I found this from like 4 years ago and boy oh boy

Let's just put aside the fact that this was a premeditated, coordinated attack for a few seconds and focus on the absolutely insane talking points used to justify the pogrom in Amsterdam:

- Some Israeli fans tore down a Palestinian flag

- Some Israeli fans yelled anti Arab slurs

- Some Israeli fans fought with a taxi driver

This in their minds justifies chasing down any Israeli they see, throw them onto train tracks and into canals in freezing temperatures, demand to see passports, steal and take photos of said passports, viciously beat them even as the victims plead for mercy, try to kidnap them by shoving them into their cars, coordinate with the violent mob by using your taxi to transport Israelis and hand them over to their attackers, stab and try to murder them.

I would ask if they can see just from reading the above how batshit insane with hatred they are, but I know it's pointless. They got a taste of abusing and killing jews being normal again and they've been drunk on it ever since. Just like they have over and over and over again over the course of history. This is what they've always done. In every generation.

Judaism and Life

I’m thinking about one of the rallying cries of the Jewish people. Our slogan, if you will. We speak it, we shout it, we sing it: עם ישראל חי. Am Yisrael chai. The people of Israel live.

It says a lot, I think, that this of all phrases is among our defining anthems. Out of all the possibilities, this is our motto, our catchphrase, our affirmation: a simple, defiant declaration of our own continued existence against the odds.

I’m also thinking of our traditional exclamation of celebration. The classic, quintessential, go-to Jewish toast, so characteristic as to have reached popular culture through a Broadway musical: לחיים. L’chaim. To life.

One of our primary “good luck” symbols, found on medallions and amulets: the single word, חי. Chai. Life. Our “lucky number” is 18, the number with the gematria value of life. We give momentary gifts and make donations in multiples of 18: giving chai, giving life.

It’s pretty straightforward, really. We just want to live. As people, as Jews, as a community.

I’m thinking about how many ways our culture and traditions repeatedly highlight the centrality of life — both the preservation of individual lives, and the continuation of our collective life. Thinking how terrifyingly often both categories of life fall under threat. And how we still keep going.

מיר וועלן זיי איבערלעבן. Mir veln zey iberlebn. We will outlive them, sung in a field with soldiers and no escape, worst come to worst but singing out defiance anyway.

… and they didn’t survive, those singers, physically they did not outlive their attackers, and too many others didn’t either. But they were still right: we, we as a collective, we did outlive. Barely, and with indescribable and lasting loss… but we did. We’re still here. Existent. Alive. Affirming that and hanging on for dear life, as individual people and as a people.

Am Yisrael chai. Mir veln zey iberlebn. L’chaim.

not to alarm anyone but is anybody else worried about how everybody is fucking stupid

This wave of people joining “creators for Palestine” has me really frustrated.

I have no issue with supporting the right to safety and freedom for the people of Palestine and I have no issue with wanting to help but I DO have an issue with the organizations that they are choosing to support.

One of the main organizations is the UNRWA, a confirmed Hamas puppet. The UNRWA is actively stealing aid from civilians, and members were actively a part of the October 7th massacre and held hostages in their homes. Why would you want to send them money?!?!?

The amount of misinformation and disinformation that is being spread at the moment is absolutely appalling. Israel isn’t “not sending enough aid”, Hamas is attacking humanitarian aid crossings and stealing the aid that they do let in.

In many of the cases of these creators, I do believe that they have only the best intentions but they are choosing to support a terror organization rather than actually helping the people they claim to care about.

There are also so many people denying the very legitimate REASONS that Israel is doing what they’re doing. I’m not saying I support everything they are doing but I understand why they’re doing it. If you want safety and freedom for the Palestinian people, you have to support the destruction of Hamas. There will be no peace until they are gone. It’s really a simple matter when you strip it down to the basics (not the conflict itself, that’s very complicated, but the reality of the current situation regarding any hope for peace).

Anyway… I now have to decide if I’m going to unfollow all of these creators whose work otherwise brings me joy. They are contributing to the false narrative and waving a literal imperial flag under the guise of “indigenous liberation” (don’t even get me started on the stupid fucking watermelons…)

If anyone has any advice about how to deal with this (tips on separating the content from the creator perhaps) or people who ARE doing good work and are actually helping the situation, please let me know.

This post is most specifically about SMOSH but it applies to a lot of creators. I’m so tired, and I can’t even begin to imagine how the Jewish people in those circles are feeling. People have been calling for Noah Grossman to be fired for being Jewish a zionist for months now, this cannot be helping that situation. I want him to know that the people with critical thinking skills and fucking basic understanding of the complicated history and current situation in the Middle East support him.

I hope that you and every other Zionist in these spaces feel deeply uncomfortable for the rest of your lives. It’s literally the least you deserve <3

Wow… this post is more than a month old, why are you saying this now????

Also tell me you didn’t read the post without telling me you didn’t read the post. You clearly have a very twisted definition of Zionism.

@spot-the-antisemitism @not-antisemitic-receipts

One thing I've been struggling with on a personal ethical level is dealing with the knowledge that the "Antizionist" movement on the Left is not an organic, grassroots ideology. We literally have recordings of the meetings by Hamas members from the 1990s where they laid out this exact setup: They would attempt to propagandize to the American and Western Left their specific narrative that was designed to ensnare Leftists by appealing to their ideologies and shortcircuit critical thinking. And it's not a coincidence that Al Jazeera, the Qatari propaganda outfit, was founded three years after that meeting, as Qatar is deeply involved in helping push this narrative on US universities. Add to the Iranian regime's previous experience at exactly this--using Leftists as useful idiots during the Iranian Revolution--and you can see the state-funded media and educational apparatus designed to achieve this exact result.

So I'm struggling with how much blame, how much personal culpability, there can be for people like, for example, Greta Thunberg, or other Gen-Z "antizionists", who have been deliberately and intentionally mousetrapped into cheering for a literal mass murderer and rapist in Sinwar. Because an enormous amount of money and effort went into trapping them with this belief system.

But on the other hand, they're actively abandoning their previously-claimed principles en masse--as feminists, as minority group supporters, as progressives--in order to embrace the "Antizionist" belief system.

So it's a struggle for me in debating how much blame they deserve individually, when they've been ensnared systematically, but their individual choices are still reprehensible.

I feel like no matter how much propaganda and entrapment you experience there is still a level of personal responsibility that cannot be denied.

ya being kafkaesque isn’t about turning into a bug it’s about how if you turned into a bug your boss would still be like “ok but we’re short staffed can u still come in”

while i understand that this is meant to be a joke about hellish capitalism, again, we cannot erase an important dimension to his work: franz kafka was a jew. he and his families were jews during a time period where traditional, religiously-based jew hatred was being replaced with a new pseudoscientific belief that jews were to be hated and oppressed because they were a subhuman race. this transition to race-based hatred of jews meant that even assimilated jews- who considered themselves citizens of states before they were ever jews- were now being irrationally targeted and hunted.

the term “anti-Semitism” was created specifically to name this new racial hatred of Jews. it was coined in 1879- 4 years before Kafka was born. 

in “the metamorphosis”, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a "monstrous vermin". in kafka’s real world, jews woke up one morning, in their country that they were told was now enlightened and accepting of all people, and found out that they were now considered “monstrous vermin”. and then 6 million jews of his generation were exterminated. 

i am giving the simplest analysis to this right now, but we need to understand that you cannot just blanketly universalize his work. you cannot remove the context of kafka’s jewishness or that he lived at a time when antisemitism became fervently racial. yes, discuss how his work comments on capitalism, society, etc. but to only use ONLY these lenses and to ONLY universalize his work is dishonest, whitewashes his work and life, and further exhibits how little non-jews know or care about the jewish history and the how antisemitism has impacted jews for over 2000 years.

It was never even brought up in my English class when we read “The Metamorphosis” that he was Jewish. That the story isn’t just about capitalism or self image or any of the other things people like to say it’s about. It’s about the experience of a Jew who wakes up one day and is no longer viewed as a human being.

“…dead Jews are only worth discussing if they are part of something bigger, something more. Some other people might go to Holocaust museums to feel sad, and then to feel proud of themselves for feeling sad. They will have learned something important, discovered a fancy metaphor for the limits of Western civilization. The problem is that for us, dead Jews aren’t a metaphor, but rather actual people we do not want our children to become.”

“The audio guide humbly speculates about who these people might have been: “She might have been a housewife or a factory worker or a musician …” The idea isn’t subtle: This woman could be you. But to make her you, we have to deny that she was actually herself. These musings turn people into metaphors, and it slowly becomes clear to me that this is the goal. Despite doing absolutely everything right, this exhibition is not that different from “Human Bodies,” full of dead people pressed into service to teach us something.

“At the end of the show, onscreen survivors talk in a loop about how people need to love one another. While listening to this, it occurs to me that I have never read survivor literature in Yiddish—the language spoken by 80 percent of victims—suggesting this idea. In Yiddish, speaking only to other Jews, survivors talk about their murdered families, about their destroyed centuries-old communities, about Jewish national independence, about Jewish history, about self-defense, and on rare occasions, about vengeance. Love rarely comes up; why would it? But it comes up here, in this for-profit exhibition. Here is the ultimate message, the final solution.

“That the Holocaust drives home the importance of love is an idea, like the idea that Holocaust education prevents anti-Semitism, that seems entirely unobjectionable. It is entirely objectionable. The Holocaust didn’t happen because of a lack of love. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented—have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandedness to the world—the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility.

“Then as now, Jews were cast in the role of civilization’s nagging mothers, loathed in life and loved only once they are safely dead. In the years since I walked through Auschwitz at 15, I have become a nagging mother. And I find myself furious, being lectured by this exhibition about love—as if the murder of millions of people was actually a morality play, a bumper sticker, a metaphor. I do not want my children to be someone else’s metaphor. (Of course, they already are.)”

- Dara Horn

I just read this beautifully written article from 5 years ago and I feel like I’m about to cry.

Everyone should read this, it explains exactly why these exhibits and tv specials and brief history lessons and school assemblies feel so hollow. Why there is a fundamental difference between the way Jews understand the Holocaust and the way everyone else does.

--Jews on this site, every fucking day.

Petition to bring back the boop function next year for the ides of March where instead of a paw on the screen it’s a little knife that Caesar gets stabbed with

if i ever seem awkward in any interaction, it is just because i am awkward. hope that helps :)

"We hope this email finds you well" babe, the only emails I'm excited to get is the ones from Archive of Our Own

Since the booping has returned, reblog if it's okay to spam you with boops!

I wanna be polite and not spam random people without permission , ,

For science!!!!

(Please reblog if you vote! :D )