#possibly on account of the jewishness

[jakowskis]

checking ao3 for the thousandth time like can someone post about owen getting railed im having withdrawals n im tired of doin everything myself. well railed or psychologically wrecked im not picky

[envyfelled]

pro-palestine protesters being called antisemitic by zionists as the real and sole reason they must oppose Israel as some sort of gotcha! because the country they're protesting against actively committing genocide just happens to be predominantly jewish. it makes me beyond livid

[spale-vosver]

Fellas, is it "woke" for Christian to try and "reclam" the terms Crusade and holy war?

[chintzwife]

trying to make a medieval honey cake . . . . . im so sorry to the jewish people i now understand how hard you all have had it for centuries im so sorry

[prokopetz]

Since we're getting into "did you know that Santa's eight tiny reindeer are a reference to the eight legs of Odin's steed?" season once again, remember: while there are some elements of Christmas (or Hallowe'en, or Easter, or...) observations that are probably pre-Christian in origin, before one believes any of that this-is-really-100%-just-a-Pagan-holiday-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off stuff, one must consider all of the following possibilities:

Our earliest known records of the cited pre-Christian practices were written down by some random Christian monk centuries after the fact, and we genuinely have no idea how accurate this account is, to what extent the apparent similarities with Christian practice are due to the author deliberately or unwittingly putting a Christian spin on it, or indeed, whether they were just making shit up.

The similarities between the two sets of practices have been exaggerated or misrepresented by Christian writers who were bent for prefiguration theology (i.e., the idea that the Bible echoes backwards in time and pre-Christian religious practices were unwittingly imitating future Christian practices).

The similarities between the two sets of practices have been exaggerated or misrepresented by Protestant writers who believe that all Pagan deities are Satan in disguise, so they think that if they can prove that Catholic practices are secretly Pagan in origin, that proves that Catholics are secretly Satanists.

The similarities between the two sets of practices have been exaggerated or misrepresented by overzealous mythographers trying to prove that all mythology and religion throughout all of human history is secretly a single unified monomyth; if it's pre-Victorian, expect shades of prefiguration theology, while if it's post-Victorian, expect a lot of stuff about the Collective Unconscious.

A bunch of 19th Century proto-Fascists were trying to construct a pre-Jewish cultural identity (and considered Christianity to be tainted by association), but didn't want to give up any of the fun rituals, so they made some shit up about how it was still okay to do Christmas because something something Odin, or whatever.

A bunch of early 20th Century Pagan reconstructionists filled in the gaps in their understanding of pre-Christian ritual with culturally Christian assumptions, then turned around and pointed at their own accidentally Christianised reconstructions as evidence that Christian practices are derived from them.

A bunch of late 20th Century self-help manual authors tried to break into the occult bookstore market by uncritically repeating any or all of the above.

Someone on the Internet just made it up.

[artifacts-and-arthropods]

Child's Writing Exercises and Doodles, from Egypt, c. 1000-1200 CE: this was made by a child who was practicing Hebrew, creating doodles and scribbles on the page as they worked

This writing fragment is nearly 1,000 years old, and it was made by a child who lived in Egypt during the Middle Ages. Several letters of the Hebrew alphabet are written on the page, probably as part of a writing exercise, but the child apparently got a little bored/distracted, as they also left a drawing of a camel (or possibly a person), a doodle that resembles a menorah, and an assortment of other scribbles on the page.

This is the work of a Jewish child from Fustat (Old Cairo), and it was preserved in the collection known as the Cairo Genizah Manuscripts. As the University of Cambridge Library explains:

For a thousand years, the Jewish community of Fustat placed their worn-out books and other writings in a storeroom (genizah) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue ... According to rabbinic law, once a holy book can no longer be used (because it is too old, or because its text is no longer relevant) it cannot be destroyed or casually discarded: texts containing the name of God should be buried or, if burial is not possible, placed in a genizah.

At least from the early 11th century, the Jews of Fustat ... reverently placed their old texts in the Genizah. Remarkably, however, they placed not only the expected religious works, such as Bibles, prayer books and compendia of Jewish law, but also what we would regard as secular works and everyday documents: shopping lists, marriage contracts, divorce deeds, pages from Arabic fables, works of Sufi and Shi'ite philosophy, medical books, magical amulets, business letters and accounts, and hundreds of letters: examples of practically every kind of written text produced by the Jewish communities of the Near East can now be found in the Genizah Collection, and it presents an unparalleled insight into the medieval Jewish world.

Sources & More Info:

Cambridge Digital Library: Writing Exercises with Child's Drawings

Cambridge Digital Library: More About the Cairo Genizah Manuscripts

[jewish-sideblog]

I think people forget that the Nazis never said they were the bad guys. If someone says, hey, I’m evil! You don’t let them take over your country. They presented themselves as scientific, not hateful. By their own account, they were progressives, and the superiority of White Europe over the other races was a proven and immutable fact. They had scientists and archaeologists and historians to prove it. They didn’t tell people they wanted to kill the Jews because they were hateful. They manufactured evidence to frame us for very real tragedies, and they had methodological research to prove that we were genetically predisposed to misconduct. Wouldn’t you believe that?

Hollywood has spent the last 80 years portraying the Nazis as an obvious and intimidating evil. That’s a good thing in some ways, because we want general audiences to recognize that they were evil. But we also want them to be able to recognize how and why they came to power. Not by self-describing themselves as an evil empire, but by convincing people that they were the good guys and the saviors. They hosted the Olympics. Several European countries capitulated and volunteered themselves to the Empire. There were American and British Fascist Parties. They had broad public support. Hollywood never shows that part, so general audiences never learn to recognize the actual signs of antisemitism.

People today think they can’t possibly be antisemitic, because they’re leftist! They abhor bigotry! They could never comprehend Nazi ideology coming from the mouth of a bisexual college student wearing a graphic tee and jeans. How could they? The only depiction of antisemites they’ve ever seen have been gaunt, pale, middle-aged men in black leather trench coats with skulls on their caps.

If the Nazis time-travelled from the 1930s and wanted to take power now, they’d change their original tactics, but not by much. They would target countries suffering from an identity crisis and an economic collapse. They would portray themselves as the pinnacle of what that society considers progressive. Back then, it was race science. These days it’s performative wokeness. Once they’d garnered enough respect and reputation, they’d begin manufacturing propaganda and lies to manipulate people’s anger and fears at a single target— Jews.

If the Nazis made an actual return, they wouldn’t look like neo-Nazis. They wouldn’t be nearly as obvious about their hatred. Their evil wouldn’t give them yellow eyes, and no suspenseful music would play when they walked in the room. They’d be friendly. They’d look like you. They would learn what things your community fears and what things you already hate. They would lie and fabricate evidence to connect the rich elites and the imperialists you revile to a single source of unequivocal Jewish evil. It wouldn’t be hard— they already have two-thousand years of institutional antisemitism they can rely on to paint their picture.

If you’re curious why antisemitism today is coming from grassroots organizations, young, liberal college campuses, suburban neighborhoods with pride flags and All Are Welcome Here signs? That’s why. It’s because, as a global society, we’ve forgotten that the world didn’t used to see the Nazis as bad guys. And what is forgotten about history is doomed to be repeated.

[infiniteglitterfall]

A truly amazing "masks off" moment

Anyone else want "jew licking freak" on a T-shirt now?

This is from a tiny Twitter account that could be a bot. Or it could be an asshole who also claims to want peace for everyone and also is just REALLY into Pokemon.

(I looked through their account. For years it was mostly stuff about Pokemon games, and promoting their own also-tiny, now-private YouTube account, along with a smattering of political stuff. Now it's a little Pokemon, lots of angry commenting about I/P politics.)

The best thing about this is that Hen Mazzig is both Israeli and Jewish. But this person, like the entire rest of the Faux-Palestinian movement, assumes that all Israelis and Jews are "white" people with Ashkenazi names.

And Hen Mazzig is North African and Iraqi: part of the Mizrahi majority of Israel Jews.

So he didn't ping their Zionist Radar.

Instead, they assumed he was just... some "freak" who "licks Jews??"

big "race traitor" vibes from them tbh

From their older posts, I think they may be Saudi Arabian. So it's possible the vibes are intentional. Idk.

[kick-a-long]

Hey jumblr, here’s a life hack: mention on your profile that you report violent antisemitism to the FBI and NSA. If you are getting lots of hate for being Jewish publicly, this has worked really well for me. It also helps get them banned because when the FBI has a report they usually tip tumblr to watch the account so the user often gets banned anyway.

That way you can open your asks anonymously and probably send some scum to jail if not get them put on the no fly list as possible terrorists.

[elumish]

I just talked about why people should be engaging critically with entertainment media and specifically getting used to identifying specific patterns or rhetoric, so here is a very non-exhaustive list of things that I see (including in ostensibly progressive entertainment media spaces like fandom or queer books):

Framing representative democracy as bad, especially when contrasted with non-democratic/autocratic or anocratic rule (e.g., "good things can get done when there's just someone smart with all the power who can force decisions through without having to debate all the time")

Benevolent dictators / benevolent autocrats (e.g., "They're such a kind and intelligent ruler, so it's good that they have absolute decision making authority")

Blaming newcomers / immigrants for the degredation of traditions (e.g., "It's not that we don't want them here, it's just that they keep trying to change things instead of learning the ways we do things")

Imperialism as a means to "fix" or "improve" other societies (e.g., "they oppress women, so invading them, deposing their goverment, and adding them to the empire is good because it will help women")

Equating gender with body parts (e.g., "secondary gender" to indicate alpha / beta / omega in the omegaverse)

Equating body parts with personality traits (e.g., alphas being inherently more aggressive and omegas being inherently more submissive in the omegaverse)

Equating sexuality with personality traits (e.g., all asexual characters being shy or quiet)

Equating sexuality with gender (e.g., all asexual characters being female or non-binary)

Lack of accounting for women or queer people in worldbuilding (e.g., "that magical species just doesn't have gay people")

Regularly having Jewish characters celebrate Christmas

Excusing abusive behavior with a bad or sad backstory (e.g., "how could he help being fascist, he was bullied as a child")

Women (except for the FMC and possibly a friend) being uniformly catty, cruel, power-hungry, man-obsessed, and/or promiscuous adulterers

Black characters only existing to support white characters

Black female characters being presented as being too strong and independent to want or need a romantic relationship, especially while white female characters have happy and fulfilling romantic relationships

Associating low empathy with violent inclinations or behavior (e.g., "he just didn't feel empathy for anyone, and that's why he became a serial killer")

[doberbutts]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[whencyclopedia]

Eyewitness Accounts of the Holocaust

The Holocaust was the murder of 6 million Jewish people by the SS, Gestapo, and other organisations of Nazi Germany and its allies in the years prior to and through the Second World War (1939-45). Innocent men, women, and children were shot in mass executions, or, if not too young or too old, they were sent to labour camps where they worked until they could do so no longer. The ultimate fate of millions was to die in the gas chambers of extermination camps like Auschwitz in occupied Poland.

In this article, accounts are presented by those who witnessed the Holocaust genocide firsthand, both its victims and those involved in its execution who were obliged to give evidence in, for example, the post-war Nuremberg trials of 1945-6.

Unburied Corpses, Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp

Wislon-Oakes - Imperial War Museums (CC BY-NC-SA)

The Nazis & the Jews

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) established himself as the dictator of Nazi Germany in 1933, and he identified Jewish people as the main enemy of the state. Based on dubious and inconsistent racial theory as propounded by such Nazi figures as Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), Hitler and the Nazi Party began a propaganda campaign against German Jews, which presented them as an inferior race who were holding Germany back from achieving its full economic potential.

Hitler wanted to remove all Jews from German territory, but the first step was to identify who exactly was a Jew. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws loosely identified Jews since even having a single Jewish grandparent placed an individual in that category. A series of 'solutions' to what Hitler called the "Jewish problem" were rolled out, such as encouraging emigration and persecuting Jewish business owners. Jews were then attacked in such pogroms as the Kristallnacht of November 1938. Next, Jews were rounded up and obliged to live in segregated areas such as ghettos in cities or in concentration camps. Jews were deprived of citizenship and other basic rights.

From 1942, the Nazis began what was secretly described as the 'Final Solution', that is the plan to murder all European Jews. Jews were transported to labour camps where they worked on state projects until they died from disease, extreme malnutrition, or physical exhaustion. Other Jews, and those who could no longer work or were too young or too old to work, were transported directly to death camps like the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in occupied Poland where they were killed in gas chambers and their remains were communally cremated. Jews were not the only victims since the Nazis also targeted Romani people, Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Freemasons, homosexuals, political rivals, prisoners of war, and those with physical or mental disabilities, amongst others. In addition, hundreds of thousands more victims were murdered in mass executions in occupied territories during the Second World War by mobile killing squads known as Einsatzgruppen. The Jews made up by far the majority of those killed, and it is estimated that 6 million died in what is today called the Holocaust. The sheer scale of the Nazis' programme means that determining the precise number of victims is not possible.

Arrested Jews, Baden-Baden

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-86686-0008 (CC BY-SA)

Hugh Greene, a British newspaper journalist, recalls what he saw of the Kristallnacht in 1938:

I was in Berlin at that time and saw some pretty revolting sights – the destruction of Jewish shops, Jews being arrested and led away, the police standing by while the gangs destroyed the shops and even groups of well-dressed women cheering.

(Holmes, 42)

Avraham Aviel, a Polish Jew and survivor of a mass execution, gives the following account of his experience in May 1942:

We were all brought close to the cemetery at a distance of eighty to a hundred metres from a long, deep pit. Once again everybody was made to kneel. There was no possibility of lifting one's head. I sat more or less in the centre of the town people. I looked in front of me and saw the long pit then maybe groups of twenty, thirty people led to the edge of the pit, undressed probably so that they should not take their valuables with them. They were brought to the edge of the pit where they were shot and fell into the pit, one on top of another.

(Holmes, 319)

An anonymous survivor from a ghetto massacre in Lviv, Ukraine, in August 1942 gives the following description of its aftermath:

I went with my mother to the office of the Jewish community regarding an apartment and there in the light breeze, dangled the corpses of the hanged, their faces blue, their heads tilted backward, their tongues blackened and stretched out. Luxury cars raced in from the center of the city, German civilians with their wives and children came to see the sensational spectacle, and, as was their custom, the visitors enthusiastically photographed the scene. Afterwards the Ukrainians and Poles arrived by with greater modesty.

(Fiedländer, 436)

Nazi Classification of Jewish People

VolksVeritas (CC BY-SA)

Rivka Yoselevska, a Polish Jew, describes her experience and that of her family in the Hansovic ghetto massacre in August 1943:

Some of the younger ones I got out naked covered with blood…I was still alive. Where should I go? What should I do?

(Holmes, 320-1)

The SS lieutenant-colonel Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962), in charge of the Final Solution's transportation requirements, here lies to Jews to make sure they do not create trouble as they are transported by train from a ghetto to the concentration camps:

Jews: You have nothing to worry about. We want only the best for you. You'll leave here shortly and be sent to very fine places indeed. You will work there, your wives will stay at home, and your children will go to school. You will have wonderful lives.

(Bascomb, 6)

The death camps were deliberately located in remote Poland to provide the Final Solution project more secrecy. Rudolf Höss (1901-1947), a camp commandant at Auschwitz, stated:

We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.

(Neville, 49)

New Arrivals at Auschwitz

Bernard Walter (Public Domain)

The typical conditions of the train journeys to the camps are described here by Avraham Kochav, an Auschwitz survivor:

There were twenty to twenty-five cars in every train…I heard terrible cries. I saw how people attack other people so as to have a place to stand, how people push each other so that they could stand somewhere or so that they could have air for breathing. It was terribly, terribly stifling. The first to faint were the children, women, old men, they all fell down like flies.

(Holmes, 332)

Zygmunt Klukowski, a Polish hospital director, describes the train journeys for Jewish people sent to the Belzec extermination camp in occupied Poland:

On the way to Belzec the Jews experience many terrible things. They are aware of what will happen to them. Some try to fight back. At the railroad station in Szczebrzeszyn a young woman gave away a gold ring in exchange for a glass of water for her dying child. In Lublin people witnessed small children being thrown through windows of speeding trains. Many people are shot before reaching Belzec.

(Friedländer, 358)

Yaacov Silberstein, a Jewish teenager, describes his arrival at Auschwitz in October 1942:

When we arrived we saw how the Jews were running to the electrified fence. There they stuck. They were tired of life; they could not continue in this fashion.

(Holmes, 330)

Dr Lucie Adelsberger, a prisoner of Auschwitz, describes the processing of new arrivals destined for the labour camps:

We undressed, had our hair cut – no actually our heads were shaved to stubble; then came the showers and finally the tattoos. This was where they confiscated the very last vestiges of our belongings; nothing remained…no written document that could have identified us, no picture, no written message from a loved one. Our past was cut off, erased…

(Cesarini, 656)

Aerial View of Auschwitz

South African Air Force (Public Domain)

Bernd Naumann, a survivor from the Birkenau camp, describes the prevalence of rats in the camp:

They gnawed not only at corpses but also at the seriously sick. I have pictures showing women near death being bitten by rats.

(Neville, 50)

Seweryna Smaglewska, a prisoner in the Birkenau women's camp, describes the living conditions there:

There were no roads, no paths between the blocks. In the depths of these dark dens, in bunks like multi-storied cages, the feeble light of a candle burning here or there flickered over naked, emaciated figures curled up, blue from the cold, bent over a pile of filthy rags, holding their shaved heads in their hands, picking out an insect with their scraggly fingers and smashing it on the edge of the bunk – that is what the barracks looked like in 1942.

(Cesarini, 528)

The SS, which managed the camps, made sure there was a hierarchy amongst the prisoners such as trustees who survived a little longer than the rest by being 'favoured' with certain duties such as burning the bodies in the crematoriums or beating other prisoners. SS Lance Corporal Richard Bock, a guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau, recalls:

A block chief would call out the kapo very fiercely, 'Kapo, come here.' The kapo came over and – boom – he hit the kapo in the face so hard that he fell over…And then he said, 'Kapo, can't you beat them any better than that?' And the kapo ran off and grabbed a club to beat up the prisoner squad quite indiscriminately. 'Kapo, come over here,' he shouted again. The kapo came and he said, 'Finish them off,' and then he went off again and he finished the prisoners off, he beat them to death…a kapo had to beat and club to save his own life.

(Holmes, 325)

Luggage of Auschwitz Victims

Jorge Láscar (CC BY)

Those meant for the gas chambers were often unaware of their fate. Bock describes the procedure that he witnessed with a colleague called Holbinger who was responsible for the Zyklon B tins that would produce the lethal gas:

…the new arrivals had to get undressed, and then the order came, 'Prepare for disinfection'. There were enormous piles of clothing…Lots of them hid their children under the clothes and covered them up and then they shouted, 'Get ready' and they all went out, they had to run naked approximately twenty yards from the hall across to Bunker One. There were two doors standing open and they went in there and when a certain number had gone inside they shut the doors. That happened about three times, and every time Holbinger had to go out to his ambulance and they took out a sort of tin – he and one of his block chiefs – and then he climbed up the ladder and at the top there was a round hole and he opened the little round door and held the tin there and shook it and then he shut the little door again. Then a fearful screaming started up and approximately after about ten minutes it slowly went quiet…They opened the door…then a blue haze came out. I looked in and I saw a pyramid. They had all climbed up on top of each other…They were all tangled, they had to tug and pull very hard to disentangle all these people.

(Holmes, 334-5)

Dov Paisikowic, a Russian-Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, was part of the team responsible for taking bodies out of the chambers, removing valuables such as rings and gold teeth, and then taking the corpses to the crematoria. He recalls:

…the doors were suddenly opened to the gas chambers. People, naked people, started falling out. We were all frightened, no one dared ask what it all was. We were immediately taken to the other side of this house and there we saw hell on this earth – large piles of dead people, and people dragging these dead to a long pit, about thirty metres in length and ten metres in width. There was a huge fire there, with tree trunks. On the other side fat was being taken out of this pit with a bucket.

(Holmes, 335)

Thousands of detainees in the camps were subjected to unnecessary and often horrific medical operations and experiments. One of the most infamous SS doctors was Josef Mengele (1911-1979), who performed all kinds of macabre operations at Auschwitz. Mengele was, though, only one part of a large SS medical team, which operated in many different camps. Dr Franz Blaha, a Czech detainee at the Dachau concentration camp, was obliged to work in this area of Nazi terror, specifically performing autopsies. Blaha reported:

From the middle of 1941 to the end of 1942 some 500 operations on healthy prisoners were performed. These were for the instructions of the SS medical students and doctors and included operations on the stomach, gall bladder and throat. These were performed by students and doctors of only two years' training, although they were very dangerous and difficult….Many prisoners died on the operating table and many others from later complications…These persons were never volunteers but were forced to submit to such acts.

(MacDonald, 59)

Auschwitz Bunks

Bookofblue (CC BY-SA)

Hertha Beese, a Berlin housewife and underground resistance worker, recalls that, unlike the general public, the resistance network was more informed about the camps. She states:

We knew that the concentration camps existed. We also knew where they existed, for example Oranienburg just outside Berlin. We sometimes knew which of our friends were there and we also knew of the cruelties in them right from the beginning.

(Holmes, 315)

Anthony Eden (1897-1977), British Foreign Secretary during WWII, notes:

…as the war progressed some horrifying reports began to come out. At first it was very difficult to assess their accuracy and they were so horrible it was hard to believe they could be true.

(Holmes, 314)

Wynford Vaughn-Thomas, a British journalist, recalls the conditions of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany when it was liberated in 1945:

In the huts typhoid, everything, had broken out and you couldn't hear yourself speak for the death rattle. There were people lying on top of each other, sick, vomiting, withered bodies crawling on their hands and knees…It was sealed off in this dark north German plain and you felt you'd reached the cesspit of the human mind.

(Holmes, 337)

Mass Grave, Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp

H. Oakes-Imperial War Museums (Public Domain)

The British Lieutenant Colonel J. A. D. Johnson described what he saw when he arrived at Bergen-Belsen:

The prisoners were a dense mass of emaciated apathetic scarecrows huddled together in wooden huts, and in many cases without beds or blankets, and in some cases without any clothing whatsoever…There were thousands of emaciated corpses in various stages of decomposition lying unburied. Sanitation was to all intents and purposes nonexistent.

(Cesarini, 759)

Hans Stark, Gestapo staff member at Auschwitz, stated, like so many others, that he had merely been following orders:

I took part in the murder of many people…I believed in the Führer, I wanted to serve my people. Today I know that this idea was false. I regret the mistakes of my past, but I cannot undo them.

(Neville, 57)

Rabbi Frankforter, who died in the Holocaust, which Jewish people often call the Shoah or Ha-Shoah in Hebrew, gave this last wish to survivor Yaacov Silberstein:

You are still young and you will remain alive. I have only one request for you that you should never let people forget. Tell everyone what they did to us at this small camp, in Buchenwald. Wherever you go tell this, also to your children so that they should pass it on. To remember and not to forget.

(Holmes, 339)

Continue reading...

[mimiiiiiiiiisstuff]

Hi! I'm new to your account, but just binged your "I bet on losing dogs" storyline, and I had a question and concept for you? How much is the reader free to interpret? I'm a theater kid, so I like her hobbies. But is there any specific physical traits you're writing for her? I know you mentioned that we were/are chubby, which is cool, but do you imagine any certain features? Because I'm Mexican American with certain features, so I was curious if you had a certain ethnicity set for her besides being half White/Jewish from Bruce being her biological father.

I also had the same question about Tiffany, because I'm currently imagining the Stereotypical All American girl. Kinda got that Disney Channel actress vibe to her. (Physically). I also had this really messed up though of the reader having to spend YEARS trying to keep in touch her mother's culture and such, learning dishes, traditions, going to local festivals by herself, having to learn how to do makeup and hair styles/products that fit her face and hair pattern. No one bothered to help or teach her. But than, suddenly Tiffany starts to steal those "habits", uncaring if they were very personal to the reader. Than everyone in the family suddenly starts to like the Reader's culture and such. (I had this scene in my brain where the Reader walks in on Tiffany is bragging about some music or dish "she" tried out from the Reader's culture, while the family are all happy and curious about it. Even when the Reader tried to introduce it to the family, everyone declined even trying it.)

I see the Reader so "Your Best American Girl" coded by Mitski.

Anyway I just wanted to ramble, bye!

ok so, I'm trying to be as vague as possible bc reader is supposed to be whoever is reading so there's no in depth description or specific height or build (except chubby in the prologue). i feel like i've basically made reader an OC which i hate but personally when I'm reading a fic, I just ignore things if I don't like them or they don't apply to me which is what i suggest yall do!!

the reader's mother is Palestinian/ Venezualan, like my own mom but you can change it if you'd like. it's important to mention that reader does have Bruce's jaw structure and face shape and shares facial features with Damian as well. It's small things like the ears, the roman nose, even the eye shape, point is that every time reader looks in the mirror she can see shadows of Bruce and Damian on her face. it's kinda like the vibe of "like him" by tyler the creator. I'm middle eastern and hispanic so I imagine reader with darker feautures like tan skin, thick brown hair, arched brows and long lashes but it's all up to you!

reader is very confused because while her dad is white, she isn't. she did try to bond with Damian and learn Arabic with him but he shamed her for not knowing and kicked her out his room, literally. she used to be embarrassed of her heritage when she was younger (courtsey of Tiffany calling her a mutt) but as she got older she realized how interesting her culture is.

she wants to learn arabic but has no teachers and it's a pretty hard language to learn if you don't grow up speaking it .she has no sources to help her and most of the time culture and traditions are things you grow up with and are passed down to you from family. her mom used to speak to her in arabic and feed her dates and sandwiches with olive oil and sugar and make her fried plantians so those things are very special to her, they're some of the only details she remembers about her late mother. so yeah reader is very "Your best american girl coded"

You're so on point about Tiffany, she's your classic all American girl. Blonde hair, blue eyes, long tanned legs and a set of pearly whites. she's the kind of white girl to act like she cares about other races but is secretly racist. you know what girls im talking about! and that prompt you sent with the food eats so hard, I have a scene mapped out with that in the upcoming chapters. I rambled too girl!!! you really got me thinking tbh but let me stop and actually write the next chapter.

[feygaleh]

I saw the post from that account that featured you in an ask from like two days ago and so this is a pretty belated response, but I just wanted to say that it made me so angry like I haven’t been in weeks. I cannot stand Zionist Jumblr, every day they seem to stoop to new lows I did not think were possible.

That post made me so mad because it’s like the epitome of everything wrong with Zionism online today, I simply cannot stand it what with their “I LovE JeWs BeING ThE BaD GUys NOw” like they cannot fathom any member of their tribe being capable of great evils, all while they endlessly call out everyone else for doing wrong. And their weird nonsensical whataboutisms that try and pick out even the most menial or nonexistent “flaws” from the people who challenge them “Faygeleh is for gay males only” and “I see you are learning Hebrew AND YET you still dare to criticize the state, hmm curious” so infuriating honestly.

But the worst thing of all is their endless conspiracies and their dogged assumptions that hold no basis in fact, them literally “Theorizing” about your synagogue being a JVP meeting place like KNOW YOU is simply one of the worst examples of this that I have ever seen up to this point, at least that other account they referenced did the only slightly less infuriating cookie cutter “Fake Jew doesn’t support the fatherland, fake Jews is not a patriot, fake Jew is pretending to be Jewish” spiel, at least I’ve seen that one so many times that I’m growing numb to the constant accusations.

These conspiratorial ramblings are all so completely anti-intellectual that it makes me sick to my stomach, and the worst part is that this is almost everything that I see on Jumblr, there’s almost no diversity in opinion, not a single attempt at any kind of nuance (While still constantly claiming nuance when it suits their agendas), it’s all entirely irrational at its core and it’s all anyone ever makes posts about.

I always celebrate to myself when I find an account that is about something else, either one like yours, or one dedicated entirely to just cool Jewish stuff like art, culture, and history, but those seem to be so few and far between these days, it’s all just about antisemitism or Zionism or the state, you’d think these people didn’t care about anything else, like do these people even enjoy being Jewish? At all? Because from the legacies they’re leaving via their internet footprints it would seem that to them being a Jew is more of a curse than anything and it makes me so, so sad.

Apologies for the long rant, but this one really was one of the worst I’ve seen in a while. I’m not even going anon this time, I’m so tired of cowering in the shadow of Zionism and all its religious extremism.

i know exactly the post and i had my own similar reaction because it’s all such cowardly baseless takes they’re making. i have nothing to add here, you’ve perfectly summarized all of my feelings on and about zionist jumblr.

thank you for this message, it is so so uplifting to know and hear there are other people out there reading the shit these people are saying and also thinking they’re being deranged. it’s such a harmful echo chamber they’re in that sometimes i start to wonder if i really AM alone in this because they say it so much. but as long as i’m here and alive and joyfully jewish, there will be a contesting voice.

[cultkinkcoven]

anyways guys so the hot take of the week is that religious people are offended by demonolatry.

I can’t believe I have to say this but yes, Jews, Christians , Muslims, and all other people from organized monotheistic religions are probably going to be offended by you worshiping demons in general. Crazy concept but yes. Religious people get upset when they see people worshipping or working with demons they believe are evil. If you are concerned with the negative opinion of religious people, keep your practice a secret. It’s what we’ve been doing for centuries. The worship of these demons has never been popular or encouraged. That’s how demons work. They have specifically been demonized, working with them is more controversial than working with pagan Gods who have not been demonized. No it is not fair, that’s simply the way it is.

Regardless of who you are working with or where they come from, you will always be practicing an alternative form of spirituality if you are working with demons. You will always be subject to ridicule for it.

In the last couple posts I’ve made about this, people gotten so over consumed with the logistical claims I was making about the religions of Judaism, Christianity etc. that my main point was completely lost. It’s not my place to speak as a Jewish person, so I’m going to speak only as a demonolater and my experience. I’m still debating deleting that post because the point seems to have flown over everyone’s heads.

So I’m just going to be as direct as possible. Yes. Religious people have always and likely will always be offended by demonolatry regardless of what demon you’re working with.

If you’re using a name that was used by a religion to identify a negative spirit, you are very likely going to offend that religion by using that name and seeking them out. It’s up to you to decide if you care that your practice is offensive to others, because it always will be. The only way to work around actually appropriating any of these religions is to make these demons your own. Just as they encountered and documented these spirits, pagans and demonolaters can do the same, discover their own names, and use them to identify these spirits. In the very short conversation I had with (L*lit) on this subject, she was very excited about the idea. Many goetic demons don’t even use the names documented in the Lesser Key because they were recorded by people who did not respect them. Prince Cerberus never allows me to call him Naberius.

Of course these spirits don’t give the slightest bit of a shit whether your practice offends the church. Nor do they care if you use a Hebrew name. But humans care, and if a religion is asking us not to use the word they invented then okay. That’s easy to work around. We’re still going to be worshiping these demons.

Satanists, Luciferians, and all those who walk the left hand path have never been regarded positively by Christianity. They will never understand why we do what we do and how we benefit from it. This has always and likely will always be the case.

Lucifer isn’t going to abandon his cult because Catholics have a problem with his worship. Nor are the followers of Asmodeus going to stop worshiping him because Jews don’t like it. This is what demonolatry is.

At the end of the day, you will offend someone. That’s the reality of the left hand path. You will be hated and you will be used as a negative example. These energies have been demonized and so will you. If that’s too anxiety inducing for you, demonolatry might not be the path for you. This has never been a popular path for a reason. Demonolatry has never been about pleasing the church.

There’s 1000 other things that I do that are offensive to religious people. I find the accounts of ancient Christian magis and other religious people to be valuable because of the information they provided on these spirits. They were the only accounts of these spirits that have actually survived. But I have no interest in appeasing the beliefs of these magis, or really anyone else but myself.

So yeah. I can’t believe “demon worshippers are offensive to religious people regardless of which demon they are worshipping” was my most controversial take of 2025 so far, but yeah. It is what it is.

[girlactionfigure]

let Anne Frank rest

NOVEMBER 11, 2024

THIS IS DISRESPECTFUL

ANNE, MARGOT, THEIR MOTHER, AND FATHER WERE ZIONISTS

Here’s the thing: we have absolutely no way of knowing how Anne Frank would feel about today’s Israel-Hamas war, because her life was brutally cut short by the Nazis at just 15 years old. Is it possible that she would be attending pro-Palestine marches and donning keffiyehs? Sure, it’s possible. A minority of Jews do that.  

Here’s what we know for sure: in her own famous diary, Anne Frank wrote that she was interested in Zionism. Her sister, Margot Frank, was an ardent Zionist. She joined the Dutch Zionist youth club in 1941, and hoped to make aliyah (immigrate) to Mandatory Palestine, where she planned on becoming a midwife for the Yishuv (pre-state Jewish community in Palestine).

Otto Frank, the only family member to survive the war, was very, very strongly pro-Israel, particularly after the Holocaust (whereas beforehand, he was slightly more ambivalent, though never anti-Zionist). In fact, in the 1970s, Otto had a disagreement with the Anne Frank House, as he demanded that the museum’s statutes explicitly affirm Israel’s right to exist — a right much of today’s keffiyeh-wearing pro-Palestine movement doesn’t accept.

We don’t know how Anne would feel today. But we do know how most Holocaust survivors feel. Not only do most Holocaust survivors -- like most Jews -- support Israel, but 49% of today’s remaining 245,000 survivors live in Israel. It’s even possible that Anne may have moved to Israel had she survived the war; after all, Israel absorbed nearly 400,000 Holocaust survivor refugees between 1946-1952, including Anne’s childhood best friend, Hanna Goslar.

APPROPRIATION OF OUR TRAUMA, AGAIN

I’ve talked about Holocaust inversion on this account for years. I have numerous posts on it, with more coming. But perhaps I haven’t made this explicitly clear yet: Holocaust inversion -- that is, the depiction of Jews and/or Israelis as Nazis, crypto-Nazis, or “worse than the Nazis” and the Palestinians as the “true” victims of the Holocaust -- is a blatant appropriation of the Jewish people’s worst collective trauma.  

That is not to say that Palestinians don’t endure pain. Of course they do, and pain and trauma can’t exactly be quantified. But this obsession with stripping Jews of our very unique, deeply painful experience and placing it onto someone else is deeply offensive. At a certain point, it almost looks like these people have Holocaust envy, which is bizarre and frankly deeply disturbing.  

Why would you want this? For six years, the international community stood by as nearly 70% of Europe’s Jewish population was exterminated in the most industrialized genocide in human history. Countries all over the world shut their doors to Jewish refugees. The Allies refused to bomb the death camps and the railroads leading to the camps, despite the desperate pleas from the Jewish community. In 1939, there were 16.6 million Jews in the world. Today, 85 years later, we just scrape 15 million. This is not what has ever happened to Palestinians, whose population has not decreased by even half a percentage point since 1948, not even since October 7, and not even in Gaza (as there have been more births than deaths, according to Hamas and Save the Children). 

Even more infuriating? Not even did Palestinian Arab leadership collaborate with the Nazis during the Holocaust -- and in 1948 -- but public opinion polls from the time period demonstrate most Palestinian Arabs favored Nazi Germany. Enough. You don’t get to take this one from us, because your ancestors, too, were complicit during the Holocaust.

STOP IMPOSING IDENTITIES ON JEWS

As I explained in a recent post, antisemitism can arguably be divided into two categories: (1) “Nazi antisemitism,” which seeks to eliminate Jews physically, and (2) “Hanukkah antisemitism,” which seeks to strip Jews of the qualities that make us Jewish. In other words, forced assimilation.

Anne Frank was a Jewish child. She was born in Germany and later became Dutch. Never in her lifetime would she have worn a Palestinian keffiyeh, because at the time, the Palestinian keffiyeh was the official uniform of British officer Sir John Bagot Glubb’s “Desert Patrol,” comprised of Palestinian and Jordanian Arab Bedouins who were loyal to the British police force in Mandatory Palestine. Since Anne Frank was neither a Bedouin nor a member of Glubb’s Desert Patrol, putting the keffiyeh on her -- a murdered child -- is nothing but imposing an identity on her that isn’t hers.  

Maybe this sounds dramatic, or like it shouldn’t be a big deal. But this is also part of a larger pattern of Palestinians appropriating Jewish historical figures and claiming them as their own (the Jesus comes to mind).

And this is not a matter of doing this just to historical figures, but to living, breathing Jews. For example, several of the released Hamas hostages testified that Hamas threatened to forcibly convert them to Islam, much like their ancestors once did to ours when they conquered the Holy Land from the Byzantines in the 7th century.

IF YOU ACTUALLY CARED ABOUT ANNE FRANK, YOU WOULD CARE ABOUT THIS

On November 7, 2024, a premeditated pogrom took place in the streets of Amsterdam -- Anne Frank’s Amsterdam.

Thousands of pro-Palestinians supporters ambushed Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv fans as they were leaving a Maccabi Tel Aviv-AFC Ajax soccer match. Much like on October 7, the perpetrators live-streamed themselves stabbing Israelis and Jews, running over Israelis and Jews, throwing firecrackers at Israelis and Jews, and beating Israelis and Jews to a pulp, as the Amsterdam police looked the other way. They stole their phones and passports, and for some time, some of the victims were missing. Jews tried to hide in a canal, in boats, in a KFC, and more, just like the Franks hid in an attic. The perpetrators forced the victims to shout “free Palestine!” They attacked not just men, but women and children. Not all of the victims were Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, or Israelis, but all of the victims were Jews -- or perceived to be Jews.  

Of course, it wasn’t long until antisemites -- and the mainstream media -- spun the event, which, again, had not only been premeditated, but the perpetrators had dubbed “a Jew hunt” (in fact, it was so premeditated Israel had forewarned the Dutch police). They said it was simply soccer hooligans brawling, or that it happened because the day before, a few Israelis had torn down a Palestinian flag, or because some of the Maccabi fans had chanted racist chants. In this regard, they’re in terrible company: every pogrom in history has had its “justification;” sometimes the justification is based on a true event; other times, it’s pure fiction (e.g. blood libel). Kristallnacht, the pogrom that marks the beginning of the Holocaust, was excused because a Jew killed a German diplomat in Paris.

Are some Maccabi fans racist? It seems so. That’s no justification for an attempted lynching. Imagine if Jews tried to lynch pro-Palestinian protestors every time they chant antisemitic chants (“globalize the intifada,” “Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud,” for example), or every time an Israeli flag or hostage poster is torn down. None of us would have jobs, because this happens daily, multiple times a day, everywhere in the world.

For over a year, Dutch Jewish community leaders have warned of a hostile, dangerous environment for Jews in the Netherlands, and in Amsterdam more specifically. The Central Jewish Consultation, the official Jewish umbrella organization in the Netherlands, defined the November 7 mob attacks as a “pogrom” and tied it to the growing antisemitic climate in the country, which existed long before any Maccabi Tel Aviv fans showed up in Amsterdam.

As usual, however, antisemites are tokenizing the words of fringe Jews whose views are not representative of the community. 

The Chief Rabbi of the Netherlands also issued a damning statement, noting the hostile, antisemitic climate in the country.

The above is true. But this is not a one-off event. The Netherlands has been failing the Jewish community for a long, long time. These situations don’t escalate out of nowhere. Instead of offering us your apologies and condolences after the fact, take decisive action.

For a full bibliography of my sources, please head over to my Instagram and  Patreon. 

rootsmetals

another post I started working on before November 7 that suddenly became very relevant…