why did anyone bother with making animated movies after Prince of Egypt? did they think they had any chance of ever comparing?

Are you kidding me.

Are you absolutely kidding me.

I don't even know where to start with this one. There are so many mind boggling implications in that first sentence that it would merit a case study. You people are insufferable antisemites and I'm tired of your shit. You can't pretend you're "just 'antizionist', not antisemitic" when YOU'RE the ones bringing up zionism whenever Judaism/Jews are mentioned in any capacity.

You just cannot have it both ways.

If you define zionism as a modern colonial and supremacist ideology – which is the definition you’re clearly going off of when you use the word propaganda – then Prince of Egypt has NOTHING to do with that. It’s retelling a 3,500 year old story that long predates any such modern movement, with no reference to the modern geopolitical landscape – a story that’s the very cornerstone of Jewish scripture and identity and is regarded as true and religiously significant by all other Abrahamic religions, most notably Christianity and Islam.

Calling Prince of Egypt ‘zionist propaganda,’ calling that 3,500 year old Jewish story of hope and deliverance ‘zionist propaganda,’ automatically goes against your own claims on what zionism even is. By your logic, zionism then is nothing more than the acknowledgment of the timeless Jewish connection to and yearning for the land of their ancestors.

Unless you’re actually saying that what you object to is Jewish people having millennia old stories about their ancestral ties to the Levant, or stories about Jews enduring oppression, surviving and reaching freedom. If that’s your problem with the movie, congrats! You’re a full-blown antisemite.

Prince of Egypt is a profoundly human, profoundly uplifting story (and a visual and technical masterpiece, hence my og joke post). You have poisoned your mind if you think otherwise, @autistic-ben-tennyson.

I found this reblog on their blog

It seems like Ben10 is just parroting this person's opinion and has no ability to think for themselves

Actually @emperorsfoot I'm very glad this got brought up because I've been looking for an excuse for years to pick apart Lindsay Ellis' tweet. I *know* that what she's saying is not a direct criticism of the movie but of the movie's fans, but something about it has been nagging me for so long you don't even know. There's an element of the story that seems to fly right over people's head and that I never see brought up in any discussion of PoE: Rameses is the one who calls for the tenth plague.

Now, I will not make ANY commentary on the biblical text and its various readings or implications. Scripture is far too important for me to dare pick it apart and give my two cents in this context and on this platform, so what follow is PURELY a commentary on the movie itself:

Rameses is the one who explicitly, textually condemns the firstborns to death in PoE. It's not a matter of interpretation, it's a fact of the movie.

This line here is the Lord's line in the biblical text. Giving it to Rameses very deliberately gives him responsibility over destiny. It's also followed by this (forgive the pisspoor gif quality)

This is as close to a freaking DIAGRAM as you're gonna get.

Rameses is pointing his finger, copying Seti's mural -> Seti's finger points to the innocent children -> the innocent children are put to death -> Rameses' son is right under them, the literal next in line.

Rameses, by imitating his father in ordering the death of innocents, puts a curse on the innocents among his people.

As a reminder, one of Rameses' core problems is that he is convinced being Pharaoh makes him capable of dictating the terms of reality ("you will be what I say you are" "if I say day is night it will be written" "it shall be as I say") - and in this particular case, he gets his wish. He says "there shall be a great cry in all of Egypt" and all of Egypt screams. That's also why the Hebrews' safety has to be bought with the blood of a lamb this time around, when they were safe for the previous plagues without condition: Pharaoh has the power of life and death on his tongue (something Moses directly acknowledges when Aaron is despairing), and a judgment so powerful has been unleashed that it cannot be escaped by anyone unless a death is substituted for a death.

The message of (that part of) the movie is not and has never been "massacring children is okay sometimes," rather it's the cosmic law: "death begets death." If you build on blood or ask for it, you WILL reap blood.

(That's why the first plague is the Nile turning to blood, because it's returning the blood of the Hebrew babies. It's not subtle either, the visual language is very clear.)

And finally, here's how Moses reacts to Rameses' curse and the devastation that follows.

It's tragic, heartwrenching. It's mourned more deeply than anything else in the movie.

And it's entirely Rameses' fault for passing the sentence.

Just saw a post that was basically "Hey off of the internet people usually aren't so crazy antisemitic and most of my day to day interactions as a visible Jew are normal, everything is gonna be ok" and I'm making a new post to not derail, but...

I'm super glad, obviously, that this is the case for many of you. But I do think we should be ringing the alarm bells. Because while you enjoy your grocery trips and post office in relative peace (as you ought to), here is a VERY incomplete list of things I have dealt with in the last 11 months.

-assaulted on my way to class, followed, spit on repeatedly (magen David necklace)

-professor took me outside of class and told me I needed to denounce my Judaism (I mentioned in passing my dad's family in an anthropology class)

-same professor refused to accept my final paper for reasons that did not match up with paper, email full of dogwhistles

-same professor told everyone to attend the protests and "teach those zionists to know their place" she is a Black Latina young professor. Yep.

-another professor straight up refused to accept any assignments that mentioned Jewishness (they were assignments about our families). Gave a student who submitted nothing except a picture of a Palestinian flag full marks. Failed me. I am an all As student, btw. Forced to drop.

-the chair of the anthropology department threw my complaints wabout said professors away without due process. His social media is full of blood libel.

-had to miss my finals as I could not physically get to them due to the protests

-followed and harassed in stores

-synagogue was vandalized multiple times

-called a kike while things were thrown at me

-protestors stood outside of my apartment patio with final solution signs

-new apartment, away from campus: friends of roommates harassed me constantly, to the point I could not use common spaces. Roommates told me that's his right because it's his "political view." He didn't even live there.

-new roommate moved in, less than 48 hours before she attempts to stab me, after learning I eat kosher style. "...kosher? kosher?! FUCK YOU" stab stab, etc. Bitch that was my good knife.

-the other roommates tell me to gtfo of the home I'm renting, keeping my rent ("you people can afford to lose money") and destroy a good portion of my belongings while cursing to me random nonsense about Israel. The police took 25 minutes to get there. We live in the middle of the city.

-fun fact: I had never mentioned my political stance to these people and it's not on my face-out social media (very bare bones profiles)

-been disbelieved by everyone I told this to including the police, my school, the leasing company, and my now ex best friend of 7 years

-cursed at in a store when I asked if there was a kosher section

-told nobody likes Jews because we bring down the vibe and have a victim complex. My knuckles are healing just fine after that, btw, thank you for asking! She is not.

I don't know how to request the 7th off from my school without basically incriminating myself with a threat of violence. There is no world where I just sit there when a classmate says "happy October 7th."

Hope this helps.

This is the situation. When you go out you will be encountering people who hold antisemitic prejudice and hatred. You will also encounter people who don’t, and maybe even some allies. But most of the time all of these people are completely indistinguishable from each other unless you talk to them. If you choose to expose your Jewishness in some way (and some people don’t have a choice because of religious cultures/traditions/convictions/looks) you can hope that you will come across the hateful people who are too afraid to something about it. But one day you wont. Depending where you live, maybe every single day you won’t.

Every Jewish conspiracy theory is so much cooler than the reality.

"You've got space lasers" "You've got an underground tunnel system in NYC" no I fucking don't I've got religious trauma and an unhealthy fixation on pickled foods.

No they fucking didn't, they arrested 10 guys for digging one tunnel between one building into another literally adjacent to it.

Its funny as shit, I get it, but this is literally the point of my post. The difference between "a few guys dug one 60 foot tunnel into an adjacent building to win a property dispute" and "The Jews have a series of elaborate tunnel systems under NYC" is pretty fucking huge. Do you understand? Do you understand how those two sentences could be construed completely differently? And how the latter could be used by the worst people in the world to justify their world view to themselves and others?

I promise I understand how funny this situation is, I truly wish I could just point and laugh, but if I hear one more person say "intricate tunnel system" instead "singular tunnel built by a dozen kids huffing lethal doses on propaganda" Im gonna flip my fucking lid.

This is some Chelm behavior, and nothing more sinister or elaborate than that.

This is so important.

Because I want to laugh about the Secret Jew Tunnel (singular). I want to tell jokes about it, because the fact that a bunch of Yeshiva bachers (basically frat boys in black hats) got arrested for illegal renovations is not even the most absurd part of the story.

But the antisemites have taken this and run with it, and I am genuinely worried that this 60 foot tunnel dug by a bunch of 20 year olds with insufficient supervision will be used as an excuse for a pogrom.

We're already seeing the literal blood libels.

This is what it means to be Jewish. We want to laugh at the silly conspiracy theories, and at the absurd things that people sometimes get up to.

And we do laugh, because we have a long history of laughing through the pain.

But we also know that we might very well be murdered over this.

Hello friends, there's a dogwhistle I've seen used a couple times on tumblr that I want to discuss.

Fellow neurodivergents especially, please listen-- towards the end of this post I describe how some in our community have been using it without knowing what it means.

A fairly common antisemitic dogwhistle used amongst alt-right circles on the internet is being a "noticer," "noticing patterns," "pattern noticer," etc. I've seen this from a couple Tumblr blogs I follow reblogging memes and such that use this term but don't provide any context about what sorts of "things" they may be noticing.

Here's the meme that I saw a blog I'm following reblog last night.

Seems pretty harmless, right? It's a meme with a cute cat.

In alt-right circles, what they are referring to "noticing" is the conspiracy theory that Jews control the world/"noticing" evidence of an imagined globalist (read: Jewish) world order/etc. If you see a meme that uses terms like "noticing patterns" that doesn't elaborate what those supposed patterns are-- just leaves you to fill in the blank yourself-- take a look at the types of things OP might be posting. The alt-right has an idea that it's forbidden to talk about who might be behind the "conspiracies" they talk about (again, the target is frequently Jewish people) so lack of context is often a red flag.

I sent the blog who reblogged this an ask informing them that the meme was a dogwhistle. If you see someone reblog something like this, check what they've been posting. If this seems like an isolated incident, the person probably reblogged it not knowing what the term actually meant. That's why dogwhistles are so effective-- to the average person they look harmless if you don't know what to watch out for!

Let's take a look at how alt-righters use this term.

Here's an alt-right definition of it from Urban Dictionary.

Oh boy, this one gets a bigotry bingo for all the dogwhistles used here. If I miss any, feel free to comment. Here are the ones I found:

-Noseticing: Noticing plus nose, based on the stereotype for Jewish people to have large noses.

-"those who cannot be named"/skirting around saying Jew: again the idea that it's forbidden to talk about who they think is behind their conspiracy theories.

-"world events and agendas": idea that Jewish people have a Globalist agenda etc etc

-Degeneracy: Nazi term to describe the behaviors/people they find undesirable.

-Early life: refers to the section in a person's Wikipedia page. If a person was brought up Jewish, it'll usually say so there.

-Oy vey: a Jewish exclamation of exasperation that Nazis have unfortunately co-opted when talking about Jewish people.

Here's probably the most obviously antisemitic meme I found.

The title and first bullet point include the "noticer" term. This meme also talks about a "group" who controls wealth. Who might the poster be referring to here?

Here's a Twitter account with many similar alt-right terms. Explicitly identifies as a Nazi and ethno-nationalist, etc etc.

A couple other pages. I clicked on them to see if I could find any more examples but the first seemed pretty blank and the second... Well, I don't have a twitter so I couldn't view.

Let's unpack these a little. The first one has "13 outta 52," a statistic used among white supremacists to depict Black people (especially African-Americans) as "savage": 13 referring to the percentage of America that is Black and 52 referring to the alleged percentage of murders in the U.S. that are committed by Black people. "109 countries" refers to the idea that Jewish people have been expelled from 109 countries during history. (Which isn't entirely true. Some "countries" in this count are actually cities, regions, etc.) Some white supremacists may use the number 110 instead to suggest that it should happen again.

The second one has a blurb alleging a global sterilization effort and concerns of fertility. This is likely in connection to pro-natalism for white people. If Nazis want a so-called "Aryan nation," they're going to want white people to populate it, and so they encourage white people to have babies for their cause. Nazi Germany employed this tactic as well, even awarding "Aryan" German women who had four or more children for their contributions to the Nazi cause.

The reason why I'm emphasizing that context matters is that some neurodivergent people have seen this and co-opted it into neurodivergent circles. As a person who is Jewish and autistic, this is pretty alarming to me. I'll show a couple examples from Tumblr:

And

I've left out the URLs of the OPs because I want to give the benefit of the doubt-- they both explicitly refer to being a "pattern noticer" in terms of neurodivergence. And it's easy to see why introducing this term to ND folks would be an easy way to get a dogwhistle passed off as harmless! Since autistic people often have analytical minds, we often make connections that others might not be able to see. But unfortunately, using terms like this only makes it much easier for antisemites to fly under the radar.

Stay safe and let's keep Tumblr free of this shit.

Because I'm only seeing other Jews posting about this, non-Jews I need you to be aware that for the past month or two there has been a wave of bomb threats and swattings at synagogues all across the US. They usually do it when services are being livestreamed. I haven't seen a single non-Jew talking about this. High holidays are coming up in a few weeks, which is when most attacks happen against our communities. We're worried, and we need people to know what's happening to us.

None of the major news outlets are running it. I had to Google it. Everyone is so distracted by the rest of the nation’s fuckery right now.

https://www.jta.org/2023/08/14/united-states/2-synagogues-evacuated-during-livestreamed-shabbat-services-as-wave-of-bomb-threats-enters-4th-week

https://forward.com/news/557648/bomb-threats-and-swatting-campaign-hits-dozens-of-synagogues/?amp=1

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/fullerton-synagogue-evacuated-during-sabbath-service-due-to-bomb-threat/3204919/?amp=1

The Book of Names lists each person murdered at Auschwitz

#and you have to remember how many names are most likely missing#from rushed trains and burned lists#from rushed transports and people who died on the death marchs#what about the names from people who died after their liberation#and then…#this is only Auschwitz#this was the biggest camp yes#but just one of many#and then remember sobibor and belsec#and try not to feel sick

This is why we punch Nazis. This is why this vile ideology must be stamped out viciously every time it tries to come out of its hole.

Never. Again.

And these are just their names, places of birth, and places of death. Doesn’t even contain the lives and loves and joys and fears and everything else each person’s universe was that they cut down.

When I was in university, every Holocaust remembrance day the local Hillel would offer sign ups for people who wanted to come read the names aloud in the middle of campus for ten minutes, keeping the reading going for 24 hours. I went and did a reading once, but I know people who read for hours when they didn’t get enough sign-ups. Antisemitism is higher in the US this year than it has been in a long time. Please, never again.

i feel sick. look how big the pages are, how many names on each page. look how many pages there are. we survived and continued to thrive, but they gave it their best shot at exterminating us. how many lives never made the census? how many died along the way, how many unnamed infants were torn from their mothers? how many died of sickness and the horrific living conditions? how many children watched their parents and grandparents die? how many parents watched their children waste away?

never fucking again.

This is ventier than what I usually post but I'm just sooo irritated.

I was trying to explain how because I'm Jewish, I'm not white, and how that is directly because nazis (and other antisemites) view Jews as a separate race. They don't view me as such and want me dead because of it. And this one person had the full on audacity to go "yeah but treating being Jewish like it's a separate race is antisemitic". YEAH NO SHIT, I WONDER WHY THAT DIDNT STOP THE NAZIS FROM COMMITTING GENOCIDE AGAINST MY PEOPLE FOR BEING A DIFFERENT RACE!

This person was poc too, and could totally understand why someone who is mixed or is white passing has situational privileges but still experiences racism because they're not actually white, but suddenly not why that applies to me because I'm Ashkenazim and pale? My skin color doesn't make me immune to racialized antisemitism, especially since I'm *actively and visibly Jewish*. An antisemite isn't going to look at me and go, "Oh pale skin, must be white! Time to move to the next person." They're going to see my kippah and Magen David and go "Oh another kike to kill."

This idea that simply *identifying as non-white* is an attempt to get out of privilege is really goddamn annoying and it burns me up when other Jews do it. It basically posits that "you're too racist to be non-white" is a legitimate line of thought, or that non-whiteness can be withheld until a group sufficiently atones, and that's a slippery slope to say the least.

Not to mention it invalidates the experience of the millions of Ashkenazim who are visibly Mediterranean and are *treated like it*. The idea of "the racism you experienced wasn't really racism because they thought you were something you weren't, now apologize for being privileged" smacks of gaslighting to me.

Honestly I’m really tired of non Jews playing Jewish characters. We’ve been shown again and again that we aren’t worthy of telling or acting out our own stories. Magneto has never been played by a Jew. He’s arguably the most important for a Jew to play as his character is an actual holocaust survivor. Moon knight who’s father is a Rabbi is also not played by a Jew. Not to mention that they took away Marc’s father being a rabbi and instead gave him an abusive Jewish mother which is all kinds of antisemitic.

We’ve even seen that actual historical Jews aren’t good enough for actual Jewish actors to play those people. Adam Driver cast as Flip in Blackkklansman and now Bradley Cooper directing and staring in a film about Leonard Bernstein. Also Cooper is not just starting in it but using a prosthetic nose to play Bernstein which fucking wow.

This isn’t even getting into the misogynistic side of the antisemitism in that Jewish women are often played by non Jewish actresses. Giving the idea that Jewish women are not desirable or pretty enough for movies.

random civilians are not responsible for the crimes of their government, and it is not a “guilty until proven innocent” thing

and this applies to everyone

really astonishing but unsurprising how people are taking issue with this post

The last two reblogs here by @tributary​ are screencaps of tags. The first (edited to remove hashtags) says:

and the second (similarly edited) says:

[Images description: A Twitter thread by Rabbi Mike Rothbaum (@ Rav_Mike) that says the following:

1) “Our local schools are plagued by antisemitism. There’s a speaker engaged by a local shul ostensibly to discuss antisemitism. ¾ of the talk is about defending Israel. My students aren’t targeted for Zionism. They’re targeted for being Jews. They need safety, not talking points.

2) There’s nothing here for my students who see swastikas in school. There’s nothing here for the kid who was told by a classmate that he’d buy him an “Easy bake oven” for Chanukah. There’s nothing here for the kid who had money thrown at them and told “pick it up you f***ing Jew.

3) You’re entitled to defend the actions of the Israeli government. You’re not entitled to hijack the topic of antisemitism to do so. It’s an abdication of our responsibility to support and defend our kids who deal with Jew-hatred every day. It’s a shonde.

4) The state of Israel has an army and a professional staff of PR professionals to defend it. All my students have are fellow Jews and our allies. Don’t abandon them.

5) After a desultory reference to Charlottesville, the speaker decried “Black Lives Matter,” Stephen Jackson, and Puff Daddy. Puff Daddy didn’t tell his Instagram followers to “like and subscribe to kill one Jew.” That was a white kid my students go to school with. [This tweet has a screenshot of an Instagram live with chat messages. The last message is from michael_13_0 and it’s pinned. It says “Like and subscribe to kill one jew”.]

6) Thing is, I KNOW this stuff is heavily funded by Jewish legacy orgs. And it really is the last thing we need to spend our Jewish dollars on. There’s so much we could be doing to support Jewish learning, students, families, elders, queer folks, Jews of Color. Israel PR ain’t it.

7) The last straw was when the speaker said we should be protecting Israel-advocating students on campus, not “counting swastikas in Idaho.“ Counting swastikas is EXACTLY what we should be doing. Jews live in Idaho – and Middlesex county – and we need to love and protect them.”

end ID]

Hello. This is my post. Goyim can touch this, because it’s not only Jews that do this. The cooptitation of antisemitism discourse by pro Israel talking points is something that has been adopted into the discourse of international politics.

This is true but I won’t comment

Yea some Jews in America can certainly benefit from white privilege because of how white supremacy operates in the USA. Those benefits don’t give white-passing Jews equal (or, as some people absurdly claim) more privilege than white people—Jews as a whole are still excluded from whiteness & actively harmed by white supremacy based on ethnic/racial anti-Semitism.

Conditional white privilege is afforded to white-passing Jews in a temporal way—as in, if you aren’t too overt about your Jewishness in some social settings, you will be afforded white privilege; however, it can change literally according to the whims of non-Jewish white people, and there’s this consistent point of view that even if the non-Jewish white people let the Jews ‘be’ one of them them temporarily, it’s shaky and you’re expected to deal with the violence, anti-Semitism, and overall any sort of oppressive behavior. If you don’t, white-passing or not, you will be non-white. It’s according to behavior, setting, ‘acting Jewish,’ assimilation of all kinds, etc.

This is me speaking from a point of view of a Jewish family that ranges from white-passing Jews to black Jews. I have seen how conditional white privilege works with Jews, and while it’s much better than how my black Jewish relatives are treated, it doesn’t mean that white-passing Jews get to be automatically aligned with white supremacy and shielded from harm—I still have white-passing cousins who get called Khazarian impostors who are invading the white race (for the record, my white-passing cousins aren’t European, they are West Asian), are called kikes on the regular, and are the targets of violence.

Conditional white privilege for Jews in America is also highly, highly location based.  In New York City, someone with stereotypically “Jewish,” often Ashkenazi features will read as white.  In backwoods Virginia?  Not so much.  I read as white if I do my makeup the right way and straighten my hair, and I don’t say anything that makes my Jewishness explicit.  As soon as I do so, my reception here in the South changes — I go from educated, articulate woman to A Jew.  And that is open season.  It means I get asked if my hair hides my horns.  It means I get asked if I have a trust fund, or if I got in college/grad school because my parents are donors.  (My parents are actually working class, thanks.  Not all Sephardim got here early and prospered.  Some of us are still dealing with language barriers and being alienated from the dominant Ashkenazi culture that surrounds American Judaism.)  I had students in the Midwest come up to me after class and tell me I was the first Jew they’d ever seen and I “didn’t look like” what they thought Jews looked like, because I didn’t have “you know, the big nose.”  I’ve had people throw pennies at me.  I got the crap beat out of me repeatedly in school because Jews were running the world.  I’ve had people track down my information on the internet to send me death threats because Hitler should’ve finished the job.  That is not white privilege.

Antisemitism is really complex, but the thing that is critical to remember is that it grew out of the emergent “science” of racism in the 18th and 19th centuries.  As white, European men set out to sort the world into tidy taxonomies, people were also sorted.  And Jews, as Europe’s long-standing, much maligned social Other, were understood to be something else.  Not white.  Not Aryan.  Not like Western European Christians.  And in the moment when race developed, the sense that Jews could never shake their Jewishness, that it was something in their blood, and conversion to Christianity couldn’t fix it, that was when earlier, religious anti-Judaism turned into modern antisemitism.  Antisemitism is wholly race and ethnicity based.  And while it is mediated by culture in the same way that many forms of racism are, given distinct forms in distinct places and times, it is based on the idea that Jews are biologically “something other,” in the same way that Asians are “something other.” 

Jews in the US have only taken on the status of “model minorities” tending into conditional white privilege since the Holocaust.  So whenever you want to talk about Jews being white, remember this: it took the attempted genocide of the Jewish population of Europe to give American Jews the ability to not be subjected to quotas in housing, university slots, and to be accepted into American social institutions — if only grudgingly.  America was still dealing with accusations of “blood libel” — in which Jews are accused of murdering Christian children to use their blood in festival food, primarily Passover matzah — in the 1920s.  This is not the distant past.  This is within living memory.  But with the Holocaust showing the full end game of antisemitism, Americans recoiled and tried to act as if they weren’t anything like Nazis and American Jews were always flourishing here. 

White America pointed to the way assimilated American Jews had prospered and decided that Jews were doing just fine — and then turned our apparent prosperity into a stick to beat other minority groups with.  (This is not dissimilar to how the Irish became white, but made complex by the fact that Jews are still, to use a legal sense, a distinct, insular minority.)  In order to obtain that conditional whiteness and thereby prosperity and access offered by white America, Jews must assimilate.  They must stop observing Judaism in traditional ways and act more like their Christian neighbours.  (This is not unlike how German Jews learned to prosper in the 19th century.  But given Germany’s history, it is safe to say that trading assimilation for begrudging acceptance is the devil’s bargain.)

What I really want to point out is this: Jewish identity in America is intersectional.  In some cases, we benefit from white privilege, or we may be white-passing.  However, we are oppressed by Christian privilege, often violently.  (FBI hate crime statistics back this up.)  It does not matter how observant or not Jews are; we are lumped in a group of “not Christian,” and as a consequence, we are forced to adhere to Christian social scripts, Christian calendars, Christian values if we are to interact with American society at large.  (And when we don’t, we’re accused of being clannish or exhibiting cult-like behaviour.)  We are expected to smile and give approval to Christians appropriating our culture, rituals, language, and holidays.  We are lumped in as an afterthought as the imaginary American “Judeo-Christian” heritage.  We are Other, tolerated, objectified, or spoken over on a religious axis.  When Jews do not have white/white-passing privilege, we then suffer from more oppression when racial and religious oppression fall down on us.  Which makes this complex, and often leads to this tension where those who are not part of the Jewish community see the image of primarily New York Jews, accepted as part of the city’s fabric, and project that Judaism is only oppressed on a religious axis, if it is oppressed at all.  But when you are part of the community and have a legacy of oppression, suffering, forced conversion, death marches, assaults, and microaggressions, both for your religious beliefs and for how Jewish or not you look, how white or not you are perceived to be, it is immediately and viscerally apparent how intersectional, conditional, and fraught Jewish identity is in the United States.

We are a contested people, constantly defined by those outside of our communities and expected to accept their definitions in order to access the privilege they offer in return for our docile agreement.  We are often model minorities, held up as what other oppressed groups should be like, obscuring our struggles right now for the Holocaust, the one white Americans feel comfortable talking about, talking over, appropriating and fetishizing.  So to say that Jews are a religious group, not a category of race or ethnicity, that serves to obscure the intersectionality of our existence in America, and it only contributes to the idea that Jews must be one thing and one thing only in order to be appropriately Jewish in the US — pale skinned, Eastern European, not too religious, and urban.  But for the rest of us, out in the parts of the States where none of those things save us from violence, that definition from other oppressed folks does far, far more harm than good.

This is all very true and honestly the idea that Jews ever “pass” as white is more often used against us by goyim to silence us or artificially align us with whiteness, and “privilege” rhetoric is similarly unhelpful. If you frame the conversation as “in what contexts, if any, are particular Jews (and which Jews?) able to access white structures of power?” you’ll not only paint a more accurate picture, but also recognize just how rare, contingent, and precarious it is for any Jew to wield whiteness.

And I’m not saying that all Jews who access whiteness in certain contexts and in certain spaces are self-conscious about it, but many of us are extremely aware of when we do, because our access to whiteness is predicated upon (based in) our distance from Jews and Jewishness as a series of ethnic identifiers.

So yeah all of the above is true and I encourage people to read the whole post because there’s lots of excellent examples and discussions of antisemitism as an ethnic-based structure of violence rooted in white supremacy.

“Let us put it generally: if a regime is immoral, its citizens are free from all obligations to it.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago.

[Pictured: Captain Pia Klemp sitting in a chair beside her controls.

@VivianAngrisani on Twitter wrote on 6/8/2019: “Pia Klemp, a German biologist & boat captain faces 20 yrs in prison for rescuing 1,000+ migrants at risk of drowning whilst crossing the Mediterranean. Seeking asylum is a human right. Only 1 in 100 sea captains are female. This woman is a humanitarian, not a criminal. #FreePia”

@Galactic_Rabbit quote-tweeted on 6/10/2019 and wrote: “Thinking about all those videos of people honored in their old age for hiding/protecting Jewish people.”]

To all the people commenting that she’s an accessory to “illegal immigration,” note that seeking asylum is a human right. Countries which refuse asylum are in violation of the Geneva Convention. They get away with this and propagandize complacency towards the victims by using bureaucracy to complicate immigration proceedings. During times of genocide, this is tantamount to hearing a would-be murder victim knocking on your door and locking the deadbolt.

People who risk dying getting smuggled across borders do so out of sheer desperation because the situation they’re leaving is worse. Finally, you are missing the entire point: violation of the law is warranted when the laws violate human rights and criminalize existence. Laws which call immigrants “illegal” are tools of a systemic negligence designed to condemn those who need legal protection the most.

Oh and here’s the petition to #FreePia.

Please Stop Reblogging Antisemitic Memes!

Unless you’re Jewish you have absolutely no business sharing the the “Most People Rejected His Message” meme. Period.

This includes not reblogging the meme when a Jewish person posts it. If we’re posting it we’re acknowledging and lampooning the antisemitism in the cartoon, even if our post isn’t directly referencing antisemitism in our commentary. That’s not something you can do.

I shouldn’t have to explain how this meme is antisemitic. The Jewish caricatures that are shown shouting “SHUT UP” to Jesus are, to put it lightly, unsubtly antisemitic. You shouldn’t need to have this pointed out to you.

That isn’t by accident.

This comic is designed to engender feelings of hatred towards Jewish people. Its author, Jack Chick, was a fervent antisemite who believed that Jews killed Jesus as part of an evil conspiracy that continues to this very day. This comic is hate speech from beginning to end.

You have no right to turn anti-Jewish violence into a joke.

Copy of the offensive material under the cut in case anyone doesn’t know what I’m talking about:

Keep reading

Goyim/non-Jewish people should reblog this