happy hanukkah!!!!

its the Happy Hanukkats :D

@prochoice-is-pro-compassion @prismatic-bell

Never normalize Nazis.

I hate _% of people statistics being used like “oh it’s such a small number” cause 1% is a small number but 1% of 7 billion is 70 million. That’s more than the population of the UK, France or Italy.

6% of the US is 19 million, as stated above. There are only 3 states that have over 19 million people in them. 19 million is the population of the entire state of New York. That’s more than half the population of California.

Taking populations and turning them into percentages is okay until you try to say “oh that’s not a lot of people” but the reality is… That’s millions. That’s enough to be its own country. That’s fucking scary.

Like don’t get me wrong, that’s nicer than the idea that Americans are split pretty 50/50 on such issues…. but that’s still 3 neo-Nazis for every Jew in the country.    6% is a nice, softened way of saying “over 1 in 20 people”.

3 neo-Nazis for every Jew in the country. 

3 neo-Nazis for every Jew in the country. 

3 neo-Nazis for every Jew in the country. 

Let that sink in. Then think about how your Jewish friends and neighbors feel right now, and have been feeling all this time.

And that’s only the people who “Identify” 

#jewfroday - a day for jewish africans

so I want to start a tag! It’s for Jewish Africans (and Jewish african descent): Amazigh, Ethiopian, Sephardi, Igbo, black American, converts, mixed and more! Upload pics or your art, and tag it as #jewfroday on Monday, November 27th! let’s lift each other up! plz rb to spread the word, I rlly want this to be a thing!

Welcome to Judaism. Our most sacred of documents doesn’t ever really bring up the concept of an afterlife, but while you’re here, please enjoy this excerpt of the text which mentions pomegranates no less than six (6) times.

“we don’t really know what happens when we die, but we know for a fact that pomegranates are delicious so let’s expand on that”

note to @julebug123 who said #this doesn’t sound right #bud I don’t know enough about Judaism to dispute it: 

Here is a video from a Jewish organisation addressing the absence of afterlife discussion in the Torah.

An excerpt: 

And this from the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals: 

Meanwhile, as noted here by the Jewish Virtual Library: 

And that’s just Chapter 4 of Shir HaShirim! When I searched for the word Pomegranate in an online version of the whole Tanakh I got 21 results! 

There are plenty of important Jewish texts (like the Talmud) that discuss and debate both the afterlife and the soul, but the specifics are far more vague/inconclusive than the vision put forth by other Abrahamic religions.

Hope that helps!

Judaism:

LMAOOOOO

They literally said the star of david was a hate symbol and equivalent to the swastika.

And they’re lying about it now.

https://www.facebook.com/dykemarchdc/photos/a.283991822467022/365479957651541/?type=3&theater

Tell me, what’s the definition of “gaslighting” again?

The most helpful part of this post is the Twitter thread by Rabbi Ruttenberg, which is linked in the phrase “thousands of years.” It goes into the history of the Star of David and why the Jewish organizers of the march are wrong.

Rabbi Ruttenberg is the shit and everyone should follow her.

36 Jews arrested at a #CloseTheCamps demonstration at an ICE detention center in Elizabeth, NJ on Sunday, June 30, 2019.

Everyone knows those are white supremacist tattoos but folks in a different article are arguing otherwise. We all know people with molon labe or Spartan tattoos are espousing a certain world view, primarily fascist ideology.

“The arrest on Sunday afternoon happened at the end of the protest outside of the Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility, organized by a new Jewish group called Never Again Action. Hundreds of Jews, mostly young people, attended the protest. Many of Never Again Action’s leaders are also involved with IfNotNow, a millennial Jewish group that opposes Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.”

Donate to their bail fund here:

It seems to me, just observing from the outside as someone who is neither Jewish nor Muslim, that identifying the Star of David–a symbol of the Jewish people and Judaism that far predates the modern state of Israel–with the crimes of Israel against the Palestinians is as bigoted as and does similar harm to identifying Islam with Islamist fundamentalism, which is widely agreed to be Islamophobic. (I specifically said the crimes of Israel btw, not Israel itself. If you don’t recognize the right of Israel to exist please get away from me. I’m also not equating Israel with ISIS and the Taliban etc. Human evil is broad enough in range to comfortably accommodate an array of wrongs that are very different from each other.)

It’s not only bigoted to identify a religious/ethnic group with the crimes committed by some of them; but when you identify Jewishness with crimes and discrimination against Palestinians, you are actively erasing Jewish people who are working against that very harm you purport to care about, effectively awarding the Israeli settlers, bigots, and right-wingers with the title of “true Jewish people.” You’re telling the very people who are ethnically cleansing Palestinians that the Star of David belongs to them and Jewish identity belongs to them. This is not only FAR from your call to make, but you are doing the additional harm of handing them a huge rhetorical and symbolic victory they would love to claim: that they are the only true Jewish people and any Jewish people who disagree with them are outside agents and fakes.

And that’s how I can tell you don’t really give a shit about Palestinian people beyond using them as a rhetorical cudgel against Jewish people. You’re just a boring, run-of-the-mill antisemite who wants cookies for your bigotry.

It struck me the other day as I was trying to articulate my opinions about explicitly Zionists groups gatecrashing DC Dyke March with Jewish pride flags, having made statements that made it clear they agree with the organizers of DCDM that the Jewish Pride flag is, or at least should be viewed as, an explicitly Zionist symbol: [Link], just how cyclical and mutually reinforcing this process is. Explicitly Zionist groups being loudly against the DC Dyke March’s decision, will only further convince the DC Dyke March organizers that they are in the right. And the DC Dyke March organizers’ actions only further legitimize the nationalist case that they are the true defenders of the Jewish people.

Both the left leaning “I’m not antisemitic, just antizionist,” type of antisemite and the extremist Jewish nationalist have something in common. They not only both believe that any open display of Jewishness is by its nature “Zionist” and should be considered as such, but they also benefit from the way this alienates and silences the vast majority of Jewish voices. And so, while they are ostensibly enemies, they each serve each other’s purposes.

This is hardly unique to the Jewish people and left leaning antisemites. The first place I noticed this cycle was with American Islamophobes and Muslims. The overwhelming majority of Muslims of course are not terrorists, and nearly all American Muslims want the same thing most Americans want, to live their lives, take care of their families, and be treated fairly. But Islamophobes paint ISIS and Al Qaeda as the real face of Islam. Their rhetoric is full of the same claims as the Islamist extremists, that there is a clash of civilizations, and Islam is incompatible with a western way of life. Both the Islamophobes and the Islamist extremists agree that Islamist extremism is the only authentic Islam.

Islamophobic bigotry, both in rhetoric and in individual and governmental action helps push vulnerable Muslims into the hands of extremists, and any Islamic terrorist action fuels and justifies the Islamophobes. Both benefit when the vast majority of Muslims who are out there expressing an Islam that has nothing to do with extremist violence are silenced.

I think it’s time to ask how bigots and extremists among the groups they are bigoted against benefit and reinforce each other, and work to refuse both groups in their attempts to claim to be diametrically opposed.

*Please note, I am a Zionist, which in this instance means I support a two state solution and both the Jewish and Palestinian right to self determination. I don’t wish to conflate Zionism in its entirety or Zioness and A Wider Bridge with extremism. However I profoundly disagree with their use of DC Dyke March’s antisemitic policy to try to tie expressions of Jewish identity to support for Israel.