#of a jewish trauma spike

[malkaleh]

I keep trying to write an update and then being embarrassed about it and feeling like I’m trauma dumping on people by updating and I just..I know it’s on me to manage my crap, I know. I am trying (not very well but I’m trying) and it’s just…I don’t know. I don’t even know.

[spacelazarwolf]

if you know any jews who work at organizations or synagogues, especially those in leadership positions, consider reaching out to them and see if there's anything they need. after things like this happen, there is always a spike in antisemitism, and the responsibility for managing that often falls to jewish organizations and synagogues. we also have to manage increased risk of harm for those of us who work in the building, and rabbis in particular are going to be responsible for helping congregants - some of whom are likely to experience antisemitic incidents in the coming weeks, or are dealing with the death of a loved one - manage their emotions and trauma, which can be an incredibly overwhelming job. community support is incredibly important right now.

[mariacallous]

Mel Brooks, who mocked Adolf Hitler in his 1967 black comedy “The Producers,” has always made the case for satire as a weapon against tyranny.

“You have to bring him down with ridicule,” he told “60 Minutes” in 2001. “It’s been one of my lifelong jobs — to make the world laugh at Adolf Hitler.”

Of course, Hitler was long dead and there were 6 million fewer Jews on the planet when “The Producers” came out. Before and during World War II, satire proved a futile weapon against the Fuhrer: Charlie Chaplin made “The Great Dictator” in 1940, similarly reducing Hitler to a buffoon. But by the time the movie premiered that October, nearly 3 million German troops had smashed into France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

 The futility of satire was on my mind when, on the Thursday after Election Day, I toured a new exhibit at the Jewish Museum on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. “Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston” features two artists, one Jewish, one African-American, whose work wrestles with racism, white supremacy and antisemitism. 

Philip Guston, born Phillip Goldstein in Montreal in 1913, was inspired by the ferment of the 1960s to create a series of cartoonish paintings featuring hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan. In these almost cheerful paintings, the frightening avatars of white supremacy look like costumed children out of a Charlie Brown comic (or, more accurately, from “Krazy Kat,” a popular comic strip in Guston’s youth).

“These buffoonish Klansmen still today are a real rebuke, I think, to bigotry in all its forms,” curator Rebecca Shaykin, who organized the exhibit, said at the press opening. “They’re still just so incredibly powerful.”

About a third of the gallery is given over to Guston’s Klan paintings, as well as some of his earlier work. The rest features riotous paintings, cartoons and a film by Hancock, a Texas-born artist who was a child when Guston died in 1980 in upstate Woodstock, New York. Many of Hancock’s paintings directly quote Guston’s Klansmen: They are in painting after painting featuring “Torpedoboy,” a sort of Black superhero who Hancock considers his alter ego. The Klansmen try to lynch Torpedoboy; he fights back with what looks like a watermelon. In one painting, Torpedoboy appears to drive a spike through a Klansman’s head. 

In the exhibition catalog, Hancock describes what attracted him to Guston’s Klan paintings. “I fell in love with the forms, and how he used comedy to take the wind out of the sails of the KKK,” says Hancock. “He helped me understand where I could take” my own characters.”

Whether audiences appreciate the comedy depends on their sensibility; remember, it was decades before “The Producers” lost its “notorious” label and became a beloved institution, at least in its adaptation as a Broadway musical. For some, the Klan paintings by both artists could be triggering. In 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, four major museums certainly thought so, and postponed a comprehensive survey of Guston’s work. They explained that “the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.” 

When the exhibition did open at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2022, the museum offered a pamphlet from a trauma specialist and a detour allowing visitors to skip the Klan-themed works. 

The Jewish Museum seems unfazed by that controversy. When I asked Shaykin about it she said the Guston-Hancock show had already been percolating when she learned of the postponement controversy. “It just made it more imperative, I think, that we bring Guston into the present moment and pair him with a contemporary artist,” she said. The only suggestion that images might be controversial is a sign outside the gallery, warning that the exhibit contains “explicit language” and “depictions of violence and lynchings.”

James Snyder, director of the Jewish Museum, also said the exhibit is right for the political moment. 

“We don’t do politics,” he said at the press preview, “but if you think about what happened the other day in the election, and where we actually really need to go, this show could not be more timely.”

What happened, of course, was the election of Donald Trump to a second, non-consecutive term. And if ever there was a rebuke to the power of satire, it is Trump. Trump was a nightly target of nearly all the late-night talk shows, where he was mocked as a racist, a would-be authoritarian, a grifter and a vulgarian. With just a week to go before the election, Jimmy Kimmel made a direct appeal to Republicans to reject Trump, calling him “the exact meeting point between QAnon and QVC.” For years Stephen Colbert wouldn’t even say his name.

Deserved or not, the jokes about Trump didn’t make a dent in his popularity — and perhaps they only added to it. In a recent episode of his podcast, “Revisionist History,” Malcolm Gladwell talks about the “satire paradox”: the idea that satire, by making the targets entertaining, actually makes them more sympathetic. He quotes Jonathan Coe, a British writer who argued in a 2023 essay that “laughter is not just ineffectual as a form of protest, but that it actually replaces protest.”

“Laughter, in a way, is a kind of last resort,” Coe tells Gladwell. “If you’re up against a problem which is completely intractable, if you’re up against a situation for which there is no human solution and never will be, then OK, let’s laugh about it.”

Not that Guston and Hancock are not deadly serious in their aims. The art is provocative and appropriately disturbing. The exhibit suggests that Guston, who changed his name from the identifiably Jewish “Goldstein” in 1935, later felt guilty about abdicating his identity — and as a result felt complicit with the Klansmen who sought to erase both Jews and Black people. “They are self-portraits,” Guston once said of the Klan paintings. “I perceive myself as being behind the hood.”

Hancock’s seemingly humorous works are also working through extremely grim themes. The Klan was active in his hometown of Paris, Texas, and in 2021 a KKK chapter planned a “White Unity Conference” there before it was blocked by the city council. Born in the mid-1970s, Hancock acknowledges in the catalog that he had benefited from the “heavy lifting” done by his elders in the Civil Rights Movement. But as a Black man and Black artist, he couldn’t ignore the legacy of racism. “It wasn’t until I was much older that I started to peel away those layers, or have them peeled away for me,” he says.

That’s why the most effective works in the exhibit aren’t satirical. At all. They include early work by Guston, who already as a teenager was depicting the Klan and lynchings in the social realist style of the day. Nothing about these dark, frightening images is cartoonish or ambiguous.

And perhaps the most arresting work in the show is a video installation by Hancock, showing scenes from the fairgrounds of Paris, Texas, juxtaposed with photographs of the lynching of a Black teenager, Henry Smith, which took place on the same site in 1893. Hundreds gather around the makeshift gallows to watch the execution. They seem to be having a very good time.   

“Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston” is on view at The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave., through March 30, 2025.

[paperstorm]

i know you said you didn’t want to talk about this and you can delete this ask when you get it but speaking into the void here

i personally as an arab never expected ronen to give a both sides are bad let peace prevail kind of statement (im aware that is what he is posting now and has reiterated that palestinians aren’t responsible for hamas i haven’t ignored that)

fully acknowledge that this is painful for him given his personal family history and just the generational trauma jewish people have lived through and antisemitism raging in the states for the past few years and spiking drastically since the bombing started

so him sticking by israel no matter how much of a bitter taste it leaves in my mouth lmao i understand why but what genuinely hurt was him reposting videos from violently islamophobic and racist right wingers like nathan*el buzolic calling it “palestinian propaganda” and who dont care about jews or israel but in his eyes brown arabs are the devil and need to be gone (ronen could very well not know what that man stands for but doesn’t change that its who he’ll be associated with henceforth cuz everyone knows and noticed)

celebrating biden sending weapons to israel knowing full well who exactly its being used against and pushing the “human shield” bullshit to justify it all makes it hard to digest seeing babies pulled out of rubble and dying and never not once admitting that collective punishment isn’t right or mass starvation isn’t right

i dont think anybody is ignoring his sentiment of wanting peace between communities but compared to what he’s been pushing it makes it harder to acknowledge when the most hes said about palestinians is “oh life will be lost on both sides no can do” and not voicing support for a ceasefire and doubling down against people trying to kindly show him a more nuanced view and flat out blocking people

i’ve long since stopped caring about celebrities and their political opinions cuz they need woke points but since we’re all a part of the same fandom i guess its making rounds more

(and also a general thing, the fact that antisemitism and islamophobic hate crimes are spiking should push politicians to call for a ceasefire instead of doubling down on their money making tactics from defence contracts and stocks cuz as long as people see videos of palestinian parents losing their children and vice versa and weeping in the streets and IDF soldiers in uniform eating mcdonalds in a full face of makeup and acrylics its just going to keep getting worse cuz the disparity is getting more obvious)

It's not that I don't want to talk about it, it's that every time I do like clockwork about 30-45 minutes later the death threats and 'kys' anons roll in and that isn't easy to deal with. But I do think these things are massively important and I do want to talk about them.

And I agree with all of this. It feels so silly sometimes to care about him or what he's saying when there are babies buried under rubble from genocidal bombs dropped purposely on apartment buildings and bakeries and hospitals and funded by American taxpayers like ... he's a random C list celebrity and we aren't the victims here by any stretch of the imagination. But it still hurts. It seems to me like he is extremely misinformed. Uninformed, ignorant, uneducated, whatever adjective you want to use. If he's bought into the human shields propaganda then he's bought into all of it, and the US/Israeli propaganda machine is one of the strongest the world has ever seen (I mean you have a state indiscriminately slaughtering thousands of children and you have the whole Western world terrified to say "hey maybe don't do that", it would be impressive if it wasn't so horrible) so he isn't the only one who's fallen for it but it's ... sad. I dont' know, it's just sad. All of that and all of what you said is context for his response to this, but context doesn't make it hurt less. It sucks that we're going to have to do the heartbreaking work of separating him from TK in order to keep loving our show and not feel like we're de-facto supporting genocide. We're not the victims in this, especially those of us who are white and not Arab and not Jewish and are far less likely to face any consequences here, but it still sucks. I don't have any answers but I'm there with everyone who feels let down by him right now.

[witchern]

i realize i'm about to kick a hornet's nest by posting this on tumblr dot com, aka the website that's chronically allergic to nuance, but the thing that's been grinding my gears all week is the fact that y'all won't let jews in the diaspora sit with our feelings. like, at all.

shock, fear, and grief are all powerful emotions. they can freeze even the strongest of us in place. i can only speak for myself, but i've been frozen at a steady 'fear' for most of the week, with the occasional spikes into 'grief.' i've never seen my dad cry, but he cried this week. my jersey-raised, black belt, tough-as-shit dad cried. because he was scared.

but some of you won't give us the time and space to feel. you see us mourning and accuse us of "grieving for colonizers" without giving a fucking thought to the possibility that the graphic images of dead jews MAY IN FACT touch upon some generational trauma and old fears.

can you give us a second to catch our breath? can you give us time to collect ourselves? can you give us time to check in with the rest of our community? what are you hoping to achieve by antagonizing us when we're struggling with our own emotions? many in our community are hurt and scared and all you can think about is dunking on us online for internet points. does that make you feel like you did something useful? is your life so unsatisfying that mocking jews for mourning dead jews is entertainment for you?

all i can say now is if you're reading this and you're part of a vulnerable community, i hope that, during difficult times, you're given the grace that the jewish community was not this week.

[gray-ace-space]

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[pearl-kite]

First and last art of fav OC(s)

@impossible-rat-babies and @dorkousloris both tagged me for this, for which I shower them both in appreciation <3

I think I'm going to tag @fooltofancy, @mihqorio, @spike-spiegel-is-jewish and @ardellian because I am curious but there is absolutely no obligation at all, as always o3o;;;

Looking back, I apparently only drew Akos and Gale this year, which is perfectly fine but makes me feel a bit neglectful of other characters. They got sketches but never anything finished.

Akos - 2006-2021

Oh goodness, you wouldn't even recognize him. Akos was originally a side character for my second nanowrimo attempt, a main character's little brother, and oof did I come up with all sorts of trauma for him. He did actually have white hair in the beginning but dyed it black, and if you look through years of art it grows out until it's only the last year or two that there's no black in it, so it's almost like he's actually all grown up.

I'd say they grow up so fast but it's been 15 fuckin years. Love him. I've also mellowed out on all of the angst I threw at him. Mostly. Then I went and tossed him into IF like Greenwarden and Northern Passage so he still gets to deal with shit :3

Gale - 2007-2021

God what is going on with those proportions. Ran everyone though a taffy puller I guess. Also when I was only just dipping my toes into digital, so there's a lot of growth there thankfully. Gale exists in a weird limbo where they've changed a lot but they're also somehow exactly the same. I don't get it, but I love them <3

[screamingfromuz]

So Israel has a very complex relationship with the memory of the Holocaust (i'm sure OP can expand). From the wall of silence that was broken with the Eichmann trial, the "Lamb to the slaughter" accusation and it's relationship to the Tzabar mythos, perceptions of the Diaspora in the newly constructed Hebrew communities, the tribal sense grief and trauma, the fact that the Holocaust is one the best examples to the justification of Jewish sovereignty in living memory and the fact that many survivors and their descendants live in Israel. So COMPLEX.

This is important, because as a very big and meaningful ethos, this is a very powerful political tool. There have been many instances of politicians in Israel using the Holocuast as a political tool for various causes. From governmental support of the elderly, arranging and supporting mass immigration of Jewish communities which are in danger, to protesting freedom of speech to a simple shock factor. There was a cases of people wearing the striped uniforms, yellow stars and white bands in various places.

And every time the Holocaust is invoked, public attention spikes.

All of this to say, invoking or diminishing the importance of the Holocaust is never ok, I don't care who does this. When the Israeli government use it to divert attention is bad. When pro-Palestinians use the Holocaust as a gotcha it is bad. When Goyim dismiss it as a "punishment" when talking to "bad" Jews it is bad.

So stop

The lesson here, is not "Wow even The Jews are doing war crimes thus absolving all of us from having to give a shit about the Holocaust and be nice to Jewish ppl who talk about it."

It's "Despite Israel's use of Holocaust memory in its national mythology,* the government and military of that State has shown itself more than willing to violate the human and civil rights of those outside the State's definition of citizenship. This demonstrates that all acting under the banner of the nation-state (as a category of polity) are capable of perpetrating crimes against humanity, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, or gender."

*or "Ideological State Apparatus" for us hardcore bitches who fuck with Benedict Anderson

[bitegore]

re: trauma from fiction,

I could maybe come up with 3 cases in which fiction actually fucks me up for a while

1: any work dealing with unreality or dreamlike settings is horribly unpleasant to look into, as it reminds me of my brushes with psychosis and makes me doubt things. not trauma, as the issue stems ultimately from preexisting things, and I can still look away long before the damage is done (which unfortunately means I can't play Pathologic 2 and Knock-knock until I'm in a better place)

2: anything from our school's literature class, as my teacher was verbally abusive and reading what she taught makes my anxiety spike. not trauma, work itself doesn't even do anything because it's my teacher who keeps ruining my attempts at re-reading Hero of Our Time

3: a long and painfully descriptive piece about illegal abortions in ussr, read by me at the ripe old age of 13 which had descriptions of deaths induced by abortion methods and details about what led to them. it was horrible, I kept having to stop, yet I still made the choice to continue. not trauma, as it really isn't anywhere near the forefront of my mind, but I'm pro-choice now

tl;dr from what I can see, you can always just stop reading the moment you see something upsetting. a more plausible source of trauma would be it opening existing wounds or the circumstances around it. and considering that this post was provoked by discourse around Maus, that's sure as fuck not what people mean. god damn it. if Maus is upsetting, isn't it a good thing, considering the subject matter?

Honestly, i'd rather people not be traumatized by descriptions and depictions of the Holocaust. At the end of the day, trauma is a very unuseful response to historical atrocities, especially ones that people are interested in repeating on different groups nowadays. What i want is for people to be very, very angry that it happened, and dedicated to keeping it from happening again.

If people are traumatized about depictions of the holocaust, how are they going to be able to engage with news stories about genocides worldwide? Are they going to be able to do something about it? the answer here isn't necessarily "no", but engaging with stuff even tangential to one's trauma is much harder on the person doing it than just like engaging with something painful and angering but which isn't checking the trauma boxes, I guess.

Someone else pointed out that secondhand trauma is a thing, though, so I am gonna walk it back a little bit and say that it's... possible for some people to be traumatized by descriptions/depictions of things that happened in real life. I just don't think that people reading Maus are going to be traumatized by that.

....also this is just a personal experience but I didn't feel like Maus was that, uh... not sure how to put it. It was heavy and it was detailed, but it wasn't so heavy or so detailed that I even had to put it down, and I grew up in an American Jewish household with the whole legacy of the holocaust hanging over my head, you know? I've read other accounts on the subject that I literally couldn't finish. Maus was not one. I'm not trying to put Maus down, but like, if you're gonna claim to be traumatized about depictions of the holocaust i feel like it's kind of insulting to the actual legacy of the holocaust to say it about the version with cartoon mice and not, like, something with photographs of emaciated corpses or piles of confiscated shoes in glossy paper on every ten pages, you know?

[urmomsstuntdouble]

Congrats on 100, can you do a Headcanon on Imperial!Russia?

ahh sorry this took me so long! i’ve been a little busy and i had to do some research, so that’s why. im not the most familiar with this period of history or russia as a character, but i hope it’s not so bad!

The first thing that I thought of when I got this ask was what effects does imperialism have on the empire in hetalia? Imperialism isn’t very heavily explored in canon, although it is portrayed as being a somewhat negative thing- Both for the empire and the other nations they interact with. I think imperialism in hetalia causes a lot of trauma for everyone involved, although it would be worse for the empire if they are a contiguous land empire, like Russia. All the adjustments that come from ethnic Russians moving into new territory (forcibly or not), and of the Russification of central Asia and Siberia were painful. as it resulted in a lot of conflicts between the Russians and the indigenous peoples of those lands, who were now tasked with assimilating. Assimilation is of course painful for those who are forced to go through it, but also for the nations who are being assimilated to anyway (I sort of talked about this before regarding America, if you’d like deeper thoughts, because it’s kind of complex and i dont want to just make this post be about what imperialism does to a bitch) 

Religion was deeply important to him, and often caused a lot of emotional distress, specifically where Lithuania (who i hc as being Jewish) is concerned. The golden age of the Russian empire featured a lot of very antisemitic laws- Specifically under Catherine the Great, who’s often credited with being like. The woman who modernized/westernized Russia. Anyway, i think his relationship with Lithuania was really difficult for him to deal with, because Lithuania couldn’t just be okay with the treatment of their people (and religion), and that made it hard for them to be okay being around Russia. However, Russia considered them to be close friends, which was just sort of painful for both parties. (side note a fic that i think really encapsulates the dynamic between russia and lithuania during the russian empire would be this fic by @still-intrepid)

Though not all of Russia’s trauma stems from the empire years, it contributed pretty heavily and the longevity of the empire, followed immediately by WW1, a communist revolution, and the Soviet Union meant that he never really had time to process a lot of the things that happened to him/a lot of his issues that originated during the Russian Empire. 

I think one of these issues is that he is Russia, and represents all Russians, and could possibly be used as a tool by possible insurgents to be like. Their figurehead or whatever. The government was naturally untrusting of him, which is part of why he’s so friendly to everyone he meets. He can’t come across as unsympathetic to a person he’s interacting with, lest they assume bad about him and send him to Siberia or something along those lines. 

This was when his drinking started to become a problem, mostly in the form of spiked tea. 

Though he really likes vodka as a drink tea is just as near and dear to his heart

The Napoleonic Wars were really traumatic for him because of all the slash and burning done by Russian troops. Though he fought in those wars, he was really not a fan of how they had to burn all those villages and crops down. 

Samovar is a good word. Ivan loves samovars. 

I think this period would also be a time when Ivan had a big growth spurt- I think he’s around 2 meters tall, but a lot of that didn’t come until the 18th and 19th centuries, because that’s when Russia really emerged onto the world stage and became the enormous (3rd largest empire in world history, 2nd largest land empire) country that it is today. 

Ivan’s weight today is more evenly split between muscle and fat, but during the empire, I think he had much less fat on his body, and was a bit muscular but not as much as what he has today. This is both because of the conquest of new lands and absolute rule, as well as that around 95% of the population was made of starving peasants, which. I think is enough to make Ivan a bit skinny, but not skin and bones, as he still had to do a lot of manual labor. 

He made a lot of enemies during this period, and yeah the Baltics were some of them, but there were even more enemies to be made in Central Asia during the Great Game. Most of the stan countries (but Afghanistan and Kazakhstan in particular) still hold resentment for this. 

During the Russo-Japanese War, there was a lot of pressure on Russia to win- people were beginning to lose faith in the monarchy, and it was sort of seen as a war that Russia needed to win in order to keep the peasants from hating the government- like a military victory they needed in order to unify the country. When Japan won, Ivan was subjected to a lot of hatred both from his bosses and his people, each believing that he was on the other’s side

idk if you consider the Soviet Union to be part of Russian imperialism (I personally would argue that it was but idk if everyone thinks that or if that’s what you mean when you say imperial russia) so i’m not really going to touch on that but if you want soviet headcanons i have vague machinations

ok i think that’s it? honestly i kind of struggled with this because i don’t have the best grasp on Russia’s character, although I do think he’s very interesting. i hope that all this was neat, and once again I’m sorry for how long it took me to write! 

writing requests

[zombiesun]

☕️ cartoon suns and also your spirituality

I was making a post about how I wanted red liberty spikes and as I was typing that post I realized if you added orange and yellow in an ombre then it would look like a cartoon sun and it just revolutionized me. I don't have that hairstyle (yet) but I thought the turn of phrase "cartoon sun" was cute and then I started feeling an affinity for cartoon suns and have kind of phased them into my aesthetic. I also inherited my sister's sun shaped wall hanging "Charlie" so it feels fated. I also identify heavily with the idea of a "sun" person I love warmth, love, and lazy days napping in the grass. It's everything I want to personify as an individual. 

*** 

My spirituality and my personal definition of it has changed a lot this year so I hope this answer comes across concisely. I think to fully explain it though, I have to mention that my religious background is a very toxic evangelical cult. I never identified as a Christian (I had very early dreams of hell/separation from g-d which I/my family took to mean that I was spiritually fucked but eventually was revealed that I just would be working for a very different patron) My mother is  Jewish but had to convert to Christianity before my father would marry her and even though she does find her faith fulfilling I was never able to experience my heritage. I felt like religion and the g-d had personally wronged me and I was a very "if you ever see me and g-d at a Denny's parking lot I'm ripping his throat out and making him watch" for years.

I experimented with Judaism and was considering joining a synagogue as a way with reconnecting with my roots but everything changed when I started going to therapy. I was healing emotional wounds and a lot of my limiting beliefs/trauma dissolving showed me parts of me that I hadn't explored. I know "empath" isn't a credible term right now but one of my earliest, defining spiritual moments was when I was around 8-9 and my mother informed me that I had the gift of “insight” and would be able to feel people’s emotions/speak into people’s souls in a way that would never be reciprocated/leave me feeling resentful in every intimate relationship. She was right and a lot of my childhood/teenager years was spent in abusive/co-dependent relationships that drained me of my energy and left me feeling resentful and profoundly unloved because I knew things about other people but no one seemed capable of putting that same energy into me. 

As I was unpacking this in therapy, I started reclaiming that part of me in a way that I hadn’t been able to before.  I started getting into tarot and the spiritual community and the fact that you could ask for signs/items to prove the universe's interest in you. I asked for a deck of tarot cards because I didn't want to buy my own and soon after we had a deck donated to the thrift store I was working at that I bought for three bucks. I started asking for more things, a new place to rent, an altar (I found mine within a tree struck down by lightning) weed (I cannot stress how much weed I have manifested during this pandemic) food, people returning into my life, etc. After a few of those things worked/I started seeing daily synchronicities in my life I started studying more and experimenting with craft. I went from being someone who hoped for oblivion at best to believing that everything is connected, everything is cyclical, nothing is coincidence, and we hold the pulse of our own lives.

 I don't really have a label for these beliefs, and I'm still developing my path and direction in regards to who I want to work with and what I want to work toward. It That being said, it is the only faith in my life that has consistently given me proof and examples of its existence. I think as of now my core beliefs would be something like: this is not my first time living, everything in my life is meant to be, and if I will it then it will be.

[perfectlyvalid49]

So here’s the thing, I was going to take the time to go through this and refute it point by point in the hopes of changing your mind. And then I got to this:

“but they have (and likely still do) steal organs and tissue from Palestinians they have killed.”

With a link for evidence to Al Jazeera’s website. So, for one, that’s fucking blood libel, which has been used to get Jews killed since before Zionism existed, and two, Al Jazeera is Qatar’s state-run media outlet. Y’know, Qatar, whose government also issues textbooks that state that most Jews in the world believe in seeking world domination and that Judaism is an “invalid, perverted religion” and that the Torah teaches Jews to kill, steal, deceive, and engage in racial supremacy. If you can’t see that there might be some bias there, then your head is so far up your ass that you can see your own esophagus.

You may not consider yourself to be an antisemite, but you are one. That right there proves it. And I refuse to waste my time with you, so we’re just going to get out the bingo card.

Oh, so close to an actual bingo!

Other particularly egregious things that made me realize you’re not worth my time (speed round): • Comparing Zionism to Nazism – Holocaust inversion, which is antisemitic. • Citing Hamas, but anything from Israel is “Zionist narrative” – nope, no bias here. • “I don’t think that now, the time when antisemitism has spiked by hundreds of percent, and in part in reaction to people celebrating the deaths of over 1000 Jews, is the right time to center Jewish trauma – your own trauma.” Again, imagine saying this to any other minority group. You accuse me of conflating Judaism and Israel, but I, a non-Israeli Jew, can’t talk about my trauma because of what Israel is doing? Who is conflating the two now? • The Hague actually didn’t say it was genocide. They told Israel to provide aid (which it was already doing) and told Hamas to release the hostages (which it still has not done). South Africa is in political alliances with Israel’s enemies, and the UN as a body has consistently held Israel to a different, higher standard than any other country – but no, no bias here. • “Anyway, good for your representative. She sounds like the she has a conscience.” This is your statement about a person who deliberately withheld information from her constituents in order to get elected – that’s what you consider having a conscience? Lying in order to get your way? Makes me doubt the hell out of everything you’ve said about your personal experiences for sure. • Hitler was TRYING to eliminate every Jew on Earth. Israel is NOT TRYING to eliminate every Palestinian on Earth, or even in the territories it gained in 1967. If you can’t see the difference, it’s because you don’t want to. • Yes, evacuate the people, some of whom helped Hamas with their attack on October 7th, into Israel so they have free access to Israeli civilians. That sounds like a reasonable response to being attacked. Also, even if they did that then people like you would say “ethnic cleansing!” and be pissed at Israel anyway. • “I don't believe that any good can come from any religious ethnostate and certainly not one whose existence is reliant upon the ethnic cleaning and disenfranchisement of the indigenous people who have called that land home for thousands of years.” Fucking really? REALLY? Here’s a list of Muslim ethnostates that have ethnically cleansed their Jews (the majority of which fled as refugees to Israel) in the last 75 years: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syraa, Yemen, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Algeria, Morocco. Algeria, where are your Jews? There have been Jews in Iraq for over two thousand years, and their synagogues stand empty or destroyed today. Palestinian leadership has repeatedly expressed that Jews would not be welcome in a Palestinian Muslim ethnostate. It seems like you have different standards for the Jewish state than Muslim ones. I wonder why? (no I don’t, it’s antisemitism)

Map of the ethnic cleansing of Jews in MENA:

• “Jews can call their homeland wherever they come from.” That’s really interesting. Do you know how many times Jews in Europe have been told to “go back to where they came from?” They did. Now you’re mad about it. • You don’t get to define a group’s words and phrases for them. I have never, ever seen a Jew use it to mean anything other than solidarity in a time when we feel under attack. The only people who view it as a rallying cry for Palestinian oppression are people who are looking for a reason to attack Jews. And comparing it to a swastika is yet another example of holocaust inversion. • Ah yes, a ceasefire. I seem to recall there was one on October 6th and then something happened to break it. Can you remind me what that was? I’m sure it was those mean old nasty Israelis doing something terrible.

Fuck you too. You’re an antisemite in denial, and your ideal world will lead to yet another genocide of Jews. And you’ll call it righteous and feel good about yourself because those bad oppressors will have gotten what you think they deserve and your bloodlust will be satisfied until you find another group who you think deserves it. You can deny that all you want, but we know what to look for because we've seen it before. There is no difference between you and a Nazi that thought that the Jews had to die because they were oppressing the German people.

On being Jewish, and traumatized (It’s been 5 months and I want to talk):

Judaism is a joyous religion. So much of our daily practice is to focus us on the things that are good. I know that there’s a joke that all our holidays can be summed up as “they tried to kill us. We survived – let’s eat!”, and you might think that holidays focused on attempts at killing us might be somber, but they’re really not. Most are celebrated in the sense of, “we’re still here, let’s have a party!” When I think about practicing Judaism, the things I think about make me happy.

But I think a lot of non-Jews don’t necessarily see Judaism the same way. I think in part it’s because we do like to kvetch, but I think a lot of it is because from the outside it’s harder to see the joy, and very easy to see the long history of suffering that has been enacted on the Jewish people. From the inside, it’s very much, “we’re still here, let’s party” and from the outside it’s, “how many times have they tried to kill you? Why are you celebrating? They tried to KILL YOU!”

And I want to start with that because a lot of the rest of this is going to be negative. And I don’t want people to read it and wonder why I still want to be Jewish. I want to be Jewish because it makes me happy. My problem isn’t with being Jewish, it’s with how Jews are treated.

What I really wanted to write about is being Jewish and the trauma that’s involved with that right now.

First, I want to talk about Israeli Jews. I can’t say much here because I’m not Israeli, nor do I have any close friends or family that are Israeli. But if I’m going to be talking about the trauma Jews are experiencing right now, I can’t not mention the fact that Israeli Jews (and Israelis that aren’t Jewish as well, but that’s not my focus here) are dealing with massive amounts of it right now. It’s a tiny country – virtually everyone has a friend or family member that was killed or kidnapped, or knows someone who does. Thousands of rockets have been fired at Israel in the last few months – think about the fact that the Iron Dome exists and why it needs to. Terror attacks are ongoing; I feel like there’s been at least one every week since October. Thousands of people are displaced from their homes, either because of the rocket fire, or because their homes and communities were physically destroyed in the largest pogrom in recent history – the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust ended. If that’s not trauma inducing, I don’t know what is.

And there is, of course, the generational trauma. And I think Jewish generational trauma is interesting because it’s so layered. Because it’s not just the result of one trauma passed down through the generations. Every 50-100 years, antisemitism intensifies, and so very frequently the people experiencing a traumatic event were already suffering from the generational trauma that their grandparents or great grandparents lived through. And those elders were holding the generational trauma from the time before that. And so on.

And because it happens so regularly, there’s always someone in the community that remembers the last time. We are never allowed the luxury of imagining that we are safe. We know what happened before, and we know that it happened again and again and again. And so we know that it only makes sense to assume it will happen in the future. The trauma response is valid. I live in America because my great grandparents lived in Russia and they knew when it was time to get the hell out in the 1900s. And the reason they knew that is because their grandparents remembered the results of the blood libels in the 1850s. How can we heal when the scar tissue keeps us safe?

I look around now and wonder if we’ll need to run. We have a plan. I repeat, my family has a plan for what to do if we need to flee the country due to religious persecution. How can that possibly be normal? And yet, all the Jewish families I know have similar plans. It is normal if you’re Jewish. Every once in a while I see someone who isn’t Jewish talk about making plans to leave because they’re LGBTQ or some other minority and the question always seems to be, “should I make a plan?” It astounds me every time. The Jewish answer is that you need to have a plan and the only question is, “when should I act?” Sometimes our Jewish friends discuss it at play dates. Where will you go? What are the triggers to leave? No one wants to go any earlier then they have to. Everyone knows what the price of holding off too long might be.

I want to keep my children safe. When do I induct them into the club? When do I let my sweet, innocent kids know that some people will hate them for being Jewish? When do I teach them the skills my parents and grandparents taught me? How to pass as white, how to pass as Christian, knowing when to keep your mouth shut about what you believe. When do I tell them about the Holocaust and teach them the game “would this person hide me?” How hard do I have to work to remind them that while you want to believe that a person would hide you, statistically, most people you know would not have? Who is this more traumatic for? Them, to learn that there is hatred in the world and it is directed at them, or me, to have to drive some of the innocence out of my own children’s eyes in order to make sure they are prepared to meet the reality of the world?

And the reality of the world is that it is FULL of antisemitism. There’s a lot of…I guess I’d call it mild antisemitism that’s always present that you just kinda learn to ignore. It’s the sort of stuff that non-Jews might not even recognize as antisemitic until you explain it to them, just little micro-aggressions that you do your best to ignore because you know that the people doing it don’t necessarily mean it, it’s just the culture we live in. It can still hurt though. I like to compare it to a bruise: you can mostly ignore it, but every once in a while something (more blatant antisemitism) will put a bit to much pressure on it and you remember that you were already hurting this whole time.

On top of the background antisemitism, there’s more intense stuff. And usually the most intense, mask off antisemitism comes from the right. This makes sense, in that a lot of right politics are essentially about hating the “other” and what are Jews if not Western civilizations oldest type of “other”? On the one hand, I’ve always been fortunate enough to live in relatively liberal areas so this sort of antisemitism has felt far away and impersonal – they hate everybody, and I’m just part of everybody. On the other hand, until recently I’ve always considered this the most dangerous source of antisemitism. This is the antisemitism that leads to hate crimes, that leads to synagogue shootings. This is the reason why my synagogue is built so that there is a long driveway before you can even see the building, and that driveway is filled with police on the high holidays. This is the reason why my husband and I were scared to hang a mezuzah in our first apartment (and second, and third). For a long time, this was the antisemitism that made me afraid.

But the left has a problem with antisemitism too. And it has always been there. Where the right hates the “other”, the left hates the “privileged/elite/oppressors.” It’s the exact same thing, just dressed up with different words. They all mean “other” and “other” means “Jew.” It hurts more coming from the left though. A lot of Jewish philosophy leans left. A lot of Jews lean left. So when the left decides to hate us, it isn’t a random stranger, it’s a friend, and it feels like a betrayal.

One of the people I follow works for Yad Vashem, and a few weeks ago she mentioned a video they have with testimonies from people who came to Israel after Kristallnacht, with an unofficial title of “The blow came from within.” The idea is that to non-German Jews, the Holocaust was something done by strangers. It was still terrible, but it is easier to bear the hate of a stranger – it’s not personal. But to German Jews, the Holocaust was a betrayal. It wasn’t done by strangers, it was done by coworkers, and neighbors and people they thought were friends. It was done by people who knew them, and still looked at them and said, “less than human.” And because of this sense of betrayal, German survivors, or Germans who managed to get out before they got rounded up, had a very different experience than other Holocaust victims.

And I feel like a lot of left leaning Jews are having a similar experience now. People that we’ve marched with or organized with, or even just mutuals that we’ve thought of as friends are now going on about how Jews are evil. They repeat antisemitic talking points from the Nazis and from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and when we point out that those ideas have only led to Jewish death in the past they don’t care. And if someone you thought of as a friend thinks of you this way, what do you think a stranger might think? Might do?

The Jews are fucking terrified. I’ve seen a post going around that basically wonders if this was what it was like for our ancestors – when things got bad enough to see what was coming but before it was too late to run? And we can see what’s coming. History tells us that they way people are talking and acting only leads to one place. I’m a millennial – when I was a kid the grandparents at my synagogue made sure the kids knew – this is what it looked like before, this is what you need to watch out for, this is when you need to run. I wonder where to run to. It feels like nowhere is safe.

I feel like I’ve been lucky in all this. I don’t live in Israel. I have family and acquaintances who do, but no one I’m particularly close to. Everyone I know in real life has either been sane or at least silent about all of this (the internet has been significantly worse, but when it comes to hate, the internet is always worse). I live in a relatively liberal area – there’s always been antisemitism around anyway, but it’s mostly just been swastikas on flyers, or people advocating for BDS, not anything that’s made me actually worry for my safety. But in the last 5 months there have been bomb threats at my synagogue, and just last week a kid got beat up for being Jewish at our local high school. He doesn’t want to report it. He’s worried it will make it worse.

I bought a Magen David to wear in November. At the time it seemed like the best way to fight antisemitism was to be visibly Jewish, to show that we’re just normal people like everyone else. Plus, I figured that if me being Jewish was going to be a problem for someone, then I would make it a problem right away and not waste time. I’ve worn it almost constantly since, but the one time I took it off was when I burnt my finger in December and had to go to urgent care. I didn’t think about it too much when I did it, but I thought about it for a long time after – I didn’t feel good about having made that choice.

The conclusion I came to is that the training that my elders had been so careful to instill in me kicked in. I was hurt, and scared, and the voice inside my head that sounds like my grandmother said, “don’t give them a reason to be bad to you. Fight when you’re well, but for now – survive.” It still felt cowardly, but it was also a connection to my ancestors who heeded the same voice well enough to survive. And it enrages me that that voice has been necessary in the past. And it enrages me that things are bad enough now that my instinct is that I need to hide who I am to receive appropriate medical care.

I wish I had some sort of final thought to tie this all together other than, “this sucks and I hate it,” but I really don’t. I could call for people to examine their antisemitic biases, but I’m not foolish enough to think that this will reach the people who need to do so. I could wish for a future where everything I’ve talked about here exists only in history books, and the Jewish experience is no longer tied to feeling this pain, but that’s basically wishing for the moshiach, and I’m not going to hold my breath.

I guess I’ll end it with the thought that through all of this hate and pain and fear, we’re still here. And we’re still joyful as well. As much as so many people have tried over literally THOUSANDS of years to eradicate us, I’m still here, I’m still Jewish, and being Jewish still makes me happy.

Am Yisrael Chai.

[blackfreethinkers]

A racial realist IS a white supremacist!!!

By Greg Miller

In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.

After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.

Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.”

When challenged on these views by subordinates, Trump has invariably responded with indignation. “He would say, ‘No one loves Black people more than me,’ ” a former senior White House official said. The protests rang hollow because if the president were truly guided by such sentiments he “wouldn’t need to say it,” the official said. “You let your actions speak.”

In Trump’s case, there is now a substantial record of his actions as president that have compounded the perceptions of racism created by his words.

Over 3½ years in office, he has presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights, endangering decades of progress against voter suppression, housing discrimination and police misconduct.

His immigration policies hark back to quota systems of the 1920s that were influenced by the junk science of eugenics, and have involved enforcement practices — including the separation of small children from their families — that seemed designed to maximize trauma on Hispanic migrants.

With the election looming, the signaling behind even second-tier policy initiatives has been unambiguous.

After rolling back regulations designed to encourage affordable housing for minorities, Trump declared himself the champion of the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” He ordered aides to revamp racial sensitivity training at federal agencies so that it no longer refers to “White privilege.” In a speech at the National Archives on Thursday, Trump vowed to overhaul what children are taught in the nation’s schools — something only states have the power to do — while falsely claiming that students are being “fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism.”

The America envisioned by these policies and pronouncements is one dedicated to preserving a racial hierarchy that can be seen in Trump’s own Cabinet and White House, both overwhelmingly white and among the least diverse in recent U.S. history.

Trump’s push to amplify racism unnerves Republicans who have long enabled him

Scholars describe Trump’s record on race in historically harsh terms. Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, compared Trump to Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln as president and helped Southern Whites reestablish much of the racial hegemony they had seemingly lost in the Civil War.

“Johnson made it clear that he was really the president of a few people, not the American people,” Anderson said. “And Trump has done the same.”

A second White House official who worked closely with Trump quibbled with the comparison, but only because later Oval Office occupants also had intolerant views.

“Woodrow Wilson was outwardly a white supremacist,” the former official said. “I don’t think Trump is as bad as Wilson. But he might be.”

White House officials vigorously dispute such characterizations.

“Donald Trump’s record as a private citizen and as president has been one of fighting for inclusion and advocating for the equal treatment of all,” said Sarah Matthews, a White House spokeswoman. “Anyone who suggests otherwise is only seeking to sow division.”

No senior U.S. official interviewed could recall Trump uttering a racial or ethnic slur while in office. Nor did any consider him an adherent of white supremacy or white nationalism, extreme ideologies that generally sanction violence to protect White interests or establish a racially pure ethno-state.

White House officials also pointed to achievements that have benefited minorities, including job growth and prison-sentence reform.

But even those points fade under scrutiny. Black unemployment has surged disproportionately during the coronavirus pandemic, and officials said Trump regretted reducing prison sentences when it didn’t produce a spike in Black voter support.

And there are indications that even Trump’s allies are worried about his record on race. The Republican Party devoted much of its convention in August to persuading voters that Trump is not a racist, with far more Black speakers at the four-day event than have held top White House positions over the past four years.

This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials, including some who have had daily interactions with the president, as well as experts on race and members of white supremacist groups. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing a desire to provide candid accounts of events and conversations they witnessed without fear of retribution.

Coded racial terms

Most attributed Trump’s views on race and conduct to a combination of the prevailing attitudes of his privileged upbringing in the 1950s in what was then a predominantly White borough of New York, as well as a cynical awareness that coded racial terms and gestures can animate substantial portions of his political base.

The perspectives of those closest to the president are shaped by their own biases and self-interests. They have reason to resist the idea that they served a racist president. And they are, with few exceptions, themselves White males.

Others have offered less charitable assessments.

Omarosa Manigault Newman, one of the few Black women to have worked at the White House, said in her 2018 memoir that she was enlisted by White House aides to track down a rumored recording from “The Apprentice” — the reality show on which she was a contestant — in which Trump allegedly used the n-word. A former official said that others involved in the effort included Trump adviser Hope Hicks and former White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.

The tape, if it exists, was never recovered. But Manigault Newman, who was forced out after clashing with other White House staff, portrayed the effort to secure the tape as evidence that aides saw Trump capable of such conduct. In the book, she described Trump as “a racist, misogynist and bigot.”

Mary L. Trump, the president’s niece, has said that casual racism was prevalent in the Trump family. In interviews to promote her recently published book, she has said that she witnessed her uncle using both anti-Semitic slurs as well as the n-word, though she offered few details and no evidence.

Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, has made similar allegations and calls Trump “a racist, a predator, a con man” in a newly published book. Cohen accuses Trump of routinely disparaging people of color, including former president Barack Obama. “Tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a s---hole,” Trump said, according to Cohen.

These authors did not provide direct evidence of Trump’s racist outbursts, but the animus they describe aligns with the prejudice Trump so frequently displays in public.

In recent months, Trump has condemned Black Lives Matter as a “symbol of hate” while defending armed White militants who entered the Michigan Capitol, right-wing activists who waved weapons from pickup trucks in Portland and a White teen who shot and killed two protesters in Wisconsin.

Trump has vowed to safeguard the legacies of Confederate generals while skipping the funeral of the late congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights icon, and retweeted — then deleted — video of a supporter shouting “White power” while questioning the electoral eligibility of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the nation’s first Black and Asian American candidate for vice president from a major party. In so doing, Trump reanimated a version of the false “birther” claim he had used to suggest that Obama may not have been born in the United States.

These add to an already voluminous record of incendiary statements, including his tweet that minority congresswomen should “go back” to their “crime infested” countries despite being U.S.-born or U.S. citizens, and his claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” after torch-carrying white nationalists staged a violent protest in Charlottesville.

In a measure of Trump’s standing with such organizations, the Stormfront website — the oldest and largest neo-Nazi platform on the Internet — recently issued a call to its followers to mobilize.

“If Trump doesn’t win this election, the police will be abolished and Blacks will come to your house and kill you and your family,” the site warned. “This isn’t about politics anymore, it is about basic survival.”

As the election approaches, Trump has also employed apocalyptic language. He recently claimed that if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected, police departments will be dismantled, the American way of life will be “abolished” and “no one will be SAFE.”

Given the country’s anguished history, it is hard to isolate Trump’s impact on the racial climate in the United States. But his first term has coincided with the most intense period of racial upheaval in a generation. And the country is now in the final stretch of a presidential campaign that is more explicitly focused on race — including whether the sitting president is a racist — than any election in modern American history.

Biden has seized on the issue from the outset. In a video declaring his candidacy, he used images from the clashes in Charlottesville, and said he felt compelled to run because of Trump’s response. He has called Trump the nation’s first racist president and pledged to use his presidency to heal divisions that are a legacy of the country’s “original sin” of slavery.

Exploiting societal divisions

Trump has confronted allegations of racism in nearly every decade of his adult life. In the 1970s, the Trump family real estate empire was forced to settle a Justice Department lawsuit alleging systemic discrimination against Black apartment applicants. In the 1980s, he took out full-page ads calling for the death penalty against Black teens wrongly accused of a rape in Central Park. In the 2000s, Trump parlayed his baseless “birther” claim about Obama into a fervent far-right following.

As president, he has cast his record on race in grandiose terms. “I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said July 22, a refrain he has repeated at least five times in recent months.

None of the administration officials interviewed for this story agreed with Trump’s self-appraisals. But several sought to rationalize his behavior.

Some argued that Trump only exploits societal divisions when he believes it is to his political advantage. They pointed to his denunciations of kneeling NFL players and paeans to the Confederate flag, claiming these symbols matter little to him beyond their ability to rouse supporters.

“I don’t think Donald Trump is in any way a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi or anything of the sort,” a third former senior administration official said. “But I think he has a general awareness that one component of his base includes factions that trend in that direction.”

Studies of the 2016 election have shown that racial resentment was a far bigger factor in propelling Trump to victory than economic grievance. Political scientists at Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts, for example, examined the election results and found that voters who scored highly on indexes of racism voted overwhelmingly for Trump, a dynamic particularly strong among non-college-educated Whites.

Several current and former administration officials, somewhat paradoxically, cited Trump’s nonracial biases and perceived limitations as exculpatory.

Several officials said that Trump is not a disciplined enough thinker to grasp the full dimensions of the white nationalist agenda, let alone embrace it. Others pointed out that they have observed him making far more offensive comments about women, insisting that his scorn is all-encompassing and therefore shouldn’t be construed as racist.

“This is a guy who abuses people in his cabinet, abuses four-star generals, abuses people who gave their life for this country, abuses civil servants,” the first former senior White House official said. “It’s not like he doesn’t abuse people that are White as well.”

Nearly all said that Trump places far greater value on others’ wealth, fame or loyalty to him than he does on race or ethnicity. In so doing, many raised a version of the “some of my best friends are Black” defense on behalf of the president.

When faced with allegations of racism in the 2016 campaign, Trump touted his friendship with boxing promoter Don King to argue otherwise. Administration officials similarly pointed to the president’s connection to Black people who have praised him, worked for him or benefited from his help.

They cited Trump’s admiration for Tiger Woods and other Black athletes, the political support he has received from Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and other Black lawmakers, the president’s fondness for Ja’Ron Smith, who as assistant to the president for domestic policy is the highest-ranking Black staffer at the White House, and his pardon of Black criminal-justice-reform advocate Alice Marie Johnson, expunging her 1996 conviction for cocaine trafficking.

In his speech at the Republican National Convention, Scott used his personal story of bootstrap success to emphasize the ways that Republican policies on taxes, school choice and other issues create opportunities for minorities.

Trump “has fought alongside me” on such issues, Scott said, urging voters “not to look simply at what the candidates say, but to look back at what they’ve done.”

For all the prominence that Scott and other Black Trump supporters were given at the convention, there has been no corresponding representation within the Trump administration.

The official photo stream of Trump’s presidency is a slide show of a commander in chief surrounded by White faces, whether meeting with Cabinet members or posing with the latest intern crop.

From the outset, his leadership team has been overwhelmingly White. A Washington Post tally identified 59 people who have held Cabinet positions or served in top White House jobs including chief of staff, press secretary and national security adviser since Trump took office.

Only seven have been people of color, including Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who are of Lebanese heritage. Only one — Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development — is Black.

Under Trump, the nation’s federal courts have also become increasingly White. Of the 248 judges confirmed or nominated since Trump took office, only eight were Black and eight were Hispanic, according to records compiled by NPR News.

Retreating from civil rights

Trump can point to policy initiatives that have benefited Black or other minority groups, including criminal justice reforms that reduced prison sentences for thousands of Black men convicted of nonviolent, drug-related crimes.

About 4,700 inmates have been released or had their sentences reduced under the First Step Act, an attempt to reverse the lopsided legacy of the drug wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which disproportionately targeted African Americans. But this policy was championed primarily by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and former officials said that Trump only agreed to support the measure when told it might boost his low poll numbers with Black voters.

Months later, when that failed to materialize, Trump “went s---house crazy,” one former official said, yelling at aides, “Why the hell did I do that?”

Manigault Newman was similarly excoriated when her efforts to boost funding for historically Black colleges failed to deliver better polling numbers for the president, officials said. “You’ve been at this for four months, Omarosa,” Trump said, according to one adviser, “but the numbers haven’t budged.” Manigault Newman did not respond to a request for comment.

White House officials cited other initiatives aimed at helping people of color, including loan programs targeting minority businesses and the creation of “opportunity zones” in economically distressed communities.

Trump has pointed most emphatically to historically low Black unemployment rates during his first term, arguing that data show they have fared better under his administration than under Obama or any other president.

But unemployment statistics are largely driven by broader economic trends, and the early gains of Black workers have been wiped out by the pandemic. Blacks have lost jobs at higher rates than other groups since the economy began to shut down. The jobless rate for Blacks in August was 13 percent, compared with 7.3 percent for Whites — the highest racial disparity in nearly six years.

Neither prison reform nor minority jobs programs were priorities of Trump’s first term. His administration has devoted far more energy and political capital to erecting barriers to non-White immigrants, dismantling the health-care policies of Obama and pulling federal agencies back from civil rights battlegrounds.

Under Trump, the Justice Department has cut funding in its Civil Rights Division, scaled back prosecutions of hate crimes, all but abandoned efforts to combat systemic discrimination by police departments and backed state measures that deprived minorities of the right to vote.

Weeks after Trump took office, the department announced it was abandoning its six-year involvement in a legal battle with Texas over a 2011 voter ID law that a federal court had ruled unfairly targeted minorities.

Later, the department went from opposing, under Obama, an Ohio law that allowed the state to purge tens of thousands of voters from its rolls to defending the measure before the Supreme Court.

The law was upheld by the court’s conservative majority. In a dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that voter rolls in African American neighborhoods shrank by 10 percent, compared with 4 percent in majority-White suburbs.

The Justice Department’s shift when faced with allegations of systemic racism by police departments has been even more stark.

After the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991, Congress gave the department new power to investigate law enforcement agencies suspected of engaging in a “pattern or practice” of systemic — including racist — misconduct. The probes frequently led to settlements that required sweeping reforms.

The authority was put to repeated use by three consecutive presidents: 25 times under Bill Clinton, 21 under George W. Bush and 25 under Obama. Under Trump, there has been only one.

The collapse has coincided with a surge in police killings captured on video, the largest civil rights protests in decades and polling data that suggests a profound turn in public opinion in support of the Black Lives Matter cause — though that support has waned in recent weeks as protests became violent in some cities.

A Justice Department spokesman pointed to nearly a dozen cases over the past three years in which the department has prosecuted hate crimes or launched racial discrimination lawsuits. In perhaps the most notable case, James Fields Jr., who was convicted of murder for driving his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, also pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges.

“The Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice is vigorously fighting race discrimination throughout the United States. Any assertion to the contrary is completely false,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband. “Since 2017, we have prosecuted criminal and civil race discrimination cases in all parts of the United States, and we will continue to do so.”

But the department has not launched a pattern or practice probe into any of the police departments involved in the killings that ignited this summer’s protests, including the May 25 death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, who asphyxiated after a White policeman kept him pinned to the ground for nearly eight minutes with a knee to his neck.

The department has opened a more narrow investigation of the officers directly involved in Floyd’s death. Attorney General William P. Barr called Floyd’s killing “shocking,” but in congressional testimony argued there was no reason to commit to a broader probe of Minneapolis or any other police force.

“I don’t believe there is systemic racism in police departments,” Barr said.

Deport, deny and discourage

Days after the 2016 election, David Duke, a longtime leader of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted that Trump’s win was “great for our people.” Richard Spencer, another prominent white nationalist figure, was captured on video leading a “Hail Trump” salute at an alt-right conference in Washington.

People with far-right views or white nationalist sympathies gravitated to the administration.

Michael Anton, who published a 2016 essay comparing the country’s course under Obama to that of an aircraft controlled by Islamist terrorists and called for an end to “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners,” became deputy national security adviser for strategic communication.

Ian Smith served as an immigration policy analyst at the Department of Homeland Security until email records showed connections with Spencer and other white supremacists. Darren Beattie worked as a White House speechwriter before leaving abruptly when CNN reported his involvement in a conference frequented by white nationalists.

Stephen K. Bannon, who for years used Breitbart News to advance an alt-right, anti-immigrant agenda, was named White House chief strategist, only to be banished eight months later after clashing with other administration officials.

Stephen Miller, by contrast, has survived a series of White House purges and used his position as senior adviser to the president to push hard-line policies that aim to deport, deny and discourage non-European immigrants.

While working for the Trump campaign in 2016, Miller sent a steady stream of story ideas to Breitbart drawn from white nationalist websites, according to email records obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In one exchange, Miller urged a Breitbart reporter to read “Camp of the Saints,” a French novel that depicts the destruction of Western civilization by rampant immigration. The book has become a touchpoint for white supremacist groups.

Miller was the principal architect of, and driving force behind, the so-called Muslim Ban issued in the early days of Trump’s presidency and the separation of migrant children from their parents along the border with Mexico. He has also worked behind the scenes to turn public opinion against immigrants and outmaneuver bureaucratic adversaries, officials said.

To blunt allegations of racism and xenophobia in the administration’s policies, Miller has sought to portray them as advantageous to people of color. In several instances, Miller directed subordinates to “look for Latinos or Blacks who have been victims of a crime by an immigrant,” then pressured officials at the Department of Homeland Security to tout these cases to the press, one official said. Families of some victims appeared as prominent guests of the president at the State of the Union address.

In 2018, as Miller sought to slash the number of refugees admitted to the United States, Pentagon officials argued that the existing policy was crucial to their ability to relocate interpreters and other foreign nationals who risked their lives to work with U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“What do you want? Iraqi communities across the United States?” Miller erupted during one meeting of National Security Council deputies, according to witnesses. The refugee limit has plunged since Trump took office, from 85,000 in 2016 to 18,000 this year.

In response to a request for comment from Miller, Matthews, the White House spokeswoman, said that “this attempt to vilify Stephen Miller with egregious and unfounded allegations from anonymous sources is shameful and completely unethical.”

As a descendant of Jewish immigrants, Miller is regarded warily by white supremacist organizations even as they applaud some of his actions.

“Our side doesn’t consider him one of us — for obvious reasons,” said Don Black, the founder of the Stormfront website, in an interview. “He’s kind of an odd choice to be the white nationalist in the White House.”

Trump’s presidency has corresponded with a surge in activity by white nationalist groups, as well as concern about the growing danger they pose.

Recent assessments by the Department of Homeland Security describe white supremacists as the country’s gravest domestic threat, exceeding that of the Islamic State and other terror groups, according to documents obtained by the Lawfare national security website and reported by Politico.

The FBI has expanded resources to tracking hate groups and crimes. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified Thursday that “racially motivated violent extremism” accounts for the bulk of the bureau’s domestic terrorism cases, and that most of those are driven by white supremacist ideology.

Major rallies staged by white nationalist organizations, which were already on the upswing just before the 2016 election, increased in size and frequency after Trump took office, according to Brian Levin, an expert on hate groups at California State University at San Bernardino.

The largest, and most ominous, was the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

On Aug. 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists, neo-fascists and Confederate sympathizers descended on the city. Purportedly there to protest the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, they carried torches and chanted slogans including “blood and soil” and “you will not replace us” laden with Klan and Nazi symbolism.

The event erupted in violence the next day, Saturday, when Fields, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, tossing bodies into the air. Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old Virginia native and peace activist, was killed.

Trump’s vacillating response in the ensuing days came to mark one of the defining sequences of his presidency.

Speaking from his golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., Trump at first stuck to a calibrated script: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” Then, improvising, he added: “on many sides, on many sides.”

In six words, Trump had drawn a moral equivalency between the racist ideology of those responsible for the Klan-like spectacle and the competing beliefs that compelled Heyer and others to confront hate.

Trump’s comments set off what some in the White House came to regard as a behind-the-scenes struggle for the moral character of his presidency.

John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who was just weeks into his job as White House chief of staff, confronted Trump in the corridors of the Bedminster club. “You have to fix this,” Kelly said, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “You were supporting white supremacists. You have to go back out and correct this.”

Gary Cohn, the White House economic adviser at the time, threatened to resign and argued that there were no “good people” among the ranks of those wearing swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” In a heated exchange, Cohn criticized Trump for his “many sides” comment, and was flummoxed when Trump denied that was what he had said.

“Not only did you say it, you continued to double down on it,” Cohn shot back, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “And if you want, I’ll get the transcripts.”

Trump relented that Monday and delivered the ringing condemnation of racism that Kelly, Cohn and others had urged. “Racism is evil,” he said, “and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups”

Aides were briefly elated. But Trump grew agitated by news coverage depicting his speech as an attempt to correct his initial blunder.

The next day, during an event at Trump Tower that was supposed to highlight infrastructure initiatives, Trump launched into a fiery monologue.

“You had a group on one side that was bad,” he said. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” By the end, the president appeared to be sanctioning racial divisions far beyond Charlottesville, saying “there are two sides to the country.”

For all their consternation, none of Trump’s top aides resigned over Charlottesville. Kelly remained in his job through 2018. Cohn stayed until March 2018 after being asked to lead the administration’s tax-reform initiative and reassured that he could share his own views about Charlottesville in public without retaliation from the president.

Kelly and Cohn declined to comment.

The most senior former administration official to comment publicly on Trump’s conduct on issues of race is former defense secretary Jim Mattis. After Trump responded to Black Lives Matter protests in Washington this summer with paramilitary force, Mattis responded with a blistering statement.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis said. “Instead, he tries to divide us.”

In some ways, Charlottesville represented a high-water mark for white nationalism in Trump’s presidency. Civil rights groups were able to use footage of the mayhem in Virginia to identify members of hate groups and expose them to their employers, universities and families.

“Charlottesville backfired,” Levin said. Many of those who took part, especially the alt-right leadership, “were doxed, sued and beaten back,” he said, using a term for using documents available from public records to expose individuals.

“When the door to the big political tent closed on these overtly white nationalist groups, many collapsed, leaving a decentralized constituency of loose radicals now reorganizing under new banners,” Levin said.

Some white nationalist leaders have begun to express disenchantment with Trump because he has failed to deliver on campaign promises they hoped would bring immigration to a standstill or perhaps even ignite a race war.

“A lot of our people were expecting him to actually secure the borders, build the wall and make Mexico pay for it,” Black said.

“Some in my circles want to see him defeated,” Black said, because they believe a Biden presidency would call less attention to the white nationalist movement than Trump has, while fostering discontent among White people.

But Black sees those views as dangerously shortsighted, failing to appreciate the extraordinary advantages of having a president who so regularly aligns himself with aspects of the movement’s agenda.

“Symbolically, he’s still very important,” Black said of Trump. “I don’t think he considers himself a white supremacist or a white nationalist. But I think he may be a racial realist. He knows there are racial differences.”

[jewish-privilege]

The storm over Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s latest comments — in which she said she got a “calming feeling” when thinking of the sacrifices Palestinians made in the creation of a safe haven for Jews after the Holocaust — have led to a slew of history lessons about the creation of Israel.

You can read here about the century-plus-long effort to create a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, and here about the violence with which the Jews were met from Palestinians when they did arrive, by the thousands, after facing systematic slaughter in Europe.

That’s a far cry from where the debate over the meaning of Tlaib’s comments on Yahoo’s Skullduggery podcast started, after she said, “There’s a kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence, in many ways, had been wiped out,” and that “just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post–the Holocaust, post–the tragedy, and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time.”

People like Reps. Steve Scalise and Liz Cheney seized on her use of the phrase “calming feeling” to cry anti-Semitism while blatantly misrepresenting her feelings about the Holocaust, which she called a “horror” and “tragedy.” But the debate is still wrong, and missing the point.

This entire episode — and the fact that this is at least the fourth time we're having this exact kind of ugly and fruitless discourse in the last six months — puts on display how willing operators of American politics in 2019 are to leave out the actual perspectives of people involved.

The lived experience of Palestinians — including the trauma of families who lived through the founding of Israel — has been largely absent from the debates on the endless Israeli–Palestinian conflict inside the corridors of power in the US. And now that it is present, people seem surprised to learn that Palestinian Americans actually have a different view. Meanwhile, non-Jewish commentators have chosen now to become the arbiters of what anti-Semitism entails. While there are times when allyship is valuable, removing Jewish voices from the center of the conversation around anti-Semitism does the exact opposite — it is disempowering, it is marginalizing, and it is dangerous.

Tlaib — the second Palestinian American member of Congress and the first woman — spoke in the most general of terms about trying to find some sort of unifying message in what Jews experienced after the Holocaust and what her family went through as the state of Israel took shape. Yes, she said that “all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post–the Holocaust, post–the tragedy, and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time,” but she also said moments later that Palestinians provided that haven “in a way that took their human dignity away, right, and it was forced on them.” If Tlaib is guilty of something, it’s oversimplifying a narrative in order to spread a, perhaps unwittingly empty, message of empathy, divorced from the entrenched politics that have governed the Israeli–Palestinian conflict both there, and in the US, for decades.

Seeing people try to squeeze Tlaib into the parameters of an absolutist, Twitter-driven debate about what is “right” or “wrong” to say about the Middle East is yet another feature of our contemporary political conversation that everything has to be simple. This dynamic showed up, in miniature and far from the life-and-death stakes of the West Bank, when the art world grappled with the firings of a host of women curators who had been brought in to make the art world less male: They were hired, celebrated, and promptly fired after they didn’t just stand there and be women, but actually tried to implement their visions.

For too long, messengers with no personal stake in the debate have been globbing onto — or sparking — scandals purely for their own gain, political or otherwise. This was the case when Meghan McCain called out Congress’s other Muslim woman representative, Ilhan Omar, in the wake of the deadly Poway synagogue shooting. Jews around this country are terrified at the increase in anti-Semitic attacks — two synagogue shootings in the span of six months harks to a degree of violence our parents and grandparents warned us about, but that we never thought we would see. We were not thinking about Omar’s tweets (problematic as some have been!) in that moment.

The same happened with Tlaib’s comments, which were eventually picked up by President Donald Trump, who yet again flung the anti-Semitism charge around with abandon. Those launching the accusations of anti-Semitism — mainly Republican practicing Christians (which, good for them!) — do not speak for Jews at large, more than 75% of whom voted Democrat in the midterms. It is wonderful — and important, and life-affirming — to have allies, particularly as anti-Semitic violence spikes throughout the country. But failing to include Jewish voices from the center of that conversation does the exact opposite. Those making the most outlandish rhetorical attacks do not suffer the worst of the backlash. Jews do.

What’s been lost in all the discussion on Tlaib’s comments is something that will probably have more of an effect in the long run. She spoke to it on the podcast, and later to Seth Meyers, where she described how she took her experience learning from the black people she grew up with in Detroit and learned how to speak on the Palestinian cause. “They constantly told me about the pain of oppression. They taught me about the history of segregation and feeling less than and dehumanized because they were black in America. And a lot of that — that lens — I bring to this issue, that’s how I talk about it,” she told Meyers. “The fact that we are dehumanizing a whole community ... it’s truly not going to lead to peace and equality and justice. And you have to, when you look at this issue, come from a place of values. People want to go ahead and jump and choose sides, not come from a place of values, because by the end you will choose the right side of history when you do that.”

Framing things that way is increasingly resonating with many young Americans who have grown up in an era with a lively social justice debate at home. Those who care about Israel’s future would be better off taking that into account, rather than shutting down the voices newly represented in US politics, and overpowering those with longer histories of representation.

Tlaib, her words, and how they’re being used in an escalating fight over who is or isn’t anti-Semitic show that something in American politics is changing. We just need to quickly figure out how best to think and talk about them.

[gayrefrain]

i’m watching BlacKKKlansman and I can’t get over how nuanced Spike Lee treats the white people in this movie. There are heroes (Flip, Trapp etc) but they’re not treated as Special or Saviors. They’re just decent. And Flip’s struggle as a Jewish man being part of the plan to invade the KKK is given great treatment, but the story never strays from Ron’s. A white director absolutely would have made this Flip’s story.

And the way it treats the Klansmen is also fascinating because they’re complex but still unforgivably racist. Felix and Connie are the best example, because we see them be a sweet couple but their moments are heavily soaked in them bashing people of color. We don’t get a scene where the audience explores the “trauma” that lead them to be the way they are. They’re just racist, and it’s not excused. 

[marxistlesbianist]

That's basically exactly how it went. He comes down pretty hard against the current "siege" of Gaza (which he at no point calls genocide) and criticizes celebrities showing thoughtless support for Israel, which is perhaps better than most American news coverage, but otherwise he portrays Hamas and Netanyahu's regiem as essentially rogue actors who just randomly started doing terrorisms at each other for no reason other than their mutual love of cruelty.

Highlights of the episode include:

Implying that nobody talking about the war on social media has anything of value to say.

Referring to spikes in both islamophobic and anti-semetic violence without a) mentioning the ratio of one to the other, or b) mentioning what liberal governments are or are not calling “anti-semetic.”

The whole of the how we got here section being just the sentence “I’m not going to talk about the thousands of years of generational trauma.”

Uncritically repeating Israel’s account of October 7th (specifically repeating the “largest loss of jewish lives since the holocaust” line).

Calling Hamas terrorists (a lot).

Portraying Hamas as an evil authoritarian party that stole power from the good Fatah party.

Blaming Hamas for the Oslo agreement’s failure to bring peace to the country.

Not mentioning why Hamas may have taken hostages.

Suggesting that Israeli violence toward Palestinians is a feature unique to Netanyahu’s governance.

Praising the Israeli citizens opposed to Netanyahu without mentioning what they actually think of Palestinians.

Suggesting that one could make arguments for or against US military support of Israel without elaboration.

And, of course, generally suggesting that the only real way forward is for everyone to put down their guns and just talk it out.

Of course, even at his best John Oliver is only a clueless social democrat who occasionally stumbles into a cogent critique of neoliberalism with no idea of how to actually fix things. This is not John Oliver at his best.

Opinion on John Oliver's hamas-israel segment?

difficult to think of anything in the world i would want to watch less