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perfectlyvalid49 · 6 months ago

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Hello, I am not Jewish, but I grew up in an area with a noticeable population of Jews who, historically, were able to be openly Jewish. I learned from a young age about the horrors that have happened to your people throughout history, and have been disgusted by the rise in more blatant antisemitism that has reared its ugly head in the days and months since October 7th, a day which also horrified and disgusted me. I have also long considered myself to be pro-Israel, seeing the neccessity for Jewish self-determination in this world.

With my background out of the way, I saw one of your posts mentioned things we non-Jews might not notice are antisemitic due to it being part of our culture and what not, and I was hoping you could tell me some of them? I've detested antisemitism for as long as I can remember, so if I've been unintentionally doing anything that fits that, I would like to stop. Thank you and have a nice day.

I want to start by saying that I really appreciate the fact that you’re trying, and that you want to learn to do better in case you’re making any mistakes. I am a firm believer that EVERYONE has blind spots when it comes to how they treat members of minority groups, be it antisemitism, racism, homophobia, or whatever else, and that while intent isn’t all that matters, it matters a lot. While I’m answering your question, I’m going to cover some stuff you may already know based on the background you gave in the hopes that this answer will be useful for other people as well. I hope you don’t mind.

I also want to put a couple caveats on what I’m about to say. The first is that this is not a comprehensive list. It’s just whatever came to mind while I was typing this up. I’m sure I’ve missed things, but hopefully this gives you an idea of the kind of thing I was talking about. If anyone sees this and wants to add additional examples, please do!

The other caveat is that different Jews will have different definitions of what is and is not antisemitic. The big obvious stuff, like people chanting “Gas the Jews,” or accusations that Jews use the blood of Christian children to bake their bread, almost everyone is going to agree that’s antisemitic. The more subtle stuff, which is what we’re going to be talking about here, is more likely to prompt disagreement. For example, last year there was a lot of conversation on Tumblr about how the goblins in the Harry Potter game were an antisemitic caricature. The reaction from Jews I know in real life basically boiled down to, “Yeah, I guess I can see it. I don’t really think it’s that big of a deal though.” So, some of the stuff I mention, other Jews might disagree that it’s antisemitic. And there are some things that I might leave out because I don’t think they’re antisemitic that other Jews think really are antisemitic. That’s OK!

I think that if we’re going to talk about antisemitism that is present in Western culture, then we need to talk about the antisemitism that’s baked into Christianity, and acknowledge that because a lot of Western culture has been heavily influenced by the church, even if a person is not religiously Christian, if they are culturally Western, then Christianity has had a large impact on their culture, and we can say that they are culturally Christian. And if this post gets big, I know that I’m going to get murdered for that statement, but that’s ok, there’s nothing Christians love more than a crucified Jew (THIS IS A JOKE (mostly.)) I don’t know if you’re Christian or not, but I live in the US, and most people here are heavily influenced by Christian thought and philosophy without realizing it, even if they’re not Christian, and these are the people I was talking about when I made the comment that prompted the ask.

So how is antisemitism baked into Christianity? Well, to understand that, we need to understand some of the problems early Christianity had, namely, the fact that the Jews of the time rejected their beliefs and the fact that Rome persecuted early Christians pretty hard. And we also need to talk about Supersessionism.

Early Christians had a major issue with contemporaneous Jews because the Jews rejected their teachings. Like, Jesus and his followers were Jews, and after his death they wanted all other Jews to agree that he was the messiah, even though he didn’t do all the things the Jewish messiah was supposed to do. This is both why Christianity has the second coming (so that he can do those things) and why the New Testament opens with a genealogy linking Jesus to David (the messiah is supposed to be from the line of David), the early Christians were *desperate* for legitimacy in their new religion. And when the rest of the Jewish community rejected it, they got a little mad, and decided that Christians clearly understand Jewish holy texts better than Jews do (up to and including editing said texts to better support their views), something that persists to this day. I have actually seen Christians show up on posts about being Jewish and try to explain to the Jews about how we’re wrong about our own religion. This is absolutely antisemitism, and it does really happen.

The other thing early Christians decided is that the Jews have been presented with the true word of G-d and have rejected it, so they must be evil. This is true of the early Christians, but I also want to stress that almost every major player in the Protestant Reformation absolutely HATED Jews. Luther literally published a treatise entitled “On the Jews and Their Lies”, and some scholars think that there is a direct line between Luther’s hatred of Jews and the formation of the Nazi party. I think Luther was the worst of them, but none of those guys were cool with Jews, so just know that all of the protestant denominations were founded by guys who would kill me if they could.

Because the Jews were now considered evil, the Christians concluded that the covenant G-d had made with the Jews now applied to the Christians. Now, in Christian thought, they were the Chosen People, and the Jews were no longer so blessed. This is the premise behind supersessionism, and it basically posits that Christians have replaced Jews as the true people of Israel, and it was embraced by many of the men who shaped what Christianity is today, in virtually every denomination of Christianity that exists.

The early Christians dealt with their Roman persecution problem by allying themselves with the Romans. One might think that this would be difficult, as the Romans are very much the bad guys in the new testament. Like, the guys who arrested Jesus were Roman, and following Rome’s orders, Pilate was Roman, and the men who put Jesus on the cross were Roman. So how could Christianity ally with the people who killed Jesus? Well, it’s simple, they were already mad at the Jews for rejecting their new religion, so they would claim that all of that was the Jews’ fault so the Romans could be allied with for political power. And Rome didn’t like the Jews anyway, so they loved it when the Christians threw the Jews under the bus.

So, a lot of cultural antisemitism has its basis here, with this idea that Jews are not like the rest of us, they’re somehow worse (“the rest of us” meaning people in Christian cultures). And while a lot of it has turned into more overt antisemitism (“Jews killed Jesus,” Jews kill Christian children for their blood to make bread/matzoh, Jews control money/media/government). But this also turns into things like sermons about the evils of the Pharisees or praising Jesus for the cleansing of the Temple. How is that antisemitic? Well, the Pharisees are the fathers of modern Judaism, so if their evil, then the modern version of our religion is based on the thoughts of evil men. Jesus’s cleansing of the Temple was, from a Jewish perspective, a story about a man deciding that the systems that Jews established to make worship easier should be taken away. Praising that is praising the disruption of Jewish worship.

And on the other end of things, we have people (mostly Christians, but some not), who are in love with the idea of Jews, but not actual Jews. In non-Christians, this looks like people with the opinion “Christians suck, but the Jews are cool.” As an example, I had a guy show up on one of my posts to let me know that he used to hold Jews in high regard because he thought our culture would make us immune from nationalism and far-right ideologies. He was so disappointed in us when we behaved just like other groups of human beings. And while he said that he had thought well of us, he still thought of us as being not like other human cultures – that’s antisemitic. And being mad at us for acting like other humans? That’s antisemitic too.

In Christians, it usually looks like people saying “We love Jews, Jesus was a Jew!” This implies that the only reason to love Jews is because of a relation to a deity we don’t believe in. It ignores real, live Jews in favor of people who if real, have been dead for 2000 years, and makes it seem like our only value is that you like one guy from a very different version of our culture (modern Judaism is VERY different than what Jews contemporary with Jesus would have practiced). These people are also the ones who are most likely to try to connect with Judaism through cultural appropriation. The most common example of this is churches that hold a “Passover Seder.” Judaism is a mostly closed religion, and our holidays are not for other people to play dress up. Like, imagine if a church in the US said it was going to do a Native American ceremony with no Native American input, and you have an idea of the level of cultural appropriation. And people would rightly call that out as not ok, but churches do this all the time. The excuse that they use is that the last supper was a Seder, but while that may be true, the modern seder, which is what most churches try to do, is not how Jesus would have celebrated in the time of the Temple. So, their reasoning doesn’t hold much water, Jews tend to be pretty clear that it’s not ok as far as we’re concerned, so this behavior is very problematic.

Moving on from Christianity, there’s also stuff that has been around so long we’ve forgotten their antisemitic origins. I mentioned goblins at the start of this, but did you know that witches are also based on antisemitic stereotypes? The green skin, the big nose, the hat which matches hats Jews were required to wear in parts of medieval Europe, the magic received from a deal with the devil – these are all heavily based on antisemitic caricatures of Jews. And while I don’t think witches by themselves are antisemitic, if you start pairing them with other antisemitic things it gets bad fast. Like, a witch is not antisemitic, and a person kidnapping children is not antisemitic, but a witch kidnapping children is raising some serious red flags. And a cabal (the word cabal is derived from Kabbalah, which is a Jewish practice, and its use is ALSO antisemitic) of witches doing so is a big freaking problem.

Or we could talk about Charles Dickens. His works are considered classics, and are often required reading in school. But Fagin in Oliver Twist is a walking antisemitic Jewish stereotype, and that’s never called out in lesson plans. So to people who have never met a Jew, but have read this classic of English literature, Fagin is what they think of when they think Jews. For the classes with one Jewish kid – how do you think it feels to have everyone in class be like, “Oh you’re Jewish, just like Fagin the bad guy!” Of note, Dickens did write a much less antisemitic Jewish character in a later novel, Our Mutual Friend, but of these two, which one gets taught?

I also want to talk about institutional antisemitism. This is similar to the idea of institutional racism, if you’re familiar with that concept – the idea that racism has worked its way into how our very society is structured, so even if you try very hard to be anti-racist, the society you live in is designed to make life harder for POC. Institutional antisemitism is the same thing, except the system is rigged against Jews instead.

We’ll start with one that Jews and Blacks have in common – redlining. It’s the practice of not allowing people (mostly Black people, but also other POC) to buy houses in certain areas. Usually this was done by banks not giving mortgages to people, but there are also homes where it’s in the deed to the house, or in the by laws of the local HOA that you’re not allowed to sell to Black people. It turns out that some houses/HOAs also have “no Jews allowed” rules as well. And it’s super subtle – is a neighborhood Jew free because we’re an incredibly small portion of the population and just so happen to not live there? Or are they legally barred from living there? It can be hard to tell without doing some significant digging. My synagogue actually had a booth at our Purim carnival last year so that we could see if our neighborhood still had anti-Black housing laws so we could work on getting them changed if so. Solidarity.

There’s also probably some institutional antisemitism in your workplace. There sure as heck is in mine, and the last time I brought it up I was told that I could find work elsewhere if I had an issue with company policy. One of the more common ones it that many jobs that require work on Sundays give a higher rate of pay for that day. The historical reason for that is because Sunday is the Sabbath, and if your company is going to force you to work on the holy day, then they’re going to value that time more highly (my company does an extra dollar an hour for Sunday hours.) But Sunday isn’t the Sabbath for Jews, and when I asked if I could be compensated for my time on MY day of rest, well, see above for the answer I got.

You can also look at the holiday situation. My company is open 357 days a year. Of the 8 days we are closed, one is for Christmas, one is for Easter and one is for New Years on the Christian calendar (It’s the Gregorian calendar after POPE Gregory). Most people don’t work Sundays, so there’s no pay for Easter, but Christmas and New Years are both paid holidays. But the Jewish New Year, which is a religious holiday, is not. Nor are any other Jewish holidays. And we have a lot, and many of them require that you not work if you’re religiously observant. Enough that most people would have to spend their entire allotment of PTO for the year, just to have off for religious observance. You could argue that Christmas and New Years and Easter are federal holidays, except Easter isn’t, and also at my company we aren’t given off for all federal holidays (we’re open for president’s day and MLK day and so on), so you actually kinda do have to defend why these made the cut. Also I’m still waiting for the reason why a Christian holiday is also a Federal holiday in a country that supposedly values the separation of Church and State.

Jews also feel this at school. In college I had a professor schedule a midterm on Yom Kippur – the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, and a holiday that is observed, in part, by not consuming any food or water for 25 hours. I asked if I could take the test on a different day, and my request was denied. I’m sure my school probably had someone I could have talked to about this but I didn’t know that at the time, so I felt like my options were come in to class on a holiday or take a 0% and screw over my grade for the semester. I chose to celebrate as best I could, and duck out of services for an hour and a half to take the test. The professor (in what I’m sure he thought was an act of kindness) had brought several barrels of apples, so that we could each have a snack while we tested. I almost committed murder that day (what, my blood sugar was low enough to be non-existent at that point and I was feeling pretty cranky). And like, I don’t think the professor was trying to be antisemitic. He was trying to be fair by making us all test at the same time, and kind by bringing us a snack. But in effect, he made life much harder for the one Jewish student in his class by refusing an easy accommodation.

And is not being accommodating to Jews antisemitic? Yeah, kinda? It sure feels that way when it seems like your only options are 1) things are shitty because people won’t accommodate you, 2) you have to work extra hard to figure out how to accommodate yourself, or 3) you can stop being Jewish and then everything suddenly is so much easier. Another really common example of this is getting invited to a party, and then none of the food is kosher. Your options are 1) go hungry, 2) bring enough food that’s kosher for yourself and everyone else (otherwise they might eat the kosher stuff and you’re back to 1), or 3) the problem goes away when you stop keeping kosher. And the reason I feel this is antisemitic is that the host is making the space unwelcoming to Jews – you can come, but you’re not gonna like it, so you might as well not come.

The last thing I want to talk about is treating Jews as white. A person might think that this is a good thing, like it’s granting us access to white privilege, but in reality it’s ignoring our needs as a minority. Claiming that Jews are white ignores that some Ashkenazi and many non-Ashkenazi Jews are definitely not even close to white, and it downplays the real discrimination Jews face. Studies have proven that it’s harder to get hired with a Jewish sounding name, and an article recently came out that said the prosecution was deliberately excluding Jews from juries (this is illegal discrimination) because they were less likely to give the death penalty, as examples. And even for white-passing Jews, the Shoah was very much about how Jews were not white. That was a pretty significant part of the Nazi ideology.

And this becomes an even bigger problem when the people who should want to be allies – other minorities and their white allies deny us the ability to seek help from them. When we talk about the discrimination that we face, we’re very frequently ignored, or told that we’re white and that we don’t know what it’s really like. This is what the left is doing right now when it calls us “oppressors” or “colonizers” – it’s denying our history of being oppressed and our history of being colonized because some of us look like we came from Europe.

Anyway, if you’re still here (I know this is VERY long), I hope this was helpful in understanding some of the ways that antisemitism can be present in small things, from church sermons to pay rates to fairy tales. And I want to be clear, I’d much rather deal with the antisemitic implications of Hansel and Gretel than deal with people chanting “Jews will not replace us.” But in an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to deal with either.

#asks and answers #LONG post #Word says 3226 words #antisemitism #it's the little things that grind you down

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annyankers · 2 years ago

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I made a comment in my earlier post about my frustrations with how people talk about the magic metaphors (ex. the “willow’s addiction muddles the gay metaphor” hellhole argument i Loathe) about how the way Wicca/paganism is talk about in btvs and how I don’t vibe on it because it has “Silver RavenWolf Energy” and I absolutely KNOW that reference will fly over many heads so here’s a lil bit about that.

First off I’ll say I’m not a wiccan myself. I learned about it’s basics years ago when I first got into actually learning about Occultish Stuff. I’m out here in the rökkatru end of things fondly remembering spongecakegate and slacking off on all my research and practice related anything. I also haven’t actively researched magic/witchcraft in years. I just know enough about Wicca and witchcraft to be able to look at it in the media and be like “lol yeah that’s Not It”.

My first pet peeve with the BTVS version of Wicca is they call themselves “A wicca” and not just “a wiccan” like normal human beings. Maybe this was a thing in the 90s, idk. I just know that in the present it makes me wanna chew on glass.

Now we get a bit more into the meat of the Bullshit:

Silver RavenWolf is a lady who writes books about Wicca and witchcraft and like, babies first paganism shit. All of it is FULL of misinformation and some very hot very bad takes. She’s the kind of person who’ll take about the Salem witch trials like real witches were burned and like it wasn’t a perfect form of religious fanaticism, sociopolitical moves for advancement inside the community, personal grudges and old fashion paranoia that got a lot of regular ass people killed. Like the puritans hung a few quakers for not renouncing their faith or living the colony. Quakers. Also NO ONE WAS BURNED IN ANY US WITCH HUNT. IT WASN’T EVEN A THING IN ENGLAND. They only burnt catholics and traitors far as I remember lol.

However, everything about her shitty awful bad books of bad takes is very Of The Times in the 90s -- as in, I’m not shocked that BTVS Wicca has a Silver RavenWolf flavor to it because she was the main bitch of “mainstream” Wicca at the time it was being made. Like honestly the magic/pagan/wicca group being all new age white feminism, granola lesbian energy and misinformation bout like... multiple religions is pretty on point, not just for a 90s occult college group but a current one and just how it was all viewed at the time of creation.

It just bugs me because there’s so many other people out there even in the 90s-00s that could’ve been referenced and Silver RavenWolf is just.... So Cursed. The takes..... So Bad......

BTVS Wicca never for even a MOMENT talks about the Horned God/Male Deity of Wicca which is um-- he’s kinda of Big Deal. Wicca is a duotheistic religion focused on the Triple Goddess and the Horned God but the show literally never mentions him and is all woo woo co-op goddess worship vibes. Cursed.

Witchcraft =/= Wicca. WITCHCRAFT =/= WICCA. THEY’RE TWO DIFFERENT THNIGS. ONE A FORM OF MAGIC PRACTICE/”CRAFT” AND THE OTHER IS A RELIGION. Willow can actually BE A WITCH and be JEWISH. Judaism even has it’s own history and legacy of mysticism/magic/occultism that Willow could tap into. Not really sad to not see it in the show mostly bc I know it’d be a lot of non-jews writing this and no one wants to see how they’d whiff it but fanfic writers... 👀

Willow shouldn’t be pissed about how the Witch Stereotype is disrespectful to witches and more pissed about how it’s antisemitic (the nose thing alone....)

Honestly there’s more but this is long enough for the moment since I have other things I need to do and I’d have to refresh my memory with an s4-6 or so rewatch and make some notes and all that so like-- another day.

for those interested here’s some links on why Silver Ravenwolf sucks so hard lol Tarnished Silver Why We Despise Silver Ravenwolf The Problem With Silver Ravenwolf

#train.txt #meta #if someone told me that the research for the wicca shit was one of her books i would not be shocked lol

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hatshepsut9 · 2 years ago

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There’s no way I’m finishing another book tomorrow, so here’s a tiny wrapup:

Mini reviews below the cut (non-spoilery as much as possible!)

The Calculating Stars: I read this because of booktube and enjoyed it— sometimes the internet can be trusted! This is an alternate history 1950’s space program book about a pilot/calculator becoming one of the first female astronauts. Overall it’s short, sweet, and smart. It does feature female and minority characters navigating typical 1950’s identity politics, but it’s not so frustrating as to be unreadable (of course it should be frustrating, but sometimes you’re just not in a patient enough mood that you’re willing to watch white men complain about the existence of women and black people when there is an actual global crisis looming over their shoulders!) If you can overlook some very cheesy flirting of the “rocket in your pocket” variety (yes, we get that you’re in the space program, you don’t have to use that fact in all your pickup lines) and you liked Hidden Figures, read this.

The Jasmine Throne: I’d never heard of this before but I got it for Christmas via a bookseller’s recommendation. I could see some people finding the writing style to be a little... affected(?), but I didn’t mind it. This is an Indian-inspired fantasy world with political rivalries, an old magic returning, and characters confronting fate. The cast isn’t huge, but there are enough characters that you get to explore things through comparisons. Trying to avoid spoilers here, but you get two characters in the exact same boat re: what happened when one of their family members got caught up in some royal family succession drama, and how each of them reacts completely differently with respect to how they view the royal character involved. And you also have 3 people who came from the same place who are dealing with colonization in 3 different ways. I really love the magic system(s) in this and I can’t wait to see what happens in the rest of the series. There is a plant/human magic system that is related to a kind of curse (that I suspect is really a power a la Elantris), a prophecy-based magic system/religion, and probably more aspects of magic that will come into play. The magic seems very localized, with religions that are tied to their locations. Halfway through the book I finally googled the series and only the first 2 books are out... I’m hoping it’s a trilogy but whatever it is, I’m in for the ride now. I would recommend this to fans of Baru Cormorant, The Poppy War, and maybe ASOIAF (but I haven’t finished any of those series so take that with a grain of salt).

The Origin of Satan: I picked this up one night because I was at the house of a religious studies major with nothing to read, and it was interesting enough that I took it home and finished it. This book goes through internal drama between Jewish groups, then once Christians became a group made up of mostly gentile converts the dramas between them and pagans (mostly Romans), and then back to internal drama between different Christian groups. It traces the way people in these conflicts would use the idea of Satan-- first meaning an angel sent to challenge a human or stop humans from doing something bad, later meaning a sort of evil angel or evil god-- to talk about their conflicts with their various opponents both internal and external. (Side note: this book is why I noticed the localized religions/magic systems in Jasmine Throne, because it talks about how before Christianity, everyone took it for granted that your religion was determined by where you live). Overall this book is interesting but it just pointed me towards related topics that I now want to read about. For instance, it’s hard for me to imagine a time when people didn’t regularly frame their conflicts as part of a battle between the forces of good and evil, because that concept is so ingrained in popular culture even though we don’t usually think of it as coming from the idea of angels and demons/God and Satan, so I’d really be more interested to get immersed in examples of how people talked about their conflicts and their opponents before all this happened. The book also just made me want to read up on gnostic Christians (luckily she also wrote a book on the Gnostic Gospels, so that’d going in my list.)

#books #booklr #book wrap up #book wrapup #tasha suri #mary robinette kowal #elaine pagels #the calculating stars #the jasmine throne #the burning kingdoms #the origin of satan #sci fi #alternate history #fantasy #history #religious studies

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sissa-arrows · 1 year ago

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@kafkaesquegf I’m answering here cause it’s long.

TL;DR: The answers depends and varies a lot on the time in history and the people you’re asking the question to.

Before French colonialism Jews were seen as just an other part of the population. Some had high position in the government some didn’t some were rich some were poor just like for the Muslim population. They did pay a tax that only had to be paid by non-muslims but that’s the equivalent of the tax that only had to be paid by Muslims it’s to help the poor and pay the army and all. On top of it people who can’t afford it Muslim or not didn’t have to pay. And sure converting meant not paying the non Muslim only tax but if you had enough money to afford the non Muslim only tax you have enough money to afford the Muslim only tax and that doesn’t change anything.

Then After colonialism started it started to be more difficult. When France arrive they claim that it’s to protect Jews from the savages Muslims (spoiler alert it’s not to protect anyone it’s because France owes money to Algeria and the French king needs to win a war to show he is the boss). Both Jews and Muslims are like “what the fuck are you talking about?” So they try to create a divide by saying that if Algerian Jews ask for the French citizenship (which came with equal rights with white people) they can have it unlike Algerian Muslims. Out of solidarity and mostly because they didn’t give a flying fuck about being French citizens Algerian Jews didn’t ask for the French citizenship. Except it was kinda ruining the whole “we are saving Jews from the savages” narrative so the Cremieux decree happened and that’s when the real divide started. This decree was giving the citizenship and equal rights to all Jewish people no matter if they wanted it or not but worst than that it meant that from that moment they would appear in the European settlers registers of births, deaths, marriages, that they would be counted in the European settlers census. And the thing that changed everything they started going to European settlers schools. In those schools they were told they were not Algerians and certainly not dirty Arabs that they were a superior race like white people. That the Algerians had oppressed them and France saved them. And the divide that previously didn’t really exist was basically created. So by the end of colonialism they were more seen as part of the settlers than part of the indigenous population. Even white communists who sided with the independence of Algeria didn’t see both groups the same way. There’s a testimony in A dying colonialism by Frantz Fanon in which a white communist says that he was in a friends group with two Algerians Muslims and one Algerian Jew . The Muslims say that now the only way to kick out the colonizers is violence. The white communist is like “I’m not sure it’s the solution violence will breed more violence” the Algerian Jew kinda get annoyed by the white communist and tells him that no violence is actually the only solution to free Algerians from the oppression of colonialism. The white communist agrees and he realizes that even if he wants to fight alongside Algerians for the independence he has racist bias. Because what seemed excessive when suggested by the Algerian Muslims seemed okay when suggested by the Algerian Jew. That being said there was the same rule for Algerian Jews as for everyone else “you’re fighting for Algeria’s independence? Then you are Algerian.” So those who fought for the independence were seen as Algerians not settlers.

WW2 also changed the situation. A lot of Algerian Jews realized they had been lied to by the French when Nazis occupation started in France and the French removed the French citizenship to Algerian Jews that way they would have no duty to protect them. Algerian Muslims helped Algerian Jews and the common history that existed before colonialism was kinda back. At the end of the war when the French gave back the citizenship to Algerian Jews one of them made a speech and said “We will only be satisfied when our Muslims brothers are allowed the same rights and dignity”. The trauma caused to Jewish people during WW2 is also one of the reasons they massively left Algeria at the independence because France told them they would be killed that they needed to leave the country. They knew France and French people they didn’t “know” Algeria and Algerians so they left. That being said those who did not fight actively against the independence and those who are not Zionists (same for everyone not just Jews, Algeria is profoundly anti zionist) are allowed to visit the country and if they chose to be buried in Algeria they can just like other Algerians.

Now a personal comment about this. I do not resent the Algerian Jewish kids who believed what they were told in colonizers schools. There was no way for them to know the truth and they were surrounded by people who were telling them they were saved by the French. That being said I do resent people (doesn’t matter if they are Jewish or not) who spread that lie of the French saving Jews from the Muslim savages nowadays because it feeds the divide that was created on both sides. Not everyone will agree with me but personally I consider that all Algerians Muslims and Jews lost something from that divide. We lost brothers, sisters, siblings, friends… We lost a part of our country and they lost so much of their culture and history. I’m not saying the situation was perfect before colonialism I’m sure aholes existed in both groups and some people hated each other and didn’t want to live with each other but something really broke with colonialism. Today some people really believe that all Algerian Jews came from Spain during the Reconquista when it’s not the truth… To these days white people and some Jewish people use the word “pied noir” to talk about Algerian Jews despite the fact that historically pied noir was only used to refer to the white European colonizers. Like they really stripped them of their Algerianness and only bring it up to hate on Algeria. Anyway we can’t rewrite history but it’s important to talk about it so maybe one day that divide heal.

Just to finish this: I mentioned in both asks about French communists and Algerian Jews the whole “you’re fighting for the liberation of Algeria? You’re Algerian then.” I just need to say that it applied to EVERYONE including Muslim Algerians. The Indigenous Algerian Muslims who fought on the side of France are not considered Algerians (I can make a post about them if somebody is interested cause it’s complicated) and they actually had to leave the country at the independence. Algerianness is defined by blood but also by your willingness and your ancestors’ willingness to spill their own blood to free the country from colonialism.

Do you have/know of any resources for learning about Algerian Jews?

I don’t think I have anything specific about Algerian Jews only. The situation is similar to white communists who helped us. French people don’t like talking about them unless it’s to pretend that the French saved them from the Muslim savages (spoiler alert no they did not they only created division and resentment).

But there’s the book When we were Arabs by Massoud Hayoun he talks about how Jews were dispossessed of their Arab identity especially in North Africa and how that dispossession was made by white colonizers to justify colonialism and by Zionists. A lot of what he says applies to Algerian Jews as well.

That being said Israel sued Algerian Jews in 1963 for being “fake Jews” because those who left Algeria went to France and refused to go to Israel. They really organized a full trial from the beginning of the afternoon until midnight trying to strip Algerian Jews of their Jewish identity and saying that even those who came were not proper Jews because they were refusing to live in certain territories and refusing to play their role as a “link between the orient and the west”. Some articles about it here here and here (the last one is the only English source I could find).

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hazel2468 · 2 years ago

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I just had a friend tell me “Well, Jews DO have white privilege- when was the last time you were hatecrimed for being a white Jew? Cops ignore you!” and I had to inform this person that my earliest fucking full memory is my mother and I being harassed by a cop at a park SPECIFICALLY because he looked at her, pegged her for a kike, and then told us that “your kind of people” weren’t welcome at this public park. He then threatened her with arrest, said a few choice words, and ten minutes later mom was explaining to little me that people will hate us because we’re Jews (I’ve posted about this before). I had to inform them that the town I grew up in was SUED for passing laws to purposfully try to keep Jews- and mostly WHITE Jews- out of their public parks and, later, out of the town entirely. And that effort was backed up by wails of “it’s not racism/antisemitism! We’re not RACIST! They’re WHITE! We just don’t want those JEWS here because they’re dirty/welfare users/ disgusting pedophiles”.

Do I pass as white on the street? Hell yes. Is there a sort of fucked up privilege in that, so long as no one knows I’m a Jew, I get treated like any other white woman? Yeah.

But does all of that change the INSTANT someone finds out I’m Jewish? Have I had people instantly begin talking to me and treating me in ways they weren’t literally three seconds prior? Have I had the attitudes of authority figures, including fucking cops, change to hostility the SECOND they have ANY indication that I’m a Jew? Have I experienced everyone from food delivery people to passersby to postal workers give me and my mezzuzah dirty looks? Yes.

It isn’t a fucking “privilege” if that privilege is contingent on you fucking hiding yourself. In the same way that (to draw a personal example here) mspec queers don’t have “straight privilege” when they date someone of what appears to be the opposite gender, Jews do not have “white privilege” when those of us who are perceived as white are conditionally given access to those benefits. Because the SECOND someone finds out we’re Jewish. We’re not white anymore. We’re either, depending on who you ask, non-white non-European pedophilic invaders who want to corrupt Christian America (Qanon), subhuman vermin who are the worst of the worst and a threat to racial white purity (Nazis and white supremacists), or uber privileged more-than-white super-rich oppressors-of-all genocidal assholes who are personally responsible for every atrocity ever committed by the government of a state the size of New Jersey (progressives and Leftists).

Until y’all are capable of understanding that not everything works under the very narrow view of race and religion that America has, until you can understand that it isn’t “you are privileged or you’re not”, until you can understand that telling Jews that we are all white and privileged when we have been and continue to be murdered for LITERALLY not being white is ignorant at BEST and racist antisemitism at worst. Until y’all can actually LISTEN to Jews when we tell you our history, our experiences, what it’s like to be part of a group that has ALWAYS been on the outside- the same shit you (rightly) offer other marginalized groups.

Fuck off.

#antisemitism #k slur #I am so sick of this shit #people really think that Jews just have it so good #when the right is screaming for our genocide #because we're either tools in their christian death cult #or they're nazis and want us all dead because we're of the Jewish race #when the left is ALSO screaming for our genocide #either because Israel is THE hot topic #and it's so cool to hate on the only Jewish state endlessly #with no nuance #and to bring all the Jews everywhere into it #OR because y'all atheist fuckers seem to be chugging the antisemitism jucie #like your life depends on it #we are SCREAMING for help #we are BEGGING for solidarity #and you don't give it #and then you complain about Jews being too insular #or too confrontational and nasty #WE CAN'T TRUST YOU ASSHOLES #We have learned #and you have PROVEN over and over #that we can't trust ANYONE but us #because NONE OF YOU care about us #rant

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sunbeamedskies · 2 years ago

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Taika Waititi is an amazing Polynesian Māori Jewish writer/actor/director who has provided us with so much joy through Thor, Our Flag Means Death, and much more. One way you can support him is by working to be a better ally to Jews. Unfortunately I have seen a rise in antisemitism in the LGBTQ+ community and social justice circles in recent years. Here are some things to consider:

1) How has the fact that Jews only comprise .2% of the world’s population and 2% of the American population influenced what I know about their history and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? The lack of Jewish voices in many groups is alarming, with non-Jews making many false claims about our history and current events, such as calling Israel “white supremacist,” as if all Jews are white. Non-mixed race ashkenazis are at most conditionally white (there are many ways for us to self identify- we don’t have an exact, official place when discussing race), while all other Jews can be considered people of color. Systemic racism can exist without explicitly being white supremacist. Both Jews and Palestinians are indigenous to the land, and following @rootsmetals on Instagram will give you even more info about it all. You must also learn how to separate the Israeli people and culture from the actions of the Israeli government - many Israelis are against their government, and approximately half of the world's entire Jewish population lives in Israel

2) How safe would Jews feel in the movements I’m apart of? Be honest with yourself - if you see things that are antisemitic or borderline antisemitic get thrown around constantly, the odds are that they would not feel safe or valued. I constantly see horrible things get retweeted and posted from socialist/communist accounts, general social justice activists, and some fellow LGBTQ+ folk unfortunately. It has gotten to the point where whenever I see a hammer and sickle in someone’s profile, I brace myself to see some antisemitic shit, and 99% of the time if I scroll for a little while, I find it. It is sad that both hardcore anti-capitalists and hardcore capitalists often view Jews as being an enemy, even though they are supposed to be the complete opposites of each others’ ideologies. Existing in an antisemitic echo chamber is dangerous and should have no place in ANY movement. There are many Jewish members of the LGBTQ+ community as well, and if you want to read about an antisemitic incident that is emblematic of the problems in some queer communities, go look up what happened with the Chicago Dyke March

3) Do I talk about and/or post about antisemitism often enough, or only after a synagogue shooting/literal nazi rally? I rarely see non-Jews stick up for Jews on the internet or in real life much except for the occasions mentioned. We are still targeted often in hate crimes, and the complete silence from others is telling of how much we are truly valued. You cannot dismantle white supremacy without unlearning antisemitism. True intersectional social justice means speaking up for us on a regular basis. Start following Jewish accounts to stay up to date and challenge yourself on your internal biases, and educate people in your communities. I post a lot on my Instagram @JenniferKleinArt , and there are so many other wonderful accounts both on Tumblr and Instagram to follow

Even though this post is mostly about antisemitism, you can also support Taika by learning more about the Māori people and following other Māori creators. Many people outside of New Zealand don’t know much about them, but they are the indigenous people of New Zealand

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this-is-my-jaam · 3 years ago

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Cultural Representation in Dragon Age/Fantasy in General pt.1

So I made a post not too long ago about my gripes with the aesthetic design with the Dalish in Dragon Age. A user by the name of fallowhearth then introduced me to the work of Bret Deveraux and his breakdown on the historical inaccuracy and generally racist design of the Dothraki in got, which got me thinking about something that bothered me, but I hadn’t been able to figure out why until I read the essay.

A lot of people claim to have based fictional races/societies off of real cultures, but the actual representation of said cultures, mostly non-white cultures, is based more on stereotypes of a culture than the real culture. The steppe peoples and nomad societies tend to be the most insultingly incorrect from my own observations. Really, any culture that lives in away that the modern western society would consider unconventional.

So I’ve already done a dive into Dalish fashion, but it occurred to me that practically nothing of the original aesthetic design for the Dalish seemed to have any relation at all to the cultures that the Dalish were based on. In fact, I can’t really place where any of the design is pulled from apart from the medieval fantasy chainmail (which is a European style chainmail btw). There are plenty of cultures that wore fur throughout history, but none that I could find use it exclusively for pauldrons. Which makes sense because what would be the point even. I know I already complained about it but the fur shoulder pads are so truly baffling to me. We’ll get back to this later, but the main point is that just throwing together random tidbits of a culture together without any understanding of the original purposes of literally anything that you are ‘representing’ sits really wrong with me.

So lets dissect the cultural designs of Dragon age and their presumable real world design inspirations. Strap in again folks because this one’s going to be long and in multiple parts or else you’ll be scrolling for an hour to get past this post. Again, this is all my opinion and I mean no offense. I don’t intend to speak for any of the ethnic groups to be mentioned in this rant, only to point out a commonality in fantasy worldbuilding that really bothers me. You are under no obligation to agree with me, constructive criticism is awesome, but please keep it civil.

The Dalish

Since we’re already here, let’s break down the Dalish. I’m going to approach this from a few directions: 1) The Jewish, Romani, and Native American people that the Dalish were based on, 2) Cultural bias and stereotyping in pop media and 3) Fantasy design tropes.

Just to clarify, this isn’t meant to be criticism directed specifically at Bioware’s art team. Artists build the image of the game, but ultimately answer to an Art Director who answers to Corporate. I’m sure the artists that worked on these games and designs are lovely people, and meant no harm in any way. They just worked with what they were given, which was not a whole lot if we’re being really honest. I think this was in part because the Dalish were already present in DA:O before a lot of the lore was super established and they only had so much money for development. You can clearly tell that a lot of thought was put into many of the other cultures’ designs for DA:2 and Inquisition, but the Dalish were in DA:O so they had to design around that to keep the canon somewhat consistent. So no beef to Bioware’s creative team, I’m going to place the blame on EA because they ruin everything that they touch. The writing team however, I have some questions for. Namely, why? Actually, I know why and it’s also EA. Moving on.

1) Jewish, Romani, and Native American Culture

Now, I am by no means an expert in Jewish, Romani, or Native American history/culture, so I apologize for any inaccuracies that there might be in this post. If you see something inaccurate or you know of any other parallels that you want to talk about, feel free to add to the conversation. I try to reply to all of the comments that I get and I appreciate learning new stuff and being corrected on things that I am wrong about. Again, please be civil.

None of these cultures exists in the aesthetic design of the Dalish. At least not that I’ve been able to tell. The writers claim that the original inspiration for the Dalish are the Roma and Jewish people. I’m pretty sure that this is because of both the nomadic lifestyle of the Dalish, and the persecution they face in lore. The Romani people are believed to have originated in India and migrated Westward, the rich culture unique to the Romani people being a melting pot of cultural elements as people married into the culture and it expanded. I don’t think too much of the Dalish was inspired by the Romani people aside from the travel culture, the persecution and ostracization they faced, and their mysterious historical origins. We’ll get into my beef with westernized views on minorities and mysticism later though.

As for the Jewish people, I’m not entirely sure which parts of Jewish culture the writers were using for inspiration, but I definitely see the historical parallels. I think that the early Elven Kingdom was probably inspired by the creation and fall of Babylon and/or Jerusalem. And the current treatment of Elves within Thedas and the Exalted March itself is likely inspired by the Church endorsed Crusades, where the Jewish people were the target of mass genocide for ‘killing Jesus’ because the Church is fucking awful and war makes money. The ‘leaders’ of the crusades were usually religious nobility, committing war crimes because religion. Both offending armies even used the Templar name. Fucked up history fact: Pretty much all of the crusades weren’t actually about religion so much as stealing territory or making money. Just look up the Children’s Crusade. So the clearest common thread that I can see is the blatant discrimination and persecution, so if that’s all that the inspiration is, then Y I K E S. I was already unimpressed with the alleged Jewish inspiration in the Dalish culture but holy shit.

To be clear, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with using history to inspire your writing. Some of the best stories are the ones inspired by real historical events and figures. But when you’re building a culture for a story and you chose to pick only the darkest parts of the culture’s history and none of the beauty of the culture itself, it rubs me the wrong way. This is all speculation seeing as how I was not in the writing room for these games, but I honestly can’t find any other parallels to the Jewish people with my limited knowledge, and if I dedicate myself to fully researching all of the potential parallels then this project will never end. Anyone who knows more about the Jewish culture and history, feel free to share your own opinions and thoughts. I really hope that I am just too uneducated in Jewish culture to see better parallels but all the ones I’ve found so far are not great. I’ll get back to this later, but I need to move on to discussing Native American cultural parallels because this post is already way too long.

My assumption is that the clan structure, philosophy, and spiritualism is inspired by the Native American people. The clan structure of Keeper > First > Second > other professions is probably based on Chiefdoms. Many tribes also hade roles specified to individuals, like hunting or weaving or building and so on, and others were more loose. Philosophies like the Vir Sulevanin or the codes of living based on individual gods are probably inspired by various religious practices and law structures. It’s hard to tell specifically where any inspiration was taken because there are a lot of nations that exist under the term Native American and as far as I know, the writers never specified any tribes. I don’t take much issue on the clan structure and the idea of the Dalish cultural lifestyle being loosely based on Native American culture. The execution is ass. For one, we barely get to see any of this stuff in practice, in game. You get to do a little with Hawke and Merrill in DA:2, and you get bits and pieces from DA:I, but overall, It’s a lot of tell, not a lot of show. What bothers me the most is how the culture is presented to the player. Most of your companions and NPC characters treat Dalish culture as lesser or too different to even bother trying to learn anything about it. If you play a Lavellan in DA:I, your own character acts very surprised that Josephine knows even two words in Dalish, and yet all of the Dalish that we meet speak the King’s language (I think that’s what English is called in DA, but I could be wrong). It makes me uncomfortable on a number of levels to have the culture presented this way to the player, especially when your responses usually make you complicit or an active participant of this problem. Sounds a whole lot like the oppression and discrimination that Native Americans deal with today and have been dealing with for centuries now. The biggest problem that I have with creating a parallel between the Dalish and Native Americans is how Dalish history is presented, particularly through Solas.

If Solas didn’t exist, I wouldn’t really have a problem with how the Dalish culture was built around lore and oral tradition. A downtrodden but proud elven people is kind of a refreshing inversion on the typical High Elf fantasy trope actually. Until you introduce the High Elf himself and he shits on the entire culture for reasons that I still can’t fully understand. If you talk with him in Haven as a Dalish elf about the Dalish people, he relates them to ignorant children. This does not change throughout the game. The only time he actually expresses that he might have misjudged the Dalish has nothing to actually do with the Dalish, just that he likes hanging out with your Inquisitor. Um, what the fuck? Solas’ whole guilt over the past thing translating into ‘I hate the Dalish because they’re not like the old elves wah,’ fucking pisses me off. I get that the Vallaslin bother him because they were originally slave markings and unnamed Dalish clans chased him off for trying to tell them ‘you’re whole culture and history is wrong,’ but if that’s all there is to him hating the Dalish then I have problems. He acknowledges that his actions led to the elves suffering, but he isn’t willing to accept the elves as they are now. He’s mad at the victims rather than the problem which is ridiculous. But now, because the game decided that Solas is a tragic villain and most of the elves side with him, it validates his belief that the Dalish culture is wrong. And if that don’t scream Manifest Destiny then I don’t know what does.

So, the thing that all of these groups have in common, and the thing that shows up the most often in media, is that fantasy minority groups are based almost entirely on real life minority groups and are depicted almost always as victims in need of saving or extinct. I’ve got a fun fact, minority groups weren’t always minorities, and weren’t always persecuted. I’d like to see that in media for like at least five minutes or something because this sucks. And framing these groups as victims for a western coded player character to rescue is the classic white savior shit that I can’t stand. Again, I’ll go deeper into that later, but I’ll end it on this last note because I need a nap now.

Culture is not defined by suffering. The Jewish people and Native Americans have faced trials and persecution for centuries, but their culture is not defined by that. The people within a cultural group are more than just their hardships. It isn’t inspiration from a culture to fantasize only about their abuse. And choosing to focus explicitly on the hardships and then turning those oppressed people into the ‘bad guys’ bc of some forced grey morality bs makes everything so much worse. If you create a society ‘based on’ existing ones, you need to actually address the positives of a culture as well. Do not present the people in a way that implies ‘less than’ to the player character. And most importantly, Do not write an oppressed people based on an oppressed people only to try and justify any part of their oppression.

And this is only part 1. Send Help. I haven’t even finished with the Dalish Art History project I already started.

to be cont.

#long post #like #really long post #dragon age #dragon age inquisition #dragon age fandom #dragon age rant #fantasy tropes #GOOD representation matters #this is separate from Dalish Redux #I just have feelings man

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aorish · 2 years ago

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(I assume you'll excuse the omitted parentheticals, etc. in blockquotes, which seem to be mostly true and not directly related to what I'm responding to)

Well, keep in mind that the label was invented by Jews to refer to how many athiests will continue to espouse essentially Christian morality and values (such as, for example, your bizarre obsession with forgiveness as an end in and of itself) We need a label for that thing, so that we can clearly think about it and discuss it.

If we're restricting the discussion of the term to it's use by Jewish people in majority Christian nations, I will concede that "cultural Christianity" is probably a useful term for that, as a descriptive set of terms or category, especially within intracultural discourse. But I think this sort of concept is often best understood in terms of negation, what a Jewish person considers as "cultural Christianity" is not identical with what e.g. a Chinese Buddhist would identify "cultural Christianity" as, because the shared overlap of cultural values between Judaism and Christianity is something that someone who is Jewish wouldn't see as an outside cultural influence, while a Buddhist would probably ascribe it to Christianity.

My point here with Buddhism isn't intended to delegitimize the use of the term by Jewish people, I'm willing to work with it in your sense of it from now on. It's just to illustrate that in the sense we're discussing it now, "cultural christianity" is as much interior to Judaism as it is exterior to Christianity. But since this means it's best understood with a Jewish cultural context, it's not clear why you're so eager to insist that non-Jewish people would find it useful. I would think the most productive use of this term is to work with other Jewish people to identify specific values that are components, like your example of "forgiveness as an end in itself" and work from there.

And if what you're saying is that Jewish people, as a distinct group of people, came up with a label to describe a different distinct group of people, ex-christian atheists, you at the very least shouldn't be surprised that most of them would be upset about that! What you're saying is: "We came up with this term to describe certain members of our outgroup, which is defined in terms that are mostly non-intuitive to them, and also lexically contradicts something significant that they consider true about themselves." This doesn't seem like a very useful or productive term to insist others use for themselves, when, by restricting its definition to that understood by Jewish people, you're simultaneously precluding them from fully understanding what is even meant by it!

That people who are both influenced by and hate Christianity get upset that we have a phrase for easily discussing that they’re influenced by Christianity seems like, y’know… not our problem? You’re trying to do an emotional appeal to counter a logical argument, and it’s not even an emotional appeal that I’m that sympathetic towards.

Well no, I'm not intentionally making an emotional appeal here. You asked why people might be upset about having a label like "cultural christian" applied to them, and I answered that, which includes both logical arguments in the direction of "they think this label is inaccurate or misleading" but also certainly includes a number of other reasons why such an approach might not be tactful. If the ultimate goal of talking about what you call "cultural Christianity" is to dismantle it, it's a poor strategy to take an approach that will antagonize the subset of ex-christian atheists who are otherwise most receptive to that shared goal!

You... don't actually need to be sympathetic to someone's beliefs or values to use them to your own advantage? If I'm trying to convince an economic conservative of the value of a socialist policy, I don't dismantle the concept of a free market or try to convince them they don't actually believe it anyway, I work from whatever common ground we share instead. If you see someone as a "cultural christian" and they see themselves as an "ex-christian" you probably do share quite a few other values with them, which will be far more productive to work from than saying "you only believe that because of cultural Christianity." If dismantling this power structure requires that you beat down all of your interlocutors and make them agree with you on everything first, it probably wasn't much of a power structure to begin with, and this is not generally a successful way to argue from a minority position.

If using this useful label requires acknowledging the (somewhat embarassing) fact that Jews in Christian countries are also influenced by Christianity, well. Okay. Being forced to acknowledge our own embarassing truths as we investigate other people’s embarassing truths is really a blessing, if you think about it? ... Again, it’s a useful term for talking about a real thing. Christianity can have influenced you even if you hate Christianity.

I think you keep touching a set of unstated assumption here that I often see come up often in this sort of discourse, but I rarely see explained, which I want to outline and respond to:

If you hold a particular value that might potentially be a result of the cultural influence of Christianity, that's:

Inherently a poor justification to hold a value

Implies that that value should be discarded

Implies it's a value that's harmful to Jewish people

????

If I have any of that wrong or I missed another reason you believe is important, please let me know, but I'm going to do my best to respond to these because they seem like what's being gestured at.

I'm broadly sympathetic to the first claim, that cultural influence is a poor justification for holding a value, with some reservations; I think that generally all beliefs or values should be questioned, and that unexamined beliefs are worse than examined ones, even if you don't choose to reject them. But although this seems to be a presumption of yours, I don't see why Christian cultural influences are inherently worse or a higher priority to expurgate than any other unexamined influences? This is also more closely ties to my own concept of morality, though, so maybe this is irrelevant to you?

I'm much less sympathetic to the second claim, that identifying a christian influence implies a certain value should be discarded. The example you gave as a culturally Christian value was "forgiveness as an end in and of itself" which on the surface of it seems... inoffensive to me? I don't hold this value in the Christian sense of it, but I wouldn't expect someone to know from your description of it why you find it bizarre, or why you expect other people to find it bizarre, and I think I could confidently draft up arguments for or against that don't originate from Christianity. Certainly also the bare fact that it's a moral value held by Christians means little to me, when I see it brought up in intercultural discourse it's usually farther removed cultures criticizing Christians for claiming to hold this (apparently to them, good) value while not actually doing so.

As for the third claim, that the fact that other people are or continue to be culturally influenced by Christianity is harmful to Jewish people.... I'm highly skeptical. This seems to be a position you hold(?), because you said it was an "embarrassing truth" that you were culturally influenced by Christianity, and it seems related to the first reblog you made on this chain to begin with. To the extent that Christianity is antisemetic, I'm entirely sympathetic, but antisemitism is neither peculiar to Christianity nor an incontrovertible part of it, let alone of all of its influences, and it seems like if we're talking about "cultural Christianity" instead of "antisemitism" that there's something else to this. I hope you have a much better example than the fact that people might suspect you're religious for attending a seder? Is there an unambiguous way that other people's cultural Christianity harms you somehow materially? What's the best example you can give me?

The rest of what you said is mostly a set of moral precepts that I find so obviously false that it seems obvious that I don’t understand them, a set of assumptions about human rationality and self-mastery that I find similarly obviously false, and some stuff chastising racists that I agree with but find misses the point.

I can't guarantee that I explained my own moral precepts well, but they are certainly ones that people other than I do hold, and I've explained them to other people in detail before and had them understand, so I think it's more likely that we're talking past each other than that they're obviously false. This is okay with me, I don't need to fully outline them again here, but I believe my values are derived from sources I can distinctly identify, and I think to the extent that you and I understand the same (Jewish-defined) concept of "cultural Christianity" we can both agree that they aren't derived from it. There are "culturally christian" moral systems that invoke "rationality" or "self-mastery" in some sense of those terms, and those people often get very angry or confused if they argue about morality with me.

I think this is a good illustration of the point I want to make about the term "culturally Christian" though. If I were to say that you don't understand my system of morality and it seems obviously false to you only because you're "culturally Jewish" that would both potentially be true, and, I suspect, also not be particularly useful to either of us. If when you asked me to explain what you meant I just doubled down on my claim and told you that you needed to deeply examine your beliefs, or I implied that you were harming me in some way by not understanding me, or I said that it was "embarrassing" that Jewish culture might have also influenced me in some ways, then, even neglecting and moral or emotional appeals, even if you were willing to be charitable and take my word for it, would you conclude that I had told you anything additional that's useful to you?

Which is why I'm still lost here, I think that "cultural Christianity" seems to be a term that you and other Jewish people who use it need to dissect further into component parts before opening a dialogue with others, because it's currently unintelligible.

Something a lot of Christians fail to realize is that they have the luxury of choosing atheism. For instance, you never see a Muslim or a Jew only saying they’re an atheist.

Imagine thinking something like this, typing it out even, and not realizing you’re telling on yourself that you think every person who was raised in your stupid little cult belongs to you forever.

Not to mention that there are plenty of ex-Jewish and ex-Muslim atheists who don’t consider themselves Jewish or Muslim, you just don’t meet as many of them because you live in a country where Jews and Muslims barely crack 2% of the population combined.

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frownyalfred · 4 years ago

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im all here for jewish bruce so please dont take this as me disagreeing with you or anything because canon doesnt even matter in the first place and mostly im just a little confused but if kate is bruce's cousin from his moms side and being jewish comes from your mom doesnt that mean kates mom is jewish and it doesnt have anything to do w. her dad who would be the kane part of the equation unlesd her dad is also jewish idk i dont really go here im just creeping on the sidelines rn yanno

Sure! Anon, this is a question that comes up a lot, and I’m not expert, but here’s what I know:

-Martha Kane and Jacob Kane were siblings

-The Kanes are established as Jewish in canon (including Jacob)

-Kate is Jewish, which, according to halachic interpretation, assumes that her mother was Jewish at the bare minimum (but that her father likely was Jewish as well)

-Martha, being Jacob’s sister, would also be Jewish (barring a weird half-brother situation, or that he converted at some point)

-The above exceptions would be unlikely considering the Jewishness of the Kane name, “Jacob”, etc.

-At the bare minimum again, since Judaism is technically matrilineal (more about this later) and the Kane family line is Jewish, any of Martha’s children would also be Jewish

-Bruce Wayne would halachically be Jewish

Now, all of this hinges on Jacob Kane being Jewish by birth and the Kane family being Jewish overall. But there are also some additional clues:

-Kate’s family was intentionally made Jewish, in a nod to Jewish creator Bob Kane, whose family was also Jewish

-Martha and Jacob’s generation usually married within Judaism by tradition (this has changed a lot in the last few decades) and marriage into another faith was generally frowned upon.

-The above makes it unlikely Jacob married into a Jewish family unintentionally (i.e., Kate’s mother being Jewish was important to Jacob as a Jewish man)

-Jacob is a commonly-given name to Jewish men

-Martha marrying outside the faith would explain why Bruce was not necessarily raised Jewish (in this retcon, at least)

Hey? Everyone keeps arguing about matrilineal Judaism. What does that even mean?

-This comes up a lot in Jewish Batman discourse. Matrilineal Judaism is a remnant of Biblical times, where Judaism could only be confirmed if the mother was Jewish (assuming the father was not present, etc)

-Certain sections of Judaism hold this strongly, including Conservative, Orthodox, Reform (to an extent) and some other traditions

-For a long time, and still somewhat to this day, it was frowned upon to marry a non-Jewish man (i.e., Jews tended to marry Jews)

-Patrilineal Judaism (Judaism passed down by the father) is slowly being more accepted, as well as other discrepancies (adoption, Jewish grandparent, etc)

-Some traditions still don’t necessarily view someone as Jewish unless they practice Judaism (had a bar mitzvah, converted, etc) but this is rare, largely because of the “one drop” rule in the Holocaust, and modern aliyah standards of Israel.

-When folks in the fandom talk about Batman in the context of matrilineal Judaism, they’re usually referring to the fact that, if Martha Kane was Jewish in any way when she had Bruce, he would technically be Jewish by birth in the eyes of many rabbis, regardless of his own practiced religion or atheism.

-Like I said earlier, all of this hinges on if Jacob Kane was Jewish by birth. I.e., that Martha and Jacob’s mother was Jewish.

I believe that canon has been established enough where we can assume that Jacob Kane was in fact Jewish by birth, that he married a Jewish woman, and had a Jewish child (Kate).

I don’t believe this retcon intentionally made Bruce Jewish. Again, some would argue that he’s not really Jewish, as he’s never practiced or recognized the religion in canon.

However, Judaism is tricky. It’s an ethnic group, a religion, and a cultural tradition, all amassed into one messy blob. It’s likely, if Martha was raised Jewish, that there were still some vestiges of Jewish cultural practices in how she raised Bruce (celebrating some holidays, traditions, or observances) unless she explicitly chose to ignore them.

All in all, I would say it is very likely that Bruce is technically Jewish. More likely than not. An accident? Yes. But a good one for all of us Jewish fans.

#more on how jewish views on justice are reflected in batman's no killing rule later #jewish batman #jewish bruce wayne #ask #anon #wow i really just wrote all of that #bruce wayne #batman #martha wayne #kate kane #batwoman #batfamily #judaism #halachic hell #i am a confused jew and don't take my word for it #this is all i can offer #would love to hear what other Jewish fans think

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nevermindirah · 4 years ago

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Non-Jewish friends, y’all might be wondering right now: Israel is doing clearly unacceptable shit to Palestinians. So, why are some Jews ardent Zionists, and why do some Jews seem to feel personally attacked by criticism of Israel?

A lot of (non-Palestinian) non-Jews have asked me where I stand on Israel/Palestine over the years, apropos of nothing, just because I’m Jewish. For the longest time I felt so stuck because I just didn’t know much about Israel/Palestine and what little I did know turned out to be largely misinformation and I felt so much pressure to say The Correct Thing That All Jews Should Say About This Issue. Obviously the violence Israel is committing against Palestinians is horrific and the interpersonal weirdness individual Jews might experience as people discuss Israel’s horrific violence doesn’t compare. I’m making this post as a small supplement to the important conversations going on about what Israel is doing to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian refugees and their descendants living outside land Israel controls. I’m making this post because non-Jews might be feeling confused by conflicting messages about Zionism as either settler colonialism or Jewish self-determination. It sucks feeling like you have to choose only one oppressed group or another. It’s possible to support Palestinian liberation and Jewish liberation at the same time! Here’s some context that might help.

Palestinian friends will probably want to ignore this post, y’all shouldn’t have to deal with your oppressors’ feelings, and especially not right now.

Zionism is the ideology behind the devastating violence Israel is committing against Palestinians right now and has been committing against Palestinians since 1947-48. It’s heartbreaking and messy to talk about this reality, because Zionism originated as a strategy to protect Jews from antisemitism.

Any oppressed group can turn into oppressors under enough pressure, because humans are flawed. Jews fleeing antisemitism turning into Israelis ethnically cleansing Palestinians happened because Zionism is profoundly influenced by its time and place of origin: 19th century Europe.

Europe invented antisemitism, and basically every European country has done at least one very very bad structural antisemitism, like expelling all the country's Jews (the monarch and/or the church then stole all the wealth the expelled people had to leave behind), looking the other way when peasants murdered a bunch of Jews as an outlet for their frustration with the actual (non-Jewish) ruling class, banning Jews from owning property or holding certain jobs or being members of guilds etc, and of course the big horrific state-sponsored mass-murder operations the Inquisition and the Holocaust. From the 1790s through the 19th century different European governments emancipated their Jews, ie removed legal barriers to full citizenship and economic participation. But this didn't end antisemitism. Just like the legal improvements of the 19th and 20th centuries didn't end antiblackness in the United States.

Also happening in this time: nationalism swept Europe. From the French Revolution through the end of World War I, Europe’s predominant form of government transformed from multiethnic empires to nation-states, countries led by and for a particular ethnic group.

So this Austro-Hungarian dude Theodor Herzl came up with this idea for Jewish nationalism. Every other European ethnic group is getting their own country, so why not Jews? Maybe this is the solution to antisemitism! Maybe we’ll finally be safe if we just all move en masse out of Europe to a place that will take all of us and never expel us!

But also also happening in Europe and around the world in this time: European imperialism and white supremacist settler colonialism. Chattel slavery saw its height and then its end (legally, at least) during this era, but white supremacy entrenched itself across the planet in post-slavery economic practices and cultural imperialism as well as national and international laws.

I believe countries have a moral obligation to take in as many refugees as they can squeeze in. International law protecting refugees has evolved a lot over the past century, but we’re still devastatingly far from every refugee getting a safe place to call home, and the main reason for that is white supremacy. The Biden administration didn’t undo the Trump administration’s horrifically low cap on refugees until like last week and it’s because Democratic party leaders treat centrist white people as more valuable voters than the huge and growing numbers of people of color, immigrants, LGBT people, unmarried women, and working class people who want to vote for elected leaders who get that nobody’s free until we’re all free. Ahem. Back to the topic at hand, the US and many other countries turned away untold numbers of refugees fleeing the fucking Holocaust, so odds are slim they’d be more welcoming in less desperate times. Moving from places where Jews are an unwanted minority to places where Jews are still a minority and either still unwanted or little understood and unlikely to win revolutionary levels of support from a largely non-Jewish public seems like a bad plan.

In the mid to late 19th century, lots of Jews took the kernel of Zionism and ran with it in different directions. Maybe this ideology could mean Jewish cultural flourishing alongside stronger political/economic integration into the societies where we’re already living! Maybe it could mean a particular kind of socialism that advocates for the liberation of Jews both as Jews and as workers! Maybe it could mean a revitalization of Jewish religious practice both in Jerusalem where we have important heritage sites and everywhere we live across the world!

Eventually Herzl’s vision of Zionism won out over the others: Jewish nationalism in the sense of a Jewish nation-state, a country that has a Jewish demographic majority and/or that legally privileges Jews over non-Jews.

Problem is, if you want to do that, you have to find a piece of land on which to do it, and Earth was already a pretty crowded place a hundred years ago. Many locations were considered, and the one that ended up winning that debate was Palestine. Where a shit ton of people, mostly non-Jews, were already living. They were forming their own nationalist movement at the time: in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire they began to organize for local self-determination in Palestine.

The Herzl types who developed Zionism as an ideology and built institutions to advocate for and create a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine were a small subset of European Jews, mostly men, mostly with significant economic privilege within what Jews were able to achieve in their particular societies at the time. They were just as Orientalist as the non-Jews around them, just as antiblack, just as racist generally for all that Jews were (and sometimes still are) considered non-white in much of Europe. They had a cool idea (put a lot of effort into something that could protect Jews from antisemitism) floating in a bathtub full of shit, and they did practically nothing to protect the cool idea from absorbing that shit. Results of this include thinking about the millions of people already living in Palestine as if they were either like the rocks and the trees that will go with the flow and accept a new ruling class, or indistinct Arabs who would just leave for other Arab countries because what could be the difference — in the staggeringly small amount of time they considered the existing residents of Palestine at all.

This racist hand-waving extended to Zionist leaders’ attitudes about Jews outside Europe as well. White Jews in settler colonies like the US were largely anti-Zionist at the time (not wanting their own countries to accuse them of dual loyalty was a common reason) but European Zionist leaders took what help they could get from Jews in the US, South Africa, Australia, etc. Jews across the Middle East and North Africa, however, barely heard from Zionist leaders about any of this until Zionist militias had removed enough Palestinians from the land and it was time to repopulate it with whichever Jewish bodies were convenient. You might have heard "all the Arab countries expelled their Jews in 1948" but lots of first-person accounts tell a different story of Israel coercing Jews who’d lived securely for a long time in places like Morocco to immigrate to Israel and then confiscating their passports and forcing them to live on less-fertile land with fewer resources while serving as a buffer between Palestinians and European Jewish immigrants. Ella Shohat is the best-known writer on Israeli racism against non-European Jews and I strongly recommend Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Perspective of Its Jewish Victims as a starting point to learn more about this.

Which brings us to today. We still haven’t eradicated antisemitism, several European governments that did a lot of structural antisemitism they still haven’t made meaningful reparations for get to feel good about themselves for “giving the Jews a state” as if carving up the former Ottoman Empire was up to them and not the people who lived there, and millions of people across the world who previously either lived peacefully enough alongside Jews or hadn’t really thought about us much at all now have very valid reasons to be pissed at this country that claims it represents all of us.

Zionism was supposed to protect Jews from antisemitism. And Israel has saved Jewish lives! But if we hadn’t sunk the past 70+ years into an ethnostate we could’ve been putting that energy into other political and economic activity to create adequate international support for refugees while we work on ending root causes of refugee crises, like antisemitism, racism, climate change, and capitalism. Meanwhile Zionism has killed, maimed, incarcerated, stolen from, traumatized, and erased the history of millions of Palestinians just because they happened to be living on land that some dudes who had a lot more in common with Thomas Jefferson and Donald Trump than with you or me decided needed to be cleansed for a Jewish ethnostate.

White nationalists in the US love Israel because they want American Jews to go away. Fascist leaders across Europe love Israel for the same reason, so much so that Israel’s prime minister is buddy-buddy with Trump and the equivalent shitstains of several European far-right parties. And I don’t know what it’s like in other white supremacist countries that are close allies of Israel, but the overwhelming majority of Zionist lobbying that pushes the US to give so much aid to Israel comes from Evangelical Christians, because they believe all the Jews have to be in the Holy Land for Jesus to come back. No thanks.

This whole thing fucking sucks. Jews and Palestinians, like all human beings, deserve to be free. Many Jews are understandably afraid of what might happen next if Israel decided to give up on ethnonationalism, allow Palestinian refugees to return, make reparations, and establish a pluralistic democracy that represents and protects all its residents — will some Palestinians murder Jews in revenge? That’s genuinely fucking scary. And it’s genuinely fucking scary to be a Palestinian in Israel/Palestine, and has been for over 70 years. We’ve gotta do something different. I say that as a white person sitting on land stolen from Piscataway people who has thought in detail about what portion of my income would be reasonable for my government to tax in order to fund reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.

Ok. One final piece of context before I wrap this up.

Most Jewish institutions in the US are explicitly Zionist, teach children that Zionism is THE way to ensure Jewish safety, and increasingly tell non-Zionist Jews that we're unwelcome or even that we’re not “real” Jews. This comes in a context where it’s only been 76 years since the latest and most gruesome of several attempts to wipe our entire people off the face of the planet. If you grew up in that environment, you, too, might be jumpy about even hearing the words Zionism or Israel, let alone considering the devastation this ideology and country have caused Palestinians.

Jews have a right to exist. Jews have a millennia-old connection to this scrap of land in the Levant, and we have a right to access religiously and culturally important geographic landmarks. What we don't have a right to is murdering or expelling other people in order to make an ethnostate, on that land or any other. Zionism is settler colonialism, but it’s settler colonialism by and for people who have a valid need for protection from structural antisemitism, which means that it’s going to take a lot of messy empathy to undo. The members of my extended family who voted for Trump (non-Jews in my case, though Jared Kushner isn’t the only Jewish Trumpite) are afraid that ending white supremacy will demote them from a privileged class to equal footing with everyone else — that’s the kind of fear individuals work on in therapy, not the kind that’s reasonable for a whole society to prevent from happening. I and millions of Jews do deserve for whole societies to work hard to end antisemitism.

I would never and will never ask a Palestinian to gently request their liberation. But if you’re not Palestinian, and you’ve got a little extra empathy to spare this week, I ask you to remember what I’ve shared here when interacting with Jews about Israel/Palestine.

If you’re a fellow Jew reading this and you feel like Israel is the only way to guarantee our safety, all I ask of you is to sit with the idea that what Israel is doing to Palestinians is too high a cost for safety that’s still not guaranteed, and start to imagine real-world ways we can protect our people from antisemitism without an ethnostate.

I made this post for people who know me (or know of me I guess?) in Old Guard and Cap fandom, despite my better judgment, because talking about Jewish Booker and Jewish Bucky and Jewish Natasha makes me so happy and I think some of the people I love on these characters with might appreciate this perspective. I didn’t provide any links in this post on purpose (to decrease its usefulness, so fewer people will reblog it) because the risk of anon hate when talking about Zionism outside my immediate fandom circles is so high. You’re welcome to reblog this post if you find it helpful! Unless you’re not within a few concentric circles of me, in which case, maybe don’t? If seeing this post makes you want to send me anon hate, no need: many people who share your perspective have already done so on Twitter.

Reliable sources on all this info are a few googles away, and I apologize for the things I know I oversimplified as well as any things I might have misremembered. I’m an American who’s never lived in Israel/Palestine who is posting this on my fandom blog.

TL;DR: This is a short ‘n pithy post about the same idea.

TL;DR, fandom edition: The shortest distillation of this anti-Zionist Jew’s feelings on the matter can be found in segment 4 of Five Times Booker Got Wasted on Purim and One Time He Didn’t.

#palestinian liberation #hi i'm an antizionist jew no i don't really want to talk about it #and yet #here we are #long post #mine #antisemitism #settler colonialism #racism #european imperialism #genocide cw

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themollyjay · 3 years ago

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The Myths of Forced Diversity and Virtue Signaling.

In my novel Mail Order Bride, the three main characters are a lesbian and two agendered aliens. In my novel Scatter, the main character is a lesbian, the love interest is a pansexual alien, and the major side characters include a half Cuban, half black Dominican lesbian, a Chinese Dragon, a New York born Jewish Dragon, and a Transgender Welsh Dragon. In my novel The Master of Puppets, the Main Characters are a lesbian shapeshifting reptilian alien cyborg and a half black, half Japanese lesbian. The major side characters include three gender fluid shapeshifting reptilian alien cyborgs, and a pansexual human. In my novel Transistor, the main character is a Trans Lesbian, the love interest is a Half human/Half Angel non-observant Ethiopian Jew, and the major side characters include a Transgender Welsh Dragon (the same one from Scatter), a Transgender woman, a Latino Lesbian, an autistic man, three Middle Eastern Arch Angels, and a hive mind AI with literally hundreds of genders. In my novel The Inevitable singularity, one of the main characters is a lesbian, another has a less clearly defined sexuality but she is definitely in love with the lesbian, and the third is functionally asexual due to a vow of chastity she takes very seriously. The major side characters include a straight guy from a social class similar to the Dalit (commonly known as untouchables) in India, a bisexual woman, a man who is from a race of genetically modified human/frog hybrids, and a woman from a race of genetically modified humans who are bred and sold as indentured sex workers.

Why am I bringing all of this up? Well, first, because it’s kind of cool to look at the list of different characters I’ve created, but mostly because it connects to what I want to talk about today, which should be obvious from the title of the essay. The concepts of ‘forced diversity’ and ‘virtue signaling’.

For those who aren’t familiar with these terms, they’re very closely related concepts. ‘Forced Diversity’ is the idea that characters who aren’t neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white males are only ever included in a story because of outside pressure from some group (usually called Social Justice Warriors, or The Woke Brigade or something similar) to meet some nebulous political agenda. The caveat to this is, of course, that you can have a women/women present as long as they are hot, don’t make any major contributions to the resolution of the plot, and the hero/heroes get to fuck them before the end of the story. ‘Virtue Signaling’, according to Wikipedia, is a pejorative neologism for the expression of a disingenuous moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating good character.

The basic argument is that Forced Diversity is a form of virtue signaling. That no one would ever write characters who aren’t neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white males because they want to. They only do it to please the evil SJW’s who are somehow both so powerful that they force everybody to conform to their desires, yet so irrelevant that catering to them dooms any creative project to financial failure via the infamous ‘go woke, go broke’ rule.

What the people who push this idea of Forced Diversity tend to forget is that we exist at a point in time when creators actually have more creative freedom than are any other people in history. Comic writers can throw up a website and publish their work as a webcomic without having to go through Marvel, DC or one of the other big names, or get a place in the dying realm of the news paper comics page. Novelists can self-publish with fairly little upfront costs, musicians can use places like YouTube and Soundcloud to get their work out without having to worry about music publishers. Artists can hock their work on twitter and tumblr and a dozen other places. Podcasts are relatively cheap to make, which has opened up a resurgence in audio dramas. Even the barrier to entry for live action drama is ridiculously low.

So, in a world where creators have more freedom than ever before, why would they choose to people their stories with characters they don’t want there? The answer, of course, is that they wouldn’t. Authors, comic creators, indie film creators and so on aren’t putting diverse characters into their stories because they are being forced to. They’re putting diverse characters into their stories because they want to. Creators want to tell stories about someone other than the generically handsome hypermasculine cisgendered heterosexual white males that have been the protagonists of so many stories over the years that we’ve choking on it. A lot of times, creators want to tell stories about people like themselves. Black creators want to tell stories about the black experience. Queer creators want to tell stories about the queer experience.

I’m an autistic, mentally ill trans feminine abuse survivor. Every day, I get up and I struggle with PTSD, with an eating disorder, with severe body dysmorphia, with anxiety and depression and just the reality of being autistic and transgender. I deal with the fact that the religious community I grew up in views me as an abomination, and genuinely believes I’m going to spend eternity burning in hell. I deal with the fact that people I’ve known for decades, even members of my own family, regularly vote for politician who publicly state that they want to strip me of my civil rights because I’m queer. I’m part of a community that experiences a disproportionately high murder and suicide rate. I’ve spent multiple years of my life deep in suicidal depression, and to this day, I still don’t trust myself around guns.

As a creator, I want to talk about those issues. I want to deal with my life experiences. I want to create characters that embody and express aspects of my lived experience and my day-to-day reality. No one is forcing me to put diversity into my books. I try to include Jewish characters as often as I can because there have been a number of important Jewish people in my life. I include queer people because I’m queer and the vast majority of friends I interact with on a regular basis are queer. I include people with mental illnesses and trauma because I am mentally ill and have trauma, and I know a lot of people with mental illnesses and trauma. My work may be full of fantastical elements, aliens and dragons and angels and superheroes and magic and ultra-high technology and AI’s and talking cats and robot dogs and shape shifters and telepaths and all sorts of other things, but at the core of the stories is my own lived experience, and neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white males are vanishingly rare in that experience.

Now, I can hear the comments already. The ‘okay, maybe that’s true for individual creators, but what about corporate artwork?’. Maybe not in those exact words, but you get the idea.

The thought here is that corporations are bowing to social pressure to include characters who aren’t neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white males, and that is somehow bad. But here’s the thing. Corporations are going to chase the dollars. They aren’t bowing to social pressure. There’s no one holding a gun to some executive’s head saying, “You must have this many diversity tokens in every script.” What is happening is that corporations are starting to clue into the fact that people who aren’t neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white males have money. They are putting black characters in their shows and movies because black people watch shows and spend money on movies. They are putting queer people in shows and movies because queer people watch shows and spend money on movies. They are putting women in shows and movies because women watch shows and spend money on movies.

No one is forcing these companies to do this. They are choosing to do it, the same way individual creators are choosing to do it. In the companies’ cases the choices are made for different reasons. It’s not because they are necessarily passionate about telling stories about a particular experience, but because they want to create art to be consumed by the largest audience possible, which means that they have to expand their audience beyond the neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white male by including characters from outside of that demographic.

And the reality is, the cries of ‘forced diversity’ and ‘virtue signaling’ almost always come from within that demographic. Note the almost. There are a scattering of individuals from outside that demographic which do subscribe to the ‘forced diversity’ and ‘virtue signaling’ myths, but that is a whole other essay. However, within that demographic, lot of the people who cry about ‘forced diversity’ see media and content as a Zero-Sum game. The more that’s created for other people, the less that is created for them.

In a way, they’re right. There are only so many slots for TV shows each week, there are only so many theaters, only so much space on comic bookshelves and so on. But at the end of the day, its literally impossible for them to consume all the content that’s being produced anyway. So, while there is, theoretically less content for them to consume, as a practical matter it’s a bit like someone who is a meat eater going to a buffet with two hundred items, and then throwing a tantrum because five of the items happen to be vegan.

The worst part is, if they could let go of how wound up they are about the ‘forced diversity’ and ‘virtue signaling’ they could probably enjoy the content that’s produced for people other than them. I mean, I’m a pasty ass white girl, and I loved Black Panther.

So, to wrap out, creators, make what you want to make, and ignore anyone who cries about forced diversity or virtue signaling. And to people who are complaining about forced diversity and virtue signaling, I want to go back to the buffet metaphor. You need to relax. Even if there are a few vegan options on the buffet, you can still get your medium rare steak, or your chicken teriyaki or whatever it is you want. Or, maybe, just maybe, you could give the falafel a try. That shit is delicious.

#writing #original fiction #media #representation #diversity #the war of souls #the hearts of heroes #The Master of Puppets #scatter #transistor #the inevitable singularity #mail order bride

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aviya932 · 4 years ago

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I’ve been thinking whether to write it or not. On one hand this is super important, on the other hand people don’t really care and I’ll probably get hate for it. But this has to be said and I’m gonna do it. This is really long but if you really want to understand what is happening in Israel right now- this is it

I live in Israel, and for the last 48 hours we have been under rapid missile attack. Hamas, which is a terror organization, have been shooting constantly at civilian cities and houses, while at the same time there have been various riots in mixed cities- by which i mean cities that have both Jewish and Islamic population- that in normal days live in co-existence. You have to understand a couple things right now before you come at me:

I don’t talk about high tension cities such as Jerusalem. This is Lod, Ramle, Jaffa and Haifa among others. Those are cities that truly are peaceful 90% of the time and I will talk about Jerusalem and Gaza so just stick with me.

THIS IS NOT A POST ABOUT WHOSE LIFE IS MORE IMPORTANT OR VALUABLE!! Living in Gaza sucks under normal circumstances but living in Sderot is not much better. There is no competition on misery and trust me as a person that actually live in Israel and knows what it’s like here on the day to day that we are well aware on how it’s like in Gaza.

this site REALLY likes to talk about experiences and how when you live through a unique event no one can talk for you about that because they don’t really know what its like. so right here right now it is my experience. You are welcome to ask follow up questions, you may send me a message to learn more or to disagree with a certain point. But if you don’t live here, even if you are from a neighbor country, then you don’t know what’s it like and i wish to god you will never know.

I don’t have all the articles right here with me, because most of the are in Hebrew and I’m writing this really quickly. So if there is interest I’ll give references and I’m really sorry for any typos here.

Here is a brief timeline of Monday, April 10. I’ll try to stick to as many events without being partial, and for contest there have been two major events on that day:

It is still Ramadan- which means that religious Muslims were on temple mount.

It was also Jerusalem day- which I have no idea how to translate but celebrates the liberation of the Jewish people and the old city from the Jordan army, and is an Israeli holiday in which it is custom to go to Jerusalem so there were a lot of Jewish people at the Kotel.

There’s a neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem called Sheikh Jarrah, in which there is an ongoing legal fight over ownership and governance. On April 10 there wad supposed to be a sitting in court about evicting Arab familiars. It was decided to postpone because of the tension but there has been many rallys over the topic.

During the Ramadan there has been a lot of tension, so the Israeli police have declared that no Jewish person will get on temple mount at that day. it made people mad, since it is a sacred location for us as well, and some groups have threatened to climb anyway. As far as I know no Jew have managed to get there, since things escalated quickly. Like i said, this month was very tensed, and when the cops hears that the Muslims in Al-Aqsa Mosque were hoarding stones they have decided to go inside. this was at about 08:30-09:00 AM. Since the mosque is right above the kotel this was very worrying but during the chaos there have been injuries- 21 cops and dozens of Palestinians. Stun grenades and stones. Hamas have given an ultimatum- either the cops get off the mountain by 18:00 or they shoot rockets at Jerusalem, which at the time is filled with as much Muslims as Jews. During the day there have been terror attacks against Jews that came to the city for celebrations and for the flag parade that was planned to start at 16:00 and to end at the kotel. there was a lynch against 3 Jews at sha’ar ha’ariot (lion gate. a lynch that was depicted by the media as the drivers’ fault and as a running over. the truth is that the driver tried to escape the stoning, hit a cement half wall and continued to be hit until a cop came to his rescue) and a 7 month old girl was hit at the head by stones.

by 18:00 Hamas fired 3 barrages toward Jerusalem. And this is the part when i can tell you first-hand. because I was there, because I could not believe that they will shoot at their own people. There were SO MANY PEOPLE at the time from BOTH SIDES. this is a precedent- until then every single shooting was aimed at Jewish city and never at Muslims.

HAMAS SHOOT AT CIVILIANS IN JERUSALEM, A CITY THAT IS CONSIDERS HOLY FOR EVERYONE, DURING THEIR OWN HOLIDAY. THEY SHOT MISSILES AT A CITY IN WHICH MUSLIM ARABS LIVE. THEY SHOT BECAUSE THE POLICE WERE TRYING TO STOP MUSLIMS FROM THROWING ROCKS AT JEWISH PEOPLE WHO DIDN’T EVEN TRY TO GET ON TEMPLE MOUNT. AND YOU KNOW WHAT THE WORST THING IS? THE FACT THAT INTERNATIONAL NEWS IMMEDIATELY STARTED BLAMING THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT AND POLICE AND COMPLETELY REMOVED ANY RESPONSIBILITY FROM HAMAS AND THE GOVERNMENT IN GAZA. It’s so so easy to blame Israel because Israel is more organized, because our government, while being mostly useless in the last year since we had 5 elections, is built by the peoples’ choice and not by fear, because Gaza is an underdog and we feel for the underdog- and for good reasons. Do not think for a moment that we don’t feel sorry for the people in Gaza. They live under a terrible government that cares more for the Palestinian agenda than their civilians, most Shekels that the Israeli government is transferring won’t reach the people and instead will be taken by Hamas to build bombs, guns, and tunnels. Hamas needs the people to stay underdogs. They will use them as human shields for as long as it gets them sympathy, they will take every opportunity they have to blame Israel and the media is giving them exactly what they want every single time- even Israeli media will twist facts and stories to sound more progressive and ‘woke’ and politically correct. so here are facts for all of you

while it makes me sound like a five year old it’s still true that this time Hamas shot first and unsolicited.

every country that has missiles shot at will, and has the right, to defend itself.

is it okay for civilian casualty? NO. Absolutely no. But don’t any of you dare to use that as a reason for Israeli cruelty. Hamas have sot over 1,000 rockets in the last 48 hours. IDF has attacked about a 150 locations. Hamas is shooting wildly at cities and homes without care who they hit. IDF is targeting senior Hamas figures only. Hamas is shooting from homes and streets. every IDF base that has weapons in will be located outside of civilian location.

IDF is using the “Roof knocking“ technique, and has been using for years. for those who don’t know it- IAF is dropping a non-explosive bomb- a smoke bomb that makes some noise- on top of any location they will hit to inform every single person inside that they need to get out. Only after a few minutes’ waiting will they hit for real. When Hamas is telling us when they will shoot it’s nothing like that. They don’t warn-they threat.

6 Israeli people have died so far. 2 of them were Muslim Arab-Israeli. They do not care who they hit.

the people in mixed cities have been rioting nearly nonstop for 48 hours now while attacking their neighbors, while burning synagogues, cars, homes and restaurants. One of my best friends lives in Lod. they have curfew from 20:00 today until 04:00 tomorrow. Her situations terrifies me more than any bomb because those are people who lived there for years.

not every Muslim and Arab is to blame, and blaming everyone is wrong. BUT ignoring what is happening right now is naive. Do not be blind and do not believe every single thing the media tells you. There are countless videos were Arabs fake death. where they dress as soldiers to fake scenes, where they openly teach their children hate and where their leaders openly lie on live television and get caught.

most of the time people lie because they really believe it, but that only serves the disinformation. Sometimes good intentions only cause more pain and hate.

Israel is not without blame. no one is without blame because life is not a book- there are no 100% good people and a 100% bad people. Life is complicated and so are people and political situations. You have to criticize your sources, and if they paint one side as good and one as bad then you should stop reading them. there are Israeli extremists as well, and far-right movements scare me as much as any Arab riots but no one is working in a vacuum.

the numbers are very different for many reasons. The death and casualties in Gaza is larger for many reasons, but I’ll focus on the most important ones. first, the IDF is more organized and so their bombs are stronger and more advanced. Second, Hamas is intentionally stationed in neighborhoods, schools and hospitals for human shields. third, Israel is using everything they can to protect its’ citizens and pays fortune on Iron Domes. Hamas does nothing to protect the people, and they have the money for that if they wanted since the receive money from Israel, the UN, and various different NGOs. If you don’t bother to protect your own how can you blame others? when people in Israel get hurt because they don’t have shelter they blame our own government.

right now everything here is a mess, and people from outside do not help when they only spread rumors and hate. You don’t live here? you have no clue what is happening. pray for all of us, but first educate your self and read more than one source of news for god sake. If you want the full picture you must read right-side news AND left-side news. Try to understand what is true, try to understand what is an exaggeration, try to understand what both sides are experiencing and don’t just assume that you are the smartest, most educated person just because you support the ‘right’ side. There is no right side. Only A side. So try to stand with us. Stand with Israel and have as much compassion for us as you have for Gaza. We are heading toward a civil war that will not hurt only one side, we have been living like that for years so trust me when i tell you that everyone is tired of how things are. We want peace but we don’t really see it happening anytime soon.

and for the love of god, don’t just send hate. I care about opinions, i want to think about stuff that i haven’t mentioned and to learn from others. Hate comments will not help either of us and will only keep us where we are now, and you trying to hurt me will honestly achieve nothing and will be kinda boring. Sorry for being so blunt but it’s the truth.

#Israel #jewish #jew #ישראל #arabs #jerusalem #ירושלים #standwithus #zionism #ציונות #יהדות #muslims

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with-my-murder-flute · 4 years ago

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Initial sketch notes of my historical research on Islamic experiences of the Siege of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, posted August 6, 2020. This is the long version of “Why might Yusuf al-Kaysani, who is from the Maghreb, have been fighting at Jerusalem in 1099?”

Trigger Warning: Graphic violence, slavery, and genocide

Notes taken from reading Paul M. Cobb’s The Race for Paradise: An Isamic History of the Crusades and supplemented by Dr. Google. I’m reading Cobb’s book partly because it’s on audiobook (though it is a fricking Audible Exclusive) and partly because it’s written for Western non-Muslim audiences, which helps get me up to speed.

The Old Guard Through History video says Joe and Nicky met during the Siege of Jerusalem in 1099, so I’ve focused most of my research on that.

Historians generally agree that in the 11th century the Islamic* world did not have a “Muslims vs Christians” worldview like the one Christians were beginning to develop. Their experience led them to expect Christians to be allies as often as enemies. Around the 1060s Christians began a new paradigm of religious war against Muslims, which Muslims didn’t really realize at the time--they responded to times when Christians would choose religious affiliation over clear strategic gain as shocking and bizarre, a departure from the status quo

(*Islamic: Society predominantly defined by Muslim rule and culture, but containing people of many different religions)

The Islamic response to the First Crusade was decentralized and diverse. There were a lot of different groups in the Levant*, many of whom had deep divisions, rivalries, and feuds. They mostly saw the Crusaders as a new factor that might affect their existing rivalries with other Islamic states, and were used to being able to broker deals or treaties with Christian groups to turn local warfare to their advantage.

(*Levant: A term used to describe countries in the Eastern Mediterranean, especially those with traditional religious significance to the Abrahamic religions - modern-day Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and parts of Egypt and Turkey. Comes from the French word for “rising”, in the sense of “where the sun rises”)

Additional term I’m going to be using a lot: “Frank”. It’s the Islamic term for, basically, “Western European” (of both the pagan and Roman Catholic varieties). It’s easier than saying “the Roman Catholics” or “The Crusaders” (which is putting a later cultural construct on people who didn’t call themselves that)

The biggest division of Islamic society in this area is, roughly, the Seljuq Turks and the Fatimid Caliphate.

In the year 1000, the Fatimids were riding high: They ruled Egypt and North Africa stretching across to the Atlantic, much of the Levant, the island of Sicily, and bits of the Arabian Peninsula around the Red Sea.

Then in the mid-11th century the Seljuqs came BLASTING OUTTA NOWHERE like holy shit calm your jets and conquered a lot of Fatimid and Byzantine territory (we’re talking the yellow parts of the map, they’ll destroy the Byzantines entirely later)

In addition to losing land to the Seljuqs, the Fatimids also lost Sicily to the Normans (who don’t even GO THERE but anyway), and North Africa through?? Independence movements?? Sheer carelessness??? I’m not quite certain.

The Seljuqs were Sunni, the Fatimids were Shi’ite, I... am not gonna try to explain that whole thing. Here’s a video.

(Small note for Yusuf character reasons: A big motivation behind the move of Ifriqiya [modern Tunisia and parts of Algieria and Libya] out of Fatimid control was that most of their populations were also Sunni)

So the Franks left Constantinople and travelled through what is now Turkey but was at the time the Byzantine Empire, and then moved into Seljuq lands. Most of the fighting in the First Crusade was against Seljuqs--mostly against tribes who fought for themselves, I think? Although in Damascus (which was a huge city the Franks just breezed by in favour of historically significant ghost towns) there was a general jihad preached like “Hey somebody should do something about all these Europeans”, so some of the people fighting were like... random people from Damascus.

While the Seljuqs were distracted, the Fatimids thought they could win some land back from THOSE UPSTARTS, so they snuck in and grabbed Jerusalem. As Peter Konieczny reports, there are scholars who think the Fatimids thought, partly because they had a lot of experience ruling Egypt’s Coptic Christian population, that they could reach a mutually satisfactory alliance with the Franks, especially since it seemed like most of the Franks didn’t intend to settle in the area, but return to Europe once they ensured pilgrim access to Jerusalem, which had mostly been hindered by banditry in Seljuq-controlled areas.

When I read stuff just generally about the Fatimid army, it’s described as being composed of two groups:

Berber tribesmen (Kutama and Sanhaja) (I’m struggling to find more info about them)

Mamluks, who are... a cross between slaves and mercenaries? Basically, they were captives from non-Muslim territory (in the Fatimids’ case, mostly Circassia in central Asia) who were brought to Muslim lands and trained as soldiers, but once active as soldiers, were paid and hired by different groups, able to achieve freedom, often gained important government posts, and occasionally toppled the government they served and ruled the roost.

This next bit is based on fairly standard histories of the Siege of Jerusalem that rely a lot on Western sources, like this article by Michael D. Hull and this article by Michael Cartwright. Which... have to be taken with a grain of salt, because medieval military histories don’t tend to line up super well with archaeology or plain logistics. Generally, it isn’t wise to take medieval European sources at their word when they say “the army had 10,000 people” or “they killed every last person”. They’re often written after the fact and with clear biases, and, when it comes to the Crusades, with an imperfect understanding of the culture they’re describing. I’d like to have better sources, but this is where I’m starting from, especially since I have limited access to academic sources during the summer.

So, the standard history says that Jerusalem was taken in 1098 by Emir al-Afdal Shahinshah, but by 1099, governor Iftikhar al-Daula was in command of the defenses. and that he had a “garrison of Arab cavalry and Sudanese archers.” Cartwright reports it as “perhaps several thousand infantry and an elite cavalry corps of 400 Egyptians.” I currently have no way of knowing which of these troops were Mamluks and which weren’t.

According to Hull, when the Fatimids in Jerusalem realized they would have to face a siege, they expelled all Christians of any denomination from the city, as well as all Jews “except for those of a sect for whom it was mandatory to reside in the Holy City”. Cartwright reports it as “...all Christians were kicked out if the city. In contrast, the Jewish population were allowed to stay”. Cartwright reports that Jerusalem’s population, 70,000 at the beginning of the year, was lowered to 30,000 by the expulsions (though some people were also coming into the city to take refuge from the oncoming Frankish army). Additional preparations included poisoning wells outside of Jerusalem to deny the Frankish army water, and emptying the land around the city of livestock and people.

The Fatimids were also expecting the arrival of an army marching north from Egypt to help them out relatively soon, which explains why their strategy was mostly “hunker down and wait” with very limited attacks outside the city.

The Franks came southward down the coast to Jaffa, where they took the nearest port to Jerusalem, and then approached the city.

June 7, 1099: The Frankish army shows up at Jerusalem with about 15,000 people total and less than 1,500 armed knights. They split into two camps, one attacking from the south, one from the north. They were in rough shape and didn’t have any siege weapons, so the Fatimid defenders were able to sit up on the walls, taunt them, and shoot arrows. They enlivened the tedium by sending cavalry units outside the walls to harass Franks who were scavenging for food and water.

June 13, 1099: Some Franks on the north side of the city managed to scrabble together siege ladders and try to climb up and assault the walls; they were repelled pretty easily by the defenders.

June 17, 1099: English and Genoese ships land at Jaffa, carrying siege equipment and fresh supplies. Hull reports that the Fatimids dispatched troops, 400 Arabs and 200 Turks, to attack the supply chain between Jaffa and Jerusalem; Hull reports that the Franks only lost 5 of the force of maybe 150-200 knights, and “all of the archers” (about 50?)

It takes about three weeks to transport the supplies to Jerusalem and for the siege towers to be built; the Genoese played an especially large role in building the siege equipment, and their chief engineer is named as William Embriaco.

On July 10 the siege engines were finished and wheeled to the walls. That night everyone inside the city and out sat over campfires, showing each other pictures of their families and trying to humanize themselves for the audience to make their impending deaths more impactful

(I kid)

(mostly)

June 13-15: Almost continuous fighting between the Franks, who are trying to move their siege engines close enough to make it onto the walls of Jerusalem, and the Fatimid defenders, who were trying to fight them off and burn their towers down.

June 15: The Franks breach the walls and begin pouring inside, killing and looting its inhabitants. There is well-documented destruction of Muslim and Jewish holy places, where Muslims and Jews fled for refuge and were killed. This part is. Sickening. Tens of thousands of people dead; the streets running with blood.

The Fatimid governor and various others (possibly the remainders of the army? Possibly important citizens? Some Jews appear to be in this group?) took refuge in the Tower of David, and were able to negotiate to leave Jerusalem safely. The Fatimid soldiers who left the city that way joined the advancing Fatimid army at Ascalon, southwest of Jerusalem.

It’s unclear who the survivors were--the sources mention people left aside being made into slaves, being allowed to leave the city, or being ransomed by rich relatives outside the city. The fact that we have Jewish and Muslim accounts of what happened during this time means there were survivors

But let’s face it: The survivors were the minority. The majority of people, thousands of them, were slaughtered by the Franks as they took over the city.

Epilogue: The Fatimids tried to take Jerusalem back a month later, and failed. Jerusalem was in Crusader hands.

It’s taken me three days to write this up and I’m ending it feeling really blah and drained by the enormity of this shit. I...

The Race for Paradise has this bit that talks about two Western ways of talking about the Crusades:

The Traditional paradigm, where this was a great moment for Christianity, whew we kicked those guys’ BUTTS!

The Lachrymose (Latin for “full of tears”) paradigm, coming to popularity since the Enlightenment, where this was horrific mass slaughter caused by religious zealotry and it was bad and everything was bad

But the thing is, we can’t actually stop there. Or, that is: It’s not actually useful for our only narratives about the Crusades to be either “Christians kill everyone and it’s awesome” or “Christians kill everyone and it’s terrible”. It’s not true; it feeds into the overall false narrative of “European Christians only interacted with [Muslims/Middle Easterners/People of Colour] very rarely, and only when there was an atrocity happening.” It means we fail to acknowledge all the cross-cultural contacts that happened without an atrocity, and fail to realize that a lot of these atrocities came out of the context of incredibly warlike countries whose economies depended on warfare and conquest.

Another element is... during the 11th century, when all of this happened, the Normans also invaded England. Their conquest was absolutely brutal. England was ethnically and linguistically divided for centuries between a French-speaking colonial upper class, and the English-speaking peasantry. But over the centuries, these two groups came to live together peacefully and build a distinctly new society. Most peoples’ narratives of medieval England are not “a land of massacre, genocide, and ethnic strife”, even though those things definitely happened. We just have much stronger associations with medieval English art, literature, culture, fashion, and architecture than its slaughters.

So basically: The challenge for us in the 21st century is to develop a richer understanding of the past. We know a hell of a lot about battles and armies; we know way less about merchants and farmers, and about the long decades between battles and armies. Military history tells us about waging war, but if we can look past that, we can find out about waging peace.

Now I’m going to go collapse into my bed, and in a day or five I’ll write up a TL;DR version about what I think the likeliest backstories for Joe are (Briefly: probably a Fatimid cavalry soldier or an ordinary person who thought it was safe to be in Jerusalem at the time, and had to defend himself and his servants etc when the city fell)

#medievalism #my stuff #the old guard #nicky/joe #yusuf al-kaysani

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