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עם ישראל חי

@jewish-sideblog

חיה הר-ורדי
she/her שלה/היא
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When I was in kindergarten I saw a painting of the American Revolutionary War. I asked my mom, “Who were the good guys and who were the bad guys?” And she said, “That’s not really how war works. It’s not like a TV show. Both sides thought they were right, otherwise they wouldn’t have been fighting.” And my seven year old ass went “Oh ok”

Anyway having internalized that fun fact in literally kindergarten? It surprises me how many college-educated adults still don’t seem to know about it.

What people seem to think this post is about:

  • Pissing on the poor
  • OP was older than most kindergartners
  • Fascist apologetics

What I'm actually saying:

  • Fandomization of real-world conflicts isn't helpful. Stop treating war like a TV show.
  • Trying to assign objective moral truths or lessons to real-life conflicts isn't helpful. If you want maxims, you'll find them in Aesop's Fables, not news articles or history books
  • Just because Nazis/Confederates/etc did horrible things doesn't mean the Allies/Unionists/etc were righteous or good
  • Every side of every conflict claims that they have justification for death and destruction
  • Never take that justification at face value
  • No justification can make death or destruction a "good" thing

The real lesson you should take from all this:

  • Having a Tumblr post with over 10k notes is a terrible curse
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being a jew studying preholocaust european jewish history is just *mourns over what could have been, mourns over what could have been, mourns over what could have been, mourns over what could have been, mourns-*

WWII alternate history stories always go “What if the Nazis won.” WHAT IF THE JEWS LIVED?

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kanguin

That’s actually such a good point about alternative history. So many ask “what if we got the bad ending?”, ignorant of the fact we did, that’s just a worse ending.

Asking “what if the Nazis won” allows one to live in the safe world where the Nazis were the root source of evil in WWII. Asking “what if the Jews lived” forces you to confront the fact that almost all of Europe was complicit in their eradication. Every European power, the United states, everyone involved hated the Jewish people. Everyone was complicit in antisemitism, everyone just sat back and let it happen.

It took an invasion of Poland for the UK and France to act, and it took a direct attack on the US for the US to officially get involved. All of the torture, enslavement, and murder of Jews before this were overlooked because not even below the surface, the German antisemitism wasn’t unique. And basically nobody has the guts to address that.

Louder for the people in the back:

“What if we got the bad ending?”, ignorant of the fact we did

We did. We Did. We Did.

I see a lot of American fiction about this premise. if the Nazis had won, it would’ve been with the help of the United States, who turned away Jewish refugees by the thousands, who refused to enter the war, who inspired Hitler. having the Nazis conquer the US and oppress its people directly allows Americans to remake themselves from perpetrators to victims

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reblogged

I have to admit an uncomfortable amount of why I want to see the Captain America movie is to get an idea of exactly how The Gentiles (derogatory) are gonna lose their shit over Sabra

Like, I distinctly remember otherwise normal film reviewers remarking upon the scene where Wonder Woman saves 2 Egyptian kids from a missile with “hur hur hur, usually Israelis kill Arab kids with missiles, they don’t save them!” The gentiles cannot be trusted to be fucking normal about Israeli actors, sadly

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Your regular reminder that Jewish Voice For Peace represents the Jewish community in the same way that Autism Speaks represents the Autistic Community.

In that they both are hate groups masquerading as advocates, overwhelmingly operated by outsiders who have nothing but contempt for our survival.

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a-s-fischer
Anonymous asked:

“Lilith is part of a closed religious practice” except it’s not appropriation to worship her as that is not practice what is within the closed practices of judaism :) Lilith is not an exclusive figure! Lilith is open

So according to your logic, it's okay to worship Lilith because she isn't worshiped in Judaism so therefore worshiping her isn't cultural appropriation. So if I a completely non-Native American/First Nations person were to start worshiping the W*ndigo, that would be completely fine, and not at all cultural appropriation, and not deeply fucked up, because W*ndigos are not worshiped in any of the cultures that have them as part of their cosmology and traditions. And I'm sure that the people from the various cultual groups that originated the W*ndigo, who tell me that doing that would be deeply deeply fucked up, and culturally appropriative, are just wrong and harshing my squee.

Don't incorperate Lilith into your practice if you aren't Jewish, and worshiping the demons from other cultures is no less culturally appropriative because they aren't worshiped in their home cultures. Hope that clarifies things! :)

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Yes, goyim, Lilith is comparable, though not analogous, to a wndg.

If you worship her, you’re asking for agony, and by Hashem you will have literally asked for it.

So I am a non-thiestic Jew, which means I don't believe Lilith, or any comparable figures, exist, which is why I felt able to offer a few alternate folkloric figures. I am not genuinely afraid of anyone attracting the attention of a hostile, powerful, and vicious, mother and baby killing night spirit.

But yeah, according to the folklore of Lilith, which is inextricably Jewish, Lilith is a murderer of babies and pregnant and laboring women. She is the folkloric personification of maternal and infant mortality. She is the folkloric personification of SIDS. She is the folkloric personification of waking up to find your child dead in their crib. She is the folkloric personification of dying in agony days after you brought a child into the world, as your blood is poisoned with septic shock. She is the folkloric personification of finding out you were pregnant as you are miscarrying, bleeding and crying from the pain of your body expelling the child you didn't even know you were carrying.

The people who want to worship Lilith are people who at least nominally believe in mysterious and potentially dangerous powers, and if I were one of them, Lilith is not the kind of figure I would want to draw the attention of. But I can actually understand the impulse, and I can understand wanting to confront and work with the personification of that kind of fear and pain. Which is why I laid out alternates.

The problem is a lot of the Gentiles who want to work with or worship Lilith are very insistent that actually the Jews are lying about her. The people from whom's culture the figure that you are trying to work with or worship derives, are wrong about her and lying about her. And I have two things to point out about this particular logic. The first and the simplest, is that if I were a baby and gestating parent murdering demon, who wanted a bunch of people to worship them, and leave themselves open to my influence, that is exactly what I would want them to think.

The second is where my non-theistic Jewish concern with the worship of Lilith really comes from. And it's that bit where the Jews are lying. Christians have been accusing the Jews of lying about their deity figure for almost two millennia, as a way of dealing with the challenge posed, as early Christians viewed it, by the continued existence of Jews and Jewish interpretations of their shared holy texts. And this idea has dug deep into the psyche of the historically Christian world. Witches and neopagans absorb this idea, this trope, that Jews lie about other people's gods, that Jews lie about their own traditions to deny other people's gods, from the culture around them without even realizing it, or identifying it as the traditional Christian antisemitism that it is.

And in this case, with Lilith, this idea gets combined with another popular little Christian antisemitic trope that has dug its way deep into the psyche of the historically Christian world. And that idea is one that I have seen Christians and people from the Christian world, from every branch, and no branch, and from every political persuasion use, the idea that Jews and Judaism are somehow responsible for everything that a given Christian might dislike about Christianity, which has morphed into everything that a given person might dislike about society. This is a great idea, for the Christians at least. One of the niftiest tricks Christians ever pulled was convincing themselves, and lots of other people, that any problem they might have with Christianity or Christian society, this small marginalized minority was to blame. It's been really useful to Christianity and to the historically Christian world to have a scapegoat, which is one of the many reasons antisemitism has such staying power. "The violent Old Testament God is the reason XYZ Christian thing exists and it is bad," is the classic example, but popular political examples are right wing Gentiles insisting that communism is the Jews fault, or left-leaning Gentiles insisting that the Jews are all greedy capitalists. The key is that whatever you think the problem in society is, it's the Jews fault.

And one specific iteration of this is that during the 60s and 70s, among certain feminist thinkers, the idea arose that before Judaism brought monotheism to the world, the patriarchy didn't exist. This is absolute historical hogwash. The ancient people who we now call the Jews were of course a deeply patriarchal society, but so were all of the other societies around them, whether or not they worshiped powerful goddesses. Inanna/Ishtar was a certified badass, but that didn't make Mesopotamian civilization any less male-dominated. Athena was a powerful war goddess, and she was the eponymous divine patron of a city with one of the most misogynistic societies ever to develop.

But the fact that this was historical hogwash did not mean that this idea that Jews and monotheism were responsible for the patriarchy didn't have a lot of popularity and prominence during the second wave feminist movement, especially in people who floated to the spiritual side of that movement, ie goddess worship, witchcraft, certain forms of neopaganism. This is the context in which Lilith entered the Gentile witchy and neopagan consciousness.

So Lilith's appeal to a lot of Gentile witches and neopagans, both at the time and now, relies on the idea of "reclaiming" her as the fierce Goddess that she's supposedly is, from those evil patriarchal Jews who clearly have been lying about her, to slander her divine feminine awesomeness. This is the subtext to the ask I answered above in the original post.

So when I wrote my post about three different alternatives to Lilith for Gentile witches and/or neopagans: https://a-s-fischer.tumblr.com/post/724297755667873793/yo-i-had-this-queued-and-didnt-realize-it-was I wrote describing alternatives which were similar to the Jewish folkloric version of Lilith, not the Lilith described in the previous paragraph. As such I was very aware of the fact that there were going to be plenty of Gentile witches and neopagans for whom none of the figures I suggested would be in any way appealing. I knew this because of something that I don't actually see talked about very often in discussions of cultural appropriation. We usually talk about it as the appropriators seeing something shiny in a culture that is not their own, that they want to use or experience. We talk about it as if the appeal were in the thing being taken, and this is true a lot of the time. But sometimes, the appeal is in the act of taking.

And the appeal, for a lot of people who venerate or want to work with Lilith, is in the antisemitism, whether they realize it or not. The appeal is in the ability to fall back on those old comfortable habits of mind absorbed from Christianity: the habits of mind that go "The Jews are lying about our glorious Goddess/Lord and savior, because she/he stood against their evil patriarchy/hypocracy and corruption." It's about leaving Jesus and the trappings of Christianity behind, without leaving behind that sense of safety and control that comes with having a scapegoat.

It feels good when you can blame those big systematic problems that you can't really do anything about on a person or a group of people, especially if that group of people is comfortably Other. It means you don't have to look at how you might be complicit in those big societal problems, as well as victimized by them, and it means you know who to hate. It means that you are striking a blow for justice and for your people when hurt the group you have designated are to blame, even if nothing ever changes, and the only thing you did was cause other people pain. Yes, those habits of mind sure are comfortable, and Christians have been killing us over them for as long as they've had institutional power. You can imagine that most Jews are not stoked to see a new group take them on and play them out.

And it's only within this framework, this conspiratorial antisemitic framework, that the idea that the Jews are lying about a figure from Jewish folklore, for whom that folklore is the only source, makes any sense at all, and it's only within this framework that Gentiles taking that figure, divorcing her completely from her folkloric roots, and then worshiping her as a goddess, would even be appealing. It's for this reason that the prominence of Lilith worship in the witchy and neopagan communities, deeply troubles me.

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shofarsogood

Gentiles stop appropriating Jewish culture challenge

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reblogged

Look I appreciate drawing comparisons between the Trump Administration and the Nazi Party. I’ve made several of those comparisons myself. But as both a trans woman and a Jew, I feel the need to make it absolutely clear that the Nazis did not start with Queer people.

The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was directly targeted by the Nazis between the 6th and the 10th of May, 1933. By that point, the concentration camp at Dachau was open, Jewish businesses were subject to massive government-backed boycotts, and Jews were barred from holding government-funded jobs.

And the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was targeted primarily because Magnus Hirschfeld, the institute’s founder, financer, and director, was Jewish. It was targeted because the Nazis considered sexuality and gender studies to be “Jewish science”.

The Nazis only ever had one primary and central target for total eradication. The Jews. A lot of other people were killed, imprisoned, and persecuted by the Nazis, and we should absolutely bring attention to those atrocities. But to say that the original targets were anyone besides Jews is a really insidious form of Holocaust denial.

Jinkx, the drag queen who said this, was raised Catholic, but began using drag as a way of reconnecting with her Jewish heritage. Which I think is wonderful in theory! But she also recently changed her middle name to Lilith. So I think she might need a little bit more of a robust background in Jewish Studies before she speaks authoritatively about the Holocaust. Or any Jewish topic, frankly.

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Look I appreciate drawing comparisons between the Trump Administration and the Nazi Party. I’ve made several of those comparisons myself. But as both a trans woman and a Jew, I feel the need to make it absolutely clear that the Nazis did not start with Queer people.

The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was directly targeted by the Nazis between the 6th and the 10th of May, 1933. By that point, the concentration camp at Dachau was open, Jewish businesses were subject to massive government-backed boycotts, and Jews were barred from holding government-funded jobs.

And the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was targeted primarily because Magnus Hirschfeld, the institute’s founder, financer, and director, was Jewish. It was targeted because the Nazis considered sexuality and gender studies to be “Jewish science”.

The Nazis only ever had one primary and central target for total eradication. The Jews. A lot of other people were killed, imprisoned, and persecuted by the Nazis, and we should absolutely bring attention to those atrocities. But to say that the original targets were anyone besides Jews is a really insidious form of Holocaust denial.

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reblogged

challenge for goyim: do you hate elon musk's nazism because you like the idea of hating nazis, or do you hate elon musk's nazism because nazism is inherently antisemitic

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reblogged

"The fascists hate you too" "they'll come for you next" bitch they are coming for me first. I'm fucking Jewish

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Idk who’s in charge of heyalma’s instagram but they need a raise yesterday

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reblogged

Since we are all so tired, propose a jumblr slumber party.

I love returning and seeing this cozy little den fill up with a constantly changing amount of goodies.

Debate topics are allowed to be both jewish and silly

i will bring the drinks and weed (for those of us who smoke)

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Palestine is Ruining the Left

I've taken this from Reddit because I've found it an interesting read, I did not write this myself, a user named u/ u/TooLittleNuance did. Feel free to reply and engage in converation.

I'm an Israeli-American leftist who has been active in American and Israeli politics for a number of years now. I have always advocated for human rights, equity, and self-determination for Palestinians who are oppressed(to different extents) under Israel, a nation that commits itself to Jewish domination of institutions. I always voted and campaigned for progressive Democrats and I assisted with the Israeli Meretz party from abroad. This is why I think the current Palestinian-sympathetic movement is ruining the left:

  1. Abandonment of Pragmatism - Just like the 2020 George Floyd protests("Defund the Police"), the Western left has completely embraced a suicidal strategy of idealistic radicalism. Many of those on the left insist the solution to the conflict is a one-state solution consisting of Palestine "from the River to the Sea". Unfortunately, they've appropriated the Palestinian mythology in their ambitions to magically destroy Israel and the ideology of Zionism by BDS somehow or supporting Palestinian "armed struggle". It doesn't take a lot of thought to see how both of those methods are incredibly ineffective and immoral to advocate for and implement. So, instead of a pragmatic approach, like empowering the Israeli left through donations and advocacy, supporting a reasonable solution(two-state or one-state under Israel), or calling for the ultimate humanitarian end to the war of a unilateral Hamas surrender, the Western left insists on a dream scenario that will never happen. This is the most egregious behavior of the left and it's their most common mistake(i.e. Vietnam). This is due to the fact that Palestinians, especially in Gaza, are suffering under disproportionate Israeli force with no Western movement to realistically end it. In fact, these Western leftists, due to these tactics, are assisting in empowering and legitimizing the far-right of Israel. They are the perfect strawman to turn people off to the left in Israel, which, in turn, results in a lengthened Palestinian suffering.
  2. Maximalism - There's a tendency on the left to outcompete each other in radicalism. It's not catchy or sexy to say "The war tactics that Israel uses are disproportionate and don't consider enough of the humanitarian cost", it has to be "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing" in order to provoke an emotional reaction from uneducated Westerners. It's not "the security policy of Hafradah has resulted in reduced human rights of Palestinians compared to Israelis", it has to be "Apartheid"(with the only legal precedent being South Africa). These maximalist statements immeasurably hurt the movement for true progress on Palestinian human rights. It results in a boy-who-cried-wolf situation: If Israel decides to transfer the entire Gazan population to the Sinai, what is that called? A "genocide"? Due to the present labeling of the war, nobody will believe it. What if Israel permanently transfers or kills 100,000 Palestinian civilians? 200,000? 1 million? What will that be called? How can it get worse than "genocide"? This Maximalist rhetoric is not only inaccurate, but it's incredibly damaging to describe the proportionate extent of Palestinian suffering, which is vital to any movement that faithfully advocates for an upliftment of Palestinian life and identity.
  3. Normalization of Bigotry - Explicit or latent Jew-Hatred is being increasingly embraced by radical sections of the Western left. Tropes such as "Zionist"(a euphemism for "Jew" for many) control of governments or blood libel. Wishing "Death to Zionists" or equating them with Nazis is, in most cases, latent Jew-Hatred. Regardless of your thoughts on the definition of Zionism(there is no definition, it is a meaningless term), it's clear that many believe that "Zionists" are just uppity Jews. Of course, this is genuinely believed by a small portion of the left. However, a substantial part of Western leftists has repeatedly failed to condemn this Jew-Hatred and to stop mirroring the language of these latent or explicit Jew-Haters. This is 1000x worse in the case of Israelis. For Western leftists, it's normal to call Israelis "colonizers", "demons", "rapists", and "child-murderers" on their social media without repercussion or introspective irony. As somebody belonging to the Israeli nationality, I have been desensitized to the insane amount of bigotry from those that I formerly respected. However, many Israelis or Jews aren't as depersonalized as I am, and they definitely take the bigotry to heart. What do you think results from that? Usually, a vote for Likud(Netanyahu's Party) or a donation to AIPAC. Thus, propagating a cycle of bigotry and continuing the suffering of Palestinians.
  4. Propaganda - This war has sparked the largest disinformation campaigns in human history. Multiple state entities (Israel, U.S., Russia, Iran, Qatar) and numerous private entities are pumping out loads of propaganda in order to manipulate uneducated Westerners into supporting their interests. Since October 7th, known Russian disinformation propagator, Jackson Hinkle, has skyrocketed in followers due to his ability to mislead Western leftists on the war. I have seen an unfathomable amount of reposts from Al Jazeera and MiddleEastEye, known Qatari state propaganda and major propagates of misinformation. I have always appreciated the value of institutional skepticism that embodied many of the historical and academic leftist leaders. However, right now, those values are completely thrown out in favor of Russia or Iran's geopolitical advocacy of "everything the West does is bad". The previous three points of behavior are certainly emboldened by the paid disinformation and bots that propagate anti-Western sentiment to destabilize Western democracy. Meanwhile, the basic interests of Palestinian civilians are left unregarded while these state operatives kill their only lifeline.
  5. Reactionary Resurgence - One of the main factors that attracted me to the left was its rejection of reactionary ideology(the establishment of traditional institutions from the past). For Israelis and Palestinians, reactionary rhetoric is normalized and encouraged in many cases. However, this reactionary ideology that has plagued those who share my nationality has spread to Western leftists in their advocacy for Palestine. Western leftists constantly appropriate the far-right and reactionary talking points that many radicalized Palestinians spout. An example would be the insistence on the exclusive indigeneity of Palestine from the River to the Sea, which abandons the progressive values of anti-nationalism and intersectionality. Another example would be the appropriation of Palestinian Martyrdom, in which many of them embraced the idea that human life can be inherently reduced to a political or national cause by their manner of death. This is a clear rejection of the values of individualism, secularism, and anti-nationalism.
  6. Historical Negligence - Those who are even a little bit informed on the Israel-Palestinian Conflict understand that the conflict is too complex to be treated as a soccer match of Israelis vs. Palestinians. Many Israeli and Palestinian leaders set roadblocks to an equitable peace, while many others progressed the conflict to a more positive state. Even more than the historical complexity of this conflict, evaluating the moral complexity requires a graduate degree in a relevant field with hundreds of hours of research. I typically advise not to trust anybody's commentary of the conflict with any less credibility than the previous sentence. However, the Western left has instead decided to follow the historical and moral analysis of demagogues. There's constantly factually wrong or misleading historical information on many of these Palestinian-sympathetic accounts. An example is the map of a "disappearing Palestine" that millions have reposted, a blatantly misleading map meant to depict "Zionist colonization", meanwhile, neglecting the historical borders of the conflict. There are many other forms of historical negligence that they commonly employ that are extremely damaging for understanding the conflict.

In conclusion, Western leftists are keeping up with the Western traditions of white saviorism and interfering with this particular trendy foreign conflict. I could have written a few more grievances that I have of the Western left(including the embracement of far-right Islamist groups) but I wanted to keep the post relatively short. In several months, Western leftists will forget about the Gazans suffering under the disproportional force of the IDF. Nobody will self-criticize the ideas or tactics that they engaged in, meanwhile, the Israeli left-wing and reliable non-Hamas Palestinian advocacy organizations are left in the dust by an ineffective white-savior-esqe Western movement. Not only that but due to all of these factors making the left look like lunatics, Biden and the Democrats are being affected in the polling, which may result in Trump being elected, a terrible outcome for Palestinians.

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abracadaze

i feel so bad for nikola tesla like imagine spending years beefing with a guy who has conned the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and you end up dying broke and starving and alone and then 100 years later another guy cons the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and he's doing it all IN YOUR NAME. he must be rolling in his grave like a fucking rotisserie chicken

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satusepiida

His ghost is setting those cars on fire actually

I hadn’t really considered “the agnostic demigod of electromagnetism is the reason Musk’s companies fail” before, but I like the concept. 

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tbh the one hundred thousand dollars I spent on my sociology degree has so far been really beneficial for jumblr and has been utterly meaningless in my real life and career. take from that what you will

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