#are not white they are from different cultures AND times

[mariacallous]

Honey cake is a hallmark of Rosh Hashanah and the fall Jewish holidays  — Ashkenazi honey cake, that is. But did you know there’s a Sephardi cake traditionally served for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur break fast and during Sukkot? Like its Eastern European counterpart, tishpishti symbolizes wishes for a sweet new year and the fullness of life. The cake is also popular for Purim and adapted for Passover.

Semolina pastries and puddings have been made for centuries throughout the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East. Tishpishti is traditionally made with fine semolina and soaked in a sweet syrup of sugar, honey or a mixture, but beyond these common elements, there are many variations in both the way tishpishti is made — such as nuts or no nuts, eggs or no eggs, flavored with lemon, orange or rose water — and even what it’s called according to different geographic and cultural roots. For example, in Egypt, it’s basboosah or baboussa, namora or namoura in Syria and shamali in Crete.

Tishpishti is perhaps the name most used and, as we know it today, the cake originated in Turkey. In the “Encyclopedia of Jewish Food,” Gil Marks explains that in Israel and for Jews from once-Ottoman Turkey, Greece and the Balkans, the name is probably a nonsense name from the Turkish “tez” (fast/quick) and “pişti” (plane/slope). Put together, it means “quickly done.” In Ladino it might also be called pispiti, tupishti and revani, which Joyce Goldstein in “Sephardic Flavors: Jewish Cooking of the Mediterranean” notes is named after a 16th century Turkish poet “who wrote about the delights of food.” 

Many tishpishti recipes use eggs, including ones that instruct you to whip the whites separate from the yolks, a Sephardi contribution to tishpishti. This recipe, however, is based on a very old traditional way of making cakes from a thick dough without eggs. My concession to modernity is adding baking powder and soda, both 19th century products, to lessen the density of the cake. Using ground almonds instead of walnuts will result in a lighter colored cake, which is traditional at Rosh Hashanah to symbolize a bright new year. Tishpishti is delicious on its own or served with a spoonful of yogurt, labneh or whipped cream and a cup of mint tea or strong Turkish coffee.

Notes:

It is best to make the syrup ahead of time so it has time to cool, although you can choose to make it while the cake bakes, then refrigerate it to cool more quickly. 

Tishpishti is best when left at room temperature for several hours or overnight so the syrup penetrates the cake. 

Store wrapped at room temperature for two days or a week in the refrigerator. The cake can be well-wrapped and frozen for two months. Defrost and then refresh with some drizzles of warm syrup. 

[applesauce42069]

I want to talk about Jewish indigeneity using this document from the UN, entitled "Who are indigenous peoples."

I'm not saying that all Jews necessarily fit every single thing that is on this document in all cases and times. I believe this document from the UN, which is clearly intended to be used for legal and political purposes, to identify vulnerable groups who need assistance. But even if we don't - we don't have to.

The document itself says:

According to the UN the most fruitful approach is to identify, rather than define indigenous peoples. This is based on the fundamental criterion of self-identification as underlined in a number of human rights documents

Jews have understood that our ancestors came from and originated in the Southern Levant since before the word "indigenous" existed. Our ancestors cared about their homeland so much that they wrote a story that said that our god gave it to them to describe how special our land was to them.

There are many ancient documents that describe how strongly Jews feel about the land that shares a name with us, the land that we call Israel. The earliest example I know of a Jew calling themselves indigenous to Israel is from 1947 at the UN, when Eliyahu Eliachar said:

As the indigenous population of Palestine, we demand the restitution of our rights, the abolition of the White Paper of 1939 and all it stands for and the opening of the gates to all Jews in need of a home, whether from East or West. Not wanted anywhere — undesirables everywhere — this germ of restlessness and despair is eating us up root and branch.

I'm going to share a graphic from the pew research centre:

why do you think this is the case? it is because most jews understand themselves as connected to israel by nature of being jewish because we are indigenous to there.

So, details from the UN document that I feel resonates with Jews, Jewish identity, and Jewish history:

Self- identification as indigenous peoples at the individual level and accepted by the community as their member. Historical continuity with pre-colonial and/or pre-settler societies. Strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources. Distinct social, economic or political systems Resolve to maintain and reproduce their ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities. Indigenous peoples are the holders of unique languages, knowledge systems and beliefs and possess invaluable knowledge of practices for the sustainable management of natural resources. They have a special relation to and use of their traditional land. Their ancestral land has a fundamental importance for their collective physical and cultural survival as peoples. Indigenous peoples hold their own diverse concepts of development, based on their traditional values, visions, needs and priorities.

...they are the descendants - according to a common definition - of those who inhabited a country or a geographical region at the time when people of different cultures or ethnic origins arrived. The new arrivals later became dominant through conquest, occupation, settlement or other means.

[kn11ves]

my comic is live right now!

kyle and rex is an absurdist drama set in a stagnant afterlife where everyone lies, cheats, manipulates, and hurts each other in order to gain political power and admiration from the public.

with characters constantly haunted by ghosts of the past, trying to stay on top of the food chain despite constant betrayals and having their secrets held up above their heads, comes back kyle, from his long stay back as a guiding spirit on earth, to take back reigns of the throne in the inbetween. though much like everyone else, hes got a long list of dirty laundry that many are aching to reveal. there are no real friends here.

⸻

updates every 2 weeks, at 6:30 pm central US time! (SP & ENG)

WEBTOON: english link + spanish link

TAPAS: english link + spanish link

FANEO: spanish link

[bluejay-makes]

Drow kiddos growing up in different cities

[cosmogyros]

It's fucking weird how rude people are about immigration sometimes. And I don't just mean bigots being biased and stuff. I mean that, on a REGULAR basis, people ask me if I'm thinking about "going back to the US". And I'm just like... no? What do you mean "back to the US"? I live in Germany. I LIVE IN GERMANY.

I literally fucking started learning German and obsessing on German culture in high school, then I went to college in the US and majored in German Studies, including two study-abroad programs in Germany, then I moved to Germany for grad school and lived there for three years and worked in various German-speaking jobs while studying, then I had to temporarily return to the US but found a German-translation-based job at the US branch of a German company, and made a bunch of German or at least German-speaking friends in my new US city, and then a few years later I was able to move back to Germany, where I got a work visa sponsored by my employer and a full-time salaried job, and after a few more years I acquired my permanent residency, and soon I'll be applying for citizenship.

And people still sometimes ask me whether I'm considering "going back to the US". Like... dude? Would you ask a Mexican living in the US about their plans for "going back to Mexico"? That is rude as fuck.

Immigration is fucking hard. Why on earth would I have gone through all this shit just to throw it up in the air like "Oh well, never mind!"

[musical-chick-13]

Regarding the whole "Fandom Is An Escape, so why should I have to care this much about misogyny/racism/ableism/transphobia/etc." thing. Idk about the rest of you, but it gets kind of hard for me to "escape" when I keep seeing people say the same vile things about characters who share aspects of my identity that I hear all the time in real life.

[hella1975]

all hate to tiktok for taking 'having a space to more openly and actively talk about different cultures' to mean 'cultures are NOT to be shared and we must be vigilantly defensive of our cultures for fear of appropriation, a word that can be applied to any multicultural interaction'. like of course cultural appropriation is a very real problem but ive seen with the access to global multicultural conversation that tiktok provides it's made people TERRIFIED to even interact with cultures other than their own for fear of 'doing it wrong'. like at some point you have to acknowledge that in the real world of the great outdoors, the majority of people are eager to SHARE their cultures. yes there are ignorant questions and biases but also... how do you think those things get unlearnt? i dont understand how deciding that multiculturalism is an elephant in the room instead of a normal thing that should just be talked about and lived with is supposed to benefit anyone? and kids on tiktok are CONVINCED that it's a time bomb of a conversation to have and therefore must be avoided at all costs but like. people generally LOVE their home and their culture and are PROUD of it and want to share it. how have we made it so that showing genuine interest and a desire to understand something so integral to a person's identity is now feared and borderline demonised?

[dykedvonte]

The Khans - My Introspective

I don't like the Military and I don't support a lot of the actions the NCR does to the Mojave in New Vegas but in terms of the Khans I feel like the fandom infantilizes or diminishes the fact that they are or at least one of the most violent raider groups in the Mojave.

What happened at Bitter Springs was a tragedy, innocent lives were lost and the fact that the NCR swept it under the rug and continued to hunt down Khans that are truly trying to back down and resettle is horrendous, but there is a history to the NCR's aggression towards them.

The Khans first appear in Fallout 1, the main faction of raiders in the game besides the mentioned Vipers (who don't actually appear if I remember correctly). They came from Vault 15 along with the members that would form rival groups; The Vipers, The Jackals, and Shady Sands. They are a very large and foreboding raiding party, known for burning towns and encampments they attack and taking survivors as their slaves or slaves to sell. They are a big reason why the Jackals and Vipers are actually so small in New Vegas, they wiped them out.

Their main targets where Shady Sands and Junker town, the former of the two would be what became The New California Republic. This explains a big part of their animosity towards the Khans, only furthered by the fact the Khans kidnapped Tandi as a young girl, the girl that would go to offically found the NCR out of Shady Sands. When the dweller saved her and killed much of the Khans, this allowed the NCR to develop into what it currently is as they no longer needed to focus on fighting off constant raids.

When the Khans became the New Khans in Fallout 2, they barely resembled the Khans as they were led by Darion, Garl Death-Hand's son (former leader of the Khans). They were smaller and refortified vault 15, still planning to take down the NCR (at this time nowhere near as imperialist as they are in FNV) as mostly a revenge/power ploy. They manipulate The Squat, a group of y'know squatters, that lived in the upper levels, promising and lying about repairing the vault and offering them ransacked caravan resources if they kept the NCR away. Being their only life line The Squat had no choice. Still the chosen one got rid of them and they left New California for the untapped Mojave.

The Great Khans, the most current iteration, continued in the path as the original Khans, regrouping and gaining information from the Followers who hoped they'd use their new medical knowledge to heal themselves. They gained more members and a substantial part of Vegas territory before they were run out by the three families. They were pushed to Bitter Springs where they first and foremost continued to pick off and attack NCR settlements, most of which consisted of caravans, towns, and camps as they saw them as easy like in their old days. It was the killing of four influential Republic members (non-military) that brought on Bitter Springs.

Bitter Springs was the result of years of hatred and animosity and likely the goal to send a final message to the Khans. It does not excuse the fact that innocent men, women, and children were slaughtered with few survivors. It does not excuse the fact that the NCR has yet to make amends for this and continues to try and persecute the Khans even in moments of surrender.

This post is not to defend what happened but to give a quick rundown of the Khan's history and their history with the NCR. It's to remind people that the NCR is not just their military power but an actual group/settlement of people that were also attacked indiscriminately by the Khans. It's to point out that the Khans were not a band of indigenous people (no matter the comparisons) driven from their homes but raiders who fed into the brutal cultures of the west coast wasteland and were in turn treated to the same things.

My frustration comes from the fact that FNV has so many comparisons to indigenous struggles but the groups it chooses are not comparable at all. Their oppression hinges on not being familiar with their past, which explains why they have the reputation they do in canon. The "tribes" are often not even groups of minorities or have goals/desires out of acquisitions of power and I feel like it is important to both acknowledge that this is bad indigenous rep because it is not supposed to be. It is supposed to be a comparison of the in-game groups and how they all do the same things and justify it in their own fucked up ways, some better at it than others.

FNV of all the Fallout games (in light of it being heavily Western based) distastefully uses indigenous imagery and theming for groups that are sad mimicries of American indigenous cultures at best and outright offensive at worst.

[giantkillerjack]

Favorite part about Death Note is that Light gets the Note and IMMEDIATELY becomes a serial killer fascist with a god complex.

No build-up, no Fall From Grace, no slow corruption of a good boy gradually becoming a monster. Just-- SPEED RUN STRATS. And I love that for him.

Tbh, I think there are a lot of folks (especially boys) from my high school days who would have immediately become monsters if given the power of life and death over every person around them.

It's kind of like how when people have apparently casual ableist beliefs, and you push them to elaborate on that just a little bit, they'll often end up openly saying stuff like "well, some people are just too disabled to be worth the resources it takes to support them." - Which is... eugenics. It's just eugenics, justified by the myth of scarcity. Now these folks almost certainly won't call it eugenics, or even think of it that way. But that doesn't make it NOT a core belief of the Nazis.

In a similar way, Light seems like a nice and well-adjusted boy with strong beliefs. No harm in that.

But to paraphrase Lindsay Ellis in her analysis of the Game of Thrones ending, "Power doesn't necessarily corrupt. Power reveals." [I think she was quoting someone else when she said this. It was someone who wrote a biography on LBJ. Whatever. Lindsay said it and she's smart as hell and I recommend her videos.]

And 15 minutes into the Death Note musical, I'm already thinking about how so many beliefs "casually" held by well-adjusted, nice people immediately reveal their monstrousness when talked through to their natural conclusion.

And I wonder how many of those people, given the power of life and death over everyone around them - the power to take their ideas to their natural conclusions - would also immediately reveal how their lack of self-reflection has laid the groundwork for them to become monsters.

[ablednt]

Granted I have the overall geographical and cultural knowledge of a 4th grader but from what I can tell the nuclear family model really does seem to be a white colonial invention

Different cultures have different approaches but I mainly hear about either large family units where multiple generations support each other and raise their children and grandchildren together or an "it takes a village" approach where children are raised somewhat communally

And I can't really speak on it much or claim that these families were free of abuse or that children aren't often an oppressed group basically everywhere I know of but the way ownership of your children is so engrained into white society is so bizarre

Like once you notice it you can't unnotice it even the most loving well meaning parents don't know what to do about it because everyone is so isolated from their own families and their own communities so you wind up with 1-2 parents who have full legal ownership of their child and are raised in a culture where you don't have personhood until you're 18 and all attempts at self actualization before them are seen as clueless rebellion. Like our culture is so divorced from the concept that a parent is someone who is helping mentor and care for their child so they can thrive as a fellow human being and it's actually so alarming

And ik this problem isn't unique to white and colonized people but it's honestly really soothing to hear about how other cultures approach and view parenting and community as a whole and to internalize it doesn't have to be this way

[irhabiya]

i think my favorite thing that i got out of my medical anthropology elective is how culturally defined health and illness are... very interesting to think about

[faunandfloraas]

inadvertently stopped using my freckle fade cream without thinking.... right around the time i started making gifs of felix.... coincidence?

[ei-mugi]

one time i was talking to my american online friends about stuff and i was like "haha yeah people always say i look ambiguously european but cant place what i am specifically" and they were like "i dont think europeans have a look though." what do you mean. you dont believe different ethnic features exist...?

[aromanticasterisms]

emilie is sooo flower based omg. she was made for me

[fanfictiongreenirises]

re: ur tags in that $10 food poll, why does the ethnicity of someone factor in to if you'll ask for reimbursement...???

this got really long lmao but in my defence the tl;dr version of it is literally "different cultures have different norms of how paying for food works regardless of amount" but if you're asking why ethnicity is a factor then i'd rather give more detail than leave it there

mmkay so first thing you need to know about me is im bengali, and culturally, there are many things that go into who pays when you're buying food and how reimbursement works. (second thing i'd like for you to know as a disclaimer is i'm 1.5 gen immigrant so my norms with paying might not necessarily reflect the current norms in bangladesh)

so if i'm out with another bengali or south asian person and they're younger than me, i'm paying for the food regardless of cost and absolutely not asking for reimbursement. if they're my age and we're friends and we're not paying for our own food for whatever reason, then we're going to fight about it and whoever loses will fight harder the next time we go out or reimburse in another way (e.g. buying other food, paying for smth else if we're shopping together - rly depends on the relationship, but it doesn't have to be a 1:1 reimbursement), but even if there is no next time and you both know it, there'll still be no "here have the exact amount back via cash/bank transfer" reimbursement over it bc you just wouldn't ask for the money back. if they're older than me, it'll take a pretty unique situation for me to be the one paying but depending on how much older, they'll likely repay me by buying something else, or paying next time. best example of this is my gujarati colleague who's about double my age - the first time we went to grab coffee together at work, it was spontaneous and she didn't have her wallet on her so i paid and refused to give her my bank details, and the next time we went for coffee she paid and specifically was like 'you paid last time' so i'd fight her less on it; every time after that we paid for our own even though she still tried to pay for mine (but fought significantly less, because the initial social dance was over).

however!! the norms in white australian culture (that i've experienced) are different!! if i pay and insist a little too strongly that they don't need to pay me back, then white australians get weird about it - because i'm not following the norms. (they'll either go to Lengths to pay me back, or they'll be like 'cool thx' and move on lmao there's no in between.) so i'll be like 'no you don't need to pay me back it's just $10' once (if at all) and then give in and accept monetary reimbursement. i don't believe anyone when they say i don't need to pay them back, unless i've known them for a v long time, so i'll still find a way to slip them money (or if i have friends who go to Lengths to pay me back, then i'll do the same for them, because that'll be their norm/expectation) (i've seen bengalis try to do this to other bengalis and the reaction ranges from being super offended to really confused/surprised lmaoo)

obviously, this is a super broad explanation and generalisation, and doesn't really take into consideration things like how my personal relationship with people also impacts this, or how different circles will have different norms within those circles that'd override other social and cultural cues that might exist, or how specific people will have preferences for paying you back that you'll respect and often mirror. and obligatory disclaimer: cultures aren't homogeneous and other people will have had different experiences with the ones i've mentioned that won't align with mine; and none of these norms are good/bad or right/wrong, they're just different norms and expectations and ways of doing things

[echidnana]

maybe this is just us but. as a system of color. we don't think it's inherently appropriative to use names from different cultures. obviously there ARE ppl who do it disrespectfully or disregard the importance of names in cultures and stuff but it's always felt weird to see white systems especially say u can't use any names from different cultures ever