#your antisemitism is on display

[fuck-hamas-go-israel]

“I would’ve hidden Jewish families in my house during the Holocaust!”

Where are these same people now? Celebrating and justifying the antisemitic attacks going on around the world.

I’ve seen people try to defend the recent Amsterdam pogrom with “oh, well, it’s understandable what the attackers doing because technically they’re not targeting Jews, they’re targeting Zionist fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv.”

And that makes it okay?

1. Did you see the assailants ask and ID every single person they attacked?

2. So if they really only meant to target Zionists and violently assault them, you suddenly “get it” because physically attacking someone for their political beliefs is acceptable?

I legitimately came across someone who commented “this isn’t terrorism, it’s just some group attacking another group that deserves it because they politically disagree.”

Last I checked, that’s the fucking definition of terrorism.

The downplaying, acceptance, and celebration of antisemitism shows us that you wouldn’t have hidden us. You’d have sold us out with a smile.

[fuck-hamas-go-israel]

First they harassed cancer patients, now they vandalise the memorial statue of a dead woman who has absolutely nothing to do with the war. What new lows can they stoop to?

But sure, they’re not antisemitic. It’s just about land and territory 🙄

Amy Winehouse's statue in Camden Market had a Palestinian flag sticker taped on where her Star of David should be.

When your movement goes after Jewish symbols and tries to erase Jews, maybe you should ask yourself - what are you actually supporting?

h/t @EtanSmallman

[anshelsgendercrisis]

something that's fucked me up over the last three weeks is the constant barrage of non palestinian goyim saying "why should we have to condemn hamas???????? why do we have to focus on jews or israelis when palestinians are dying??????????" and i know ppl who have already decided i'm guilty by virtue of being a jew won't give a shit, but i'm hoping people who still have a bit of humanity left in them will.

i've gotten so many anons chiding me and demanding to know why they should give a shit about the people killed by hamas (not all of whom were jewish or even israeli), and the answer i keep wanting to give is that. honestly you don't fucking have to. quite honestly, i wouldn't have cared if no one talked about it. i would be hurt to see people didn't see the loss of (assumed to be jewish) life as a tragedy, but i would have much preferred silence to the utterly horrific things i have had to see over the past three weeks.

bc that's the thing. we as jews are so fucking jaded when it comes to gentile reactions to violence against us. we're used to you saying it doesn't matter or even that we deserved it. gentile apathy has so thoroughly broken us that we consider it a win when y'all don't actively celebrate instances of antisemitism. and you had the opportunity to disrupt that pattern, to either take a single moment to offer condolences for the loss of so many lives (not all of whom were jewish or even israeli) or just simply back off and give us space to grieve.

but instead, i witnessed people, who just over a month ago had been wishing their jewish followers a happy rosh hashanah, post or repost some of the most appalling displays of antisemitism i have seen since may of 2021. i have watched you post about the "zionist media" ("jews control the media"), tell jewish israelis to just use their dual citizenship to go back to their third beach house on long island ("all jews are rich"), that jews israelis are bloodthirsty monsters who get pleasure from killing children (modern day blood libel), that jews are the "new nazis" (holocaust inversion), that jews in the diaspora are responsible for the actions of the israeli government (dual loyalty), and that every single israeli should die (literally genocide???????????)

i witnessed people who call themselves antizionist gleefully become tools of political zionism, bolstering the claims that the diaspora is not safe for us and therefore we must support israel when the countries we currently live in turn on us like they have without fail for the last 2000 years. and when i point this out, instead of taking this to heart, people double down. they insist if i'm pointing this out it must mean i believe it.

you all had the opportunity to do nothing, to prioritize the safety and liberation of palestinians over your own hatred of jews, and yet you still chose antisemitism. and i will never forgive you for it.

[tikkunolamresistance]

you're so weird for generalising the entire free palestine movement as pro-hamas and anti-semetic. you post a lot about how we should fight for israelis and palestinins, jews and christians and muslims and everybody else to live side by side. that is what the free Palestine movement stands for. you're weird for pretending it's a pro hamas and anti semetic movement. youre a liar and a propagandist. you should campaign for peace without tarnishing the movement you deep down adhere to. you and the free palestine movement believe in the same thing. stop pretending you are not one of them. and also stop pretending jews cant be anti-zionist

hi! thank you for being polite through gritted teeth here. let’s do this.

i will never forgive the pro palestine movement for how they behaved on october 7th, 2023 and subsequently treated and still treats the active hostage situation in gaza.

since that day, the only version of the pro palestine movement that has had any significance in my life as a jewish person is the antisemitic hatred festering globally.

i would be standing with you if i felt safe doing so. allowing any measure of antisemitism into your movement that has direct material impact on more than 50% of the worldwide jewish population invalidates any intention of peace any single supporter has.

it is very important to me that the movement i show up for represents my values on all levels. this conflict is not one you can just skim, this conflict has too many moving parts to have a faultless ‘side’ but i will always stand beside those that call for peace, dignity, and respect— something the pro palestine movement has failed to display to me anywhere. including and especially tumblr.

i campaign for the integrity of my people and the future we all deserve: israeli and palestinian co-existence and overall jewish safety.

bring them home now.

[aqlstar]

Today is Oct 7th. While we’re going to our memorials and our rallies for the hostages, there will be groups all across the US that rally to celebrate and support of the terrorists who committed the Simchat Torah Pogrom.

The mainstream media will (of past behavior is any indication) likely do their best to bury their heads in the sand.

It is our job, as Jews in diaspora (and allies ❤️), not to let them. When you see open support for terrorism, violent antizionism, and other forms of antisemitism on display today, stop and take pictures, record video, or record audio. Take note of which organizations are promoting it.

Document what is really going on, and email it to your local news and your local Jewish advocacy group. If you don’t know where to send it- send it to me! We’ll figure it out together.

If America continues to sweep its antisemitism problem under the rug, it’s going to fester and spread until there is no room left for Jews in the states.

Don’t let that happen.

[fuck-hamas-go-israel]

I made my original response as a tongue in cheek comment about how people like to use Israel as a scapegoat for unrest in the Middle East, but I’d just like to add that true enough, there are people blaming Israel for the fall of Assad.

There are conspiracies that the CIA and Mossad have funded the rebels to overthrow Assad. And on video reports of how Assad lived in luxury while his people suffered under tranny, there are comments like “Assad was a good guy, this is just Israeli propaganda to make people think badly of Islam” as well as “don’t let this distract you from Gaza”.

Antisemitism truly makes people brain-dead.

exactly

[brainscrems]

Making a little pinned post for goyim who stumble across this blog. Nothing in your background, none of your experiences with marginalization, nothing at all makes you exempt from having unconsciously incorporated antisemitism into your world view and mindset. The best thing you can do is seek out a wide range of all jewish voices with no preconceived notions, hear how different things affect their lives and oppression, and take that into account about what you say and do. Next thing to address. Antisemitism from the left DOES exist and it IS in your movements for palestinian liberation, as ugly a truth as that is. I support a free palestine and an end to genocide. So, when I showed up to my first protest and saw a displayed swastika with hundreds of people around, I was extremely dismayed that not a single one was willing to stand up and say a goddamned thing. This is the state of antisemitism on the left. Most people won’t *openly* spout hateful rhetoric, tho those who will are quite loud. The real problem is that there is no collective willingness to go after the open antisemites in these movements. It’s deemed acceptable because it’s for a good cause. And let me tell you, this shit is quite typical and we jews see it constantly. Just because you aren’t seeing antisemitism doesn’t mean it’s not there. Of course you aren’t seeing it. You’re not jewish. You don’t have the background to notice shit that you’ve been taught is normal and fine. Yet, your silence in the face of these things or even your engagement in them still hurts us. And. You know what they say. If nazi joins 4 people at a table and they do nothing about it you have 5 nazis. So. What can you do? Seek out jewish voices and LEARN!! Don’t tokenize us. Don’t choose ones you already agree with. The first resource I recommend for dealing w antisemitism in leftist spaces is called “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere” by April Rosenblum. This is a jew with a long history of palestinian advocacy and she has done a great job at breaking down where antisemitism happens. Link at the bottom. It was written in 2007 and remains depressingly relevant today. This pamphlet is 24 pages, a bit long, but very thorough. This pamphlet is the barebones details of what’s antisemitic btw. The things listed in there are basic “nearly every jew in the world” would agree things. There is more than just what is contained in there that’s antisemitic and your best resource is gonna be listening to jewish voices. No tokenizing. No dismissing. Just listening and seeing what makes sense. That said, this shit is essential reading because it gives you the tools to start making spaces safe for jews. If you don’t care about that then, well, you probably don’t belong on this blog.

EDIT: In an ideal world I would like a binational one-state solution with a right of return for jews and palestinians as well as massive reparations for palestinians. I don’t identify as a zionist. And. I know jews who identify as zionists who want the exact same things I do. If your rhetoric is calling for violence against those people you can fuck right off. Zionist is a jewish word that has been appropriated by goyim, both by christian “zionists” as well as those who wish to discredit jews wanting to live peacefully with palestinians in our shared homeland. It means whatever the jew using it says it does in the context of their speech. The people who support the ethnic cleansing and genocide of palestinians or the treatment of palestinians as second class citizens are called kahanists and racist assholes, not zionists. Stop misusing our fucking word. Learn what the word means from actual members of our community instead of shouting about it as a fucking outsider and appropriating a term with deep community roots. Yea, Israel has committed so many war crimes and is currently committing genocide. This is not what zionism represents to most zionists so if you’re pushing that narrative just fucking do better and stop putting jewish lives at risk with your irresponsible rhetoric. I once again redirect you to the linked pamphlet. This is not a heavily focused on topic in it, but it gives clear instructions on what not to do, even if it doesn’t give you all the details on the why.

[fuck-hamas-go-israel]

No matter what, don’t lose your humanity.

I see this rhetoric very often, that if you call for the release of the hostages and condemn Hamas terrorism and the atrocities they’ve committed, then you automatically “must support the death of Palestinian civilians”.

Conversely, those who claim to care about the Palestinian civilians don’t seem to call for the release of hostages, never acknowledge the rape, torture, and murder of civilians on Oct 7. In fact, they seem to celebrate death of who they perceive as “Zionist”.

I saw this play out before my eyes on TikTok. A singer named Cat Janice was dying from cancer, and she asked her audience to use her song in their videos as she had willed the proceeds to her young son who is not more than 7 or 8 years old. People labelled her a Zionist because she apparently was following an Israeli account on Instagram.

It was a very tragic story and her family was going through a hard time dealing with the aggressive cancer that was slowly weakening her body.

But as we’ve seen:

They don’t care about people who are suffering from terminal illnesses and will harass them anyway.

In her videos of her giving updates on her situation and pleading with people for empathy for her young son, they flooded her comment section with spam:

Unfortunately, Cat Janice passed away, BDE. But that didn’t stop the harassment. In fact, some celebrated her death and even lauded it as a good thing as there is “one less Zionist” now.

Yes, there are people like this out there. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as they’ve been violent, they’ve been sending death threats, they’ve been chanting for violent “resistance” and “intifada” and the death of Jews and Israelis, as well as their allies. They celebrate violence in the most disgusting and dehumanising way possible.

Just look at the comments in this video of a Jewish creator saying that in Berlin, a Jewish student was attacked:

Meanwhile, we chant “Am Yisrael Chai”. We call for life, we focus on saving all lives, no matter who.

As the leaders of Hamas said in an interview, “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We consider our dead to be martyrs.”

Every innocent death is a tragedy, Israeli and Palestinian. Death IS a tragedy. The killing of Hamas terrorists, albeit deserved, is a tragedy because of the terroristic path they chose in life and what horrific crimes they had committed in order to warrant death as a means of justice.

As much as I wish that one day, those people who have spewed those vile, antisemitic, inhuman things will feel guilty for what they have said, I doubt they will. The perceived safety and anonymity of social media coupled with their complete absence of humanity, compassion, and empathy evaporates any drop of guilty conscience they may have. All we can wish is that fair and just consequences for their actions will be meted out to them one day.

But my fellow Jews, my fellow zionists, my fellow allies, please never, NEVER stoop to that level. It goes against everything we are about.

Once we lose our humanity, we’ll become dulled to the suffering of others. That’s not what we want, and it directly goes against the spirit of Judaism and Israel.

Continue to mourn the death of innocents, continue to get angry and weep for tragedy and injustice, continue to celebrate new life and lives saved. Continue to feel like a human being. Don’t be like them.

Don’t. Lose. Your. Humanity.

[thegayhimbo]

I had nativenews reported for the same reason, and this is the response I got for my troubles. Suffice to say, @staff isn't going to do a goddamn thing about that blog. nativenews has been posting hateful garbage for a while now, and I know people here who've reported them multiple times with no success.

Tumblr staff will terminate gay blogs willy-nilly for violating their "terms of service" and "community guidelines" (at least that's the justification they give when it happens), but when someone like nativenews is promoting and endorsing a terrorist organization like Hamas, @staff won't lift a finger to do anything about it.

"We take all reports seriously and strive to apply our policies fairly and consistently" my ass. 🙄

Oh, okay….

People are now happily reblogging a Call to Action from fucking Hamas to “continue and escalate their global public movement” against “Zionists” and somehow not seeing how violently and horrendously antisemitic that is. It goes without saying, but if you’re uncritically sharing posts from a terrorist group responsible for massacring, torturing and raping Jewish civilians en masse, you certainly need to take a gigantic step backwards and have fucking words with yourself.

Needless to say, I have reported the post and the account that originally posted it, @ / nativenews.

My Jewish friends, please stay safe.

[jewish-vents]

i’m a teacher and i had a kid draw a swastika in my classroom on like. the second day of school. so one of our admin came in to two of my classes the next day to talk about it. and she started by telling this story about how she had a hijabi student. and a boy in the class was “really curious about what her hair looked like.” and had the students guess what happened next (pulled the hijab off, gross and awful) and how that might have made the hijabi student feel. at this point i’m sitting at my desk like “it’s been five minutes are we going to talk about the swastika” and then she finally goes “yesterday someone drew a symbol that represents division. and hate. and those aren’t things we stand for” and a kid (of course) was like what was it? and this fucking woman turns to me and goes “are you comfortable sharing what it was?”

?????? i thought that’s why you were here?? i thought you were here to explain why swastikas are not okay, and we are seven minutes into your little presentation and you haven’t said the word swastika or even jewish. so i said it was a swastika and several of the kids didn’t know what that was. which was disturbing on its own as i teach middle school but i digress. i said no way in hell am i drawing one so my admin looks at me and is like “could you google a picture?”

can’t believe i did this but i didn’t know what else to do in the moment so i pulled up a google image search of swastikas and projected it on the board. at no point did the admin say “hey you can take that down now” it just sat up there until i got uncomfortable and sick to my stomach enough to close it myself. and then she came back the next period and did the WHOLE song and dance again (no jewish, no antisemitism, not even the word NAZI which is insane to me) and STILL told the opening story about the hijabi girl even with two hijabi girls sitting in the class this time who were clearly uncomfortable.

this was like three weeks ago and it’s been quietly bothering me for a while and i finally told my (nonjewish) work friends about it and they were all like “holy shit that’s so fucked that she asked you to do that” and i told my (jewish) partner and he went “she couldn’t have picked up a fucking marker??” and that was when it really hit me.

maybe she didn’t want to be in a situation where she drew a swastika on a jewish teachers whiteboard. ok. but she apparently didn’t consider the WORSE implications of asking that same jewish teacher to google an image of a swastika and project a google image search of a page FULL of swastikas on her board.

AND she never once checked in with me after that. she left the class without talking to me again and hasn’t said a word about it since. i remember i even asked her “do you want me to leave the room” beforehand because im thinking i don’t want to have to look at swastikas but she asked me to stay because “the impact is real and they need to see it” which. uh. i’ve been pushing this experience down for weeks bc at the end of the day it “wasn’t that bad” but like. holy shit. she really wanted to put my trauma on display for the students instead of just asking me to leave and explaining what a swastika is/showing them one. and it took her nearly ten minutes to get to the actual swastika!! i’m just. so done

.

[queer-geordie-dyke]

I've said this *so very many* times but with the news that Hamas executed 6 hostages in cold blood because they were so close to being rescued, I'm here again:

The lauding and fandomisation of terrorists who have displayed an inhuman disregard for life, who have subjected innocent human beings to unimaginable brutality, and the absolute dehumanisation of these human beings by so-called "human rights activists" would be laughable if it wasn't one of the most monstrously evil things I've ever witnessed.

Every single person who has excused, justified, or even praised Hamas, every single person who has happily contributed to the climate of dehumanisation of Israelis, every single person who has spread antisemitic conspiracies online, every single person who has stood at "protests" cheering on terrorists who rape and murder and kidnap - I hope every single one of you carry that shame for the rest of your lives.

Fuck you all sincerely. You are beneath contempt.

[unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240]

Here's the thing that really broke me about the goyische left's response to the Hamas massacre: once again, the uncritical, antisemitic double standard for Israel and Jews versus literally anyone else has now expanded to assume that Jews do not deserve human rights or have lost them by virtue of being Israeli.

Let's say, for a moment, that you have been radicalized to really believe that the Hamas attack on civilians was a liberatory action, perhaps unfortunate that it targeted unarmed civilians, but what else were they supposed to do? Besides, Israel has visited similar and worse attacks on Palestine for years, so turnabout is fair play, especially in service of the struggle of liberation of a brutally oppressed group. [To be clear: I take issue with this and find it morally repugnant. But for the moment, let's accept arguendo this belief as a baseline.]

Do you really include rape, torture, killing children at all but especially in front of their parents, or killing parents in front of their children and taking hostages of the survivors, beheading infants, trapping and burning families hidden together alive, stripping and parading hostages naked through the street, mutilating and displaying the bodies of the dead proudly and celebrating their deaths, and doing all of this on a holy day where Jewish people the world over are supposed to be celebrating the end of the holiday season and the beginning of a new cycle of Torah learning. On a day that people will be resting, with their families, unarmed and in their holy spaces, and are explicitly commanded to be happy.

.......amongst the "unfortunate-but-necessary violent struggle?"

Like even if you believe in your heart of hearts that all Israelis should die or at least are acceptable casualties in the struggle, do you really believe that there is any excuse for the above atrocities? If you do, I need you to ask yourself some things:

Do you think there is any justification for the manner and cruelty of the deaths?

Do you really think that there is anything a person could do in order to deserve any of these actions as a sentence?

Was the cruel nature of this, designed to inflict the greatest amount of trauma on the survivors and the Jewish people at large, actually necessary to accomplishing the goal of liberation?

Would you accept any of these actions being done to any other group?

If you are a white American, do you think you personally deserve this yourself for everything the United States has done to the native population (never mind anyone else)?

Do you think that civilians can be held 100% accountable for their government's actions? Is that a standard you yourself would like to be judged by?

If context is important, how is the last 2000 years of brutal antisemitism from virtually every part of the world not also relevant context? How is the Holocaust not relevant? The Farhud?

Do you think refugees fleeing genocide should be able to live wherever they can and that other countries and peoples have a duty to step up and take them in? If so, would you call refugees of genocide colonists and settlers?

Do you think that children should have to answer for the crimes of adults? That it is ever okay to kill them in cold blood?

Do you think that non-combatant deaths should ever be celebrated?

Theoretically, if the only way Hamas could accomplish its goal (which we will assume arguendo is Palestinian liberation, despite the mounds of evidence against that) is to kill whatever Israelis they could get their hands on, don't you think that a valid liberation force would just kill people as efficiently as possible rather than take the time to brutalize and humiliate them first? Wouldn't that be the more morally understandable thing to do?

Do you think it's ever okay to mock or talk down to people grieving their dead, no matter who they were, especially if they were random citizens rather than, say, high-profile politicians?

These questions to me are unanswerable and the fact that they are even in question at all unjustifiable. The left has either actively participated in this or remained silent in the face of it. And too many friends who I thought were allies have failed to reach out to even ask if we're okay, let alone made even the weakest of condemnations of the brutality my people have experienced this week.

This tells me that you think my humanity, as a Jew, is conditional. That my right not to experience war crimes is up for debate.

How am I supposed to trust you ever again? Feel safe in your presence? Collaborate with you on other issues? Why should I?

For the people who are posting about the situation yet failed to condemn the torture and brutality against my people, please know that I will likely never fully believe you that you are for restorative justice, against the death penalty, against cruel and unusual punishment, against sexual violence, for children's rights and against the murder of children, against terrorism, against civilian casualties, for the rights and protection of refugees, for freedom of movement, support indigenous groups, and certainly certainly anyone claiming to be against antisemitism. There will forever and always be an asterisk next to your statements in favor of universal human rights which reads: *except Jews.

[undeadlobster]

People are so desperate to look for a black/white good/bad binary in this conflict and it just doesn’t work

Typical American worldviews just can’t comprehend the nuance

The state of Israel is actively committing a genocide, full stop. Hamas is a terrorist organization utilizing child soldiers and suicide bombers, full stop

The victims here are the civilians of both Palestine and Israel. Denying the evils of either Hamas or the state of Israel helps no one and shows that the only thing you care about is looking like you’re on the “right side”

EDIT: Hen Mazzig

[ticklepinions]

Everyone should read the following. If we are a community you need to understand a few things.

Are you entitled to say anything you want due to "free speech"? Hell yeah!

Should you? Absolutely the fuck not!

The blatant racism, anti-queerness, transphobia, misogyny and fatphobia I have seen is down right abhorrent. And if you display any of these ideologies or opinions, you simply do not belong here. You shouldn't be comfortable making a safe space for yourself as you make this lovely community unsafe for the rest of us.

There is nothing political about human rights. But unfortunately that's where we are in this life. I'll try not to be biased but certain political leanings tells me all I need to know about you. POC conservatives will always make me laugh. You are nothing but a pawn for the cis/hetero/whites who don't give a shit if you live or die. Nothing but a slur, a body to dispose of. You may share their views but they are not sharing the power and privilege they have with you.

Let's talk about certain individuals who act so tough under the "big strong amurican sharing their views just to get shitted on, fucking snowflakes". Why do you want to be oppressed so badly? Why do you purposely antagonize people and then when they defend themselves you try dismissing them by saying how they're wasting their time... The irony of it all. The sheer ignorance.

I feel sorry for you people. Truly, I do. But I'll be damned if I let any of you try to tear any of us down for having opinions and ideologies (hint hint see the irony?) that fight for the rights of people who don't have them.

And let me get something clear- from the river to the sea. We all should not stop fighting till all of us are free. There are so many resources out there to educate yourself, yet you choose to remain ignorant. You do not belong here. You act as though you are better than everyone else because you have "edgy" opinions, opinions that literally call for the deaths of the marginalized and oppressed. You do not belong here. You have the gall to tell people they are wasting their time, when their sheer existence alone is putting them at risk for isolation and death (by the same bigoted people you support). You do not belong here.

If an elephant (Israel) has it's foot on a mouse's (Palestine) tail, tell me which one is truly the one at risk. There is a gen0cide going on. If Israel is trying to reclaim it's "land" why bomb it? Why destroy it? With a military with their degree they should be able to eliminate all these "terr0rists" with minimal to no "collateral damage" (aka the 30,000 innocent Palestinians, 2/3rds of which were woman and children, with countless injured, orphaned, homeless and starving). Why bomb hospitals, mosques, sacred places? Standing with Palestinian people is not antisemitism, it's anti gen0cide and war crimes (a multitude of which Israel has shamelessly committed).

And I'm not on anon. I stand for the people of Palestine. I stand for justice. I stand for equity. I stand for the freedom of all oppressed people.

And I implore everyone who follows me to educate themselves. The right path does not lead you to discriminate against the marginalized. Continue to fight my friends, continue to amplify the voices of those unheard, continue making this community and those you belong to, safe for all and unsafe for those who think otherwise.

For you @knismosexual + @littleonelee

I hope you truly reflect on how your actions impacts this entire community and the communities you live in. Until you learn how to act right, unfortunately this community isn't for you. You shouldn't feel welcome here. You shouldn't feel like you belong here. DMs are wide open if you have any thoughts. But again I say, supporting transphobic, racist, anti-queer, misogynistic, discriminatory views is not simply an "opinion" or personality to adopt. You are hurting real people, accepting the deaths and harassment that plague them every single day. You have no place in this community.

[matan4il]

Daily update post:

I've seen the following headline discussed on several news sites:

And most of the discussion surrounded the issue of why are the terrorists shirtless (which takes the gold medal at the "turn a simple answer into a pointless debate" olympics. They're shirtless to make sure they're not carrying suicide vests, that they plan to detonate in the vicinity of the soldiers). What people should be noting about this, is that these armed terrorists were coming out of a hospital. It's another needed piece of evidence that Hamas has been using Gazan hospitals for their military operations. I am once again encouraging you to think about the UN, the Red Cross, the journalists reporting from Gaza, and every "respectable" human rights organization, like Doctors Without Borders, which operated in these places, and COVERED THIS UP for Hamas for the past 16 years.

Denmark's police announced that they have arrested 3 people (with one additional person arrested in The Netherlands) for planning to carry out a terrorist attack against Jews and Israelis.

Israel's top satire show continues to ridicule the inability of the world to have any moral clarity, of even the most basic kind, when it comes to antisemitism.

And that's how you could have done it, SNL.

In the same context, I watched the House debate on the bipartisan resolution calling for the presidents of Harvard and MIT to resign. Some of the arguments against the resolution were absolutely infuriating, either types of "whataboutism" ("But what about all the other things we should be doing to combat antisemitism?" Well, Karen, you can do those, too. There's absolutely no contradiction. At the same time, you say that you've dedicated many years to fighting antisemitism, and yet look at the state of your fight. Maybe holding people in position of educational power personally responsible, maybe making people see that there is a price to pay for taking Qatari money and allowing antisemitism to thrive, would make a difference, on top of those other measures that should be taken to fight Jew hatred) or just repeated, "But free speech!" (as if that line of defence wasn't obliterated during the hearing, when it was demonstrated that other marginalized groups' right to protection has been treated as superseding the right to free speech, on the same campuses where these presidents failed to define a call for the genocide of Jews as harassment, which means that not only did these universities fail to protect Jewish students from antisemitism, they engaged in discriminatory behavior towards Jews themselves).

Thankfully, the resolution passed, 303 to 126.

Here's a reminder of what Jewish students have been dealing with:

On the last day of Hanukkah, I wanna share with you this story. You might have seen this picture before:

This is the Posner family's hanukkiah. In Dec 1931, a moment before the Nazis' rise to power, and when their imminent threat is already well felt by German Jews, Rachel Posner puts this hanukkiah at the window, knowing that the Nazis' headquarters in Kiel, the German city where her husband is the community's rabbi, is situated right across the street from their home. After lighting the candles, she's suddenly inspired to take a picture of the hanukkiah with the Nazi banner in the background. When she gets the picture printed, she writes on the back:

"Judea, drop dead!" says the banner. "Judea will live forever," answers the light.

"Judea, drop dead!" was a part of a common Nazi slogan back then. It went, "Germany, wake up! Judea, drop dead!"

The Posner family heeded the warning signs, and left Germany in 1933, one of the last moments when that was still possible for Jews. The family moved to Israel, and was saved. Once established, they decided to donate the hanukkiah to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance authority, to be displayed at our museum. The family only asked for one thing: to get to light the hanukkiah every Hanukkah. Now, museums are not supposed to say yes to this. If you donate something to a museum, that's it. The artifact belongs to the museum, you don't get to ask to use it, and in fact, for preservation purposes, it's not supposed to be used. But YV understood from the start that our museums is not going to be like other ones, and that when people donate artifcats to us, these are not just inanimate objects. These are the remainders of people who are lost, innocence that was robbed, a world that was destroyed. These are reminders of hope and life in the face of hatred and murder. And we can't take that away from people. That's why YV agrees to this type of request.

So, when I take people on a tour of our museum during Hanukkah, and go into our "German Jews room," and I show the corner where a large "window" bears an imprint of Rachel Posner's photo, I have to explain why the display next to the "window" is empty, other than a small note that reads, "temporarily removed." And why Hanukkah is the only time of the year when visitors can't see this hanukkiah.

This year was no exception. Hanukkah came, and we got the Posner family hanukkiah out of the glass display case... Except this year, after the Oct 7 massacre, things are different. The hanukkiah first traveled to Germany, where it was lit by the families of the hostages asking for their loved ones' return, and then it traveled back to Israel, and from there to Gaza, where it was lit by a great grandson of Rabbi Akiva and his wife Rachel Posner.

This is 41 years old Tal Haimi.

Tal was a third generation at kibbutz Nir Yitzhak. He's one of many Israelis, from which there was no sign of life since Oct 7, though there was an indication that they're held in Gaza (most commonly, their cell phone signal was picked up there). Yesterday, his family got confirmation that he was murdered during the Hamas massacre, and it was his body that was kidnapped to Gaza. His wife Ella is pregnant, and was documenting the course of the pregnancy for the past two months, hoping to share that with him, when he returns from captivity. May his memory be a blessing.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[eretzyisrael]

by Matti Friedman

The failure of Holocaust education has been most sharply observed by the writer Dara Horn, particularly in a prescient essay for The Atlantic last spring and before that in a 2021 book, People Love Dead Jews. After visiting numerous museums and speaking to educators who teach Holocaust curricula, she concludes in the essay, “The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against antisemitism. But it doesn’t.” 

By turning the Holocaust into a generic story about prejudice, Horn argues, Holocaust education left its recipients without any understanding of the specific problem facing Jews—or even much sympathy for real Jews in the present. 

This was the argument she made half a year before the Hamas attack of October 7 and its aftershocks, when any doubts about the accuracy of Horn’s hypothesis were put to rest. The well-meaning donors who’ve footed the astronomical bill for museums, memorials, classes, and films should ask for their money back.

The confusion between knowledge of the how and of the why is illustrated, inadvertently, in the figure of one of the experts interviewed in Evil on Trial, Omer Bartov, a Holocaust historian at Brown who describes himself as a “historian of genocide.” Bartov, who is Israeli, belongs to Israel’s most unfortunate export category—namely, academics who find a home for themselves on an increasingly unhinged Western left by reassuring their comrades that their dark fantasies about Israel are sane. Barely a month after October 7, Bartov wrote a New York Times op-ed accusing Israel of “crimes against humanity” and warning of a possible “genocide” in Gaza, taking the two key terms first invented to describe the Nazis and deploying them against Jews. Then, after visiting one of the college encampments where Zionists are cast as malevolent global villains, he reassured an interviewer from Democracy Now! that he’d seen nothing amiss and that antisemitism on American campuses “does not exist in any significant form.” The protesters may be trafficking in lurid stories of Jewish evil, but the Holocaust professor thinks that this time the stories are true.Prisoner shoes on display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, Oświęcim, Poland. (via Alamy)

One of the blithe assumptions of Holocaust narrative has always been that no one would identify with the Nazis, but this is wrong. They’re villains, to be sure, but also strong figures, men of action. Just as the best character in Schindler’s List is the Nazi commandant played by Ralph Fiennes, the best character in Evil on Trial is Adolf Hitler, acted with deranged energy in the reenactment scenes by Károly Kozma. When I finished the series on Netflix, I saw that I could continue to Hitler’s Circle of Evil, then to Hitler: A Career, and then to five other movies with title screens featuring Nazis. All of this manages not only to bestow upon the Nazis a kind of dark glamor but also to reassure everyone that if you don’t have a red band on your arm and a skull on your hat, you’re fine. 

The Jews, on the other hand, tend to be mostly absent as real characters. They occasionally appear to be marched away with their hands up or shot into ditches in their underwear. But we don’t get a sense of who they are, or why their difference—and particularly their stubborn refusal to adopt whatever ideology is current—has repeatedly turned them into figures of hate. 

The liberal West may believe itself to be post-Christian, but it’s still the world created by an ideological system that co-opted Judaism and then developed a furious resentment toward its continued existence, thus establishing a civilizational pattern that seems destined to repeat forever.

If Holocaust stories treat Jews as props, they miss understanding what the Jews think about what’s happening to them. And what they think is worth consideration, not just out of courtesy.

Judaism is a religion with a very long memory, and Jewish texts include stories of oppression and extermination stretching back to Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus. Europe’s Jews saw the threat as a continuum that didn’t start or end with Hitler. They knew he was a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. It is this insight, unlike the details of SS hierarchy or the sadism of Dr. Mengele, that has the power to help us make sense of the world we see right now.