#i'm a jew and if the example was

[duckprintspress]

I think you're missing the central point about the les-for-les recs thing. Imagine for a moment that someone said they were creating a romance recommendation list for straight-straight romances which specifically excludes straight-bi romances. Not limiting their criteria to stories only centering m/f relationships or which have a straight main character (understandable personal preferences), but which specifically exclude the presence of bisexuality in the story even if those criteria are met.

You'd immediately clock that as biphobic, right? Because if it's not about what pov identity someone feels represented by, and not what flavor of relationships they want to read, but about feeling threatened or grossed out by an author saying a character's sexuality could, at one point, include or have included other genders...

If someone wants recs for wlw stories with specifically lesbian main characters? Awesome. With only sapphic relationships present? Have fun. Specifically excluding the presence of bi women? Wait, uhhh, why, specifically would that matter if the other criteria are met? You know, other than biphobia.

I think, no matter what, that people are allowed to have preferences, and excluding bisexuality still is a preference.

Taking the scenario you propose. Are they saying, "straight relationships with bi characters are WRONG and EVIL and HAVE NO RIGHT TO EXIST and people who make that are BAD PEOPLE" etc. etc., or are they just saying, "I'm personally not comfortable reading stories that include bi characters, and I want to make a resource for people who feel as I do." The first is completely off the wall and I would never defend them. But the second? I'd at least defend their right to do that.

Would I platform them doing so? No.

Should I have platformed the les-4-les in this case? Also no. As I said in my reply to another ask just now, I clearly made a mistake, and I own that, acknowledge it, and apologize for it. Make enough judgement calls in a lifetime, sooner or later everyone makes the wrong one, and in this case, I did, plain and simple. I didn't clock the biphobic aspect as solidly as I should have on my initial glance through. I should be reading more carefully and thinking more thoroughly before I reblog posts like that. I screwed up.

But I will stand by that in the same way that some people prefer a certain top/bottom dynamic and that this isn't inherently homophobic, in the same way that an individual can be uncomfortable dating a person - no matter the person's gender - if that person's genitalia doesn't match their preference, in the same way that individuals are always allowed to have things with which they are comfortable and things they're not, it's not inherently wrong for someone to want to make a blog that highlights lesbian relationships that have never involved a bi person.

And again, I'm not saying I didn't screw up by platforming it. I obviously screwed up.

But an individual having that preference isn't something I'm prepared to police at the level you describe. People are allowed to be uncomfortable reading a book with content that squicks them, and are allowed to create resources, request tags, etc., that help them avoid the content they don't want to read. We can't tell people "don't like, don't read" then get all pissy when they try to say, "here's what I don't like to read and I want to make a resource to help people like me find things they'll want to read." Even when the thing they're "don't like, don't read"-ing is something exclusionary.

And we are entitled to avoid the people who make choices we think are weird, dumb, uncomfortable, whatever. "Hey, those preferences scream 'biphobe' about OP. Blocked!"

I should have avoided the les-4-les blog. That was clearly my mistake.

But I won't say I think it has no right to exist. Only that it serves people with a particular mindset, one I don't share and shouldn't have platformed, and if it helps the people with that mindset, then I'm glad. Everyone has a right to read things they're comfortable with. Even biphobes.

And honestly? I'm debating platforming this ask and it's response. I'm aroace and before I knew those identities existed, I thought I was bi (because the way I feel about all genders is the same! that's what bi is, right? lmao, the confused-bi-to-oh-wait-ace pipeline...). I'm married to a bisexual/homoromantic woman. Anyone who thinks I'm a biphobe and want to platform biphobes, endorse or defend biphobes, etc., really doesn't know me, and I don't want to open a can of worms inadvertently. But like. As I started this post by saying...people are allowed to have preferences and I will continue to defend the right for them to have those preferences, even if they are preferences I don't share or even preferences I think are kinda reprehensible. And I would say exactly the same if it was hetero-for-hetero. Because yeah, it's biphobic, and I fucked up by platforming it, but people are still allowed to have that preference.

Sorry, I know I'm going around in circles in this answer. It's because engaging with this kind of thing makes me very anxious. So I'm going to leave it at that and shut up now.

-unforth

(side note: I do not promise to continue answering/engaging with asks I receive on this topic. I don't think I have anything more to add to my explanation or to my apology.)

[shalom-iamcominghome]

Little celebratory thing: it feels like I'm getting a bit better at alef bet! Even though the vowel markings can feel redundant, they're still something I've been able to remember and recognize individually!

[lynchiangf]

it's so frustrating to see the ease with which people take israel to be representative of all jewish people somehow. like yesterday I was reading the news and it said something like 'the jewish and the palestinian side of the conflict' as if jewish people are a hivemind and universally support israel. ultimately I think that's a narrative that just benefits israel and if you buy it I'll conclude you respect neither jewish people nor palestinians, you just respect colonial interests

[erela-tsisdu]

While I have seen plenty of antisemitic zoomers from browsing Tumblr (and other websites), I'm actually real tired of people singling them out as being uniquely antisemitic when I've seen just as many millennials & gen xers spreading blood libel & kissing Hamas & Hezbollah's asses.

In fact, most people I've had to block for supporting terrorist groups have been over 30.

The Mastodon instance I left recently for antisemitism was mostly filled with people over 30.

My mom is in a lot of leftist gen x groups & has lost friends over defending Jewish people.

Gen z is not unique for antisemitism, and I'm honestly tired of people somehow acting like it is when I've been seeing people older than me claiming Hamas wasn't radicalized until recently, Jews (((zionists))) are a plague & use zionist money to spread propaganda. Oh, and that Jews have believed in fairytales since biblical times to commit many genocides.

[femme-objet]

the other day i saw an infographic that wasn’t like focused on this issue but in support of its claim that there are palestinian jews it gives the example of samaritans and like. that seems like a politically charged assertion, that the samaritans are jewish

[jewishvitya]

A pro-Palestine Jew on tiktok asked those of us who were raised pro-Israel, what got us to change our minds on Palestine. I made a video to answer (with my voice, not my face), and a few people watched it and found some value in it. I'm putting this here too. I communicate through text better than voice.

So I feel repetitive for saying this at this point, but I grew up in the West Bank settlements. I wrote this post to give an example of the extent to which Palestinians are dehumanized there.

Where I live now, I meet Palestinians in day to day life. Israeli Arab citizens living their lives. In the West Bank, it was nothing like that. Over there, I only saw them through the electric fence, and the hostility between us and Palestinians was tangible.

When you're a child being brought into the situation, you don't experience the context, you don't experience the history, you don't know why they're hostile to you. You just feel "these people hate me, they don't want me to exist." And that bubble was my reality. So when I was taught in school that everything we did was in self defense, that our military is special and uniquely ethical because it's the only defensive military in the world - that made sense to me. It slotted neatly into the reality I knew.

One of the first things to burst the bubble for me was when I spoke to an old Israeli man and he was talking about his trauma from battle. I don't remember what he said, but it hit me wrong. It conflicted with the history as I understood it. So I was a bit desperate to make it make sense again, and I said, "But everything we did was in self defense, right?"

He kinda looked at me, couldn't understand at all why I was upset, and he went, "We destroyed whole villages. Of course we did. It was war, that's what you do."

And that casual "of course" stuck with me. I had to look into it more.

I couldn't look at more accurate history, and not at accounts by Palestinians, I was too primed against these sources to trust them. The community I grew up in had an anti-intellectual element to it where scholars weren't trusted about things like this.

So what really solidified this for me, was seeing Palestinian culture.

Because part of the story that Israel tells us to justify everything, is that Palestinians are not a distinct group of people, they're just Arabs. They belong to the nations around us. They insist on being here because they want to deny us a homeland. The Palestinian identity exists to hurt us. This, because the idea of displacing them and taking over their lands doesn't sound like stealing, if this was never theirs and they're only pretending because they want to deprive us.

But then foods, dances, clothing, embroidery, the Palestinian dialect. These things are history. They don't pop into existence just because you hate Jews and they're trying to move here. How gorgeous is the Palestinian thobe? How stunning is tatreez in general? And when I saw specific patterns belonging to different regions of Palestine?

All of these painted for me a rich shared life of a group of people, and countered the narrative that the Palestininian identity was fabricated to hurt us. It taught me that, whatever we call them, whatever they call themselves, they have a history in this land, they have a right to it, they have a connection to it that we can't override with our own.

I started having conversations with leftist friends. Confronting the fact that the borders of the occupied territories are arbitrary and every Israeli city was taken from them. In one of those conversations, I was encouraged to rethink how I imagine peace.

This also goes back to schooling. Because they drilled into us, we're the ones who want peace, they're the ones who keep fighting, they're just so dedicated to death and killing and they won't leave us alone.

In high school, we had a stadium event with a speaker who was telling us about a person who defected from Hamas, converted to Christianity and became a Shin Bet agent. Pretty sure you can read this in the book "Son of Hamas." A lot of my friends read the book, I didn't read it, I only know what I was told in that lecture. I guess they couldn't risk us missing out on the indoctrination if we chose not to read it.

One of the things they told us was how he thought, we've been fighting with them for so long, Israelis must have a culture around the glorification of violence. And he looked for that in music. He looked for songs about war. And for a while he just couldn't find any, but when he did, he translated it more fully, and he found out the song was about an end to wars. And this, according to the story as I was told it, was one of the things that convinced him. If you know know the current trending Israeli "war anthem," you know this flimsy reasoning doesn't work.

Back then, my friend encouraged me to think more critically about how we as Israelis envision peace, as the absence of resistance. And how self-centered it is. They can be suffering under our occupation, but as long as it doesn't reach us, that's called peace. So of course we want it and they don't.

Unless we're willing to work to change the situation entirely, our calls for peace are just "please stop fighting back against the harm we cause you."

In this video, Shlomo Yitzchak shares how he changed his mind. His story is much more interesting than mine, and he's much more eloquent telling it. He mentions how he was taught to fear Palestinians. An automatic thought, "If I go with you, you'll kill me." I was taught this too. I was taught that, if I'm in a taxi, I should be looking at the driver's name. And if that name is Arab, I should watch the road and the route he's taking, to be prepared in case he wants to take me somewhere to kill me. Just a random person trying to work. For years it stayed a habit, I'd automatically look at the driver's name. Even after knowing that I want to align myself with liberation, justice, and equality. It was a process of unlearning.

On October, not long after the current escalation of violence, I had to take a taxi again. A Jewish driver stopped and told me he'll take me, "so an Arab doesn't get you." Israeli Jews are so comfortable saying things like this to each other. My neighbors discussed a Palestinian employee, with one saying "We should tell him not to come anymore, that we want to hire a Jew." The second answered, "No, he'll say it's discrimination," like it would be so ridiculous of him. And the first just shrugged, "So we don't have to tell him why." They didn't go through with it, but they were so casual about this conversation.

In the Torah, we're told to treat those who are foreign to us well, because we know what it's like to be the foreigner. Fighting back against oppression is the natural human thing to do. We know it because we lived it. And as soon as I looked at things from this angle, it wasn't really a choice of what to support.

[anarchotolkienist]

Specifically it goes back to Nietzsches Genealogy of Morals and The Antichrist, where he identifies Christianity as fundamentally a Jewish religion who grew out of the priestly caste rule (rule by the weak) and the resentment felt by the Jews at their domination by other peoples, especially the exile in Babylon and slavery in Egypt. Thus Judaism (and through Judaism, Christianity) exalts the weak and debases the strong, it is a true slave morality (quite literally, the morality of slaves, rather than the morality of slave owners, as he would prefer), and it was in its changed form as Christianity that Judaism would dominate and defeat the Aryan, dharmic morality (and, his pagan followers would add, religion) of the European aristocracy that he so adored.

For every claim about Pagan survivals in European / North American folk traditions and holidays, it's important to remember that there are at least three layers of cruft on top:

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestants trying to discredit Catholicism by claiming that it was secretly Pagan

Nineteenth-century Romanticists and Nationalists trying to construct an "authentic" volkisch identity by connecting everything to a remote pre-Christian (pre-Jewish) antiquity, and

Contemporary Neopagans and New Agers who want to maintain these traditions.

[jellybeanium124]

if you'll allow me to flaunt my psych minor for a second, I'd like to talk about epigenetics. there's studies that show that if you shock a rat when you let them taste a certain flavor, they will immediately become averse to that flavor. not surprising. what is surprising is that the rat's grandchildren, who have never been shocked when given that flavor, will also be averse to it and afraid of it and avoid it. there's also correlational evidence to suggest that the descendants of people who suffered through famine are more likely to put on weight and keep it on easier, even if they have never been through a famine themself.

trauma gets passed down. the kinds of trauma your parents, grandparents, and so-on lived through is still living in you. even if your parents were the most well-off, loving, best parents in the world, their trauma is still in you.

now if you'll allow me to take a slight turn here: there's a wild rabbit inside every jew.

my dad grew up being called "jew-boy." my mother had a coworker throw pennies at her at her job in the 2010s. and that's just two examples. they both grew up being harassed for being jewish. I wasn't. I'm incredibly lucky. the amount of antisemitism I've experienced in real life has been incredibly minimal. I didn't even hear anyone make an antisemitic joke in front of me until college.

and none of us were seriously persecuted. none of my grandparents were seriously persecuted. but even though nobody's broken my windows, nobody's beaten me in the streets, and I haven't been at any of those horrible protests in person, the fear is there. this deep seated, blood-pumping fear of the ancient jewish rabbit in me telling me to run. to run for dear life, to run as far as my legs can get me, as long as my heart keeps pumping and my lungs keep breathing.

we all feel this.

everyone feels this.

I called my mother yesterday. when I brought up this feeling she paused, and the silence said everything. she told me I wasn't alone. she feels it. my dad feels it. my brother feels it. my nana and grampa feel it. every jew you know, online, in real life, hell, even the famous ones, they feel it. the rabbit is inside us all, and the rabbit knows, because its brothers who didn't flee in the past were slaughtered.

the rabbit is leaping around my chest, all of our chests, chanting run run run run run run run.

I don't know if I can explain it to gentiles. I don't know if this makes sense to you. I don't know how to get across how crystal clear and deep and primal this fear is, and how much all of us are feeling the exact same fear, despite our different lives and different histories and the fact we're different people.

part of me wishes it didn't matter. that I didn't feel like I needed to get goyim to understand my specific cultural and ethnic experiences. because I don't feel like I need to deeply understand everyone else's. I am a white passing ashkenazi american jew, and I will never fully understand what it is like to be anything else. that doesn't dissolve my responsibility to educate myself and practice empathy, but it's ok. idk, maybe other people do desperately wish they could get people not in their specific group to deeply understand what it's like to be them. I imagine that feeling is universal. I guess, it's just like, the left is unified that everyone is a person, everyone is equal, everyone is human, except the jews. nobody is left out but the jews. everyone's word is believed, but the jews. and it makes me feel like I have to beg and plead with people to understand what being jewish means, because we're not included with everyone else. we're the enemy. and I want people to see we're not the enemy.

epigenetics.

[fairuzfan]

This post is for the anon who sent me that video asking me to debunk it's claims so they can be better equipped against accusations of antisemitism.

Sorry, I won't post the video since I refuse to have that man on my blog but I can give you common Zionist talking points and the illogicality behind it.

To preface: most of the questions Zionists will ask you are a trap, and will make you fall into a "rabbit hole" (as I was once told when I was younger), as we try to apply their reasoning. My advice is to ALWAYS center the humanity of Palestinians. For example, when a Zionist says:

"Don't Jews deserve a homeland to be safe?"

It fundamentally ignores the core issue: Palestinians are being raped, murdered, and expelled from their homes so that the establishment of this so called "homeland" may exist. When people ask this to you, I personally advise saying something like:

Why must Palestinians suffer for the establishment of this homeland?

Always recenter to the issue at hand—the inhumane removal and treatment of Palestinians.

"Palestine belongs to the Jews and Not Muslims"

The whole premise of this claim is flawed—there is a weird tendency to equate Arab/Palestinian=Muslim when it just is like. Completely untrue. There are Palestinian Christians, Bethlehem is famously a Christian city, who have been there for centuries. There are Palestinian Jews, who have been there for centuries. There are Palestinian Muslims, who have been there for centuries. My grandpa told me stories of how he would turn on lamps for his Jewish neighbors in Al-Khalil (or Hebron) during Shabbat.

To claim that Palestine is EITHER Islamic or Jewish doesn't make any sense and completely neglects the fact that dissemination of culture has occurred for centuries, as well as the intermingling of people throughout generations. To somehow assert that for some reason, Jews and Muslims did not have ANYTHING to do with each other—did not create together, did not build families together, did not build culture together, all while being PALESTINIAN—is incredibly racist and nonsensical. "Palestinian" is not a religious identity—it's a cultural and ethnic one.

Also, it does not negate the core issue—Palestinians are being killed, removed, and tortured so that others can live on that land.

"Well what about [something about partitioning land]?"

Honestly like, who cares about the partitioning throughout the 1900 and early 2000s. Sorry, I'm not going to list the whole "partitioning" history nonsense. The whole reason "Israel" exists is because of a Mass Exodus, murder, and rape of Palestinians. Everything after that is rendered obsolete.

"Well, I heard Palestinians allied with Hitler"

I don't know how to tell you this but Palestine was under British Control. No they didn't.

"Israel withdrew from the Gaza and left them to themselves and they put Hammas in charge"

Oh yeah, Israel totally left Gaza, that's why Gazans' water, electricity, internet, and food is completely controlled by Israel (this is sarcasm, Israel still controls basic life in Gaza).

Go back to centering the idea that no human deserves to be shoved into an open-air prison, starved, and controlled. Did you know that the Zionist Entity controls the amount of water Gazans receive, as well as counting their calories to ensure they don't have enough energy on a day to day basis?

"I heard Israel asked Arabs to stay"

Show them these papers and videos when they say this:

If you can't show them these videos, check in the next point what to say.

"Well the Palestinians left of their own will in 1948"

Palestinians in 1948 didn't "leave." They had heard of how the Zionist Entity was slaughtering Palestinians en masse. Women especially heard stories of rape and sexual violence. They fled from *violence*. Again, from an earlier post, that this was a calculated effort on the Zionist Entity's part to try and get them to "leave" on their own and "abandon" their houses so that they can come in and say "hey, they left on their own so, we can come in and take their houses now."

Anyways, the idea that once you leave your house you can't ever come back to it is incredibly odd to me as an argument on Zionists' part. Like if you leave your house right now to go to the grocery store and you come back and see someone in your house and they're like "sorry dude, this is my house now, you left so that means you can't come back," you'd be like, "what the hell!" It would be even weirder if everyone agreed with the guy who took your house, which is what happened to Palestinians.

In Al-Khalil, or Hebron, Palestinians always have to have someone stay in their house or else a Settler will come in and take it from them. So it still goes on today as well.

This is not a point, but when that one person in the video said "Arabs lived under Israeli rule" and showed a clip of a bustling city with mountains, I'm pretty sure that was Amman, Jordan, not Palestine lol. Those buildings in the mountains look like how downtown Amman builds the residential areas. Could be wrong tho.

"There are no Jews living under Palestinian rule in Palestine"

What is this, some sort of gotcha argument? What are they trying to prove, the racist (obviously false) notion that Palestinians hate Jews as a whole? How do they know no Palestinian Jew lives in Gaza? Also, Settlers in Palestinian Territory exist??? I had never heard this claim before, its incredibly stupid lol. You're automatically a citizen of "Israel" if you're Jewish, whether or not you live in or outside of Palestinian Territories. So of course technically they don't live under Palestinian rule, they're granted full rights as an "Israeli" citizen automatically!

Go back to talking about the inhumane treatment of Palestinians, I wouldn't bring up the above counterpoint unless they really won't let it go since the main point is mistreatment.

"Why are Christians supporting Israel then, if it's a secular issue rather than a religious one?"

Well actually for a couple reasons:

Oil interests and regional control of goods (White People Supporting White People).

Weird fundamentalist ideology where they want to enact the second coming of Christ.

And finally because they are racist and don't think Arab Christians deserve to live. They literally bombed a 1500+ year church the other day. Why would (White) Christians cosign that.

Anyways, its a stupid argument again, because it forgets the core issue of Palestinians dying and being displaced.

In summary, always go back to the point of centering the Palestinians being displaced, tortured, and murdered, no matter the argument a Zionist gives you.

[andersunmenschlich]

The Song of Moses

In which Moses finally finishes listing all of Yahweh's laws and does some preemptive scolding. Feel free to turn to Deuteronomy 32 and read along!

First he tells the sky and the ground to listen to him. If you check the last bit of the previous chapter, you'll see that this is because he wants those two things to act as witnesses, so they can be called upon later to testify that yup, the Israelites were told how awesome Yahweh was and also what all of his laws are.

It made more sense when he said he wanted the record of all the laws to be a witness. That does tell people that the Israelites had all those laws. The sky and ground? Not so much.

Next he wishes that his words will drop like rain, distill like dew, and be like gentle rain on plants that need gentle rain, and heavy rain on plants that need that. Why? Because (he says) he's about to say Yahweh's name and tell everyone how great the supreme god is. These two things, apparently, are as important to the Israelites as water is to plants.

Then he begins.

The Rock, he says, does work that can't be criticized because everything the Rock does is in accordance with law.

This can't be argued. If what you do is up to divine code, it's definitely flawless! Who is the Rock, though? Odds are good he isn't talking about Dwayne Johnson. Perhaps he'll elaborate later.

The Rock, Moses says, is a certain type of god: a god that holds firm and steadfast, a god that stands by the law, who judges according to it and never breaches it. Like a rock, basically. Immovable. Unbending. Unchanging. Incorruptible.

The Rock's sons, however, have acted contrary to this. Rather than acting like rocks, they have become not-sons to him by acting like a generation of twisted, tangled up things.

Yes, the words here are specifically male.

Moses says this is no way to treat Yahweh (thus clarifying that the Rock is Yahweh), and insults the Israelites by calling them stupid and not a people—that is, not a cohesive tribe, not a family. "Isn't Yahweh your father?" Moses asks. "Isn't he your owner? Didn't he make you? Didn't he give you everything you have?"

Then he goes into a kids-these-days rant in which he tells his listeners to ask their fathers and grandfathers what things were like in the past.

The especially interesting part is coming up.

Once upon a time, apparently, the Most High god divided up the sons of Adam into separate nations. Obviously each of those nations would need to live somewhere, so he gave them territory—and what decided how many territories there were? According to what were the borders fixed?

The most obvious thing to do would be to fix the borders according to the number of nations.

The Most High god did not do that.

This is where the text diverges. The oldest versions we have (the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint) say that the Most High used the number of his sons to decide. He gave the sons of Adam their inheritance in land, and his own sons their inheritance in peoples. Yahweh got the Israelites: they were the people he inherited from the Most High, his father.

Later versions say the Most High used the number of Israel's sons. But Israel (also known as Jacob) didn't have any descendants at all back when the Most High was splitting Adam's descendants into nations. Now he has millions. What number between zero and millions do you suppose the Most High used? Or do you suppose he used a still farther future number, and went into the billions? And what would it mean for Jacob and his descendants to be Yahweh's allotted heritage if no one was assigning the various bundles of Adam's descendants to the different sons of the Most High god?

The Israelites are Yahweh's people because the Most High god (Yahweh's father) gave the Israelites to Yahweh. They're his heritage.

Yahweh met and took possession of his human inheritance (Moses says) in a desert land. A howling wilderness waste, in fact. Yahweh surrounded his inheritance, watched it at all times, and guarded it like you do the center of your eye—that is, reflexively and as violently as necessary.

Next Moses compares Yahweh to an eagle. Eagles, Moses says, wake up their nestlings and then hover over them checking to be sure they're all right. Yahweh does that, metaphorically speaking. He also metaphorically spreads his wings and carries the people his father gave him on his pinions (because flapping wings are a nice safe place to sit... or maybe eagles are strictly gliders, and never need to flap).

Never mind ornithology.

Moses emphasizes that Yahweh was the only god taking care of Jacob's sons. And that's as it should be, because Jacob's sons belong to Yahweh—other gods are alien to them, foreign.

The Israelites are Yahweh's inheritance. He is their owner; their master; their father; their lord; their god.

And (this is the important bit) their god is the one who has been taking care of them all this time. They have no right to desert him: he was the one taking care of them. Him alone. No other god has ever done anything good for them.

Next Moses tells us about all the good things Yahweh has done for Israel: the high places in the land are great and he made Israel ride them, he fed Israel the fruit and grain produced by the land, squeezed honey out of rocks and oil out of boulders for them, got them ox cheese and goat milk and fat tasty sheep, the best rams, the richest wheat, the finest grapes, etc.

And then darling little Israel got spoiled, and started disrespecting the god that had made him so strong and healthy. Decided he didn't want to hang out with the rock that had saved him.

According to Moses, the Israelites started hanging out with Yahweh's brothers—foreign gods! They were his people, his inheritance, his father gave them to him, and here they were treating his brothers like they weren't his property! You know what that is? That's an abomination. That's idolatry. That's adultery. Yes! It's like when your female who belongs to you starts treating some other man like she's his, that's what it's like! Israel made Yahweh jealous. They grieved him. They enraged him.

What's more, they even cheated on him with supernatural beings who weren't even sons of the Most High—with Johnny-come-lately deities their ancestors had never even heard of! Why, those aren't even gods at all, and here the Israelites were killing animals for them!

They ignored the rock that was a father to them, and forgot the god (a proper god, an actual son of the Most High) who had exerted himself extremely to make them what they were.

Obviously Yahweh saw this.

He saw it and rejected them the way they rejected him, because that's how a mature father responds to disrespect from his children: he says, "Oh, so you'd rather hang out with adults who aren't me? Give them kisses and gifts instead of me? Fine! You don't want me—I'll go away! No more support from me! Let's see how you do without me, you perverse, unfaithful brats! Make me jealous with people who aren't even family, will you? Make me angry by showering affection on non-people? I'll show you. I'll make you jealous with random kids who aren't even a part of any family; I'll make you angry with another, stupid group of kids!"

No, seriously. That is how mature Yahweh is in the Bible (at least according to Moses).

"They're giving sacrifices to non-elohim gods?" Moses shows Yahweh reasoning. "That makes me jealous, so I'll go find non-tribal people to bless, to make Israel jealous. They're (pointlessly) setting up idols to gods that aren't about to so much as give them the time of day? That makes me angry, so I'll shower blessings on a nation so stupid they won't ever thank me for it. (Another one, one that's not Israel. A different foolish nation.) That ought to make Israel as mad as I am!"

And he is very angry. According to Moses, he's so angry he could burn the entire earth right down to the bottom-most part of it, devouring the whole earth and every tasty and/or valuable thing on it, right down to the foundations of the mountains.

Note that the earth is flat.

In the Bible, the earth is always flat. You have to twist the words to make it mean anything else: in a plain reading, the earth of the Bible is flat.

When Yahweh (through Moses) says his anger burns to the depths of the lowest pit, turning the earth and everything on it to ash and setting the very lowest parts of all the mountains on fire, he's picturing a flat earth burning. That's the image he's evoking for us: fire falling from the firm arch of heaven and burning straight down through the flat earth itself until there's no place lower to go.

The fact that the core of the earth is already molten will never be mentioned.

Because the writer of Deuteronomy didn't know.

In any case, Yahweh goes on to threaten far worse than just leaving the people his dad gave him—he plans to hurt them as much as he possibly can. He'll heap disasters on them, spend every last arrow he has shooting them: he'll use famine to turn them into shriveled husks, burn them up with fever and poison them with plague, order in some sharp-fanged wild beasts to attack them, get some venomous snakes to bite them, make sure their kids are hacked to death outdoors and everyone indoors will be terrified no matter how old or what sex they are... he really gets into the list.

This is the way Yahweh treats his people, and it sets a pattern, doesn't it? If your wife cheats on you, this is how you treat her. If your kids don't appreciate you, this is how you treat them. Remember, this is the Rock! Everything he does is lawful and upright.

Some of his people started worshiping his brothers instead of him (and even gods who weren't members of his family at all and might not even exist).

The Most High gave them to him. They're his people. They don't get to choose who they worship. They worship him, or they die horribly. Simple as. And if they do worship him, like they're supposed to, like they're lawfully meant to, because they're his property—why, then he'll treat them so well! Of course he will! That's the law too, after all. Let no one say he isn't just.

In fact, there's only one reason why he isn't going to wipe his people out so entirely that it would be like they never were: Yahweh is afraid that if he does that, the Israelites's enemies will think they're the ones who did it.

That's right—he hates the thought that someone else might take the credit for his holocaust!

He's not worried about other gods taking credit. Apparently if some other god said "I'm the one who wiped out the Israelites!" he could do something about that. But if a group of humans said it, he'd be completely powerless to correct them! There would be nothing he could do at that point. They'd walk off happily thinking they'd won because they were stronger than their Israelite enemies, rather than that they'd won because Yahweh was murdering the Israelites.

If those enemies had any sense, Yahweh assures us (through Moses), they would understand the fate he had planned for them, too. Obviously they're not stronger. One of them would only able to chase off a thousand Israelites if he, Yahweh, had given his people up.

Those unspecified enemies, after all, don't have a god as awesome as Yahweh "the Rock" El. And they suck as people, too.

If we think of this unspecified nation as a vine, they're a vine from Sodom, that grew in the fields of Gomorrah, with poison grapes that taste bitter and make wine that might as well be snake venom.

Yahweh knows that. He knows they suck. He's a very just and righteous deity, and this unspecified nation has definitely been breaking his laws right left and center. He'll have his vengeance! And soon, at that. They'll definitely fall and be destroyed soon. In the meantime, Yahweh will judge his people, and then he'll be sorry for the ones who were his slaves—after he sees how horribly weak and few they've become, of course. And he'll make fun of them a bit first.

"Oh no!" he'll say. "I wonder where my brothers went? And whatever happened to the rock they used to run to for protection? Say, maybe the not-elohim you sacrificed animals and wine to will come and help you out!"

And then he'll gloat.

"See?" he'll say. "I'm the only one you can rely on. No god can stand against me. I can kill you. I can make you live. I can hurt you. I can heal you. And there is no one who can take you away from me."

Such amazing compassion! He's talking instead of killing you. And it gets even better.

"I lift my hand to the sky," he says, "and swear on my own immortality that when I sharpen my flashing sword and my hand grasps it in judgment, I will most definitely revenge myself on those who have opposed me and reciprocate the hatred of those who hate me. My arrows will drink so much blood they'll get drunk on it, and my sword will eat flesh and drink the blood of those slain in battle, and those who surrendered and were taken captive, and the heads of the enemy leaders!"

Proportionate, isn't it?

Moses then announces that the sky itself should rejoice with Yahweh at such a time, and that all the other gods should bow down to him. Why? Because he's avenged the blood of his sons (which, if you'll recall from earlier, he spilled himself) and taken vengeance on the people who opposed him.

He repays hatred for hatred, and (through vengeance and blood-spilling) cleanses his people and their land.

Having recited this poem, Moses emphasizes that all the rules he listed earlier are not just words, they're the Israelites's very life, and they need to follow those laws as closely as possible or else.

The end!

[shalom-iamcominghome]

It's actually quite wild to me to know that some xians have this idea that jews and muslims are more catered to than they are like...

I'm looking forward to observing jewish holidays and shabbat but I am not looking forward to my employers or my uni potentially not accommodating the holidays (though obviously xian ones will automatically). Not to mention my fear of antisemitism - something that is alive to this day and is just as deadly as ever.

Not to mention that we live in a post-9/11 world where in the U.S. especially, muslims are seen as muslim first (in a derogatory way). Like, you do not have to look far into the minds of some people to find the islamophobic caricature that lives in their mind rent-free.

I don't doubt that some people have uncharitable ideas of xianity, but by no means does that mean jews and muslims are seen as better or are treated better, because that isn't the case (at least as far as the U.S. is concerned).

[geekthefreakout]

I'm sorry, I need to call this out directly... magenta with the pink text didn't even address any of the points Eden made. Just acted like they were being attacked and trying to accuse Eden of being anti-arab without actually saying it. It was the debate equivalent of sticking out your tongue and saying "NO, YOU!!"

magenta with the pink text, did you read what Eden said? And actually comprehend any of it? You're showing your whole ass here, babes. She wasn't attacking you. She was correcting you, very kindly and very thoroughly. It's sad that you can't handle that.

I am saying this in the hopes that rather than antisemitic, you're just 14 and reactionary- it's okay to say you were wrong.

I think the top tweet is a bad faith interpretation of this sign. These protestors aren't telling Jewish people they should be in hell. They're talking to the Israeli invading force. The soldiers that have been bombing them.

I disagree. All Jews, even ones you don’t like, are indigenous to the Levant.

IDF soldiers don’t deserve antisemitism for being “bad.”

No Jews deserve antisemitism for being “bad.”

Muslims don’t deserve Islamophobia for being “bad.”

Hamas terrorists don’t deserve Islamophobia or anti-Arab hatred for for being “bad.”

People of any marginalized group do not deserve to face bigoted discrimination for being “bad.”

When you criticize people who you dislike from a marginalized group while weaponizing that group’s identity against them, then you are insulting all members of that group. Not just the ones you don’t like.

Bigotry is not ok. Ever. Period.

[xclowniex]

The whole "israhell" and "isnotreal" shit is just blatantly anti jew at this point.

Like Israel has been a word used by jews to describe jews for centuries, far before Israel, the country existed. For example, am yisrael chai means the Jewish people live.

"Oh but I'm talking about the country not jews"

Cool yeah sure that may be your intention, but the other month a synagogue in the US as Israel crossed out and replaced with Palestine by antizionists who thought that the passage on the outside of the synagogue was referring to the country of Israel, when in reality it was referring to jewish people. Essentially the word jewish/jewish people was crossed out and replaced with Palestine.

Hopefully most people can look at that and go "damn that's fucked up and antisemitic".

And I get that there is the very likely that they did not know that Israel also means jewish people, however it takes 2 minutes to Google search + vandalizing a synagogue bad full stop. And the whole not knowing that it has multiple meanings in of itself causes antisemitism.

And ignoring the fact that people aren't pulling this shit with other countries they don't support, as a jew I feel unsafe when i hear people saying that shit as I A) have no clue if it's has or will result in them pulling similar shit at synagogues or even with posts using Israel meaning the Jewish people and B) I also have no clue if they genuinely mean Israel the country or Israel as in the Jewish people.

It's super simple to not use israhell or isnotreal. Using those words does not at all do anything to actively help Palestinians, it is slang created by those in the west so they can refuse to say Israel. And if you believe that not saying Israel is more important than not making jews, not zionists, jews around you uncomfortable, than unfortunately you are not normal about jews.

[creature-wizard]

Looks like it's time to talk about starseeds and the New Age movement again.

Since I'm seeing more starseed content being posted, I'm gonna make another post on why the whole starseed thing and the surrounding New Age belief system are... not good.

So for those who don't know, New Age mythology is essentially a hodgepodge of cherrypicked and distorted myths from various cultures, racist pseudohistory, and far right conspiracy theories. To put it very briefly, starseeds are supposedly here to help Earth resist the reptilians, a race of politics-manipulating, war-starting, media-controlling blood-drinking aliens. For those who don't recognize the tropes here, these are basically all antisemitic canards. The reptilian alien myth as most know it today comes from David Icke, who ultimately cribbed a bunch of his material from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a Russian hoax created to justify violence against Jews. He was also influenced by the work of people like Fritz Springmeier, a hateful crank who based much of his work on other hateful cranks.

(David Icke, by the way, also claims that transgender is an evil reptilian conspiracy. You'll never find just one form of bigotry with these people.)

There are supposedly numerous alien races out there, and one of the most prominent among them are the Pleiadians, AKA Nordics. While modern depictions of the Pleiadians give them more variety in skintone, there's no denying that older Pleiadian mythology basically pictured them as Aryans In Space, even associating them with the swastika.

You see what's going on here? "Good" swastika-loving Aryan aliens versus "evil" Jewish aliens? Sound familiar?

Racism isn't just a tangential part of the starseed myth, either. It lies at its very core. It's inextricably tied in with the ancient astronaut hypothesis, which has a history of racist motivation behind it. The TL;DR is that a bunch of white people couldn't believe that non-white people had built a bunch of things they couldn't figure out how to build themselves (EG, the Great Pyramids), so they proposed that the real builders were anyone from Atlanteans to aliens. (Atlantis, by the way, never existed; it was a literary device created by Plato.)

One supposed purpose of starseeds is to help the world "wake up to the truth," which basically just means "convert people to New Age spirituality." New Age believes that world peace is contingent on a majority of the world being converted to New Age belief, and that resistance against their belief system is ultimately the work of the aforementioned reptilian aliens.

To put it another way, New Agers think they understand other cultures' spiritual traditions better than the actual members of said cultures, and think that anyone who disagrees with them is being manipulated by the conspiracy, or is an agent of the conspiracy. This includes Indigenous cultures which are already endangered from white Christian colonialism.

Essentially, endangered cultures cannot speak up for themselves and resist New Agers' efforts at cultural assimilation without being labeled a problem and an enemy. It's basically white Christian colonialism repackaged as "spiritual, not religious."

Again - if you heard from these people that some ancient text or myth describes extraterrestrial beings visiting our planet for one reason or another, you heard misinformation. They twist and misrepresent literally every myth and text they get their hands on. For example, you may have heard that the vimanas from Hindu traditions were actually alien spacecraft. They were no such thing. Or maybe you heard that the Book of Enoch describes aliens performing genetic experimentation on humans. It literally does not. At best, all of the stories they cite just kind of sound like aliens if you ignore most of their content and pay no attention to their cultural contexts.

The starseed movement preys on alienated people, especially autistic people and people with ADHD. You can look up nearly any list of signs that you're supposedly a starseed, and many of them will align perfectly with characteristics associated with autism and/or ADHD, or that people with these conditions commonly report. Some people within the movement even go so far as to claim that ADHD and autism don't even exist, but were actually made up by the conspiracy as a cover to suppress and control starseeds, which is some yikes-as-hell ableism.

So basically, people are being told that if they have these certain characteristics or symptoms, that means it's their job to spread New Age spirituality to defeat the conspiracy and help others ascend to the fifth density.

And what's the fifth density, you might ask? It's supposedly humanity's next evolutionary level, because New Age is also based on biological misconceptions. Supposedly once everyone's DNA "upgrades," they'll essentially morph into an aetheric form. Supposedly, this is preceded by a number of "ascension symptoms," including depression, headache, gastrointestinal issues, and any number of other symptoms that could indicate almost anything, including stress.

What many of these people don't realize is, this prediction has already failed. Back in the 2000s and 2010s, experiencing "ascension symptoms" was supposed to precede ascension to 5D beginning December 21, 2012. One lady, Denise Le Fay, was convinced that the hair loss she was experiencing in 2008 was an ascension symptom. As we can see by looking her up, she's very much still with us on the 3D plane these days, repeating the same tired old scripts New Agers recycle endlessly.

By the way, everything you near New Agers saying today about old systems being dismantled, dark forces being arrested or kicked off the planet, and new economic systems on the horizon? They've been recycling these scripts for years now. Take a look at this page written back in 2012. You got stuff about the complete dismantling of an enormous network of sinister forces," "the arrest and removal of a world-wide cabal," and a "new economic system."

("Cabal," by the way, is a dogwhistle term for "Jews.")

Furthermore, people in this movement are often encouraged to try and access past life memories through dreams or hypnosis, which makes the whole thing feel even more real to them. But the thing is, you can have incredibly vivid experiences about literally anything you put your mind to - the people in the reality shifting having vivid experiences of living another life in the Harry Potter universe are a great example of this. Just because you have vivid experiences, doesn't mean they have any bearing on anything happening in this reality.

So yeah, the starseed movement and the larger New Age movement are both extremely harmful. They promote racist pseudohistory, medically-irresponsible pseudoscience, conspiracy theories that target numerous marginalized groups, and functionally target aliened people with ADHD and autism to convince them that spreading its beliefs is their job.

[jessicalprice]

I think the thing that most Christian atheists who are rebelling against authoritarian Christian backgrounds don't get is why Jews remain Jewish.

Like, I get it, you engaged in your practices because you were told that God would punish you if you didn't, because you're told you're supposed to fear God.

(Incidentally, we don't even use the same language about this. The term that gets translated in most English bibles as "fear" is, like many classical Hebrew words, a lot more multivalent than the English term, and has more of a connotation of "awe." (See, for example, the Gilgamesh dream sequence: "Why am I trembling? No god passed this way." A god is something in whose wake one trembles.) It's what one feels when one is faced with something bigger than oneself, something overwhelming. For some people that may be fear of being harmed. For others it may be wonder or even ecstasy, standing outside oneself.)

But in 2023, Jews have the option (and, indeed, still the cultural pressure) to completely abandon Judaism. Very easily. We can, in fact, do it quite passively. If we're not actively trying to engage with it, it will very much drift away from us.

And it's not fear of divine punishment keeping most of us engaged.

The thing is, if you proved to me tomorrow that God doesn't exist, I'm not sure anything about my life or my practice would change. (I'm already agnostic, so *shrug*. I don't believe in a God-person. Sometimes I believe in a unity to reality, a life and a direction to it. Sometimes I don't. I just don't have the arrogance to think I understand definitively the way the universe does or doesn't work.) I still would celebrate Shabbat, I still wouldn't eat pork, I still would have a mezuzah on my doorway.

I do all that stuff because I'm Jewish, not because I think God will get mad if I don't. I do all that stuff because it's part of a cultural system that I see as wise and life-giving and therapeutic and worth maintaining.

And the thing is, the cultural system that Christian antitheists want us to assimilate into, under the guise of "getting rid of religion", is very much a white Protestant culture. It's not culturally neutral. It has practices, and it has a particular worldview, and it has cultural norms that are just as irrational as any other culture's.

It's also very telling that Christian antitheists purport to be harmed by Jews continuing to be Jewish. Why? We don't impose our norms on anyone else, and we overwhelmingly vote (and organize, and engage in activism) against the imposition of Christian "religious" norms, such as the curtailing of reproductive freedom, blue laws, etc.

So you're only "harmed" by our continued existence in the same way Christians purport to be harmed by it: by claiming that the very existence of a group that doesn't share your worldview and practices is somehow an act of oppression against you.

Which is, you know, white supremacist logic.

You're still upholding the logic of Jesus's genocidal, colonial Great Commission even though you supposedly don't believe in the god that ordered it anymore.

That's gotta be one of the saddest things I encounter among my fellow humans.

You took down all the crosses in the church of your mind and chucked them out the window, but you still refuse to step foot outside the church building, contenting yourself with claiming it's not a church, and firing out the windows at the synagogue and mosque down the road, the same way you used to.

[infiniteglitterfall]

I do realize this is a real niche post but I cannot tell you how many damn times over the past 10 months I've seen gentiles tell Jews some version of, "Your own holy book SAYS God doesn't want you to have a country yet!"

And it's such an incredibly blatant and weirdly specific tell that they're not part of something that grew from progressive grassroots, but something based on right-wing astroturfing.

1. Staying in your own lane is a pretty huge progressive principle.

Telling people in another group that their deity said they couldn't do X is, I think, as far as you can get from your own lane.

2. It's also very clearly Not In Your Own Lane because I've never seen anyone actually be able to EITHER quote the passage they're thinking of, OR cite where it is.

It's purely, "I saw somebody else say this, and it seemed like it would make me win the debate I wasn't invited to."

3. It betrays a complete ignorance of Jewish culture and history.

Seriously? You don't know what you're referencing, its context, or even what it specifically says, but you're... coming to a community that reads and often discusses the entire Torah together each year, at weekly services... who have massive books holding generations of debate about it that it takes 7 years to read, at one page per day....

And saying, "YOUR book told you not to!"

I've been to services where we discussed just one word from the reading the whole time. The etymology. The connotations. The use of it in this passage versus in other passages.

And then there is the famous saying, "Ask two Jews, get three opinions." There is a culture of questioning and discussion and debate throughout Judaism.

You think maybe, in the decades and decades of public discussion about whether to buy land in Eretz Yisrael and move back there; whether it should keep being an individual thing, or keep shifting to intentional community projects; what the risks were; whether it should really be in Argentina or Canada or someplace instead; how this would be received by the Jews and gentiles already there, how to respect their boundaries, how to work with them before and during; and whether ending up with a fuckton of Jews in one place might not be exactly as dangerous for them as it had always been everywhere else....

You think NOBODY brought up anything scriptural? Nobody looked through the Torah, the Nevi'im, the Ketuvim, or the Talmud for any thoughts about any of this?? It took 200 years and some rando in the comments to blow everyone's minds???

4. It relies on an unspoken assumption that people can and should take very literal readings of religious texts and use them to control others.

And a sense of ownership and power over those texts, even without any accompanying knowledge about what they say.

It's kind of a supercessionist know-it-all vibe. It reads like, "I know what you should be doing. Because even if I'm not personally part of a fundamentalist branch of a related religion, the culture I'm rooted in is."

Bonus version I found when I was looking for an example. NOBODY should do this:

There are a lot of people who pull weird historical claims like "It SAYS Abraham came from Chaldea! That's Iraq!"

Like, first of all, a group is indigenous to a land if it arose as a people and culture there, before (not because of) colonization.

People aren't spontaneously spawning in groups, like "Boom! A new indigenous people just spawned!!"

People come from places. They go places. Sometimes, they gel as a new community and culture. Sometimes, they bop around for a while and eventually assimilate into another group.

Second: THE TORAH IS NOT A HISTORY TEXTBOOK OMFG.

It's an oral history, largely written centuries after the fact.

There is a TON of historical and archaeological research on when and where the Jewish culture originated, how it developed over time, etc. It's extremely well-established.

Nobody has to try to pull what they remember from Sunday school for this argument.