#they tell us to get out of Israel and go back to Brooklyn and like. have you seen what happens when we do?

[thebluestcowboy]

NJ and NY are states with a lot of diversity and people love to brag about how multicultural and accepting these places are, but one (1) single mention of the Jewish people in Lakewood or Monsey and people instantly turn into the most racist right-wing Jew haters. It’s actually disgusting

[laineystein]

I know that the media would have you believing that war is constant and ruthless but sometimes it’s a lot of sitting around and waiting for orders. And a lot of talking. Really introspective talking. And the things that people say when there’s a very real chance that they might die, are probably the most poignant and well said. So here’s a conversation my unit had in a million different ways with a million different words:

We love beings Jews. We love being Israeli. We can’t imagine being anything else or belonging to any other group. But this statistic that we are 0.2% of the worlds population has been so much more than a statistic lately. We all feel it. We feel how so much of the world has turned their backs on us — how the same people that posted those stupid blue squares on instagram are now using language that calls for our genocide and the destruction of our homeland. We know that for so many people we are pawns in their political game. We know that so many people think we are sub-human and therefore deserving of less respect than any other person. We don’t need anyone to tell us what they think of us because so many people are showing us by what they’re doing or not doing. And that’s okay. We’re used to it. We’ve always been alone. We’ve always fought (and won) our own battles. We’ll win this one without any of you. It’s fine. But it makes me think about how the same people that alienate us are the ones that critique how we live in insular communities (like the neighborhood I grew up in Crown Heights) and how our religion is closed and how we don’t need a place (read: Israel) where we all live together (assumedly because no other group has such a place — which is just a total lie). And there’s this thought amongst many Jews that communities like the one I grew up in in Brooklyn exist as a result of the persecution we faced. Just like there’s this thought that Israel exists because of the Holocaust. The survivors of the worst thing that can happen to a group decided to live together and close out the outside world. Now I’d argue that we certainly haven’t closed anyone out in Israel - I’m currently serving with Israelis that are Arab and Druze. But is our country very Jew-centric? Absolutely. Just like Crown Heights is very Jew-centric. Goyim can/do live and visit Crown Heights but it is a place that caters to what is otherwise considered a counter-culture in America. Just like Israel caters to Jews in an area of the world where all of us were expelled. We are fine living in these places. We have created these communities and curated them to our Jewish way of life. But people wonder why we close ourselves off and why we need special spaces - and that same ignorance is the answer. Sure, our diets are different and we have laws about how we go to school and work and pray that make it very difficult to live in a non-Jewish world but there’s a very real truth that so many people are scared to say aloud so I will: We don’t trust goyim. Goyim have never stood up for us or protected us. Only we can keep ourselves safe. Only we truly care about our wellbeing. We do not feel safe around goyim. And I think we have every right to be distrustful. We have every right to think that our survival and security rests solely in our fellow Jew. So while this has all proven that the Jewish people are amazing and loving and stronger than even we knew, it’s also only cemented this idea that we absolutely need our own world. And it’s clear that we’ve essentially lived in our own world all this time anyway - our world view is not your world view. Our experiences are so incredibly different than the goy experience. If you’re not Jewish and especially if you’re not an Israeli Jew, you can’t possibly understand any of this. And that’s fine! But don’t get angry when, in the absence of your support, we’ve figured it out. And don’t be upset when your Jewish friends - Israeli or not - have pushed you away because you didn’t show up in the way they’d hoped. You’ve merely proven us right. We do not need you. Our communities are enough. Our country is enough. Together, we will outlive you.

[notaplaceofhonour]

This is from a couple years ago, the last time violence flared up in I/P, and now I’m seeing people reblog it again in the context of everything that has happened since the October 7th attack. Because of this, I’d like to do some housekeeping:

1) I made a minor (in the sense that it doesn’t change any of the actual facts presented) but fairly glaring typo in the initial version: I called the organization “In Our Lifetime”; its actual name is “Within Our Lifetime”. Oops. I went back and edited it to fix the typo.

2) This was written well before October 2023, and reflects only things that had already happened when it was written. I think it mostly still holds up, but there are also parts of it that—while I wouldn’t say are flat-out wrong—I worry may be misapplied to Israel’s actions in 2023 as a form of atrocity denial. As of October 31st, 2023, Israel has bombarded Palestine with an onslaught of bombings and killed thousands of innocent Palestinians. Whether this “officially” constitutes genocide by the strictly legal & academic definitions, I leave that to the courts & historians to decide, but what is undeniable is that Israel’s government is guilty of absolutely heinous atrocities, and an inexcusable disregard for the worth of human life. That shouldn’t get lost in all of this.

3) Within Our Lifetime, unfortunately, continues to be relevant—they organized the recent “National Day of Action for Gaza” rally in Brooklyn—and they’re actually worse than I described them. WOL’s founder & leader, Nerdeen Kiswani, has repeatedly claimed Zionists control Hollywood (ie, Jews control Hollywood trope), that the Media is totally controlled by “Global Zionism” (a reference to “International Jew” & “Globalist” conspiracy theories), and regularly defends terrorist attacks & hate crimes against Jews as “resistance” & “freedom fighting”. She has been very explicit about the fact that when she says, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” she means she wants Israel to be destroyed and that Israeli Jews should “leave and never come back”. They are, in short, a hate group, and they keep using all of the Anti-Zionist slogans in all the ways that Anti-Zionists keep telling me they don’t mean. In other words, WOL is as much a threat to the Pro-Palestinian cause as they are a threat to Jews; if you are going to a protest, make sure it isn’t one WOL is organizing.

I'm struggling to understand what 'globalize the intifada' means.

Is it a call for resistance or a call for violence against Jews and israelis? I genuinely dont know and its frightening to see friends post those words. I'm scared to ask a few of my friends as idk what their answer will be. I'm scared this phrase is encouraging violence against my community.

People can understand the need to listen to minorities but see Jews as European colonizers.

They deny Jews the right to say what is and isnt antisemitism.

They see us as pawns that submit to the will of others as we atone for our historical sins.

Yet every other minority has a claim to their story. A claim to their indigenous homelands.

Progressives justify violence against Jews and Israelis but not against other minorities.

Not to even mention that history has been rewritten to hide the fact Jews were exiled from most MENA states.

They say its cultural appropriation when Mizrahi Jews cook traditional foods.

They say Jews are white while turning their backs on black and brown Jews.

I rarely censor my thoughts on my main platform so it's very telling that I'm posting this here. I am genuinely afraid of what will happen when I question friends calling to globalize the intifada.

Do you feel the same?

[weyassinebentalb]

Gaza Conflict Stokes 'Identity Crisis' for Young American Jews

Dan Kleinman does not know quite how to feel.

As a child in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, he was taught to revere Israel as the protector of Jews everywhere, the “Jewish superman who would come out of the sky to save us” when things got bad, he said.

It was a refuge in his mind when white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted “Jews will not replace us,” or kids in college grabbed his shirt, mimicking a “South Park” episode to steal his “Jew gold.”

But his feelings have grown muddier as he has gotten older, especially now as he watches violence unfold in Israel and Gaza. His moral compass tells him to help the Palestinians, but he cannot shake an ingrained paranoia every time he hears someone make anti-Israel statements.

“It is an identity crisis,” Kleinman, 33, said. “Very small in comparison to what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, but it is still something very strange and weird.”

As the violence escalates in the Middle East, turmoil of a different kind is growing across the Atlantic. Many young American Jews are confronting the region’s long-standing strife in a very different context, with very different pressures, from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

The Israel of their lifetime has been powerful, no longer appearing to some to be under constant existential threat. The violence comes after a year when mass protests across the United States have changed how many Americans see issues of racial and social justice. The pro-Palestinian position has become more common, with prominent progressive members of Congress offering impassioned speeches in defense of the Palestinians on the House floor. At the same time, reports of anti-Semitism are rising across the country.

Divides between some American Jews and Israel’s right-wing government have been growing for more than a decade, but under the Trump administration those fractures that many hoped would heal became a crevasse. Politics in Israel have also remained fraught, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-tenured government forged allegiances with Washington. For young people who came of age during the Trump years, political polarization over the issue only deepened.

Many Jews in America remain unreservedly supportive of Israel and its government. Still, the events of recent weeks have left some families struggling to navigate both the crisis abroad and the wide-ranging response from American Jews at home. What is at stake is not just geopolitical, but deeply personal. Fractures are intensifying along lines of age, observance and partisan affiliation.

In suburban Livingston, New Jersey, Meara Ashtivker, 38, has been afraid for her father-in-law in Israel, who has a disability and is not able to rush to the stairwell to shelter when he hears the air-raid sirens. She is also scared as she sees people in her progressive circles suddenly seem anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, she said.

Ashtivker, whose husband is Israeli, said she loved and supported Israel, even when she did not always agree with the government and its actions.

“It’s really hard being an American Jew right now,” she said. “It is exhausting and scary.”

Some young, liberal Jewish activists have found common cause with Black Lives Matter, which explicitly advocates for Palestinian liberation, concerning others who see that allegiance as anti-Semitic.

The recent turmoil is the first major outbreak of violence in Israel and Gaza for which Aviva Davis, who graduated this spring from Brandeis University, has been “socially conscious.”

“I’m on a search for the truth, but what’s the truth when everyone has a different way of looking at things?” Davis said.

Alyssa Rubin, 26, who volunteers in Boston with IfNotNow, a network of Jewish activists who want to end Jewish American support for Israeli occupation, has found protesting for the Palestinian cause to be its own form of religious observance.

She said she and her 89-year-old grandfather ultimately both want the same thing, Jewish safety. But “he is really entrenched in this narrative that the only way we can be safe is by having a country,” she said, while her generation has seen that “the inequality has become more exacerbated.”

In the protest movements last summer, “a whole new wave of people were really primed to see the connection and understand racism more explicitly,” she said, “understanding the ways racism plays out here, and then looking at Israel/Palestine and realizing it is the exact same system.”

But that comparison is exactly what worries many other American Jews, who say the history of white American slaveholders is not the correct frame for viewing the Israeli government or the global Jewish experience of oppression.

At Temple Concord, a Reform synagogue in Syracuse, New York, teenager after teenager started calling Rabbi Daniel Fellman last week, wondering how to process seeing Black Lives Matter activists they marched with last summer attack Israel as “an apartheid state.”

“The reaction today is different because of what has occurred with the past year, year and a half, here,” Fellman said. “As a Jewish community, we are looking at it through slightly different eyes.”

Nearby at Sha’arei Torah Orthodox Congregation of Syracuse, teenagers were reflecting on their visits to Israel and on their family in the region.

“They see it as Hamas being a terrorist organization that is shooting missiles onto civilian areas,” Rabbi Evan Shore said. “They can’t understand why the world seems to be supporting terrorism over Israel.”

In Colorado, a high school senior at Denver Jewish Day School said he was frustrated at the lack of nuance in the public conversation. When his social media apps filled with pro-Palestinian memes last week, slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “Zionism is a call for an apartheid state,” he deactivated his accounts.

“The conversation is so unproductive, and so aggressive, that it really stresses you out,” Jonas Rosenthal, 18, said. “I don’t think that using that message is helpful for convincing the Israelis to stop bombing Gaza.”

Compared with their elders, younger American Jews are overrepresented on the ends of the religious affiliation spectrum: a higher share are secular, and a higher share are Orthodox.

Ari Hart, 39, an Orthodox rabbi in Skokie, Illinois, has accepted the fact that his Zionism makes him unwelcome in some activist spaces where he would otherwise be comfortable. College students in his congregation are awakening to that same tension, he said. “You go to a college campus and want to get involved in anti-racism or social justice work, but if you support the state of Israel, you’re the problem,” he said.

Hart sees increasing skepticism in liberal Jewish circles over Israel’s right to exist. “This is a generation who are very moved and inspired by social justice causes and want to be on the right side of justice,” Hart said. “But they’re falling into overly simplistic narratives, and narratives driven by true enemies of the Jewish people.”

Overall, younger American Jews are less attached to Israel than older generations: About half of Jewish adults under 30 describe themselves as emotionally connected to Israel, compared with about two-thirds of Jews over age 64, according to a major survey published last week by the Pew Research Center.

And though the U.S. Jewish population is 92% white, with all other races combined accounting for 8%, among Jews ages 18 to 29 that rises to 15%.

In Los Angeles, Rachel Sumekh, 29, a first-generation Iranian American Jew, sees complicated layers in the story of her own Persian family. Her mother escaped Iran on the back of a camel, traveling by night until she got to Pakistan, where she was taken in as a refugee. She then found asylum in Israel. She believes Israel has a right to self-determination, but she also found it “horrifying” to hear an Israeli ambassador suggest other Arab countries should take in Palestinians.

“That is what happened to my people and created this intergenerational trauma of losing our homeland because of hatred,” she said.

The entire situation feels too volatile and dangerous for many people to even want to discuss, especially publicly.

Violence against Jews is increasingly close to home. Last year the third-highest number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States were recorded since the Anti-Defamation League began cataloging them in 1979, according to a report released by the civil rights group last month. The ADL recorded more than 1,200 incidents of anti-Semitic harassment in 2020, a 10% increase from the previous year. In Los Angeles, the police are investigating a sprawling attack on sidewalk diners at a sushi restaurant Tuesday as an anti-Semitic hate crime.

Outside Cleveland, Jennifer Kaplan, 39, who grew up in a modern Orthodox family and who considers herself a centrist Democrat and a Zionist, remembered studying abroad at Hebrew University in 2002, and being in the cafeteria minutes before it was bombed. Now she wondered how the Trump era had affected her inclination to see the humanity in others, and she wished her young children were a bit older so she could talk with them about what is happening.

“I want them to understand that this is a really complicated situation, and they should question things,” she said. “I want them to understand that this isn’t just a, I don’t know, I guess, utopia of Jewish religion.”

Esther Katz, the performing arts director at the Jewish Community Center in Omaha, Nebraska, has spent significant time in Israel. She also attended Black Lives Matter protests in Omaha last summer and has signs supporting the movement in the windows of her home.

She has watched with a sense of betrayal as some of her allies in that movement have posted online about their apparently unequivocal support for the Palestinians, and compared Israel to Nazi Germany. “I’ve had some really tough conversations,” said Katz, a Conservative Jew. “They’re not seeing the facts, they’re just reading the propaganda.”

Her three children, who range in age from 7 to 13, are now wary of a country that is for Katz one of the most important places in the world. “They’re like, ‘I don’t understand why anyone would want to live in Israel, or even visit,’” she said. “That breaks my heart.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2021 The New York Times Company 

source https://www.techno-90.com/2021/05/gaza-conflict-stokes-identity-crisis.html

[dailyaudiobible]

04/13/2021 DAB Transcript

Joshua 7:16-9:2, Luke 16:1-18, Psalms 82:1-8, Proverbs 13:2-3

Today is the 13th day of April welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I'm Brian it's great to be here with you today as we continue to move forward. In the Old Testament we are moving our way through the book of Joshua now. So. we’ve finished the Torah or the Pentateuch, and we are reading the story that comes next as the children of Israel cross the Jordan into the promised land and the walls of Jericho have fallen. The next city that was to be conquered was called Ai, but the children of Israel ran away from the people of Ai in defeat. And, so, now it's been determined that somebody that took things from Jericho that were supposed to not be taken, that were supposed to simply be devoted to destruction. And, so, all of that is getting sorted out. We’re reading from the New English Translation this week. Joshua chapter 7 verse 16 through 9 verse 2.

Commentary:

Okay. So, in the Old Testament today in the book of Joshua it is discovered that this man Aiken has taken treasure, has pillaged in some way the ruins at Jericho and hidden them. And this has caused the Israelites to be defeated in battle, in the next battle with Ai. And, so, all of the discovery is done, right? All of the investigation is done and it’s learned that Aiken is the one guilty for this and they find stuff buried in his tent and then all…all of…everything that has anything to do with Aiken then is destroyed. Then the children of Israel take the Army and go against Ai and defeat Ai. So, the second city is defeated in the conquest of the promised land. So, Ai was the little village and it…it's ruins still do exist, at least as archaeologically identified. I’ve been to that place. It’s in what we know as the West Bank near Bethel just like the Bible says. It’s…it’s like the site of it…it’s like in a couple people's backyards in kind is sort of sort of kind of like a neighborhood near…near main road. And, so, we've been able to speak to the archaeologists there and film a little bit there. There’s not a whole lot to be able to see that site. It’s sort of like a village up on a hill where this happened. But we could be like, “man, that’s pretty harsh, a harsh way to deal with Aiken. First conquest, all of this stuff going on.” And, so, we can scratch our heads and go like, “that's…that's a pretty severe punishment.” But if we’re wondering about that or maybe we’re wondering, why the severity and what those implications might be, really, we kind of find them in the gospel of Luke coming out of the lips of Jesus as He concludes a parable. “No one, no servant can serve two masters for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” Okay. So, in the incident with Aiken, this is the first battle for the promised land. And if we pause just for a second and remember what it took to get to the promised land, like a whole generation wandering in the wilderness, like all of the plagues, freeing the people from slavery in Egypt, like all of that. Most of the time that we have been together this year in the Scriptures in the Torah we have been moving toward this place and it took an awful lot to get there. And, so, disobedience and rebellion are going to be introduced with the very first act? Well, that would undo…that would undo the whole thing. That would set a precedence. And, so, essentially a counter precedent was set, because as we saw the giving of the law what is one of the most important things for the people to remember? That there is one God and only one God, that there is no other, and that to disobey God, or to chase after another God is breaking the covenant. So, to the rebel or disobey against God or chase other gods in any form is idolatry and a breaking of the covenant. The children of Israel can hardly get across the Jordan River before we see this begin. And, so, that gives us just a little bit of a context for Aiken and a little bit of understanding from Jesus. And the thing is this is always gonna be a problem for them. This kind of stuff is going to plague the children of Israel. And…and really modify and diminish some of the mission. But we’ll watch that unfold as we continue the journey, not just to the conquest of the…of the promised land, not just like through the book of Joshua but through their entire history. We will…we will see that they are indeed what God called a stiff-necked people, right? Stubborn. But are we any less stiff-necked? That's a fair question as we move forward. And the stories as we move forward will serve as a mirror to answer that question.

Prayer:

Father, we thank You for Your word and we thank You for bringing us here. We are grateful. We love You. We revere You. We thank You for Your word and for all that it is bringing into our lives, all that we are learning, all that is being reconstructed in us, all that is being transformed and renovated. May we stay open to Your work we pray. In the name of Jesus, we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is home base, it’s the website, it’s where you find out what's happening around these parts.

If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app you can access pretty much all of these things from there as well. There’s a Drawer icon in the upper left-hand corner of the app screen and that opens up a drawer and in there you’ll find these things like the community section, whether on the app or on the web and that's where the Prayer Wall lives that we talk about often because we are a community that…well…one of the things that binds us together because we’re all over the world, literally really really far away from each other physically. is that we’re in it together in spirit through prayer and just through being in each other's lives as we take this journey through the Scriptures. So, be familiar with the Prayer Wall. That's in the Community section of the website or in the app.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com as well. There is a link on the homepage. If it's the app that you're using, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner, or the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or encouragement you can hit the Hotline button in the app, the little red button up at the top or you can dial 877 942 4253.

And that's all for today. I’m Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

This is Alan in New Milford CT. I would like to lift up my brother who called in on April the 8th whose family is suffering from covid virus. You have so many of your family members that you had mentioned my brother and you sounded so beaten, so desperate, so hurt. I can understand as a father how frustrating it must be to care for a family and trying to deal with a disease for which you have no power over. So, I want to join the many thousands and thousands of my brothers and sisters who are gonna pray for you in the next few days. Our dear heavenly Father we thank You for Your great grace and that Your hand can wrap around this world and touch families and loved ones wherever they may be. Father we take authority over this covid virus that has ravished this man's family and we curse it to its roots. And Father we stand on Your word. There are so many wonderful scriptures that regard healing and it’s by Jesus stripes…stripes he bore upon his back by which we are healed. And Your word tells us I am the Lord thy God who healeth thee. Father we stand on Your word. We just ask You to be merciful and gracious. And God where there may not be adequate medical help for them, we know that You are the chief physician. And, so, we look to You oh God to spare this man's family and encourage him and strengthen him and God give him hope. Father we all need hope in this time in this day. There's things going far beyond our own strength to do end to deal with. But God, we thank You that You are a gracious and merciful God. And, so, we bind together and thank You Father in Jesus name. Amen.

Hello DAB family my name is Matthew from the UK. Today is the 8th of April 2021. Let us pray. Father in the name of Jesus I come before you on behalf of my brothers and sisters at the Daily Audio Bible. I come on behalf��I come before you on behalf of Brian and his family. Lord bless them, protect them, and continue to encourage them to continue to deliver the Daily Audio Bible to the entire world. Father, I lift up every member of the Daily Audio family that is calling out to You now for one submission or the other. Father, those who are grieving, those are in pain. My Lord and my God, I commit them to You that Lord that You shine Your face towards them oh God and grant them the desires of their soul. Father, particularly today I lift up Carlos Vallecula from Brooklyn to You whose family have been afflicted with covid. Father You Lord who delivered me from covid You will deliver Carlos and his family from covid. Carlos do not be afraid for the Lord your God is with you. He said He has not given you the spirit of fear but the spirit of power of love and of sound mind. Everyone who came to Jesus received healing, therefore I do clear healings and the name of Jesus to your family. Be strong in Jesus’ name. Amen. Amen.

Hi this is Radiant Rachel and I have a prayer request for my niece Kaylee who some of you might remember has called in and sang some prayers before. She is struggling with a fear of feeling food in her throat. She was choking…well not exactly joking…it was in her esophagus and not her windpipe about a month ago and she's been taking some steps of progress and eating things like pizza and sandwiches and then she goes back to not wanting to have any solid food. And also, you know, not feeling comfortable with feeling even like cold go down her throat, like cold liquid. So, just please keep her in your prayers as she goes through the healing process of getting comfortable with feeling food in her throat again. And we just Lord we lift Kaylee up to You today. We just pray that she will have no more fear and that she will be able to eat and enjoy food like a regular little 7-year-old. And I just pray that she will be able to use this experience in the future to help someone else who might need some comforting. And we just thank You for healing her and thank You for giving her the nourishment that she needs to grow and develop and thrive in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Good morning DAB family today is April 7th, 2021 and I just want to thank Brian and Jill and the Hardin family for this podcast and the countdown begins for baby China to arrive. And I also want to pray for Emily, and I think her name is Kayla and some of the other DABbers, Victoria Soldier. You guys are heavily in my prayers, even some of you that I can't remember your names, but God knows your names. And I would also like to ask for prayers for my family, my household. Our house almost caught on fire due to the circuit box being so hot. It burnt. A lot of our things…our stuff that were plugged into the socket and we're having a hard time getting the insurance to cover those things that we lost. They’re asking for so much but we're just trying to stay positive and get everything that they want. So, this is __ from Mississippi. Just please keep us lifted up in prayer as well. And thank you so much. Have a blessed day everybody.

My name is Terrell calling from Missouri. I'm really going through it right now. I'm going through a divorce with my wife having to move out of the house pretty soon. We've been through it for the last six years and I'm just…I'm ready to do something better within our marriage. I really don't want to lose my family. I don't wanna lose my wife. Coming off of Easter this past Sunday, I'm hoping and been praying for a resurrection in my marriage. I want to see a revitalization…revitalizing…I want to revitalize everything that's going on and just make it all brand new. We've hurt each other in the past, nothing physical, but we just want to…I want to move past everything that's been wrong. I've learned so much over the last few years and I just want to be able to apply it to my marriage and do right by my wife and kids. I’m praying to be able to get her back, get my family back and just work through this in a way that God's called me to be. Thank you.

[sunflowerbloomss]

Hi! I've seen your post about Unorthodox. As a person who is not Jewish I wanted to search for opinions about this show here on tumblr to get to know different points of views, especially from Jewish people. Then I found your post and a few other posts. Many of them were criticising the show for using the "escape from the cult" trope. Yours was rather positive. Those people said that it's making Hasidic people look bad and that it's ignorant. What's your take on this?

hello!!! i actually have a lot to say about this so bear with me for a sec. my tl;dr is basically that the “escape from the cult” trope is always bound to showing “the cult” in the worst way possible, while on unorthodox the only person with bad motives from the community is moishe.

i’ll start by saying that the hasidic community they’re talking about is satmar, which is located in brooklyn and has many of the “rules” (for a lack of a better english word i know) that are presented in the series. they didn’t state the name in the series because they would sue their asses, but keep in mind that we’re talking about one of the most strict hasidic communities there are in the world. i am not as familiar with the subject as i would like to be, but i know names of a few hasidic communities and approximately how strict they are (though it’s complicated). satmar are known for leading a pretty strict way of life. when i told my mom i’m watching a show about a girl running away from satmar, she said “yeah, well, with them, the only way out is running of suicide”. (keep in mind that my mom really doesn’t like religion). so, generally - we’re talking about a very strict community that is known for being so strict.

now, to the series - i don’t think  they’re showing the community esty runs from to be a cult. i think that when we see esty “following the rules” she’s happy even after she runs she still loves her community. when things are not getting complicated for her - and even when they only start to - esty is still happy. she’s married and she has her family and she’s doing the things she loves. she realises she doesn’t belong there when she understands she has to give up the things she loves to do things she doesn’t love because “that’s the way it is”. when she gives up her piano lessons to go to this woman who tries to teach her how to have sex, when she forces herself to have sex even though she doesn’t want to, when she realises she has to live with yanky for the rest of her life even though she wants to go back to her grandmother’s house for a bit. this is where things start to get complicated for her - when she has to do the things she doesn’t want to do.

that’s when she decides to run. that’s when she thinks she can’t do this anymore, becuase she doesn’t like the idea of doing things simply because she must. now, here’s the time to stop and get back to reality again. i believe some of the criticism is about the fact that the series shows esty “having” to do things she doesn’t want to do to make hasidic communities look bad and sexist. i do not know personally someone who came from a hasidic communities (and frankly, i’m too lazy to google it) but i do know religious and haredi jewish people, and i’ll tell you this - from my personal experience and from many different people’s personal experiences, the more religious you are the more it’s okay for you to be sexist. this is a huge generalization, but i’ll say that orthodox jewish communities have a sexism problem (just like many other communities, yeah? i’m just saying that for our own discussion). i can talk a lot about sexism and judaism, but i’ll shorten this huge essay to this - ignoring the ways orthodox jewish communities use the bible and the rules of judaism to justify and amplify their oppression of women is also a problem. we don’t like to talk about it, because then we feel like we portray judaism as bad, but imo not talking about it or trying to soften it is unfair to every woman who gets beaten down by it. so i think showing the community pushing esty to have children and listen to her husband is not only okay but important. that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about other good things that happen in religious communities, but if we decide to talk about orthodox judaism we have to talk about this. imo it was very well done.

anyway, back to the story - so esty decides to leave. and she doesn’t tell anyone about it, because she knows they wouldn’t let her go if she would. how does she know that? she sees how much they despise anyone who decides to leave. this is also something that is important to represent about hasidic communities (and also about any orthodox communities, the more religious they are the importance of representing it grows) - they don’t like it when people leave. sometimes it’s because they’re afraid some things that are secret about their community would get to other people who are not part of it and then the community would lose it secrecy (which can be both good and bad, if you’d ask me). once again i don’t know a lot of stories regarding different hasidic communities (and every one of them is so different so the stories would be different) but i know many stories of people from religious and haredi communities who told their family they don’t want to be religious anymore, and their family had abandoned them. my disclaimer is that there are in fact some stories about those who are still in great touch with their family, and that they visit on holidays and so, but there are many stories about people who end up losing their family because they didn’t want this type of life anymore and the family couldn’t agree to that. (there are also many stories like this about families disowning gay kids in the name of the bible, but that’s for a different show). so anyway - the community wanting esty back even though it’s clear that she doesn’t want to go back to them is not portraying them as a cult. it’s pretty realistic imo.

and hey, she never says that she ran because she hates them and that she wants “to take this cult down” (which is a very important thing in the “escape from the cult” trope). she said she left because “i didn’t fit in there”. she didn’t try to take with her anyone, she didn’t try to “save” anyone from her community. if this show had really taken the road of showing hasidic communities as a cult, esty would’ve tried to take her aunt and grandma with her. she didn’t.

another thing that is important is how the only person from the community who is supposed to be unlikeable all through the series is moishe. now, i have something to say about this. there is a chance it’s by chance, there is a chance it’s just because how this turned out, but moishe - the character we’re supposed to hate - is the only character from the community (who isn’t esty or her mom) which “enjoys” sins. we have him betting (forbidden), and even though i think it’s not forbidden we have him taking yanky to a strip clup with him, which isn’t something i believe the community would look at as happily. moishe, then, is a character that sins both in the religion and in morals. he scares esty and he breaks into her mom’s house, he constantly lies to yanky just because he wants to. looking at all the characters who stayed in the community, the only one the audience is supposed to dislike is moishe. we’re supposed to like yanky, because he just wants to bring esty back; we’re supposed to like the grandmother, because she feels bad that both her daughter and her granddaughter left the community; we’re supposed to like the aunt, because she cares so much about esty and she doesn’t really know what to do.

so, really, after all that, we’ve come to the conclusion that the community esty comes from is shown both positively and negatively. the criticism isn’t there just because the director wanted the viewer to hate everything esty came from - it’s there because it’s important to show the negative sides of strict communities. we’re only supposed to dislike one character - moishe - who is someone we probably should’ve disliked even in another show, at a different time. 

i do want to say something about yael, since she’s the only representation of secular judaism in this show and imo her character is fantastic. as i said on one of my posts - i hate her guts, but i love her character. she’s the representation of the secular judaism, and when we see her from esty’s pov we see just how many things she does are not to many people’s liking. when esty says “my parents lost their whole families in the holocaust” and she replies “so did half of israel” we can understand how for her it’s not as a big deal as it is to esty. she talks about hasidic people the way this series is blamed for showing them - “they’re nuts, the men study the torah every day and the women are baby machines”. if this series truly would’ve wanted to show this pov (which would think esty escaped a cult) we would conclude that yael is right. but she’s not, and it’s something we see a lot in the show.

this is long and this concludes to the point that i don’t think this show uses a trope of “escaping the cult”. it clearly has criticism about the hasidic community, which is pretty justified in my opinion, but it’s not seen as a cult. i would also like to mention that this series is based on a book by a woman who also left the satmar community. i haven’t read it so idk how accurate to her story the series is, but the themes are first and foremost introduced here by someone who actually lived there.

this was long and if you’ve actually read all of this i’m really happy!! i hope this is good enough of an answer. kinda messy and i probably forgot a few things, but my main point stands. i do get however why there are people who don’t like this show, but i personally think it’s very well done, so. yeah. that’s all

[eretzyisrael]

September is a super busy time of the year for families, with millions of students returning to schools,  entering new classrooms, meeting new teachers and peers, and sitting at new desks. During these first few days or weeks, parents will be watching — perhaps weepily, perhaps with relief — as their offspring disappear behind school doors, launching themselves into the next phase of their academic careers.

Doors are things we take for generally take for granted. Unless there’s a problem — the door won’t lock! — we don’t really think much about them. We talk about them more in metaphors than we do about their actual physical manifestations. We assume they keep unwanted things out and keep us safely in, but the assumption is an unconscious one.

But for one Israeli dad, Omer Barnes, who is the CEO of REMO Doors, doors are something more — and I don’t just mean his livelihood. They may be a solution to a uniquely American problem: school shootings.

For generations, parents used to assume that when their kids disappeared behind their school doors, they would be safe. That, at the end of the day, kids would walk out the doors of their schools, and walk through the ones that open into their homes and rooms, where they could talk about their days, share meals, do homework, and play pretend.

But, increasingly over the past few years, that assumption, that feeling of security, has been challenged. Since Columbine, we’ve experienced over 200 school shootings here in the U.S, with 24 school shootings taking place in 2019 alone. That’s not comparable to any other country in the world. And that reality has made the dreadful possibility of our kids not returning home from school something very real.

It was to avoid this possibility that the superintendent of Harrington Park, New Jersey — where Omer’s kids are enrolled in school — called him one day. The superintendent got word that Omer was in the door and security business, and wanted him to come check out the school’s front door and, if necessary, suggest a replacement as a way to keep out a potential shooter.

It was during this visit that Omer, a father of two, found out about what kids actually do during active shooter drills. During these drills, which now occur in just about every public school in the U.S., kids pretend as if there was an active shooter in the building. They have to hide under their desks and keep quiet and still in a dark classroom until the drill is over. Many times, these drills happen with no warning, and with no letter home to parents.

“My kids?! You’re putting my kids for 20 minutes, half an hour in the dark, and you think it’s normal?” Omer recalls asking. “I grew up with a country of terror and drills and this is wrong.”

It’s hard for us to know how effective active shooter drills really are. In fact, psychologists have noted that frequent and realistic drills can be harmful for kids, and cause anxiety and depression.

In Israel, Omer tells me, these kinds of traumatizing drills would never be acceptable. Yes, Israeli kids are familiar with terror and missile threats. For school drills, or during times of emergency, Israeli kids run to the merchav mugan, which literally means “protected space,” known colloquially as the mamad.  Since the Gulf War — which Omer and I both lived through in Israel — every new construction project, from private homes to schools, have to have a designated space that is a shelter from both bombs and chemical weapons. The mamad can be any room in the house, as long as its constructed to meet certain safety standards.

And so, when there’s a missile attack, Israeli kids know to run to the mamad and shut the door. They can bring coloring books and other activities to the safe space — no silence and dark required. This doesn’t mean that they avoid trauma, however. After Operation Protective Edge, Omer tells me, one of his nieces was so traumatized by the missile alarms that she was too scared to be in her bedroom in the dark by herself. The difference here is that this type of trauma is both familiar and expected — all Israeli citizens are familiar with it, unlike the quiet trauma of American active shooter drills that exist only on school grounds.

After the meeting with the superintendent, Omer needed time to think. And, after months of research, Omer realized that changing the front doors was not a solution. After all, the shooter usually comes from inside the school — either a student or a former student. And so, he turned his attention to classroom doors.

The door that he came up with, which is made in Israel, is not just a door: made of metal, it is both fireproof and bulletproof. With the door in place, a classroom with cinderblock walls is transformed into a safe room. The idea is to recreate the mamad in every American classroom. After all, school shootings are a type of terror attack, Omer said. And who knows terror better than Israelis?

Of course, bulletproof doors are not Omer’s invention. But what he helped create is an affordable ($2,500) bulletproof door that is fast to install and easy to operate. What’s more, since the REMO door fits over the existing doorframe, it takes just under an hour to install. And the door itself has no complicated electronic mechanism, just a simple analog palm lock. When demoing the door in a classroom, he asked a 5-year-old to lock the door from the inside. The fact that he managed to do it showed to Omer that this was truly a workable solution.

Moreover, Omer hopes the doors will be so effective that they might help end school shootings altogether. Like a guard checking bags at the entrance of every building in Israel, Omer hopes that his doors will deter shooters from carrying out attacks in schools.

The doors so far have been installed in dozens of schools, including Bnos Menachem, a girl’s Yeshiva in Brooklyn, the first school to get a government grant to install the doors. Omer’s doors have also been endorsed by 25 senators after a recent visit to the senate.

The doors aren’t just about keeping kids physically sound. Omer he recalls how stressed he was when his son, 11, came back home after a drill. “There was a school shooting today but we don’t know who died,” his son told him.

Later, Omer discovered what had actually happened: “They did a drill at lunch, and one kid had a nosebleed and they saw the blood in the corridor and they thought someone died,” he said.

Active shooter drills are traumatizing, not just for the students, but for the millions of teachers who have to go through them. But with the safe doors, things are different. Once the door is locked, and the kids are safe in their classroom. They don’t need to turn off the lights. They don’t need to be quiet. Just like in the mamad, where kids and adults can entertain themselves while they wait for safety, the kids and their teachers can have a semblance of normalcy as they wait for the lockdown to end.

When there’s a lockdown drill, kids can color, read, write, or chat with each other. In other words, they can go about their day. “Suddenly, lockdown is creative time,” Omer said.

[osinyy]

Never have I felt so very JEWISH as sitting in the kitchen reading the end of @jhscdood‘s For You Have Returned My Soul Within Me over my breakfast of a bagel and schmear with maple-flavored pork sausages. I struggled to read the right-aligned font with my lapsed day-school Hebrew. I sang the prayers under my breath. I said the shema before bed last night after reading the first chapter. 

I cried so much reading about Big Brother Bucky ‘saving’ Becca at the dance hall. About Yaakov bar (ben?) George v’Yocheved going to the mikvah before shipping off to the front. About him meeting Gabe and sharing their Hebrew names and finding the shul in Europe and making Shabbos even without challah or wine, just two stumps of candles burning for maybe ten minutes.

I wept reading about Rabbi Linda and Bubbe Becca and their flat out acceptance of Bucky and his trauma. I wish Linda was my Rabbi, truth be told.

Under the cut are just a few of my favorite bits. (Which, actually, got a lot longer than I thought it would. There are also spoilers below.)

“Soldat!” the Commander barks. “What are you doing?”  (...)   He says, “I was resting.”

“Of course Steve called me, boychik. He has me on speed dial.”

The melodies have changed – of course the melodies have changed, it's been 70 years since he last went to temple, they're allowed to write new music for ancient words if that's what makes them happy, but–

The shema is the same.

שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָֽד

His breath hitches.

Rabbi Linda laughs, and gets up out of her seat, extending her hand for him to shake. He takes it, and she cups his in both of hers, gently. “We have a good community here, Bucky. There is so much we have been through, but we made it out by joining hands and moving forward together. I believe you can do that, too.” 

He reads Eli Wiesel and Harold Kushner.

He reads Primo Levi and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

He says, “I feel like I am back at yeshiva.”

Becca says, “Good God, that's depressing. You're coming over tonight, The Producers is on at six.”

“A lot of those Torah scrolls were lost when the Nazis came,” Rabbi Linda confirms.

Then she says, “But many were also hidden away and kept safe, or transported to England or the US, or later to Israel.”

She looks at him steadily for a long moment. She says, “And some were taken by the Nazis. Locked away in basements and vaults as trophies of war, meant to be kept from us, never to be read from again.”

She leans forward. “But we keep finding them. These little troves of Torahs. And we recover them, we repair them, we restore them, and we bring them back into our communities, to be used again in the way they were intended. The Torah from your temple could very well be one of those, could be somewhere in the world being read from this Shabbat.”

“We, the Jewish people, are more than what happened to us during the war. It still hurts us, yes, but it doesn't define us.”

She puts her hand on his, gently. She does not seem to mind the metal. She says, “It was not the end of our story, and this is not the end of yours.”

On the way home, he stops at a store that doesn't have the word “mart” in its name, and he buys a dress shirt that won't make his sister tease him.

She teases him anyway.

“I think I want to go to the mikvah,” he tells Rabbi Linda. “Is that something people still do?”

Linda's eyebrows rise. It's rare for him to state a desire so plainly. Bucky thinks he likes the freedom in doing so. He should do it more often.

“There are a few formal mikvot in the area,” Rabbi Linda says. “But personally, I prefer to use the ocean.”

She hands him an envelope. Inside are a Social Security card and a Florida State driver's license. The name reads, Jacob Elijah Barnes.

“You've been spending too much time with my sister,” he says, rolling his eyes at the joke. We’re always waiting for Elijah to return.

It takes a couple weeks of poking around Brooklyn, venturing out from his new room at a new shelter in the old Jewish section of the borough, to find Steve. And of course, when he does, it's at Friday night services at a little temple prominently displaying a rainbow flag on the front gate.

He slips inside just after services have started and takes a seat a few rows behind Steve, who has placed himself two-thirds of the way back, on the far right next to the aisle. He's wearing a kippa that's dark blue, and embroidered with the tree of life in silver thread.

Bucky follows along with the service, singing Lecha dodi and all the rest, and he sees the exact moment that Steve hears him and realizes he's there: his head lifts, alert and on guard, while at the same time, his shoulders relax and drop a good two inches.

“C’mon, Becca, it’s–”

“Ugh, I hope I have another stroke tonight and forget this entire conversation,” she says, and then hangs up on him.

“Hanukkah starts Tuesday night,” Steve says, because he's always been bolder than Bucky, if not braver. “If you want to come over, we can light the candles together.”

“I think,” Bucky says quietly, “I think I'd like that.”

[chiseler]

Israel and the Far-Right American Left

Presidential elections are, for the most part, psychic events. Chimeras. Deceptions. Or, as Noam Chomsky calls them, “personalized quadrennial extravaganzas.” But Chomskyites are often puzzled to hear their anarchist role model, one election cycle after another, touting the mainstream Democrat.

So why does Chomsky, with a saddened, syllable-dragging and demoralized voice, encourage voters to participate in their own exclusion – i.e., the electoral process? His under-read Goals and Visions holds some answers. The essay, dating back to Dr. Chomsky’s heyday, makes a beautiful (and deeply counter-intuitive) case for anarchists supporting strong centralized government in the near term.

Voting is a provisional bulwark against absolute corporate tyranny, which must, so the argument goes, be defeated first – I’m not persuaded that Chomsky’s theory illuminates his latest White House hopeful, Bernie Sanders. If, as Chomsky argues, our American Democracy is some terrifying variety show, beamed into politically atomized brains, then certainly he's able to see the emperor has no clothes here. That is, Bernie (pardon the image): a butt naked cipher. I recently asked the MIT linguist a simple question.

"What has Bernie Sanders ever done to help Palestine?"

For years, international activists have been putting Palestinian dignity at the center of their program. And Chomsky's laconic response — "Not much" — won't surprise them. No stranger to equivocation where BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) is concerned, I hoped to tease out whatever nuances might have created this strange contradiction on the American Left, in essence to answer my own query: "How can otherwise principled boycott supporters drop the ball and say 'oops' as historical Palestine experiences a genocide?"

If that word frightens you, you're in good company: Bernie Sanders, Noam Chomsky, and even Norman Finkelstein refuse it — despite a growing chorus that includes Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, who coined “incremental genocide” to define The Holy Land's occupation/annexation/extermination agenda. I'm sitting here in Brooklyn firing off emails in a chair designed by Ray and Charles Eames (so, please, don't call me an "armchair activist") — criticizing figures in my own personal pantheon.

Forgive me for what I do.

Stoop shouldered, he gazes out over his audience like a tortoise, half as old as time, in vain and reflexive search of the shell he left behind somewhere. Now, wouldn’t it be wonderful if this self-styled socialist were running for President? Sure, but Senator Bernie Sanders’ deportment and general appearance constitute a sadly instructive, big old honkin’ “tell” – only chumps and chuckleheads could possibly miss it. Outward displays of Hard Leftism fall away whenever Bernie aids and abets the Democratic Party in strange, stentorian Brooklynese.

Remember that solemn promise he made at the outset of his 2016 campaign not to run as an independent? And another obvious tip-off: pledging support for the Party’s foreknown nominee — i.e., the Monsanto shillaber with whom Sanders was so nauseatingly flirtatious. I keep these facts firmly in mind as I await honest responses to my pestering missives. Critical of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, Noam Chomsky also fails to advance any feasible alternatives.

Nor, by his own admission, has Bernie lifted a finger: "He’s moved towards support for Palestinian rights, more so than any other candidate, but he’s focusing on domestic policy." To wit, Bernie "knows very well that any word on the topic will let loose the familiar and cynical litany of ‘anti-Semitism’." But isn't it even more "cynical" to suggest, as Chomsky does, that ordinary citizens be held to a higher standard than his pick for US President? Some of us risk opprobrium, and worse, every day because party politics are obtuse to suffering in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders exploits disaffected voters by herding them back into the Democratic Party fold, under a primary assumption about their malleability, laziness and glib call for “revolution.” Though he claims to be a serious socialist, he actively supports a murderous wingnut Zionism. Take his resounding stamp of approval on “Operation Protective Edge,” which killed over 550 Palestinian children in 2014, serving Israel’s long-term agenda of land grabs, water theft, indefinite detention... a nigh endless atrocities list which includes the systematic torture of little kids (see UNICEF's Children in Israeli Military Detention, available as a PDF online).

I next decided to bother Chomsky’s old friend and political ally Dr. Norman Finkelstein, son of two Holocaust survivors and decades-long champion of the Palestinian cause. In recent years, Finkelstein has become something of a pariah on the Left thanks to his anti-BDS stance: "I think Bernie should be let alone in the primary to focus on his domestic agenda." This was getting monotonous.

Finkelstein unintentionally loops back to his mentor's essay, Goals and Visions, torpedoing its thesis as our half-assed interview progresses — acknowledging, for instance, that if Bernie couldn’t tax Jeff Bezos, and instead funded New Deal economics with attempted military cuts: “It could literally trigger a coup plot.” Responding to that same question, Chomsky answers with a devastating blow to his own theory: "Even if he were elected — a long shot — he would not be able to do much without a supportive Congress — an even longer shot.”

In plain language, Sanders and the rest of Congress are tied to the defense industry. So what about Uncle Noam’s (imagined) boundary line — the one supposedly separating captains of industry from democratically elected representatives? It’s a sham, though possibly a well-meaning one, like some avuncular bedtime story offered in lieu of reality-based hope.

Genocide kind of rubs me the wrong way.

I’m not sure there’s anything particularly “revolutionary” about pulling a bloodstained lever for state-sponsored carnage in slow motion. But, hell, that’s just my opinion. So let’s listen to Bernie himself — the old Bernie, who spoke a modicum of truth about our so-called electoral options. "Essentially, it's my view that the leadership of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are tied to big-money interests and that neither of these parties will ever represent the people in this country that are demanding the real changes that have to take place."

It’s axiomatic that we don’t launch revolutions in the ballot box. And yet, here we have Sanders fans, crowding around a Smurf with dyspepsia as if he were Big Bill Haywood. To his followers, I’d say: If you’re counting on some latter-day Dem to save you from capitalism’s war-mongering and general rapaciousness, then listen to Bernie’s earlier, slightly less dishonest incarnation. “You don’t change the system from within the Democratic Party.” Now there’s a sentiment I can agree with.

Bernie’s sheep-dogging dovetails with his oft-stated support for pugnacious Israel, since both positions coincidentally strengthen Monsanto. The agribusiness colossus, known mainly for genetically modified crops, produced Agent Orange during America’s illegal assault on Vietnam, and now makes white phosphorous doted on by the Holy Land and that (surprise!) melts human flesh. Israel routinely and, yes, illegally drops the stuff on civilians in Gaza, since... well, a bunch of Arabs live there... Go ahead and Google the images – if you can stomach them – of civilian “collateral damage” roasted by Bernie and his newfound Democrat pals.

Who needs an American Left that parses us into a hopeless corner of complicity with the ghouls over at Monsanto; or into an equally occult alliance with Bernie Sanders’ favorite arms manufacturers at Lockheed Martin: death-peddlers spanning generations which, to the surprise of no one, have their own rollicking relationship to The Holy Land’s psychopathic ethno-nationalism. The same corporations profiting on Israel’s crimes are destroying the biosphere. So what's an impressionable, idealistic soul to do? It's either make common cause with an artlessly compromised left, or enter a nihilistic hellscape populated by the likes of Ben Shapiro, or Dr. Jordan Peterson. Some choice.

Israeli talking points, a species of American PR industry-calibrated blather and Labor Day Telethon sanctimony, relentlessly fuse democracy and religious statehood – two distinct conditions which will never mesh -- into grotesque synonyms. But as of this writing, 97% of the water in Gaza is contaminated; electricity has been cut to 4 hours per day; Israeli courts convict 99.74% of Palestinian defendants (not that many people are guilty); 85% of Israel’s “security fence” (The Apartheid Wall) is on land rightfully and legally belonging to the people of Palestine.

Standing opposed to it all -- and indeed ridiculed by America's preeminent professional anti-Zionist, Dr. Norman Finkelstein, whose sole income these days derives from working the college lecture circuit where he finds himself harangued night after night by 20 year old corn-fed Methodist William Henry Harrison High School Irgun-wannabes, for daring to suggest that the state of Israel might possibly have its own problem with mass-murder -- the amateurs in BDS, wielding the kind of principled Internationalist vision which helped bring down Apartheid in South Africa, chase one last hope.

It is a movement which has become beautifully amorphous, internalized by artists who refuse to perform in Tel Aviv, or inspiring students to tell the truth. Again. Finally. Without fear. Meanwhile, courageous young people within Israel are choosing prison and the death of their social lives over a collusion so easily embraced, and even sought, throughout the rest of the industrialized world. In a Land of Soldiers and unceasing bloodshed, this requires the kind of backbone and resolve that once inspired folk tales.

Ahed Tamimi, to whom this editorial is dedicated 

by Daniel Riccuito

Special thanks to R.J. Lambert

[laineystein]

“This is new.”

The Boy™️ and I went out for his birthday on Thursday night. His favorite restaurant happens to be close to where we both grew up so we drove through the same neighborhoods that raised us - streets we walked to get to school or back and forth from the houses we grew up in. Of course, we ran into three separate people we knew. This seems to be a trend lately. It’s like our past, every little detail we’ve been so good at keeping hidden, keeps rearing its head, demanding to be dealt with. One of the people we ran into was a teacher we both had in yeshiva and they commented “oh, this is new!” And we both smiled and laughed and wished them a good shabbat. We didn’t talk about it then but we spent Shabbos together – alone – and we spent most of the night unpacking all of it.  

 This wasn’t the first time we’d heard it. It’s all anyone seems to say lately. When I had a ride to the airport at 4am and my mother strong-armed me into admitting who it was she said “oh, that’s new”. When his Modox parents were a bit passive-agressive toward me earlier in the summer because suddenly I was *everywhere*, I finally got his mother to admit that she worried about our relationship simply because it “came out of nowhere”…because “it’s new” and a lot of our “decisions seem impulsive.”

  No. This isn’t new. We’re not new. Our relationship is 15 years old. This has been a thing - many things, actually - for a decade and a half. I have been in love with this man for half of my life but to the world, even the people we love the most, yes - this is new. And I can’t argue with them. We don’t. We have no idea how to handle this. 

  We were fifteen and sixteen. Simply put - being a teenager means being young and dumb and somehow being terrified and craving happiness in equal amounts. He was (is) my best friend’s brother and they’re extremely close. On top of that, he’s Modox and I wasn’t and am not. His family never treated me differently, even when other families did - especially early on at yeshiva when it was very clear that I was raised differently than most of my classmates. But I loved them and they loved me. They loved me as their daughter’s best friend. It didn’t make sense to explain that I was more than that with their son - especially because we didn’t know what that was. 

We were teenagers! We were intense and fearless and manic and we were absolutely terrified of letting anyone down. We’re both the first born in our immigrant Jewish families. There has always been so much pressure on each of us to be the best - the smartest, the most hardworking. For him - the most devout. We both had to marry well and have big Jewish families. We were the product of generations of trauma - children and grandchildren of families that had consistently escaped persecution and now we were seemingly well adjusted teenagers in America, finally free to live the lives everyone who came before us fought so hard for. It was a lot of pressure, all the time. But together? No pressure. The things I struggled to tell his sister - how much I hated my yeshiva uniform, how marriage and children weren’t in the forefront of my mind yet…everything I couldn’t tell anyone else in the world, I told The Boy™️.

That’s where the name comes from - and those of you who used to follow my studyblr know I talked about him often. I never talked about him by name. His sister always thought I had someone in Israel that I had this big crush on. And I did. When he was in Israel with me I had a huge crush on him. But I loved him in Brooklyn too. I loved him when we traveled to France and Amsterdam and Italy. I spent four out of my five IDF civilians (time off from the military) with him and no one knew. We have lived so many lives together. We’ve experienced so many things, side by side, and no one had any clue. And we watched each other love other people and try to make it work with people that weren’t us. But ultimately he was the one who helped me through breakups and med school. He was the person that literally saved my life in 2020 when my shifts at the hospital during COVID had me so mentally and physically exhausted that I could barely get out of bed…literally. Then when things calmed down I realized, it didn’t matter what was going on in the world, he’s always been my biggest supporter and I cannot and will not live without him and the fact that we weren’t sharing this thing that made us both so undeniably happy just felt ridiculous and unfair.

But we didn’t know how to even explain everything so we kind of…didn’t? It was never “this is my best friend and we’re in love” it was “I’m going to Israel and he’s coming too”. We alternated Shabbos between his parents’ house and mine. All the while everyone is hesitant, almost nervous - this is new, this is new, this is new. It’s not new. But this is the first time we’re admitting how we feel and what we are to the people we love. He’s not just my friend’s brother. He’s not even just my best friend or my boyfriend. He’s the man I want to marry and have a family with. I get why our families are so confused. They have no idea all we’ve done and how so many of the things they celebrate in us - our jobs, our successes, our faith - is because of the other.

  So we have to start being honest. They’ll never truly get it if they can’t see how deep it is, if they can’t acknowledge the history. But how do we explain it? We are who we are because once upon a time we were both really struggling with our faith. We thought we were terrible Jews because we didn’t want the things our parents wanted. I didn’t believe in tzniut. Some days he didn’t either. We were doing things we were told kids in yeshiva don’t do! We were having sex and smoking weed and going to bars in the city because we could. But it wasn’t about being a part of the goy world. We didn’t want that. We just wanted to be who we were in the Jewish world and we had no idea how to do that. For so long it felt like it was us against the world - Jewish and gentle. We didn’t fit in with either but we could be who we wanted to be, together, in this weird in-between. He’s safety. He always has been. When I have a thought and I know no one in the world will understand it, I know he’s the exception. We always felt like we were judged, even inadvertently by people who swore they were being open minded and supportive, but together that was never a worry. So how do we explain that? 

We don’t. We won’t. We need to be honest about some things: about how far our friendship goes back, about the depth of it - then and now. Everyone else is free to make their own assumptions. They can draw their own conclusions or they can just learn to accept us as we are now. The weird part is that everyone has been much more accepting than we imagined - especially his sister. She loves our relationship so much, to the point that we feel bad for keeping it from her for so long. But we don’t know if we’d be who we are now if we hadn’t lived this other life together. We weren’t wrong. Having this one thing in life that is untouched by the world was magical. We still have days where we miss it, especially now as questions of marriage and children flood in. But we’ve agreed that we’ll be honest with our children. All of it. 

I guess a lot of this for us wasn’t just about *us* but about who each of us are as people. We’ve always worn so many labels. We’re completely opposites but we have fundamental similarities. We both love being Jewish. We’re loud and proud, unapologetic Jews. But we weren’t always! And the secret nature of our relationship aside, that’s what’s the most difficult for us to acknowledge publicly - myself in particular. I get a lot of that - often from many of you. I am so so honored that where I am with my faith today, at 31, is something so many of you admire. I can’t even begin to explain to you how much that means to me. But I guess it’s important to note that this was a journey. I was a mess. I always loved being a Jew but for several years I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know that I had the power to write my own narrative and live my life as a Jew on my own terms. The strength and confidence you see now is because all of the bullshit I went through before. Even now I am constantly learning. Every day I become more and more secure in my role as a Jewish woman, now that I can define what that means for me. 

And that’s all I want for any of you! Live your Jewish truth! We are all products of so much hardship. We really do deserve to be the best version of ourselves. We deserve happiness and security in our relationships, in our careers, in every aspect of life possible. And if you’re not there yet - if you wake up wondering where you fit into the Tribe, that’s okay! You will get there! Being a Jew is a super power!!! You just need to figure out how to be a Jew in a way that makes the most sense to you. There truly is no one way to be a Jew - no wrong way to be a Jew. Being a Jew, in any capacity, makes you an awesome Jew. I wish I had someone to tell me that but I didn’t. It took me many years to be where I am now. So for anyone who needs to hear it: you’re an awesome Jew and I’m so proud of you! 

[privilegeasatoolofresistance]

On the Violent Fragility of White Men

It has been a while since I have written a piece about the most recent events in the news, but I want to try to get back into it.  Both for myself as a way to process and understand all of the news I am hearing and seeing every day, and to share my ideas with the world to hear insights from others about how these things are sitting with you.

I consider myself a pretty active news follower.  I try to read the local paper (or as much of it as I can stomach) every day, I listen to Democracy Now! and other podcasts that get more in depth with news stories from the people. I get a lot of news from the people and organizations I follow on Facebook, and I listen to public radio whenever I have the chance in the car.  Though my news sources are mostly from my own biased world, I still have a general sense of what is going on in the world most of the time.  I write this to be upfront about where I get my news from and also about what I stand for.  

The catalyzing event pushing me to write this piece is the most recent school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas.  Let me first say that I am saddened, disheartened, and frustrated to see yet another young white man go into a school and kill his classmates.  It has also recently come out that the shooter, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, was motivated to kill his classmates and others, at least in part, by the rejection of a young woman at his school.  Democracy Now! reporting quoted the mother of the woman who he attacked and killed:

“The mother of Shana Fisher, one of the victims in the art classroom where police say Dimitrios Pagourtzis entered and opened fire, told the Los Angeles Times that her 16-year-old daughter had four months of problems with this boy. “He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no,” unquote. Sadie Rodriguez said her daughter recently stood up to him in class, and, quote, “a week later he opens fire on everyone he didn’t like,” she said. Rodriguez also spoke to Houston station ABC13.”

This is not the first time that a young, white man (we will get to the race part in a bit) has killed a woman who either dumped, rejected, or otherwise slighted him.  This is something that is built into the fragility of toxic masculinity.  I feel it inside of myself.  No, I don’t have a desire to go out and kill people, but I have felt a desire to blame a woman if I am somehow not desirable or not wanted.  In fact, at a much younger age, after my longtime female partner broke up with me, I tried on multiple attempts to get her to reconsider.  Thinking to myself, that she couldn’t really mean “no,” and she only needed me to convince her of that.  Sure, I could tell myself that I was in love and heartbroken and just doing anything I could.  Or I could see the reality that my fragile, masculine ego had been broken, and I could not let them happen.  Especially not as a young person (I was around 20 at the time).  

While the deeply entrenched nature of domestic violence in our country (and all across the world) is well-documented, the presence of toxic masculinity does not often get covered when talking about school shootings.  However, we see it time and time again that the young man (usually white) is out to seek either revenge or in some way, protect his pride against the horror of rejection or dismissal.  We saw it explicitly with the Isla Vista Killings in 2014, and have seen it constantly after some investigating has been done in so many other mass shootings.  The killings in Sutherland Springs, Texas were connected to domestic violence and militarism.  Earlier this year Jaelynn Wiley was killed in Maryland after rejecting a male at her school.  And in our local news, there has been coverage of the killing of a young woman in Springfield, Massachusetts with a knife after he broke up with her.  She was stabbed more than 30 times.

The reality is that these things happen all too often, and are the deadly result of boys being taught that they can literally have whatever they want, including women.  There has been a tweet going around facebook about a young boy never being told to leave girls around after they say no:

While this seems so simple, it captures so much of the violence of patriarchy and the ways in which we teach out boys the fragility that they so often internalize and eventually let out in aggressive and violent ways.  

To connect all of this to race, these cases almost always end with either the shooter being taken out in handcuffs (as was the case in Santa Fe most recently, as well as Parkland in February) or them shooting themselves to avoid arrest.  So rarely do we see them being shot down by the police or other law enforcement, we have to ask, how can that happen?  How can that happen when Stephon Clark was literally in his grandmother’s backyard and shot 20 times, including 8 times in the back?  

How can Tamir Rice, a 12-year old boy,  be shot after cops pull up and start shooting after a few seconds?  How do these white men (including Dylan Roof, who killed nine people in a CHURCH in Charleston, South Carolina) be escorted nicely from their killing sprees, while innocent black people are gunned down on the streets?  In order for this to happen our systems, including white supremacy, have done such an effective job at dehumanizing people of color, that we have more compassion for violent, white killers, than we do for black fathers and mothers going about their business.  This is also connected to the litany of instances where white people have called the cops on black people, for such benign things as waiting for a business partner at starbucks, having a BBQ in Oakland, checking out of an Airbnb, taking a nap in a dorm common room, and others.  All of this while the police getting called to negotiate with a violent killer in Santa Fe, Texas.  To negotiate with a violent killer, who has already killed people in his school. I didn’t see the BART officer who killed Oscar Grant negotiating with that unarmed black man.  I didn’t see the NYPD officer who killed Saheed Vassell in Brooklyn.  

Meanwhile in Gaza, Palestinians are literally being killed at long-range for walking to the edge of the concentration camp that Israel has created for them.  Getting shot, for walking to the border with Palestinian flags, and demanding to return to the land that was once theirs.  If Israel had half as much compassion as we have for violent white male killers in the US, these killings could be avoided.  

And the narrative is always the same for the white police officer in the US as it is for the Israeli state: we were doing it in self-defense.  Just how 12-year old children with toy guns are a threat to white people in the US, unarmed protestors with flags and stones are a threat to the existence of Israel.  Anything we can tell ourselves in order to keep ourselves safe, except that these young white men are trained to be violent and aggressive by patriarchy and white supremacy.  

Fragility is built into systems such as patriarchy and white supremacy and these school shootings are the ultimate expression of that fragility.  As men and as white people, we need to do better to teach our boys, our fathers, our uncles, our friends, and anyone else in our lives who will listen, that we are not entitled to anything, and especially not to any other person if they do not want us.  We need to teach this from a young age and talk about it often to reverse these devastating effects of socialization that kill people every single day.  And as white people, we need to realize just how badly we have been hoodwinked into thinking that those people of color around us, are threatening simply because they exist.  Next time we feel this as a white person we really need to meditate on what is truly happening inside of us.  

Let’s teach our people how to reject all of the myths that we have been fed for centuries and to raising boys to have a healthy relationship to rejection.  We can do better, and we need to if we stand any chance at stopping the violence so embedded into our society.

[woodworkingpastor]

Resurrection! -- Luke 24:1-12 -- Easter -- April 4, 2021

Please pray with me:

O God, who for our redemption gave your only-begotten Son to the death of the cross, and by his glorious resurrection delivered us from the power of our enemy: Grant us so to die daily to sin, that we may evermore live with him in the joy of his resurrection; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

News that demands a response

In a recent article in The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz tells the following story about good news:

One of the most amazing things I have ever witnessed involved an otherwise unprepossessing house cat named Billy. This was some years ago, shortly after I had moved into a little rental house in the Hudson Valley. Billy, a big, bad-tempered old tomcat, belonged to the previous tenant, a guy by the name of Phil. Phil adored that cat, and the cat—improbably, given his otherwise unenthusiastic feelings about humanity—returned the favor.

On the day Phil vacated the house, he wrestled an irate Billy into a cat carrier, loaded him into a moving van, and headed toward his new apartment in Brooklyn. Thirty minutes down the interstate, in the middle of a drenching rainstorm, the cat somehow clawed his way out of the carrier. Phil pulled over to the shoulder but found that, from the driver’s seat, he could neither coax nor drag the cat back into captivity. Moving carefully, he got out of the van, walked around to the other side, and opened the door a gingerly two inches—whereupon Billy shot out, streaked unscathed across two lanes of seventy-mile-per-hour traffic, and disappeared into the wide, overgrown median. After nearly an hour in the pouring rain trying to make his own way to the other side, Phil gave up and, heartbroken, continued onward to his newly diminished home.

Some weeks later, at a little before seven in the morning, I woke up to a banging at my door. Braced for an emergency, I rushed downstairs. The house had double-glass doors flanked by picture windows, which together gave out onto almost the entire yard, but I could see no one. I was standing there, sleep-addled and confused, when up onto his hind legs and into my line of vision popped an extremely scrawny and filthy gray cat.

I gaped. Then I opened the door and asked the cat, idiotically, “Are you Billy?” He paced, distraught, and meowed at the door. I retreated inside and returned with a bowl each of food and water, but he ignored them and banged again at the door. Flummoxed, I took a picture and texted it to my landlord with much the same question I had asked the cat: “Is this Billy?”

Ninety minutes later, Phil showed up at my door. The cat, who had been pacing continuously, took one look and leaped into Phil’s arms—literally hurled himself the several feet necessary to be bundled into his owner’s chest. Phil, a six-foot tall bartender of the rather tough variety, promptly started to cry. After a few minutes of mutual adoration, the purring cat hopped down, devoured the food I had put out two hours earlier, lay down in a sunny patch of grass by the door, and embarked on an elaborate bath.

Responding to the Gospel

The New Testament word gospel is like many other theologically important words we encounter in the Bible, in that it’s not inherently a religious term. As a verb, gospel simply means “to proclaim good news.” It’s the kind of thing that a messenger would relay from the battlefield to the king, bringing news of a favorable turn in battle, or even of victory itself. In this sense, the landlord in our story proclaimed a type of gospel to Phil when he called and said, “Billy has come home.”

But gospel is not just any news, it is the kind of news that demands a response. Hearing the gospel places a demand on our lives. How will we respond? What will we do differently—what changes will we make—now that we’ve heard this good news? Is “good news” really good if it doesn’t elicit a change from deep within us? How would you have felt about my story if Phil had just told Kathryn, “I’ve moved on; since Billy obviously wants to be there, just keep him”? It’s not a bad ending, but it is significantly less satisfying.

The report of the first Easter morning begins with a report of the longest sabbath ever:

On the sabbath they rested according to the commandment (Luke 23:56b).

Having been witnesses to Jesus’ death, all the women could do was rest and mourn. They were left to process their complicated thoughts and dashed hopes, and wrestle with the fact that their desire to be in a place where everything is in order and and everything is right—essentially to be in a place they could call home—was apparently not meant to be.

The Sabbath is intended as a day of remembering. And we would do well to remember that the people of Jesus’ day had expectations of what Jesus would do, expectations that his death seems to have ruined. The people who surrounded Jesus��his disciples, the women who travelled with him and financially supported his ministry, even his opponents—had an expectation of what God would do in their lives. We’re not all that different: in our day, we want God to bless our efforts, to help us in times of difficulty, to work in people and events for a particular outcome.

The expectations of those we read about in the Bible were a bit different from ours: they expected that God would return to his people, defeat their enemies (which meant the Roman government), renew His covenant with them and dwell with them in a restored temple. People had gotten their hopes up that Jesus was that person who would be king; some expected Jesus to lead an insurrection or command an army, and Jerusalem would once again be a place of importance and power. When Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God—even when he taught the disciples to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” this is the kind of thing they were expecting: the Kingdom of God would be revealed as a political kingdom on earth, with a real king in a real temple commanding real armies and fighting real battles against real enemies.

There was a reason why the people expected this; it’s because there had been a kingdom once before, a kingdom the people had lost. In the Old Testament—amidst all the stories of the Hebrew people and judges and prophets and kings, amidst all the stories we tell our children in Bible School and the stories whose violence and gore make us wonder why they’re in the Bible at all; even amidst all the rules and regulations and building plans for the things the people would need to properly worship God—amidst all of this are two stories that describe times when the people turned away from God in significant ways. And the problem the people of Jesus’ day had that led to their misunderstanding was that they’d picked the wrong problem for Jesus to fix.

In 1 Samuel 8 we read of the time when God’s people recognized they were facing a great difficulty. Samuel—the faithful prophet and judge of the people—was getting old and his sons were corrupt. The people rightly recognize that the path they are on is a dead end, so they ask Samuel to appoint a king to lead them. Samuel objects to this plan; God is to be their king. But God does something surprising: he tells Samuel to go ahead and appoint a king anyway. If they would rather be led by an earthly ruler and not God himself, then fine.

But in choosing a king the people had turned away from God; it proved to be their first step to exile in Babylon. Eventually Israel is defeated by a foreign nation, the temple and city wall are destroyed, and the nation’s leaders are taken into captivity to live in Babylon as punishment for their unfaithfulness. It is a great oversimplification to compare them to Billy the cat bolting out of Phil’s moving van to head out on their own, but that’s essentially what the people did. Life with Phil—even in the new place—would have worked out. But Billy had different ideas, and so do we. God’s people ended up in exile—separated from their home, the place God intended them to flourish—and their life was never the same.

It’s understandable why the people thought Jesus would fix this problem for them. But it was still the wrong problem. The ultimate issue wasn’t that the life they were living wasn’t working out like they had hoped. The problem was that they were in exile from their Creator. The real story they needed to remember is found in Genesis 3 where Adam and Eve turn away from God because they have come to believe they know better how to live their lives than God does. And lest we think that Adam and Eve is just an old relic of a story—a kind of fable that we can take or leave—this basic problem would be repeated by the Apostle Paul just a few years after Jesus’ death:

All have turned aside, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, there is not even one (Romans 3:12).

The people of Jesus day looked out at the world around them and were saying, “what we see doesn’t make sense. We should have our own king and rule the world in the name of God.” But the reason Jesus left his Father’s side to be born and walk among us was because God was saying, “the reason your world doesn’t make sense is because your relationship with me is broken. If we fix that, then everything else can be put right.”

Jesus gave us all kinds of clues that his mission on earth was to put things to rights—to put the world back together in the way God intended. So we see Jesus travelling around healing the sick, raising the dead, challenging people to repent, and telling stories about the so-called wrong kind of people doing the right things and being validated by Jesus. Outsiders were becoming insiders in God’s family.

And so when Mary Magadalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women encounter the angel at Jesus’ tomb, their response to this good news—this Gospel—is to become the first preachers in the history of Christianity! They run back to the apostles and tell them good news: what we thought was the end of the story is really only the middle of the story. There is more to come because Jesus has defeated the ultimate enemy; Jesus has defeated death. Our broken relationship with God can now be restored. Sins can be forgiven. We can learn what it means to properly love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; from that we can learn to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Anglican scholar N.T. Wright describes the benefits of being put back in right relationship with God this way:

All those who believe in Jesus, rescued by his cross and resurrection and enlivened by his Spirit, are part of the new family. This was and is central, not peripheral. The church was the original multicultural project, with Jesus as its only point of identity. It was known…as a worship-based, spiritually renewed, multi-ethnic, polychrome, mutually supportive, outward-facing, culturally creative, chastity-celebrating, socially responsible fictive kinship group, gender-blind in leadership, generous to the poor and courageous in speaking up for the voiceless.

This is the meaning of Easter and what life in Christ points to: sins have been forgiven, relationships with God and one another can be restored, and we now can participate with God in putting the world to rights.

But the news still requires a response. Even with the challenges of our present times—quite obviously represented by the fact that we have gathered outdoors for worship instead of in our beautiful and comfortable sanctuary—we live in something of a paradise where we can get along quite well without God. Why do we need God when we have decent jobs that provide for our basic needs and so much more; where comforts are only a click on Amazon.com away; where we can be constantly entertained with the latest TV program, sporting event, or concert; and where by and large most of the challenges that make life dangerous rarely, if ever, touch us? Furthermore, there are so many who will reduce Christianity to the notion of “praying a prayer so you can go to Heaven when you die,” and pretty much do whatever else you want until that day comes.

Still, the story comes down to our expectations of Jesus. Is he the center of your life, the hub around which everything rotates? Is he somewhere on the periphery—something akin to an app on our smartphones that delivers something we need every so often? Might Jesus be out of sight and out of mind?

How will you respond to the good news? Does Jesus’ invitation to be made right with God and then join in with the rest of God’s family in cooperating with God to put the world to rights demand a response in you? Are you ready to find your way back home into the loving arms of your Creator?

[blackcoffeeandblankpagess]

NYC Marathon 2017 Recap

Woke up at 4:45 and walked over to penn station to take the subway to the staten island ferry, the walk was a lil sketch but once I got to the platform there were a few marathoners and we all traveled together, one dude on the subway looked at me and was like “you look fast” I hope so buddy

While waiting for the (6:15) ferry I talked to a man from israel who had run 8 marathons in his home country, a few in europe, and this was his first in the states, so cool

The ferry ride goes right past the statue of liberty which is also cool

On the bus the man who sat next to me was AWESOME. This was his 28th time running nyc, 107th marathon, and he was 70 years old. Goals??? He was telling me about the races he has run all over the world and it makes me so excited to think that today was the first of a lifetime of marathoning 

Got to the start village around 7:30, my wave wasn’t until 10:15 so plenty of time but it didn’t feel slow. I ate some oatmeal for breakfast and drank a shit ton of water and gave myself about 2.5 hours for the food to digest 1.5 hours for the water (these are the things that you learn to prioritize when your gi tract is out to kill you)

We could see the bridge from the starting village but couldn’t actually see the runners on it, still it was super cool to hear the cannon go off for the elites even if we couldnt see them ALSO can we talk about how fucking badass shalane is??? wish I could have watched the race but from what I’ve seen/heard it was phenomenal #tarheels

When the cannon went off they played frank sinatra’s new york, new york and it was magical

I was being very careful with my pacing on the bridge because i was warned by many people who have run nyc that it’s easy to go out too fast and ignore the hill and screw yourself over and my strategy was supposed to be running the first half at ~9 minute pace. The first mile was exactly 9 but then….

I went out way too fast, I was dropping sub 8s in the early miles and even though I kept repeating myself that the race doesn’t start until the second half and doesn’t really start until mile 20, I continued to betray my plan

I think the main issue was that I felt good, it wasn’t like I was killing myself to get my splits so I was just like …this is fine, also I’ve only raced half marathons before in which case pushing the pace is okay because by the time it really gets to me the race is over

Needless to say, I fucked myself over real bad!!! (we’ll get to that in a minute)

I saw the wonderful @mountains–and–miles at mile 5.5 and one of my best friend’s (who is currently abroad) family at mile 8.5 so I had a lot to look forward to in the first half, also the crowds in brooklyn are AMAZING 

At mile 7 I just happened to pass fricken KATHRINE SWITZER!!!!! talk about strong women. I had no idea she was running and I was like HOLY SHIT!!!!!

Around mile 10.5 I started to realize my mistake of taking off too fast but the effects didn’t really hit until mile 16

Ironically I ran the first half in the exact time of my first half marathon (1:47) although my tracker prob said 1:49 or something because weaving in and out of people added distance

Miles 15-16ish are the queensboro bridge which I think could more accurately be named hell on earth. I was also wary of this area heading into the race after everything I had read. It’s really silent after leaving the crowds of brooklyn, a hill, and it was the part of the race where I really started to come apart

Miles 16-19 are first ave in manhattan which is wild but I was seriously breaking down at this point, threw my time goals out the window and decided to just focus on getting to the finish line, as the OG tumblr homies will appreciate my mantra was “it does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop”

Basically miles 18-25 I did a run/walk pattern that I remembered someone I know using for an ultra and shockingly it didn’t cost me as much time as I expected

I saw my mom at mile 19 and again at mile 22 where she jumped in and ran with me for a few blocks which I desperately needed at that point

By some crazy turn of events at mile 24.5 I just happened to run into the other girl from the unc marathon club who was running the race…out of 51,000 runners, what are the odds??? 

According to my watch I ran 26.2 in 4:09, but my official time was 4:12. Because of a lot of weaving around in the beginning of the race I added about a quarter of a mile in distance

One of the toughest parts of nyc is actually the finish, once you cross the line you have either a half mile or mile walk to exit depending on if you checked a bag. During my walk towards the exit I ended up making a fun detour to the medical tent!!

My calves were hurting a LOT, not just the expected I just ran a marathon so obviously I’m sore hurting. I decided I would stop at the med tent since I still had probably about a mile total of walking left to meet my parents. On my way to the med tent I suddenly was having trouble breathing which is fucking terrifying. Every time I took a breath in my breathing was all shaky and I felt like I was gasping for air and couldn’t get any. Something which has never happened to me so that was bizarre.

The doctors were all wonderful and one of the guys joked that he couldn’t help me since I had on my UNC jersey and he was a duke alumn, fair

After a few mins my breathing was normal and my legs weren’t much better but I didn’t think sitting there was really gonna help so

I got a post race poncho and I was expecting it to be a shitty rain poncho but it was giant and fleece and fuzzy and I think I’ll probably build a home inside of it and live in it forever

When I finally reached my parents (who for the record are divorced so the fact that we were all together briefly made my heart happy) I burst into (happy) tears

Afterwards we went back to our friend’s apartment in manhattan and they had an ice bath and hot tea waiting for me, amen  

Took a train home and got back around 8 to some leftover homemade pizza and kombucha for dinner, nice

Those are all of the little details I think. I would definitely summarize it as a learning experience. Went out way too fast but also expected that to happen since it was my first marathon. In training and in racing I have a lot I plan to do differently the next time around (spring!!). Overall though i have no regrets, it was an absolutely incredible experience and as bart yasso said, “the nyc marathon is the closest thing a regular person can get to an olympic experience” so many runners from all over the globe. The announcements in the starting village were in all different languages it was amazing.

Also thank you so much to everyone who messaged/commented/texted me wishing me luck and giving me advice, it seriously means the world to me

Edit: Something else worth noting, I never once felt nervous for this race only pure excitement and that is how I know this is a lifetime sport for me, love love love

[hetmusic]

TMR TALKS TO... O MER | The Most Radicalist

In this interview feature, we get to know the most radicalist up and coming stars on the planet. This time we had a chat with Brooklyn-based Isralei musician O Mer. “All my dreams are rentals because I can’t afford my own” is a lyric from O Mer’s ‘Repack The Junk’ that truly encapsulates the essence of his songwriting. His optimism glimmers through the undeniable clouds of pessimism, although one could also call the latter pragmatism. His commentaries look at contemporary culture (be it politics or social media, as we hear in the aforementioned single), the environmental crisis is the focus of ‘The Flood’, and ‘Anthem’ considers how the praise of individuality is easily traded in for ticking boxes of who one “should” be. Each of O Mer’s tracks consciously examines the state of being human against a backdrop of evolved production that combines Middle Eastern patterns and scales, scorching rock chord progressions, soulful vocals, electronic samples, hearty bass and so much more. For this global citizen, he sees very little distinction between most of these genres and so the clever patchwork forms a language anew; one best to convey O Mer’s view of the world. Throughout the interview below we discuss the inspiration behind some of O Mer’s work, how life in Israel influenced his creativity, why he chose Brooklyn as his new home and what to look out for next from this unique talent.

TMR: We were really struck by 'Repack The Junk’, in which you oscillate between optimism and pessimism. Was this song inspired by recent events or something more internal? Both. This song is basically me taking a critical look at the way I internalized pop culture. I think a lot of the stories we tell ourselves about the way we go about our lives are hypocritical and I’m totally a part of the hypocrisy. The way many musicians (me included) incorporate their “brand” into the art making process to the extent where they are inseparable can be very confusing to me. I wanna be able to tell myself I’m free as an artist, but artistic freedom is full of uncertainty and in a sense “unbrandable”. TMR: Almost everything you record is then warped or affected by electronic production, when did you first begin experimenting with digital sounds? After hearing Kanye West’s ‘No Church In The Wild’, I realized there’s a freedom electronically manipulating sounds affords that is very hard (and expensive) to find elsewhere.       

TMR: A rare acoustic moment arrived on your ‘Everything Is Everyone’s Fault’ with the title-track itself. Was it poignant to strip back the layers for this song?   

Absolutely, this version of the song is the third version I made. The first one was orchestral with a very dense beat and the second was more groove oriented (which is ridiculous now that I think back on it). It took both of these failed versions for me to realize I wrote a good song that needs to be produced in as minimal a way as possible in order to really come through.   

TMR: Where things really seemed to pick up steam for you was with the release of ‘Now I’m Alive’, does this track still holds a special place for you?   

It is definitely one of my favorites to play live and I’m definitely proud of it, yet it’s not my favorite song that I wrote. I used to spend a long time trying to understand why it stood out the way it did and I think it has something to do with how simple and undeniable the message is, almost feels like I stole it…       

TMR: Having previously lived in Israel, did you find that the proximity to Eastern and Western cultures has shaped the creative community in the country?   

It most definitely did, not only the proximity but also that in the 20th century Jews came to Israel from all over. It’s probably why most Israeli musicians are very stylistically flexible (the marvelous Noga Erez is probably the best current example). TMR: Now you're based in Brooklyn, what drew you to that part of the world? I wanted to move to one of the bigger music scenes and see what it’d be like, Berlin felt to close, LA too far, and between London and Brooklyn, I knew more people living in Brooklyn so I moved there, it really was that naive and silly. TMR: Who's your favourite upcoming Brooklyn artist right now? altopalo, Psymone Spine and Sabine Holler. TMR: What should listeners, new and well-acquainted, look out for next from you? I’m working on new music all the time and am planning to jump back on the release wagon very quickly after this EP release. I’m also planning on shooting more live videos at home and maybe some band stuff, a bunch of people have been asking for those and I should be less lazy about it, maybe now that it’s in writing I can’t procrastinate no more?

http://www.themostradicalist.com/features/tmr-talks-to-o-mer/

[the-record-columns]

Feb. 20, 2019: Columns

A not so permanent wave...

The 1918 Helene Curtis Empress permanent wave machine from Arlene Staley sits next to a 1948 AMI Jukebox also in perfect working condition.

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

Every so often, I begin my column with a note to the effect of "...the best part of my day is my company."

And it is.

The "bait" out front leads many to assume we are running an antique store and, once I get them past it not being a store, but a poor man's museum, I have some amazing visits with folks that wander in literally from Boomer to Bangkok. Being a wannabe storyteller, it is always great to have a "fresh set of ears," as Sonny Church says.

Also, at this time of year, it is approaching the anniversaries of my parents’ deaths in 1995—March and April—and, while they are always on my mind, it just seems to bear down on me more this time of year. I, as you are bound to know, was their baby boy, and they were both elderly when they died. Most of their contemporaries are also gone and, frankly, it is rare for anyone to stop by who even knew them.

Which brings me to my company.

The offices of The Record and Thursday Printing are "decorated" with an array of old, unusual, and eclectic items which just beg for a story to be told about each one of them.

And, that allows me to often work in a story about my mother, Cary, or my daddy, The Preacher.

So this past weekend when three folks came in from Gastonia and walked straight to the hair-curling machine, I was ready.

The machine, which looks like something form Saddam Hussein's basement, is actually a 1918 Helene Curtis Empress permanent wave machine — and it is still in perfect working condition.  It was given to me by Arlene Staley some years ago, and it has been photographed with many a hairdresser who ended up randomly visiting here, and it is a great piece of history.

I live upstairs above The Record in the 911 Main Street building in what was once The Maylflower Beauty Shop and Beauty School. My mother sometimes had her hair done there and, when was a little boy, I was with her when she got a "permanent" one day.  She looked like they were going to blast her into outer space with all those wires and clips attached to her head.

Well, in no time, we were climbing those same steps again and I asked why we were there. My mother said she was going to get a permanent.

“You just got one,” I said.

“Well, I need another one,” she replied. 

“Then it wasn't very permanent was it?” I told her.

 As she laughed, getting ready to explain that your hair grows out and another treatment is needed, I said “...looks like you would call it a ‘temporary.’”  

My mother never drove a car. Years later, when sometimes my dad couldn't take her to the beauty shop, she would call me and she would always say, "Kenny, can you take me to the beauty shop?  It's time for another temporary.

To remember and to tell stories about my sweet mother, Cary, is priceless to me.

I thank my visitors and anyone else who gives me the chance to share those memories.

Attack against one is an attack against all

By EARL COX

Special to The Record

We are living in a time when anti-Semitism is again on the rise and public opinion is being wrongly and strongly influenced against Israel and the Jewish people. 

Back during the 1930’s and 1940’s, millions of Jews became victims of the Holocaust not because they were unaware that something bad was happening but because it was all too horrible and too unbelievable to actually grasp the reality that systematic intimidation and murder could be taking place in an educate and sophisticated society such as existed in Germany and Europe.  The first step down this dark passage of history began with intimidation.

On April 1, 1933, the Nazi regime announced a boycott of Jewish tradesmen, craftsmen, lawyers and doctors, accompanied by intensive anti-Semitic propaganda that claimed the boycott was merely reciprocation for the hostile attitude of foreign Jews towards the new German regime. 

For a time, the boycotts eased up however the economic and social isolation intensified.   Anti-Semitism and racism became a normal part not just of public campaigns, but also of teachings in schools. Eventually, the Nazi PR machine succeeded in convincing the German public that Jews were subhuman and were to blame for Germany’s many woes.  Jews became thought of as the enemy of Germany and thus were openly attacked in the streets and often in broad daylight. 

Today, an eerily similar pattern is emerging. 

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns against Israel and Israeli products is said to be in retaliation for the sufferings of the Palestinians for which the United Nations and others blame Israel.  Of course, this is nonsense. Thankfully the Jews now have a safe haven and it’s called the land of Israel however not all Jews live in Israel.  Those who continue to reside in France, Europe, Spain, Brussels and even in parts of the United States, are coming under increasing threats of attack. 

In France, for example, Jews have been warned by government officials not to wear any articles of clothing or jewelry that identifies them as Jewish.  In 2017, a 65-year-old Jewish grandmother and teacher, was murdered by an Islamist neighbor who broke into her apartment, beat her and threw her from her balcony. Witnesses reported hearing him shout, “I’ve killed my Jew!” This past Friday night in Brooklyn, N.Y., there was another attack on a synagogue.  The perpetrator threw a rock through the windows causing the glass to shatter and land close to where the children and adults were gathered around the peaceful Shabbat table. 

The Rabbi said, “We are facing this unfortunate experience not with discouragement, but with solid determination – to continue celebrating our faith, sharing our rich heritage, and offering our culture in an inclusive and warm environment. At the same time, we acknowledge the disturbing and increasingly frequent incidents of hate and prejudice in our New York community, and its destructive and divisive effects, especially on young people.”

Violence against Jews is not isolated to New York or Pittsburgh or France or anywhere else in the world.  Those of us who consider ourselves civilized and want to live in a peaceful society much consider an attack against one of us as an attack against all of us.  According to God’s word, we must stand shoulder to shoulder with our Jewish brothers and sisters knowing that it is our duty, as Christians and citizens of the free world, to make absolutely certain that another Holocaust never happens again.

[hummussexual]

This year, Ramadan–the ninth month of the Islamic year, in which observant Muslims fast to commemorate the revelation of the Quran–happens to coincide with most of Gay Pride month. Quiet as it’s kept, there are uncounted numbers of queer Muslims in the gay community. One of them is Izzadine Mustafa.

Izzadine was born 25 years ago in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His father, a Palestinian Muslim, and his mother, a white Christian, raised him and his two brothers Muslim. They also raised Izzadine female, but when he was 21 and in college, he came out as a transgender man and began, he says, to reinvent himself. He’d always wanted to live in New York, so he got a job at the Institute for Middle East Understanding, based in Brooklyn. Izzy’s now here; he’s queer; and–with due journalistic objectivity–he’s slightly awesome. I started by asking him what it’s like, combining Ramadan with Gay Pride.

IM: Ramadan is a way for me to reflect and recenter myself, and Pride is a month when I’m surrounded by queers and we make community from that. Muslims break our daily fast at dinners called iftars. So it’s been really cool, attending iftars with other queer Muslims, celebrating Ramadan as well as Pride month.

SD: How did your parents meet?

IM: My dad grew up in the occupied West Bank, in a village near Nablus called Jama’in. He got a scholarship to a school in Washington DC, but then he lost it. He couldn’t afford much, so he found the University of New Mexico, which is the cheapest school in the country. He studied business management and actually met my mom in Arabic class. He wanted an easy A and my mom, who’s from Texas, wanted to learn Arabic.

SD: Tell me about being a trans organizer.

IM: It’s really important for me say that I’m a transgender man. Part of the reason I’m out-loud about my trans-ness is that, even within leftist and liberal spaces, trans folk are not that common. There’s lots of stereotyping and ignorance around who we are. Also, I come to the trans community with a lot of privilege, in that I’m a masculine transgender man. I pass. I walk through the world and people don’t recognize that I’m trans. So I have a lot to learn from the trans community.

I want to be there, especially for young trans people. When I make public that I’m transgender, Muslim, and Palestinian, I get lots of messages from trans kids who are Muslim and struggling with their identity. It’s important for me to show them that it’s going to be OK, you know?

SD: What do you think you bring to Islam as a trans person?

IM: Perspective. Being a trans man, I understand both gender roles. I’m not blinded by the arrogance and entitlement that societies instill in boys at an early age. I’m hoping to bring to the Muslim community the message not to sweep these issues under the rug. Muslims are so diverse; we’re not a monolith. There are many Muslim communities throughout the world that accept trans folks. I hope all Muslims can see that there are trans and queer Muslims, and that’s OK–because there’s now this global resurgence of white supremacy raining down on everybody. But we’re all in this together. My main mission–why I do this work–is not only for my people but for the collective liberation of everybody.

Izzadine Mustafa. (Photo: Courtesy of Izzadine Mustafa)

SD: And do you think celebrating Gay Pride is liberating?

IM: Pride is when LGBTQ people express themselves; it’s a momentous month. But the reality is that Pride is giving more and more space to groups who oppress people, such as the NYPD, the Israeli military, such as politicians who honestly don’t care about many LGBTQ lives.

In 2013, I went to the New York City Pride Parade – my first since I came out as queer, trans. I was carrying a sign that said, “Don’t Pinkwash Israeli Apartheid.” And a man from the Israeli LGBTQ contingent came up and started yelling, “You’re a terrorist supporter, you’re a terrorist!” Then he spit in my face.

SD: Why were you carrying that sign at a Pride march?

IM: I felt it was important because pinkwashing is one of the things I’m passionate about as a Palestinian trans person and part of the queer community. Pinkwashing is a way the Israeli government covers up the occupation and its human rights abuses against the Palestinian people, my people.

For instance, there’s this campaign called Brand Israel that tries to make Israel look like a gay haven. They say, “LGBT folks of the world, come to Israel. We have a huge Pride; we offer acceptance.” They go to college campuses and queer communities and say things like, “Palestinians don’t accept queer people; they’ll kill you.” This is basically an Israeli far rightwing government, saying they’re LGBTQ-friendly. But when I go home to Palestine, the Israelis don’t see me as LGBTQ; they see me as a Palestinian–and they’re really racist about it.

What Palestinian queers say is, “Of course there’s anti-LGBTQ sentiment in Palestine. Just like in America and all over the world–even in Israel.” I, as a Palestinian trans person, do not want a government giving us legitimacy when it’s used to justify the oppression of my people.

SD: So you’ve actually been to Palestine and Israel?

IM: I grew up in a very white, middle-class neighborhood. But as my dad says, “To know where you’re going, you have to know where you’re coming from.” So when I was nine years old, my parents started sending me and my brothers to the West Bank village where my dad’s family lives. After that, we would go almost every summer, partly to help out my grandmother; partly to see there was more to life than growing up in a cozy American neighborhood.

The first time I went, it was around 1999, before the second Intifada. I would see barbed wire, checkpoints, soldiers, everyone speaking two different languages. It was shocking for me and confusing because here I am, used to just hanging out on the playground with friends. But it was also good to bond with my cousins, who were around my age, and I got really close to my grandmother. As I got into my teenage years, I started to understand the full scope of the occupation.

I’d return to school in August and start debates with my teachers about Palestine. I’m of the 9/11 generation, so there were constant conversations about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terrorism. Palestine would be thrown in, in history class, even in English classes, so I would challenge my teachers on their bigoted statements. In my junior year in high school, I was the newspaper editor and I ran a few pieces on Palestine. Each time I got in trouble.

SD: Why did people object?

IM: Point blank, because many people subscribed to the ideology that Israel should be a land for Jews only. They saw me as challenging that, even though the majority of my friends were of the Jewish faith.

I remember in middle school going to all the bar mitzvahs. Then in high school our friendships started changing. There was this program that would send Jewish kids to Israeli high school for a semester and they would learn how to train in the army. They’d come back and we’d get into these extensive arguments, concluding we couldn’t be friends. I’d say, “You want to join in on the oppression of my family? I’m not going to stand for that.”

SD: What’s queer activism like in Palestine?

IM: There are a number of Palestinian organizations in Israel and the West Bank that work on sexual and gender diversity. There’s Al Qaws, which provides services to queers, and counters Israel’s message that Palestinian queers don’t exist. They also say, “We don’t support this occupation.” And there’s this Facebook page called “Pink Watching Israel,” which is a committee of Palestinian queers and allies. Gaza is a separate situation because they’re under siege, so it’s harder to express any kind of freedom there.

SD: There are about 6,000 Palestinian political prisoners, and I recently read news accounts about some going on hunger strike.

IM: We called it the Dignity Strike. For forty days, about 1,500 Palestinian political prisoners refused to eat. And they won. In Palestine, everyone knows somebody who’s been or is now in Israeli prisons. One in four Palestinian men have been imprisoned in their lives. You have 500 to 700 children prosecuted in Israeli military courts. Kids as young as eight years old are sent to prison. Israel will kidnap a child from their home during a night raid and take them to prison. Their parents have no idea where they are or what’s happening to them. So this was a hunger strike for the most basic demands, like family visitation rights. And the children won better access to see a lawyer and their parents.

I wasn’t involved in the organizing, but I tried to push it into the media. The hunger strike, like the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, used nonviolent tactics to pressure Israel to respect our basic human rights. What this strike did was to galvanize people; to unify Palestinians across Gaza, Israel, and the West Bank. It’s a long time since that happened. It’s the prisoners, we hope, who will unify us as a people.

SD: Has prison affected your family?

IM: One of my uncles deals with mental health issues because of the torture he got when he was 18, 19 years old. He was arrested for participating in demonstrations during the first Intifada and was in prison for years, beginning as a teenager. Every time I go home to my village, there’s always a celebration for somebody who spent years in prison and is just coming home. It’s like a weekly occurrence.

SD: Is there anything that inspires you in all this?

IM: Movements toward justice and liberation. Like the Movement for Black Lives, Standing Rock, and Black Lives Matter. I’ve also noticed there’s been a resurgence of people working on rights for undocumented immigrants, for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights. We seem to be coming together around issues that connect but also separate us. I’m seeing cross-movement building and so many people willing to learn about the occupation of Palestine. I also think there are more young Palestinians who are no longer silent. Growing up, lots of us would hear from our parents, “Don’t talk about Palestine,” for fear of repercussions. Now, there’s young, fearless Palestinians in Students for Justice in Palestine, the Palestine Youth Movement, and a few organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and Black Solidarity with Palestine. We’re working hand-in-hand, saying, “We’re not afraid.”

Also more people are seeing that the Arab and the Muslim worlds are not the enemy – our enemies are those who try to pit us against each other. So there’s things to be inspired by in this dark, dark time.

SD: How was coming out to your family?

IM: I was worried at first, because growing up in this country, you mostly hear stories of families disowning kids. So I went into it hoping for the best and expecting the worst. But when I came out to my parents, they were actually accepting and welcoming. It took my mom a little longer because she was like, “Oh, I’m losing a daughter.” But I’m their son, now. And when my dad told my grandmother in Palestine about me being trans, she was like, “Amazing! I have a third grandson!”

You know, I’m not the most religious person. I don’t pray five times a day, I don’t go to the mosque often. But something that has grounded me in Islam is the idea of embodying God, right? Or trying to. Compassion, being good to people and to living things. What’s kept me going are those values of love, patience, and good deeds. Yeah.