#museum of jewish heritage

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Dion J. Pierre

The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City is celebrating the 130th birthday of the Polish-Jewish artist Arthur Szyk with a special lecture series hosted by the world’s leading expert on his work.

Titled, “Commemorating Arthur Szyk’s 130th Birthday,” the lecture series will include four 90-minutes sessions led by award winning author Irvin Ungar, a former rabbi who has studied Szyk for over 30 years, publishing three books about him and hosting exhibitions of his art at museums throughout the world. Among art historians, Ungar’s scholarship and curation is credited with single-handedly fostering a “Szyk renaissance.”

Born in 1894 in the city of Łódź during the Russian Partition of Poland, Szyk, though his life ended prematurely in 1951, lived through a violent and epochal moment in history — an age of revolution, world war, and genocide. His works, from sketches of the Boxer Rebellion he drew at the age of six to his depiction of Hitler as Pharaoh — and later, Hitler as Anti-Christ — were expressive commentaries on troubled times.

After Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Szyk fled to England and then America, where he earned a reputation as a “soldier in art” for portraying the Nazis and Axis leaders as primal mad men and using irradiating imagery to alert the world to the plight of the Jewish people under Nazi occupation, an issue that affected him personally. In 1940, his mother, Eugenia, was murdered in the Chełmno extermination camp, just 30 miles from the city in which he grew up. Many more of his relatives — and his wife’s — were murdered during the Holocaust.

Arthur Szyk, Anti-Christ, 1942

Szyk’s contemporaries widely acclaimed his work, both for its creativity and social consciousness. In 1949, he published “Do Not Forgive Them, O Lord, For They Do Know What They Do!,” an anti-racist drawing that condemned the bigotry which Black soldiers who fought fascism abroad faced in the segregated American south. In the piece, a soldier is on his knees and bound by rope while two hooded Klansmen holding shotguns watch him from a distance. His humanism once prompted allegations that he was a member of the Communist Party, charges which were entirely unfounded.

Today, Szyk is best known in the Jewish world for what is regarded as his magnum opus, The Haggadah, an “illuminated manuscript” which tells the story of Passover Seder in a series of watercolor illustrations. It was thoroughly anti-Nazi, linking the oppression of Jews in Nazi Germany with the enslavement of Jews in Egypt and, ultimately, their Exodus.

There is much more to learn about Szyk, Irvin Ungar told The Algemeiner on Thursday during a phone interview, including his tireless advocacy on behalf of the Zionist movement and the establishment of the State of Israel, as well as his “prolific” production of illustrations for modern editions of classic books such as Canterbury Tales and��Anderson’s Fairy Tales.

“My job has been how to bring all these various aspects and dimensions of Arthur Szyk together and to present an unbelievably talented and creative artists who excelled in book illustration, religious art, and political art,” Ungar said. “He was excellent in all three. It’s very rare to find any artist who can excel in all three areas with the great degree of skill and craftsmanship which he did.”

Szyk, an “artist of and for the Jewish people and for the world,” transcended his time, Ungar added, and continues to speak to ours. Rising antisemitism, illiberalism on the far-right and far-left, and great power conflict were the major themes of his art and make him an invaluable resource for comprehending a world in peril.

“He has something to say to us today,” Ungar emphasized. “He had something to say about United Nations in 1947 and 1948. It applies today. He had something to say about antisemitism being the great softener of his democracy at that time, and that would also apply to our day. You can find numerous of his artwork and think ‘That was created for today,’ and that in my mind is why his artwork is eternal.”

Commemorating Arthur Szyk’s 130th Birthday, begins on Monday, February 26, at 7 PM. Ungar will give two more lectures in March before concluding the series on April 8 with an exploration of The Haggadah.

[totallyhussein-blog]

“Iraq, you are in our hearts”

The Awafi Kitchen is where Arab and Jewish cuisine are one. They are part of the Iraqi Jewish community and are based in Boston, USA. All of their family were displaced from Iraq between 1950 and 1970. The following statement and photograph were posted on the Facebook page of the Awafi Kitchen, and was titled ‘Our Return to Iraq’.

“Last month, after five decades away, members of our family finally walked the streets in Baghdad, the city they once called home. Out of hundreds  of us in diaspora across the world, we were the first in our family to set foot in Baghdad since our waves of displacement between the 50s and 70s.

The trip was every feeling all at once. Pure joy, gratitude, and reconnection, inextricable from the grief and pain of facing our decades of separation, and seeing much of our family’s hometown deeply changed. 

Our whole lives we’ve dreamed of witnessing the beautiful Baghdad we have been painted in memories. We found beauty, but also bore witness to the impact of decades of war, the US occupation, and ongoing resource extraction, and how this has limited the place’s ability to thrive.

That being said, the people we met were incredible. We spent two weeks surrounded by an abundance of love and warmth everywhere we went. There's beautiful new realities rebuilding. Iraqis returning, Iraqis who have stayed through it all. 

Tender moments of mutual curiosity and excitement: younger Iraqis eager to learn about the old Baghdad of our family’s youth, the lost Jewish history of the city, and in turn our family eager to learn what it’s like to live as an Iraqi in the contemporary world. And ultimately, as friends reminded us, we accomplished our goal: it was just about touching foot to earth, and that we did.

For any Iraqis considering returning like we did, know that you can count on us for advice or perspective. Don’t hesitate to reach out. And for Iraqis with a reluctance to return, for those who still cannot, we empathize with you. Iraq, you are in our hearts.”

[toonrandy]

For National Jewish Heritage Month, here’s Brad Meltzer from Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum!

[ilookattextile]

I got a job at a Ukrainian museum.

On the first day someone asks me if I have any Ukrainian heritage. I say I had ancestors from Odesa, but they were Jewish, so they weren’t considered Ukrainian, and they wouldn’t have considered themselves Ukrainian. My job is every day I go through boxes of Ukrainian textiles and I write a physical description, take measurements, take photographs, and upload everything into the database. I look up “Jewish” in the database and there is no result. 

Some objects have no context at all, some come with handwritten notes or related documents. I look at thick hand-spun, hand-woven linen heavy with embroidery. Embroidery they say can take a year or more. I think of someone dressed for a wedding in their best clothes they made with their own hands. Some shirts were donated with photographs of the original owners dressed in them, for a dance at the Ukrainian Labour Temple, in 1935. I handle the pieces carefully, looking at how they fit the men in the photos, and how they look almost a hundred years later packed in acid-free tissue. One of the men died a few years later, in the war. He was younger than I am now. The military archive has more photographs of him with his mother, his father, his fiancé. I take care in writing the catalogue entry, breathing in the history, getting tearful. 

I imagine people dressed in their best shirts at Easter, going around town in their best shirts burning the houses of Jews, in their best shirts, killing Jews. A shirt with dense embroidery all over the sleeves and chest has a note that says it is from Husiatyn. I look it up and find that it was largely a Jewish town, and Ukrainians lived in the outskirts. There is a fortress synagogue from the Renaissance period, now abandoned. 

When my partner Aaron visits I take him to an event at the museum where a man shows his collection of over fifty musical instruments from Ukraine, and he plays each one. Children are seated on the floor at the front. We’re standing in a corner, the room full of Ukrainians, very aware that we look like Jews, but not sure if anyone recognizes what that looks like anymore. Aaron gets emotional over a song played on the bandura. 

A note with a dress says it came from the Buchach region. I find a story of Jewish life in Buchach in the early twentieth century, preparing to flee as the Nazis take over. I cry over this.

I’m cataloguing a set of commemorative ribbons that were placed on the grave of a Ukrainian Nationalist leader, Yevhen Konovalets, after he was assassinated. The ribbons were collected and stored by another Nationalist, Andriy Melnyk, who took over leadership after Konovalets’ death. The ribbons are painted or embroidered with messages honouring the dead politician. I start to recognize the word for “leader”, the Cyrillic letters which make up the name of the colonel, the letters “OYH” which stand for Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN in English). The OUN played a big part in the Lviv pogroms in 1941, I learn. The Wikipedia article has a black and white image of a woman in her underwear, running in terror from a man and a young boy carrying a stick of wood. The woman’s face is dark, her nose may be bleeding. Her underwear is torn, her breast exposed. I’m measuring, photographing, recording the stains and loose threads in the banners that honour men who would have done this to me. 

Every day I can’t stop looking at my phone, looking up the news from Gaza, tapping through Instagram stories that show what the news won’t. Half my family won’t talk to the other half, after I share an article by a scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies, who says Israel is committing a genocide. My dad makes a comment that compares Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. This gets him in trouble. My aunt says I must have learned this antisemitism at university, but there is no excuse for my dad. 

This morning I see images from Israeli attacks in the West Bank, where they are not at war. There are naked bodies on the dusty ground. I’m not sure if they are alive. This is what I think of when I see the image from the Lviv pogrom. If what it means for Jews to be safe from oppression is to become the oppressor, I don’t want safety. I don’t want to speak about Jews as if we are one People, because I have so little in common with those in green uniforms and tanks. I am called a self-hating Jew but I think I am a self-reflecting Jew.

I don’t know how to articulate how it feels to be handling objects which remind me of Jewish traumas I inherited only from history classes and books. Textiles hold evidence of the bodies that made them and used them. I measure the waist of a skirt and notice that it is the same as my waist size. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Jewish homes during pogroms. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Palestinian homes during the ongoing Nakba. Clothes hold the shape of the body that once dressed in them. Sometimes there are tears, mends, stains. I am rummaging through personal belongings in my nitrile gloves. 

I am hands-on learning about the violence caused by Ukrainian Nationalism while more than nine thousand Palestinians have been killed by the State of Israel in three weeks, not to mention all those who have been killed in the last seventy-five years of occupation, in the name of the Jewish Nation, the Jewish People — me? If we (and I am hesitant to say “we”) learned anything from the centuries of being killed, it was how to kill. This should not have been the lesson learned. Zionism wants us to feel constantly like the victims, like we need to defend ourself, like violence is necessary, inevitable. I need community that believes in freedom for all, not just our own People. I need the half of my family who believes in this necessary “self-defence” to remember our history, and not just the one that ends happily ever after with the creation of the State of Israel. Genocide should not be this controversial. We should not be okay with this. 

Tomorrow I will go to work and keep cataloguing banners that honour the leader of an organization which led pogroms. I will keep checking the news, crying into my phone, coordinating with organizers about our next actions, grappling with how we can be a tiny part in ending this genocide that the world won’t acknowledge, out of guilt over the ones it ignored long ago. 

[mariacallous]

For the first time since World War II, one of Prague’s most historic synagogues has held a Jewish worship service.

Kol Nidre, the introductory service of Yom Kippur, took place in the Klausen Synagogue on Friday night, ending a hiatus that lasted more than 80 years and encompassed both the murder and suppression of Czech Jewry.

Originally erected in 1573 and rebuilt after a fire in 1694, the Klausen Synagogue is the largest synagogue in Prague’s Jewish Quarter and once served as a central hub of Jewish life. It’s known as the home of several prominent rabbis and thinkers, from Judah Loew — a 16th-century Talmudic scholar also known as the Maharal of Prague — to Baruch Jeitteles, a scholar associated with the Jewish Enlightenment movement of the 18th and 19th centuries.

But for more than 80 years after the Holocaust decimated Czech Jews, the Klausen Synagogue held no services.

That was until Friday evening, when about 200 people poured in for a service led by Rabbi David Maxa, who represents Czechia’s community of Progressive or Reform Jews. That community was joined by guests and Jewish tourists from around the world for Yom Kippur, according to Maxa. He saw the moment as a sign of Jewish life resurging in Prague.

“It’s quite remarkable that there is a Yom Kippur service in five historic synagogues in Prague,” Maxa told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Under German occupation in World War II, the Klausen Synagogue was used as a storage facility. Although the Nazis and their collaborators killed about 263,000 Jews who lived in the former Czechoslovak Republic, they took an interest in collecting Jewish art and artifacts that they deemed valuable enough to preserve. The Jewish Museum in Prague was allowed to continue storing those objects, and the synagogue became part of the museum’s depository.

After the war, there were not enough survivors to refill services in the synagogues of Prague. The country became a Soviet satellite in 1948, starting a long era in which Jews were often persecuted and surveilled for following any religious practices. The last Soviet census of 1989 registered only 2,700 Jews living in Czech lands.

“During Communist times, it was very difficult to relate to Jewish identity,” said Maxa. “People who visited any kind of synagogue were followed by the secret police, and only after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 did it become possible for people to visit synagogues without the feeling of being followed and put on a list.”

After the end of communism, some synagogues returned to use by the few Jews who still identified as such. Two of the six synagogues that still stand in the Jewish Quarter now are in regular use as houses of worship.

But the Klausen Synagogue, which was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1982, remained part of the Jewish Museum, hosting exhibitions about Jewish festivals, early Hebrew manuscripts and Jewish customs and traditions.

Museum director Pavla Niklová said returning the synagogue to use for Yom Kippur happened almost by accident. Maxa was asking if she knew about a space large enough to host his growing congregation, Ec Chajim, for the holiest day in the Jewish calendar — its own space, which opened four years ago about a 20-minute walk away, could not accommodate the crowds expected for Yom Kippur.

Since the museum had just taken down its exhibition in the Klausen Synagogue after 28 years, she had an answer. The clean, empty space was ready to be refilled with Jewish life.

Visiting the synagogue just before Yom Kippur, Niklová said she was awed to see the building returned to its original purpose. She hopes that it will continue to be used for large services.

“I felt like the synagogue started breathing again,” she told JTA. “I believe it was a good move to take down the old exhibit, and now we can start anew.”

For many in Prague’s Jewish community, which is largely secular, Yom Kippur is the single most important service of the year. Even Jewish families that suppressed religious practices under Communism often passed on the memory of Yom Kippur, said Maxa.

Maxa founded Prague’s Progressive Jewish community in 2019, responding to a growing number of people who sought to explore their Jewish roots. The community currently has 200 members and adds about five more every month.

“Often, I meet people who simply want to learn about the culture, tradition and religion of their grandparents,” said Maxa. “They say, my grandmother and grandfather were Shoah survivors — can I come and learn more about Judaism? We offer a wide range of activities, including of course regular services, but also educational courses to help these people reconnect with the tradition.”

Maxa, who himself grew up in Prague with little connection to his Jewish roots, wants to revive some of the rituals that threaded through Prague’s pre-war Jewish world — including a tradition of organ accompaniment in the city’s synagogues. On Friday, Jewish organist Ralph Selig performed during his service.

Like many of his congregants, Maxa’s family history intertwines with the losses of the last century. His father came from Prague and survived the Holocaust. He does not know if his father visited the Klausen Synagogue, but he knows it was a familiar part of his world.

“It means a lot for me that the tradition was not exterminated, and that this is coming back, even to a place where no services were held since World War II,” he said.

[girlactionfigure]

THURSDAY HERO: Shalom Yoran 

Selim Sznycer, aka Shalom Yoran, was a Polish Jew who escaped the mass murder of all the Jews in his town, including his parents, and wanted to fight Nazis. However, when he tried to join a Russian resistance group, they rejected him for being Jewish, which led him to create his own militia of 200 Jews who hid in the forest and carried out acts of sabotage against the Nazi occupiers.

Selim Sznycer was born in Poland in 1925. After the Nazis invaded Warsaw, the Sznycer family fled to a different part of Poland, the town of Kurzeniec, occupied by the Soviets. But in 1941 the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. and despite their best efforts to escape the Nazis, Selim and his family found themselves living under Nazi occupation once again.

The Jews of Kurzeniec were forced into a squalid ghetto. Not far away was a Russian POW camp, where the prisoners were suffering from abuse, starvation and disease. Local Soviet partisans were forming militias to fight the German occupiers, and Selim heard about the nascent resistance movement from an escaped Russian POW.

The day before Yom Kippur in 1942, Nazi high command gave orders to “liquidate” the ghetto – meaning kill all the inhabitants. From a contact in the resistance, Selim learned of the horrific plan, and he and his brother were able to escape from the ghetto and hide in a nearby barn owned by Polish peasant, Ignalia Biruk, who took in the terrified Jewish boys at great risk to herself. From his hiding place, he heard the sounds of all the Jews in the ghetto being massacred, including his own parents. He later remembered his mother’s last words to him, “She told me, ‘Go fight… try to save yourselves, avenge our death and tell the world what happened.’ These are the words that guided me through that dark period, what gave me strength to fight, and what inspires me to share my story today.”

That winter, Selim, his brother and three friends hid in the Polish forest near the Sang river. They survived the brutal cold by building an underground bunker. A few kindly locals periodically gave them some food, but most of their provisions were stolen.

Selim wanted to fight the Nazis who had taken everything from him, and in 1943 he and his small group approached a Russian partisan unit, but they wouldn’t allow the five Jews to join because they had no weapons. Desperate to join the fight, Selim persisted, and finally the unit commander told him that if they returned to Kurzeniec and blew up the Nazi munitions factory, they would be allowed to join the resistance group. The Russians assumed the Jewish boys couldn’t possibly survive the dangerous mission, but they carried out the bombing successfully and returned to the forest, only to be told the real reason they were rejected: they were Jewish.

Undeterred, Selim wandered the forest in nearby Belarus looking for Jews who wanted to fight. He formed an all-Jewish resistance unit featuring 200 fighters. After the Germans were defeated at Stalingrad, Selim and his group harassed and sabotaged the retreating German soldiers. They blew up bridges and railroad supply lines. In 1944, Belarus was liberated by the Soviets, and Selim and the other Jewish resistance fighters went from the firing pan to the fire: they were drafted into the Red Army, where they were viciously persecuted for being Jewish, enduring beatings and near-starvation. Selim managed to escape and flee to Italy, where he illegally fought with the British Army until the war ended in 1945.

Selim used a fake British passport to emigrate to Palestine, then occupied by the British who severely restricted the number of Jews who could enter the territory. Like many Jews, when Selim got to Israel he dropped his Polish name and started using his Hebrew name: Shalom Yoran. He joined the Israeli Army and became a decorated Air Force officer. He built a successful career developing the Israeli aircraft industry. He was a founding member of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York and a governor of Tel Aviv university.

In 2003, Selim/Shalom published “The Defiant,” a memoir about his experience as a resistance fighter during the war. He dedicated the book to his parents. Shalom Yoran died in 2013 at age 88, survived by his beloved wife Varda, and their children and grandchildren.

For fighting Nazis and avenging his parents’ deaths, we honor Shalom Yoran as this week’s Thursday Hero.

[youcantcallmethat]

Consider: Bucky's parents naming him James Buchanan to try and give him more opportunities by giving him a name that won't be flagged as Jewish.

His parents being deeply concerned that their children will have opportunities stripped from them because of bias. This still affecting him when he's older because to be Jewish means it's incredibly difficult, and straight up forbidden at some, to attend college.

His family being proud of their Jewish heritage and religion but accepting that they need to give their children as many opportunities as possible.

All of this meaning that when Bucky 'died', his Jewish identity was stripped from him in memorial, partly due to antisemitism and partly due to ignorance because why would some people think that James Buchanan Barnes was Jewish?

Something Bucky himself struggled to identify with and only did privately.

Bucky's siblings, especially Rebecca, trying in vain to have his Jewish identity recognised after his death, but failing.

Bucky reconnecting with his Jewishness after he's freed from HYDRA and seeing just how much of him was erased to make way for propaganda (comics, war museums) where all he is is a sidekick/friend to Steve.

[writer-at-the-table]

Marriage Contract by Ben Shahn, 1961, Ink, watercolor, paint, and graphite on paper

Most decorated Jewish marriage contracts use ornamental motifs as framing devices for their written Aramaic text. Ben Shahn's Ketubbah is a marked departure from this model. In the superb execution of this document, the artist has integrated floral and foliate decorations within his lyrical Hebrew calligraphy, the predominant design element.

While Shahn's artistic personality emerged through the religious themes in his illustrations for the 1931 Haggadah for Passover, he would not return to such subjects for many years. The artist spent most of the 1930s and 1940s as a social realist painter. Along with so many other painters and sculptors during those difficult years, Shahn felt that art could help right the inequities of society. His terse visual commentaries on such topical subjects as the Sacco and Vanzetti case, Nazism, poverty, and labor problems brought him great recognition as both a humanitarian and an artist. It was after World War II that he turned inward through what has been called his transition from social to personal realism. During this period he incorporated allegory and religious and philosophical symbolism in his work, often based on his own cultural heritage.

Shahn's updating of the traditional ketubbah results from his changing stylistic and subjective concerns. He became fascinated with letters, both Hebrew and English, which became essential elements in his work. This calligraphic preoccupation led to his 1954 illustrations for The Alphabet of Creation, a book which related a parable of the origin of the Hebrew alphabet. His own combination of these twenty-two letters become a personal stamp and appears on most of his prints and drawings after 1960, including this Ketubbah.

Like the butterfly stamp of James Whistler and the Japonist monogram of Toulouse-Lautrec, this symbol shows Shahn's stylistic inspiration as coming from outside mainstream Western culture. The expressive style of Shahn's Hebrew characters changes with the meaning of each theme he depicts. For this Ketubbah, which is presented at the joyous celebration of marriage, he develops a commanding but elegant Hebrew appropriate to the legal nature of the document and the solemnity of the moment-a calligraphy markedly different from the flame-like evanescences in his tribute to the Feast of Lights, Hanukkah. As had been the custom of Hebrew scribes throughout the ages, Shahn adds eccentric elements to certain letters. Most notable here is the oft-repeated, stylized Star of David.

Shahn's meandering floral and foliate forms refer to Psalm 128:3, a common visual allusion in Jewish marriage contracts: "Thy wife is a fruitful vine in the midst of thy house, thy children are as young olive trees set around thy table." (Kleeblatt, Norman L., and Vivian B. Mann. TREASURES OF THE JEWISH MUSEUM. New York: Universe Books, 1986, pp. 192-193.)

[vaspider]

Have you heard about The Little Synagogue on the Prairie? I went to Heritage Park in Calgary last weekend and I was able to see it, it’s a really fascinating part of history and it’s been restored beautifully. The Torah scrolls there were donated by the local Jewish community and they’ve been able to trace the scrolls back to a specific calligrapher in Prague 200 years ago. The person doing the historical interpretation there was Jewish and she was able to tell me a lot about the history and I think it’s really neat that it’s highlighted in the museum like that so more people can learn about it. They have some beautiful antique menorahs there too.

I had heard about them, yeah! :) That's awesome.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Andrew Lapin

In their objections to the original exhibit, the Wing Luke’s staff contingent, WLM4Palestine, cited portions that read “Today, antisemitism is often disguised as anti-Zionism” and spotlighted campus protests and the phrase “from the river to the sea.” Such passages, the staff allege on their GoFundMe page, “attempt to frame Palestinian liberation and anti-Zionism as antisemitism.”

On Instagram, they further alleged that the exhibit “sets a dangerous precedent of platforming colonial, white supremacist perspectives and goes against the Museum’s mission as a community-based museum advancing racial and social equity.” 

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat argued that the staffers’ anger was misplaced, and had the effect of abandoning Jews.

“What the exhibit is saying is, don’t take your anger about the Middle East conflict out on local Jews, who are independent, freethinking humans,” he wrote. “For a highly fraught subject, this is pretty basic stuff.”

While decrying the staff response as “fueled” by “anti-Jewish ideas and attitudes,” the Jewish groups added that they had made “adjustments and modifications” to the exhibit following the walkout. They said this was done “to help people better understand the exhibit by clarifying language regarding the exhibition’s intent to focus on confronting hate locally by three historically redlined communities.”

A digital version of the exhibit with the original partners listed, including content focused on the Black and Asian-American experiences, is viewable on the Jewish Historical Society’s website. An accompanying podcast, released shortly after the museum staff walkout and featuring guests including the mayor of Seattle, is also still accessible.

Kranseler told JTA that the Jewish Historical Society was “still working with our partners on two additional panels that will explain the genesis of our collaboration on this exhibit and provide additional information regarding the history of our three communities working together.”

The digital version still includes language the Wing Luke staff had walked out over, such as the declaration that “Today antisemitism is often disguised as anti-Zionism.”

[killing-time-w-kaz]

Wish me luck. I’m applying to both the Jewish Heritage Museum and the 9/11 memorial museum for jobs. What a time to apply for those places

[eretzyisrael]

by Elica Le Bon

In the latest chapter, actress Gal Gadot, who plays the Evil Queen in the upcoming rendition of Snow White, has been subject to these same targeted attacks. As images of Gadot in the new role surfaced, the “humanitarians” and “anti-racists” emerged from their “safe spaces for intersectional liberation” to launch a witch hunt against Gadot for her Israeli Nationality, explaining “how fitting” it was for Gadot to play a “character that tries to kill a child and steal her kingdom.” Content creators with huge platforms immediately demanded that their audience boycott Snow White in protest of Gadot’s participation, with others parroted the old antisemitic trope that she was only cast because “Jews run the world”

To be clear: this was not a boycott against the war in Gaza, against Netanyahu, against the Likkud, against settlements, or against Ben-Gvir. No. This was a Jewish boycott.

This is not the first we’ve seen of the Jewish boycott. Earlier this year, Marvel erased the Israeli heritage of Sabra, a Jewish superhero, seemingly to appease the anti-racists who were offended by her race.

This Jewish boycott is often found in art-dominated spaces, where radical liberals most susceptible to this mind virus tend to congregate.

We’ve seen Jewish and Israeli artists ostracized from the arts and entertainment industries purely for their ethnicity or nationality alone. In July, a British art museum canceled a show by Israeli artist Pomidor (which was about Russian dissidents resisting Putin’s oppression and had nothing to do with the Israel-Hamas conflict) purely because she was Israeli, and released a statement reflecting the same. To be sure, Pomidor had not posted anything about the war except on Oct. 7 to stand with the victims of those massacred. My good friend Zoe Buckman, a British Jewish artist from Hackney now living in New York, has been frequently made the target of such attacks and boycotts against her works as a Jewish artist (again, her works having nothing to do with the conflict and despite constantly expressing her solidarity with both Jews and Palestinians but calling for an end to antisemitic hate crimes), even having a prominent voice in the art world change her Instagram handle to “Zoe Buckman’s number one hater” and encouraging peers to disassociate with her.

One would like to imagine that as our world advances, we progressively mature from the animus of bigotry, race-based hate, and xenophobia in all forms. While fronting as reasonable, antisemites and anti-Zionists trade acceptance only for purity, requiring Jews loudly shed themselves of all ties to Israel in exchange for entry into the “progressives” club - something that thousands of years of stateless persecution dictates the vast majority of Jews cannot do.

[lowresolutioncryptid]

I’ve been seeing a lot of terfs deny the very clear link between trans exclusionism and nvzism/white supremacy simply because they do not understand the history behind it. ignorance is not a legitimate excuse to perpetuate systems of white supremacy. And it is further testament to the harm that banning critical race theory and queer studies in schools is doing to y’all’s brains. Because if I’m being completely honest, I’m seeing an alarming amount of self-identified terfs and radfems who are legit STILL IN HIGH SCHOOL. YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE. My blog is 18+, not for children, anyone under 18 gets immediately blocked. Anyway…

Transphobia and anti-blackness are historically linked and continue, to this day, to be overlapping forms of systemic oppression. Black trans women, specifically, have higher murder rates than any other group. Both trans and black people statistically face more medical discrimination than cis and white people, respectively. The combination of both of these marginalized identities forms a particular and very sinister intersection of oppression.

Not only do both of these systems of privilege work to uphold the social and structural power of cis people and white people.. biological essentialism and transphobia also, historically, were used to define the beliefs of white supremacy and race essentialism. Race essentialism is the false belief that it is “natural order” for whites to oppress other races. For centuries, white “philosophers” made up a whole list of pseudoscientific “reasons” WHY they believed racism was “natural”. One of them was the idea that “distinct and separate biological sexes were the mark of a more evolved race-“ meaning the white race.. they compared European patriarchal sex roles and gender roles to the matriarchal cultures and gender variance that they observed in communities of color.

I have seen terfs accuse people who bring up this historical fact of “masculinizing” black women and women of color, which is a very real issue, but in this case and with historical context, that is a misunderstanding and most of the time is being said by people who want to silence trans people and shut down any criticism of terfism.

Acknowledging the thousands of years of acceptance of gender variance and third/fourth gender categories within pre-colonial African, Indigenous, Latin, Asian, & Middle eastern cultures, is not to blame for the masculinization of women of color, and as a matter of fact: the invention and enforcement of Eurocentric gender roles REQUIRES and RELIES on the masculinization of women of color in order to uphold white women’s place within white supremist systems as the “ideal of femininity” that they can then weaponize against women of color when they do not adhere to those Eurocentric standards.

During times of enslavement and segregation, black women were forced, legally and socially, to conform to very strict Eurocentric femininity standards in order to avoid harassment and violence, and if they deviated from these norms and codes they were dehumanized, masculinized, and were “made into examples” of white femininity being “superior”. Gender roles and biological essentialism do not exist in a vacuum outside of the white supremist systems that they were created within and invented to maintain. To imply that all women share the same experiences within these systems is akin to saying “I don’t see color”.. it’s denying the lived experiences of people of color.

Most gays are familiar with the symbol of the pink triangle, the badge worn by LGBT victims of ww2 concentration camps, but the transgender victims are often overlooked..

“Hitler’s Nazi government, however, brutally targeted the trans community, deporting many trans people to concentration camps and wiping out vibrant community structures.” - Museum of Jewish Heritage.

The US holocaust memorial museum that holds remembrance vigils for the victims persecuted by the nazis, under the Obama administration, included both gay men and transgender people in their list of victims. However, under the Trump administration this was changed to only include gay men. When asked about this change one of the museum’s head curators responded that because trans people were viewed by the nazis as indistinguishable from gay men that they are “included” with the definition. This is an obvious cop-out. The other reason that they gave was that the term “transgender” was only officially coined in the 1980’s, despite the thriving population of German trans people and gender-nonconforming subcultures that pre-date the nazi control of Germany.

Ancient Judaism recognizes at least six (6) distinct sex categories and gender roles, our women fulfilling “traditionally masculine” roles and vice versa.. this is a direct threat and opposition to nazism which relies on Eurocentric patriarchal gender roles. White women serve one purpose within nazi ranks: BIOLOGICAL incubators for white babies. If you don’t have 1) European genetic material 2) biological capabilities of reproduction (vagina, womb, mammaries) to be exploited for domestic labor, you are not considered a “true” woman by nazis. “Woman” being defined within nazism by biological, reproductive traits is so eerily similar to terf’s definition of woman that the only explanation for still perpetuating these ideas that I can think of, other than apathy or being full blown nazis, would be ignorance and historical illiteracy. The systemic eradication and erasure of trans and gender-nonconforming people by the nazi party was essential in maintaining these standards at a structural level, as well as the reinforcement of these false beliefs within popular culture. In order to maintain that false image of “dominance” “supremacy”, they had to invent a subclass that was then deemed “inferior” by their own standards.

When trans people of color and trans Jews are explicitly telling y’all that the harmful rhetoric you spread about trans people has DIRECT historical links to white supremacy and nazism, and (whether intentionally or unintentionally) upholds these systems that are killing us, it’s not your place to dig your heels into the ground and come up with excuses. It’s your place to listen and reevaluate your views.

[bitchbrisket]

Purim being celebrated in Aden (Photo courtesy of Aden museum of Jewish heritage)

[malkaleh]

Doña Gracia Nasi (1510-1569)

Inspired by the medieval women week (she’s not medieval so I’m not including but it was sparked by it) - an image of one of my heroines - a Jewish woman who used her wealth to help others escape The Inquisition, who held to her people. I would love a mini series about her.

An Article About Her (MyJewishLearning)

A YouTube Discussion (Museum Of Jewish Heritage NYC)

[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.”