#mostly German and/or Jewish

[hyperpotamianarch]

Could i dm you on the subjecting of becoming friends over a mutual hobby in hebrew/judean/linguistics?

Feel free, I guess. My DMs are open.

[doberbutts]

Jewish folks of tumblr, I have a question for anyone who knows a lot about the history of Germany 1890-1920, specifically in the Apolda region, and Jewish last names.

I am interested primarily because two different sources (one being a gentile doberman person, and the other being a nonpracticing Jewish person) have informed me that the last name Mann and names ending with the syllable Mann were primarily of Jewish ethnicity within Germany.

This is interesting to me because the doberman breed comes from the name of the creator- a tax collector in Apolda named Karl Fredrich Louis Dobermann. He made the breed to protect him because he was getting attacked while performing his job.

This is also interesting to me because MULTIPLE doberman history books that I've read have stated the breed lore that despite Hitler's seize of control of the breed during his rise to power in Germany, many of the breed's founders who took over the care and legacy of the breed after Dobermann's death were adamantly anti-Nazi, voiced disagreement with Hitler's ideals, and moved rapidly to get as many of the dogs out of the country as possible to prevent him from using them. This is repeated in American historical accounts- that at some point this country had a higher number of dobermans than Germany, right before the war officially broke out, and that German breeders were exporting their dogs here en masse to prevent the breed from being destroyed by the ensuing chaos.

In modern days, the breed is infested with far right, Q-anon, and neonazi reactionaries here within the US, owing a lot of that to its German roots and use during the war as well as its reputation as a fierce police and military dog both in Germany and here in the US.

I think it would be very interesting indeed if the breed had Jewish or Jewish-adjacent origins that were erased by Hitler's destruction. We already know that Dobermann himself was extremely cagey about his personal life as well as what went into the breed. We also know that at least two of the three people he passed the torch to were vocally anti-Hitler, if the history books are to be believed. And we know that the doberman history itself has experienced many purges of information, missing journals and pedigrees, cobbled together on a "stop paying attention to this" and "oh it was lost in the war".

We also know that this was commonplace among Jewish and Jewish-friendly communities to scrub the evidence of the existence of Jewish people present in an area to prevent them from coming to further harm as the SS began to search for anyone they might have missed.

Dobermann was buried as a German and, to my knowledge, was registered on the census as a German. I'm wondering if there could be any connection to Jewish community whatsoever, or if it just so happened that the early doberman people were not Nazis, or if the breed history books have got this so very wrong.

This comes especially as I watch the German Shepherd community once again get rocked with the realization that their own breed founder was proudly pro-Hitler, writing about it in his journals and breeding theory, while the doberman community mostly has 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️ I guess he didn't write it down 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️ to compare.

Again, I just find that very interesting, as "oops I guess there's no records" are a fairly common tactic used by freedom fighters and abolitionists worldwide to protect a vulnerable population. And it seems like an interesting coincidence, if the rest has any real truth to it.

[mossadspypigeon]

the anti israel crowd: GO BACK TO EUROPE UR JUST EUROPEAN COLONIZERS

meanwhile:

race is what???

race is what exactly?

hebrew? not english or german? or irish? HMMM.

where does the hebrew language and therefore the hebrew race/people (the jewish ethnicity) originate?

(the israelites were taken to babylonia and the judeans stayed so the last bit is lmfao but whatever)

oh shit even ai knows:

between the med sea and the jordan river lmfaoooooo. what was that about palestine from the RIVER TO THE SEA?

btw encyclopedia britannica has become a nearly fully pro palestine source filled with mostly revisionist history about israelites occupying judea and israel (funny how the bible is a fairy tale to all of you until you can use it to discredit and demonize jews) and yettttttt lmao.

btw that manifest is from 1938:

it’s almost like you want us all to go “back” to europe for a reason and it’s not because jews are actually from there.

[mariacallous]

For half a millennium until the Holocaust, the cosmopolitan city of Thessaloniki, Greece, had a unique claim to fame: it was Europe’s only major city with a Jewish majority. 

But the golden age of Thessaloniki’s mostly Sephardic Ladino-speaking Jewish community came to a sudden end with the Nazi occupation of Greece in 1941 and turned cataclysmic with the deportation two years later to Auschwitz of nearly all the city’s Jews. By the end of World War II, some 65,000 Greek Jews — 87% of the total and 96% of those from Thessaloniki — had been killed, leaving barely 2,000 survivors in Thessaloniki (also known as Salonika).

Among them were the parents of Dr. Albert Bourla, a veterinarian who would go on to become the chairman and CEO of Pfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.

In 2022, Bourla won the Genesis Prize — often described as the Jewish Nobel — for having led the development of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Stan Polovets, co-founder and chairman of the Genesis Prize Foundation, said in announcing the reward, “Millions of people are alive and healthy because of what Dr. Bourla and his team at Pfizer have accomplished.”

Now, with global antisemitism at its worst levels since World War II, Bourla is about to realize another milestone: the long-awaited opening of a Holocaust Museum of Greece. 

Bourla donated the $1 million Genesis Prize money toward construction of the museum. The museum is also being funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and the governments of Greece and Germany. The management of the museum is currently trying to raise an additional $10 million.

“Those who know me know that in addition to being very proud of my Jewish heritage, I am equally proud of being Greek,” Bourla said in an emotional June 2022 speech in Jerusalem accepting the Genesis Prize. “My mother’s courage and optimism came from her experience of narrowly escaping death at the hands of the Nazis. In fact, both of my parents turned their experience surviving the Holocaust into something positive and life-affirming. This clearly shaped my worldview.”

The 9,000-square-foot museum occupying eight floors in an octagon-shaped structure will be located at the site of Thessaloniki’s Old Railway Station, where the first Nazi train carrying Jews to Auschwitz departed on March 15, 1943. 

But the museum, slated to open in 2026, won’t be just about the tragedy of the Holocaust. Exhibits and artifacts will tell the story of more than 2,300 years of Greek Jewish history in Thessaloniki and 38 other communities, beginning with the ancient Romaniote Jews who settled in Greece during the reign of Alexander the Great.

At an Oct. 29 groundbreaking ceremony in Thessaloniki, Polovets was joined by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, and local dignitaries and Holocaust survivors.

“I was honored to participate and was moved by the ceremony, during which President Steinmeier said he ‘felt shame’ and that the memory of what was done to the Jewish people on this site ‘cannot be erased.’ That is why this museum is so important,” Polovets said. “The memory of this once-vibrant Greek Jewish community and its near destruction by the Nazis —  especially during the current wave of rising global antisemitism — must never be erased.”

Only about 5,000 Jews remain in Greece: About 4,000 live in Athens, and the remainder live in Thessaloniki, Ioannina, Rhodes, Corfu and other communities. Meanwhile, Greece has not been immune to the wave of antisemitism sweeping Europe. Vandalism of Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust memorials is fairly commonplace.

A 2014 global survey of antisemitism by the Anti-Defamation League found that 69% of Greeks harbor antisemitic views — the highest percentage of any country in the world outside the Middle East. While those findings are sometimes disputed, Greece continues to struggle with antisemitism. 

However, physical violence against Greek Jews is extremely rare, and the current Greek government, as well as the one that preceded it, are considered among the most pro-Israel in Europe. Greece observes International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and in 2014 the parliament outlawed Holocaust denial.

A big push for the Holocaust museum came from Thessaloniki’s former mayor, 82-year-old Yiannis Boutaris, who died on Nov. 4, less than a week after the Holocaust museum’s groundbreaking ceremony. Boutaris announced that his city would build the museum at a 2017 event attended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other dignitaries.

“It will symbolize our shame,” Boutaris said at the time, “for what happened, for what we did, and mostly for what we could not or did not wish to do… during and after the war.”

In addition to Bourla, other famous Jews with roots in Thessaloniki include actor Hank Azaria, Israeli businessman and philanthropist Leon Recanati, his sister the philanthropist Jude Recanati, actress Lea Michele, former Nevada congresswoman Shelley Berkley and Belgian-born American fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg. 

Polovets said Bourla’s donation aligns with the Genesis Prize Foundation’s values and mission of inspiring Jewish pride.

“With the rise of global antisemitism, education will be at the center of the museum’s activities, hosting permanent and temporary exhibitions and archives that will highlight the value of preserving the remembrance of the Holocaust, acceptance and respect for diversity, human rights, and freedom,” he said.

Polovets said he hopes the museum will inspire visitors to fight hatred from spreading today.

“Hatred in any form leads to denial, disrespect and destruction,” he said. “Democracy and respect for others are values that can never be taken for granted, and each of us has a responsibility to stand up to all forms of hatred.”

[iamthetruenhaz]

Russia's prep work

I originally wrote this as a reply to a reddit comment about the prep work Putin's Russia has done to reconquer Eastern Europe (and Central Asia) and soften up the West in order to "reclaim" the "lost" global power status the USSR had.

Putin* has been prepping his "reconquering" of Eastern Europe and Central Asia since he stepped into office. He took on an openly anti-western course since the Munich speech in 2007. He probably saw American global dominance weakening following Afghanistan and Iraq and because Russia had stabilised after the 90s, he thought it was time to act.

First he paved the way with the Chechen war where he "won" and got to jump on the War on terror bandwagon and use Islamic terrorism as a boogeyman for his own imperialistic purpose to rile up Russians against external threats.

Then he invaded Georgia to probe the soil and see how the west would react. They mostly ignored him so he went on to meddle in Eastern European politics, coerce Ukraine for gas and fund right-wing parties all across Europe (at the time mostly to drive a wedge between Eastern and Western Europe and suck EE countries back into Russian orbit) while pumping anti-western sentiment and Soviet nostalgia at home.

He saw that the west was disunited because of the US-UK-EU split following the wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria. He capitalized on that in several ways using both the wars and the refugee crisis that followed. One, to increase racist and nationalist propaganda and stir up hatred against "the liberal gay western cabal" and the resulting Euroscepticism. Two, to prop up the "proper" traditionalist Russia as an alternative. Three, to paint Eastern European countries as a puppet of the US liberals who were "ackschually" nazis in disguise, which was easy when the West was divided between trying to coax them into the EU and leaving them as a buffer-zone backwater. The brightest example of the latter was in late 2021 when Lukashenko started dumping Middle Eastern migrants on the Polish border so the Poles could be painted as a racist, white supremacist state. Unlike, you know, Belarus (really Russia) which weaponized the migrants.

Then he failed in Ukraine when his puppet's sharp turn away from a planned EU accession path caused the Euromaidan revolts. Pro-Russian protesters soon spawned, staging provications (my own country had a wave of protests and pro-russian counter-protests back then and I remember neonazis and other paid protesters being at the forefronts). Russian media started hurling accusations of nazism against pro-western protesters.

All of a sudden, it's like a switch was flipped in Russian society. Decommunization was out the window. In 2015, Stalin was chosen as the most influential figure in *world* history by Russians. All the anti-Western, Russian irredentist, traditionalist, racist and homophobic sentiments coalesced into one, directed against the "evil nazi gay jewish West". Putin started openly provoking the West with displays of military force, close flybys in territorial waters, playing Cuban missile crisis in Kaliningrad. All to rack up the atmosphere of an imminent Cold War II and maybe even WWIII where a "wronged", "humiliated" Russia would finally make the West pay. The WWII victory celebrations also took on the appearance of a war cult, with jingoistic slogans like "we can do it again", "to Berlin" and "we're coming for the German women" displayed on every 9th May parade. Eastern European countries, especially the Baltics and Poland, noticed and tried to raise alarm, but were mostly told to keep their paranoia down and ignored.

In the last decade, he used his military and propaganda machine (what we call "hybrid warfare") to create the impression of the following: (1) The West is imperialist (and is being hypocritical about it), waging pointless bloody wars in the Middle East; (2) The West is weak in those wars, causing Russia to step in like in Syria and deal with the issue "properly"; (3) Western democracies are weak in dealing with "barbaric" refugees because they're too greedy not to let them in but too soft to throw the bad apples out (this was used to boost nationalism and Euroscepticism).

By those means, Russian propaganda managed to manipulate both anti-imperialist and nationalist groups within the West as well as in Russia and Eastern Europe and pave the way for its "just war" of "reconquering" Eastern Europe. In the West, the image of Eastern Europe was molded as either "poor backwards savages we're better off without" (for nationalists), "paranoid silly yokels crying wolf about Russia who is now playing nice" (for moderates), "ingrates not worth defending so we'll pull out" (for Trump-like US conservatives) or "backwards homophobic barbarians we don't want here because they'll ruin our utopia" (for progressivists). In Russia, they were portrayed as "lost property", accused them of being "taken over by nazis" anytime they tried to acknowledge any of the repressions suffered from USSR, and "unconscious puppets of the West" and routinely threatened with "annexation in 3 days" whenever they "misbehaved" by taking a stance against Russia's politics, whether past or current. Finally, in Eastern European countries themselves, Russia tried to ruin the image of the liberal West by portraying them as "the real fascists", "liberalism gone so far it circled back to fascism" and to prop up its own image as the "savior from debauchery upholding the good ols ways".

Also worth noting that Putin was all too eager to intervene in any country that tried to reject Russian dominance or even its own pro-Russian dictatorship. He was ready to support Belarus in 2020 and intervened in Kazakhstan in 2022 just a month before the invasion of Ukraine.

So yeah, it was quite the prep work. All to ensure that when he went on his imperialistic crusade in EE, people at home and in the West and even in Eastern Europe itself would applaud him, failing that be indifferent, failing THAT remain unheard.

* by "Putin" I don't necessarily mean just him, but the lobby behind him as well.

[aqlstar]

PSA for Americans mostly-

Americans use Caucasian to mean white because of fake race-science done by a weird German dude.

In the real world, Caucasians come from the Caucasus.

That means you can in fact have Caucasian Jews- Jewish people who follow the rites of the Jewish diaspora in the Caucasus.

The aren’t ethnically Caucasian, in the same way European Jews aren’t ethnically European, but the Caucasian Jews are very real (unlike the mythical white Jews of tumblr).

You may have also heard them called ���Mountain Jews,” or even “Red Jews.” They make frequent appearances in Ashkenazi urban legend/popular culture as larger-than-life heroic figures.

[tisajest]

I'm bored so imma share my ethnicity headcanons for the batfam. If you want the tldr version just read the bolded text lol

Bruce - WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) American, Irish, and Dutch Jewish

The Wayne family has been in Gotham for centuries and has stayed mostly WASP, the few exceptions before Martha were French, German, or Dutch typically. Martha comes from Gotham's Kane family and it is an Irish Jewish family that was established over a century ago. Her mother was from a wealthy Jewish Dutch family that fled in the early stages of WWII.

Dick - mostly French Sinti (Manouche) and Mexican Calé Romani, but also has Hungarian Boyash and British Romanichal Romani ancestry, English, WASP American, Hungarian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Indigenous Mexican, West African, and North African. Looks like a lot listed out like that but it really just comes from being from a nomadic culture and from the Americas. He just considers himself Romani, Sinti/Calé if pressed. You won't get the whole "I'm 1/8 Italian" thing from him.

Dick's mother (Mary) was from France and had a lot of French/other Western European ancestry as well as her Sinti ancestry. Her family was culturally and ethnically Sinti Romani and had been in France primarily for centuries. Her mother was a dirty blonde with more Eurocentric features and her father looked more Mediterranean and had more Romani features.

Dick's father (John) was culturally Mexican Calé Romani because of his Mexican mother (Maria Perfecta). Her family has been in Mexico for a long time, having immigrated primarily in the 17th and 18th centuries. As such, she also had some Indigenous Mexican (primarily from Central Mexico, so Otomí, Purepecha, Nahua, Cora (among others but those were the first examples that came to mind)), West African, and Iberian ancestry, as well, primarily. Her family mostly stuck to Central Mexico, some distant lineages went either North or South.

John's father (William Grayson) also had Romani ancestry because his father, William Cobb, was Boyash and Romanichal. Cobb's mother was the daughter of Hungarian Boyash immigrants and his father immigrated from London. Grayson was disconnected from his Romani heritage, however, and was raised collectively by Haly's Circus as a multicultural orphan. Grayson's mother was Amelia Crowne, who came from a wealthy WASP American family. Due to the disconnect from his father's side, most of John's Romani cultural practices come from his mother.

Bonus: just for funsies I had Dick be born in Brazil, he's not Brazilian ethnically nor culturally, but he does speak Brazilian Portuguese and has Brazilian citizenship. Haly's also picked up a Brazilian performer around the time Dick was born. They were the honorary uncle/nephew duo of Dick's early childhood and he made sure Dick grew up speaking Portuguese correctly (John was born in Portugal and spoke conversational European Portuguese). Thus, Dick has Brazilian, American, Mexican, and French citizenship.

*I corrected some spelling errors in this section (Caló (language) to Calé (people), Senti (1 typo) to Sinti) and corrected some details that I missed in my late night writing this post (I added "more" before "Eurocentric features" bc I feel like I was implying that Mary's mom looked like a more typical white woman, which isn't the case. I also added "and had more Romani features" after Mary's father's Mediterranean description bc I feel that I implied he didn't look Romani at all, just Mediterranean, which also isn't the case. Yes both had more mixed features but both were still solidly Romani in appearance)

Jason - Irish, Italian, Greek, WASP American, French Canadian, and Anglo-Australian

Jason's father (Willis) was born to a single teen mother in Gotham. She was the granddaughter of Greek immigrants, descendant of Irish immigrants a little further back, and has general WASP-y American ancestry as well from having been in the Northeastern US for centuries. She likely also has Dutch, German, French, and Indigenous American ancestry as well, but those are generations removed and irrelevant. Willis's father was never in his life, but he had French Canadian grandparents on his mother's side and WASP American on his father's.

Jason's mother (Sheila) was the granddaughter of a WWII vet and an Australian war bride on her mother's side. Her grandfather was the son of Southern Italian immigrants and her grandmother was an Anglo-Australian primarily, with 1 Irish immigrant grandfather. Sheila's father was basically just WASP American with a somewhat recent German immigrant grandmother.

Despite being the whitest mfer, he was a polyglot from an early age because he was always out interacting with his community. So he is very conversational/fluent in Puerto Rican Spanish (has been mistaken as Puerto Rican as a result, too, and this was him when he was told he wasn't actually Puerto Rican lol), knows quite a bit of Yiddish, Cantonese, Tagalog, and other languages. He picks up languages quickly.

Tim - German, WASP American, White Cuban (mostly Spanish, French, and Chinese)

Tim's father (Jack) is mostly WASP American and German, as his mother's parents were German immigrants. The Drake family is a more recent addition to Gotham's elite, but the ancestors had been in the Northeast (New York and north New Jersey specifically) for generations.

Tim's mother (Janet) is the daughter of Cuban immigrants, both parents having left Cuba as children. Janet's mother (Emilia) was mostly of Spanish and French ancestry, her family were Cuban elites that were able to recover their wealth in NYC. Janet's father (Alfonso) was biracial, his father was Spanish and his mother was mostly Chinese. His family was also very wealthy, but lost most of it in the exile. They had to rebuild their business in Miami.

Tim speaks Spanish, but not nearly as fluently as Jason. Janet mostly spoke English to him. Tim grew up mostly monolingual, the languages he speaks later are learned through study primarily. His Spanish, thus, is a mix of Cuban, Mexican (Dick), Textbook, and Puerto Rican slang and profanity (Jason).

Cass - Han Chinese (mainland China (South) and Malaysia), Malay, Irish, and WASP American

Cass's mother (Lady Shiva) was born in Malaysia to a Malaysian Chinese mother and a Chinese immigrant father. They moved to Guangzhou when she was very young. Her Malaysian Chinese mother had some Malay ancestry as well, but she was primarily Chinese.

Cass's father (David Cain) is the son of a Northern Irish immigrant and WASP Americans. That's about all I got, I don't give a shit about him lol

Damian - Arab (specifically Jordanian circa like half a millennium ago; Palestinian and Yemeni), Han Chinese, Miao Chinese, plus Bruce's ethnicities above

Damian's mother (Talia) was half Arab and half Chinese from both parents. Her father (Ra's) was born in what is now Jordan to parents from the region, one of which (his mother) was Han Chinese originally from Western China. His father was ethnically Southern Levant, Palestinian/Jordanian. Talia's mother (Melisande) was the daughter of an American mother with a Palestinian father and a Yemeni mother. Melisande's father was the American son of parents from Yunnan, he was Miao.

See Bruce above.

Duke - African American, Gullah, (maybe Mandika, it depends)

I don't fully understand what's going on with his bio dad (Gnomon), so Imma just ignore him and just do his mother. If he's an immortal metahuman, he's Mandinka from Senegal. If he's a non-human immortal being, then he's that ig.

Duke's mother (Elaine) is Gullah. She was born and raised in Georgia and later moved to Gotham, but she was very connected to her community and culture. She raised Duke in the Gullah culture at home, as well. She also taught Duke the Gullah language, it's his first language. As Duke grew up, the home became more bi-cultural (Doug is a Gotham native, so not Gullah and thus had different traditions and culture to share).

Steph - Scottish, Polish, Lithuanian, and Black

Steph's father (Arthur) is originally from Chicago, his father was the son of Scottish immigrants and his mother was the daughter of Polish immigrants.

Steph's mother (Crystal) is a native Gothamite, her father was unknown to her (he was mostly WASP American, but he did have a black grandmother) and her mother was the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants.

That's about it, I didn't include Alfred bc I just see him as ethnically English, maybe some Celtic ancestry (Welsh/Cymry and/or Cornish) and from the South of England.

Anyway, those are my headcanons! Let me know what you think if you want.

[make-friends-with-the-rats]

Chag Pesach Sameach!

hi I was bored so I made the above graphic to give myself an excuse to talk about...

Jewish Newsies Characters

The Jacobs Family

I hope that I no longer have to explain that the Jacobs family is canonically Jewish. However if you want the evidence, I believe this post should cover the major points.

David and his family are Polish Jews, and it's my personal headcanon that Esther and Mayer moved their family to New York City in the early 1880s to escape persecution under the Russian Empire's May Laws of 1882.

Joseph Pulitzer

The historical Joseph Pulitzer was Hungarian, but he was also Jewish and went to great lengths to conceal this fact in order to avoid antisemitism.

Both of his parents were Jewish, but Joseph allowed a rumor to spread that his mother was Catholic. He married his Christian wife, Katherine "Kate" Davis, in an Episcopal ceremony at an Episcopal church and didn't tell Kate or her family of his Jewish heritage until after they'd married. [x]

All that aside, Joseph Pulitzer, if not a practicing Jew, was very much Jewish in his character and beliefs. I'm currently working on a research post that will go more in depth into this topic.

The Newsies

According to the figures of the president of the Newsboys' Union, Dave Simons, at the time of the 1899 strike a majority of two-fifths or 40% of the newsies were Jewish. [x]

Crutchy Morris: while early scripts described Crutchy as Irish, the real Crutch Morris could have been Irish or Jewish. It was common at the turn of the century for immigrants coming to the United States to take on anglicized spellings or variants of personal names. "Morris" was often substituted for the Hebrew Moshe (מֹשֶׁה) or "Moses." [x] Marty Belafsky, who originated the role of Crutchy, is also Jewish.

Mush Meyers: the surname "Meyers" was adopted by German Jews in the 18th century when they assimilated to German culture because it was close to the Hebrew first name Me'ir (מֵאִיר). [x] Aaron Lohr also has Jewish heritage. I like to think that Mush's parents were both an interracial and an interfaith couple. Mush loves celebrating both Jewish and Christian holidays with his friends and doesn't really consider himself as being of one religion or the other. He believes in kindness and wishes that everyone would get along.

Snipeshooter alright this one is mostly just my own headcanon, but there is actual evidense behind it (if you squint). In Hard Promises, Boots has a selling partner named Mud and when they get food from the nuns Mud asks Boots who Jesus is. Now, I can't prove that Snipeshooter replaced Mud, but I can point out that Boots and Snipeshooter are best friends and that they buy their papers together one after the other.

Hard Promises script.

[ceasarslegion]

caesar. ceasar who was mysweetstruggles. why. hitler kin? what. what. hello???

Mysweetstruggles was a blog that existed for a wild, wild few months way back in the day. I was still in high school when the whole thing happened.

When the height of tumblr kin drama was tearing this site's reading comprehension asunder, folks claimed that "kinning" something meant that you literally, actually, legitimately were whatever character or object you claimed to kin. If you kinned komaeda, it's because you believed you literally were komaeda. This was complete with claims about having "kin memories," which were repressed memories of your past lives of whatever you kinned. The kin drama often came in the form of other kinnies demanding you face "accountability" for the actions of the mostly fictional characters folks would kin, and claims of others "faking it" by being "doubles" of yours. As if uh... as if komaeda is a real person and not a guy a writer came up with. On the other end of the spectrum, people were writing callout posts for folks who tagged their art as "kin" for either kin drama reasons or because they were so anti-kinning that they looped back around to being extremists in their own right.

It was a weird place to be. Nowadays when people claim to "kin" something it's mostly because they really identify with that thing or historical person or character, not because they claim they literally ARE that thing. Let's all breathe easy and count our blessings that that fresh piece of hell is over.

Anyway, mysweetstruggles came onto the scene in the height of the old kin drama. She claimed that she was kin with uh... Adolf Hitler. She claimed that she was Hitler in a past life and that she she reborn as a neurodivergent Jewish girl so she could "atone for [her] past sins." For obvious reasons, this stirred a lot of shit at the time, because it was also the height of when tumblr thought that reading American Psycho meant that you personally wanted to murder all sex workers with axes irl. Not that I'm equating these two, I'm pointing out that the morality crusaders were even worse then than they are now, so a blog like this got a LOT more attention than it probably should have.

Anyway, it went on for a while where she would post about how sorry she was for the holocaust in the unique crytyping style of when you wanted to communicate that you were upset or ashamed of something on the 2010s internet. She got tons of asks asking what the hell was wrong with her and she'd post every single one with replies about how she "couldn't control her kin" and how "she had memories of her past that had to be hitler" and that she realized she was kin with Hitler during history class when she recognized her kin memories as Hitler's.

In the middle of all this, she would also post aesthetic edits of weimer republic cinema and things that looked both German and from the 1940s at the same time, suspiciously. It was never outright swastikas but it was about 2 steps removed from a roman eagle and an iron cross.

And then when all the hate she inevitably got from this came to a head, she made an absolutely legendary post where she claimed to be her older sister, claiming that all the tumblr hate had led to the cops being called on their house, that "Addy" was arrested for having a mental breakdown, dragged to an "insane asylum," and that she was never going to be let out again. It had a good dollop of "you guys did this by hating on a teenage girl who claimed she was reincarnated Hitler."

The blog stayed up for a good few months after that post and then was deactivated for good. But you can still find screenshots of her posts if you type her URL into Google images

EDIT: I FORGOT ABOUT HER CLAIM THAT HITLER WAS GAY AND THAT HOMOPHOBIA WAS WHY HE WAS FORCED TO DATE EVA BRAUN INSTEAD OF HERMAN GÖRING...

[girlactionfigure]

THURSDAY HERO: Tadeusz Pankiewicz

Tadeusz Pankiewicz was a Polish pharmacist who helped the starving, suffering Jewish residents of the Krakow ghetto by providing them with medicine, food, and other lifesaving supplies.

Born in Sambor, Poland in 1908, Tadeusz studied at the prestigious Jagiellonian University in Krakow. In 1933 he took over the family business: a small pharmacy called Under the Eagle. Germany invaded Poland in 1939, but Tadeusz’s quiet life and successful small business were mostly unaffected, until 1941, when the Nazis forced the city’s 15,000 Jews into a ghetto.

Tadeusz’s pharmacy happened to be within the ghetto’s borders. The Nazis shut down other businesses and essential services in the ghetto to make it impossible for Jews to get food and other necessities, but Tadeusz refused to close his store. He bribed the Gestapo, using his own savings, to keep Under the Eagle open. Tadeusz was inspired by his Catholic faith to stay and help people however he could.

Conditions in the ghetto were horrific. There was never enough food, and every day residents died of starvation or illness; others were shot in the street by Nazi soldiers. Medicine of any kind was almost impossible to obtain, except from Tadeusz, who provided health care and pharmaceuticals for free to residents of the ghetto. He also provided them with lifesaving products such as hair dye to disguise their identity and tranquilizers to keep children quiet during Gestapo raids.

Tadeusz’s pharmacy became the go-to place for Jews to meet, plan underground activities and acts of defiance, and get lifesaving care and equipment. Tadeusz and his pharmacy employees Irena Drozdzikowska, Helena Krywaniuk, and Aurelia Danek put their lives at significant risk to help the Jews of the Krakow ghetto. Besides medicine, supplies and a safe place to meet, the brave pharmacist and his staff shared their meager wartime food rations, and hid Jews on the property during deportations. They were able to smuggle some Jews out of the ghetto and take them to hiding places where they would be safe.

Tadeusz actually befriended German soldiers to get information from them! He got them drunk and cleverly manipulated them into telling him about planned actions against Jews so he could warn them. Another service Tadeusz to the Jews trapped in the ghetto was acting as intermediary between them and the Poles with whom they left their valuables.

Among the people who met in secret in the pharmacy were prominent figures such as writer Mordechai Gebirtig and artist Abraham Neumann, who were tragically shot by the Germans in the ghetto in the infamous Bloody Thursday of June 4, 1942. Julian Aleksandrowicz survived the war to become a doctor and medical professor who specialized in the treatment of leukemia. Dr Abraham Mirowski, another Jew saved by Tadeuszm later said that the kind pharmacist was “living among us, was continuously exposed to dangers, but it did not make him scared. He was full of sympathy for our tragedy and wanted to help us with all his heart. Each death of a man or a woman was a traumatic experience for him.”

After the war, Tadeusz stayed in Krakow and, in 1947, he published his memoirs of life under German occupation. He continued working as a pharmacist. In 1957, some of the Jews he’d saved brought him for a visit to Israel as their guest. Tadeusz was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem in 1983.

Tadeusz Pankiewicz died in Krakow in 1993. His pharmacy is now a museum about the history of the Jews of Krakow, with special focus on the ghetto years. Tadeusz and his brave staff are also a featured museum exhibit.

For helping Jews in the Krakow ghetto, we honor Tadeusz Pankiewicz as this week’s Thursday Hero.

[kaiserin-erzsebet]

I'm curious why you described Kafka as Austrian and I'd love to hear more about whether that was an identifier he used! I know he was born in the Austro-Hungarian empire and wrote in German, but I'd always understood that he identified as Czech and Jewish and that the Austrian part was incidental.

There's a bit of a linguistic thing going on here that I will do my best to explain:

"Austrian" in our current day means from the Republic of Austria which is more or less the former German-speaking Crownlands that formed a German republic after World War 1.

But "Austrian" as it was used in the 19th and 20th century meant the whole of the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy. To be Austrian was to belong through citizenship and loyalty to the supranational state. It was not mutually exclusive with being German or Czech or Jewish. As someone born in Bohemia, Kafka was by citizenship Austrian. Czech and German are national or ethnic categories, I think I am imposing less on him by calling him by his supranational citizenship (at least until 1918).

It also connects him to the circles of Austrian (again, in the sense of the state) artists and writers who would have influenced him and who he would have influenced. For example, in the Wien 1900 exhibit in the Leopold Museum in Vienna he's included in part of the Austrian avant-garde alongside many other German, Jewish, Czech, Hungarian, etc. intellectuals.

As for the way that a multilingual person from Prague would have identified in the late 19th and early 20th century, it is really complicated. There was a lot of pressure to "choose a side" because of things like labeling your nationality on the census, when many people didn't necessarily fit in only one. "Most used language" is also a complicated question for bilingual people living in a multinational society. In Prague, for example, many Jewish people answered "German" on the census for a variety of reasons, but mostly to get more money allocated to "German" schools and such.

I strongly recommend Gary B. Cohens' The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914 (2006) for a discussion on how complicated these identities can get.

Marsha L. Rozenblit's Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I (2001) is also very good for the discussion of how "Jewish" and "Austrian" were not always separate identities.

[venomvalley]

hey bby so i’m not american and literally know nothing abt appalachia and ur posts abt it are sooo interesting like wow that seems like a whole other culture that i’d never heard of?? anyway where’s the best place to learn about it?? or you could js ramble or smth idk 😭😭

OH BESTIE I AM SO GLAD U ASKED!!! i love talking about my home :3

this is the end-all-be-all of resources for all (most) things central appalachia. everything u might need is either here or given to u in a very handy link!!!

sorry for an errors but this became a big huge gigantic infodump that is under the cut im warning u now

PART 2 HERE

APPALACHIA 101: A CLASS BY RO

ok to start with, let’s identify where appalachia is in the US. heres an official map by the appalachian regional commission (a government created partnership to help with economic development)

these subregions help distinguish which areas face certain issues in terms of industry and resources (for example, central appalachia is the poorest mainly because of companies monopolizing the coal mining industry and the lack of urban growth)

HISTORY:

interesting geology about how the appalachian mountains formed and also some very cool trivia facts.

the term appalachia comes from the appalachee tribe who lived in the florida panhandle. french huguenots confused the native territory and map makers marked a bit further north than florida, and the term was thus linked to the mountainous region.

(btw the pronunciation of the term is very controversial because depending on where you live it’s pronounced differently, but there’s a regional saying where i come from: “call it apple-atcha or i’ll throw an apple atcha.” it’s a simple respect around here to say it the correct way.)

now there’s been a huge discrepancy as to who actually settled in these mountains. the original inhabitants were, of course, native americans: specifically the cherokee, iroquois, and algonquin tribes. then came the europeans: mainly english, irish, scottish, and german settlers. these settlers brought along african slaves and sold them to landowners to sustain the farms. some other notable groups are the romani, jewish, and muslim people.

BIG NOTE: the banjo that’s become such a staple of appalachian culture, used in bluegrass, was an african instrument brought to the region by the slaves. appalachia owes a lot of its influence to black culture and it all started with the banjo. people both from and not from the area seem to forget that.

now lets talk about melungeons. melungeons are an ethnic group solely belonging to appalachia, and nobody can decide on where exactly this ethnic group originates from. most can agree on english and african roots, while others claim that native american ancestry is there too. the general consensus is that, if you’re appalachian, have non-white ancestry, and your family can be traced back to melungeon settlements, then you descend from melungeon people (fun fact, my family is on my pappaw’s side).

CULTURE:

now that the simplified history is out of the way, let’s get into culture. appalachian culture has been a thing mainly defined by non-appalachians, chewed up and spit out for the rest of the country to digest, which is why i love talking about it myself and hearing other appalachians define what it means to them.

central appalachia is the region im from, so i’ll mostly be speaking about the culture from my point of view as every region has their own quirks!!!

for some overarching resources, the r/Appalachia subreddit is my go-to. real appalachians talking about all manner of things, and the occasional outsider asking silly questions for the 100th time.

i also recommend #appalachia on here. it can be hit or miss (not a fan of some of the weird ~aesthetic~ posts) but there are some gems in there. especially for pictures regarding holler/mountain life.

DISCLAIMER: i would just like to say that me discussing the positives of the culture does not mean i’m undermining in any way the impact that bigotry has on our culture, same as the rest of the US. appalachia still holds beliefs of racism, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny. the issue lies in how our stereotypes make this bigotry seem homogenous and exponential to the area, completely disregarding the different races, backgrounds, religions, sexualities, and genders of the people who live here. we’re not all straight, cis, white folks.

here is my favorite tumblr run by a queer appalachian thats a fantastic resource for knowing more about the culture.

and this is a website solely dedicated to sharing the stories of black appalachians and their contributions to the area.

here’s another article showcasing black folks’ experience in appalachia’s coal country.

my favorite website to look through. poignant, crowdsourced photos of every day people that categorize appalachia by state so you know where in the region these photos came from.

STEREOTYPES AND THEIR ORIGINS:

to piggyback off my disclaimer, appalachia faces a lot of stereotypes and hardship just for being from here. to outsiders, we’re all toothless, uneducated hillbillies who dont wear shoes and hate everybody who aint like us. this depiction immediately comes to mind

at first, the term “hillbilly” was embraced by appalachian people. we used it in our music and our media, even though mountain people have always been looked down upon by people from the cities.

it wasn’t until the 1970s when the stereotypes really dug their claws in. the movie “deliverance” catapulted this negative depiction of appalachia to the mainstream, and it’s something we still haven’t been able to shake off.

RECLAMATION:

in recent years, a lot of reclamation has been done for hillbilly culture. my generation is embracing our accent, learning traditions, and falling in love with our hollers for the first time in our lives.

i’ve experienced the stereotyping firsthand, and for a long long while i resented where i grew up. i hated my accent, the food i ate, the mountains that i lived in. i don’t know what changed my viewpoint, but embracing my culture is the best thing i’ve ever done.

and so many people around here have dozens of stories just like mine. our accent and culture will forever be interwoven with stupidity and violence and addiction and poverty. but that aint who we are.

“MOUNTAIN TALK”:

ah yes, our wonderful dialect. contrary to popular belief, the american south and appalachia have different dialects and accents (the same way two southern states can sound completely different). if you stay in one of these places for long enough, you can definitely tell the difference.

here’s my favorite video ever that perfectly encapsulates mountain talk. this is what my grandparents sound like and to an extent what i sound like, and though my generation has lost a few of the terms and accent through the rise of social media, people very much still talk like this up in the holler.

here’s an amazing article going over the dialect and providing explanation for the terms/sayings we use.

FOOD:

food is extremely important to the appalachian culture, and our food is a direct product of our self-sufficiency as well as the melting pot of cultures that lived here. food is a way we show and share love for family and friends and neighbors alike.

everybody has their own garden around here, and the veggies are shared amongst the community. it’s not uncommon for somebody to stop by and bring a few cucumbers or maters or taters from their garden cause they grew extra this year.

our diet mostly consists of fruits (watermelon and cantaloupe are the staple of just about every appalachian household) and veggies (tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, any kinda bean you can think of, zucchini, onions) and CORNBREAD.

the staple appalachian food is soup beans and cornbread with fried potatoes and raw veggies straight from the garden. a close second is white half runner green beans with new potatoes, cornbread, and fried chicken.

AND DONT FORGET THE CATHEAD BISCUITS!!!! we pride ourselves on our biscuits.

canning and preserving veggies is also very common around here.

here’s a youtube playlist all about showcasing appalachian food and recipes.

MUSIC:

bluegrass!!!!! MY BELOVED!!!! whenever people think of appalachia, there are two musical staples that come to mind: bluegrass and the banjo.

i dont have much to say about this section because my historical knowledge is admittedly limited compared to the other topics, so i’ll just leave some of my favorite bluegrass/folk songs:

rocky top - osborne brothers // you can never go home again - gangstagrass // tyler childers - nose on the grindstone // moonshiners - goodnight, texas // codeine - trampled by turtles // shake sugaree - elizabeth cotten // skin and bones - jean ritchie // dust in a baggie - billy strings

the appalachian murder ballad is also a very good music genre, if not misogynistic at times.

a genre that didn’t begin in appalachia but became extremely popular is shape note singin. it’s for everyday people who cant read sheet music, so the notes are translated into shapes and sung in a choir. i heard this all the time growing up, both in church and at funerals.

SUPERSTITIONS/LEGENDS:

appalachia is most known for its mountains and the hundreds trails that dissect them. so of course, we’ve made up some interesting legends surrounding these woods, and we (well, most of us) have a very deep respect for them.

(as well as just some very weird superstitions, most of which we don’t follow and a few we just entertain to carry on the tradition.)

there are some that i remember from my childhood, like not staying in the hills past dark; if someone calls your name from the trees, don’t respond; don’t leave your windows open at night; etc etc. a lot of these superstitions are passed down through oral tradition—things to tell your kids so they dont get too curious and wind up bear food, cause going up in the woods is a very common childhood experience around here.

behind my mammaw’s house, there was a grassy bank then a creek then the mountains right on the other side, maybe 200 feet away from the house. me and my brother would go and explore from dusk til dawn, rain or shine, winter or summer. all she told us was to not go past the bridge that led to a nearby holler and to come home when the sun starts to set.

ive seen a lot of outsiders say that these mountains arent scary but SPEAK FOR YOURSELF!!! even if you dont believe in the spiritual aspect, there are.. wild animals up here????? terrain that could absolutely hurt you if you don’t know what you’re doin????

now haints (ghosts) are a different story. a lot of people believe in haints around here, either because of their own personal experience or because of stories told to them by their peers. bottom line: dont mess with em, dont piss em off, pay your respects like you always do to the dead.

speaking of the dead, we take good care of our graves around here. family cemeteries are a huge thing up in the hollers, so groups of families go every year to maintain the graves and replace flowers. and don’t go steppin on graves, especially those of strangers. i learned that lesson when i was little (it’s seen as very disrespectful).

also im just gonna list off a few cryptids/legends we got around here:

the not-deer

mothman

flatwoods monster

the bell witch

MOONSHINE:

GOOD CORN LIQUOR!!! very stereotypical of me but i love me some apple pie moonshine or moonshine soaked cherries. it’s just really fucking good. also my great pappaw used to have a moonshine still in the shower of this unused apartment he bought cause it used to be illegal to make and sell. now, it’s still illegal to make and sell unless you’re a bonafide distillery for a majority of states.

also moonshiners are just iconic as a whole.

my favorite fact is that moonshiners running from cops is the reason nascar started.

COAL MINING:

oh lord here we go. arguably the root of modern central appalachia’s issues while also being what we’re KNOWN for, we have: the coal industry. i’m gonna try to be as succinct as possible because this is a very sore topic for me and my family and my friends and their families etc etc.

this topic has a lot of layers to it by itself, so i’m gonna leave a lot of info to articles or else this will be the longest tumblr post of all time.

to sum it up, coal mining was started by big name rich northerners who needed a reliable power source for the country. appalachian miners were subject to horrible working conditions, health issues that last a lifetime (hello black lung), and addictions from treating their injuries and the stress from working in the mines.

when i was younger i would look up to see the tops of the mountains cut off and skinned, this ugly brown color instead of lush, vibrant green, and i just wanted to cry. this is mountaintop removal.

mining companies have also been dumping their waste into our water sources for over a decade, effectively poisoning them.

frequent flooding in coal country is a direct result of mountaintop removal.

fuck the coal industry.

places in central appalachia where MTR was used have much higher mortality rates and poverty rates than the rest of appalachia.

THE END THANK U FOR READING

[reallucyvanpelt]

my schroeder/lucy headcanons

Lucy is french on her mothers side - she came to the states after ww2. she’s jewish on her mothers side and Christian on her fathers, though they mostly celebrate Christian holidays. Sometimes they do visit her aunt in the east (New York) to have Passover seders. Could def see her later finding out more about the religion and her families history <:

Schroeders family is german but he rarely speaks german at home. he only knows about german composers, and has a certain disdain for Wagner - mostly because of Lucy <3

as they grow up (18/19) and attend college, they don’t stay in touch, except when they return home for holidays. they start going out after college, when they both move to the city (New York)

Schroeder becomes a big big part of the local jazz scene and Lucy starts working either as a journalist for some small paper in the area or as an assistant in a psychiatrists office. They move together

I agree with the general #schrucy shippers who say that she fell first and he fell harder - I even would go so far that he started pining after her on college holidays, letting himself be invited to dinners by her mother, visiting Linus to see Lucy..

That’s all I got for now <:

[claraameliapond]

"Before we can talk about the 7th octoer, we need to talk about the 6th October, in which a charity called Defense of Children International Palestine announced that it had been the deadliest year so far for children in the West Bank, over 42 I believe at that point had been killed.

That same day, settlers rioted in the town of Huwara, shooting a 19 year old, killing him, in the chest. While his funeral was going on, an Israeli minister went to Huwara , and said we needed to close down the Palestinian shops in the town, and build a highway arolund it for settlers.

That same day, the Washington post reported that Israel was cutting off the supply of donkeys, to Gaza, and donkeys were important because fuel was in insufficient supply and donkeys had become one of the main methods of moving supplies around.

So, October 6th was an atrocity too. "

Josh Paul, former US Official

Israel is not and has never been a peaceful immigrant population. They have been a merciless, brutalist occupying force who invaded someone else's home , stole it and violently occupy it to this day. ...and tried to gaslight them and the world into believing that they were there first. They weren't.

The jewish population originally in Palestine that lived peacefully alongside muslim Palestinians and christian Palestinians historically decended into the modern Palestinians, who over generations may have changed their religion, but share their genetic and historic identity. Many jewish Palestinians stayed in Palestine, they didn't all leave. Those that call themselves israeli Zionists and claim that that land was theirs originally are literally from every other place in the world, mostly germanic europe, and have no historic, genetic connection to the land or its originary population. Judaism is a religion, not an ethnicity

#Decolonise Palestine

[etz-ashashiyot]

Okay so here's a weird (highly specific) gerische feel:

As far as I can prove (which is my mother's side of the family, but mostly her mother, because my biological grandfather was totally estranged by the time my mom married my father and I've never met him) I have no Jewish ancestry

However

I do have German ancestry and learned a bit of German in my younger years (but otherwise have no cultural connections to it)

My beit din was actually mixed minhag so I have the option of choosing Ashkenazi or Sephardi

I adore Sephardic food and music and liturgy, and if I were choosing a minhag in a vacuum I would honestly choose it, however,

When I learn Yiddish music and sing in Yiddish, it feels like home, like I was made to make these sounds and sing these melodies, and,

My body has a hard time processing food in general, but you know what it doesn't typically have issues with and which I actively enjoy eating? Gefilte fish, pickled herring, beets, shredded horseradish, garlic, pickles.... etc.

.......I may or may not have seasoned my bowl of matzah ball soup this past year at seder with shredded horseradish

Conclusion: I think my germanic heritage has ensured I remain painfully Ashkenazi and I should probably just embrace it lol ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(I still typically just follow the minhag hamakom, though, at least with davening)

[jewishsimming]

So I have been doing some thinking and research about my shtetl idea.

For those of you who don't know, a shtetl is a Yiddish word (Jewish-Germanic language) for a small town. Specifically the term refers to small towns in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe, usually (but not always) in the Pale of Settlement - countries like Poland, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine etc - but I believe also included some parts of the Austrian Empire and Hungary?). These towns were not entirely Jewish but a lot of them were majority Jewish. So I'm thinking agricultural, artisan, small town mentality where everyone knows everyone else's business and there's class tension.

(If you want a pop culture frame of reference, Fiddler on the Roof's Anatevka is a fictional shtetl).

I'm just trying to think of where to put it. I want to say Henford-on-Bagley but I'm not sure.

It'd have to be a modified Decades Challenge. With respect to the original rules, they are very American-centric and Christian-centric and focus more on a middle or upper class situation, especially with regards to women not being able to work (lower and middle-class women do not have the option not to work, mostly).

IDK. I'm having a good think about it. I feel like modified rules could also lend itself to a generic Small Town Challenge without it having to be Jewish (but making it Jewish makes it more fun).