#modern Jewish history

[historicity-was-already-taken]

A lot of people (going by follow/unfollow patterns since October 7, 2023; a date which, speaking as a Jewish historian with a literal Masters degree in Modern Jewish History, will be permanently engraved in Jewish memory for as long as the Jewish people exist, regardless of whether or not that makes non-Jewish users upset) seem to take the simple statement: "In the 1930s anti-Semites were saying that exact same shit, except back then, they were telling us to go to Palestine," as a political statement, or an entry into the discourse.

It is simply a fact; in terms of modern European Jewish History, American Jewish History, and the intellectual history of anti-Semitism. If that causes a cognitive dissonance temper tantrum, that is on you. You get to decide whether you will use that dissonance as an opportunity to learn, or whether you will use it as an opportunity to scream your William of Norwich of the Twenty-First Century shit even louder.

[baebeylik]

Decalogue with Lions. Jewish. American. Early 20th Century CE.

Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

[lionofchaeronea]

Over the Town, Marc Chagall, 1918

[grecoromanyaoi]

omg I thought you knew this already but basically the polish soldiers napoleon sent to suppress the haitian revolution ended up siding with the rebelling slaves instead, so they became the only white people welcome there and the government officially classified them as noir (black)

HUH. interesting.

[krazysworld]

Henri Dresner

Gianfranco Pontecorvo

Jetty Pront

Monique Cofman

Agnes Neuman

Murdered by Nazis in Auschwitz 💔

The Holocaust happened.

It was real and we are seeing now in 2024 how a Holocaust gets started with the new nazis which are Hamas and there brown shirts ( college protestors )

If you think this ends with Jews

You are crazy.

[the-catboy-minyan]

people who use DNA tests to """prove""" Jews aren't indigenous to Israel by showing some Israelis ancestry is purely European.

you know Jewish converts are a thing right?

[the-cricket-chirps]

Helen Frankenthaler

Swan Lake #2

1961

[ace-hell]

"italy ruled out that the don't recognize jerusalem as israel's capital"

Well first of all who tf are you even lmfao no one asked

Second of all, be careful italy, you saw what happened to gaza after they took hostage our people, and you got our menorah🫵🏻

I wouldn't get so cocky if i were you

[yiddishlore]

Woodcut illustration of a Jewish woman from Syria.

From De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diuerse parti del mondo (1590) by Cesare Vecellio.

[qqueenofhades]

Bon soir. Do you have resources/recommendations for understanding the Israel/Palestine conflict as it related to American media coverage and American anti-semitism?

I do not have any particular content resources, but as I said on WhatsApp, I am willing to write you a brief (ha) primer of this whole mess, its historical context, and the political issues/positions that inform how it is currently covered and talked about in America and the West. Obviously this will not cover everything, but it will hopefully give you some sense of where this is all coming from and why.

The modern state of Israel was founded in 1948, on territory that is historically associated with the ancient/biblical "Israel." Obviously, this took place in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and the attempt to wipe out European Jewry. It was felt that the world at large owed reparations to Jews for that "yet again, we tried to kill all of you, our bad" thing. One might say, understandably so.

However, this was controversial because there were already people living in that territory, and overnight they found themselves stateless, or otherwise long-term/deliberately excluded from the new Israeli state apparatus. The Israeli government has long since promoted an image of the (secular) Israeli citizen as also (religiously) Jewish, even though there are many Middle Eastern Christians, Muslims, Arabs, etc etc., who may not identify with this particular ethnic-religious model of Israeli citizenship.

The Middle East has long been a geopolitically/militarily contested area (dating all the way back to the crusades) due to its huge symbolic importance to the three major Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, exemplified by the incredibly sensitive issue of who gets to lay claim to the city of Jerusalem and how). In the nineteenth century, European colonial powers also occupied and exploited the region, particularly Britain in Egypt and Syria, France in Lebanon, and others.

The Ottoman Empire was also in conflict with its European imperial rivals, further increasing the instability and resulting in the development of various nationalist, religious, separatist, and other proxy groups. This all informed the situation at the time Israel was created in 1948, especially as the Middle East and Northern Africa entered the postwar period of decolonization/independence in the 1950s/60s. Pan-Arab nationalist leaders like President Nasser of Egypt portrayed the creation of Israel as yet another crass imposition of European colonial/imperial interests, rather than any kind of merited settlement/feeling bad about the Holocaust. Many Arab states still refuse to recognize Israel, or have any diplomatic relations with it, as a result.

Because Jews have experienced political, religious, and genocidal persecution throughout history (the manifestation of anti-Semitism), the idea of having an actual territorial homeland, where they can be safe from that, is obviously an important protection. There is a very big difference between religious Judaism and political Zionism, defined as the state of Israel's political activities and agendas. However, legitimate criticism of Israel as a nation-state, the same as any other nation-state in the world, is often coded in implicitly (or wildly explicitly) anti-Semitic dogwhistles. Zionism and Judaism are also often deliberately conflated, used interchangeably, or without any attempt to separate them.

Jews of the diaspora, i.e. those in America and Europe, often find themselves ambushed with criticisms of Israel's political and military excesses, and asked to explicitly renounce any allegiance to Israel in order to be seen as "good Jews." Which is a heaping helping of problematic stereotypes all at once. Many Jews in America are liberal, Democratic voters, members of Reform congregations etc, and do legitimately oppose the militaristic and seemingly apartheid-esque actions of the Israeli nation-state. But when your choice is "totally renounce the homeland for your people that was created in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and intended to provide very real and very needed shelter against future atrocities of this type, or be subject to more anti-Semitic vitriol," that is... not good.

The U.S. has long supported Israel as a political entity for various reasons. One, because it is often antagonistic or in opposition to the largely Muslim nation-states in the Middle East, and sees Israel as a more natural ally (so yes, institutional Islamophobia does play a role). Two, because the evangelical Christian right-wing wackjobs think that it's important to support Israel because one day Jesus will come back there and start the Rapture (true story).

Right-wing Republicans are often extremely anti-Semitic because they're Christian nutjobs, and left-wing tankies are ...also extremely anti-Semitic, because they paint Israel as just an extension of the American imperial regime and it should therefore be destroyed/delegitimized. (Remember, everything is America's fault somehow and other countries have no agency and never act independently, just as dumb American puppets!) As usual with tankies, they make no effort to understand the sensitive historical, religious, and identity issues around the necessity of a Jewish homeland and why it happened in the first place.

All that said, Israel as a nation, culture, and military (not Judaism as a religion) has often behaved appallingly toward the Palestinians who also live there, and has rejected any idea of a two-state or power-sharing solution. This is where Palestine would also have the right to organize itself as a state and exert the same level of influence/defend itself from what often reads as deliberate ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs and attempts to set up an apartheid state where only religious/ethnic Jews have full citizenship rights.

This is exemplified by the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu took a brief vacation, a few undistinguished caretaker far-right PMs occupied the chair for a year, and then he came back.

Almost every player in this situation has an interest in promoting themselves as fully blameless and their enemies as fully and even demonically in the wrong, which complicates any complete or objective assessment. There are Palestinian militant groups, i.e. Hamas and Hezbollah, who are painted as obvious terrorists and extensions of al-Qaeda, especially in the wake of 9/11 and the start of more U.S.-led wars in the Middle East. This assessment neatly serves the purposes of both American and Israeli political agendas and should be scrutinized, especially considering that all sides are engaging in armed violence at all times.

Israel often engages in the same kind of imperialistic "we're only attacking our enemies defensively in order to preserve our own survival as a state" rhetoric as, say, Russia, and has been notably slow about providing weapons or assistance to Ukraine, in contrast to other western allies. However, unlike Russia, which is not under legitimate threat from anything except Putin's wild revanchist delusions of grandeur, Israel does have plenty of other nations (particularly Iran) that would like to wipe it off the map, if it was at all possible to do. This does not excuse the terrible things its powerful military apparatus has repeatedly done to Palestinian civilian populations, but it, again, makes it more complicated.

As the basic realities currently stand, the conflict does not have any obvious short-term or long-term end. Israeli gives no indications of shifting its extreme-assimilationist political and military policy, there will continue to be violent friction between the political and religious Abrahamic factions that lay claim to Jerusalem and its larger symbolic legacy, and the wider world will continue to be invested in promoting and using particular depictions of the conflict for its own domestic and international purposes.

So yeah.

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Ruth Adler Schnee

Textile artist and interior designer Ruth Adler Schnee was born in 1923 in Frankfurt, Germany. Schnee's family fled the Nazi persecution of Jews and ultimately settled in the Detroit area. In the late 1940s, she began designing and winning awards for textiles. Schnee was a trailblazer in the transition of textiles from simple decoration to a medium of contemporary design, and was also a well-known interior designer who worked with famous architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright. She is credited with helping spread midcentury modernism to Michigan, and the revival of midcentury modernism in the 1990s brought a resurgence of interest in her work. In 2015, she was named the Kresge Foundation's Eminent Artist. Schnee's work can be found in the collections of the Henry Ford Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ruth Adler Schnee died in 2023 at the age of 99.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

"The penultimate period of Jewish existence in Poland presents the story of an ancient people coping persistently with an oppressive present, clinging to old hopes or seeking anew for a better future, unaware of the perverse and monstrous fate that lay ahead of them. But our terrible knowledge of the Holocaust hampers us, in a sense, from perceiving the responses of the Po­lish Jews during the interwar period in the true dimensions of that time, for their actions appear dwarfed and futile, against the mon­strous dimensions and completeness of their destruction. It is, therefore, essential for us to remind ourselves, again and again; the Polish Jews did not know and could not know what awaited them."

Celia Heller, On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland Between the Two World Wars, pg. 249.

[baebeylik]

Jewish Ceremonial Wedding Ring. Possibly made in Italy. 13th-14th Century CE.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[lionofchaeronea]

Portrait of the Artist as a Harlequin, Abraham Mintchine, 1931

[unopenablebox]

also. what would authors even do if they couldn't have jewish characters alert other characters about how they don't eat pork

[thedosianexplorer]

HAGGING OUT: MAY

I spent the festivities enjoying decadence that was gone too quickly to photograph but some highlights:

Spiked ice tea (hibiscus/cherry/rosehip/berry tea and Queen Charlotte rum)

Chocolate croissants and cream puffs

Brioche French toast

Bread drizzled with hot honey and spices

Basically if it was a rare treat, an indulgence, or intoxicating in some way, we partook and delighted in the transition to a new season. It coincided with some truly lovely weather, some of the first we've had this extremely fickle year.

April is a hard month for us here between the inevitable (taxes) and difficult anniversaries, so we cut loose on the 30th and put it behind us for another year. Thanks to springcleaning I had time to create a new devotional piece:

This is for Freyja's shrine and is the box lid for containing objects offered or dedicated to Her. I painted it to look like an amber gem bordered with amber beads. Everyone at my altar gets a themed box and I'm working my way through all of them. Painted with Arteza acrylic paints (highly recommend, great pigmentation, blends well, and dilutes without being grainy).