#i just. i feel like such a fake jew all the time!!

[jewish-vents]

I wish I had a single Jewish friend. I wish I had anyone at all to talk to who isn't unsafe. I'm always on guard and always trying to be perfect and I just don't know how long I can take it. But my only Jewish relative is my mother, who was raised completely Christian, who only found out she was Jewish when I was 19, deep into her 40's. I'm so far behind other people in terms of knowledge. I don't know anything. I'm too stupid to be Jewish. My grandparents' documents upon immigrating list their nationality as Uzbek, not Jewish. I don't have the proof to make others think of me as legitimately Jewish. The only two rabbis within 500 miles (I live in the Rocky Mountains) have said they can't work with me unless I'm willing to drive 8 hours one way to meet with them in-person multiple times a week. So I can't convert. I can't make anyone see me as Jewish. All I can do is look up Jewish knowledge on my own and try to teach myself whatever I can about Judaism. I feel like a fake Jew. I feel like a lost cause. And yet I know, listening to the things people around me say, that if anyone knew I was even this much Jewish, most of the people around me at my university would want me dead. Jewish enough to kill. Not Jewish enough to matter.

.

[vurren]

i wish there was hebrew school for adults :( i'd do anything to have gotten a jewish education and live a jewish childhood, even if i'd decided later on that i didn't believe in god

[starlightomatic]

Hi! I saw your tags on unlearning zionism and I was wondering if you've ever spoken about that/the kind of processing you had to do? I think it's... Interesting (for lack of a better word) how this is a sentiment I've seen reflected on pretty much all explicitly non-zionist Jewish blogs I follow, and how much that reflects both how closely entwined the concept and Jewishness has become and the fierce zionism in some people.

Obviously you're free to not discuss this at all, I also understand it's deeply personal. (I'm also not intending to make anyone change their mind, I believe this is a process Jewish people should be afforded on their own terms; I'm really just trying to understand where they're coming from). ♥️

The tl;dr was through talking to people, breaking my rigidities, and being lucky enough to encounter people who were kind, committed to dialogue, and not dismissive.

Longer version under the cut.

In winter 2019 I started dating a non-zionist, so a lot of the early stuff was through conversations with them.

Here are the specific things I recall through them:

They validated my experience of having felt traumatized by a negative experience I had at a protest. I felt very on the defense, and dismissed, as a zionist who wanted to be in leftist spaces and they validated that. I don't know if they were faking it or not, but it felt real, and being heard and not dismissed was super important to building trust and safety. Ultimately, building trust and safety was the most important thing.

They would sometimes patiently poke holes in things I said. Matter of factly, not confrontationally. For example, once I said I didn't like the separation wall dividing Israel proper from the West Bank but that it was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, and they were like "no, that wasn't the wall, it was a change in PA policy." Another time I was like "I don't understand [West Bank] settlers, if they want to be pioneers and settle more land they should settle the Negev, where they're not encroaching on Palestinians!" and they explained to me more about the situation between Israel and Bedouins and how that actually still would involve encroaching/displacement.

They're very religious, and so they had the tools to poke into my "but just open a siddur! you can see all the references to returning to Jerusalem!" and discuss how that differed from and predated zionism the political ideology. They were able to break through my dismissiveness/derision of Chareidi antizionism and help me understand that it has legitimate religious underpinnings. (They're not Chareidi though.) They affirmed for me that they do feel connected to Eretz Yisrael and they love Eretz Yisrael.

They also explained that indigenous doesn't mean "from a place" but rather describes a relationship to colonialism. It still didn't totally click for me, and they and I have both since come to understand that there are a lot of definitions of indigenous, but what it did help me understand was that when people push back against "Jews are indigenous to EY" they're not always trying to say we're not from there.

In general it helped me break down what I thought an antizionist was. I thought that an antizionist was someone who didn't think Jews had a meaningful spiritual and communal connection to EY, thought we weren't from there, didn't give a shit if all Israeli Jews ended up pushed into the sea, hadn't opened a siddur to see references to return to Jerusalem, etc. I was also pretty rigid in my thinking and had collected a bunch of talking points, mostly that I'd co-created with other members of Jewbook (Jewish facebook). They helped me break out of that rigidity and once I'd done that I was open to learning more.

What happened next is that in fall 2019 is I did a fellowship that, while unrelated to the topic, put me in contact with other Jewish antizionists.

There was one person whose project we visited during an outing on the fellowship, who had discussed their project's antizionism. I was bothered by it and asked them one question: Did they feel Jews were connected to Eretz Yisrael? Did they feel connected to Eretz Yisrael? They responded yes of course.

Another person was my roommate on the fellowship, a leftist antizionist Syrian Jew. For a while one of my sticking points had been Mizrahi support of Zionism -- my thought process here had a few pieces. One, it seemed like white privilege to go against what most Israeli Jews of color believed and wanted. Another was that I felt that a lot of antizionists were dismissive of and racist towards Mizrahim and don't understand or care to understand their needs, history, or motivations (I do still think that's true). I also saw the expulsions from SWANA and the fact that Israel took in the SWANA Jewish refugees as proof of the necessity of Zionism.

So, I think that interacting with a Mizrahi antizionist both taught me expanded perspectives on the issue, and taught me that it's possible to be antizionist and still in solidarity with Mizrahim. I learned more nuance, for example around Israel's taking in of the refugees; I knew they had been mistreated, but I think it helped me connect the dots about what that meant about the entire Zionist project. That was also the year A-WA's album Bayti fi Rasi came out, and when I listened to Hana Mash Hu Al Yaman, I think that's when it clicked for me that Israel taking them in was not some sort of miracle or blessing in disguise but rather a last resort for people who did not want to go but had no choice. The main characters in that song wanted to stay in Yemen which is I think something that hadn't clicked for me before. That may not be the majority Mizrahi perspective but it is a perspective and one I hadn't previously considered.

By the same token, my partner at the time (the one I talked about at the beginning of the post) was raised as a Yiddish speaker, and we talked about Yiddish suppression during the early days of the state, as well as Ben Yehuda's disdain for Yiddish, and the general early Zionist disdain for Eastern European Jewry and "old world" Jewish culture. I was already aware of the New Jew concept (the idea that the old Jew was studious and unathletic, but we should put that behind us to become strong and agricultural). They helped me frame this in terms of antisemitism, connecting it to the vitriol Chassidim receive from other Jews, antisemitism directed towards Jewish men and the ways it's about gender and goyish and Jewish constructions of masculinity, anti-circ rhetoric that depends on the Hellenistic idea of the body as perfection, and Naomi Klein's analysis of the dislike of Yiddish by Ben Yehuda et al as sexist due to their association of it as "feminine" and therefore lesser.

We also talked about the ways that Zionism devalues diaspora culture. I definitely see this in the ways that eg Jewbook zionists used to see the Ashkenazi past in Eastern Europe as simply a time of pogroms and violence with nothing generative or valuable. It seems that zionism posits Israel and Israeli culture as the "right" or "completed" version of Judaism, and discourages us from mourning the loss of culture we experienced during the Holocaust and our subsequent exodus.

I think there is nuance here; there are Israeli Yiddishists, there are people practicing all kinds of diaspora Jewish cultures in Israel, etc. I think this is a case where antizionists take something real and over emphasize it to sound bigger and more harmful than it is. It's not Israel's fault that European Jewry got destroyed and it's not Israel's fault that A-WA's family had to leave Yemen. Sometimes it feels like antizionist project those harms onto Israel and Zionism.

At the same time though, there is a kernel of truth in the way at least that many North American zionists view Ashkenazi culture, thought I can't say how much of that is their Zionism and how much is the legacy of American assimilationism (even among religious Jews).

In any case, 2020 is when I started on my journey to deepen my understanding of old world Ashkenazi culture and history. I started with a day spent in the kids' section of the Yiddish Book Center using the beginner education resources there to start teaching myself Yiddish (I had a lot of familiarity because my extended family speaks it, but I didn't yet). About half a second later the pandemic started, and the chaos from that took all my attention for a while, but by the end of the summer I did a deep dive on my genealogy and spent two weeks tracking down documents and names and towns. At that point my family history was no longer abstract, and I started wondering more about what their lives were like in the old country.

I started watching Yiddish plays on zoom, including a production of the Dybbuk that I fell in love with. I got involved in the shtetlcore movement, which was a social media aesthetic fad that was basically the shtetl version of cottagecore. That spring the duolingo Yiddish course came out and I did a six month streak. The following winter I went to a virtual Yiddish conference. I went again two more times in person, and last summer I went to a week-long retreat where we were only allowed to speak Yiddish. I also do Yiddish drag and burlesque.

With this emphasis and knowledge it's hard for me to accept any framing that the only "right" place for Jews to live is Israel, or that diaspora cultures are lesser-than. At some point I encountered a belief among some zionists (though I don't think most believe this) that the Jewish people's differentiation into a myriad of different cultures was a bad thing, and constituted negatively picking up pieces of non-Jewish culture, and that it's good we're back together in Israel so we can become just one culture again. I obviously strongly disagree and I while I wish we had not had to experience the trauma of Khorban Beis Hamikdash and the ensuing displacement, I think the variety of different cultures we split into is beautiful.

Ironically, Israel is actually a place of great cultural exchange between those cultures. And yes, I do worry there will be cultural loss if everything blends together melting pot style, but that's more of a function of how societies work as opposed to official state policy. And I also think the Jewish subcultures will endure. Also the cultural loss is the fault of the Holocaust, the Soviet Union, and nationalist SWANA countries way way more than it is Israel's.

At this point I've come to view the idea that Zionism is detrimental to Jewish culture as weak, but I still am not a Zionist, and that's because the issue with Zionism is not that it harms Jews but that it harms Palestinians.

In early summer 2020, I, along with many other white people were called to reckon with the realities of white supremacy in the US, and our part in it, far more deeply than we had before. I learned to understand how racism functions as a pillar of the US's underpinnings, how white supremacy morphs to sustain itself, how I as an individual and Jews as a group were being used to maintain white supremacy. It fundamentally shifted how I view these topics and how I understand the way that states function.

It was impossible not to apply these concepts to Israel-Palestine. While it is obviously not a one-to-one comparison and I am frustrated with folks who seem to think it is, the concepts and analyses I learned in June 2020 were very elucidating in understanding Israel as a state, and how white supremacy and Jewish supremacy operate in Israel-Palestine.

One of those concepts is a deeper understanding of power dynamics and the oppressed-oppressor relationship. While that is not the be-all end-all, and it is still possible for an oppressed group to do harm and commit war crimes (as they did on Oct 7), it helped me understand the ways it makes no sense to view Palestinians and Israelis as equal parties or to view Palestinians as "the aggressor" as many zionists do. Riots are the language of the unheard and, yes, so is violence. Do not imagine that I excuse, condone, or celebrate Oct 7, but I understand why it happened.

These past seven months have forced a magnifying glass on Israel-Palestine and I have spent a lot of time thinking and talking about it. I have had many experiences and interactions that have illuminated different things to me, but I'll leave you with this one.

In 1956, a young man named Ro'i Rothberg was killed in Kibbutz Nahal Oz by Palestinians who lived in Gaza. Moshe Dayan came to give a eulogy and in it, he said:

Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.

Which is to say, he is stating point blank that the Nakba happened, and that Nahal Oz -- and in fact Israel -- is built on land that had been farmed and inhabited by Palestinians. The hasbarist canard of "we didn't steal their land" falls away when Moshe Dayan himself admits it, doesn't it?

He is acknowledging, also, that he understands why the people of Gaza are enraged, and why some of them express this rage as violence. He gives his solution: That the Israeli people, and especially the people of Nahal Oz, must always be on their guard. Must never become peaceniks and forget the rage of the people of Gaza. He says "we are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the cannon's maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home."

His vision is of an Israel that is always militarized and militant, always on its guard, never to know peace. A people who will send their children to the army generation after generation after generation. Never to rest. Never to be able to lower their guard.

And that is awful! Not just for Palestinians, but for Israelis! Dayan lays out here that if the Nakba is not redressed, this will continue forever. He wants it to continue forever; I want the Nakba redressed.

He knew Nahal Oz would be attacked again. And he was right. On the morning of Simchat Torah of this year, 5784, twelve residents of the kibbutz were brutally murdered. A family that my family knows hid there in their bomb shelter for ten hours with their small children until they were rescued. The kibbutz was destroyed.

And Moshe Dayan knew it would happen, all the way back in 1956. And yet did nothing to change our trajectory. I cannot forgive him that.

In the months since the destruction of Nahal Oz, we have seen Gaza pummeled with a terrifying vengeance. For years I have encountered, albeit few and far between, people who have clammored for Gaza to be "turned into a parking lot." I was horrified by them, but did not take seriously the threat they represented. Yet now, their genocidal flowers have borne fruit. Gaza lies in ruins. 60% of the roads and infrastructure are destroyed. The descendants of refugees are refugees again, chased from their homes by the descendants of refugees. The live in tents, they scrabble for water and food. They live under threat of bombing, or being shot, or dying of illness and malnutrition.

And still Nahal Oz remains destroyed. The Jewish dead of Europe remain dead. The synagogues of Tunis and Algiers remain empty. Nothing is fixed, only more and more broken.

Is it to continue this way? Is this the world we want?

I say no. I say another world is possible. And on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

[dearlittlefandom-stalker]

Imagine being one of the Roman soldiers though. Imagine having to do what you thought would be a normal execution one day.

Three convicts, two of which are thieves. As for the third… I mean, yeah some people say this guy is the “messiah” (whatever that means, you’re no Jew) and there is talk of miracles and the religious nuts really seem to hate him, but you have him nailed to a cross all the same, so what? If he is a god then he can join the club; Caesar knows that the Romans have enough gods to fill their pantheon and then some. Most likely he’s just a man with some hefty delusions that cost him his life.

But then earthquakes happen. Weird but can be written off as chance, right? Then the sky goes dark midday. A blood moon rises.

That ain’t normal.

Feelings unlike anything you’ve ever felt arise in your gut. The man cries out with a loud voice “It is finished!” and dies immediately after. You shiver. Uncanny, that is.

“Surely this Man is the Son of God,” a fellow Soldier exclaims beside you. At this point you might agree, but the spear still pierces through his skin all the same and you think (hope) that whoever this God-Man was that he isn’t your problem anymore, seeing as he’s dead. Hopefully you can forget the whole thing. (Somehow you feel that this scene will haunt you for a long time)

But the debacle is not over with the burial, as you had assumed. The religious nuts get real anxious and noisy, so to shut them up Pilot has a watch set to guard the body of a dead man. A dead man.

You personally have seen many dead men in your time, but never have you seen one move. Never have you seen or heard of people particularly wanting to touch dead bodies, either. You almost say as such when you are one of the men assigned the last watch, but decide you’d rather like to keep your tongue than chance losing it. You expect it to be rather a boring job, all told.

And it is. Until these, these beings of light and lightning descend on top of you from the Heavens and the last thing you can think before you know no more is whatever god whose body I’ve been guarding please spare me

You wake up, despite all your expectations to the contrary. You almost wonder if it would have been better if you died.

Those religious nuts come to you and your fellow guards and give you some coin along with a fake story to tell. They offer to save the skin off your back so you are not put to death like others who’ve been killed for less. You go along with the story because to be honest there is still a part of you that hopes this was all a dream. But the borrowed words taste like ash in your mouth and the coins jingle in your pockets with all the weight of a chain.

You go through the rest of the day (and night, and the next day and night) after the event in a haze. Your feet walk where you know not and you don’t care to correct them.

But then you see Him.

The same Man you saw die.

The same Man whose body you guarded.

This Son of God, in the flesh, you see stand in front of a crowd with your own two eyes and you can scarce believe it but all the same you know more than you’ve ever known anything before that this is real, that this Jesus is truly not just a god, but The God.

And so you decide to follow Him.

Just imagine that for a minute.

[spot-the-antisemitism]

Genuine question, and I don't know if you answered this previously, but how do you feel about the Palestinian citizens? Like, if you ignore whatever the fuck Hamas has going on and just look at the innocents, what are your thoughts on the genocide? Do you think Israel is justified in bombing the Gaza strip? If you think think that Israel isn't justified, what are your thoughts on the people that do?

I'm not trying to start shit or anything, this is all asked out of genuine curiosity, and there isn't a wrong or right answer (everything is objective when it comes to opinion based questions such as these)

have a good timezone

Dear anon,

My heart goes out to them and any answer that doesn't extend at least some compassion for people trying to survive in a dictatorship is wrong.

There is a middle ground between "these brown people don't understand how to not be antisemtic and not murder it's their CuLtUrE" and "All palestineans are complicit in hamas war crimes, even NO especially the refugees who weren't even in Gaza"

There is some normalcy and compassion that can exist between fetishization and racism

'your thoughts on the genocide?' STOP APPOPRIATING THE HOLOCAUST WHEN TALKING ABOUT GAZA.

You call it a genocide only because you don't want to call October 7th a war crime. Would you call the Iraq-Iran war a genocide? NO? Why not? Is it because the Jews aren't the ones doing the killing? I see.

"If you think think that Israel isn't justified, what are your thoughts on the people that do?"

I have spoken to those people. They feel like they HAVE to support the IDF to counter the "IDF belong in hell" Westboro baptist church style nonsense. It's kinda sad. PSA: you don't have to excuse your sides war crimes either.

I promise you if you can extend compassion for the Gazan civilian who bears some complicity in what Hamas does because they control everything in Gaza you can extend it to the average kahanist likudnik

Curent timezone time is: early morning

I am open about living in the southern us because I don't fake ethnicities for clout unlike my enemies

I WILL have a good morning

Cecil

[focaccia-nose]

This comment on one of my recent posts pretty much sums up what I am going through as an american Jew.

My post was about the pain I have experienced navigating within my community and in leftist circles. It was about how I feel unsafe and hurt by people I thought were close to me. It was about how the escapism I was using to cope is being infiltrated by antisemitic rhetoric.

I was at a house show the evening of October 7th and people in my small leftist town CHEERED for the murder and rape of people like me. How am I supposed to feel safe knowing that lives like mine are considered disposable? That nobody would have cared if I was gunned down at a music festival, just because citizens in Gaza have it worse. That doesn't cancel out the fact that Jewish people everywhere are struggling. Just because it's not as bad as being in a war zone, doesn't mean that it's not real.

It's been said so many times that many things can be simultaneously true that I want to tear my hair out.

This is the ultimate gaslighting and so reductionist that I don't even know how to where to begin. The idea that we all lived together peacefully before Israel was established is bullshit.

If your response to suffering is to invalidate their lived experiences, make fun of them, put words in their mouth, or accuse them of faking it, you are fucked in the head.

Propaganda is working on you.

[hatsunevitu]

both kyle and cartman joined the debate club in high school. kyle thought it would help him with his public speaking skills and improve his critical thinking, meanwhile cartman was just looking for an opportunity to release the anger and stress he had and fucking destroy someone in a verbal fight.

and – uh-oh, such a coincidence – they both joined it at the same time without knowing it.

kyle was obviously pissed off, and he was actually thinking of quitting, because the idea of spending school hours arguing with cartman didn’t really seem appealing to him, but eventually his pride wouldn’t let him simply give up.

“I can be in any club I want, and I won’t let Cartman fucking ruin it for me! You’ll see, dude, he’ll drop out in one or two meetings when I absolutely win him in a debate!” as he then explained to stan.

kyle was preparing for the first debate harder than for any of his normal school activities. he would spend nights perfecting his reasoning and making a plan for his speech, until he was absolutely sure cartman had zero chances to win.

the theme was something controversial like, i’m not sure, politics or something, and kyle was totally sure that cartman would come unprepared, because he hates anything homework-like, and he ususally prefers improvising.

he was wrong, though, as cartman has been preparing. he entered the classroom with a small stack of papers with his reasoning on them, he was smiling brightly and joking, and kyle for the first time felt insecure about his skills. he felt rather nervous as he knew that cartman’s charisma and the ability to tell lies in the blink of his eye made kyle look worse in a debate, but he still hoped the teacher had some common sense and wouldn’t let cartman blind them with his confident smiles and fake politeness.

but the nervous anxious feeling in kyle’s chest wouldn’t go away, so when cartman started speaking, kyle couldn’t just stay quiet, sighing irritatedly when cartman said things like “violence is bad”. as kyle knew damn well that’s not what cartman actually thought.

so when the debate was coming to its end and cartman was giving another hypocritical speech, kyle just couldn’t be silent anymore, interrupting cartman with his new counter arguments (and adding some insults as well). cartman, of course, lost his temper too, and the constructive discussion instantly became a heated bickering. teachers tried to stop it but when kyle and cartman are fighting literally nothing can distract them.

cartman: Look, capitalism is just the natural way of things. It's the perfect system, without it everything would fall apart!

kyle: How can you be sooo blind and ignorant to everything?! Capitalism breeds inequality, it's the reason behind a lot of problems in our society, you just don't know it because you haven't experienced all the struggles, you fat privileged fuck!

cartman: Oh, I’m privileged?? Well, you’re just a whiny jew who can't handle the truth. You're just jealous your greedy ass can't make money yourself!

kyle: Shut up, Cartman, I’m warning you!

after a few antisemitic-fatphobic-homophobic slurs they were both kicked out and banned from entering the club again.

they both seemed disappointed and annoyed by it, but cartman had a smug smirk on his face, feeling proud of making kyle mad.

they wouldn’t stop their fight though, arguing all the way back home, without being pressured or watched, and kyle caught himself thinking that arguing with cartman is pretty, well, addicting and he might actually be enjoying it.

at the end they decided it’s a tie, and for the goodbye cartman says something like “Well, you’re annoying as fuck, but I gotta hand it to you, you’re good at debating. Who even needs that stupid club, anyway?”

and kyle smiles, nodding. “Next week, the same time” he says already walking away from Cartman.

and they meet again, choosing a topic and preparing for the debate by themselves because they don’t need a club to argue with each other.

[thecurioustale]

It Is October 7 Again

I am going to talk about genocide today, and anti-Semitism, and a few other things. This is a long post.

Over the past year you have perhaps noticed the drastic uptick of Jewish people, both online and in person, who are reporting anti-Semitism. And you may have noticed that they are also talking much more often, more openly, and more passionately about Jewish cultures, traditions, and identity.

You should heed this: This is the telltale of a group of people who are being socially isolated, repressed, and wronged. Even casual, non-religious Jews like myself, for whom Jewishness is far from the center of their identity, are experiencing this. To the extent that the vilification of Jews is a reliable canary in the coal mine whenever a society is headed down an especially bad path, the past year has been an alarming one for Western nations, both inside and outside the English-speaking world. You know how we've been worried sick about all the book bans the fascists are doing? Yeah, well, this Jew-hate stuff on the left is cut from the same cloth.

Anti-Semitism is only one small plank of the fascist resurgence on the mainstream right, but it is one of three principal ideological planks (together with racial revolution and the elimination of capitalism) on the authoritarian left, and in the past year it has become the hottest of the three despite being the smallest. And this is where most of the consternation comes from among Jews, because most Jews (including myself) are also leftists. Our backstabbers this time are the people with whom, and for whom, we have done so much work in the pursuit of justice.

And it hurts. Despite our small numbers, Jews have always been integral to the struggle for queer rights, for sexual equality, for racial justice, for environmental stewardship, for fair wages, for safe workplaces, for affordable healthcare. And the hurt is palpable: "We were there with you. We were there for you. And now when it is our turn to call upon our friends, you cast us into the sea." And it's not like we can just stop being leftists. We have to coexist now in this awkward alliance of antipathy.

Let me tell you something, as a queer person myself (agender) and more importantly as a lifelong leftist: If you're siding with Hamas in this—an Islamic terrorist organization whose view on gay and trans people is that they should be put to death and whose view on women is that they should be docile servants to their male guardians—if you're siding with that over the existential self-defense of the free democratic nation of Israel, you need to get your head examined, because you're a special kind of fool...and also probably a bad person too, in dire need of some self-improvement.

If nothing else, even if you do side against Israel in the war against Hamas, you should be doing more to speak out against the deluge of anti-Semitism that is infecting leftist discourse and spaces, because it is discrediting the entire leftist coalition. Failure to speak out against hate speech makes you not only a fool and a bad person, but also a fake leftist. It means everything you've ever said about opposing racism and prejudice was meaningless, superficial blather, likely meant more so to make yourself feel self-righteous and socially accepted among your peers than to actually contribute to the causes of justice.

When an animal, or a person, or a whole society, is attacked by a predator—when one is already in the predator's grip and it is too late to flee—the first instinct is usually to resist. And at first there is the strength to resist, before the wounds accrue. So, in societies, this is the stage when people raise their voices in resistance. This is where we are at now. This is the time of story-telling among Jews, of reminders to one another that the gaslighting by our fake friends is false, that all of these narratives about Jews being the scourge of the Earth and Israel a land of Nazis are lies, no matter how ubiquitous these narratives may seem.

The language and imagery coming out of Jewish communities and people for the past year has been language largely of self-affirmation: "We are here. We are real. We are valid. What is being done to us is wrong. What is being said about us is false." This has been the growing refrain of Jews around the world for the past year, and you should heed it, because it concerns you. It concerns you because we share this society together and are in it together.

In the West we enjoy broad free speech rights and relative physical and economic safety to use those rights. And I am hopeful that the current spate of anti-Semitism is at a high-water mark, and that things won't get significantly worse from here. But even if this bears out, and things don't get much worse than they are right now, even this current level of bigotry is still deeply wrong and unacceptable.

And so there is that other refrain that Jews are also saying: "It hurts to be betrayed by our own allies, for whom and with whom we have done so much." I know I just said it, but it bears repeating: Few groups of people in the world have been more passionately committed to the causes of liberalism, liberation, civil rights, and progressivism than Jews, particularly secular Jews and Reform Jews (i.e. the least strict denomination of Judaism). This is because Jews are deeply cosmopolitan and civil-minded, believing in community action and coming together. And even more so it is because Jews are the ultimate refugees, with deep knowledge of the barrel end of guns and tyranny. Jews bear deep generational traumas and cultural conditioning, informing the near-universal Jewish commitment to the importance of upholding and expanding universal education, public health, civil rights, and personal liberty and dignity.

Bad-faith actors psychopathically call this uptick in affirmative language coming from Jews an attempt to distract from "the genocide in Palestine," as though it were merely a tactic in some insidious Jewish effort to portray Jews as the victims of their own violence. A disgusting lie, is what that is. But it does niggle at the mind, doesn't it? "Why are Jewish people pretending that the war isn't happening? Why are they ignoring the destruction in Gaza? Why are they only talking about themselves and their dumb traditions and music and crap?"

Well, we're not ignoring what's happening in Gaza, of course. We talk about it often. No one I've come across is happy that the Palestinian people are suffering. Rather, this kind of spin is just one of the many tactics of propagandists and radicals to distort the truth of their own anti-Semitic wrongdoings through any means, and, moreover, it is a time-tested tactic of racial supremacists and other cultural bigots worldwide to portray a persecuted minority's efforts at sanity and self-defense, i.e. through the sharing of their stories and customs, in a negative, selfish, and menacing light.

I want it to be known that Israel is not the systemic aggressor in the Middle East, and never was. Israel is a small country, alone in the region, surrounded and vastly outnumbered by mostly hostile, at best indifferent nations, and vilified by the wider world because of generations of successful anti-Jewish propaganda by anti-Semitic actors. Israel is fighting to preserve its very existence. It does get money and some amount of weaponry from America, and lip service from Europeans who are embarrassed by their past, but when terrorists are streaming over the border and rockets are flying, America feels very far away indeed, and Israel has always known that if it fails in its own self-defense there will be no one coming to help. None. Israel would be destroyed.

And many if not all of you who are opposed to Israel's ruthless prosecution of this war would be singing a very different tune if the name "Israel" were removed from the picture and you were inserted in its place: if, across the railroad tracks in your own town, there was a neighborhood full of people who would take any chance to murder you—literally murder you—with no far-flung federal government to swoop in and protect you. You're on your damned own.

That's Israel.

One year ago today was the October 7 massacre in Israel, when Hamas fighters did exactly that: They breached the Israeli border out of Gaza and murdered over a thousand people, and took hundreds more hostage—including people of numerous nationalities around the world—many of whom have since been murdered by their captors.

In addition to murder and abduction, Hamas fighters on that day committed sexual assault, physical assault, bodily mutilation, arson, robbery, and many other felonies. Going by the videos and voice messages they so boastfully recorded and posted for the world to see, they did so mostly in a frenzy of wild bloodlust. Madness, in other words. True madness, perpetrated by the insane, who had been radicalized into it through a culture that glorifies holy war, mass murder, and martyrdom, and which dehumanizes Jews as thoroughly as any society ever did, including That One.

On that day Hamas committed the single-biggest music concert slaughter on record anywhere in the world. They practically annihilated several small Jewish villages on the border. (And, to be clear, these were not newly-established settler homesteads within Palestinian territory, not that that would have justified it, but these were longstanding Jewish communities clearly on the Israeli side of the border.) The murder committed by Hamas fighters was indiscriminate—not the fake sort of "indiscriminate" charged of the Israeli Defense Forces, but truly indiscriminate, targeting people purely on the basis of opportunity. It didn't matter to these terrorists if their victims were passive and compliant, physically disabled, or children. Death to them all.

It was an act of terrorism. It was a crime against humanity. And it was, to put it mildly, an act of war. And you might find that inconvenient, but too bad for you. The most comparable milestone in American living memory would be the September 11 attacks. Israel formally declared war immediately—something that nations, including Israel in the face of past invasions, have done increasingly less frequently done since the Second World War, as the language of "war" has fallen out of fashion amid an arrogant belief by Westerners that we have somehow grown beyond it. A formal declaration of war is what Israel made, and it was proper that Israel make this declaration, and Israel was warranted in so doing.

As soon as the events of October 7 became publicly known, there were celebrations among Islamic terrorists, their sympathizers, and anti-Semites of all stripes worldwide—including Western progressives who have a whole punch of pride flags and hearts and kittens and puppies in their bios. The celebrations were immediate. They always are. When you belong to that bunch, there's never a wrong time to celebrate the murder of Jews, civilian or not, no matter how few or how many. And bear in mind: At this point there had been no Israeli counterstroke yet; none of the arguments which would find their voices in the ensuing months, about the supposed heavy-handedness of Israeli's response, applied yet. People celebrated this slaughter on principle, on the notion that Israelis—Jews, really—should be killed wherever possible, and the State of Israel destroyed. They celebrated on the notion that Jews are white colonizers (a lie that would be laughable if it weren't so deeply vile) and that only Muslims may inhabit this part of the world and govern its peoples.

And, so, like I said, I figured today would be a good day to talk about genocide.

Let's get into it.

That word, genocide, more than any other, is how anti-Semites, lamentably parroted by those who uncritically believe the emotionally-charged accusations of anti-Semites, distill the Israel–Hamas War. They reach for this word, which occupies the very top shelf of human atrocity, wantonly and shamelessly, in order to claim the mantle of righteousness for themselves, and to rationalize their own genocidal policy goal of exterminating Jewish life and self-determination in the Middle East.

It is unfortunate that we live in a time where people of bad faith and limited intellect instinctively reach for the most powerful, emotionally evocative language possible, bypassing any hope of nuance or accuracy in any arena of discourse where they are participants. It is unfortunate for two reasons: It misrepresents and thereby obscures the truth of things, and it saps this severest of language of its essential power when it is actually needed.

Most people in the West have never experienced war and don't understand just how horrible it is even under the best of circumstances. So, because of this, genocide is a very hard accusation to defend against amid the backdrop of war. Nobody wants to be a "genocide denier," and if you try and bring nuance into the conversation by arguing that all of these blown-up buildings and dead bodies are not "genocide," then you look either cynically pragmatic and ludicrously detached from the horrors of war, or you look like an apologist for genocide.

And anti-Semites know that, and therefore use the word all the more fervently and frequently. It is in virtually every piece of media they publish: a constant reminder, whose familiarity and repetition makes it become truer and truer over time in the minds of the people exposed to it. That is how propaganda works, after all.

But the thing is, "genocide" isn't just an arbitrary word. We have that word as a way of describing actions which serve to erase an entire people. Blown up buildings, dead bodies, displaced communities...as horrible as these things are, they are not, by themselves, going to erase an entire people. They are not, by themselves, genocide.

The reason the distinction is so important is because genocide is almost indefensible while war is frequently highly defensible. War, though it is terrible, is a legitimate recourse in many situations. Among them, when your people are physically attacked—your community, your nation, your ethnic group, your entire identity—war is sometimes the only means of self-defense.

You know how the fascists like to accuse their enemies of doing the things that they themselves are guilty of? It's the same thing with the people who raise the charge of genocide against Israel: Their policies toward Israel and Jews are not so subtly—and sometimes outright openly—genocidal in nature. They believe Israel should be erased from existence, its Jews either killed or again scattered across the world in a new Diaspora. (A word originally invented to describe an atrocity committed to Jews, just like the words ghetto, pogrom, and others.) And let me tell you something: A person who can condone genocide in their own heart, and who knows of the power of the word genocide to horrify the public, will have no reservations about using that word to sully their would-be victims.

There are so many comfortable Westerners with dark hearts who loll about on their phones and keyboards and talk about how they would just love for Israel to roll over and die.

But Israel isn't going to do that. Sorry, not sorry. So long as the Israelis have a say in their own fate, they are going to protect themselves. A murderous terrorist organization like Hamas must be stopped. It must be dismantled completely if possible, or at least so badly degraded that it cannot again commit large-scale atrocities. As an Israeli military commander said shortly after October 7: "What [else] are we supposed to do? Send them roses?"

When your enemies are determined to use physical force to hurt you, and have utterly no qualms at all about using any means they can no matter how unethical or inhumane, and cannot be stopped through dialogue, war is a defensible option.

My thesis today is a simple one: 1) Israel is in the right and Hamas is in the wrong, unambiguously; 2) the war was forced on Israel and Israel is justified in fighting it; 3) most of the people who are claiming that Israel is the aggressor are at best misinformed and bafflingly naïve, and at worst are sick individuals with deep-seated anti-Semitic views that those around them perhaps weren't aware of; and 4) global anti-Semitism is sharply on the rise and needs to be acknowledged and reconciled with respect to people's opinions on the Israel–Hamas War.

But before I continue to address these points, I also want to lay out three markers in the ground, for you to contextualize the rest of this essay by:

Firstly: Conditions in Gaza are indeed very bad in many places, with many civilian deaths and injuries, and massive displacement of people from their homes. I make no denial of that whatsoever, nor do I uncritically condone it. But neither do I primarily blame Israel for it. I primarily blame Hamas, for stationing its fighters among civilians for the express purpose of causing as many civilian casualties among their own people as possible.

Secondly: Go count the number of Jews in Middle Eastern and North African countries other than Israel, and compare those numbers to what they were a century ago, and then come back and speak to me of genocide.

Thirdly: The people who are most emphatically promulgating this anti-Israel, anti-Jewish rhetoric on social media, regardless of what color their skin is or what gender they are or how many pride flags and cute doggos are in their bio, are bad people. They are bad people and you should be deeply wary of trusting anything they say or relying upon them in this chaotic leftist coalition of ours. At the very least, you need to be on your guard around them. Someone who spreads anti-Semitism and tries to make you feel bad for not agreeing with them is giving you a capital-letter Clue about their true nature as a person. I am someone who naturally overestimates people's good faith and underestimates their willingness to lie and cheat. And maybe you're more pragmatic than that. But if not, then beware.

So. With all that said:

The mission charter of Hamas is to destroy Israel, and Hamas is the government of Gaza. There can be no avoiding military action in Gaza to dismantle Hamas. The only questions are what kind of force, how much, how long, and to what end.

I'll leave the answers to those questions for another time, or to others better-suited than me. Originally I went off for many paragraphs on a tangent about this, but my purpose with this essay isn't really to armchair quarterback Israel's military strategy, and I'm hardly an expert on that stuff anyway.

I will say, however, that one thing Israelis and Jews worldwide have been talking about with increasing concern for many months now is that the war isn't going well. After many years of relative quiet and the opportunity to build up its forces and human resources, Hamas is better-organized and equipped than I think any of us thought, while Israeli's military strategy has been almost bafflingly incompetent: The IDF goes into Hamas hotbeds, eliminates as many of the individual fighters and commanders as the intelligence and reconnaissance provides for, and then pulls out and moves on.

It sounds good on paper, like firefighting: Go put out one hot spot in force and then move on to the next one. But the way Israel has been carrying out this process isn't working: All the fires that get "put out" come back aflame again after the army leaves. Hamas has learned from its own experiences, and from the teachings of other terrorists and Islamist fighters who have been involved in actions throughout the Middle East, how to deal with this strategy in a most resilient way.

This is frustrating and disturbing, because all the reasons for the war are still valid and urgent, but Hamas, though it has been militarily weakened and many of its fighters killed, is still very much intact and functional. As long as the war can realistically be won, then I would be willing to support it for as long as it takes. But if it cannot realistically be won, then either the strategy must be changed or alternative solutions must be sought out. The trouble is, I don't see any acceptable alternative military strategies or viable non-military solutions. I originally went into many paragraphs on this topic as well, but, again, it felt like it was derailing my purpose with this essay. Suffice it to say that Israel is in a difficult position.

The reason why Israel is in such a difficult position is because Palestinian society is fundamentally broken, and is unable and unwilling to act as a good-faith partner in peace.

Few peoples in the world have had a sadder history in recent times than the Palestinians. They were doomed to failure from the beginning: The Arab political borders in the region are nonsensical, the result of two empires (the Ottomans and the British) having their way with the region and ultimately drawing nearly-arbitrary national borders that do not reflect the true cultural mosaic of the Arab world. Palestinian society was created by chopping off bits of several of these arbitrarily-delineated surrounding Arab countries, and ever since then the Palestinians have been in thrall to these richer, stabler, and more powerful neighbors, not just their closest neighbors but other countries farther afield across the Middle East and North Africa. The cultural identity of the Palestinians is therefore largely defined by their history since the founding of Israel, i.e. in terms of the conflict with Israel. The Palestinians' whole story, and their ongoing fate, is to be the thorn in Israel's side that keeps Israel involved in continual armed conflict against a small Muslim population, enshrining Israel as a common enemy for the Arab world (and the Persian world i.e. Iran and its proxies) to unify against and thereby distract from the corruption, incompetence, and extremism of their own authoritarian governments...all at the expense of the welfare and future hopes of the Palestinians themselves.

Before the founding of Israel, the people who would become the Palestinians originally had the chance to have half the land of what is now Israel and Palestine. And not just any half, but the better half: the more agriculturally productive half. The Jewish Zionists who would go on to found Israel were on board with it. But the Palestinians were compelled by their masters to say no, because the Arabs thought they could defeat Israel militarily and thus get 100 percent of the land. That's why several Arab nations invaded Israel immediately after it declared independence in 1948. And the Arabs lost decisively, despite having far superior numbers, better weapons, and more equipment, because the Jews faced utter annihilation if they lost whereas the Arabs were only in it for marginal territorial gains. Hell, in those days Israel didn't even have the US support pipeline to help it out; it did get some help from the outside, but for all intents and purposes the new Israeli state was completely on its own, significantly more so than today.

Israel won even so, and the Palestinians lost their best chance at a fruitful land to call their own.

What followed were decades of Islamic radicalization throughout the region and the continued exploitation and manipulation of the Palestinian people by nearby authoritarian governments, by the Soviet Union, and of course by the ever-growing Islamic terrorist organizations as regional Islam sank into a dark age of ultraconservative radicalism and violence. The Palestinians were convenient puppets. And their neighbors, who paid them so much lip service, did nothing to actually help them. They accepted very few refugees and did almost nothing to build the Palestinian economy. They wanted the Palestinians to remain weak, volatile, and oppressed.

Israel, for its part, has tried so many times over the decades to make peace with its most intricated neighbor. Under left-wing and right-wing governments alike, Israel has sued for peace. It is in Israel's overwhelming economic and security interests to have peace with the Palestinians, and Jews in general are a peace-loving people. We have our hawks, too, but on the whole Jewish culture is oriented around peace because Judaism has aligned with peace for centuries, and because Jews throughout history have always been a persecuted minority, and you can't be bellicose when you're at the mercy of a cruel majority.

Over the decades Israel has tried every approach there is to try: They have tried offering land concessions. They have tried economic investment and aid packages, almost to the point of outright bribery. They have tried physical force. They have tried cooperation, occupation, de-occupation, and mediated international negotiation...all to no avail.

Nothing works, because the Palestinians are never given the chance to say yes: The Islamic extremists and self-interested foreign governments ensure that Palestine always says no, always maintains a front of armed opposition to Israel. The Palestinian demands for peace are always compelled to include provisions that would essentially destroy Israel, and thus are unacceptable by the Israelis and never truly serious. (A claim often preemptively made against the Israelis as a way of deflecting from this, though perhaps it is also fair to say that Israel's present government might not be willing to make enough compromises to reach an agreement.) Consequently, Palestinian terrorism against Israel has been a fact of life for most of Israel's history. Israelis suffer for it, but Palestinians suffer even more.

This is why the Israeli occupations of Palestinian territory happened in the first place. Palestinian terrorists were murdering Israeli civilians, Israeli children, in indiscriminate attacks of opportunity. Long before most of us were born! The Israeli public demanded action, and, slowly, the modern shape of the conflict took form, with Israel, in all its superior military might, brutally suppressing the never-ending fountain of Palestinian terrorism, further solidifying Palestine's fate as a broken society and a failed state.

Palestine has never had good governance. The various Palestinian governments, mainly the PLO and Hamas, have always been ludicrously corrupt and self-serving, vacuuming up international aid for their own consumption or to sell off for cash, living high on the proverbial hog while their people suffered—the near-inevitable story of undemocratic societies run by religious extremists. It's a bitter truth to face, but the Palestinian governments have never cared about the Palestinian people. Nor have other Islamic societies in the region, who pay so much lip service to Palestinian liberation but are actually the chief perpetrators of Palestinian suffering.

Hamas apologists in the West, mostly on the left, like to claim that Palestine is justified in any and all violence against Israelis, because they frame this violence as a righteous resistance to Israeli oppression. They frame Israel as the source of all Palestinian suffering. It isn't. Israel is the instrument of that suffering, the weapon that bludgeons, but the hand that orchestrates the blow is neither Palestine nor Israel, but the larger geopolitical forces in the region. It was true then, and it's true today. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and others bear most of the blame, together with the Islamic terrorist groups who force violence even beyond what the authoritarian governments want.

I don't categorically reject armed resistance against oppression. I don't unconditionally sanction it either, but my point is that if the Palestinians had a real argument on their hands for why they should be giving Israel so much grief, I might be more sympathetic to their cause. But they don't. There is no such argument. The Palestinians, by reason of being controlled by terrorists and authoritarian governments, continually provoke Israel. This is not a chicken-and-egg problem. The Palestinians are always either taking the first shot explicitly, or are preempted by Israeli countermeasures shortly before being able to take the first shot. They have to take the first shot, because Israel isn't going to. Israel wants it calm and quiet. Whenever Hamas and all the other Islamic terror groups operating in Gaza and the West Bank calm down, the whole Israeli–Palestinian Conflict calms down, because Israel isn't the aggressor. The Palestinians are.

And I think many Westerners lose sight of that, or aren't able to conceptualize it in the first place, because Israel is the more populous, richer, and more technologically and militarily sophisticated of the two nations, and in Western conceptual framing we don't often imagine the smaller party being the aggressor. But this is one of the cases where it is.

And, remember, it's not Palestine acting by itself: Today when you see Palestinian terror groups (including Hamas and others) lashing out, what you are really seeing is the long arm of Iran, of Syria (more so before the war), and of other belligerent nations, as well as the long arm of large-scale Islamist terrorist networks like Islamic State, and, more so in recent times, the supposedly long arm of Russia. So Palestine itself may be the smaller party compared alone with Israel, but in the broader geopolitical scheme of things Palestine has huge forces behind it. Israel does enjoy a strong amount of US support, but not that much, and the Israeli population is still very small compared to the total population of all the belligerents who actively plot against it. They may look like the big dog compared to the Palestinians, but they are very much the underdogs regionally.

And Westerners clearly don't understand this, or most of this anti-Israel rhetoric would simply not land.

What is happening in Gaza right now? Carnage. Destruction. Not genocide, but bad enough that it raises fundamental questions about urban warfare and the ethical defensibility of guerilla tactics, and also about how nations should respond to this kind of terrorism given that terrorists are going to do what they do regardless of the ethics.

With regard to the first point, urban warfare with modern artillery is just about as bad as warfare gets. And Gaza is so compact and so densely populated, and so heavily urbanized, that basically the whole theater is urban; and Hamas deliberately stations its fighters among the civilians for the exact purpose of causing as much destruction and as many civilian casualties as possible; that basically any Israeli artillery or air support is going to leave giant piles of rubble in its wake. The alternative would be sending in ground forces only, but Gaza is Hamas' home turf and this would lead to horrendous Israeli casualties. That's not how you fight a way. Israel has to use heavy weapons. They try to be smart about it, but collateral damage is unavoidable, and in this war in particular, owing to the brutal nature of the October 7 attacks, Israel has adopted a military stance that leans more toward effectiveness and less toward minimizing collateral damage compared to previous Israeli operations in the Palestinian Territories. It's not genocide. It's fierce urban warfare against a sophisticated terrorist enemy using guerilla tactics with no regard for human life, including that of its own fighters and its own civilian people. I thought Hamas would have been beaten by now. I think many people did. But it hasn't, and so the war continues.

With regard to the second point, I think people who oppose Israel's actions in Gaza need to step back and ask themselves what they would do differently? There are thousands of armed terrorists literally just a few miles away, who will use any means they can to kill as many of your civilians as possible. This ensures that the fighting will be as destructive and as harmful to civilians as possible. So what do you do? Do you let that daunt you? Do you not fight back? No, really: What do you do?

Because every non-violent solution you can name, Israel has already tried, and they've tried it sincerely. Other than rolling over and dying.

The Palestinians are committed to fighting. At any cost. They support this Hamas government. They embrace the Islamic extremism that has ruined so much of that part of the world. They hate Israel with a passion. And in so doing they have brought this disaster on themselves, and there are moments when it is incredibly tempting to say they deserve it. When I think of them, I think of MAGA Republicans here in the United States: people gripped by religious extremism and racial supremacism, who are always full of bluster and spoiling for violence, and whose policy goals—which they want to forcibly impose on the rest of us—are a mixture of abhorrent and absurd. The Palestinian people as a whole share many of these lamentable qualities. But at the end of the day I cannot bring myself to say that any civilian population deserves the horrors of war, no matter how ugly or extreme their culture is. I think what the Palestinian people really deserve is a long rest—the kind that only a cessation of war operations can bring. They need this war to end. And they are the ones who are in the best position to end it. If they rejected Hamas and demanded ceasefire talks, a cessation of fighting would come very quickly. And my fear is that, as they always have, the Palestinians will make the wrong choice. Indeed, they have made the wrong choice up till now.

This is where Western anti-Semitism becomes particularly deleterious in its power. One thing that the Islamic world has always been excellent at is Western PR for the Palestinians. For my entire lifetime, anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian propaganda and PR has been leaps and bounds better than the Israeli efforts at controlling the messaging. Just look at how easily a new generation of young leftists in the West has been beguiled and deceived. I see ordinary accounts on Tumblr and elsewhere, ordinary people living ordinary lives, interspersing their posts about fanart, or what they're cooking for dinner, or whatever, with reblogs of literal Islamic propaganda, complete with anti-Semitic hate speech, genocidal calls for the destruction of Israel, the works! It's incongruous and disorienting, and serves as a reminder that ignorant, uninformed people are easily fooled. When you check out the sources of this reblogged content, and see what accounts they follow, it's only a couple more layers deep till you get to paid agitators and literal terrorists. It's not subtle at all. But it works anyway, because people don't scrutinize what they see.

And by winning over the hearts and minds of gullible young leftists with their suave propaganda, the forces that doom Palestinian society to a state of perpetual suffering also give the Palestinians false hope, hope that the world will come to their cause, reject Israel, and embrace the Palestinian people. It's insidious, because it's halfway a false hope—no one on the world stage actually cares about the Palestinians, despite all the lip service; they just hate Israel and want to prop up its enemies—and because it's halfway a real hope: It actually is possible to imagine a world where the anti-Israeli propaganda campaign succeeds, and Israel becomes an international pariah that is able to be picked off by its enemies. And the Palestinians are holding out for that outcome. But because it's so unlikely to actually come to pass, it very much functions like a false hope.

This is a very old truism, but I think it still applies: I think the Palestinian people need to decide, as a people, that they want peace for themselves more than they want death for their enemies. And, until they make that decision, I think the Palestinians are going to continue to suffer. And I hate that for them, but more so I hate it for Israel. The Israelis do not deserve what the Palestinians are doing to them. It's one thing to see the Palestinians doom themselves to suffering, but another to see them doom an innocent society. And although Israeli cities are not being pummeled like Gazan ones are, and thus the physical dangers and privations are much lower, Israelis still sustain serious trauma and anxiety from the constant threats of violence and attacks. And Israelis have not had a proper chance to rest either, nor grieve October 7, because the war came on immediately and the anti-Semitism followed suit instantly. Jews have been on the defensive ever since. I have heard a great deal to this effect over the past year from Israelis and by secondhand reports from visitors to Israel.

Meanwhile:

Even though Israel's war operations in Gaza are not genocide, I think there is an argument to be made that Israel's actions may not be commensurate with a positive security outcome either. I wouldn't personally agree with that argument, at least not currently, but with the war getting bogged down and Hamas regenerating it's always a good time to step back and remember that the Palestinian people are actively suffering while Hamas is only being eroded extremely slowly. Is it worth it? And what should Israel do if it isn't?

We must never let ourselves be locked into war. This war is justified on principle, and I would support it for as long as it takes if it were winnable. But if it turns out not to be winnable, then the earlier we can identify that, the better. Right now I don't think we're there. But, like I mentioned earlier, I can see that moment possibly coming. And winter is on its way. I think Israel needs to change its strategy to something more effective, and soon, or else look for alternatives to continuing its current, highly-disruptive operations. And it doesn't help that Israel's government is far-right, and therefore less trustworthy than a typical democratic government would be. So all the more reason for the feasibility of winning to become a principal and urgent question to answer.

Jews have lived in the land that is now Israel for thousands of years. Usually as a minority to the various societies of the day, but, like I've said elsewhere, since when did being a minority ever make a population illegitimate? They are natives. They have every right to be there. To call them white colonizers is an abuse of the language of anti-colonization, and a mockery of anti-racism. Many Jews are not even white-skinned to begin with, but even those who are were never "white" enough to be spared the white supremacist policies of the various majority-white societies where Jews have lived. And the reason so many Jews ended up living in Europe at all is because they were driven out of the Middle East long, long ago.

Any effort to portray the Israelis as white colonialist aggressors is laughable in the very worst way. It is a joke. It is a joke that anti-Semites would think that anybody with half a brain and half a heart would ever buy such flimsy and blatantly false logic. It is a joke that these so-called progressives immediately reach for words like "genocide" and "colonization" because they lack any ethical basis for their preconceived opinions or any intellectual appetite for the contortions of rationalizing those incoherent opinions.

The Palestinians have no shortage of sympathizers and supporters. That's perfectly clear judging by all the scam fundraisers I receive in my inbox nearly every day. I could almost laugh at these odious leftist anti-Semites being scammed out of their money, but, honestly, I think the people who actually donate are probably less likely to be in the "bad people" camp and more likely to be in the "deeply misinformed" camp. Putting your money where your mouth is is very meaningful, and I was recently reminded in a visceral way of the desperation and pain that often accompanies a person's decision to donate to somebody who is in dire need. And so to them I would merely say: Please make sure your donations are going to real fundraises to actually help real Palestinians. If you do nothing else, please at least do that.

Jews, meanwhile, have some support too. It's a "silent majority" kind of thing, though probably not an actual majority. But I often see surprisingly high levels of likes and reshares of Jewish content that speaks out against anti-Semitism, and even content that lays out the justifications for Israel's legitimacy and right to self-defense. And that heartens me.

On every other day, we think about Palestinian suffering. But today is the one-year anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history, and one of the worst terrorist attacks in the history of the entire modern world. And every day since then has been rife with Jew-hate, including from allies and even friends. Today is a day to think about Jewish suffering, and elevate Jewish voices.

And if you find someone who can't do that, who has to play the partisan game to the bitterest end, it's fair to say there's something wrong with them.

[bonyfish]

Hey do you guys want to hear the pawn shop story I don't tell because it sounds so fuckin fake? It is, regrettably, the season for it and I've been thinking of it again.

To preface this story with a defense of my honor, this is neither the weirdest nor the most upsetting thing to happen to me while working at the pawn shop. (The clown mask fake robbery probably takes the cake on both counts.) That is to say that in isolation, all elements of this tale are quite mundane to the reality of working at a pawn shop in southern Indiana.

Anyway.

CW: antisemitism, the 2016 election, customer service work

The year is 2016. I'm a couple years out of art school and have been working at a pawn shop in my small city for most of that time. I am a few months out from the event that will mark, in addition to calamity on a national and global scale, the beginning of the dissolution of my relationship with my parents: the election of Donald Trump. I am also beginning to suspect my new coworker Brian (not his real name) might be kind of a sleeper asshole.

Brian and I were at the jewelry counter this day, when this German couple in maybe their mid-40s walked in. They were friendly and in good spirits, and we chatted a bit while they tried on rings. My grandfather was German, and between that and growing up on Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, German and Austrian accents kind of put me at ease. So I liked these two, up until the fellow tried to negotiate the price of a ring down and the lady said, "He's not Jewish, if that's what you're thinking!"

Now this was far from the first time I'd encountered the greedy/thrifty Jew stereotype while working at the pawn shop. As with many unpleasant interactions, my default reaction was to pretend I hadn't noticed the negativity and forge on ahead. So I said something like, "That's too bad, since I'm Jewish and we would've had that in common."

To which the woman replied, laughing, "See, the joke is you're all greedy!"

Typically when I responded to this sort of thing by revealing that I'm Jewish, the other person would become embarrassed and apologize or otherwise end the interaction. Once or twice someone had covered up the awkwardness of the moment by making as many offensive jokes as possible before one of my coworkers took over, but this blithe statement of perceived fact was new. I did not know how to deal with this.

I said, "That is the stereotype, yes."

I'm not sure how she did it conversationally, but from there she segued quite abruptly into talking about how she really likes that Trump fellow, because he "tells it like it is." My coworker was just nodding along, agreeing with her and chatting, while I stood there wondering how I had ended up in this situation and how quickly I could exit it. Even at the time I was marveling at how hamfisted the moment would have been from a narrative perspective, were this a story and not my own wretched weekday morning. I mean, they were even German, for fuckssake. I hate the punchline/stereotype of all Germans being Nazis because, as I mentioned, my grandfather and his family were German Jews, and I feel like that stereotype erases those people while simultaneously letting actual Nazi Germans off the hook for their own choices. But here I am listening to this conversation and realizing that now I have this story I can't tell because it's too damn stupid.

Presently they left, and I tried to see if Brian had made any sort of connection between these people insulting me to my face and then endorsing this particular candidate, but of course he saw nothing wrong with the interaction. This marked the decline of any fellow-feeling I had towards him as a coworker. Another coworker later told me that Brian "didnt believe" in gay people, which explained why he couldn't work the register-- I trained him, and since I don't actually exist, there's no way he could've learned to do his job properly.

Anyway that's my story. A year or so later I quit with no prospects because having to play nice with people who I knew voted for Trump was making me crazy. Next time I'll tell a more fun story, like the one about all the cockroaches, or the other one about all the cockroaches.

[jewishvitya]

A lot of things I hear and have a resistance to, I find hard to untangle and figure out. Is this Israeli propaganda I haven't unpacked yet, or is it that these people are applying a lens that doesn't fit the situation?

For example, the idea that Israeli music is appropriated when it sounds Middle Eastern, is it correct or is it because 60% of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, coming from Arab countries, have a long history of making music like this? What did we appropriate and what did we bring with us? I don't know how to look into that, I don't understand music enough. Same with food, what's appropriated and what did people just bring with them? A lot of us never left the Middle East. So I don't know. I have no idea how to check which is which. I can point to the erasure of Palestinian culture as lending itself to appropriation, because it's real and it's insidious, but the rest I personally don't know how to pick apart.

But there's also something I hear more and more about how Israelis changed our names into Hebrew names to sound more indigenous. On one side of my family, the original name was Levi because of the tribe of Levi. It was changed to hide that we're Jewish and avoid violence in diaspora. Are people changing names because they finally feel free to have visibly Jewish names, or is it some attempt to obscure a history in diaspora? This isn't music, this is something I can look at a bit more easily.

I'm sure for many of us the freedom to go back to our roots is valuable. It's true that a lot of us had Hebrew names we used among ourselves, and "localized" names (not sure what else to call it) we used in official documentation etc. I'm named after my great great grandmother's Hebrew name that she had while living in France, and she never moved to Israel. I'm sure she would have loved the safety of using her name officially. So, of course, many people jumped on this opportunity. You give them the ability to register with a new name, and they use the name they had in the safety of their own community.

A Jewish person changing their name to Hebrew is often shedding a false identity they were forced to adopt.

But at the same time.

When Jewish refugees were brought here in early immigration waves, their names were changed often not by their choice. Leadership had a whole thing about imposing Hebrew names on people. I remember a story from history class, I don't remember which aliyah it was about, but we were told about people standing there and someone being like "All of you - your name is this. And this bunch - your name is that." There was a joke stereotype about Ethiopian Israelis having names that start with the letter alef because that's the first letter of the alphabet and their names were picked from an alphabetized list.

When my family members came to Israel, they kept their non-Hebrew surname, but they were given a list of Hebrew names to choose from. I think this was recently enough the they would have been able to say no to it, though. So they took their Hebrew names willingly.

I don't know if it's accurate to say the intention was to sound more indigenous. Because, at the time that this was mostly happening, the zionist movement was proudly colonialist. They separated between us and the Palestinians, placing the Palestinians as the indigenous population, as a way of placing us above them.

I think it was an attempt to homogenize Israeli society. To make it into something cohesive. Part of the melting pot. Another thing that was happening at the same time was all kinds of abuses to try to strip Jewish immigrants and refugees from their cultural and religious practices. Zionism had a very complicated and toxic relationship with Judaism, especially in those days. It had a goal of founding a state with Western enlightenment values, but for Jewish people. It relied on Judaism as an ethnicity for the definition of an in-group, and hated Judaism as a religion.

But about the names. I don't think it's to fake indigeniety. I think in some cases it's a genuine return to our own language now that we're comfortable, and in other cases, forced assimilation.

[chamotate]

klaus please

YAYAYAY THE DUMB FUCKING NAZI anyway i will not be defending him, but there are obviously reasons for why he became... him..

theres a lot of lore for him so this will probably be very rambly and make little sense, but then again it is also late.

Klaus from a very young age was quite neglected. His mother went out drinking a lot, trying to cope with the death of his father, so Klaus had to grow up fast. And what better way to grow up!!! the goddamn hj!!!! (sarcasm obviously) Obviously at this point it was not a big thing, as it was before moustache man came into power, but Klaus' first lessons were hate. So he grew up hating. A lot.

He would spit at people who he deemed "undesirable" in the streets. Like genuinely. He spat a lot. Obviously at this point, he was punished very frequently for it. Doesn't mean he stopped though.

1933, the moustache man is in power (im terrified of what is and isnt allowed on tumblr), Klaus is OVERJOYED. This boy has read his little book cover to cover and probably knew it by heart. His mother couldn't care less. As long as he was out the house and not bothering her. Klaus had no idea how to care for himself however. He relied on Erik's family to feed him, as at this point he was VERY malnourished.

The HJ was... unfortunately... very good for Klaus. He learnt to stand up for himself, how to fight, etc. But at what cost?

Erik was more left leaning than Klaus. Sure he "believed" what he was told, but that didn't mean he followed it. He would befriend Jews, kiss boys (without Klaus' knowledge of course), but Klaus did know of his "weird sleeptalking". Erik seemed to spill all his secrets this way, but was always able to brush it off as a weird dream, so Klaus thought nothing of it.

Erik had deep feelings for Klaus. Hate, love, lust, who knows? Passion would be the best word. He was passionate, but unsure in what way. Sometimes he would give Klaus small pecks during their hugs, just to see what would happen, if he would ever notice. And when he did... holy shit... it was hell on Earth. Klaus started screaming, hitting, almost beating him to death, before realising... that was his ONLY friend. Would he really kill his only friend over something like that? Surely he was just confused. That must've been it.

Ever since that day, Klaus would try "convert" Erik, back to "normal". Erik gave up, he lost all interest in Klaus, so he said he was cured. Klaus felt like he was the chosen one. He was a narcissist, especially because he was the "ideal". White, blonde, blue-eyed, Aryan.

At the age of 15, he killed for the first time. He saw a young Jewish boy while on a walk with Erik and immediately beat him to the ground, he meant to step on his chest to threaten him and laugh about it later, but he missed and snapped his neck. He's not been the same since. He knew it was right (in his eyes), but he couldn't help but feel guilt. He felt like a fake. He had nightmares every night, replaying the sound of that kid's neck snapping.

1935, 4 years before the war, a poet (Sergei) stumbles upon Klaus studying under a tree. Little did Klaus know he was talking to his worst nightmare. A Russian. Communist. Gay. Jew. He lived on in ignorant bliss, a new friend, he looked funny, he SOUNDED funny, but he was probably just paranoid with propaganda, right?

Meanwhile, he's dating Ida, still paranoid that Erik will try date him or something, he decided he better keep himself taken. He takes her on dates, he even got himself a job to buy her gifts and earn her love. She doesn't feel much for him, but she enjoys the company, so she sticks around.

1939, Klaus is pissed the fuck off. He realises the truth about Sergei from Ida (who Sergei trusted way more than any other German) and he wants to kill him. As soon as possible. The next time Sergei went for a visit to Germany, Klaus grabbed his dagger, ready and eyes burning with hate, before Sergei dropped to his knees infront of him and started crying. LITERALLY CRYING TO A NAZI???? Klaus assumes Sergei is a self hating Jew or something along those lines and decides to tolerate him a little longer, hoping to use him as an ally.

Ida starts to develop stronger feelings for Klaus as she sees him "care" for Sergei. THERE IS A MASSIVE MISUNDERSTANDING HERE. Sergei believes Klaus heard the news about Sergei's loss and was comforting him, Klaus believes Sergei hates his own identity and wants his validation and Ida thinks Klaus has become a better person and they are finally bonding.

Not long after, Klaus and Ida marry.

Sergei is somewhat upset at this BUT THATS A STORY FOR A DIFFERENT TIME!!!! THIS IS ABOUT KLAUS!!!

Klaus finds out a few months later that Sergei was crying about his dead fiance this whole time and goes back to hating him, buuuutttt.... he has other ideas this time. He manipulates Sergei, abuses him, uses him, whatever he feels like. He makes Sergei feel guilt for existing.

1942, Klaus and Ida have their first child Heike(at this point she's like 2 but this is a key date and a key thing), who from FUCKING BIRTH is taught this propaganda. Klaus plans to make his children into his own sort of minions almost.

Sergei, however, whenever he gets the chance, he tries to teach the kid to be a good person. Even though he knows it won't do anything.

Klaus is still a fucking monster. He gets off on the fact that he can make Sergei do anything. Because Sergei knows, one wrong move, the Gestapo will be involved. He's given up on making Sergei "useful" and now just humiliates him and uses him for entertainment. (DUDE FUCKING KYS LEAVE MY BOY ALONE.)

anyway yada yada he continues the same shit. he never gets sent to war bc hes a loser and that makes him feel not valued. (good)

1945. The war is over. Klaus is SOBBING. FULL ON CRYING. His beloved moustache man is gone. He burns any documents that relate him to the regime and hides his uniforms (which he only ever takes out afterwards to see his kids wearing them). He's proven innocent (the ugly bastard) and goes back to indoctrinating his kids (who he now has two of)

He still believes in all the values and tells Ida that their kids need to bring back the glory of Germany. She doesn't fully agree, but she also doesn't understand much politics and lets him do all the political business.

Sergei has cut him off at this point and Klaus is very bitter.

1959, The last time Klaus and Sergei ever meet. Sergei shoots a bullet right through his Nazi skull and leaves. Simple. No witnesses.

:3

that bit would be further explained with Sergei's perspective but from Klaus' lore perspective, there is no clear reason.

most of his lore relies on Sergei + Ida so this was difficult but i accepted the challenge and it was a fun ride

[jewish-vents]

something i’ve noticed lately is online leftists being ignorant to some (most) forms of antisemitism, but vocal ONLY about jokes/stereotypes about jewish ethnic features.

they can point out the big nose stereotypes all day long (and they should) but when we beg them to have more concern for conspiracy theories, double standards for jews/israel, disinformation about jewish history and the war, holocaust inversion/denial/fake care for survivors, using zionism as a get out of jail card for judenhass, generalizing all israelis and diaspora jews as genocidal, denying that most jews identify with zionism, misusing jewish terms, demonizing jewish culture and hebrew, actual modern day blood libel, tokenization, accusing jews of “stealing culture”, denying indigeneity, painting ashke jews as white colonizers/villains, completely disregarding other diaspora groups, calling for israelis to be murdered, trying to “revoke” israelis’ jewishness, falsely calling the jewish people /only/ a religious group, redefining or goysplaining words/concepts they learned last week, using historically antisemitic canards, desecrating jewish monuments, houses, businesses, schools, and synagogues, AND literal, physical violence against jews….

it’s silence. crickets. it’s excuses and justifications. it’s thoughtless conversation enders. it’s refusal to sit with discomfort and address one’s mistakes. it’s a buzzword copy and pasted with a flag. “death to israel” or “kys zionist”. it’s “antizionism ≠ antisemitism”.

if you refuse to acknowledge the many forms antisemitism takes, of course you’d hyperfocus on one specific type. racist tropes about jews in media are awful. they’re harmful and part of dehumanization.

but if your understanding of antisemitism starts and ends at “greedy long nosed goblins in harry potter,” and you refuse to listen to jews, and refuse to see how antisemitism functions outside of pop culture and how it manifests into verbal and physical violence, you are no ally.

spreading antisemitism will not help palestinians at all, and it’s so fucking devastating that online activists can log on and feel vindicated and like they’re all heroic just for harassing random jews. meanwhile they’re wasting time and energy that could go towards something that ACTUALLY helps the palestinian people.

(also funny that they wanna call jews white when these stereotypes are about non-white ethnic features. and they stem from nazi propaganda about jews/jewish blood “ruining” white genetics. i could go on and on about the weird racial science lefties have ran with since oct7, especially within what we understand as race/ethnicity as social groupings, what makes someone indigenous, the weird blood quantum shit, noble savage trope, and the infantilization of palestinians)

.

[marstonie]

MY THOUGHTS — i beg to read to the end. saying that zionism and israeli jews are epitomizing "white supremacy" has to be the worst fucking opinion i have ever had to witness. god, you fucking antisemitic pigs are unbearable. yes, antisemitic, not antizionist — believe me. if you would just spend one serious minute of your life to indulge yourself in the history of israel, in the history of HOW it came to be, and especially WHY it came to be, all of you naive, ignorant people would see pretty clearly that this isn’t an aggressive, "settler colonialist" (😭) state, but it’s the reaction to thousands of years of opression, to an ACTUAL genocide of over 6 million jews, to the fact that no place on earth wanted to harbour them in safety — so first question, where else to go? and please enlighten me, after you’ve spent actual time reading in a history book or attending a real school, how israel was the initial aggressor in this conflict? how jewish people back then were doing something bad or fundamentally different than what every single group of people had done in the history of humanity — to migrate and to settle. do we want to go over the settler history of arab states and nations together? do you want to enlighten me, what makes the arabs settling good, and the jewish settling evil? do you care to provide any information that isn’t solely based on bias or — how do i say — hatred for jews? one pattern i have been very much observant of, is that the majority of the pro-palestine movement is uneducated, and refuses to use any actual historic facts or historic depth as backup for their cries to eradicate the only safe home that jewish people have on this messed up world. and i, too, believe the expansion politics of israel to be wrong, and strongly believe that palestine should exist in a free, individual state — however, the pro-palestine movement is calling for palestine to demolish the jewish state. to eradicate and murder millions of israeli jews. they are saying things like "resistance isn’t terror", and believe this is a cry for peace — when the hamas terrorists raped women, murdered children, beat teenagers and elderly in blood and kidnapped hundreds — terror remains TERROR. you can acknowledge this terror, and still call for palestine to be free! i AM calling for palestine to be free! yet, i am asking you, how do you expect to have diplomacy, when the leading political force of gaza is currently, a terror organization. tell me, how? but you won’t want to tell me, because to you, the murder and rape of jewish, innocent people is resistance. i hope you fake and disgusting activists choke. i am a shockingly pacifist person, but this bullshit makes me feel rage and sadness beyond words. i hope you all wake up from this disgusting lunacy, and turn to actual activism, turn to actual advocacy for peace. i will always be advocating for peace and the freedom of both these states. you guys are doing neither.

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

Hello,

Ive been following you for years and I love your blog. In all my years on this website I have never posted, sent an ask or a message, commented or interacted with anyone on this website in any way. However seeing your recent posts about Palestine made me feel like I had to say something.

Just because you support the “weaker” side, it doesn’t make you immune to lies and propaganda.

Please educate yourself before you spread misinformation and/or misleading info.

I am a citizen of Israel. This conflict started when Hamas brutally murdered hundreds of innocent civilians, including elderly and children. They kidnapped over a hundred more. They are known for being a terrorist organisation whose stated goal is to murder jews.

I am terrified. My people are forever scarred. I and everyone I know have lost loved ones in this war. And the fact that people like you in these terrible times choose to focus solely on the suffering of the Palestinians, ignoring and justifying our suffering, speaks volumes.

The bombings you speak of, are a retaliation for the slaughter of October 7th. Israel warns citizens in advance, in order to prevent as many casualties as possible. But we cant just ignore the murder, kidnapping, rape and harm to our people like you do. We have no choice but to defend ourselves.

We have no interest nor desire to commit genocide against the Palestinian people. If we did, we would have already done so. Instead we financially support Palestine, despite the fact they use this money not to better their lives, but to instead attack our civilians.

Beware of misinformation like the accusations against Israel for bombing the hospital in Gaza. That is a straight up lie that was proven false, and the Hamas spread it along with lies about how many people got hurt, in order to convince people like you that they are justified. And its working.

Before you accuse others, maybe check your own biases and think to yourself why a Palestinian life is worth something to you and an Israeli one isn’t.

Can you even imagine what it feels like to go online after such a tragedy for a little relief, only to see people like you calling for my death?

And yes, that is what you’re doing by supporting and encouraging the actions of Hamas. An organisation that cares more about killing innocent civilians like me than protecting its own people.

I hope that if you can’t take the time to properly understand this complicated situation, you will at least stop talking about something that you clearly don’t understand.

You know, I put all of this in a private post initially. I've been largely focused on spreading charity posts, actual concrete things that can be done to save the innocent people caught in the crossfire. But clearly, my message has been mixed, so I'll define it right here.

This is just something that seeps into my bones and I had to say it somewhere: the sheer refusal by both sides to admit what they're doing. Oh, we thought that music festival was soldiers....wait no we didn't, it was random Gazan civilians who did it instead, not us, hurt them instead. Oh we are going to wage all out war....no those innocent civilian casaulties weren't us, it was them! (No, the cause of the explosion has not been independently proven. It has, however, been proven that Israel shelled the place three days earlier as a "warning" then called ordering an evacuation shortly before.) Put down an evacuation order so short and so sudden the UN protests that civilians can't possibly get out in time, then bomb one of the convoys. Tell your countrymen the evacuation order was fake so you get more human shields. More rockets! More airstrikes! More "accidents" to the tune of hundreds of civilians dead, and you never have to carry the burden or the blame for any of it. Shoot from far enough away, target enough civilians, makes it easy, makes it fun. The glory of war with none of the guilt and none of the risk! Ain't that a wonderful thing. Ain't that a fucking joke.

I grieve for the innocent Israeli citizens slaughtered because Hamas cowards wanted to kill the defenseless. I grieve for the people in Gaza getting slaughtered because neither side cares if they live or die. The difference between the two is not that one life is worth more than the others. That is morally repugnant and fundamentally absurd. The difference is that Israel is getting aid from many nations, while other nations only give aid to Hamas, not the people of Gaza. They need humanitarian aid, they need someone to speak for them and beg for restraint, which is why I'm primarily reblogging posts that call for humanitarian aid to them and for a ceasefire so they can, at the very least, have the evacuation time they should have been allowed. It is not because their lives are worth more, but because to far too many, their lives are worth less.

I understand your pain and fear, and I am deeply sorry for your loss. I too find those rooting for Hamas or declaring that the victims deserved it for being settlers repugnant. But the people of Gaza did not do this, and if it's a choice between them living and Hamas dying, I will choose their lives every time. I will always choose life. And I refuse to apologize for that. Violence like this is a cycle, revenge and revenge and revenge again because you cannot kill an idea with bombs, only keep destroying until nothing is left to fight over. You cannot stop a cycle by continuing to spin.

[spacelazarwolf]

I was not on leftbook, entirely, but my friend joined a leftbook messenger group chat for mutual aid and communism and stuff, typical anti-cap, and since I had messenger app (to talk to friend), I joined the group chat and bruh I remember the antitheist, the body shaming, the anti-sex work, intersexism, etc. there was a conversation about religion at some point, religion and faith and one of the group chat leaders there was atheist and he said there would be no room for ANY religion post-revolution because “all we have is each other, not some fake person in the sky”, and I was like “okay but for some, they Need that faith and for many, their faith and religion actually inspires the hope needed to do xyz” “no they don’t because all religion is *blah blah*”. It made me feel incredibly uncomfortable because that meant Islam and Judaism would be obsolete in this persons dream world. I remember the barely disguised antisemitism, tho I wasn’t, at the time, as learned about antisemitism because I only knew The Big Stuff and was tbh still really just barely leaving libertarianism at this point. (I knew it was bad but I was raised to believe that was the only possible actuality, so I didn’t believe in it to be a good thing, just inescapable necessity so I was trying to learn how to challenge capitalist thoughts by being around leftists and then realized leftists are whew god VERY racist, antisemitic, and ableist). There were some good ones in the chat too but yikes.

oh yeah leftbook was so fucking antisemitic it was actually nuts. one of my jewish friends was called a racist bc they said that there were some antisemitic tropes in a song that came out that everyone was raving about. i’m like 75% sure it was a kanye song which like is hilarious considering he’s a nazi sympathizer now and has been deeply racist and antisemitic for years. but yeah. being a jew in leftbook was scary.

[creekfiend]

Just wanted to say thanks for "people from culturally Christian backgrounds" because that seems like a good way to phrase it, and I'm going to try to remember to use it when I'm talking about this sort of thing. (I try to not be a dick to people, when possible, and trauma's messy and complicated.) I'm sorry that some people are being horrible in this whole discussion, and I hope you are doing okay.

I'm doing fine! I really sympathize with most of the people involved in this tbh (except the outright antisemites of course lol) bc like I HAVE seen a lot of reactive and reductive and unkind blanket statements about this by some jumblr people in which they are condescendingly explaining other people's realities to them. Which is my LEAST favorite thing. Jumblr can also be really... umm, dog pile-y in a way that I find frustrating and unproductive. However. I think it's also fairly obvious that most of these reactions are trauma responses, and while that isn't an excuse it is an explanation and provides additional context that I do not feel is irrelevant. For jews we have constantly been told 'well simply stop being jewish' like all the time by everybody, often at gunpoint. So like, when I see nonjewish atheists assert that stuff jews are TELLING you they have gone through "literally never happens" that ALSO REALLY SUCKS. like so so bad. Cannot overstate how much that sucks. Cannot overstate how much it sucks to see ppl I sympathize with deeply wrt their mistrust and hatred of like, organized religious authority, align themselves with people who refer to jewish atheists as "religious nationalists" for refusing to divorce themselves from their ethnic backgrounds/culture/community/traditions. That rhetoric is Just antisemitism in a form that has been used to cause real and violent harm to us in living memory.

Also really alienated by the idea that one must be This Vitriolically Angry About Religion to "count" as an atheist. Like what? That is bonkers. I do not understand why the people making seemingly reasonable posts about "actually here's some interesting writings by people from Islamic cultures or majority Hindu cultures or orthodox jewish cultures outlining the ways that the authorities in these societies have used religion to cause harm on a systemic level" (objectively true) seem to be aligning themselves with people who are doing the SAME THING TO JEWS that they resent being done to them -- e.g. condescendingly explaining to us that our negative experiences with a certain type of atheists Don't Exist or Don't Count or cannot possibly be rooted in antisemitism.

I find the whole thing depressing and troubling. I don't tend to follow jumblr because of the aforementioned issues I have w it but this backlash seems to me to be disproportionate and really hateful in a way that... combines poorly with the increased antisemitic sentiments being lobbed at jews from all ideological sides recently. I wish we could all be more congizent of 1. the role trauma is playing here for everyone and 2. the inherent lack of productive discussion that can be had when two parties are simply Trauma Responsing at each other back and forth endlessly.

Then there's the people who just get super aggressive about people "believing fake things" but I'm not sure there's any help for them. Sure wish that the nonjewish atheists who are not like that would disavow them though! I certainly am more than happy to say "acknowledging a cultural/societal dynamic that privileges one religion and culture as default and that existing in thay culture might cause people to have unexamined assumptions about other religions and cultures" should not be weaponized against individual people in order to bully them by insisting they are a thing that they manifestly are not (atheists aren't Christians. The fact that atheists from Jewish backgrounds will have Jewishness shackled to them regardless of their degree of identification with Being A Jew is actually bad and a function of antisemitism; it is not an aspirational dynamic we should be applying to other people simply because their cultural background is privileged over our own in our society.)

Like can we stop talking past each other and try to understand where people are coming from

People are expressing a lot of hurt and anger about atrocities and systems of oppression that I ultimately feel are totally interconnected. Because of this hurt and anger most people are not being precise in their language or prioritizing connecting or actual dialogue about this and instead focusing on dogpiling and gotchas. It's discouraging.

I'm a secular humanist jew with complex feelings towards both jewishness and atheism as concepts and movements. I want to understand and connect with people based on our common ground.

This is I guess all me being a big baby who is unsuited to internet fights but this one specifically feels really hurtful to me because I feel like my reality is being ignored and denied. I suspect a lot of people are also feeling that way. Which might be a good place to START the discussion to be honest.