Purpleyin's slightly fannish tumblr

Every single year, without fail, we deal with the fact that the internet is obsessed with promoting the misinformation that Ostara must have been stolen from Easter.

People will argue until they’re blue in the face…But they won’t provide citations or evidence to the contrary and the reason why is simple: there isn’t any.

If you find that celebrating Ostara brings you joy: we aren’t here to rain on your parade or stop you in the slightest.

But misinformation, even misinformation that sounds cool and serves to further rhetorical goals, is still wrong and harmful.

So, after years of promising it, we’ve finally delivered: Easter isn’t stolen from Ostara.

Have questions? We’re happy to answer!

Make sure to follow our Instagram @jewitches for the ongoing discussion!

#These are my new favorite people for like the next MONTH XD#Easter Is Not Ostara 2kforever (via @breelandwalker)

Transcripts at the reblog.

CW: antisemitism, pale of settlement, pogroms, genocide, cultural erasure

I don't think goyim can really conceive of how much Jews actually hold back in our criticism of antisemitism in media, and when you hear us it is often because we see a dangerous message that you don't... Yet.

I have a complicated relationship with Tim Burton's rendition of The Corpse Bride. I love it as a beautiful piece of stop motion art, but it isn't what it should have been, he took a Jewish story from the Pale and with intention stripped it of its Jewish origins. This alone is incredibly antisemitic. The criticism you will hear has probably been "this is a Jewish story, it should have retained its Jewish elements" but have you heard why we feel strongly about this story?

The story of the corpse bride is incredibly important to me and was born from Jewish trauma and Christian violence. Mobs would routinely attack Jewish weddings, they would murder brides and they would bury them in unmarked graves by the roadside still in their wedding clothes, they reasoned that without Jewish wives there are no Jewish mother's. Jews are intrinsic to the story.

It is antisemitism to take our story, about our pain, at the hands of non-jews and strip it for "useful" parts, in fact it is heartbreaking every time.

We are often forced to pick our battles and fighting a battle over a movie that has already been released by a director with a cult following is not worth it, you only hear us speak up in numbers when the antisemitism may lead to another century of violence, because raising our voice means picking a fight, because so many of you already see our pain as inconvenient and it is exhausting to never be heard.

-anyone can reblog

The main bundle has 69 (heh) games for $60. The sister bundle has 66 games for $10.

The sale runs Feb 10-24, 2023

hey yall the prison scenes in stranger things s4 were filmed inside of a nazi prison that is also being used as a sorta tourist spot where you can literally pay to spend the night there in 'stranger things themed' cells

30 fucking million per episode and they couldn't make a set or find literally any other location what the fuck

Hello friends it’s 5am and I want to talk about a few things: Jewish Bucky, Steve the golem, and the importance of Sam and Bucky’s dynamic. This is gonna get long so I’ll put a cut in at some point

okay so Bucky in the MCU is based off two characters, Bucky Barnes, Captain America’s sidekick and Arnie Roth, Steve Rogers’ childhood best friend who saved him from bullies growing up. Arnie is gay and Jewish (Roth is a very typical Jewish name without being a stereotype). Remember these characters were all originally created by Jews and names are very important in Jewish culture. Now, Steve is a character who was metatextually created by Jewish writers to fight the Nazis (and therefore protect the Jewish people). A golem is a being created from clay to protect the Jews in times of trouble. There’s a whole extra thing about truth  and death that i can get into at another point BUT that’s not super important right now because Steve is a different kind of golem.

Keep reading

with spooky season approaching i would like to once again gently remind the rpc that

día de los muertos/the day of the dead isn’t Mexican Halloween and shouldn’t be treated as such

also if your character is jewish you should NEVER give them horns in any depictions. this is a very problematic stereotype that affects jewish people every day as well. 

Every actual in-person anarchist I've ever met is someone who realized that people can be complete garbage to each other and looked around at the world and went "we built this in such a way that it not only permits but ENCOURAGES treating other people like shit, what if we tried to fix that but I don't want to be in charge of that in fact NOBODY should be in charge of that, because when people are in charge of shit they treat each other like shit"

This is def the best face of anarchy and the face I vibe with. But there is an undeniable side of anarchy who are assholes, who want to be in understood control, who view anarchy as part of their post apocalypse doomsday agenda, or even people like my father who was an anarchist all my life probably still sees himself as one and has fallen down a qanon conspiracy hole.

To say these people aren't a facet of anarchy is a no true scotsman fallacy, and to believe everyone is a nice anarchist who would never want to have power to abuse is naive, also just some people are toxic they can hold anarchist values and just never fix their own attitudes.

I think there is real value in discussion around how to deal with bad apples. I agree with anon here that acting like we can do no harm will lead to unintentional harm at the minimum, and its just the responsible thing to do when planning our future to include bad actors and how to handle them (this doesn't have to be punishment, it can be intervention and a restorative justice approach)

So here's the thing, "I want to be in understood control" is literally not anarchist. The word MEANS "without leader."

Insisting that we have to accept people who want to build hierarchies as anarchists is like insisting on accepting North Korea as a democratic republic because that's what they say they are.

"No true Scotsman" doesn't mean "you can't say that people whose ideas are exactly antithetical to your philosophy aren't practicing your philosophy" it means "you can't arbitrarily say that people who you don't like who practice your philosophy aren't practicing your philosophy".

Anprims are real anarchists and their ideology sucks in a constellation of ways, but they ARE anarchists. People who want other people to recognize their authority are not anarchists.

I'm not saying that we have to pretend that these people - folks who claim to be anarchists but who are authoritarians - don't exist, I'm saying that we need to dismantle the systems that let these people take power, teach people to recognize what those systems look like, and work preemptively to prevent people who want power from having it.

Recognizing authoritarian impulses and authoritarian actions is actually really important in anarchist movements.

The joke (joke? comment?) I'm making to anon is that more than anyone I've ever known, anarchists understand that they are capable of abusing people. Most anarchists I know aren't particularly nice, but what's interesting is that they KNOW that they aren't nice and don't expect themselves to be nice.

It's actually a really useful thing to have a group of assholes sitting around and looking at a social problem because nice people pretend that everyone will just get along, whereas assholes will be like "hey, if you don't plan for someone to swoop in and take over that project or misuse funds, someone is going to do it. Here's how I'd do it, let's make sure there's some redundancy in responsibilities."

"How to handle bad apples" is a perennial problem in leftist spaces that leftists are well aware of and discuss a lot. Unfortunately the most common (and often most functional) answer is "factionalism" because it's not like anyone in the group has the authority to kick anyone else out, so you find the seven people who come down on your side of the issue and the bad apple keeps the three people who agree with them and now you have two groups with similar ideology who will ENDLESSLY sit around and lament what a fucking asshole that person was until a similar problem forms in the new group and repeat ad infinitum.

I'm kind of joking but I'm kind of not; handling interlopers, power grabs, and manipulation in any organization is difficult and we're not good at doing it in hierarchical systems and we're not good at doing it in democratic systems and we're not good at doing it in D&D groups, so I feel like it's a little unfair to say that anarchists don't recognize this problem when legitimately, most of the way that I've seen it handled among anarchists is "we're not including you in the work we do because you are being piece of shit; if you can prove you aren't a piece of shit or if you step back from doing these things and chill, you can stay, but otherwise, leave. If you don't leave, we are leaving." Which is a better way of handling it than I've seen in vote-based hierarchies.

Figuring out how to get this to scale is an *extremely difficult* problem that I promise you, people who are serious about anarchy are thinking about a lot. There isn't one good answer, but redundancy and accountability help a lot.

Also I'm sorry about your dad, that sounds really shitty to deal with.

A complaint I have seen come up several times, that always gets dismissed, is the antisemitism in anarchist circles. A "good" anarchist would never tell a black person to stop doing things that connect them to their heritage, but apparently they're totally cool doing that to Jewish people. Im not going to tag them here because I'll let them choose to get into this conversation, but uhhh... Yeah it seems like there's some issues. (Being outside it, I suspect it comes from a lot of anarchists being culturally Christian atheists who haven't fully internalized that Judaism is an ETHNOreligion cause I know I haven't).

So I guess the question is how do y'all expect to prevent the WHOLE GROUP being assholes to a smaller group that they've just all collectively agreed is wrong? Cause that sounds like something weve already got in place, but with no way to appeal it.

I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but this is an absolute rhetorical landmine that I can't considerately respond to without further information.

For instance, a lot of anarchists and body autonomy activists I know (including me) are opposed to infant circumcision, and opposition to infant circumcision is often called antisemitic.

I can't broadly say that all cultural practices are above criticism simply because they are cultural practices, and I know that anarchy and anarchists have a complicated relationship with religion. I can easily see how opposition to organized religion can be interpreted as antisemitism and I know that there are many anarchists who are unilaterally opposed to religion (organized and otherwise).

After all: No gods, no masters.

THAT BEING SAID

I do strongly agree that antisemitism can be a problem in anarchist spaces, and I will say that anarchists in particular seem somewhat more prone than other leftists to accept conspiratorial lines of thought that have antisemitism as their foundation. I absolutely have seen anarchists frame their criticisms of corporations or governments in antisemitic ways and I think it's important to educate people about the history and historical roots of antisemitism so that they can recognize and counter it.

April Rosenblum has written an excellent explainer on the subject of antisemitism in leftist movements, how to recognize it, and how to counter it that I strongly recommend reading (and handing out! There's a booklet-ready version!)

Also, the framing of "how do you stop the whole group from being assholes to a smaller group who they believe are wrong" seems kind of odd to me because, well, how do you? That's not an easy question to answer under any philosophical or political system.

There are multiple ways to approach this problem (you can educate people in order to prevent bigotry, you can get the whole group to vote bigots out, you can leave groups that tolerate bigotry, you can choose not to work with bigoted organizations) that are often more direct and holistic than the systems we see in place in the world today (pre-noculating against blood libel and conspiracism often works better to prevent people from buying into antisemitism than going to HR when your coworker starts cornering you at the watercooler about Wayfair's child trafficking).

I am certainly not going to claim that anarchists are especially good at this, but I think that anarchists do tend toward suspicion of large groups and groupthink generally and that can be useful for getting people to reexamine prejudices and work toward moving.

And THAT being said, there is a long history of Jewish anarchism and I am probably speaking over some Jewish anarchists who have much more thoughtful opinions about this than I do.

White LGBT goyim want to claim the pink triangles but don’t want to claim the intergenerational trauma from the holocaust most Jewish people live with or make any spaces for LGBT Jews

White LGBT goyim want to derail discussions of the holocaust to talk about how much LGBT people were affected too and you’re a homophobe for not being inclusive enough or making things comfortable enough for them while talking about your peoples oppression, but they don’t want the intergenerational trauma from the holocaust most Jewish people live with or make any spaces for LGBT Jews

White LGBT goyim want Anne Frank to be their bicon but can’t fathom what it’s like to be a Jewish kid and to be compared to her in the nastiest ways and later learn about her and realize she wasn’t a bad person, they were just insulting you for being Jewish. LGBT goyim need a reason to care about a murdered Jewish girl because antisemitism isn’t enough. They want to see themselves in her, they can’t fathom what it’s like to have no choice to

White LGBT goyim love LGBT history but only when it’s through a white, goyische lense. They want Oscar Wilde but don’t want Magnus Hirschfeld, Faygele Ben Miriam, Leslie Feinberg

White LGBT goyim love Jews except for when we are open about it, except for when we’re proud, except for when we’re religious, except for when we see our Jewishness and our gayness and our transness as inseparable, except for when we identify with Jewish cultural genders, except for when we want to be visibly Jewish at pride parades and marches, except for when we refuse to assimilate. Except for when we’re Jewish. Except for when we call out their antisemitism

Goyim can reblog but don’t add anything, unless if you have a *respectful* question. If you’re just going to “not all goyim” in my notes then don’t bother I’ll block you love and light. Also before anyone calls me a transphobe/homophobe I’m trans and bi I’m just tired of not feeling safe or welcome in the lgbt community for being Jewish lol

I am respectfully asking goyim to stop saying “well what about this innocent explanation?” when they ask me to explain an antisemitic dogwhistle.

Yes, that person COULD have been born in 1988.

Yes, that person COULD be saying that it was specifically corrupt “religious people” who crucified Jesus.

Yes, that person COULD be honestly confused about how dual citizenship works.

Yes, that person COULD think that (((these brackets))) are just another silly internet joke.

You aren’t the first to bring it up, and you won’t be the last. But “I can’t hear anything” doesn’t mean the dogwhistle isn’t making any sound. It just means you’re not a dog.

Leftists can and should reblog this. You’re not immune. I’ll see someone brag about being able to spot terfs a mile off, then scroll down and see they reblogged a cat picture from from user oyveyzegoyimknow or something.

For those who (like me) have never seen the triple parentheses:

Ah, right, I should probably explain them:

Thank you for the detailed explanation. I knew some of them but not all of them. The thing about parenthesis was new to me. If you think of any other antisemitic dogwhistles people should know about, I’d love to know exactly what to look for.

Hey, this is my area of expertise. If anyone wants anymore sources on this on dogwhistles to look out for the Anti-Defamation League’s list of hate symbols. The Southern Poverty Law Center also does a fair amount of tracking this type of nonsense.

i tried to explain what generational trauma is to someone recently and they were like “oh so because something happened historically, you get to have issues about it now?” and no.... that’s not what that is.

when i was in 8th grade, on my class trip to washington dc, we visited the holocaust museum. it’s a wonderful, extensive, informative place, and it’s a beautiful tribute to the victims. as a jewish kid, i knew what the holocaust was. i’d faced antisemetism every day of my life, and will continue to do so. i knew what had happened to my ancestors not too long ago.

but when i stood in that museum. in the recreation of the cattle trains used to move us to the camps. in the recreation of an auschwitz cabin, staring at the map of the camp. when i saw the pile of shoes and jewelry taken from the victims. when i learned how their hair, so very much like mine, was cut for having texture. and how their teeth were pulled for the gold fillings. i had a panic attack.

it was embarrassing, but i was a shitty little 8th grader, and i tried to hide it. but I couldn’t breathe. it was like there was a band around my chest the entire time i was in the museum. i was surrounded by ghosts, by the whispers of emaciated men and trapped women and crying children.

what is generational trauma?

it’s the psychological idea that trauma can be passed down through multiple different ways. trauma can change you significantly, even rewrite neural pathways and physically change how you think. that, paired with the cycle of subconsciously sharing our trauma with our children, as well as mixing with the trauma we learn as we grow, leads to some really rough patches in our relationships with our identites.

this is a really great 4 minute video from the healing foundation about the trauma carried by aboriginal people in Australia. tw for some really heavy topics, but all presented in a relaxed and serious environment.

what do we do?

well, honestly, i don’t know. it’s not like we’re gonna stop sharing our stories with our descendants, nor our histories. we can’t get rid of things related to our identities that give us our own trauma, the bigotry we face unfortunately isn’t going anywhere.

but being aware of your generational trauma is a good step. it’s not just being “sad” or “sensitive” to history. it’s our history still affecting us today. when your indigenous friends are made upset by discussions of colonization, when your black friends feel the weight of a millenia of racism placed on their shoulders, when your gay friends ask you to please stop using that word, when your trans friends see another historical figure deadnamed and misgendered, when your jewish friends can’t talk about the Shoah without their voices breaking.

so why the fuck are you lecturing us?

our murdered ancestors live on in us, in our eyes, our hearts. we are reminded of them constantly, made painfully aware of who we are and how many people hate us.

we were not supposed to survive, and if most of the world had their way, we wouldn’t have. (no, the allies were not heroes of wwii, you turned us away at your borders and continue to let us die from nazis today. if america had had the option, they wouldn’t have given a shit about jewish victims, but that’s a whole other essay i could write)

it’s time to start acknowledging the past, acknowledging your generational trauma and the trauma of those around you. i’m not making up an excuse to “have issues”. at the time i’m writing this, october 2020, i’m 17. i have felt this weight my entire life, and i will continue to shoulder it, as will everyone else.

my point is, maybe we can shoulder that weight together. maybe then it won’t weigh us down as badly. we have solidarity, and we are tough, and resilient, and strong, and beautiful. your generational trauma is something to be aware of, but not ashamed of. we can do this—change the world for the better. we can break the cycle so our descendants don’t feel as we do.

you should reblog this even if you’re not affected by it. goy do not care about jewish people at all and that is so fucking clear

reblogging again for thanksgiving. reach out to your native friends today. listen to them. show them kindness and respect and solidarity.

Don’t forget black people deal with this, too. The trauma of slavery still lives on in us and affects all aspects of our lives. It’s ingrained in our culture.

https://twitter.com/aiukliAfrika/status/1224201758320287744

“Beaumont to Detroit: 1943 “ - Langston Hughes 

“Looky here, America What you done done Let things drift Until the riots come.

Now your policemen Let your mobs run free. I reckon you don’t care Nothing about me.

You tell me that hitler Is a mighty bad man. I guess he took lessons From the ku klux klan.

You tell me mussolini’s Got an evil heart Well, it mus-a-been in Beaumont That he had his start

Cause everything that hitler And Mussolini do, Negroes get the same Treatment from you.

You jim crowed me Before hitler rose to power And you’re STILL jim crowing me Right now, this very hour.

Yet you say we’re fighting For democracy Then why don’t democracy Include me?

I ask you this question Cause I want to know How long I got to fight BOTH HITLER – AND JIM CROW”

From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (p.281)