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etz-ashashiyot · 7 months ago

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Chapter 4: Executed Jews

By Dara Horn, excerpted from People Love Dead Jews

ALA ZUSKIN PERELMAN AND I HAD BEEN IN TOUCH ONLINE before I finally met her in person, and I still cannot quite believe she exists. Years ago, I wrote a novel about Marc Chagall and the Yiddish-language artists whom he once knew in Russia, all of whom were eventually murdered by the Soviet regime. While researching the novel, I found myself sucked into the bizarre story of these people's exploitation and destruction: how the Soviet Union first welcomed these artists as exemplars of universal human ideals, then used them for its own purposes, and finally executed them. I named my main character after the executed Yiddish actor Benjamin Zuskin, a comic performer known for playing fools. After the book came out, I heard from Ala in an email written in halting English: "I am Benjamin Zuskin's daughter." That winter I was speaking at a literary conference in Israel, where Ala lived, and she and I arranged to meet. It was like meeting a character from a book.

My hosts had generously put me up with other writers in a beautiful stone house in Jerusalem. We were there during Hanukkah, the celebration of Jewish independence. On the first night of the holiday, I walked to Jerusalem's Old City and watched as people lit enormous Hanukkah torches at the Western Wall. I thought of my home in New Jersey, where in school growing up I sang fake English Hanukkah songs created by American music education companies at school Christmas concerts, with lyrics describing Hanukkah as being about "joy and peace and love." Joy and peace and love describe Hanukkah, a commemoration of an underdog military victory over a powerful empire, about as well as they describe the Fourth of July. I remembered challenging a chorus teacher about one such song, and being told that I was a poor sport for disliking joy and peace and love. (Imagine a "Christmas song" with lyrics celebrating Christmas, the holiday of freedom. Doesn't everyone like freedom? What pedant would reject such a song?) I sang those words in front of hundreds of people to satisfy my neighbors that my tradition was universal — meaning, just like theirs. The night before meeting Ala, I walked back to the house through the dense stone streets of the Old City's Jewish Quarter, where every home had a glass case by its door, displaying the holiday's oil lamps. It was strange to see those hundreds of glowing lights. They were like a shining announcement that this night of celebration was shared by all these strangers around me, that it was universal. The experience was so unfamiliar that I didn't know what to make of it.

The next morning, Ala knocked on the door of the stone house and sat down in its living room, with its view of the Old City. She was a small dark-haired woman whose perfect posture showed a firmness that belied her age. She looked at me and said in Hebrew, "I feel as if you knew my father, like you understood what he went through. How did you know?"

The answer to that question goes back several thousand years.

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The teenage boys who participated in competitive athletics in the gymnasium in Jerusalem 2,200 years ago had their circumcisions reversed, because otherwise they wouldn't have been allowed to play. In the Hellenistic empire that had conquered Judea, sports were sacred, the entry point to being a person who mattered, the ultimate height of cool — and sports, of course, were always played in the nude. As one can imagine, ancient genital surgery of this nature was excruciating and potentially fatal. But the boys did not want to miss out.

I learned this fun fact in seventh grade, from a Hebrew school teacher who was instructing me and my pubescent classmates about the Hanukkah story — about how Hellenistic tyranny gained a foothold in ancient Judea with the help of Jews who wanted to fit in. This teacher seemed overly jazzed to talk about penises with a bunch of adolescents, and I suspected he'd made the whole thing up. At home, I decided to fact-check. I pulled a dusty old book off my parents' shelf, Volume One of Heinrich Graetz's opus History of the Jews.

In nineteenth-century academic prose, Graetz explained how the leaders of Judea demonstrated their loyalty to the occupying Hellenistic empire by building a gymnasium and recruiting teenage athletes — only to discover that "in uncovering their bodies they could immediately be recognized as Judeans. But were they to take part in the Olympian games, and expose themselves to the mockery of Greek scoffers? Even this difficulty they evaded by undergoing a painful operation, so as to disguise the fact that they were Judeans." Their Zeus-worshipping overlords were not fooled. Within a few years, the regime outlawed not only circumcision but all of Jewish religious practice, and put to death anyone who didn't comply.

Sometime after that, the Maccabees showed up. That's the part of the story we usually hear.

Those ancient Jewish teenagers were on my mind that Hanukkah when Ala came to tell me about her father's terrifying life, because I sensed that something profound united them — something that doesn't match what we're usually taught about what bigotry looks or feels like. It doesn't involve "intolerance" or "persecution," at least not at first. Instead, it looks like the Jews themselves are choosing to reject their own traditions. It is a form of weaponized shame.

Two distinct patterns of antisemitism can be identified by the Jewish holidays that celebrate triumphs over them: Purim and Hanukkah. In the Purim version of antisemitism, exemplified by the Persian genocidal decrees in the biblical Book of Esther, the goal is openly stated and unambiguous: Kill all the Jews. In the Hanukkah version of antisemitism, whose appearances range from the Spanish Inquisition to the Soviet regime, the goal is still to eliminate Jewish civilization. But in the Hanukkah version, this goal could theoretically be accomplished simply by destroying Jewish civilization, while leaving the warm, de-Jewed bodies of its former practitioners intact.

For this reason, the Hanukkah version of antisemitism often employs Jews as its agents. It requires not dead Jews but cool Jews: those willing to give up whatever specific aspect of Jewish civilization is currently uncool. Of course, Judaism has always been uncool, going back to its origins as the planet's only monotheism, featuring a bossy and unsexy invisible God. Uncoolness is pretty much Judaism's brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening — and why Jews who are willing to become cool are absolutely necessary to Hanukkah antisemitism's success. These "converted" Jews are used to demonstrate the good intentions of the regime — which of course isn't antisemitic but merely requires that its Jews publicly flush thousands of years of Jewish civilization down the toilet in exchange for the worthy prize of not being treated like dirt, or not being murdered. For a few years. Maybe.

I wish I could tell the story of Ala's father concisely, compellingly, the way everyone prefers to hear about dead Jews. I regret to say that Benjamin Zuskin wasn't minding his own business and then randomly stuffed into a gas chamber, that his thirteen-year-old daughter did not sit in a closet writing an uplifting diary about the inherent goodness of humanity, that he did not leave behind sad-but-beautiful aphorisms pondering the absence of God while conveniently letting his fellow humans off the hook. He didn't even get crucified for his beliefs. Instead, he and his fellow Soviet Jewish artists — extraordinarily intelligent, creative, talented, and empathetic adults — were played for fools, falling into a slow-motion psychological horror story brimming with suspense and twisted self-blame. They were lured into a long game of appeasing and accommodating, giving up one inch after another of who they were in order to win that grand prize of being allowed to live.

Spoiler alert: they lost.

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I was in graduate school studying Yiddish literature, itself a rich vein of discussion about such impossible choices, when I became interested in Soviet Jewish artists like Ala's father. As I dug through library collections of early-twentieth-century Yiddish works, I came across a startling number of poetry books illustrated by Marc Chagall. I wondered if Chagall had known these Yiddish writers whose works he illustrated, and it turned out that he had. One of Chagall's first jobs as a young man was as an art teacher at a Jewish orphanage near Moscow, built for children orphaned by Russia's 1919-1920 civil war pogroms. This orphanage had a rather renowned faculty, populated by famous Yiddish writers who trained these traumatized children in the healing art of creativity.

It all sounded very lovely, until I noticed something else. That Chagall's art did not rely on a Jewish language — that it had, to use that insidious phrase, "universal appeal" — allowed him a chance to succeed as an artist in the West. The rest of the faculty, like Chagall, had also spent years in western Europe before the Russian revolution, but they chose to return to Russia because of the Soviet Union's policy of endorsing Yiddish as a "national Soviet language." In the 1920s and 30s, the USSR offered unprecedented material support to Yiddish culture, paying for Yiddish-language schools, theaters, publishing houses, and more, to the extent that there were Yiddish literary critics who were salaried by the Soviet government. This support led the major Yiddish novelist Dovid Bergelson to publish his landmark 1926 essay "Three Centers," about New York, Warsaw, and Moscow as centers of Yiddish-speaking culture, asking which city offered Yiddish writers the brightest prospects. His unequivocal answer was Moscow, a choice that brought him back to Russia the following year, where many other Jewish artists joined him.

But Soviet support for Jewish culture was part of a larger plan to brainwash and coerce national minorities into submitting to the Soviet regime — and for Jews, it came at a very specific price. From the beginning, the regime eliminated anything that celebrated Jewish "nationality" that didn't suit its needs. Jews were awesome, provided they weren't practicing Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism. The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not antisemitic, merely anti-Zionist. (In the process of not being antisemitic and merely being anti-Zionist, the regime managed to persecute, imprison, torture, and murder thousands of Jews.) What's left of Jewish culture once you surgically remove religious practice, traditional texts, Hebrew, and Zionism? In the Soviet Empire, one answer was Yiddish, but Yiddish was also suspect for its supposedly backwards elements. Nearly 15 percent of its words came directly from biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, so Soviet Yiddish schools and publishers, under the guise of "simplifying" spelling, implemented a new and quite literally antisemitic spelling system that eliminated those words' Near Eastern roots. Another answer was "folklore" — music, visual art, theater, and other creative work reflecting Jewish life — but of course most of that cultural material was also deeply rooted in biblical and rabbinic sources, or reflected common religious practices like Jewish holidays and customs, so that was treacherous too.

No, what the regime required were Yiddish stories that showed how horrible traditional Jewish practice was, stories in which happy, enlightened Yiddish-speaking heroes rejected both religion and Zionism (which, aside from its modern political form, is also a fundamental feature of ancient Jewish texts and prayers traditionally recited at least three times daily). This de-Jewing process is clear from the repertoire of the government-sponsored Moscow State Yiddish Theater, which could only present or adapt Yiddish plays that denounced traditional Judaism as backward, bourgeois, corrupt, or even more explicitly — as in the many productions involving ghosts or graveyard scenes — as dead. As its actors would be, soon enough.

The Soviet Union's destruction of Jewish culture commenced, in a calculated move, with Jews positioned as the destroyers. It began with the Yevsektsiya, committees of Jewish Bolsheviks whose paid government jobs from 1918 through 1930 were to persecute, imprison, and occasionally murder Jews who participated in religious or Zionist institutions — categories that included everything from synagogues to sports clubs, all of which were shut down and their leaders either exiled or "purged." This went on, of course, until the regime purged the Yevsektsiya members themselves.

The pattern repeated in the 1940s. As sordid as the Yeveksiya chapter was, I found myself more intrigued by the undoing of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, a board of prominent Soviet Jewish artists and intellectuals established by Joseph Stalin in 1942 to drum up financial support from Jews overseas for the Soviet war effort. Two of the more prominent names on the JAC's roster of talent were Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, and Ala's father Benjamin Zuskin, the theater's leading actor. After promoting these people during the war, Stalin decided these loyal Soviet Jews were no longer useful, and charged them all with treason. He had decided that this committee he himself created was in fact a secret Zionist cabal, designed to bring down the Soviet state. Mikhoels was murdered first, in a 1948 hit staged to look like a traffic accident. Nearly all the others — Zuskin and twelve more Jewish luminaries, including the novelist Dovid Bergelson, who had proclaimed Moscow as the center of the Yiddish future — were executed by firing squad on August 1952.

Just as the regime accused these Jewish artists and intellectuals of being too "nationalist" (read: Jewish), today's long hindsight makes it strangely tempting to read this history and accuse them of not being "nationalist" enough — that is, of being so foolishly committed to the Soviet regime that they were unable to see the writing on the wall. Many works on this subject have said as much. In Stalin's Secret Pogrom, the indispensable English translation of transcripts from the JAC "trial," Russia scholar Joshua Rubenstein concludes his lengthy introduction with the following:

As for the defendants at the trial, it is not clear what they believed about the system they each served. Their lives darkly embodied the tragedy of Soviet Jewry. A combination of revolutionary commitment and naive idealism had tied them to a system they could not renounce. Whatever doubts or misgivings they had, they kept to themselves, and served the Kremlin with the required enthusiasm. They were not dissidents. They were Jewish martyrs. They were also Soviet patriots. Stalin repaid their loyalty by destroying them.

This is completely true, and also completely unfair. The tragedy — even the term seems unjust, with its implied blaming of the victim — was not that these Soviet Jews sold their souls to the devil, though many clearly did. The tragedy was that integrity was never an option in the first place.

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Ala was almost thirteen years old when her father was arrested and until that moment she was immersed in the Soviet Yiddish artistic scene. Her mother was also an actor in the Moscow State Yiddish Theater; her family lived in the same building as the murdered theater director Solomon Mikhoels, and moved in the same circles as other Jewish actors and writers. After seeing her parents perform countless times, Ala had a front-row seat to the destruction of their world. She attended Mikhoel's state funeral, heard about the arrest of the brilliant Yiddish author Der Nister from an actor friend who witnessed it from her apartment across the hall, and was present when secret police ransacked her home in conjunction with her father's arrest. In her biography, The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin, she provides for her readers what she gave me that morning in Jerusalem: an emotional recounting, with the benefit of hindsight, of what it was really like to live through the Soviet Jewish nightmare.

It's as close as we can get, anyway. Her father Benjamin Zuskin's own thoughts on the topic are available only from state interrogations extracted under unknown tortures. (One typical interrogation document from his three and a half years in the notorious Lubyanka Prison announces that the day's interrogation lasted four hours, but the transcript is only half a page long — leaving to the imagination how the interrogator and interrogatee may have spent their time together. Suffice it to say that another JAC detainee didn't make it to trial alive.) His years in prison began when he was arrested in December of 1948 in a Moscow hospital room, where he was being treated for chronic insomnia brought on by the murder of his boss and career-long acting partner, Mikhoels; the secret police strapped him to a gurney and carted him to prison in his hospital gown while he was still sedated.

But in order to truly appreciate the loss here, one needs to know what was lost — to return to the world of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, the author of Benjamin Zuskin's first role on the Yiddish stage, in a play fittingly titled It's a Lie!

Benjamin Zuskin's path to the Yiddish theater and later to the Soviet firing squad began in a shtetl comparable to those immortalized in Sholem Aleichem's work. Zuskin, a child from a traditional family who was exposed to theater only through traveling Yiddish troupes and clowning relatives, experienced that world's destruction: his native Lithuanian shtetl, Ponievezh, was among the many Jewish towns forcibly evacuated during the First World War, catapulting him and hundreds of thousands of other Jewish refugees into modernity. He landed in Penza, a city with professional Russian theater and Yiddish amateur troupes. In 1920, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater opened, and by 1921, Zuskin was starring alongside Mikhoels, the theater's leading light.

In the one acting class I have ever attended, I learned only one thing: acting isn't about pretending to be someone you aren't, but rather about emotional communication. Zuskin, who not only starred in most productions but also taught in the theater's acting school, embodied the concept. His very first audition was a one-man sketch he created, consisting of nothing more than a bumbling old tailor threading a needle — without words, costumes, or props. It became so popular that he performed it to entranced crowds for years. This physical artistry animated his every role. As one critic wrote, "Even the slightest breeze and he is already air-bound."

Zuskin specialized in playing figures like the Fool in King Lear — as his daughter puts it in her book, characters who "are supposed to make you laugh, but they have an additional dimension, and they arouse poignant reflections about the cruelty of the world." Discussing his favorite roles, Zuskin once explained that "my heart is captivated particularly by the image of the person who is derided and humiliated, but who loves life, even though he encounters obstacles placed before him through no fault of his own."

The first half of Ala's book seems to recount only triumphs. The theater's repertoire in its early years was largely adopted from classic Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and Mendele Moykher Seforim. The book's title is drawn from Zuskin's most famous role: Senderl, the Sancho Panza figure in Mendele's Don Quixote-inspired work, Travels of Benjamin the Third, about a pair of shtetl idiots who set out for the Land of Israel and wind up walking around the block. These productions were artistically inventive, brilliantly acted, and played to packed houses both at home and on tour. Travels of Benjamin the Third, in a 1928 review typical of the play's reception, was lauded by the New York Times as "one of the most originally conceived and beautifully executed evenings in the modern theater."

One of the theater's landmark productions, I. L. Peretz's surrealist masterpiece At Night in the Old Marketplace, was first performed in 1925. The play, set in a graveyard, is a kind of carnival for the graveyard's gathered ghosts. Those who come back from the dead are misfits like drunks and prostitutes, and also specific figures from shtetl life - yeshiva idlers, synagogue beadles, and the like. Leading them all is a badkhn, or wedding jester — divided in this production into two mirror-characters played by Mikhoels and Zuskin — whose repeated chorus among the living corpses is "The dead will rise!" "Within this play there was something hidden, something with an ungraspable depth," Ala writes, and then relates how after a performance in Vienna, one theatergoer came backstage to tell the director that "the play had shaken him as something that went beyond all imagination." The theatergoer was Sigmund Freud.

As Ala traces the theater's trajectory toward doom, it becomes obvious why this performance so affected Freud. The production was a zombie story about the horrifying possibility of something supposedly dead (here, Jewish civilization) coming back to life. The play was written a generation earlier as a Romantic work, but in the Moscow production, it became a means of denigrating traditional Jewish life without mourning it. That fantasy of a culture's death as something compelling and even desirable is not merely reminiscent of Freud's death drive, but also reveals the self-destructive bargain implicit in the entire Soviet-sponsored Jewish enterprise. In her book, Ala beautifully captures this tension as she explains the badkhn's role: "He sends a double message: he denies the very existence of the vanishing shadow world, and simultaneously he mocks it, as if it really does exist."

This double message was at the heart of Benjamin Zuskin's work as a comic Soviet Yiddish actor, a position that required him to mock the traditional Jewish life he came from while also pretending that his art could exist without it. "The chance to make fun of the shtetl which has become a thing of the past charmed me," he claimed early on, but later, according to his daughter, he began to privately express misgivings. The theater's decision to stage King Lear as a way of elevating itself disturbed him, suggesting as it did that the Yiddish repertoire was inferior. His own integrity came from his deep devotion to yiddishkayt, a sense of essential and enduring Jewishness, no matter how stripped-down that identity had become. "With the sharp sense of belonging to everything Jewish, he was tormented by the theater forsaking its expression of this belonging," his daughter writes. Even so, "no, he could not allow himself to oppose the Soviet regime even in his thoughts, the regime that gave him his own theater, but 'the heart and the wit do not meet.'"

In Ala's memory, her father differed from his director, partner, and occasional rival, Mikhoels, in his complete disinterest in politics. Mikhoels was a public figure as well as performer, and his leadership of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, while no more voluntary than any public act in a totalitarian state, was a role he played with gusto, traveling to America in 1943 and speaking to thousands of American Jews to raise money for the Red Army in their battle against the Nazis. Zuskin, on the other hand, was on the JAC roster, but seems to have continued playing the fool. According to both his daughter and his trial testimony, his role in the JAC was almost identical to his role on a Moscow municipal council, limited to playing chess in the back of the room during meetings.

In Jerusalem, Ala told me that her father was "a pure soul." "He had no interest in politics, only in his art," she said, describing his acting style as both classic and contemporary, praised by critics for its timeless qualities that are still evident today in his film work. But his talent was the most nuanced and sophisticated thing about him. Offstage, he was, as she put it in Hebrew, a "tam" — a biblical term sometimes translated as fool or simpleton, but which really means an innocent. (It is the first adjective used to describe the title character in the Book of Job.) It is true that in trial transcripts, Zuskin comes out looking better than many of his co-defendants by playing dumb instead of pointing fingers. But was this ignorance, or a wise acceptance of the futility of trying to save his skin? As King Lear's Fool put it, "They'll have me whipp'd for speaking true; thou'lt have me whipp'd for holding my peace." Reflecting on her father's role as a fool named Pinia in a popular film, Ala writes in her book, "When I imagine the moment when my father heard his death sentence, I see Pinia in close-up . . . his shoulders slumped, despair in his appearance. I hear the tone that cannot be imitated in his last line in the film — and perhaps also the last line in his life? — 'I don't understand anything.'"

Yet it is clear that Zuskin deeply understood how impossible his situation was. In one of the book's more disturbing moments, Ala describes him rehearsing for one of his landmark roles, that of the comic actor Hotsmakh in Sholem Aleichem's Wandering Stars, a work whose subject is the Yiddish theater. He had played the role before, but this production was going up in the wake of Mikhoel's murder. Zuskin was already among the hunted, and he knew it. As Ala writes:

One morning — already after the murder of Mikhoels — I saw my father pacing the room and memorizing the words of Hotsmakh's role. Suddenly, in a gesture revealing a hopeless anguish, Father actually threw himself at me, hugged me, pressed me to his heart, and together with me, continued to pace the room and to memorize the words of the role. That evening I saw the performance . . . "The doctors say that I need rest, air, and the sea . . . For what . . . without the theater?" [Hotsmakh asks], he winds the scarf around his neck — as though it were a noose. For my father, I think those words of Hotsmakh were like the motif of the role and — I think — of his own life.

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Describing the charges levied against Zuskin and his peers is a degrading exercise, for doing so makes it seem as though these charges are worth considering. They are not. It is at this point that Hanukkah antisemitism transformed, as it inevitably does, into Purim antisemitism. Here Ala offers what hundreds of pages of state archives can't, describing the impending horror of the noose around one's neck.

Her father stopped sleeping, began receiving anonymous threats, and saw that he was being watched. No conversation was safe. When a visitor from Poland waited near his apartment building to give him news of his older daughter Tamara (who was then living in Warsaw), Zuskin instructed the man to walk behind him while speaking to him and then to switch directions, so as to avoid notice. When the man asked Zuskin what he wanted to tell his daughter, Zuskin "approached the guest so closely that there was no space between them, and whispered in Yiddish, 'Tell her that the ground is burning beneath my feet.'" It is true that no one can know what Zuskin or any of the other defendants really believed about the Soviet system they served. It is also true — and far more devastating — that their beliefs were utterly irrelevant.

Ala and her mother were exiled to Kazakhstan after her father's arrest, and learned of his execution only when they were allowed to return to Moscow in 1955. By then, he had already been dead for three years.

In Jerusalem that morning, Ala told me, in a sudden private moment of anger and candor, that the Soviet Union's treatment of the Jews was worse than Nazi Germany's. I tried to argue, but she shut me up. Obviously the Nazi atrocities against Jews were incomparable, a fact Ala later acknowledged in a calmer mood. But over four generations, the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation - and in that way, Ala suggested, they destroyed far more souls. And they never, ever, paid for it.

"They never had a Nuremberg," Ala told me that day, with a quiet fury. "They never acknowledged the evil of what they did. The Nazis were open about what they were doing, but the Soviets pretended. They lured the Jews in, they baited them with support and recognition, they used them, they tricked them, and then they killed them. It was a trap. And no one knows about it, even now. People know about the Holocaust, but not this. Even here in Israel, people don't know. How did you know?"

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That evening I went out to the Old City again, to watch the torches being lit at the Western Wall for the second night of Hanukkah. I walked once more through the Jewish Quarter, where the oil lamps, now each bearing one additional flame, were displayed outside every home, following the tradition to publicize the Hanukkah miracle — not merely the legendary long-lasting oil, but the miracle of military and spiritual victory over a coercive empire, the freedom to be uncool, the freedom not to pretend. Somewhere nearby, deep underground, lay the ruins of the gymnasium where de-circumcised Jewish boys once performed naked before approving crowds, stripped of their integrity and left with their private pain. I thought of Benjamin Zuskin performing as the dead wedding jester, proclaiming, "The dead will rise!" and then performing again in a "superior" play, as King Lear's Fool. I thought of the ground burning beneath his feet. I thought of his daughter, Ala, now an old woman, walking through Jerusalem.

I am not a sentimental person. As I returned to the stone house that night, along the streets lit by oil lamps, I was surprised to find myself crying.

#People Love Dead Jews #Dara Horn #Soviet Jewry #Soviet antisemitism #antizionism is not antisemitism #jumblr

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justinssportscorner · 5 months ago

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Anna Merlan at Mother Jones:

By the time J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump were falsely referring to her as a man, the lies about Imane Khelif had already traveled halfway around the world. Last week, two Olympic boxers—Khelif, from Algeria, and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan—were subjected to brutal international scrutiny about their sex and gender, and whether they were entitled to compete in women’s events; the attention on Khelif became particularly acrid after her opponent, Italian Angela Carini, quit 46 seconds into their bout, declaring that she had “never been hit so hard in my life.” A photo of the two women exiting the ring, Carini in tears, Khelif casting a glance, was widely shared, with people like Rowling—who’s promoted transphobic views for years, but has denied being transphobic—offering heated and derogatory commentary about Khelif. “Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better?” Rowling tweeted. “The smirk of a male who’s [sic] knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.”

While the attacks on Khelif are of a piece with familiar recent Western controversies over who is allowed to participate in girls’ and women’s sports, many of the articles and individuals magnifying the debate relied on or relayed the claims of a discredited group with strong ties to the Russian government, a deep grudge against the International Olympic Committee, and a seemingly vested interest in proving that the IOC-run games are, as the group’s leader has claimed, a venue for “sodomy.”

In trying to unravel what led up to this moment, many individuals and news outlets cited a statement released by the official-sounding International Boxing Association, which stated that both Khelif and Yu-Ting had previously been disqualified from competing in the IBA-administered Women’s World Boxing Championships in March 2023. The women were barred from that competition, which took place in New Delhi, following tests the organization has not publicly clarified, citing privacy rules. At the time, IBA president Umar Kremlev told a Russian state news agency that the women had been found to have “XY chromosomes” and claimed the two had “pretended to be women” and “tried to deceive their colleagues.” Even if the IBA’s findings were true, having XY chromosomes does not automatically make someone male—women with Swyer syndrome, a rare genetic condition, have XY for instance. Nor are XY chromosomes proven to constitute an “unfair advantage,” although that is exactly what an IBA official claimed in a press conference on Monday. One pediatrics expert told NBC in 2009—one of the innumerable times this issue has been raised in women’s sports—that such a claim was “malarkey.”

[...] When Khelif and Yu-Ting were disqualified by the IBA back in New Delhi, skeptics questioned how it benefited Azalia Amineva, a Russian fighter. The women were not ruled ineligible until after they’d already competed and Khelif had won a bout against the previously undefeated Amineva. While IBA officials said the sequence of events was due to a week’s delay in being provided testing results, as the Associated Press has pointed out, the decision meant the Russian fighter’s perfect record was retroactively restored. Kremlev isn’t shy about expressing a broad fixation on gender and sexuality, with him, as the sports website Defector has pointed out, decrying the IOC on YouTube for promoting “outright sodomy and the destruction of traditional values.” In the wake of the Paris games’ opening ceremony, he blasted the spectacle, which featured queer performers, as “pure sodomy,” while saying the IOC “burns from pure devilry” and that its president is a “chief sodomite.” He also claimed that “men with changed gender are allowed to fight with women in boxing at the Olympics.” (Videos with such remarks have been helpfully subtitled in English to draw a wider, Western audience.) Last week, Kremlev announced the IBA would give $50,000 in prize money to the defeated opponents of Khelif and Yu-Ting.

[...] The Khelif affair captures English-speaking transphobes with rigid ideas about the nature of womanhood picking up on a politically motivated campaign from a discredited organization at open war with the IOC. Indeed, right-wing organizations in the United States, including the Independent Women’s Forum and CPAC, via its chair Matt Schlapp, have paid for sponsored posts on Musk’s X platform, calling her “a man“—posts that appear when users search for information on the controversy.

The International Boxing Association, which is a Kremlin-led body led by Umar Kremlev that is permanently banned from being the sanctioning body for Olympic boxers, has instigated a transphobic war against cis women boxers Lin Yu-ting and Imane Khelif.

The IBA issued politically-motivated disqualifications of the pair in 2023 that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

#Imane Khelif #International Boxing Association #2024 Paris Olympics #2024 Summer Olympics #Transphobia #Angela Carini #Lin Yu Ting #Umar Kremlev #IOC #International Olympic Committee #Boxing #Women's Sports

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readyforevolution · 1 year ago

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JACK DANIELS HOLSCLAW (1918-1998)

Tuskegee Airman Jack Daniels Holsclaw was born in Spokane, Washington, on March 21, 1918. His father, Charles, was a clerk in a downtown store, and his mother, Nell, was a manager at Pacific Telephone and Telegraph. Holsclaw attended North Central High School in Spokane, where he excelled both academically and athletically. When he was 15, he became the first black person in Spokane to earn the Eagle Scout badge.

Holsclaw entered Whitworth College in 1935 but transferred to Washington State College (now Washington State University) in 1936 to play baseball. Beginning in his junior year, he played center field and helped the Cougars finish as co-champions of the Northern Division, Pacific Coast Conference. He was the second African American earn a varsity letter in baseball at the college.

In 1939, Holsclaw transferred to a chiropractic program at Western States College in Portland, Oregon, where he met his wife, Bernice Williams. They had one son, Glen. Holsclaw completed the chiropractic program in 1942 and passed the Oregon state board examination.

While there, he enrolled in a government sponsored Civilian Pilot Training Program at Multnomah College and earned his pilot’s license. On October 5, 1942, he enlisted in the army as a private and entered flight school, training at Tuskegee Army Airfield, Alabama. After completing his training, he received his wings and was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant on July 28, 1943. Lieutenant Holsclaw received advanced training at Selfridge Field near Detroit, Michigan before his squadron was shipped to Italy in December 1943.

Lieutenant Holsclaw flew in the 100th Fighter Squadron, 332d Fighter Group, an all-black pursuit squadron. Holsclaw named his favorite P-51 “Bernice Baby” in honor of his wife. The 332d Fighter Group had distinctive red tails giving them the nickname “Red Tails.” The 332d Fighter Group escorted bombers on their runs over enemy territory, shielding them from German fighters. To the bomber crews that were protected by them they were the “Red Tail Angels.”

On July 18, 1944, in an aerial battle over Italy, Holsclaw shot down two German fighters. For this action he received the Distinguished Flying Cross. By December 1944, Holsclaw had completed 68 combat missions, nearing the limit of 70, when he became Assistant Operations Officer, an important administrative position that included aerial mission planning. In January 1945, Holsclaw was promoted to captain.

Captain Holsclaw returned to the United States in June 1945 to serve as assistant base operations officer at Godman Field, Fort Knox, Kentucky. He served as an Air Force ROTC instructor at Tuskegee Institute and then Tennessee State College.

From 1954 to 1957, Holsclaw was assigned to Japan, and from May 1962 to the end of 1964, he served as chief of the training division, Sixth Air Force Reserve Region at Hamilton Air Force Base, California. He directed the preparation of two textbooks to guide incoming air force personnel. Holsclaw retired from the Air Force on December 31, 1964 as a Lieutenant Colonel.

From 1965 to 1973 Holsclaw served as a manager in the Marin County Housing Authority, California. In 1973, he and Bernice returned to Washington where Holsclaw joined the staff at the People’s National Bank in Bellevue. He remained there until his second retirement in 1983. He and Bernice took up residence in Arizona, where Jack Holsclaw died on April 7, 1998, at the age of 80.

In August 2019, the Jonas Babcock Chapter, NSDAR, dedicated a historical marker in the memory of Lt. Col. Holsclaw at the site of his childhood home in Spokane.

#jack holsclaw #blacktumblr #black history #black liberation #african history

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rollerska8er · 5 months ago

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On Transphobia as Cultural Imperialism

On 1 August 2024, Imane Khelif, an Algerian, and Angela Carini, an Italian, two Olympic women's boxers, fought a second-round boxing match. 46 seconds into the match, after two powerful blows from Khelif, the Italian withdrew from the match, reportedly exclaiming "It's not fair!" and complaining that she had never been hit so hard in her life.

Khelif is a cisgender woman with a build that reads, to many, as masculine. The international governing body for boxing, a corrupt organisation run by a Putin-backed wannabe Russian oligarch, had previously banned Khelif from participating in matches on the basis that genetic testing found that Khelif had XY chromosomes, indicating a possible intersex condition. To be intersex is a distinct thing from being transgender, but most people don't know or don't care to learn the difference.

What this precipitated has been well-documented. British right-wing television channel TalkTV called the fight "Domestic violence turning into spectator sport", while disgraced YouTuber Logan Paul called it "the purest form of evil". J. K. Rowling, posting a picture of Khelif placing a hand on Carini's shoulder in a show of good sportsmanship, accused Khelif of smirking and misgendered her as "a male who knows he's protected by a misogynist sporting establishment".

Khelif's father stated "My child is a girl. She was raised as a girl. She's a strong girl. I raised her to be hard-working and brave. She has a strong will to work and to train." After the end of the Olympic Games, Khelif immediately launched legal action against her critics.

Imane Khelif comes from Algeria, a former French colonial possession. It is pointed that she managed to win a gold medal in the heart of France.

Algeria is one of 63 countries around the world in which homosexuality is illegal, punishable by imprisonment and fines. Algerian law does not recognise the possibility of changing one's gender.

The accusations levelled against her by predominantly white Western commentators who hail from Britain and the United States, therefore, have a certain colonial edge to them. This is not to suggest that Algerian legal attitudes to homosexuality and transsexuality are morally defensible, far from it. But this debacle constitutes the projection of a specifically Western hatred - that is, transphobia in the guise of feminism and protecting lesbians - on to a person from a country that criminalises homosexuality and does not recognise transsexuality.

Transphobia of this kind is becoming a kind of colonial cudgel. The idea of men "dressing up as women" to overtake "real" women is a specifically Western concern, a reaction to increased visibility and accommodation for transgender and non-binary people. This anxiety operates within a specific cultural and political context, and one that is by no means global.

While it may apply in Italy, where homosexuality and transsexuality are recognised, It does not apply at all in Algeria, for example.

Rowling, Paul, and various other blustering commentators saw a woman with a masculine build fight another woman, and concluded that this woman was a male infiltrator who had somehow made it to the Olympics.

This is not to say that the treatment of Khelif would have been acceptable if she had been transgender. Far from it. But this mass-libelling was both transmisogynist and colonialist: transmisogynist because it relied on hateful tropes about trans women, and colonialist because it removed Khelif from her ethnocultural context and placed her in a Western context that did not and could not apply to her. She was expected to fit the norms of Western society, and she was publically harangued for it.

This has happened before, of course. Caster Semenya, a South African middle-distance runner found to have the intersex condition 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency, was banned from many athletics events due to the "unfair advantage" conferred upon her by her naturally higher testosterone levels, and continues to fight court battles to let her run.

(The argument has become cliché at this point, but Michael Phelps, a man with various bodily mutations which happen to make him an exceptionally good swimmer, has never been asked to return even one of his twenty-eight Olympic medals.)

Transphobia of the kind that is now popular across the political spectrum in the Western world has become a tool for a pernicious kind of cultural imperialism that is, quite simply, fascist. It stems from a colonial, white supremacist, hegemonic mindset, which insists that the Western world has the purest ethics, and everyone in the world must be held to such standards.

I am not a moral relativist. I do not believe that queer, trans and intersex liberation only works for some cultures. I believe in and support queer, trans and intersex liberation worldwide.

But by the same token, I do not believe that Americans and Britons should be allowed to demand that everyone in the world is an American or a Briton, to be treated like an American or a Briton. I do not believe that the collective white saviour complex of Western liberal democracy and capitalism will liberate queers, trans and intersex people.

And I certainly believe that the mass-crybullying of athletes who happen to excel at what they do on the basis of pseudo-feminist white woman pearlclutching can and should be called out for what it is: cultural imperialism.

It is the white Western world demanding that the entire world be brought to heel.

We must reject this, and we must not fool ourselves into believing this is mere idiocy. Mere idiocy is one thing. Trying to ruin a person's life because you assume every muscular, square-jawed woman is a secret man in disguise, because you're Oh So Fucking Feminist And Just Trying To Protect Women And Girls From Disgusting Violent Men is, quite simply, fascist crybullying.

Accept no excuses or apologies from these wheedling maggots. They want everyone who is not like them dead.

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hopetorun · 11 months ago

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i'd love to hear your beliefs about the tension in their relationship because i'm a very nosy bitch but obviously only if you feel like it!

lol well i did offer! beliefs is a strong word, tbh. more of a like ... is this stuff true? i don't know. but if i were writing a story where i wanted to have tension in that relationship, these are the places i would be inclined to introduce that tension. maybe there is tension in some of these places in real life! that's none of my beeswax.*

anyway: some places i think it is plausible that there's tension in the relationship, or at least plausible enough to play with in fiction. receipts on these where i can find them, sorry if they're paywalled but them's the breaks.

*unless they make it part of their public narrative

back in 2022 matthew was on the athletic hockey podcast and he talked about feeling "like a babysitter" when keith visits and how much keith enjoys being one of the guys. now mostly i think they probably have a pretty good time, but babysitter is a word choice there. i don't think it's a stretch to imagine that having your retired dad show up at your workplace and becoming the life of the party to relive his glory days could be ... trying.

not to beat around the bush but they're both opinionated guys! opinionated and chatty! and as a result you get: keith slamming the panthers on the radio. matthew sticking his nose into brady's contract negotiations (brady being grimace emoji about it). like, we know for a fact that the radio thing bothered matthew! and there's plenty of opportunities for one or both of them to offer unsolicited opinions that don't go over well.

to the previous point: i considered not including that because it's not as speculative as the others on the list. but it's definitely something i'd draw on if i was writing a story where their relationship is tense.

look, i'm not a man and not only am i not a man but i don't have any brothers and my dad died four and a half years ago and he never talked about his dad. so i can't claim to be an expert on the fathers-and-sons relationship dynamic. but why would i let that stop me from speculating wildly!

anyway: legacies. oldest sons. expectations. @ohtemporas touched on this briefly earlier, the way there's often an extra pressure on the oldest kid to be the same-gender-parent's legacy. do what i did. represent me well in the world. and i don't think it's even particularly weird for that to potentially lead to some conflicting feelings if all that legacy building leads to you being surpassed in some way. that's just human! especially for competitive people, and as i have said on this website before: no one becomes a professional athlete without being competitive.

here's keith being presented with matthew's 99th point puck from the 21-22 season, which his then-teammate did up with the writing for this specific purpose. chantal thinks this is SO funny. do think maybe being conflicted about being surpassed makes him not proud of matthew? no. but people can be complicated.

speaking of people being complicated: that one post-game after matthew scored 5 points on the blues. i think the tension between keith wanting his own team's success and wanting his sons' success isn't something people were making up out of whole cloth. but maybe it was especially noticeable when matthew was still in the western conference? i feel like it got dialed back after the trade. lol.

i'm mentioning it only because otherwise someone else might: i don't care about the hat thing. i think it's silly. if i was asked to throw my favorite hat onto the ice at an nhl game just because some schlub scored three goals i probably wouldn't.

a few concluding thoughts

i don't think any of this means they have a bad relationship! mostly i think that no two people have a perfect relationship where they agree on everything and never butt into each other's business uninvited and never hurt each other's feelings, because that's impossible.

i'm not making some counterpoint list of all the reasons i think they love each other. someone else can. i don't think having high expectations of someone means you hate them and i don't think anyone spends their time and money following their son's hockey team around the country on a road trip hoping to see him score his 100th point out of hatred or spite.

maybe i'm wrong about all of this and they've hated each other since 2002 and someday we'll get a tell-all story and people can come into my ask box or whatever and tell me how wrong i was. i don't care. all rpf characterization is fake. i watched keith froth at the mouth in the stands at the 2016 wjc every time someone so much as breathed on matthew, though, so i don't think i'm wrong.

#ask maggie #matthew tkachuk

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kemetic-dreams · 1 year ago

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THE TOP 7 BENEFITS OF SPRINTING

ARE SPRINTS GOOD FOR YOU?

When I first got into fitness I used to think the longer the distance attempted the fitter I was. It had to be a 6 mile/10km run at a minimum to qualify! However, fitness is far more than the distance you can run and being functionally fit is considerably more beneficial.

I certainly prefer sprinting as a pastime now and my main endurance cardio is a purposeful brisk walk.

Humanity has been sprinting since we evolved to stand upright. It's made possible by an unusual quirk of our anatomy—a feature that our tree-dwelling closest living relatives don't have.

At some point during our evolutionary history (perhaps as we moved out onto the savannas of Africa), it became necessary for us to cover the vast distances between sources of food quickly, and we went from walking to running to sprinting.

Running at maximal pace (sprinting) confers a variety of physiological and health-related benefits. Many of us move from our beds to our cars to our desks, without ever needing to propel ourselves forward quickly.

#1 IMPROVES YOUR BODY COMPOSITION

Your body composition is your ratio of fat-to-muscle. Most westerners have weak body composition, with high levels of fat and low muscle mass. As a society, we eat too many energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods that promote the deposition of fat in our bodies. Many of us certainly don't do enough regular movement to build and maintain lean body mass.

Sprinting, however, not only helps to burn fat but also encourages muscles to grow. The reasons for this are not as straightforward as you might think.

Researchers are aware that it's not just the total calorie burn that matters for body composition, but the type of diet and exercise people do.

Research in Exercise and Sports Science Review suggests that sprinting shocks the body into becoming fitter at the cellular level. The researchers found that gene expression matters most for improving body composition.

Sprinting sends a signal to cells all over the body to toughen up and adapt to the new physical activity requirements, improving oxidative capacity and metabolic control during subsequent exercise, leaving you leaner.

Do you think endurance athletes have less body fat as a percentage of overall mass than sprinters? Interestingly there is research comparing the body composition of sprint and endurance athletes demonstrated that sprinters tend to have lower body fat percentages even though endurance athletes may look leaner.

#2 STAVES OFF AGEING

Since it helps build muscles, sprinting can help you stave off the muscle-wasting effects of ageing. Humans have several different types of muscles in their bodies, including so-called "fast-" and "slow-twitch" fibres. Fast-twitch muscle (type IIa and type IIb fibres that help you move powerfully) fatigue far more quickly than slow-twitch muscle (type I fibres used for posture and endurance).

Sprinting, as you might expect, trains fast-twitch fibres while movement patterns like standing, walking, and jogging activates slower-acting muscle cells.

Sprinting is an excellent exercise for those who want to build speed and power. The more you train the fast-twitch muscle fibres in your legs, the faster you'll be able to run and the higher you'll jump.

The skeleton also gets stronger too. Sprinting is classified as a weight-bearing exercise, and thus the bones can get stronger from sprinting. Getting your sprints in can help ward off osteoporosis and protect your balance and coordination.

You may feel you are too old to sprint and that it is an activity just for the young? Well, if in any doubt be inspired by Irene Obera still sprinting and breaking records well into her 80s.

It isn’t just about the body though, sprinting helps with ‘quickness’ and reaction time: evidence suggests improvements in reaction time reduces the risks of cognitive decline and conditions such as Alzheimer’s and dementia as we age.

#3 IMPROVES CARDIOVASCULAR HEALTH

HIIT or "high-intensity interval training" is something of a buzzword in the fitness industry right now. Practically every blog or fitness site recommends that people engage in this type of workout, and for a good reason—it's time-efficient and highly effective. HIIT is something I utilise as part of the programme in the Animal Moves book too!

Sprinting is the quintessential HIIT training tool. It's high-intensity, and you can do it in intervals, sprinting for a short period then resting between sprints.

Research in the Journal of Sports Science Medicine suggests that HIIT training has many advantages for cardiovascular fitness over traditional "steady state" training (such as jogging for five miles). Researchers found that, compared to controls, students who engaged in HIIT training saw significant improvements in their VO2 max (a measure of oxygen use) and peak power output, two important markers for cardiovascular fitness.

Unfortunately, HIIT training was much less enjoyable for the majority of people enrolled in the study than the less extreme exercise. It is much harder work for sure, but turning this activity into a game such as a game of chase or a version of tag would undoubtedly enhance the enjoyment factor.

Sprinting even has it's own category of HIIT called SIT (sprint interval training) which has similar health and performance benefits including attaining a lower resting heart rate.

It's no secret that sprinting like other forms of exercise is great for your heart. Regular sprints lower your risk of heart disease, improve your blood cholesterol levels, and help control and prevent high blood pressure.

#4 REDUCES STRESS

Like other forms of exercise, sprint training can combat stress. It releases feel-good endorphins into the brain, helping sprinters cope with the rigours of training and come out on the other side feeling good, ready to do it all over again.

Sprinting calms your body and your brain. In the short term the physical stress of the sprint helps you to focus on the task at hand. After your body works hard through sprinting, the levels of stress hormones, like adrenaline and cortisol, drop. Stress and anxiety fade away.

Endorphins tend to be highest at the end of an exercise session, giving the sprinter a sensation of confidence and relief. The sprinter’s high!

#5 IMPROVES YOUR METABOLISM, EVEN AFTER THE SPRINT IS OVER

Sprinting burns more calories per unit of time than jogging, but the average person can only sustain a sprint for 30 seconds at most. After that, the body depletes its anaerobic stores and must rely on aerobic sources of energy, which can't sustain the same high levels of effort.

In the past, the thinking was that sprinting couldn't burn as many calories as long-duration physical activity. But, researchers have found that sprinting increases the rate of energy burn long after a person finishes exercising. Sprinting isn't just about the calories your body burns during exercise, but also those that it uses to recover afterwards. One measure for this phenomenon is EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) otherwise known as the after-burn effect or oxygen debt.

Heavy resistance training and HIIT workouts appear to be superior to steady-state running or lower-intensity training in creating EPOC.

From an evolutionary point of view, it wasn't an advantage to dedicate vast energy resources to building muscle: it was much better to keep muscles as small as possible to lower energy requirements. The process of modifying muscle fibres into fast-twitch is energy-intensive, meaning that the body resists building them if it thinks it can get away with it. Sprinting overcomes this natural reluctance, however, and forces the body to make these energy-consuming adaptations after you finish exercising, dramatically increasing your overall burn.

#6 SPRINTS IMPROVE GLUCOSE CONTROL

Many westerners have poor glucose control (and don't know it). Our cells have become less sensitive to insulin, which acts like a key that unlocks the cell's door, allowing glucose to enter. Reduced insulin sensitivity or, more seriously, the development of insulin resistance (which can develop into type 2 diabetes), means insulin can't shuttle sugar into cells, leading to a dangerous buildup of glucose in the blood.

Researchers published in BMC Endocrine Disorders found that sprinting could improve metabolic risk factors, such as high blood sugar levels, as well as improve cholesterol levels, reduces blood pressure, cuts abdominal fat, and improves sugar metabolism.

Researchers believe sprinting might improve glucose control through pathways similar to how it improves cardiovascular health. A burst of intense exercise such as sprinting, signals to cells that they need to get their act together and make it more likely you'll survive in a demanding environment.

Sprinting tells your cells that life is fierce, and you need them to do better!

#7 YOU CAN DO IT ANYWHERE

The great thing about sprinting is that it can be done anywhere. You don't need special equipment or training gear. You don't need a gym membership; you can sprint at home. Even with limited space, you can sprint on the spot or even seated in your chair using your arms.

It's even better when you get outside to exercise; you can sprint in your back garden or down the street. Head to your local park and sprint there too. You can watch a video of me sprinting outside here!

if you are in the gym and want to replicate the intensity of the sprint on a treadmill - try Treadmill Drivers - otherwise known as the Deadmill. Very playful and very powerful!

My personal favourite is sprinting when rushing for the bus! What about you?

To help you improve your sprint technique and for an example sprint programme check out this post.

#kemetic dreams #fitness motivation #sprints #fitness #runners #running #runningmotivation #sprinters #sprinter

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