aph-japan reblogged

#jewish #jewish issues #ashkenazi #ashkenazi jews #ashkenazim #eastern european jews #eastern europe #european jews #black jews #brown jews #brown ashkenazim #black ashkenazim #tallit #intracommunity racism #multiethnic issues #multiethnic erasure #anti race science #race science #seriously #fandom misinformation #misinformation campaigns #misinformation #misinfo #intracommunity antiblackness #bionormativity #bionormative assumptions #things i cut people off over #drake meme #memes #*GOYIM DO NOT RB TO MAKE ABOUT CURRENT EVENTS OR I AUTOHARDBLOCK

aph-japan reblogged

cantotallyeven

I bring a sort of "it's wrong to hate people based on how or where they were born" vibe to political discourse that apparently right wingers and left wingers both don't really like

aph-japan reblogged

koushirouizumi

Pinned Post

slyandthefamilybook

since we now know that all those "my blog is safe for Jewish people" posts are bullshit, here are some Jewish organizations you can donate to if you actually want to prove you support Jews. put up or shut up

FIGHTING HUNGER

Masbia - Kosher soup kitchens in New York

MAZON - Practices and promotes a multifaceted approach to hunger relief, recognizing the importance of responding to hungry peoples' immediate need for nutrition and sustenance while also working to advance long-term solutions

Tomchei Shabbos - Provides food and other supplies so that poor Jews can celebrate the Sabbath and the Jewish holidays

FINANCIAL AID

Ahavas Yisrael - Providing aid for low-income Jews in Baltimore

Hebrew Free Loan Society - Provides interest-free loans to low-income Jews in New York and more

GLOBAL AID

American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee - Offers aid to Jewish populations in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in the Middle East through a network of social and community assistance programs. In addition, the JDC contributes millions of dollars in disaster relief and development assistance to non-Jewish communities

American Jewish World Service - Fighting poverty and advancing human rights around the world

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society - Providing aid to immigrants and refugees around the world

Jewish World Watch - Dedicated to fighting genocides around the world

MEDICAL AID

Sharsheret - Support for cancer patients, especially breast cancer

SOCIAL SERVICES

The Aleph Institute - Provides support and supplies for Jews in prison and their families, and helps Jewish convicts reintegrate into society

Bet Tzedek - Free legal services in LA

Bikur Cholim - Providing support including kosher food for Jews who have been hospitalized in the US, Australia, Canada, Brazil, and Israel

Blue Card Fund - Critical aid for holocaust survivors

Chai Lifeline - An org that's very close to my heart. They help families with members with disabilities in Baltimore

Chana - Support network for Jews in Baltimore facing domestic violence, sexual abuse, and elder abuse

Community Alliance for Jewish-Affiliated Cemetaries - Care of abandoned and at-risk Jewish cemetaries

Crown Heights Central Jewish Community Council - Provides services to community residents including assistance to the elderly, housing, employment and job training, youth services, and a food bank

Hands On Tzedakah - Supports essential safety-net programs addressing hunger, poverty, health care and disaster relief, as well as scholarship support to students in need

Hebrew Free Burial Association

Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services - Programs include early childhood and learning, children and adolescent services, mental health outpatient clinics for teenagers, people living with developmental disabilities, adults living with mental illness, domestic violence and preventive services, housing, Jewish community services, counseling, volunteering, and professional and leadership development

Jewish Caring Network - Providing aid for families facing serious illnesses

Jewish Family Service - Food security, housing stability, mental health counseling, aging care, employment support, refugee resettlement, chaplaincy, and disability services

Jewish Relief Agency - Serving low-income families in Philadelphia

Jewish Social Services Agency - Supporting people’s mental health, helping people with disabilities find meaningful jobs, caring for older adults so they can safely age at home, and offering dignity and comfort to hospice patients

Jewish Women's Foundation Metropolitan Chicago - Aiding Jewish women in Chicago

Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty - Crisis intervention and family violence services, housing development funds, food programs, career services, and home services

Misaskim - Jewish death and burial services

Our Place - Mentoring troubled Jewish adolescents and to bring awareness of substance abuse to teens and children

Tiferes Golda - Special education for Jewish girls in Baltimore

Yachad - Support for Jews with disabilities

afrenomes

Great list! I’d also add Keshet, a US-based LGBTQ Jewish organization that “works for full equality of LGBTQ Jews and our families in Jewish life” by training Jewish communities to be more queer-inclusive, providing resources and events for queer Jews, as well as advocating for queer rights on both a state-by-state and national level.

aph-japan reblogged

koushirouizumi

matan4il

Today, exactly 80 years ago

On November 9 1938, Kristallnacht happened. Crystal Night, Night of the Broken Glass, The November Pogrom. Call it what you will, here are some things I’d like to share with you, also highlighting a few common misconceptions. * It wasn’t one night. Kristallnacht began on the night of November 9th. It’s a date with great significance in German history, going back to 1848. That’s why on the 9th of Nov 1923, exactly 95 years ago today, Hitler tried to take Germany through a Mussolini-inspired march in Munich, but he failed. His failure led to his arrest and imprisonment, which is when he also wrote “Mein Kampf”, ‘my struggle’, a book spreading his ideology and world view. The Nazis came to see this date as a stepping stone to their eventual ascent to power in 1933, so from that year on, Nov 9th was celebrated by them every year. That meant that when Goebbles, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, decided to organize a huge pogrom, Nov 9th was the perfect date for it. Groups of Nazis were coming together all over Germany to celebrate the date. In 1938, they were preparing to go on a night march and it was easy to use that to launch an attack on the Jews living under Nazi control. But while the violence erupted over night and by Nazi activists, regular people joined in on it and it lasted several days in many places and in some, a whole week of violence aimed at destroying Jewish life under Nazi rule. * It didn’t happen in Germany alone. By Nov 1938, the Nazis have taken over Austria as well through an annexation that the Austrians mostly favored, and they were also occupying a meaningful part of Czechoslovakia. Jews in all of these territories were attacked. In addition, inspired by the pogrom in Germany, similar riots erupted in the free city of Danzig (Gdansk) which was only semi-autonomous, meaning it was partly Polish, though inhabited by many Germans. That means Kristallnacht actually happened across no less than four separate rules. * The number of synagogues destroyed used to be considered as a lower number, but today we know that over 1000 synagogues were destroyed in Germany alone (and never forget that this was not happening just there). Each synagogue represents a community. Sometimes more than one. The synagogues were targeted because that’s the center of Jewish life. It’s a symbol. Destroying the symbol is a declaration of intent. But also, synagogues were centers of religious, social and cultural life for the Jews, they were centers of assembly. Without a place to come together, it was harder for Jews to organize and try to help each other through this crisis. * MORE than 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps during Kristallnacht. It’s the German Jews alone who made up 30,000 new prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps following this event, but we mustn’t forget 12,400 more Jews from Austria who were also sent there and an estimation that a few thousands Czech and Slovak Jews were as well. * MORE than 91 Jews were killed during Kristallnacht. This number is often quoted because that’s the figure quoted in the report the NAZIS themselves compiled, but it is believed today to be an underestimation, especially since it was the morning of Nov 10th, while the pogrom continued in many places AFTER that morning. Certainly if we also take into account the number of Jews arrested during Kristallnacht and killed in the Nazi concentration camps right at the end of this event, the number is now thought to be thousands of Jews who died due to this pogrom. * Kristallnacht marked the first time Jews were sent to concentration camps simply for BEING Jewish. It was the first time that being a Jew in itself was officially criminalized. The Jews were sent to the camps before, they were murdered there for being Jewish before as well, but the arrests pre-Kristallnacht always used some excuse or pretext to arrest the Jews (even when unofficially it was clear that Jews were being targeted as Jews). After Kristallnacht, the Jews made up the majority of prisoners in every single Nazi concentration camp. * The Jews were forced to pay a fine for all the destruction that occurred during Kristallnacht, a sum of one billion reichsmarks, or a fifth of the collective property of the Jews in Germany during that time. That’s right, the Jews were forced to pay a FIFTH of their total property as a fine for the damages caused by the attack targeting them. * The other day I got to hear the story of one family during Kristallnacht. Two Nazi activists burst into their house in the middle of the night. They stabbed the father, Aharon, in the stomach. He jumped out the window and somehow survived the fall. They then stabbed the mom, Mina, and killed her. They proceeded to stab the kids, who were badly wounded, but survived. Aharon took his kids and managed to escape Germany for South America. Mina was one of the 91 Jews who were included in the Nazis’ report. After the war, one of her sons, still bearing the deep scars from the stabbings, returned to Germany to testify in the murder trial for a family member killed in a similar fashion during Kristallnacht. Those trials ended with the murderers being convicted, but even though Mina’s killers were known as well, they were never brought to justice. There was no real justice for most of the victims even after the end of the Holocaust. May the memory of all who were murdered and all who suffered because of this event be a blessing.

aph-japan reblogged

koushirouizumi

A prayer in both Hebrew and Dutch to be recited on Sabbath and holidays in memory of the victims of Kristallnacht.

aph-japan reblogged

koushirouizumi

Listen, the nazis were not antisemitic for identifying Jews as a separate ethnicity from Germans. That's just a fact. The nazis were antisemitic for deciding that meant Jews were lesser than Germans and didn't belong in Germany. Jews today stating that we are a distinct ethnic group from west Asia is not "buying into nazi race science", it's a historical fact. Acknowledging that we are treated as perpetual foreigners is not agreeing that we should be. Stop denying modern antisemitism and twisting things so you can get off on calling Jews nazis for one minute and think for once in your lives.

aph-japan reblogged

koushirouizumi

afloweroutofstone

It’s always fun to be reminded how recent European national identities are. Peasants in 1860’s Sicily had never heard the term “Italy” before, the majority of people in France didn’t speak French at the time of the French Revolution, etc.

dostoyevsky-official

pyjnda

from the observations of a british diplomat in the ukraine in 1912, quoted in Bini Adamczacks Beziehungsweise Revolution

[when one asks the avarage peasant farmer in the ukraine about his nationality, he will answer, he is "greek-orthodox"; when one pushes him to say whether he is a russian, a pole, or a ukranian, he will answer, he is a farmer; and when one demands demands to find out which language he speeks, he will say that he speaks "the language from around here". ... i.e. when one wants to find out which state he would like to belong to – whether he would rather be governed by an pan-russian or a specifically ukranian government – one will find out, that in his opinion, all governments are a plague on the land, and it would be best, if the "christian peasantfolk" were left to themselves.]

cathkaesque

aph-japan reblogged

pt1nets

“There was never any mystery about what had happened to Europe’s Jews. That an estimated 6 million of them were put to death during the Second World War was widely accepted within a few months of the war’s end. The handful of survivors, whether in the displaced persons’ camps or in their countries of origin, paid implicit witness to the number of dead. Of 126,000 Jews removed from Austria, 4,500 returned after the war. In the Netherlands, where there had been 140,000 Jews before the war, 110,000 were deported—of whom fewer than 5,000 returned. In France, of 76,000 (mostly foreign-born) Jews who were deported during the years 1940-44, less than 3 percent survived. Further east, the figures were even worse: of Poland’s pre-war population of over 3 million Jews, fully 97.5 percent were exterminated. In Germany itself, in May 1945, there remained just 21,450 of the country’s 600,000 Jews. The returning remnant was not much welcomed. After years of anti-Semitic propaganda, local populations everywhere were not only disposed to blame ‘Jews’ in the abstract for their own suffering but were distinctly sorry to see the return of men and women whose jobs, possessions and apartments they had purloined. In the 4th arrondissement of Paris, on April 19th 1945, hundreds of people demonstrated in protest when a returning Jewish deportee tried to reclaim his (occupied) apartment. Before it was dispersed, the demonstration degenerated into a near-riot, the crowd screaming ‘La France aux français!’ The venerable French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel would doubtless not have resorted to such language. But he was not embarrassed to write a few months later, in the journal Témoignage Chrétien, of the ‘overweening presumption’ of ‘the Jews’ and their urge to ‘take everything over’. Little wonder that the future French government minister Simone Weil could write, of her return from Bergen Belsen: ‘We had the feeling that our lives did not count; and yet there were so very few of us’. In France (as in Belgium) deported resisters who had survived and now returned were treated as heroes: the saviours of their nation’s honour. But Jews, deported not for their politics but on account of their race, could serve no such useful purpose. In any case De Gaulle (like Churchill) was curiously blind to the racial specificity of Hitler’s victims, understanding Nazism in the context of Prussian militarism instead. At Nürnberg, the French prosecutor François de Menthon was uncomfortable with the very concept of ‘crimes against humanity’—he preferred ‘crimes against peace’—and throughout the trial he made no reference to the deportation or murder of Jews.402 Nearly three years later an editorial in Le Monde on January 11th 1948, headed ‘The survivors of the death camps’, managed to speak movingly of ‘280,000 deportees, 25,000 survivors’ without once mentioning the word ‘Jew’. Under legislation passed in 1948, the term ‘déportés’ could be applied only to French citizens or residents deported for political reasons or for resisting the occupier. No distinction was made regarding the camp to which someone was sent or their fate upon arrival. Thus Jewish children who were locked into trains and shipped to Auschwitz for gassing were described in official documents as ‘political deportees’. With mordant if unintended irony these children, most of whom were the sons and daughters of foreign-born Jews and who had been forcibly separated from their parents by French gendarmes, were then commemorated in documents and upon plaques as having ‘died for France’. In Belgium, Catholic parties in the first post-war parliament protested at the idea of any compensation being paid to ‘Jews arrested simply for a racial motive’—most of whom, it was hinted, were probably black-marketeers. Indeed, in Belgium the exclusion of Jews from any post-war benefits was taken a step further. Since 95 percent of the Jews deported from Belgium had been foreign nationals or stateless, it was determined by a post-war law that—unless they had also fought in the organized resistance movements—surviving Jews who ended up in Belgium after the war would not be eligible for any public aid. In October 1944, the Belgian authorities automatically ascribed the nationality ‘German’ to any Jewish survivor in Belgium who could not prove his or her Belgian citizenship. Theoretically this abolished all wartime ‘racial’ distinctions—but it also turned surviving Jews into de facto enemy aliens who could be interned and whose property was seized (and not returned until January 1947). Such rulings had the attendant benefit of marking these Jews for eventual return to Germany, now that they were no longer threatened by Nazi persecution. In the Netherlands, where, according to the Dutch resistance paper Vrij Nederland , the Nazis themselves had been taken aback at the alacrity with which local citizens and civic leaders cooperated in their own humiliation, the handful of returning Jews was decidedly unwelcome. One of them, Rita Koopman, recalled being greeted thus upon her return: ‘Quite a lot of you came back. Just be happy you weren’t here—how we suffered from hunger!’ Indeed, the Dutch did suffer greatly through the ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944-45 and the many houses vacated by deported Jews, in Amsterdam especially, were a valuable source of wood and other supplies. But for all the enthusiastic cooperation of Dutch wartime officialdom in identifying and rounding up the country’s Jews, the post-war authorities—their own conscience clear—felt no obligation to make any particular amends to Jews. Instead, they made a rather self-congratulatory point of refusing to distinguish among Dutch citizens on racial or any other grounds and thus froze the country’s lost Jews into retrospective anonymity and invisibility. In the Fifties, the Catholic prime ministers of the Netherlands even declined to contribute to a proposed international monument at Auschwitz, dismissing it as ‘Communist propaganda’. In eastern Europe there was of course never much question of recognizing Jewish suffering, much less compensating it. In the immediate post-war years Jews in this region were concerned above all with merely staying alive. Witold Kula, a non-Jewish Pole, wrote in August 1946 of a train journey from Łódz to Wrocław where he witnessed the anti-Semitic mocking of a Jewish family: ‘The average Polish intellectual doesn’t realize that a Jew in Poland today cannot drive a car, doesn’t risk a train journey, dare not send his child on a school outing; he cannot go to remote localities, prefers big cities even to medium-sized ones and is ill-advised to take a walk after nightfall. You would have to be a hero to go on living in such an atmosphere after six years of torment’. After Germany’s defeat, many Jews in eastern Europe pursued their wartime survival strategy: hiding their Jewish identity from their colleagues, their neighbours and even their children, blending as best they could into the post-war world and resuming at least the appearance of normal life. And not only in eastern Europe. In France, although new laws forbade the overt anti-Semitic rhetoric of pre-war public life, the legacy of Vichy remained. The taboos of a later generation had not yet taken hold, and behaviour that would in time be frowned upon was still acceptable. As in the Thirties, the Left was not immune. In 1948 the Communist parliamentarian Arthur Ramette drew attention to certain prominent Jewish politicians—Léon Blum, Jules Moch, René Mayer—in order to contrast them with the parliamentarians of his own party: ‘We Communists have only French names’ (a claim as unseemly as it was untrue).”

— Tony Judt in Postwar

aph-japan reblogged

koushirouizumi

Anonymous asked:

I'm unfollowing and blocking you and reporting you. You claim to be a nazi? I don't care if you're jewish. Saying you're mixed "Ashkenazi" is disgusting. I don't know what ashke means, but a nazi in a different language is still a nazi. I see you speaking German on here too. Stop proudly flaunting your fucking German nazi status if you claim to be Jewish.

aranealesbian-deactivated202104 answered:

I…

aph-japan reblogged

koushirouizumi

neil-gaiman

ametsunami asked:

Why is your last name gaiman

neil-gaiman answered:

Well, you asked....

For a long time Jews didn’t have surnames. We were patronymic. If your name was Ruben, and your father’s name had been David, you’d be Ruben ben David. (ben meaning son of, or bat daughter of). Ashkenazi Jews got surnames at the end of the Eighteenth Century, when countries passed laws making the Jews get surnames.

So...at the end of the nineteenth century, in Radomsk and Lodz in Poland, into the 1940s, it was spelled Heiman. The Heimans on this Holocaust memorial, in Miami, were my family. By the end of the War, they were all murdered.

My great-grandfather, and his family, left Poland and moved to Antwerp in about 1911.

Here’s the Antwerp Police records on the family from around 1913. It was being spelled Geiman, then. (It was a throaty “Ch” sort of an H, the kind you’ll find in the scottish Loch or in Chaim, a first name meaning life, which is, I am assured, where the surname comes from, and the Ch became a G.)

Leib Geiman was a courier on the Diamond Bourse.

(Why is my great-grandmother, Eva, not listed? Why were all the children there with my great-grandfather? I have no idea.)

Somewhere around 1914, Leib Geiman came to London. There are different stories in the family about why he left Antwerp, most of them involving a missing diamond.

My great-grandfather Leib (or Leon) spelled his name Geiman for the rest of his life, and that was the name he was buried under in 1951.

My grandmother, Mary, didn’t like the spelling Geiman. She kept fiddling with it. My grandfather was Gaeman on the engagement announcement, then Gaiman on the wedding invitations. I think she went back and forth a bit -- Gaeman was the spelling on my Aunt Helene and Uncle Ronnie's birth listings. And then, before my father was born in 1933, m grandmother changed it again, to Gaiman, and that was the name he was born under, and that was how they left it.

My Uncle Monty became a British Citizen in 1947. His naturalisation information says,

(I don’t know why they weren’t dotting their eyes...).

So that’s why my last name is Gaiman.

punalippulaiva

I was expecting the fact H tended to be translitterated into Г (G) in Russian cyrillic to be relevant (and vice versa); Radomsk and Lodz were, after all, part of the Russian Empire until 1918, and one would presume their paperwork to be written in cyrillic, in which Heiman would be written Геиман, Geiman when moving to Antwerp in 1912.

crimson-vipera

I love that they listed "Mordka" on your uncle's paperwork like it's a proper name and not a nickname (lit. "The Face"). Unless I'm reading too much into the Polish heritage and it's actually a name in a different language?

neil-gaiman

Well, according to

Polish-Jewish Genealogy -- Questions and Answers - Part 2

jewishgen.org

It was a variant of Mordechai

The given names used in the civil registers were the Yiddish secular names used by Jews in the everyday lives, not the Hebrew shem ha-kodesh used for religious purposes. You will therefore typically see "Leib" rather than "Arya", "Hersz" rather than "Cwi", "Wolf" rather than "Zev", "Ber" rather than "Dow", "Chil" rather than "Jechiel", "Szyia" rather than "Jehosze", "Chackiel" rather than "Jechezkiel", "Mordka" rather than "Mordechai", "Icek" rather than "Icchok", "Jankiel" rather than "Jaków", etc. See the presentation on Given Names for more information on religious vs.

Which doesn't also mean it wasn't a sort of nickname. My Uncle Monty was tiny and hunchbacked probably from an illness as a baby. (You can read more about him, not very well disguised, in my graphic novel Mister Punch, drawn by Dave McKean.)