#never be scared to be jewish

[hindahoney]

hi! fellow Jew here. I just wanna say that I see all of the heart and care you put into this account and it makes me so so happy. I’m honestly scared to talk about being jewish on my account (which has a fairly large following) and I think I’m gonna start to try to get over that fear, you’re really an inspiration, thank you. and chag purim sameach!!

[shalom-iamcominghome]

It's weird being simultaneously jewish and non-jewish at the exact same time. Because to non-jews, I am jewish. They see someone like me, and they don't typically care about the intricacies of jewish thought and law - they only see a jew, and they react accordingly. This isn't malicious on their end, I think, it's just a consequence of not being jewish or having people close to you who are. But to jews, they know that I'm not jewish yet, correctly so I may add, and I'm treated as such.

I'm not complaining about being treated as jewish or not being treated as jewish, but I'm saying it's a weird tug-of-war where I simultaneously am and am not. I don't compromise on where I am visibly associated with jews, and as a consequence, I'm treated as a jew for good and bad. I want that, though. Even when I have been terrified of being visibly associated with jews, I wouldn't abandon it.

[an-attempted-poet]

sometimes i think that with everything going on in the world i might be more religious than i thought.

it's still hard for me to believe in a higher power or a god because i am so heavily and wholeheartedly a science person, as well as when i was younger and really was religious it felt like nothing i prayed for ever worked and all my trauma kept coming, no matter what i did

i think as i get older and have more of a idea of the world i've come to terms with being religious but not believing in a strict power. that i can find comfort in religion and the community i grew up in but i don't have to adhere to the exact definition of religion i thought i did when i was younger

[raydfil]

opened the explore tab on here and immediately got whacked in the face with people saying that people drawing fucking hatsune miku as my nationality/heritage should be. killed and tourtured. oh boy i love the internet and people being normal.

[snekdood]

so to me it looks like israel is enabling conspiracy theory thinking around the world, causing more ppl to be antisemitic, making more jewish people look to israel as if its the only place they will be safe from literally being hate crimed, which is ultimately the goal of israel's govt. so uh yeah the israeli govt is fucking evil and netanyahu can choke and die for all i care.

[malkaleh]

I’m absolutely without a doubt a water human. By which I mean I need to be by the ocean - I’ve always loved it and yes, I’ve always felt safe there and by it. It doesn’t mean no caution around it, it doesn’t mean there aren’t parts I’m scared of but it is safety and home as well - I need water and stars to be beside trees and flowers.

[liviz223]

It's so interesting how people can acknowledge a post about how vaccinations in Gaza are a good thing and to not spread antivax rhetoric (the vaccinations are a very good thing) but cannot acknowledge anything about the hostages being kept there or about antisemitism...

Mind you, the International Red Cross hasn't visited the hostages like they would if most of the hostages weren't Jewish, released and rescued hostages have said they hadn't gotten any medication from them, and the IRC has refused to answer hostage families when questioned about it or given non-answers.

If you find yourself only acknowledging one side of this idk maybe you just can't find the humanity in the other? Maybe it's a double standard. Maybe it's dehumanization.

Ask yourself why. Reflect a little.

[akajustmerry]

everytime someone, usually white, talks about the IOF using major US cultural events as "distractions" to commit more genocidal operations in Palestine, I want to SCREAM. The assumption that the IOF is hanging on the us's every fart to make their moves is US centrism, narcissism at global proportions. the IOF don't need "distractions" they've been murdering, torturing and displacing Palestinians and other Arabs for almost a century with impunity because they KNOW they can get away with it. Because the IOF knows practically no one who can actually stop them gives a fuck about Palestinians and Arabs. The IOF don't need a presidential assassination scandal, a met gala, or any large event to cover for their atrocities because they've been doing them in broad daylight everyday, all day for decades, AND BRAGGING about it. Claiming the IOF is doing anything because some event is providing a "distraction" is a vapid projection of a personal inability to deal with the cognitive dissonance and guilt of bearing witness and experiencing these events simultaneously. Not to mention, it plays into anti-jewish conspiracies of Jewish world domination by insulating connections between major events that are often unconnected. It's okay that you feel scared and confused and overwhelmed, but stop pretending the IOF even cares about Palestinians and Arabs enough to wait for the world to be distracted to kill us. They don't need to. They never have and it's hugely ignorant of at least a century of history, anti-Arab racism, and Zionism to say otherwise.

EDIT: I was wrong making this post. @el-shab-hussein took the time to correct me in their reblog here. But I will also copy and paste their correction here:

They committed some of the most atrocious massacres since the start of the acceleration during and directly after the debates between Trample and Bitchen, with several hundreds confirmed dead by day. It's crazy how much Palestinians have discussed the phenomenon of Israel using major U.S. events as a distraction before the acceleration and we've posted about it on tumblr and I've seen other Palestinians make threads about it on Twitter to compile various instances where U.S. events and other major world events used as distractions (wow! Look an example to back my point: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). "They don't need distractions" yes they do, that is the very basis of the massive Israeli lobby and hasbara industry. Don't patronize us just because you can't understand how central the U.S. and its apathy is in our genocide. Recognizing the role of American cultural imperialism and its far-reaching consequences is not perpetuating it - what an incredibly lazy way to try to shut us up - it's recognizing who's the lynchpin in the equation here.

[ameliarating]

I would like more people to understand that the real test of anti-Semitism, will not be, and will never be, will the people who are otherwise agreeing with you be anti-Semitic to you. It is, will they be anti-Semitic towards the people with whom they disagree.

It doesn't mean anything when a proudly anti-Zionist Jew in a watermelon kippah and a keffiyeh is welcomed by a pro-Palestine encampment.

It doesn't mean anything when a proudly Zionist Jew draped in an Israeli flag is welcomed by a right-wing pro-Israel counter-rally.

The test of anti-Semitism is what happens when the Zionist Jew walks into the pro-Palestine encampment and what happens when the anti-Zionist Jew walks into the pro-Israel counter-rally. How fast do people resort to anti-Semitic canards? How quickly is that person treated as the worst sort of example of what the other camp hates?

And it's that last example that is scaring me. Because that's where I see the anti-Semitism spike.

People who are loudly and visibly Jewish are often the most cheered on by those who agree with them, especially in movements where they are a minority. The flipside is that people who are loudly and visibly Jewish are often the most virulently harassed by those who disagree with them.

[shalom-iamcominghome]

I think I'm "used" to antisemitism until I watch a sermon which enthusiastically says that jews will be sacrificed for the rapture and then I'm baring my teeth

[rotzaprachim]

yeah i do think we've seen way too much throwing around of comparison to historical fascists at the same time we haven't seen enough analysis of who those fascists actually were and who they appealed too. plenty of people today, including conservatives, centrists, AND the online left like to think that they never would have supported fascism. the online left in particular likes to believe in a good hard fighting mass of the proletariat that always looked out for *other* oppressed peoples and stood up for the jews and whatnot. but that's... not how fascisms has ever gotten control, or gotten power- it's gone strong because proletarian masses HAVE supported it, and then been too scared to do anything about it, and then made the excuse that the trains "ran on time" even when fascists policies made their lives appreciably worse. so much of the appeal fascism is the promise of "stability" against social change and social turmoil and even inflation, and it has been popular among the middle and working class, to the point of antifascists being sometimes labelled as the indulgent (((jewish))) urban elite. remember that.

[snekdood]

im not gonna say you cant use the n word w a hard r on a almost fully anonymous tumblr account where you claim to be black-

I will say that it makes you 100% more suspicious and worth keeping an eye out on you bc usually its neo nazis pretending to be black that spam saying the n word w an r and use tumblrs weird trust for almost fully anonymous accounts to their advantage to get away w it

you can say it, but, if you Are a neo nazi pretending to be black, I will say, you're not doing a good job of convincing me rn that you actually are.

[shewantstobe]

Hey there. First off, 100% agree that anyone who supports the murder or displacement of Palestinians is vile. But like... it kind of is that deep, though.

There's a massive difference (really, a bunch of them) between zionism and nazism, but I'm gonna focus on one for the sake of clarity. Zionism is an ideology that has existed, depending on how you define it, for hundreds to thousands of years. It wasn't called by that name until ~125 years ago, but Jews have been trying to reclaim sovereignty or return to their historic land since antiquity. There are many schools of thought within Zionism, some of which advocate for the displacement of Palestinians, most of which do not.

The National Socialist Party (read: the Nazis) was a political organization founded with the specific intent of conquering the whole of Europe and creating a master race, and systematically murdered millions of people in the name of that goal. It was a specific political party with specific goals and aims that existed for 25 years before being banned.

Being a Zionist does not (necessarily) mean supporting the Israeli government. If you want to say that about supporters of Likud (the current PM's party) or the Religious Zionist Party (which wants to resettle Palestinians in other Arab countries), fine. But I think that easier than convincing 12 million Jews (in keeping with the conservative 80% number in my OP) that Zionism now means specifically supporting the starving and bombing of Gazans would be to continue to let Jews define an ideology that many see as a cornerstone of their faith and culture.

To be clear, I don't personally identify as a Zionist or an anti-Zionist because of the lack of clarity. I don't want people to mistake my support for Israel existing as a peaceful democratic state alongside a sovereign Palestine as support for what's happening now.

That being said, I've seen a lot of very violent rhetoric about Zionists, and I've seen the term used a lot to dismiss people (largely Jews) without considering what they're actually saying. I don't want a term that many Jews identify with to be used as a cudgel against them.

Re: your last point (the slippery slope), I'm going to chalk this up to how easy it is for something to seem extremely prevalent based on one person's feed and nonexistent based on another. I have personally seen many, many people explicitly say that Israel should be dismantled. Someone I know in real life blocked me after an argument in which she told me earnestly that all Israelis should be deported and she doesn't care what happens to them because they shouldn't have been there anyway. It is not a slippery slope to push back on an argument that is actually being made. It becomes really difficult at a certain point to tell what someone is advocating (i.e. when someone says to "end the occupation," do they mean settlements in the West Bank or the entire country of Israel?). So maybe people argue against that too much, but it's really hard to get a sense of how prevalent an argument actually is on social media.

Leftists have gotten real comfortable calling for violence/death to all zionists, and it really makes me wonder 1. how they define zionism and 2. whether they're remotely aware of how much of the world's Jewish population that includes. Based on the rhetoric I've seen condemned on here, I'm going to go with the very most basic definition of supporting a Jewish homeland in the Levant.

85% of the global Jewish population is in the U.S. or Israel. I'm assuming that any Israeli Jew who hasn't emigrated is fair game, so that's about 45% of all Jews there. According to Pew's most recent data, 82% of American Jews say that caring about Israel is "essential or important" to their Jewish identity.

Even if we just assume that every Jew in the world outside these two countries is staunchly anti-zionist (they're not), that's fully 80% of world jewry supporting Israel to some degree.

When you call for all zionists to die, you are calling for the death of 80% of Jews. Over 12 million people. That is the death toll of two holocaust.

I am appalled by the violence in Gaza. I support a ceasefire with release of hostages. I support self-determination and freedom of movement for Palestinians. I am deeply critical of the Israeli government. But I support a Jewish state. If that's the bar for deserving to die, you're a lot less pro-Jew than you think.

[spitefullyjewish]

Okay, this is my third time trying to put this into words. I am very upset, hurt, and honestly terrified. I’m about to share a lot about myself, my family, and a very scary situation happening right now, so for my own safety, I won’t provide too many details.

I live in a secondary city in a South American country. The Jewish community here is very small—around 5,000 people total out of over 50 million. In my city, which has over 3 million people, there are only about 300 Jews. We’re literally on the other side of the world from Israel.

We own a family business, a small clothing factory where we make knitted garments. It was founded by my grandmother 48 years ago. My father is the current manager, and both my sister and I work there. We employ around 80 people. We pay fair and legal wages (not the industry standard in my country), and although times are really hard, we’ve never missed a payment, not once in our 48 years in business. My father paused his own salary and hasn’t received a cent since January, and my sister and I both stopped getting paid for three months. But the people who work with us have always received their salaries as they should.

Now, today, September 30th, (just a couple of days before the start of our high holidays and exactly one week before the first anniversary of October 7th) the biggest and most important public university in my city, in conjunction with the syndicate council, invited the Palestinian ambassador to give a conference about the current situation and the war. Well, apparently, it derailed into open antisemitism and ended up as a conference about how Jews are all thieves and scammers. Because, I kid you not, back in the '90s, a huge group of my country’s biggest companies went bankrupt and couldn’t pay their employees what they owed. One out of about 30 of those companies was owned by Jewish people. So, of course, "we Jews are all liars, scammers, and thieves, just like the Israelis—always trying to take what doesn’t belong to us"

So, what conclusion did they reach at this conference about Palestine and the current war happening on the other side of the world? Well, naturally, they decided to target Jewish-owned businesses in my city (which means our factory and two other small businesses in our area) to protest and vandalize, because we’re all thieves and scammers, and Israel is bad and horrible, and everyone in my city needs to be made aware of that. When are they planning to come? October 7th, of course, when else?

The only reason I even know about this is that one of my Jewish friends decided to attend the conference to hear from the Palestinian ambassador and, risking their own safety, stayed to hear the names of the businesses that are going to be targeted.

I'm hurt and scared and I've been trying not to cry since I found out. These are the people on the left, these we were supposed to be my people, I've marched with them, I've worked and voted with them. I don't know what to do? Please, please tell me how are they different from actual Nazis? How is this situation different from any other jew living in Europe in the 1930's? I guess shannah fucking tovah to me, as if last year wasn't a wake up call. I am fucking awake.

[jinglejanglemornings]

my horrible cat just put her whole bushy tail on the menorah and almost burned herself and the house down oy vavoy NOT a jewish cat

[mesetacadre]

So, like, have any of you actually ever had a conversation with a fascist offline about what they believe? I have.

To be clear, this wasn't a sit-down-let's-talk conversation. He (the only one) tried to start shit, and we (me + 2 comrades) confronted him in the act and regrettably got into a 30-minute "conversation".

Fascists, individually, are very mentally feeble. They are cowards who always seek to start conflict while trying to make themselves out to be the victims. This is, of course, until they gain enough popularity and canon fodder to throw 20 unstable fascists at anyone they don't like. But until this exaltation occurs¹ and their organizations enter a relatively stable cycle (in contemporary liberal democracies, they last between 2 and 7 years before disintegrating), there remains a contradiction between their aggressive desire to seek confrontation and their individual and collective insecurities. Fascist ideology is mostly not rooted in reality (more on this later), and it also has an important component of self-hate. They are an inferior specimen, unable to achieve what the fascist martyrs before them achieved (in Spain, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera usually occupies this position), and to add injury to insult, it's those who they perceive as weak and undeserving who rule over them. They ignore this perceived inferiority by joking about being chads, the superior race, or non-degenerates. But behind their rhetoric and "humor" there is usually a tinge of insecurity and hate against anyone who doesn't fit their increasingly narrow standard, including themselves.

This fascist we talked with kept referring to Jewish conspiracies, to the freemasons in every position of power, to old Falangists, to fascist "theorists", to some kind of esoteric spiritualism within the bounds of Christianity, somehow, and hyperborea. He talked about communists, how they were already in the government (referring to the social-democratic PSOE), how we were degenerates, how the day will come, etc. He attempted to scare us by saying that he was an ex-member of this more notorious fascist party and that they were looking for him to beat him up, which isn't something you admit to people you're trying to start conflicts with. After a while of his ramblings, one of my comrades couldn't help but laugh at him. It was all very ridiculous; I don't remember exactly what he said that made my comrade laugh. He got slightly more agitated, and the conversation ended in ~5 minutes.

Individually, fascists are also not the brightest people you'll encounter. For somebody to internalize fascist beliefs, they have to be unconsciously willing to never dig deeper about their beliefs, to contrast them with one another, or to contrast them with other fascists. They'll read a text (they may be stupid, but a lot of them do read more than you'd expect) about, say, the concept of race, and never really address the fact that it contradicts their own beliefs, or a fellow fascist's beliefs about the nation or about Europe.

And a really interesting thing is that fascism is far from a monolith. It's more akin to an entelechy². The specific contradictions of fascism manifest themselves much more between individual fascists than within a single individual. Like I mentioned before, there are contradictions when it comes to race (racialists like the nazis vs anti-racists like Falange Auténtica), to Europe (the idea of a Great Europe vs every idea of Nationality/Empire, which generally coexist poorly), to the nation (its intersection with race and/or Europe and how it interacts with these), to the reaction against progress (a conception of fascism as progressive, reactionary, or neither³), to science (a realist position based on scientificism such as race science and Kameradschaftrecht (nazi feminism) vs metaphysical conceptions, such as esotericism or the Thule society, reliant on aesthetics and mysticism), or to the economic policy (bourgeois positions, corporatism, vs workerist positions such as Strasser or Bombacci).

These contradictions aren't unique to the contemporary fascist situation of fragmentation and the peculiarities of social media either. Back in the 30s and 40s, there was a lot of disagreement on who counted as fascists. On one end, during the rise of the NSDAP, there was a small cadre of orthodox fascists who narrowed fascism "a la Italiana", and did not consider nazi-fascism to be fascism because of its differences on the scientificist conceptions of race. The Nazi party repressed this small wing. On the other end, it was a prevailing position in the USSR to not consider fascism to start with Italy's fascii di combatimento, but rather in Russia's Black Hundreds, having a broader conception of fascism.

This fascist we talked with considers himself a Carlist⁴, while another member of his groupuscule considers himself a national-socialist, while being Moroccan, and a third is a run-of-the-mill reactionary concerned with the 2030 agenda, globalism, immigrant invasions, the great replacement, that sort of thing. When fascist groups are relatively small and lack any form of inertia and/or formalized structure, their activity is extremely sporadic. There is no discipline to be found, no real planning or broad strategy, they are, rather, a group of similarly-enough-minded friends who sometimes like to do some vandalism or threaten/agitate leftists of any stripe. Their only method of growth is to generate controversies, fights, have a provocative tweet go semi-viral, to generate noise. When it comes to agitation for the fascist, concrete ideology is not relevant. They appeal to both rage and the satisfaction of, for example, seeing x annoying leftist org get their posters ripped off. Discussions of fascist theory rarely, if ever, influence their pragmatic activity, sometimes it's more similar to a circlejerk to see who has the most esoteric, exaggerated and offensive positions.

This is not to say fascist infighting is irrelevant, far from it. Fascists have their own petty disputes between groups, periods of extreme fractionarism, inter-fascist and intra-fascist violence. But when it comes to the philosophy of action, to how they apply all these beliefs, you'll be pressed to find meaningful, material differences. Some might be more or less aggressive, more or less esoteric, more or less contrarian, more or less effective. But they all rely on building that momentum, that controversy -> confrontation -> growth -> controversy cycle. The moment fascist groups lose that momentum, or one too many campaigns fall flat and fail to garner attention, they'll start to turn against themselves, to deteriorate their own structures in the permanent search for conflict that their beliefs demand. There is no way to hold the belief that, for example, race is a scientific category that makes the white/national/aryan/european/whatever race constantly threatened to disappear without exhorting you to seek conflict, whether it's against immigrants or other fascists who don't place as much importance on race.

If you find yourself in the context of a few small fascist groups festering and seeking conflict, it is a strategic error to confront them outright. Unless you're willing to downright kill them or injure them severely enough (with the bigger threat of legal repercussions that entails), fascists will be able to turn your explicit opposition against them into ammunition to attract more reactionaries to their own ranks. The best you, as an organized communist, can do in the period before exaltation, is to quietly collect information about them, study their patterns, and exert as much opposition as is possible without letting them turn it into a visible confrontation. If you're going to cover up their symbols and posters, do it when they can't film you or try to start a fight. If they're threatening someone to provoke them to then cry and hue about the rabid leftists, use the fact that they have low numbers, record them, and intimidate them without physical violence. Even if you can leave them writhing on the floor in a fight, they can use that as ammunition, but they can't use a video of them putting their tails between their legs and running off. You can't debate with fascists, this much is clear. You also can't just use violence to scare them away, because they'll use that violence to gain momentum, and then you can end up with an actually decently-sized and consistent fascist organization.

This is how we have been opposing these small groups of fascists attempting to grow through controversy. We opposed them non-visibly, effectively and professionally. When this group of about 15 fascists total (they never appear with more than 4 at a time because of their inconsistency) encountered this, they were at one point scared enough to stop all activity for about 2 months, and after that have yet to appear again. Meanwhile, other, more infantile orgs, overreacted by opposing them with full force and very publicly, which only encouraged the fascists to keep going and wasted energy in a futile back-and-forth, as well as putting their members in unnecessary risk by engaging in unplanned situations.

¹ Throughout this entire post, all analysis of the behavior of fascists offline assumes this exaltation has not occured

² Entelechy here means an impossible ideal, built entirely in the imagination, or with an unstable and shoddy manifestation.

³ Fascism often positions itself as a revolutionary movement, while other times it places more importance on the opposition against progress.

⁴ Carlism is a Spanish political current originating in the rejection of Isabel II as a legitimate heir to Fernando VII, it became very intertwined with Franco's dictatorship and the Falange during the Civil War