#building Jewish observance

[matan4il]

Judaism is a native religion and identity, so like all indigenous religions, it has ALWAYS sanctified the bond between the tribe and its ancestral land:

* Jews, no matter where around the world we are, pray in the direction of the Hebrew Temple in Jerusalem.

* Israel, Jerusalem, and Zion are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible hundreds of times, often in connection to the importance of the bond between the land and the Jewish people.

* The Hebrew calendar and Jewish holidays are based on the agricultural year as experienced in the Land of Israel. For example, we celebrate Shavu'ot, the Jewish festival of the harvest, during the Hebrew month of Sivan, which is roughly around the Gregorian month of June. In Australia, June is the rainiest month of the year, with severe temperature drops, absolutely not the right time for the harvest. But Australian Jews still celebrate Shavu'ot at the same time as all other Jews, around June. Because we ALL honor and preserve the agricultural cycle of our ancestors in Israel.

* Many Jewish prayers express a desire to return to Israel, for example with the phrase, "Next year in Jerusalem."

Here's a greeting card, drawn at Linz, a Nazi concentration camp in Austria, which was turned into a DP (displaced persons) camp at the end of the war. The card features the above three Hebrew words (you can see the freed prisoners of the camp on the left, heading towards a land with palm trees on the right, with one of the buildings having a Star of David on top):

* The holiest site for Jewish people in the entire world is the thousands of years old Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where the Jewish temple stood, in Israel.

* Several Jewish holidays explicitly celebrate the Zionist notion, meaning the importance of the bond between the Jews and the Land of Israel. Hanukkah is a celebration of the native Jews fighting off the Greek occupying forces, and re-establishing Jewish sovereignty in Israel, and the freedom from religious persecution this allowed Jews, by re-dedicating the Hebrew Temple in Jerusalem to Jewish worship, after it was defiled by the Greeks (including by re-lighting the Temple Menorah). Passover celebrates the deliverance of the Jews from Egypt, and the start of their journey back home, to their ancestral land in Israel, with the Passover meal ceremony including thanking God for bringing Jews back to Israel, and for building the Temple in Jerusalem for them.

* The language of the Jewish people is Hebrew, which is the last Canaanite language, the last of the languages spoken by the native peoples of Israel. Hebrew is specifically tied to the geography of Israel. For example, in the Bible, the Hebrew word for "west" is also the Hebrew word for "sea," because Israel's western border is the Mediterranean Sea. Similarly, the Hebrew word for "south" is also the Hebrew name of the desert that makes up the southern part of Israel, the Negev. Every Jewish language, which developed in the diaspora (such as Yiddish and Ladino), features words borrowed from Hebrew.

Here's an Israeli poster made in 1949, honoring "Sea Day" and featuring a part of a biblical verse (Genesis 28, verse 14): "And your seed shall be as the sand of the earth, and you will spread to the sea and to the east, to the north and to the Negev, and blessed in you and in your seed will be all the families of the Earth."

* Among the 613 Jewish mitzvahs, religious decrees that Jews must observe, one explicitly states that whenever possible, Jews should strive to live on their ancestral land in Israel. This is called in Hebrew, "mitzvat yishuv Eretz Yisrael."

* Among the 613 mitzvahs, there are 26 mitzvahs that can only be observed while living in the Land of Israel. These are called in Hebrew, "mitzvot ha'tluiot ba'aretz."

* Jewish homes have included for centuries a decorative piece hung on the eastern wall, and called "mizrach" (the Hebrew word for "east"), because that was the direction of Israel to most Jews. It usually included a biblical verse in Hebrew, often one that either mentions the east, Israel or Jerusalem, and also illustrations of Jerusalem or Israel.

Here's an 18th or 19th century mizrach from Germany:

* In Jewish synagogues, especially in Europe, the eastern wall was the most important one, because it was the one facing Israel. This wall was called, "kotel ha'mizrach" which means in Hebrew "the wall of the east."

* Oh, but the word "kotel" refers specifically to the walls of the Temple Mount. For example, the Western Wall, the only one of the Temple Mount's four walls accessible to Jews for centuries (and therefore the plaza in front of it became the second holiest place to Jews, after the Temple Mount itself) is called in Hebrew, "ha'kotel" (the wall). So why would a synagogue wall be referred to as "kotel" as well? Because every Jewish synagogue is called "mikdash me'at," a lesser temple. Every Jewish synagogue is a reminder and placeholder for the destroyed Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.

* Accordingly, many Jewish synagogues feature reminders of the Beit Ha'Mikdash (the Hebrew Temple). For example, this holy ark, from a synagogue in Romania, which survived the Holocaust, and is today presented at Yad Vashem (Israel's national Holocaust museum), includes two pillars on its sides, a reminder of the Temple in Jerusalem's pillars believed to have been build by King Solomon. The holy ark's pillars are named exactly like the Temple's two pillars, Boaz and Yachin. This holy ark also features two hands, they're meant to be the high priest's, while he's performing the priestly blessing, an ancient Jewish ceremony that was conducted on the steps of the Temple in Jerusalem.

* In fact, over the centuries, one of the most prominent Jewish symbols is the menorah, which is a reflection of the candelabra eternally lit in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.

The Temple Menorah being stolen by the occupying Romans, as seen on the Titus Arch in Rome:

The menorah as incorporated into jewelery, as a Jewish symbol, goes back thousands of years:

* For centuries, Jews created Jewish art and culture, which expressed Zionist longing. For example, the Sephardi doctor, philosopher and poet Rabbi Yehuda Ha'Levi writes what is maybe the most famous of the "Zion poems" while living in Islamic-occupied Spain: "My heart is in the East, and I am at the end of west / How shall I taste what I eat, and how should it be an enjoyable taste? / How shall I repay my vows and commitments, while / Zion is in the ropes of Edom, and I am in the bonds of Arabia? / It would be easy for me to leave all of the good of Spain, just like / It would be precious to me to witness the ashes of a ruined temple."

* In 1140, Rabbi Yehuda Ha'Levi finally fulfilled his wish, and boarded a ship for the Land of Israel. We don't know what happened to him, but the phrasing in a Hebrew letter, written by Jews who knew him, and found in Egypt, implies that he was murdered. For almost 2,000 years, it was dangerous for Jews to try and return to Israel, and it certainly wasn't possible on the scale of a national movement. Jews knew it was dangerous. And yet for centuries, despite that, individual Jews like Rabbi Yehuda Ha'Levi persisted in attempting this return. This is a part of Jewish history. It's not just that there was a small number of Jews, who managed to remain in Israel despite the repeated expulsions and massacres of Jews from our land, it's also that there was a small number of Jews who dared attempt the return to Israel continuously, over centuries, and neither of these things would have happened had Judaism not been Zionist. Always.

* For centuries, every Jewish wedding includes a part, where the groom recites an oath of loyalty and longing for Jerusalem. The text itself is taken from the Bible, from the second part of Psalms 137: "If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget itself, let my tongue be glued to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not raise Jerusalem at the height of my joy."

* For centuries, every Jewish wedding included a symbolic reminder of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and our ancestors' following expulsion from the Land of Israel, by breaking a cup made of glass.

* For centuries, many Jewish homes featured an unfinished patch, as a similar reminder. I'm a secular Jew, but my real life bestie is religious, and her house has a hole in the eastern wall, intentionally left there.

* In fact, the destruction of the Temple, and the following expulsion of the Jewish people from Israel, is SUCH a traumatic and significant event for the Jewish faith, that there is a religious national day of mourning every year, on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av (the date when Jews believe the first Temple was destroyed in Jerusalem by the Babylonian occupiers, and the second one, re-built after an expulsion and return of the Jews from Babylon to their native land, was destroyed by the Roman occupiers), when Jews fast.

* Ethiopian Jews, who were probably the most disconnected Jewish community along the centuries, have a special holiday, called Sigd. This name is derived from the Hebrew word for worship or prostration, "sgida." It features asking God to return them to Israel. Since the state of Israel has helped the Ethiopian Jewish community to return to this land, starting in 1982, it has become a part of Sigd to celebrate it specifically in Jerusalem.

The Ethiopian Jewish community celebrating Sigd in Jerusalem:

* In fact, the three major Jewish holidays, other than Yom Kippur, are also called "the three pilgrimages" ("shloshet ha'regalim"), because while the Temple stood in Jerusalem, they included all Jews coming there to celebrate the holiday together. These three holidays are Sukkot, Pesach (Passover) and Shavu'ot.

Here's a piece of art depicting Jews in antiquity, coming from all over Israel to the Temple in Jerusalem for sholoshet ha'regalim:

* The Hebrew Bible itself expresses the Jewish Zionist longing, the desire of the Jews to return to their ancestral land no matter what, after they were expelled by the Babylonians from Israel, the same desire that drove their return from their first exile, as recorded in the Bible, and supported by historical documents and archaeological finds. Here's the first part of Psalms 137:

Upon the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, and we wept, as we remembered Zion. On willows there we hung our harps, because there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors for joy. "Sing to us from the song of Zion!" How shall we sing God's song on foreign soil?

and here's the craziest thing about this list: there's a good chance I forgot some stuff.

This is posted in honor of the first candle of Hanukkah tonight, and the many Tumblr antisemites, who distort Jewish identity and history by claiming Zionism is incompatible with or has nothing to do with Judaism, people who in the name of anti-Zionism celebrated the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, who ignore Jews pointing out that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic, who prove it by going out of their way to deny Jewish native rights, and who think posting "Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish followers!" (as if Hanukkah isn't a Zionist holiday) covers up their antisemitism.

Happy Jewish sovereignty in Israel holiday to all who celebrate Hanukkah! I hope you really enjoy its foods! xoxox

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

[kick-a-long]

Jewish Columbia students were chased out of dorms, spat on, and pinned against walls: damning report

By Matthew Sedacca

Published Aug. 31, 2024, 3:44 p.m. ET

Jewish students at Columbia University were chased out of their dorms, received death threats, spat upon, stalked and pinned against walls, as the Ivy League school devolved into a cesspool of antisemitic hate in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 murderous raid on Israel.

The new and disturbing details emerged from the lengthy, 91-page document released Friday by the school’s faculty-led antisemitism task force, which revealed the extent to which the hate permeated the institution.

“Students described being shoved, pushed to the ground, berated for showing support for Zionist causes, and watching Israeli flags burned,” the task force’s authors wrote.

Jewish and Israeli students at Columbia University endured a months-long nightmare of harassment, violent threats and assaults after Oct. 7.

Getty Images

“They recounted seeing drawings of swastikas in their dorms, students yelling pro-Hamas chants, and being denied access to public spaces and opportunities simply because they were Jewish or Israeli.”

Testimony from nearly five hundred Columbia students informed the report, which found visibly observant Jews had been pinned to the wall and had their jewelry ripped off while coming and going from synagogue. Others recounted being spat on and having been called ethnic slurs on campus.

One student, who had installed a mezuzah on her dorm’s doorway prior to the Israel-Hamas war, was forced to move out after people were pounding her door throughout the night beginning in October, demanding she explain the Jewish state’s war in Gaza.

“If I walk on campus right now with my star out or kippah or say ‘am Yisrael chai,’ I could start World War III,” one anonymous student’s testimony read.

Instructors tasked with guiding and mentoring students instead contributed to the sense of isolation and unease among Jews and Israelis on campus, according to the report.

Students recalled being pushed to the ground and watching Israeli flags being burned.

One faculty member leading a class that delved into the Israel-Hamas conflict called a student who previously served in the IDF a murderer. Another professor extensively said a pair of Jewish donors to the university had “laundered” “dirty money” and “blood money.”

During the spring, as protests and encampments roiled the school’s Morningside Heights campus, protesters, including outsiders and members of the university community, bellowed death threats at Jewish students. Demonstrators who held Israeli flags, meanwhile, recalled being assaulted.

“There is a sense of personal threat, and we keep looking over our shoulders,” master’s student Omer Lubaton Granot, an Israeli veteran and father of a toddler, told an Israeli radio station in the wake of protesters seizing the academic building Hamilton Hall in April.

Councilman Eric Dinowitz (D-Bronx) described the students’ testimonies as “horrifying — and not surprising.”

“These are stories we’ve been hearing about, as the report says, even before the encampments,” he told The Post, adding that antisemitism had been on the rise at college campuses even before Oct. 7

“Without any sort of consequence [for students and faculty] this sort of behavior will continue

The task force offered several recommendations to address the issues detailed in the voluminous report, including improved anti-bias training for students and staff along with a new system for reporting complaints about antisemitism.

The report was issued just days before Columbia’s fall semester begins and less then three weeks after embattled university president Minouhce Shafik suddenly resigned, citing the “period of turmoil” that marred her brief tenure at the school.

Interim President Katrina Armstrong called the disturbing incidents “completely unacceptable” before rattling off new initiatives at the university aligning with the panel’s recommendations.

“This is an opportunity to acknowledge the harm that has been done and to pledge to make the changes necessary to do better and to rededicate ourselves, as university leaders, as individuals, and as a community, to our core mission of teaching and research,” she said

[mylight-png]

An interesting difference between the pro-Hamas vs pro-Israel movements is how people treat and discuss civilians on the other side.

I have been repeatedly told that, because I want Israel to keep existing and for Hamas (a genocidal terrorist organization) to not win, I must hate Gazan civilians.

In reality, I believe that any innocent civilian blood spilled is tragic. I do not argue that it is good that Gazan civilians are dying, only that the blood is on the hands of Hamas, who used them as human shields. That is why I want Hamas dismantled: they do not just pose a threat to Israel, but to their own civilians too. Additionally, other than a few very fringe groups and individuals, this has been a shared sentiment throughout most of the pro-Israel movement.

So many of the pro-Israel activists I follow publicly condemned the tragic murder of the Palestinian boy in the US. We do not want hate. We do not want death. We simply recognize that peace and Hamas are incompatible.

Meanwhile, people who oppose Israel and support Hamas have repeatedly celebrated Israeli civilian deaths. I've seen people saying that they hoped Hamas would hit more Israeli residential buildings. They tear down posters of the hostages, including posters of Kfir, a baby who isn't even a year old. Regularly, I've seen violence incited at their rallies (by them) against us. I've seen it on my own campus, I've seen it on the news. An elderly Jewish man was killed at one of their rallies, and I have yet to see them say anything to condemn it.

None of them have condemned the broken windows and stolen books at a kosher restaurant. None of them have condemned the stabbing of a Jewish woman and a swastika being drawn on her door. None of them have condemned the Molotov cocktails being thrown at synagogues.

In regards to the actual war, all of them were so frantic to accuse Israel of the hospital hit (which was then proven to be a misfire) but said nothing when, earlier, Hamas had hit an Israeli hospital.

One side, the pro-Israel side, values life on both sides. We don't want civilian deaths. We only want the organization actively seeking our deaths to be dissolved.

The other side, however, makes no such distinction. To them, all Israeli and Jewish blood spilled is the same. To them, it is all cheap.

And I just think that's noteworthy and interesting.

(I recognize that some people are not like this, I am simply writing my observations about the majority of what I have witnessed.)

[etz-ashashiyot]

Serious question but lighter topic:

How many actively engaged Jewish households does one need to build a sustainable Jewish somewhere. (Assume we are talking about a traditionally observant but not chareidi community.)

[unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240]

Y'ALL.

I just had an Idea.

Okay hear me out: a traditional egalitarian shul that operates effectively as a weekly retreat center. You drive there before Shabbos, check in, turn in your car keys and your phone and anything else not shabbosdik, and then settle in to your Shabbat-friendly room. You stay for all of Shabbos in an environment that totally facilitates traditional observance with community, activities, full davening, meals, socialization, built-in Shabbos nap time, as well as personal space to do whatever reflection you want and to have a breather away from people if you need it.

Located in the middle of a nice plot of land with an eruv around both the buildings and the natural spaces, but ideally reachable by public transit.

That would deal with SO many of the barriers to traditional observance that are faced by huge parts of liberal Jewish communities now that most shuls are located in rich areas without good public transit. Done right, it would also really help people with a variety of other access needs, including those with young children, elders, and people with mobility issues that normally can't walk a mile (or more) to shul.

And it would facilitate close-knit communities while leveling a lot of the haves and have-nots of hosting and access to Jewish education, having lots of local Jewish family, etc.

Think about how much studying, davening, and learning could happen while also giving people real downtime and time with friends every week. It would be like a lock-in or sleepover or mini-vacation + deep level Torah and learning.

THINK ABOUT IT.

[doberbutts]

I’m wondering if you have thoughts on James Baldwin’s “open letter to the born again”? I’m struggling a bit with what his point is in that piece; it feels kinda dismissive on Jewish zionists agency in creation of Israel? But I may be missing parts or not getting things

The text in question.

And the segment I think anon is struggling with:

I know what I am talking about: my grandfather never got the promised “forty acres, and a mule,” the Indians who survived that holocaust are either on reservations or dying in the streets, and not a single treaty between the United States and the Indian was ever honored. That is quite a record.

Jews and Palestinians know of broken promises. From the time of the Balfour Declaration (during World War I) Palestine was under five British mandates, and England promised the land back and forth to the Arabs or the Jews, depending on which horse seemed to be in the lead. The Zionists—as distinguished from the people known as Jews—using, as someone put it, the “available political machinery,’’ i.e., colonialism, e.g., the British Empire—promised the British that, if the territory were given to them, the British Empire would be safe forever.

But absolutely no one cared about the Jews, and it is worth observing that non-Jewish Zionists are very frequently anti-Semitic. The white Americans responsible for sending black slaves to Liberia (where they are still slaving for the Firestone Rubber Plantation) did not do this to set them free. They despised them, and they wanted to get rid of them. Lincoln’s intention was not to “free” the slaves but to “destabilize” the Confederate Government by giving their slaves reason to “defect.” The Emancipation Proclamation freed, precisely, those slaves who were not under the authority of the President of what could not yet be insured as a Union.

It has always astounded me that no one appears to be able to make the connection between Franco’s Spain, for example, and the Spanish Inquisition; the role of the Christian church or—to be brutally precise, the Catholic Church—in the history of Europe, and the fate of the Jews; and the role of the Jews in Christendom and the discovery of America. For the discovery of America coincided with the Inquisition, and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Does no one see the connection between The Merchant of Venice and The Pawnbroker? In both of these works, as though no time had passed, the Jew is portrayed as doing the Christian’s usurious dirty work. The first white man I ever saw was the Jewish manager who arrived to collect the rent, and he collected the rent because he did not own the building. I never, in fact, saw any of the people who owned any of the buildings in which we scrubbed and suffered for so long, until I was a grown man and famous. None of them were Jews.

And I was not stupid: the grocer and the druggist were Jews, for example, and they were very very nice to me, and to us. The cops were white. The city was white. The threat was white, and God was white, Not for even a single split second in my life did the despicable, utterly cowardly accusation that “the Jews killed Christ’’ reverberate. I knew a murderer when I saw one, and the people who were trying to kilI me were not Jews.

But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.

Finally: there is absolutely—repeat: absolutely—no hope of establishing peace in what Europe so arrogantly calls the Middle East (how in the world would Europe know? having so dismally failed to find a passage to India) without dealing with the Palestinians. The collapse of the Shah of Iran not only revealed the depth of the pious Carter’s concern for “human rights,” it also revealed who supplied oil to Israel, and to whom Israel supplied arms. It happened to be, to spell it out, white South Africa.

Well. The Jew, in America, is a white man. He has to be, since I am a black man, and, as he supposes, his only protection against the fate which drove him to America. But he is still doing the Christian’s dirty work, and black men know it.

My friend, Mr. Andrew Young, out of tremendous love and courage, and with a silent, irreproachable, indescribable nobility, has attempted to ward off a holocaust, and I proclaim him a hero, betrayed by cowards.

For context: Andrew Young, considered the right hand of MLK Jr, had a longstanding and occasionally fraught relationship with the Jewish community. He stepped down from Congress shortly after being forced to choose between voicing support for Palestine and continuing to work towards black-jewish interests by his constituents and fellow politicians, as he felt very strongly about supporting both. This was a fairly unpopular move. While I don't believe he ever called himself Jewish by the strictest sense, he was actively involved in Jewish communities and the known "white" ancestry within him is a Polish Jew in his great grandparents.

To be honest, I don't really see much a problem with this as I think it fairly closely matches up not only with my understanding of the history of this problem but also my own country's part in it as well as my personal feelings on it decades later. It pretty blatantly says that Zionism is utilizing a machination of white supremist colonism due to the extensive history of antisemitism and having had the ancestral land dangled in front of them like bait on a hook from the British Empire, which owned Palestine at the time. It also goes on to say that many Zionists aren't even Jewish and are antisemitic in nature, but are Christians happy to get rid of as many Jews as possible and how that tracks due to the Christian church's millennia-deep history of antisemitism.

I don't think it lets anyone off the hook. I think it pretty much flat out says this is a problem caused first and foremost by white Christians who hate Jews and Arabs alike and have a vested interest in getting the two populations to fight because it'll be easier to kill off just the one group instead of both of them, if one ends up eradicating the other. It even talks about the friction between the black community and the Jewish community, what caused it, what drives it, how that friction in itself is a tool of white supremacy to hurt us both.

[mesetacadre]

Hello! In one of your posts you mentioned Anna Louise Strong's The Soviets Expected It, where she describes that Belarusians did not turn on their Jewish neighbors when Nazis invaded the USSR. Then you said that in 30 years the USSR managed to extirpate antisemitism from the general population. Was this something Strong said in the book explicitly? I'm interested in the topic and I was wondering whether Strong's book is worth reading for her analysis on how the USSR managed to eliminate antisemitism or whether she only mentions it briefly. Thank you!

Hello! After searching for it, @komsomolka helped me find this quote. It wasn't by ALS as I remembered, but rather by Vic L. Allen in his book The Russians are Coming: The Politics of Anti-Sovietism:

It was German practice as they entered Soviet territories to encourage the local populace to engage in pogroms against the Jews as a first stage in their genocidal policy. They had some success in those areas which had become part of the Soviet Union since 1939 but in the Soviet Union proper there was no evidence of spontaneous anti-Semitism. A Jewish historian commentated that "In Byelorussia, a conspicuous difference is evidenced between the old Soviet part of the region and the area which had previously belonged to Poland and was under Soviet rule from September 1939 to June 1941. Nazi and anti-Jewish propaganda drew a weak response in the former Soviet Byelorussia: we encounter complaints in Nazi documents that, "it is extremely hard to incite the local populace to pogroms because of the backwardness of the Byelorussian peasants with regard to racial consciousness" Another view of the cause of the racial attitudes in Byelorussia was given in a secret memorandum by a collaborator to the chief of the German army in August 1942. He wrote: "There is no Jewish problem for the Byelorussian people. For them, this is purely a German matter. This derives from Soviet education which has negated racial difference... The Byelorussians sympathize with, and have compassion for the Jews, and regard the Germans as barbarians and the hangman of the Jew, whom they consider human beings equal to themselves...".

The Russians are Coming: The Politics of Anti-Sovietism (pages 144-145), Vic L. Allen, via ebook-hunter.org

This book goes into some detail regarding jews in the USSR, the sixth chapter, in part II, is dedicated to this.

Anna Louise Strong also wrote about antisemitism in the USSR, although just like almost any other subject in her books, she tackles it through a collection of anecdotes and observations, though I still think she paints a clear picture that's corroborated by Allen's book, for example:

Acts of race prejudice are severely dealt with in the Soviet Union. Ordinary drunken brawls between Russians may be lightly handled as misdemeanors, but let a brawl occur between a Russian and a Jew in which national names are used in a way insulting to national dignity, and this becomes a serious political offense. Usually, the remnants of national antagonisms require no such drastic methods; they yield to education. But the American workers who helped build the Stalingrad Tractor Plant will long remember the clash that Lewis and Brown had with the Soviet courts after their fight with the Negro Robinson, in the course of which they called him “damn low-down nigger.” The two white men were “deported” to America, disgraced in Soviet eyes by a serious political offense; the Negro remained and is now a member of the Moscow City government. The devotion of long-suppressed peoples and their willingness to die for their new equality is the prize that the Soviet national policy won for the present war. The Jews in the Soviet Union especially know that they have something to fight for as they see beyond the border Hitler’s destruction of the Jews and the anti-Semitism that spreads from country to country. When I last visited Minsk, which under the tsar was a ghetto city, and under the Soviets was the capital of the Byelo-Russian republic, with more than one-third of the population Jews, I asked the young Intourist guide, “Don’t you yourself, as a Jewish woman, ever encounter racial feeling in your daily contacts?” “I haven’t for years,” she answered. I wonder what she encountered when the Nazis entered Minsk.

The Soviets Expected it, Anna Louise Strong, via redstarpublishers.org

I recall across the years one of the Birobidjan leaders who went on the same train with me to Moscow. His energy and teasing laughter made him the life of the train. He frequently sat in the compartment with two Red Army commanders, joshing them about the quantities of edibles they consumed and declaring that he would have them arrested for upsetting the food balance of the country. Later he told me that these two commanders gave him more delight than anything on the train. He told me of his own early life in the Ukraine amid constant pogroms. He repeated the discussions with the two Red Army commanders. They had been asking whether the Red Army gave adequate help to the Jewish settlers. “We hear they made you a road. Was it a good one? Do they help you properly with your harvest? How are relations developing between the Red Army and the new immigrants?” “Can you imagine what those questions mean to me, a Jew of Birobidjan?” he asked. “No, you can never imagine it, for you cannot live my life. Those Red commanders are the sons of the Cossacks who used to commit the pogroms! And now it is all gone like a dream! They want to know if they help us adequately! They are too young even to remember pogroms. But I remember; I am old enough.”

The Soviets Expected it, Anna Louise Strong, via redstarpublishers.org

How much discrimination there was against Jews in educational institutions is hard to tell. It was never general but certainly there was some. It was evasive and struggles always developed against it. My best friend felt for a time undermined in her university job because she refused to yield to the anti-Semitism which seemed to be promoted by the Party secretary at the university. One day she came home exultant. “Now I know the Party doesn’t stand for anti-Semitism,” she said. “They removed A… He was in charge of universities here for the Central Committee and was behind much of this anti-Semitism.” This anecdote shows the confusion that existed. Anti-Semitism was sometimes promoted by people high in office, but always with evasion. The basic law that made it illegal was never attacked, challenged or revoked. The disease of anti-cosmopolitanism passed, and anti-Semitism with it. Not by law or decree, but because of three facts. In 1950, the USSR reached the highest production in its history, with comparative abundance of goods. The USSR also attained the A-Bomb — the threat of America’s monopoly was gone. And, also in 1950, the Chinese People’s Republic was established in Peking, and at once made alliance with the USSR. The sick, excessive patriotism bred by the cold war could not survive close contact with an eastern, equal ally, whose inventions began a thousand years before Russia’s, and whose present intelligence and achievements even the most successful Russians had to acclaim.

The Stalin Era, Anna Louise Strong, via redstarpublishers.org

In simple oratory the worker and peasant deputies to the new National Assemblies told of their tortured past and of their happiness when the Red Army arrived. Women told how in former days young boys had been held on anthills by landlords’ agents in order to break the spirit of rebellion, how a mother picking up fuel in the woods to heat water for a newborn baby had been caught by the lord’s forester, beaten, and afterward turned over to the attack of fierce dogs. It was a gruesome account of medieval conditions. Deputies from Grodno told how the Jewish and ByeloRussian workers of the city had organized their own militia before the Red Army came and had rushed out and helped build a bridge for it into the city under the fire of Polish officers. “As soon as the Red Army came,” said a carpenter from Bialystok, “we asked them to set up Soviet power for us. But they told us: ‘Soviet power is the power of the people. Organize it yourselves, for now you are the bosses of your lives’.” A simple peasant women deputy said: “Let the priests pray to God for Paradise, but for us the daylight is already come; the bright sun is come from the East.” Letters telling a similar story reached America from Jews in the occupied regions. They especially commented on their rescue from death, for they had been threatened both by German bombing and by anti-Semitic bands of Poles. “If the Red Army had been a day later, not a Jew in our town would have been left alive,” wrote a man from Grodno. Other letters marvelled at the new equality. “To the Bolsheviks everyone is equal; there is no difference between Gentile and Jew.” There was a grimmer side to the story. Poles in fairly large numbers were deported to various places in the Soviet Union. Letters received by their relatives in Europe and America showed that they were scattered all over the U.S.S.R.; the sending of the letters also indicated that they were not under surveillance but merely deported away from the border district. The Soviet authorities claimed that former Polish officers and military colonists had done considerable sabotage and kept the people disturbed by rumors of imminent invasions by Rumanian and British troops. After the conclusion of the Soviet-Polish alliance against Hitlerite Germany, these Poles rapidly joined the Polish Legion under the Red Army High Command. Most of them then stated that they fully understood the necessity of the Red Army’s march into Poland.

The Stalin Era, Anna Louise Strong, via redstarpublishers.org

The new people’s government of Lithuania had appointed as governor of Vilna an able Communist, Didzhulius, not long since out of prison. Prison had injured his health and he had gone to a rest home, but had not been able to take the time to get well. People were needed for Vilna, and so he came. When I saw him he had held office only three days. “We must end this evil process whereby first Poles suppress Lithuanians and then Lithuanians suppress Poles,” he told me. “Under Smetona only thirty thousand people here had the vote. We have given it at once to everybody. “There were one hundred thousand unemployed here. We at once began road-building and other public construction; we are setting up public relief. The old Polish pensioners had buildings and funds which Smetona did not let them touch. We have made their possessions available to them for the relief of those most in need. We have done more to relieve the misery of starving people in three days than Smetona did in six months.” One of the first decrees passed was that government officials must hear citizens’ requests in whatever language the citizens choose. For this purpose officials are sought who can speak as many languages as possible. Schools also are to be in all the local languages. “Under the Poles education was only in Polish; under Smetona it was only in Lithuanian,” said Didzhulius. “Now we shall have to have schools in our languages since there are four chief languages in this district: Polish, Jewish, Lithuanian and Byelorussian.”

The New Lithuania, Anna Louise Strong, via redstarpublishers.org

Overall, I think the picture ALS paints is a nuanced one. The USSR made a lot of progress removing racism and nationalism from its population, although it was not perfect and some decisions like the deportations were negative for the moved population (though not as genocidal or malevolent as most like to paint it), they did an outstanding job at the task of removing prejudice from their society at a time where that was not happening anywhere else, and this was reflected both in laws and in action. We have a lot to learn from their policies, both their many (even to this day) unparalleled achievements as well as from their flaws.

To these third party accounts I'll also add Stalin's own words:

In answer to your inquiry: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism. Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism. In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty. J. Stalin

Anti-Semitism: Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States . J. V. Stalin, 1931. First published in the newspaper Pravda, No. 329, November 30, 1936

[capybaracorn]

Land Day: What happened in Palestine in 1976?

Every year on March 30, Palestinians hold protests and vigils and plant olive trees to reaffirm their connection to the land.

(30th of March 2024)

Hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza joined the Land Day protests near the eastern Gaza borders, March 30, 2022 [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

Every year on March 30, Palestinians observe Land Day, or Yom al-Ard, recalling the events of March 30, 1976, when six unarmed Palestinians were killed and more than 100 injured by Israeli forces during protests against Israel’s confiscation of Palestinian land.

How much land did Israel confiscate?

Israel ordered the confiscation of 2,000 hectares (4,942 acres) of land belonging to Palestinian citizens of Israel in the Galilee. These plans were part of Israeli state policy to Judaise Galilee following the creation of the state of Israel.

The confiscated land is roughly the size of 3,000 football pitches or the area from the tip of Manhattan to Central Park in New York, US.

What do Palestinians do on Land Day?

Palestinians, both inside Israel and across the occupied territory, mark this day by holding protests and vigils and planting olive trees to reaffirm their connection to the land. The protests are often met with brutal use of force by Israel.

Um Ahmad al-Banna was wounded in the protests of March of Return and joined Land Day commemorations in Gaza in 2022 [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

Is Israel still seizing land?

Yes, Israel has continued to seize large swaths of Palestinian land, designating them as military zones, state land and other labels.

Most recently, on March 22, 2024, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared Israel was seizing 800 hectares (1,977 acres) in the occupied West Bank, in a move that would facilitate building more illegal settlements.

“While there are those in Israel and in the world who seek to undermine our right to Judea and Samaria and the country in general, we promote settlement through hard work and in a strategic manner all over the country,” Smotrich said, using Biblical names for the area that are commonly heard in Israel.

Settlements – illegal under international law – are Jewish-only communities built on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

On March 6, Israel’s settlement-planning authority announced it had approved the construction of some 3,500 new housing units in Maale Adumim, Kedar and Efrat within the occupied West Bank.

From November 1, 2022 to October 31, 2023, Israel has approved at least 24,000 illegal housing units to be built on Palestinian land.

Earlier this month, the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said settlements had expanded by a record amount and risked eliminating any possibility of a Palestinian state.

[hero-israel]

Hi. I want to preface this by mentioning I am a non Jewish supporter of Israel and of the Jewish people, but I have some serious questions that really bother me and make me rethink my position.

Reading up on the beginning of the Zionist movement and its leaders, I cannot help but think, how can they simply ignore that there are already people there, or that said people would be alright with becoming a minority? Did they really think Arabs and arabised people living there would just be alright with it?

I do believe that Jews are indigenous to the land and that it’s only just that they have their homeland back, but I think the way they went about it was wrong. It’s not the fault of the people living there that Romans exiled them after all. Some Zionists leaders admitted that the only way to establish a state was against the will of the native population and that some ethnic cleansing is necessary to achieve it.

I want to support Israel but I’m very uncomfortable with the idea that many innocent people who lived there for generations were kicked out after the lands were bought by Zionists, or ended up ethnically cleansed in the civil war even if they didn’t participate in the hostilities. It feels morally inconsistent to me to just ignore this or brush it aside.

What is your view on all of this?

My view is that it's fine to believe exactly what you said - "the Jews are indigenous, it's only just that they have their homeland back, but the way they went about it was wrong." Nothing in that construction justifies hatred or violence against Jews or Israelis, nor does it prevent building a better future for Palestinians.

Israel exists. It houses half the world's Jewish population and a majority of all Jewish children, mostly descendants of refugees from obliterated communities in the MENA or Europe (more the former). Those political realities matter far more than an essay debate published in 1928. You may have already encountered people who try to relitigate the Civil War by pointing out that Abraham Lincoln unlawfully suspended habeas corpus and didn't even really like black people anyway, so instead of a gruesome and devastating war led by a morally compromised man it would have been better to allow the South to gradually phase out slavery on its own, that it should have happened some other way. Well, it DIDN'T happen some other way, it happened and people well into the 21st century need to move on with life. If anyone in the world had an excuse to cling to bitterness forever, it would be the Jews of Israel vis-a-vis Jordan and Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Poland and Russia and Germany. So why are the Jews of Israel able to move on with having relationships with all those countries that persecuted and destroyed them? And if they can do it, shouldn't casual observers half a world away do it?

By all means, read up on early Zionist history, see what the ideas were and how they had to change when exposed to real events (and also see how they were specifically opposed to population removal). Some, like Martin Buber, urged a binational state formed cooperatively with Arabs. Ze'ev Jabotinsky warned that Arabs would never accept large numbers of Jews as their equals and that promises of shared wealth were a fantasy, therefore Jews would need to demonstrate military power and win respect and negotiations that way. Albert Einstein had initially hoped for a binational state, but once history happened the way it did, he accepted - and loved - the Israel that he got.

I also think you should look a bit more deeply into just why so many people departed Palestine in 1948, and just how many generations had passed since their own ancestors had in turn immigrated there.

Whatever you may read about the 1920s, or 1940s, you will find nothing that justifies hatred, harassment, violence, or genocide against Jewish people at any place or time, including Israel today. If you truly are a supporter of the Jewish people as you claim to be - and we would be happy to have you - by all means look at the true toll of history and keep speaking up for our protection and our lives.

[girlactionfigure]

THURSDAY HERO: BEN SHIMONI

Full English text of this sign about Ben at the bottom of the page

Ben Shimoni, 31, was celebrating peace at the Nova music festival in southern Israel on October 7, 2023 when the event came under massive terrorist attack by a barbaric well-armed horde of killers and rapists. Amid carnage and chaos, Ben dodged bullets to reach his car and then picked up four strangers. He maneuvered their way out of the festival site and drove thirty minutes to Beersheba, where his passengers got out of the car. To their shock, Ben said he was going back to rescue more people. They tried desperately to change his mind but Ben turned the car around and headed back to hell. 

Ben was very familiar with the roads around the festival area because he spent his childhood in Gaza. Ben lived in Gush Katif, a tight-knit, warm community of Jews. In 2005, when Ben was only 13, his idyllic life was hideously disrupted when his family and all the other Jews in Gush Katif were forcibly ejected by their own government in a tragically misguided attempt to conciliate the Palestinians. Families who’d harvested land and built businesses over a lifetime had to hand it all over to their enemies. The Palestinians immediately destroyed the farms and factories, elected Hamas and began building terror tunnels to kill Jews. Now 18 years later, paragliding terrorists on a mission of destruction were at the Nova music festival and Ben was on a mission of his own: to rescue as many people as possible. 

Like a firefighter rushing into a burning building, Ben drove into a field that was still under massive attack. He immediately filled his car with five more terrified strangers, and drove them to safety in Beersheba. This group, too, was shocked because once again, after reaching safety, Ben chose to go back to the festival site. He’d already saved nine lives but made one more desperate and valiant attempt. He picked up three frantic girls and almost got away until they were stopped at a checkpoint manned by heavily armed soldiers. Ben’s girlfriend Jessica Elter was on the phone with him and heard what happened next. Jessica told the Jewish Chronicle: “Suddenly I heard Ben asking, confused but not afraid, if some people in the road were Hamas terrorists or Israeli police. I heard the girls in the back screaming and pleading with Ben at the top of their lungs to ‘Drive, drive, drive.’ I heard a lot of yelling in Arabic and a big crash, some shooting and, after a minute of quiet the phone just hung up.”

Ben’s car was later found riddled with bullets but empty and he was initially classified as missing. However after five days Ben’s family was notified that his body had been identified, some distance from the car. Nearby was the body of the girl who’d been in the passenger seat. They had both been shot. The two girls who were in the back of the car have never been found and are presumed to be hostages in Gaza. Jessica is praying for their rescue and hoping to learn more from them about Ben’s final minutes.

Jessica says that Ben’s heroic self-sacrifice to save at least nine other people was completely in character. “He was shy, loyal, very honest with every person he met, and never said no to someone in need. He always put others before himself, truly. He had the best heart ever. And the thing he did that morning testifies to the person he was.” Jessica and Ben had attended several previous Nova festivals. Jessica would have been at that one too, except that she had recently grown more religious and stayed home to observe Shabbat.

Ben was a successful businessman who worked in the restaurant industry and appreciated the Israeli night life scene. His brother Avinoam remembers that Ben “loved life. Loved cars, traveling and parties. Always puts himself last and wants to help, so it’s not surprising that the last action he did in his life was trying to rescue his friends from hell.” 

Israeli band Synergia released a song based on a poem written about Ben Shimoni. It begins, “Who is the person who goes back into hell, a moment after he escaped?”

At the Nova festival site, Ben’s loved ones put up a sign about Ben’s life and his heroic actions on October 7, 2023. May his memory always be for a blessing and may his soul have a great elevation!

Full text about Ben (from the blue sign in the image above) at the memorial site, written by his family:

Ben Binyamin Shimon was the first born son to parents Pnina and Rafi Shimoni after many efforts to bring children into the world. Ben has younger twin brothers, Avinoam and Chai, and Chai has special needs. The three of them grew up in Dugit of Gush Katif near the sea. Following the Israeli disengagement from Gaza, Ben’s parents Pnina and Rafi divorced. Ben moved to the north with his father, and two years later, his brother Avinoam joined him, spending their teenage years there together. After completing his military service, both Ben and his father decided to leave the north and move to Modiin to start a business together, which led Ben into the world of business and back to the south. In recent years, Ben moved back to live with his mother and brother Chai in their home in Ashkelon. Later on, his partner Jessica also joined them. Ben always loved extreme sports, cars, and motorcycle racing. His friends and close-knit family were his whole world.

He was always ready to help, even when not asked. Ben loved to celebrate life and live in the moment; nightlife and parties were an integral part of his life. He owned several businesses related to food and nightlife.

In the last few months of his life, he decided to leave these businesses and began working as a sous- chef with his good friend Matan Zafrir at the Pitmaster restaurant in Petah Tikva, with a bright future ahead in the industry. His coworkers recount that they had never met a more professional, caring, and dedicated person than him. 

That Saturday, Ben decided to stay home for the second holiday of Sukkot, a decision that, as it turned out later, saved his mother and brother Chai from traveling to celebrate at the home of their friend from Dugit, Tova Goren, who lived in Kfar Aza and was murdered in her home along with her daughter Eran.

On October 7th, in the early morning hours, Ben left for the Nova festival, where he met up with his friends Tom Peretz and Michal Ohana. His partner Jessica, who was inseparable from him, surprisingly decided to stay home that evening with his mother and brother Chai. When the attack began, Ben immediately called his mother to inform her that there were rockets and to wake up Jessicaand take everyone to the safe room (bomb shelter).

Ben wasn’t afraid of the rockets; he got in his car and started to flee. He knew the area well, having grown up there and served there during his military service. Ben was an experienced driver and knew how to navigate the roads of the Gaza envelope. At the beginning of the journey, he picked up four passengers he didn’t know; Jude Kotler, Amit Shalit, Mashi Lindner, and Tal Gozal. From their testimonies, we understand that Ben quickly grasped the situation and did everything to calm them down and bring them to safety.

He rescued them to Be’er Sheva. On his way there, he contacted his father, who lives in Be’er Sheva, and asked if he could bring them to his house.

His father was at work in Omer (another city in the South) and told Ben to come and get the key. Ben realized this would delay him and decided to drop them off at a house he didn’t know at the entrance to Be’er Sheva. There, they begged him to stay with them and not return to the festival area, but he was determined to save his friends who were still there. That morning, during the rescues, Ben managed to speak with his friends and family. Everyone had the chance to talk to him; his father Rafi, his mother Pnina, his brother Avinoam, and his girlfriend Jessica.

They were all proud of him for saving people, and asked him to come home and not return to the area of the festival. However, Ben was determined to save his friends. He returned and managed to save another eight people he didn’t know to the Netivot area. Only ten months later we were connected with these people and learned that they were physically healthy but not mentally. Afterward, he returned to the festival area for a second time in hopes of finding his friends Tom and Michal, even though they told him not to come.

Nevertheless, he drove to the last location they sent him. But when he arrived at the location, Tom and Michal were no longer there (probably because their phone battery died, and they had already moved to their next hiding place). Today Tom and Michal are safe and sound. At that time, Ben knew that Gaya Halifa (Z”L), who worked with him at the Pitmaster, was also at the festival, so he contacted her and understood she was in danger. He asked her to send him her location. Gaya was with her friend Romi Gonen; they were hiding from the terrorists’ gunfire in a small bush near the Re’im parking lot.

Gaya sent Ben the location, and along with it, she wrote, “Don’t come; there are gunshots.” Despite this, Ben chose to look for them. He found them and got them into his car. In addition to them, Ben saw Ofir Tzarfati (Z’L) and offered him to join them in the car. Ofir had just made sure that his friends and girlfriend were rescued into another car and there was no space for him to go with them, so he joined Ben’s car.The four of them began driving towards Ashkelon on Road 232. Gaya managed to speak with her father, Avi and tell him that Ben rescued them and they were on their way out, asking him to pick her up from Ashdod. Romi texted her friends and family that a friend of Gaya’s from work (Ben) came to rescue them and that they were on their way out. After a short drive of a few kilometers at a crazy speed, during which Ben was on the phone with Jessica, he told her that he saw figures ahead and asked, “Are they terrorists? Arabs?” Immediately after, Jessica heard gunfire and screams. At 10:12 AM, at the Alumim Junction, they encountered an ambush by terrorists who slaughtered them.

The car stopped, and Ben and Gaya were murdered on the spot. Ofir and Romi were injured and half an hour later, kidnapped to Gaza. All this was recorded on a phone call between Romi and her mother, Mirav. After 54 days, we learned that Ofir was murdered in captivity at Shifa Hospital, and his body was found and returned for burial in Israel. As of today (ten months after October 7th, at the time of this writing), Romi is still held captive by Hamas, and we all pray for her safe return to her family, healthy in body and soul. Ben and Gaya were declared missing for five days. After extensive searches and understanding that something terrible had happened, we hoped that perhaps they were injured or even kidnapped, but the bitter news came. Ben planned to continue living life to the fullest and build his life his way, but fate chose for him to die a hero. Ben left behind a grieving family, friends, and a girlfriend who miss him, are proud of him, and love him deeply.

[alwaysbewoke]

NINE HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS COMPARE ZIONIST POLICIES TO THOSE OF THE NAZIS

“Sometime after [1956] I heard a news item about Israelis herding Palestinians into settlement camps. I just could not believe this. Weren’t the Israelis also Jews? Hadn’t we – they – just survived the greatest pogrom of our history? Weren’t [concentration] camps – often euphemistically called ‘settlement camps’ by the Nazis – the main feature of this pogrom? How could Jews in any measure do unto others what had been done to them? How could these Israeli Jews oppress and imprison other people? In my romantic imagination, the Jews in Israel were socialists and people who knew right from wrong. This was clearly incorrect. I felt let down, as if I was being robbed of a part of what I had thought was my heritage. …

I have to say to the Israeli government, which claims to speak in the name of all Jews, that it is not speaking in my name. I will not remain silent in the face of the attempted annihilation of the Palestinians; the sale of arms to repressive regimes around the world; the attempt to stifle criticism of Israel in the media worldwide; or the twisting of the knife labelled ‘guilt’ in order to gain economic concessions from Western countries. Of course, Israel’s geo-political position has a greater bearing on this, at the moment. I will not allow the confounding of the terms ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘anti-Zionist’ to go unchallenged.”

Dr. Marika Sherwood, ‘How I became an anti-Israel Jew’, Middle East Monitor, 7/3/18. Marika Sherwood is a survivor of the Budapest ghetto.

-----

“Israel, in order to survive, has to renounce the wish for domination and then it will be a much better place for Jews also. The immediate analogy which a lot of people are making in Israel is Germany. Not only the Germany of Hitler and the Nazis but even the former German Empire wanted to dominate Europe. What happened in Japan after the attack on China is that they wanted to dominate a huge area of Asia. When Germany and Japan renounced the wish for domination, they became much nicer societies for the Japanese and Germans themselves. In addition to all the Arab considerations, I would like to see Israel, by renouncing the desire for domination, including domination of the Palestinians, become a much nicer place for Israelis to live.”

Dr. Israel Shahak, Middle East Policy Journal, Summer 1989, no.29. Israel Shahak was a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

-----

“I am pained by the parallels I observe between my experiences in Germany prior to 1939 and those suffered by Palestinians today. I cannot help but hear echoes of the Nazi mythos of ‘blood and soil’ in the rhetoric of settler fundamentalism which claims a sacred right to all the lands of biblical Judea and Samaria. The various forms of collective punishment visited upon the Palestinian people – coerced ghettoization behind a ‘security wall’; the bulldozing of homes and destruction of fields; the bombing of schools, mosques, and government buildings; an economic blockade that deprives people of the water, food, medicine, education and the basic necessities for dignified survival – force me to recall the deprivations and humiliations that I experienced in my youth. This century-long process of oppression means unimaginable suffering for Palestinians.” 

Dr. Hajo Meyer, ‘An Ethical Tradition Betrayed’, Huffington Post, 27/1/10. Hajo Meyer was a survivor of Auschwitz.

-----

“As a Jewish youngster growing up in Budapest, an infant survivor of the Nazi genocide, I was for years haunted by a question resounding in my brain with such force that sometimes my head would spin: ‘How was it possible? How could the world have let such horrors happen?’

 It was a naïve question, that of a child. I know better now: such is reality. Whether in Vietnam or Rwanda or Syria, humanity stands by either complicitly or unconsciously or helplessly, as it always does. In Gaza today we find ways of justifying the bombing of hospitals, the annihilation of families at dinner, the killing of pre-adolescents playing soccer on a beach. …

There is no understanding Gaza out of context – Hamas rockets or unjustifiable terrorist attacks on civilians – and that context is the longest ongoing ethnic cleansing operation in the recent and present centuries, the ongoing attempt to destroy Palestinian nationhood.

The Palestinians use tunnels? So did my heroes, the poorly armed fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Unlike Israel, Palestinians lack Apache helicopters, guided drones, jet fighters with bombs, laser-guided artillery. Out of impotent defiance, they fire inept rockets, causing terror for innocent Israelis but rarely physical harm. With such a gross imbalance of power, there is no equivalence of culpability. …

And what shall we do, we ordinary people? I pray we can listen to our hearts. My heart tells me that ‘never again’ is not a tribal slogan, that the murder of my grandparents in Auschwitz does not justify the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians, that justice, truth, peace are not tribal prerogatives. That Israel’s ‘right to defend itself,’ unarguable in principle, does not validate mass killing.

Dr. Gabor Mate, ‘Beautiful Dream of Israel has become a Nightmare’, Toronto Star, 22/7/14. Gabor Mate is a survivor of the Budapest ghetto.

[talenlee]

Privilege Is Without

You might have heard, or read really, at some point, me saying the phrase whiteness is a fog. The idea is that ‘white’ is not, in and of itself, a cultural form, an identity, but rather it is a system of acceptance outside yourself that permeates culture. The fog gets into all the cracks and presses against all the surfaces, but it isn’t, in and of itself, defined by something internal.

I am, after all, white. The system looks at me and goes ‘oh, this guy qualifies for the standard currently.’ Of course, it’s entirely possible for that to be withdrawn. Find the right weirdo and they might (say) falsely claim I’m Jewish and suddenly that whiteness can be withdrawn from me. It’s a complex system that rolls around in its day to day. Go back two hundred years and I wouldn’t get counted. The system is not tracking some inherent, actual, real like chemical detail or compositional detail about me. It is something people socially observe and attribute to me. Some of those attributions are pretty easy but sometimes they’re not.

I bring this up because I find some people talk about Privileges as if they’re things people have imbued in them. A few years ago I lost my mind about it on twitter, where I saw someone complaining about ‘bilingual privilege.’ It struck me as having the energy of a very white person trying to find some way to complain about something, some anything that a person of colour they knew had that they didn’t have and therefore as a way to diminish the feeling of persecution that they felt at realising that privilege exists. That’s a pretty reasonable emotional reaction – it can feel like being told you have something that you don’t consciously feel you have and that feels bad. Not to be cruel about it but ‘how can I have privilege when I’m keenly aware of the things in my life that suck?’ isn’t an unreasonable emotional response when you first discover things.

But, just like with realising that you aren’t actually 6′ when you say you’re ‘about that’, there is an objective measure and factual information you can absorb that can help you dismantle that emotional reaction and get a better handle on reality as it exists. And that’s why I say whiteness is a fog. It’s not a thing in you, your privilege isn’t you, it’s a thing that presses against your surfaces. If you have a name that’s gender ambiguous, you will find situations where privileges are removed from you by people who assume your gender, for example. Deep-voiced femmes know that just being misgendered on the phone can get you better service, because the system, in its headless foolishness, has decided that that voice has access to a tier of privilege, even if it has to get there by misgendering you.

And this is where we get to the way I recommend people think about privilege as an external thing. People don’t ‘have’ privilege, people interface with privilege. Privilege is a system external to you, and if the system decides to respond to you, then you get what the system provides, and if it decides not to, then you don’t. It’s not that you have this wellspring of privilege bubbling up inside you, it’s that there’s an incredibly shitty card reader everywhere, and it constantly scans you and it just so happens, oh, here, you are getting the benefits of this. But you may not want those benefits, but the system doesn’t know that. It happens even when you’re interacting with a person, because the person is ceding their choices and behaviour, typically, to the system. There’s no masc privilege in the middle of a cornfield. It needs to have the system, with its removal from humans making choices, with its ability to offer rewards and incentives.

There are days I have been misgendered. The system did not correctly recognise me, based entirely on a ponytail. The system’s failure to identify a cis boy is, to the system, a hiccup, but if you believe that you believe the system is reliable and consistent and builds its respones out of good data. It’s not. It made what was to me a mistake, but how many people do you think responded to the incident with a mollifying ‘well you do have long hair.’ And when I’ve been attacked based on things – it doesn’t matter if I’m not actually a dyke, being seen as one is enough of a reason to get attacked… and when the mistake is discovered, one of the priviliges is the system kicking in and going: Hey, this is inappropriate. If the privilige was inside me, and not part of a series of social interactions, then how does that happen?

Whiteness is something that recognises me, and I say yeah I’m white because you know what it means. I even use that term to refer to my ignorance and inexperience with the nonpriviliged position! But I’m not ‘white.’ White doesn’t mean anything about my DNA or my history. I’m the Australian son of a British immigrant who came to Australia from a refugee program with her Welsh mother and British father, and my other side of the family came from Free Settlers who came to Australia to colonise it based on being told by a system above them that they were allowed and capable of doing so. And these are material things, these are points of real history but they also interact with that system. If my grandmother hadn’t been married to a British man, when she came to Australia, there was a chance they would have given her a literacy test because the Welsh weren’t considered white at that point. And that’s my grandmother. That’s a woman that was in my life for thirty five years, not some distant memory!

I didn’t get Whiteness at birth. I was born into a space where there was Whiteness, and the Whiteness accepts me because by doing so it can use my opinions and interest against the people Whiteness excludes. The aim of Whiteness is Whiteness, the aim of Privilege is Privilege. There is no inherent power in these things, but that is social, and that means anything they do and anything they impose is being imposed by people and we can do things to oppose that social system.

Admittedly, sometimes opposing that social system means things like ‘ignoring the cops.’

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[matan4il]

Daily update post:

Today, Israeli forces went into a hospital in Jenin (it's not in Gaza, there is no border fence between Israel and Jenin, there are no security measures other than getting intel and pre-emptively stopping terrorist attacks) in order to eliminate several Hamas terrorists who were hiding in there. Because the operation would require going into a hospital, the intel had to be VERY reliable, the threat huge and immediate, and the IDF's Chief of Staff had to personally approve it. The intel indicated these terrorists were gonna carry out a suicide bombing, that would use an entire vehicle loaded with explosives, rather than a suicide bomber "just" wearing a vest with explosives. The first such terrorist attack that I know of in Israel happened on Feb 22, 1948 (before the State of Israel was established, but after the Arabs started a war against the Jews). It was carried out jointly by rogue (and antisemitic, based on the slurs they used) British soldiers, who did it in the service of the Arabs' war against Jews. They blew up the explosives on a central street (Ben Yehuda) in Jerusalem. This is a partial picture of the damage caused:

Three buildings were completely destroyed, but the impact was much wider (including glass windows shattering across the city). 58 people were killed, 49 of them immediately, while 9 more died in the hospital from their injuries. Hamas itself carried out their first terrorist attack of this type on Apr 6, 1994. A car filled with explosives bypassed a bus driving children back from school, and then blew up right in front of it. When those who were alive tried to get out of the bus, they couldn't because the driver had been killed, and they didn't know how to open the door. 8 people were murdered in total, and 55 injured, almost all kids and teenagers. An extra touch of sickness? That day was the eve of Yom Ha'Shoah, Israel's Holocaust Memorial Day. The headline screamed in Hebrew, "Blood of the Children," while in the top left corner, there's a reminder about the sirens for Yom Ha'Shoah going off at 10, to observe a national commemorative minute of silence.

There's a very nice and well intentioned campaign right now, enlisting American celebs to ask everyone to stand against antisemitism. That's incredibly important due to the global rise in antisemitism we've witnessed since Hamas' massacre, but the bigger issue to me is that so many people are ignorant on what actually constitutes Jew hatred. So in one reblog they can oppose antisemitism (and absolutely believe that this is their own stance), while in another they can help spread antisemitic narratives, including antisemitic dogwhistles, modern blood libels, erasure of Jewish rights, history and pain, and demonization of Jews. I'm not talking about people who are aware that stuff like saying "From the river to the sea" is repeating a genocidal chant against the Jews. I'm talking about people who honestly see a non-Jew posting an explanation on why anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism (even though Judaism IS Zionist, and anti-Zionism absolutely IS a tool for antisemites, and goes hand in hand with classic antisemitism), and they totally believe this, and reblog such a post, that is speaking over the majority of Jews, who are Zionist, and repeatedly try to explain how anti-Zionism hurts ALL OF US, every single Jew.

But it is a nice vid, so here:

The president of the Israeli Bar-Ilan University said at the Knesset (Israel's parliament) today that they are trying to deal with thousands of students who come to study, but are suffering from post-traumatic symptoms that impair them psychologically and cognitively, whether from the events of the Hamas massacre, or the fighting in Gaza. He mentioned that these symptoms harm every skill needed for academic work, even for people who are exceptionally gifted. BIU is the university with the fourth biggest number of students in Israel (according to 2021 numbers).

In connection to this subject, in the US, charges have been filed against a man who has threatened to blow up a local synagogue and kill Jews, following the war in Gaza.

New Zealand is another country now suspending funding to UNRWA, the UN agency whose members were found to be complicit in the Hamas massacre. The intel was reliable enough that the UN fired some of these employees, rather than suspend them pending a hearing. I first wrote about the news here. NZ is the 15th country to do this, though it should be noted that Switzerland froze its funding to this UN agency even before this latest intel, because of past antisemitism and terrorism encouragement that UNRWA was regularly responsible for. There is a continuously updated list of who's suspending its UNRWA funding at UN Watch.

This is 76 years old Menucha Cholati with her husband Israel.

On Oct 7, they each hid separately from the Hamas terrorists who invaded their community, kibbutz Kissufim, for hours on end. When Israel was finally rescued by Israeli soldiers, he asked to see his wife. He was advised that it's better not to, but he insisted. Holding on to a bag for all his and her meds, which had been pierced by bullets, he got to see his wife, only to discover that the terrorists burned her alive. May her memory be a blessing.

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

[kittyoverlord]

Queer Converts at Chabad?

It's more likely than you think.

I'm putting this together because as someone whose practice tends more "traditional" (for lack of a better term), and someone who is very obviously Queer, I have found myself relying on Chabad every now and again, and have some tips for how to interact with the organization with minimal stress. Hope this helps someone.

For those who don't know, Chabad is the "missionary"* branch of Chasidic Judaism, an ultra-Orthadox Jewish community which holds some of the most bigoted beliefs you'll find in Judaism. At the same time, Chabadniks are some of the nicest people that you'll ever meet.

My first experience with Chabad, I had just started learning about Judaism in college and had very little context about the wider Jewish community. During Sukkot I happened upon the local Chabad's sukkah in the middle of campus, and decided to pop in. They were holding a learning session about the meaning of the Lulav, and through a line of questioning I learned for the first time about Family Purity (Nidah) laws, and I piped up, "What if you're gay?" To which the Chabad Rabbi kinda stumbled over his words and said, "Well, simply put, you can't be gay." or something to that affect. I said, "Oh, ok." very calmly, realizing what I had walked into, thanked him for the Pizza, and respectfully left.

I've also had some good experiences with Chabad. There's a local Jewish festival in my town every year, and the last time I went I visited both of the Chabad booths (one for the university, and one for the general town). I can't remember which, but one Rabbi wrapped tefillin for me, while the other Rabbi only offered to the cis men who walked up after me. I found myself surprised, but glad to fulfill the mitzvah, and we had a brief conversation about Jewish practice and being true to oneself. His words were very measured, but were neutral, not antagonistic.

This is just to give you a bit of context of what you may deal with at a Chabad house.

Today, on the last(ish) day of Sukkot, I needed to go shake a Lulav and eat in a Sukkah. I couldn't build my own Sukkah this year due to my health, and had also been unable to plan ahead to register for any local events. As someone who has struggled to connect with my local Jewish community becuase it's very spread out vs. where I converted, I don't have any connections with local Jews who may have their own Sukkahs. Hence, I turned to the last possibility, the everpresent Chabad.

I googled around and found the closest Chabad house, found an email form, and sent a quick email inquiring about stopping by to use the Sukkah. I also had a back-up house closer to the liberal bubble I grew up in where Chabadniks are more likely to keep their homophobia on the DL, but I couldn't find an email for them, so I was gonna call the next morning. However, I received an email respose right away and quickly was able to set up a time for me to visit their Sukkah.

Fast forward to today. The Rabbi was very pleasant and I was able to observe the mitzvot of the lulav and dwelling in the Sukkah, so mission accomplished. I had planned on what to say regarding my queerness - "Yeah, I live around here, I just tend not to fit in to many local congregations." which went fine. What I was not anticipating was the very pointed questions to determine how Jewish I was.

I had been thinking about what I would say about this after seeing this post from @vaspider. So I hit him with the "I started practicing in college where the Jewish community was really close together." We walked around it for a bit but he was practiced and ended up eventually hitting me with the "Are your parents Jewish?" then asked me where I converted. While I have little love for Chabad, I didn't feel comfortable lying to him, so I let him know that I converted with the conservative shul where I lived at the time.

The reason he was asking me such pointed questions is because he was trying to determine how much effort it would take to work me into the Chassidic community. If I were born Jewish, he would just need to convince me to strengthen my traditional practice and be a nice heterosexual woman. As a convert in another denomination**, he would need me to convert again with a Chasidic Rabbi before I could be fully incorporated into his shul.

Luckily, I was somewhat prepared for this possibility, so I wasn't taken totally by surprise. And I didn't really feel insulted - I know he subscribes to a very specific idea of the world that is fueling his actions.

I was also very consious to not offer my hand to shake, and he didn't offer his. A lot of Orthodox people observe a practice of not touching people of the "opposite" sex, and I didn't want to extend my hand only for him to refuse it. I wasn't trying to be stealth, but have a full beard, and wasn't sure where he would land on that.

At least after all of that he still had me shake the Lulav and gave me some noodle kugel to eat in the Sukkah. That's all that I wanted.

TLDR: Chabad has the reputation it does for a reason, but if you go in with a very specific purpose and knowing what to expect, they can be a valuable resource. They want you to fulfill the mitvot, so if you can put up with a bit of awkwardness and proseltyzing, it may be worth it to you. Of course, it may not be, this is just to provide some info for other Queer Disabled Jews who find themselves in need of a Jewish space in a pinch.

Edit: I told my Rabbi (who hates Chabad) about this and basically summed it up as, "I feel like a carry a little of your spirit every time I interact with Chabad, because I think I'm fueled out of spite. Like, 'I'm going to fulfill these mitzvot, even if you don't want me to.'" and he loved that. My Rabbi is the best.

If spite is what gets you there, use what works lol.

*I'm calling them missionaries because that's the closest term I could think of, however their goal is not to make non-Jewish people Jewish (that's prohibited), their goal is to make already Jewish people more Orthodox. Not that they'd turn away someone trying to convert.

**Jewish groups that vary by practice are more commonly referred to as "movements" as at the end of the day a Jew is a Jew so even different movements will respect eachother, but of course there's always exceptions and I just didn't want to use the word "movement" over and over again, so denomination seemed like a sufficient synonym.

[gaelic-symphony]

Gentle here. Why can't you just pick off the pepperoni? I don't like pepperoni either, it scares me, but that's maint autism. Happy birthday

It's a valid question if you're not familiar with the rules of kashrut! Basically, if my dairy dish came into contact with meat of any kind at any point during preparation, then it's not kosher.

This is part of what the rabbis call "building a fence around the Torah." The rule in the Torah is not to eat milk and meat together, but in order to make sure we don't *accidentally* eat anything with even a trace of both milk and meat, we have all these extra rules about keeping milk and meat separate. Many Jews who observe some level of kashrut have two sets of dishes, utensils, pots and pans, etc., one set for meat and one set for dairy.

Additionally, Jews who keep strictly kosher will only eat prepared foods that are certified kosher, meaning that a certified representative of a rabbinic agency who is knowledgeable in the laws of kashrut inspected the facility where the food is made and the preparation process to make sure that they all comply with Jewish law. If there are any non-kosher foods present, like pepperoni, then none of the food prepared there can be certified kosher.

That last part wouldn't be an issue for me personally since I only care about official kosher certification when I'm in my own home preparing food in my kitchen, but even if I'm going out to eat, I still keep kosher-style, which means that I cannot eat anything that has been in contact with meat from an explicitly forbidden species of animal.

Thanks for the ask! Feel free to drop by with any other questions you might have about kashrut or other Jewish topics.

[california-112]

Prepare to have your ask box spammed!

What are some of your favorite Mulder headcanons?

Shields are...down! Let the spam rain :)

Mulder headcanons! Here we go! Some are extremely surface level and some are weirdly deep, so this might be a bit of a rollercoaster.

The bedroom in Mulder's apartment is used as essentially a dumping ground/boxroom/shed up until S6 because when he first moved out of his parents house he took literally EVERYTHING that belonged to him that he wanted to keep. He had zero intention of going back there to live on a long-term basis, and between going to Oxford and then going straight into the FBI, he never had to. So he has almost everything that he owns in that apartment (excluding what's in the basement office), and that's why he needs a box room to keep the place vaguely liveably tidy.

The reason he could sacrifice the bedroom to this so easily is because ever since Samantha's abduction, he's found that he has fewer flashback nightmares about it when he's not sleeping in a bed. This is specifically because I prefer the original abduction story he used in the Pilot what randomly got changed in S2.

He didn't have any partners on the X-Files before Scully (I Do No See Diana), and so when he felt like he needed to discuss a case with someone, he recorded himself presenting to a camera and then reviewed the tapes to make more sense of his ideas. (I have explored this in a fic!)

I think his fear of fire as canonised in Fire is very real, he just learns to control it more as the series goes on

He's asexual. To me 😌 I present the GIFs below (from this set of mine) as evidence:

Also in this scene he says that he hardly ever drinks and I believe that. We hardly see him drinking alcohol on screen as far as I remember. Also in the bar scene in FTF, I don't know how many shots of whatever $86 would get you, but he is GONE. He would never normally monologue like that to a random stranger. Also, he fully gives the wrong address for either himself or Scully when he gets in the cab. He may have a high alcohol tolerance, but he hardly ever uses it.

This is more of an AU maybe, but I love the idea of him being a trans guy. It adds so much to his character and viewing the series through that lens gives meaning to a lot of throwaway remarks, particularly ones like in Tooms when he says he even asked his parents to call him Mulder (and they notably didn't!). There are many good fics about this in the Trans Mulder Literary Universe AO3 collection!

This is more about other people thinking about Mulder but I definitely think that Frohike and to an extent Skinner see Mulder as a surrogate son.

When Mulder gets hold of the modern version of PowerPoint OH BOY. Scully regrets the Microsoft subscription immediately. There is so much word art. He tries to build every entry and exit effect into every slideshow. He uses the origami bird transition and the turning-to-dust transition and all the other cheesy ones. None of his documents are under 100MB between either amount of slides or amount of pictures. His hard drive is full almost immediately because he tries to turn every case file into a presentation. And Scully sits through all of them, because she loves him.

Like me, he celebrates the New Year rather than Christmas or another religious holiday in that season (though I do love the popular Jewish!Mulder headcanon). It's still a secular holiday, he just has a few of his own traditions that he likes to observe every year. I have a fic planned where he shares them with Scully which I hope to write and share this year :)

That's all that come to me at the moment...though if any more turn up I shall let you know :) Thank you for this ask, I had a lot of fun thinking about these! Maybe more of them will be turned into fic, who knows!