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.

i really do wish gentiles understood how utterly decimated the jewish diaspora was by the end of the 20th century in the wake of the wave of pogroms in eastern europe, the shoah and its aftermath, and the expulsions across north africa and south west asia. in the early 1900’s, around 50% of the world’s jewish population lived outside of eretz yisrael or the us. today, that number is 13%. there are countries who had large jewish populations at the turn of the 20th century that now have no jewish presence. there has not been such a large wave of expulsions and fleeing since the spanish inquisition — which is another horrifically traumatizing series of events that gentiles don’t understand the enormity of.

during the spanish inquisition, almost half a million jews were forced on pain of death to convert or flee. thousands were killed, hundreds of thousands fled. until the shoah, it was the single most massive trauma in jewish history since the siege of jerusalem and expulsion from judea. jews made up nearly a quarter of spain’s population and had been there for centuries. some of our most important texts were written there. ladino developed there, sephardic music, culture, and identity. and then it was gone. everywhere the inquisition could reach, from spain to naples to sicily to malta to the americas, the jewish populations were brutalized, genocided, and expelled. it changed the course of jewish history forever.

in the 20th century, within the span of 50ish years, hundreds of thousands of jews were killed in or fled horrific pogroms in eastern europe, a third of the entire jewish population was systematically murdered within the span of a few years, centuries old jewish communities weren’t just expelled but almost entirely wiped out which led to the loss of centuries old diaspora languages and traditions, and nearly a million jews were expelled from places they’d lived for hundreds or even thousands of years.

like. do you understand? do you understand the kind of communal trauma that kind of massive global upheaval has on a people? the expulsion of 300,000+ jews from spanish territories was enough to leave a centuries old mark on the jewish community. do you understand the impact that the murder of over six million and violent displacement of over 2 million jews will have on the jewish psyche and on jewish history? do you have any idea how earth shattering the last century has been for the jewish people? do you have any idea what we’ve lost? what’s been violently stolen from us? can you try?

i posted this less than 20 minutes ago. this post did not mention the state of israel a single time. how rotten does your soul have to be to respond to a post like this with an anonymous message like this?

"factually undergoing a decline"

Israel: 1948

Holocaust: up till 1945 with continuing pogroms and issues through 1948 and beyond

how is that a decline

i think they’re talking abt the past year, which like?? is still not accurate?? antisemitism has been rising since at least 2016 in the us, and in many other countries it’s either not safe to be openly jewish and some you literally cannot go to if you’re jewish????? what fucking planet are these ppl on.

According to Reuters and CNN, antisemitic incidents are up FOUR HUNDRED PERCENT (400%) since October 7th, 2023.

The only people who think antisemitism is on a decline are the people who cannot conceive of antisemitism as a pervasive, consistent thing in the world- they think antisemitism is Nazis marching and saluting and declaring out loud in blunt terms "We hate Jews".

I am making this in good faith and I genuinely want an answer, ideally from someone who believe this.

With the current information we have, why do people insist Israel is committing a genocide?

South Africa is trying to extend the deadline to find evidence of genocide to present in their court case against Israel. Israel also makes efforts to minimize civilian casualties like warning before they attack and try to get as many people to evacuate as they can before they move to an area.

Under international law, hamas occupying hospitals and schools means that they are no longer protected areas and in those places, any civilian casualties caused by reasonable force are attributed to hamas and therefore don't count towards evidence of genocide.

Death toll doesn't automatically equal genocide as there has to be intent for it to count as one.

We can all agree that Israel has committed war crimes and even if they didn't, what is happening is utterly terrible.

So why insist on it being a genocide instead of a terrible war? Why can't it be a massive tragedy without it being called a genocide?

And I know I'll get certain comments from other jews so I'll make it explicitly clear, I'm not talking about antisemites who call it a genocide because they want a socially acceptable excuse to hate jews, I'm talking about people who are not antisemitic and call it a genocide

!!!!!! I have something for you!! Sincerely! I read this article when it came out and I think there's a lot of value in what the author says. He articulates exactly what has made me so uneasy regarding (mostly Israeli) conversations around the war, and he does it with incredible empathy toward all sides. I am neither Israeli nor Jewish, but the author is both, so I'm far more comfortable with showing you his opinion rather than presenting my own.

It's a very long read and suitably heavy, so it may be best to read it across multiple sittings rather than all at once. Mind you, he includes a lot of direct comparisons to the Holocaust... because he's a Holocaust scholar, in addition to credentials as former IDF. Your mileage may vary, but he does know the history, and he's coming from a perspective of affection for Israel rather than hatred of it.

As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel

This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far-right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history – and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree

By Omer Bartov

13 Aug 2024

On 19 June 2024, I was scheduled to give a lecture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Be’er Sheva, Israel. My lecture was part of an event about the worldwide campus protests against Israel, and I planned to address the war in Gaza and more broadly the question of whether the protests were sincere expressions of outrage or motivated by antisemitism, as some had claimed. But things did not work out as planned. When I arrived at the entrance to the lecture hall, I saw a group of students congregating. It soon transpired that they were not there to attend the event but to protest against it. The students had been summoned, it appeared, by a WhatsApp message that went out the day before, which flagged the lecture and called for action: “We will not allow it! How long will we commit treason against ourselves?!?!?!??!!” The message went on to allege that I had signed a petition that described Israel as a “regime of apartheid” (in fact, the petition referred to a regime of apartheid in the West Bank). I was also “accused” of having written an article for the New York Times, in November 2023, in which I stated that although the statements of Israeli leaders suggested genocidal intent, there was still time to stop Israel from perpetrating genocide. On this, I was guilty as charged. The organiser of the event, the distinguished geographer Oren Yiftachel, was similarly criticised. His offences included having served as the director of the “anti-Zionist” B’Tselem, a globally respected human rights NGO. As the panel participants and a handful of mostly elderly faculty members filed into the hall, security guards prevented the protesting students from entering. But they did not stop them from keeping the lecture hall door open, calling out slogans on a bullhorn and banging with all their might on the walls. After over an hour of disruption, we agreed that perhaps the best step forward would be to ask the student protesters to join us for a conversation, on the condition that they stop the disruption. A fair number of those activists eventually walked in and for the next two hours we sat down and talked. As it turned out, most of these young men and women had recently returned from reserve service, during which they had been deployed in the Gaza Strip. This was not a friendly or “positive” exchange of views, but it was revealing. These students were not necessarily representative of the student body in Israel as a whole. They were activists in extreme rightwing organisations. But in many ways, what they were saying reflected a much more widespread sentiment in the country. I had not been to Israel since June 2023, and during this recent visit I found a different country from the one I had known. Although I have worked abroad for many years, Israel is where I was born and raised. It is the place where my parents lived and are buried; it is where my son has established his own family and most of my oldest and best friends live. Knowing the country from the inside and having followed events even more closely than usual since 7 October, I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered on my return, but it was still profoundly disturbing.

[Remainder of article under the cut]

yeah cool you’re an american jew that doesn’t think antisemitism is a thing anymore. anyway did you know that david gerbi has been trying restore synagogues and cemeteries in libya to try to facilitate the return of libyan jews but non jewish libyans keep trying to lynch him every time he comes to libya.

so this absolute genius showed up to tell me why murdering and ethnically cleansing jews from a country is actually fine and “appropriate.”

i want y’all to guess what country this person is from.

Hi there! Jew of Polish descent here!

Many of my relatives were murdered in your country. My great great uncle, his wife, and his daughter were forced from their homes in Białystok and murdered in the Treblinka concentration camp. Right now, non-Jewish Poles are living comfortably inside his house and profiting from his business.

When Jews survived the war and tried to return home to Poland, you motherfuckers still murdered them even without the Germans egging you on. In cities like Kielce, Jews were murdered after the war for daring to want to come home.

Go fuck yourself

Seeing some absolutely asinine shit on Tumblr about how the UK riots are being controlled by Zionists, so let’s ask the organizers of the protests what they think about Jews:

(source)

(source)

(source)

make no mistake, the main targets of these Nazis during these riots are Muslims and immigrants, but you’re absurdly antisemitic if you think these guys are being controlled by Jews and wouldn’t take the opportunity to firebomb a synagogue on their way to firebomb a mosque.

anyway, please make a donation to Hope Not Hate to help fund efforts to deradicalize the UK 💜

During the holocaust some estimates say that over 50% of the entire European population of Roma people were murdered.

They were also forced to be identified in camps with the brown upside down triangle

They were considered racially impure, much like the Jews. In many nations they were hunted by their fellow countrymen, who had an existing bias against them that was fuelled by war propaganda. The Einsatzgruppen (basically a moving, mobile killing squad) had Roma as a target. And, yes, there was a "Gypsy Question".

Their population was absolutely decimated. But worse.

August 2 is a date that some acknowledge this genocide. Some other dates....some not any dates at all. This date was chosen because of the huge killings on that night of those in the Zigeunerfamilienlager. Roma families were kept together in a camp in Auschwitz.

The Nazis decided to "clear" most of the camp that night, killing many children and elderly on purpose. There was a lot of fighting, they fought back with improvised weapons. Let no one ever say that they walked wearily to their deaths. They fought for themselves and their families with every ounce of strength they had.

Thousands were killed in gas chambers that night, the women, children, elderly and infirm. The rest were sent to work camps.

Germany only officially acknowledged this aspect of the holocaust in the early 80s. In the Former Czechoslovakia and Czech Republic Roma women were forced into sterilisation through a number of means, in the 70s, the 90s and into the 00's, with some reports that this is still ongoing.

The Roma are not a footnote in history. Their suffering was immeasurable, like so many others. In ways that some places will still not acknowledge or account for.

May the memories of those gone be a blessing, and the future of those that remain be a brighter and more hopeful one.

Oh hey it's the 2nd of August. It's international Romani genocide memorial day. 79 years and still the vast majority of countries don't give a fuck about it nor recognize it. Hell on Earth everywhere

It's been 80 years since the Nazis liquidated the Romani family camp in Auschwitz, killing 4,000 people in a single night. Most countries don't recognize it and most European countries continue to treat us like shit

This was done by Pro Palestine protesters 🙃🙃 When the FUCK will people start acknowledging leftist antisemitism!!! Do another 6 million Jews have to die??

I mean what the fuck dude

Date: 7/30/24

A NON-EXHAUSTIVE BUT NEVERTHELESS EXHAUSTING LIST OF NEO-NAZI AND WHITE SUPREMACIST DOGWHISTLES

since some of y'all apparently need a refresher course. as always, use your judement when deciding if it's a dogwhistle or just innocent usage of a number or symbol

Fed - An accusation by neo-Nazis that open displays of racism (e.g. chanting sieg heil, carrying a swastika flag) are false flags carried out by federal agents. Used to sow doubt about who is a "real" Nazi to make it easier for them to operate in public

Fedposting - A term used within white supremacist circles to describe posting things that are too blatant and lack plausible deniability. Often used as damage control when neo-Nazis lose control and start spreading open racism

Schizoposting - Posting while under the influence of paranoid delusions. Neo-Nazis will often jokingly claim to suffer from schizophrenia as a cover for their conspiratorial beliefs

Soap Material - A derogatory phrase targeting Jews. A reference to the rumor that Nazis processed the fat of those killed in concentration camps to make soap. According to Yad Vashem, there is little evidence that this was the case, and it was most likely a rumor told by camp guards to frighten prisoners

I'll contribute some, off the top of my head

41% - an old statistic for the percentage of trans people (might be trans youth; I don't recall) who had attempted suicide. Often incorrectly implied to be the percentage who committed suicide. May be used on its own, or as a suicide bait via "join the 41%." Sidenote: when trans people are accepted by those around them, the suicide attempt rate drops to nearly that of the overall population.

Deus Vult - Latin for "God wills it," a reference to the Crusades. Used to show support for a holy war, usually against Islam but often also against Judaism

Gibs - short for "gibsmedat" (give me that) in a mockery of an AAVE accent. Refers to welfare benefits, and/or (usually black) poor people who receive them.

Glowy/Glowie - See "fed," above. Comes from how govt agents can be bad at blending in, i.e. they glow in the dark.

Return to tradition - A call to regress society to a glorified past, one without "(((wokeness)))" or "(((political correctness)))" or, more directly, "rights for women and minorities, likely in a plot orchestrated by the Jews."

RETVRN - See "Return to tradition," above. This variant emulates Roman engravings, replacing the 'u' with a 'v' and writing in all capital letters.

Shekel - Israeli currency. Used to imply someone is on the payroll of Jews (e.g. "3 shekels have been deposited into your account" -> "you were paid by Jews to make that post")

I WANT TO EMPHASIZE "ZIO" IS A NAZI DOGWHISTLE

On July 1942, 2, most of the children of Lidice, a small village in what was then Czechoslovakia, were handed over to the gestapo office of the gestapo.

These 82 children were then transported to the of extermination camp 70 kilometers away. Once they arrived, they were gassed to death. This remarkable sculpture by Marie Uchytilová commemorates this massacre.

A group of Bronze Sculptures, paying tribute to the children who died. Its construction was decided in 1969 by the woman sculptor, Marie Uchytilova. As a symbol of an imaginary tomb of the 13 million most innocent victims of the war - children, she chose as model, 82 children of lidice asphyxiated in the gas rooms of chelmno.

She took 20 years to make this beautiful sculpture because she used the vintage documents to reproduce the faces of the missing children and to represent them according to their exact size.

Lidice was also wiped out as a village. All that's left are some stone walls/foundations. The Gestapo even dug up dead bodies and looted them for jewelry.

When I was in Prague I learned that the Nazis (falsely) thought that Lidice was harbouring members of the Czechoslovak resistance that assassinated Reinhard Heydrich.

Said resistence members eventually ended up barricading themselves in the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague and fought the Nazis off until the bitter end. (They refused to be taken alive). You can still see the bullet holes.

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May his memory be for a blessing.

Absolutely disappointing how far you have to read until they mention that he was Jewish himself. Too often the narrative is of gentiles rescuing helpless Jews during the Holocaust - the Jews that risked their lives and often died for their people are forgotten and erased.

May his memory be a for a blessing.

leftist goyim don't want to centre jews, the primary victims of the holocaust, in discussions about the holocaust because they would need to acknowledge this:

the world that allowed the holocaust to happen, this world, hasn't changed much. antisemitism didn't disappear when the camps were liberated. for thousands of years, jews have been targeted by anybody who needs a scapegoat - regardless of an individual's political affiliation or professed values.

if non-jewish progressives acknowledge jewish suffering, historical & modern, they might just need to do something about it. but then... they'll lose their scapegoat. we can't have that. so, what to do?

the obvious answer is historical negationism: to remove jews from the holocaust entirely. to reshape the shoah into a fable, a lesson, a unit of measurement. the holocaust follows every jew like a shadow & goyim appropriate our trauma to make shadow puppets. it's horrific.

I feel like people have such a limited view of the Shoah as something that killed religious Jews living in Eastern Europe. Certainly, that’s the majority of Jewish deaths from a raw numbers perspective. But that narrow view erases so much suffering.

Imperial Japan was allied to the Nazis, so Jews in East Asia and the Pacific forced to flee or die as Japan expanded their empire. Fascist Spain was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, and it’s not like the Sephardic Jews could easily flee into France after 1940. The Axis powers had colonized Algeria, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia at that point, so North African Mizrahi Jews weren’t spared the horrors. While the US government didn’t directly kill Jews, they denied us refugee status during the Shoah, and they did nothing to prevent the spread of multiple US American fascist parties and white suprematist groups. The Vatican, unofficially allied with Fascist Italy, handed over the names and locations of Jews they had converted to Catholicism decades or centuries prior. Families who didn’t even know they were ethnically Jewish were dragged out of Catholic Churches during Mass and sent to slaughterhouses hundreds of miles away. There were precious few diasporic communities throughout the world where Jews were safe in the 30s and 40s.

The Holocaust spanned entire continents. The Holocaust was global.

As an addendum, as I've been thinking about it: The countries that offered refuge to Jews during the Shoah are not as heroic as you may think they are. Jews fleeing to the Soviet Union were shipped to gulags or sent to remote farms with no food in the middle of the Russian interior. They didn't fare well under Stalin. Switzerland accepted a few thousand refugees, but turned away nearly 2/5ths of asylum seekers and left them to die at the border. The Republic of China took in a few thousand more Jews from East Asia and sent them to the Shanghai Ghetto, only for the People's Republic to turn around and kill or exile them all that same decade.

As mentioned above, the USA's Johnson-Reed Act was specifically designed to limit the number of immigrants from countries with large Jewish populations. That act wasn't repealed until the 60's. During the Holocaust, only about a hundred thousand Jewish refugees made it to the US, while hundreds of thousands more died on the wait list. You'll find similar stories from Canada, Portugal, and Great Britain.

The Philippines and the Dominican Republic took in a measly two-thousand Jewish refugees combined. The British Mandate limited Jewish refuge to Palestine to about 20,000. And every other country that accepted Jewish refugees eventually fell to Axis control. That's it. Those are all the countries. Nobody else would take us.

The Holocaust was global. Many more countries than Germany still have direct blood on their hands and reparations still to pay. But every country on Earth failed us to some extent in our hour of need. There are less Jews alive today than there were in 1939. And that's because, no matter where you're from, your country failed to protect us from human history's largest genocide.

This is one of the most powerful, damning pieces I’ve ever read. At the very end, the author talks about a witness testimony written by a Sonderkommando, Zalmen Gradowski, in Auschwitz. I’m warning you, excerpts of his account of people being killed and burned are in here and are graphic, but the fact that most of us probably never heard of this man before this piece proves the author’s point. Read if you can.

From Hollander-Waas Jewish Heritage Services: Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. We gather to mourn the 6 million Jews, 500,000 Romani, and countless others who were murdered for who they were, along with victims of all other genocides both past and present. The long term genealogical ramifications of genocide are hard to imagine. In this infographic prepared by co-founder Caitlin Hollander, you can see just how significant the scale of loss truly is for the Jewish community long-term.

Today is January 27th, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I'd like to get some stuff off my chest.

First, I'd like to take a minute to point out that it is not Yom HaShoah, which is the day Israel (and by extension large portions of the Jewish diaspora population) uses as Holocaust Remembrance day. Yom HaShoah is on the 27th of Nissan, a date that was selected to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, centering Jewish resistance in our own story. That date was selected nearly five decades before the UN picked January 27th, which was selected to center our white saviors who came to liberate Auschwitz. This is utter bullshit. And no excuses for not being able to handle a moving date on the Gregorian calendar - April 19th would be the Gregorian equivalent, and it was not selected.

Having said that, given how many infographics I've seen over the last four months about how people are increasingly denying or doubting the Holocaust, I figure any day that acknowledges it is a good thing, so yeah, let's take two days to remember. I think it's worth it.

So given that this is the Holocaust Remembrance Day that centers our goyishe friends, let's talk about how our goyishe friends should observe the day.

1. It is likely that you never learned a lot of details about the Holocaust. Holocaust education usually boils down to, "and the Nazis put Jews in camps in order to kill them, and a lot of Jews were killed in gas chambers, and about 6 million died in all." Go learn some details. Read or watch an account from a survivor.  Learn about the medical experiments, or the death marches. Learn some details about what the gas chambers were actually like. Try to understand the horror. Learn about the SS St. Louis or the Evian conference in 1938 where almost every country on Earth decided it was better to let the Jews die in Germany than to allow them into their own countries.

2. On that note, take the time to understand that anti-semitism neither began nor ended with the Nazis, and that even the "good guys" were incredibly antisemitic.Try to recognize that the antisemitism that was present where you live right now in the 1930s didn't just disappear, it just went into hiding. Think about where it might be hiding now.

Basically, because this is the Holocaust Remembrance Day for the goyim, I want to focus our remembrance of what happened on the goyim. What did they do? What could they have done to help? Why didn't they? We can come back in May for more Jewish focused learning, but the Holocaust could not have happened without A LOT of willing goyim, and I think we should spend the day remembering them and their actions.

And as a side note: if you happen to read this and you've chosen to spend the day engaging in Holocaust denial or Holocaust inversion, then know that my hope for you is that something happens in your life to teach you empathy and basic human decency. And I hope it isn't pleasant for you.