one critic wrote, "Even the slightest breeze and he is already air-bound."

Zuskin specialized in playing figures like the Fool in King Lear — as his daughter puts it in her book, characters who "are supposed to make you laugh, but they have an additional dimension, and they arouse poignant reflections about the cruelty of the world." Discussing his favorite roles, Zuskin once explained that "my heart is captivated particularly by the image of the person who is derided and humiliated, but who loves life, even though he encounters obstacles placed before him through no fault of his own."

The first half of Ala's book seems to recount only triumphs. The theater's repertoire in its early years was largely adopted from classic Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and Mendele Moykher Seforim. The book's title is drawn from Zuskin's most famous role: Senderl, the Sancho Panza figure in Mendele's Don Quixote-inspired work, Travels of Benjamin the Third, about a pair of shtetl idiots who set out for the Land of Israel and wind up walking around the block. These productions were artistically inventive, brilliantly acted, and played to packed houses both at home and on tour. Travels of Benjamin the Third, in a 1928 review typical of the play's reception, was lauded by the New York Times as "one of the most originally conceived and beautifully executed evenings in the modern theater."

One of the theater's landmark productions, I. L. Peretz's surrealist masterpiece At Night in the Old Marketplace, was first performed in 1925. The play, set in a graveyard, is a kind of carnival for the graveyard's gathered ghosts. Those who come back from the dead are misfits like drunks and prostitutes, and also specific figures from shtetl life - yeshiva idlers, synagogue beadles, and the like. Leading them all is a badkhn, or wedding jester — divided in this production into two mirror-characters played by Mikhoels and Zuskin — whose repeated chorus among the living corpses is "The dead will rise!" "Within this play there was something hidden, something with an ungraspable depth," Ala writes, and then relates how after a performance in Vienna, one theatergoer came backstage to tell the director that "the play had shaken him as something that went beyond all imagination." The theatergoer was Sigmund Freud.

As Ala traces the theater's trajectory toward doom, it becomes obvious why this performance so affected Freud. The production was a zombie story about the horrifying possibility of something supposedly dead (here, Jewish civilization) coming back to life. The play was written a generation earlier as a Romantic work, but in the Moscow production, it became a means of denigrating traditional Jewish life without mourning it. That fantasy of a culture's death as something compelling and even desirable is not merely reminiscent of Freud's death drive, but also reveals the self-destructive bargain implicit in the entire Soviet-sponsored Jewish enterprise. In her book, Ala beautifully captures this tension as she explains the badkhn's role: "He sends a double message: he denies the very existence of the vanishing shadow world, and simultaneously he mocks it, as if it really does exist."

This double message was at the heart of Benjamin Zuskin's work as a comic Soviet Yiddish actor, a position that required him to mock the traditional Jewish life he came from while also pretending that his art could exist without it. "The chance to make fun of the shtetl which has become a thing of the past charmed me," he claimed early on, but later, according to his daughter, he began to privately express misgivings. The theater's decision to stage King Lear as a way of elevating itself disturbed him, suggesting as it did that the Yiddish repertoire was inferior. His own integrity came from his deep devotion to yiddishkayt, a sense of essential and enduring Jewishness, no matter how stripped-down that identity had become. "With the sharp sense of belonging to everything Jewish, he was tormented by the theater forsaking its expression of this belonging," his daughter writes. Even so, "no, he could not allow himself to oppose the Soviet regime even in his thoughts, the regime that gave him his own theater, but 'the heart and the wit do not meet.'"

In Ala's memory, her father differed from his director, partner, and occasional rival, Mikhoels, in his complete disinterest in politics. Mikhoels was a public figure as well as performer, and his leadership of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, while no more voluntary than any public act in a totalitarian state, was a role he played with gusto, traveling to America in 1943 and speaking to thousands of American Jews to raise money for the Red Army in their battle against the Nazis. Zuskin, on the other hand, was on the JAC roster, but seems to have continued playing the fool. According to both his daughter and his trial testimony, his role in the JAC was almost identical to his role on a Moscow municipal council, limited to playing chess in the back of the room during meetings.

In Jerusalem, Ala told me that her father was "a pure soul." "He had no interest in politics, only in his art," she said, describing his acting style as both classic and contemporary, praised by critics for its timeless qualities that are still evident today in his film work. But his talent was the most nuanced and sophisticated thing about him. Offstage, he was, as she put it in Hebrew, a "tam" — a biblical term sometimes translated as fool or simpleton, but which really means an innocent. (It is the first adjective used to describe the title character in the Book of Job.) It is true that in trial transcripts, Zuskin comes out looking better than many of his co-defendants by playing dumb instead of pointing fingers. But was this ignorance, or a wise acceptance of the futility of trying to save his skin? As King Lear's Fool put it, "They'll have me whipp'd for speaking true; thou'lt have me whipp'd for holding my peace." Reflecting on her father's role as a fool named Pinia in a popular film, Ala writes in her book, "When I imagine the moment when my father heard his death sentence, I see Pinia in close-up . . . his shoulders slumped, despair in his appearance. I hear the tone that cannot be imitated in his last line in the film — and perhaps also the last line in his life? — 'I don't understand anything.'"

Yet it is clear that Zuskin deeply understood how impossible his situation was. In one of the book's more disturbing moments, Ala describes him rehearsing for one of his landmark roles, that of the comic actor Hotsmakh in Sholem Aleichem's Wandering Stars, a work whose subject is the Yiddish theater. He had played the role before, but this production was going up in the wake of Mikhoel's murder. Zuskin was already among the hunted, and he knew it. As Ala writes:

One morning — already after the murder of Mikhoels — I saw my father pacing the room and memorizing the words of Hotsmakh's role. Suddenly, in a gesture revealing a hopeless anguish, Father actually threw himself at me, hugged me, pressed me to his heart, and together with me, continued to pace the room and to memorize the words of the role. That evening I saw the performance . . . "The doctors say that I need rest, air, and the sea . . . For what . . . without the theater?" [Hotsmakh asks], he winds the scarf around his neck — as though it were a noose. For my father, I think those words of Hotsmakh were like the motif of the role and — I think — of his own life.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Describing the charges levied against Zuskin and his peers is a degrading exercise, for doing so makes it seem as though these charges are worth considering. They are not. It is at this point that Hanukkah antisemitism transformed, as it inevitably does, into Purim antisemitism. Here Ala offers what hundreds of pages of state archives can't, describing the impending horror of the noose around one's neck.

Her father stopped sleeping, began receiving anonymous threats, and saw that he was being watched. No conversation was safe. When a visitor from Poland waited near his apartment building to give him news of his older daughter Tamara (who was then living in Warsaw), Zuskin instructed the man to walk behind him while speaking to him and then to switch directions, so as to avoid notice. When the man asked Zuskin what he wanted to tell his daughter, Zuskin "approached the guest so closely that there was no space between them, and whispered in Yiddish, 'Tell her that the ground is burning beneath my feet.'" It is true that no one can know what Zuskin or any of the other defendants really believed about the Soviet system they served. It is also true — and far more devastating — that their beliefs were utterly irrelevant.

Ala and her mother were exiled to Kazakhstan after her father's arrest, and learned of his execution only when they were allowed to return to Moscow in 1955. By then, he had already been dead for three years.

In Jerusalem that morning, Ala told me, in a sudden private moment of anger and candor, that the Soviet Union's treatment of the Jews was worse than Nazi Germany's. I tried to argue, but she shut me up. Obviously the Nazi atrocities against Jews were incomparable, a fact Ala later acknowledged in a calmer mood. But over four generations, the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation - and in that way, Ala suggested, they destroyed far more souls. And they never, ever, paid for it.

"They never had a Nuremberg," Ala told me that day, with a quiet fury. "They never acknowledged the evil of what they did. The Nazis were open about what they were doing, but the Soviets pretended. They lured the Jews in, they baited them with support and recognition, they used them, they tricked them, and then they killed them. It was a trap. And no one knows about it, even now. People know about the Holocaust, but not this. Even here in Israel, people don't know. How did you know?"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That evening I went out to the Old City again, to watch the torches being lit at the Western Wall for the second night of Hanukkah. I walked once more through the Jewish Quarter, where the oil lamps, now each bearing one additional flame, were displayed outside every home, following the tradition to publicize the Hanukkah miracle — not merely the legendary long-lasting oil, but the miracle of military and spiritual victory over a coercive empire, the freedom to be uncool, the freedom not to pretend. Somewhere nearby, deep underground, lay the ruins of the gymnasium where de-circumcised Jewish boys once performed naked before approving crowds, stripped of their integrity and left with their private pain. I thought of Benjamin Zuskin performing as the dead wedding jester, proclaiming, "The dead will rise!" and then performing again in a "superior" play, as King Lear's Fool. I thought of the ground burning beneath his feet. I thought of his daughter, Ala, now an old woman, walking through Jerusalem.

I am not a sentimental person. As I returned to the stone house that night, along the streets lit by oil lamps, I was surprised to find myself crying.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Nobody is immune to propaganda and flattery. Today's example is Nicholas Kristof.

Kristof has won two Pulitzer prizes for journalism and is a columnist for the New York Times. One could be forgiven for hoping that Kristof might be harder to sucker than the average illiberal left campus Hamasnik, but it turns out that speaking to his orientalist, white savior ego and confirming biases is so effective that he'll skip doing *any* basic journalism.

Here's Kristof on 1/31/25, using a Twitter post from Omar Hamad as an example to argue that it is wrong to suggest that Palestinians overwhelmingly support Hamas and the attacks of 10/7/23.

In his post, Hamad shows a copy of a book Kristof co-authored and gives it a glowing review.

Kristof clearly enjoyed the glowing praise and responded by arguing that Omar Hamad shows us how Palestinians are clearly sensitive and tolerant.

To be clear, I'm sure many Palestinians are sensitive and tolerant, but Omar Hamad isn't one of them and this is an ironic way to make the argument.

Here are other tweets from Omar Hamad:

"O God, take the Jews and wash the earth with them and make our land their graves"

"By God, mother, God's victory can only be achieved through blood."

The truth is that neither my family nor I were ever part of Hamas. We lived in Gaza like any other family that did not belong to Hamas. However, I deeply regret that. I regret not being part of October 7, and I regret not firing a rocket at our occupied lands. I regret not killing an Israeli soldier. This regret has been planted within every person in Gaza, even in those who were opposed to Hamas's ideology. You are nothing but bloodthirsty butchers. You could have gained the sympathy of the entire world, but you revealed your true nature, your vile, Nazi- like, bloodstained face. Do not think that just because you hold power now, you are right or eternal, immune to defeat. Let me remind you, in one era, no force was greater than the Mongols, but their time came, and they were defeated. In another period, no one was more powerful than the Nazis, yet they too were defeated. Now, it is you, and I tell you, you will be defeated. If not now, then in the years to come.

Kristof didn't even bother to look up who was heaping this praise on him. He saw the praise, he let his confirmation bias and ego fill in the blanks instead of trying...you know...investingating, reading, looking for supportable facts, questioning sources, examining biases...you know...journalism.

The only thing which makes this example of falling for flattering confirmation bias bait extraordinary is that it's a Pulitzer Prize winner doing it - this is exactly what's happening every minute among the west's far left and we can see their disdain for facts and reason all over social media. Their disregard for intellectual rigor and intellectual honesty is comparable to that of the MAGA dittoheads on the far right.

This the intellectual laziness, these are the unexamined set of biases which animate the anti-Israel campus protestors who wave the flags of Islamist movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Movements who would happily murder their useful idiots at Columbia University and Harvard.

They are markedly more susceptible to propaganda which speaks to their white savior views of themselves...than this two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

[girlactionfigure]

I need to get something off my chest and this only became clear to me 45 seconds ago. 

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say the following. 

I am DEEPLY traumatized. 

For me, the trauma from losing my older brother to terror really never went away but it definitely became bearable. Life was going on. 

But then it came to an immediate stop on October 7th, 2023, the day my heart was ripped from my body over and over. 

So what happened 45 seconds ago that made me realize this? 

A friend of mine reached out. He produced a movie that he’ll be screening in synagogues across America on Tisha Beav, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, a fast day that starts in a few hours. 

He sent me a private link to watch the movie. He promised me it had no gore, no atrocities, and that I’d be safe watching it. 

I started the movie. I forced myself to keep watching. 5 minutes. 10 minutes. 15 minutes. 

But then I asked myself why I was doing this to myself and I stopped the movie. 

I simply could not. And no, there was no gore, no blood, just a whole lot of unbearable tragedy. 

The movie had many people, heroes who told their story from that dark day. There were many positive messages in the movie and I totally see what they were trying to accomplish with this movie. 

But I simply could not keep watching. 

This isn’t behind us yet for us to look back at it. We are still in it! That day hadn’t ended. The mourning and devastation hasn’t ended. 

Our national suffering hasn’t ended. 

This entire country is traumatized. The government will have to spend BILLIONS after this war to deal with the PTSD of this entire country. Tens of billions.  

I still find it hard to register that October 7th happened. That thousands of Gazans, and I chose that word carefully because it is an absolute lie to say it was only Hamas terrorists, came in and massacred families. And while they did it, as many survivors have attested, they laughed. 

A few survivors have said that among all the bloodshed and cruelty, the part that sent shivers down their spines was the laughter. 

As these animals raped and beheaded men, women, and children, as they burned families alive, they laughed. Hysterically. This for them was the highlight of their life. 

But I can’t watch a movie about it because we’re still in it. 

We are doing everything we can to teach our enemies a lesson that gone are the days that you can just massacre Jews and not pay a price. They must pay a price big enough that they will know that they made a very big mistake on October 7th. 

Our enemies need to bleed enough that they can no longer say that they’ll do 10/7 over and over. They need to fear Israel. They need to know what happens when you invade our country and murder our people. 

In any normal society, the entire world would stand behind anyone trying to eliminate that evil. And you know what? They would. They’d stand behind anyone, anyone except the Jews. 

I’m going to say this as clearly as I can and yes, I am speaking from a place of pain, unbearable pain, pain and trauma, but I still have to say it. 

If you are calling for Israel to hold its fire before eliminating and obliterating Hamas, you are making a clear statement, “I know full well what they did on October 7th, 2023, and I am completely ok with them doing it again and again.”

That’s what a ceasefire with Hamas means. 

I have not gone down there to see the houses and cars burned to a crisp, to smell the death in the air. I couldn’t. I still can’t. 

I can’t watch or read about the atrocities. I block anyone who sends me that horror. From my perspective, those are snuff films, with one small difference. The atrocity in those films? The victims are my family members. 

Until Israel’s enemies, Iran’s puppets are a thing of the past, it is not only Israel’s right to eliminate them wherever they are, it is Israel’s responsibly! Its responsibility to its citizens. Its responsibility to those families. Its responsibility to the world! 

What Hamas did on that day, and I mean this whole heartedly, is the cruelest barbarism the world has EVER known. Ever. Yes, ever! 

There are many Holocaust survivors who were interviewed after 10/7 who all said the same thing. “Even the Nazis didn’t do this…”

The Nazis drank themselves to sleep. Deep down they were ashamed. Hamas live streamed it and is deeply proud of October 7th.  

So let me very clear. There is not ONE, not ONE other country on this planet that would have to justify a war like this after a day like that. Not one. 

Except Israel, the only Jewish state. 

I am far from being able to watch movies about October 7th. Maybe I’ll never get there. I’m unable to hear the stories, watch the videos, or even see the pictures. 

Every time I accidentally see anything about that day, I am retraumatized! 

So yes, I know we will win this war and I know things will be ok but I am far from there. I am far from being ok. This country is far from being ok.  

And the salt on the open wound is the fact that we can’t do what we need to do to eliminate the threat on our borders and ensure that 10/7 never happens again, because every step of the way, the global community puts wrenches in our wheels. 

“Proportionate response”? What’s proportionate to murdering 1200 innocent people in their homes? What’s proportionate to raping mothers in front of their children and children in front of their mothers? What’s proportionate to beheading babies? There is no proportionate response to such barbarism. It doesn’t exist. 

“Genocide” 

“Indiscriminate killing”

“Starvation” 

Such lies! 

“Don’t go into Rafah or else!”

The lies don’t stop. The deception never ends. 

Israel eliminates tens of terrorists. Hamas calls them kids and the world eats it up! 

The aftermath of 10/7, which continues till today, is almost as hard to believe as 10/7 was. 

There are two sides in this war and there is no option C. 

Israel who fights to live in peace and to remove the animals who raped our children from this planet before they do it again, but next time, it won’t only be Israel. 

Hamas who did what they did and aim to do it again and again. 

Those are your only two choices.  

Remaining silent today is the equivalent of witnessing first hand what the Nazis did and turning a blind eye. Remaining silent and neutral in this war is immoral. 

Defending Hamas or demanding Israel cease its fire and not finish the job is immoral. 

Giving Israel anything but your FULL support is immoral. 

And let’s say it as it is. Enough with the charade already. If, after October 7th, you don’t stand with Israel, you are actively encouraging Hamas to do it again. You are actively condoning the murder of Jews and encouraging them to do it again.  

If you don’t stand with Israel now, in our darkest hour, you stand with Hamas and pardon my French, but if you stand with rapists, murderers, and pedophiles who take pride in their “work”, well you are a terror-supporting, Jew-hating, mass murder-condoning piece of… and you will be remembered in history as such. 

I am deeply traumatized and the truth is, for this country and the Jewish people, trauma is the new normal because we are all traumatized. 

Anyone who knows what happened on October 7, 2023 should be deeply traumatized. 

Stand with Israel when we need you most. Do what you can to help. We won’t forget it. 

If you don’t, history won’t forget it. 

Tonight begins the 9th of Av, as I said, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar. I’ll be going to the western wall to pray. 

For 45 years, I fasted on this day but deep down, I didn’t really feel the pain we are supposed to feel on this day. How can I authentically mourn the destruction of a temple I never saw and find very hard to relate to?

This year, I will feel it in spades! This year, we experienced an entire year of the 9th of Av. 

This year, we are fasting under the very real threat of our enemies murdering us again like they always have. 

Iran threatening to attack on the 9th of Av. They know what they’re doing. They know that this day is our most vulnerable. 

So tonight, I will begin my mourning and my fasting with a gaping hole in my heart and a deep prayer that God make this our last 9th of Av. That one year from now, we will dance again in the streets of Jerusalem and the prophecies of the Jewish people coming home will all have come true. 

Tonight I will try to embrace the pain and hope it’s not too unbearable. It will be. I know that. 

But tonight, for the first time in my life, the 9th of Av will be what it was supposed to be, a day on which we mourn and remember what our enemies did to us over and over. 

Tonight, this year, it won’t be hard to feel it. 

The only thing that’ll be difficult this year is to bear the unbearable pain that we feel as a nation. 

I wish you a meaningful fast if you’re fasting and if you’re not, spend a few moments to reflect on our history, specifically as it pertains to this day, the 9th of Av. Maybe even say a little prayer that we get past this. It can’t hurt. 

The Jewish people need the strength to get through this dark time in our history. We’ve been through worse and came out on the other side, but getting through this will require real strength and dedication. We need all the prayers we can get. 

Have a meaningful 9th of Av. I know I will.

@HilzFuld

[utilitycaster]

1. My biggest isssue (as a POC) is when is a character POC or otherized? Do we use IRL or in world? Beau is Human, brown woman. At no point in C2 is the fact that she is brown comes up other than discriptions. Her humaness is what matters especially in the COB. She is treated the same aa Caleb. Fjord, Nott and Molly havs far more in text displays of racism towards them. Ppl dismiss jester as being "white" but insist dorian is poc. When in world they are the same colour.

2. And teiflings would be more discriminated against. I know robbie is poc and dorian is blue but hes a genasi. In the world of exandria i view him and ashton as the same race. So i see these weird arguments online and its always a cross steam trying to use both in world races and irl to prove a point. Since i am examining the world of exandria i use the races displayed there and no attention to what the people look like irl. Also it avoids unintentional sterotyping down the road

3. An example ppl drawing drow and ashton with black racial features (my own) and then someone else complaing that the fandom made the asshole and the would be villian into black men. This fanon has unintended consequences once the story is fully fleshed out. Saying Orym is non white (despite Liams art direction) is bad because people to this day are mad Marisha made beau dark. It cant be both way. This way ppl can headcanon stuff so they dont have 2 go looking for other ips for representation.

----

So this is a really good point and I am, as said, an ethnic/religious minority but not a racial one and so this is how I tend to interpret this stuff in fantasy works, especially ones that have multiple species (humans, elves, etc) as it's not limited to Critical Role (ie, happens in Dragon Age too), which I think is what you're saying here but feel free to let me know if I'm wrong:

There's "is this character treated, in-world, as racialized" (which is often more contextual in a lot of fictional works in a way it is not IRL due to patterns of colonialism in our world, which is a long conversation I'm probably not equipped to articulate well, but just as an example, Fjord is racialized as a half-orc on the Menagerie Coast, but half-orcs in Yios, for example would have a very different experience). In other words, do people within the work of fiction discriminate against them on the basis of race? Anyway, as you said, Fjord, Molly, Jester, and Veth in her goblin form are treated as The Other; Fjord (and Molly, though his memory is only a few years long) grew up with this experience whereas Jester and Veth grew up, for different reasons, sheltered from or unaffected by that discrimination. Beau didn't experience racism in-world, nor did Veth in her halfling form, despite both of them being visibly nonwhite. For a Dragon Age example, Bellara, Davrin, and Antoine grew up with racism as elves, but Neve did not (and indeed comments on using her privilege as a human mage among human mages) despite being visibly nonwhite (and despite Antoine being white).

There's then "is this character treated out of world as racialized", or in other words, do fans treat them as nonwhite. This is also complicated, and this is something I can speak to as Jewish people who are not also POC experience 'conditional whiteness', ie, when right-wing people want to hate Jews we are the nonwhite infiltrator and when left-wing (and often themselves white) people want to hate them they are the white oppressor. So racist fans will hate characters who are nonwhite (like Beau) and fans trying to prove their blorbo cannot be criticized on the basis of oppression. In this case, Beau and Veth are nonwhite; Fjord and Jester often vary depending on what argument the person wants to make; Molly, as opposed to Jester, is almost NEVER drawn with nonwhite features (which frankly says a LOT of unflattering things about the white queer centering, now that I think about it); etc.

And then there's "is the actor/creator racialized in real life," ie, Robbie, Aabria, Anjali, Utkarsh, Aimee, Christian, Mica, Khary, etc are all POC and the main cast are not. Most of their characters are nonwhite, but few are racialized - Shakaste, Deanna, Bor'Dor, Opal, Deni$e, and Reani do not experience racism within this setting. Genasi (as played by Anjali, Robbie, and Taliesin) are a complicated case of being tokenized/model minority within the Empire, and the Silken Squall being inspired by native culture but their role within the world only slightly touched upon such that it's hard to draw a definitive conclusion.

And, since I referenced it in the tags elsewhere, for an NPC case: Essek is racialized by the people of the Empire (as a drow) along with the rest of the Dynasty; he is not racialized within the Dynasty and is indeed in a privileged position there; and whether or not he's treated as nonwhite by the fandom depends on whether someone wants to hate on him or defend him on the basis of identity. He is an NPC, and Matt's white, but in theory could be controlled by a nonwhite GM such as Aabria, or a nonwhite player in the way that Robbie played Cerkonos.

Anyway: completely agree that a lot of people do this in the end so that they don't have to seek out like, Desiquest or Rivals of Waterdeep or Into the Motherlands or other APs run by actual real nonwhite people either because of parasocial connections to the cast, the fact that CR has a larger fandom and they want the attention, or the fact that often they are here for white queer characters and bring in nonwhite characters (and headcanons of white characters) as some kind of armor against criticism.

I think in terms of character interpretation you do need to consider both in-world (Fjord is textually treated as the racial other to the point of self-harming to fit in; you cannot treat him as The Racial Majority in the world without being noncanonical) and out-of-world (irl people are racist towards Beau) but yeah a lot of people really want to have it both ways.

This happens a lot with queerness too - one of the big backlashes I experienced during this campaign is when I pointed out that Exandria is not, in fact, a setting with systemic homophobia and Imogen's experience of being othered in Gelvaan is an extremely bad metaphor for queerness given that she can read people's minds and almost killed two people, but it is true that people irl may be homophobic towards Imogen as a character. But again, you need to be consistent in those arguments - if you are talking about in-world racism or homophobia, you cannot bring up Imogen or Beau, who do not experience these things. If you are talking about fandom racism, you can bring up Beau. And if your issue is racism and representation in the real world, you can and should push back on (for example) people being racist towards Utkarsh for daring to exist and not know every rule of D&D when Emily Axford is onscreen but also we are watching a show of 8 white people when there are other actual plays with a more diverse cast. And yeah, fanon isn't canon and if the character is only nonwhite in your mind, it is not racist of people to disagree or to not vibe with them and it's also worth checking, if you are headcanoning someone with an identity you do not personally have, to see if you're falling into harmful stereotypes. Why are you headcanoning Orym, a character who doesn't experience in-world discrimination, played by a white man, as nonwhite, instead of seeking out works with textually nonwhite or racialized characters? And why are you incapable of accepting that sometimes you'll like a character who is not on every single axis of oppression and it's like, fine, provided you work against oppression in your real world life? If your faves are always white or always men (or, frankly, always demographically like you) then maybe take a look at yourself and who you are capable of relating to, but if you have a mixture of diverse favorite characters it's fine if not every one of them checks every single box.

[bogleech]

Guess I have to make a main thread about this. Someone decided to fight with me in the notes on this post just yesterday about Gaza and made select responses of mine into a callout thread here, where they say my anger towards the IDF is all a cover for antisemitism. This didn't make any sense, because they said they were also against the IDF killing civilians, and I repeatedly said that Jewish people aren't to blame for the IDF or represented by the IDF in any way, putting us supposedly both on the exact same page. What gerry leaves out of their own screenshots, and I'd actually forgotten, is that at first they came at me from an angle that I was disrespecting the victims in Gaza.

So this implies they feel gaza is being subjected to a genocide, and a pretty big one, since they're upset my language made it sound "smaller and tamer." When it becomes obvious that I do in fact consider it a serious genocide, that's when they switch over to saying that my criticism of Netanyahu or the IDF is inherently an attack on Jewish people.

Notice I never actually said "zionists" in this screenshot, even, but that I defined "regular humans" as humans who don't want to kill innocent families. That would automatically include Jewish people since they overall do not wish to kill anyone, but have in fact spent quite a lot more time trying not to get killed. I believe there may be entire books about this fact! I think there's even whole museums about it, if I'm not mistaken?!

So then they pivot to saying I'm an antisemite because I said the IDF and its supporters can "burn in hell," and they say "invoking hell" is an antisemitic dogwhistle, which is definitely news to me?!

So I tried to clarify, again, that I'm only angry at the people who are themselves killing civilians and the "pro-genocide maniacs" who defend the killing of civilians, which they responded to as if I had "lumped them in" with those. You can just see right there that I didn't make any assumption that they were a part of that at all. Thanks to their earlier comments I still thought I was speaking to someone 100% against the IDF's actions, but every time I said that the killers and their advocates alone are bad, they've framed it in some new way as me just not liking anyone Jewish. So now that you have that context:

...In a response to an ask, they finally just say they hated me to begin with and set out with the intention to "bait and sealion" me (their own words!!) into saying something they hoped would be antisemitic, which they believe was successful despite me never saying anything about Jews other than "this isn't their fault." They saw what they admittedly wanted to, so strongly, that they show me saying "this isn't the fault of Jews" as evidence that I blame Jews. But speaking of people "going mask off"

In multiple more recent posts and asks, this person appears to say that they simply do not believe the IDF is really targeting children or ambulances or relief aid, that "none of those are true," and the deliberate targeting of any children is supposedly just a conspiracy theory??? So I guess they did successfully troll me and I feel like a real gullible dumbass, because the only reason I continued responding to this person in the first place was that they said they were in fact against the ongoing massacre. Instead, these comments sound like they think the IDF is being unfairly vilified by dishonest propagandists, and that's why they hated me enough to try and fish for callout fuel. That's the nastiest fucking thing anyone's yet pulled on me about this and it's not one that I'm just going to ignore. I should have smelled a troll early on and just blocked them, but it's SO hard for me to suspect ulterior motives. I always go in thinking people mean well, and that there's just a miscommunication we can work out. I almost feel like this individual noticed that and tried to exploit it?!? Unfortunately I'm sure this kind of thing will happen again simply because I don't intend to obediently shut up about what's being done to Gaza. It's not logistically possible for the death and destruction to all just be accidental collateral damage. Don't let anybody ever fool you into thinking the IDF is the face of the Jewish community or vice-versa, just as you can't let anyone fool you into thinking Hamas represents all Palestinians. Especially don't engage this person, stop doing so if you have been, and block them.

[xclowniex]

This is the biggest crock of shit to come out

I know plenty of poor jews, who have housing issues and food issues, but the community rallies together to help them so they can survive. The government and other community groups do not help, it's people at synagogue who help. I actually know people who have had a harder time getting help from the government with benefits as "because they're jewish, they should be rich and are likely trying to scam the government". - real thing said to a jew I know who tried to get on the benefit (social welfare).

Also she is literally pushing the jews are all rich antisemitism trope

It is not privileged to live life being seen as sub human, which I had gone through. Literally no joke, I was treated as sub human for years at school because I was jewish and no one did anything about it.

I know a jew who is currently being discriminated against at work for being jewish.

Then on the topic of her being excluded from synagogue, all the reform synagogues in the country pray for people in Gaza, they denounce Israel's actions. Even a few of the orthodox synagogues do too!

The only way you would be excluded is if you wished harm upon those in Israel, which is a valid reason to be excluded as there are plenty of jews with family in Israel, and you would be wishing harm on your fellow shul goers family.

Whilst I am glad that her experience has mainly been a positive one as a jew in Aotearoa, it is not reflective of the overall jewish communities' experience.

As she said herself, she does not connect with the majority of the Jewish community, so she should not speak on experiences of the wider jewish community as a whole.