Jewish History - Blog Posts

I'm remembering my great grandfather and his little sister, who survived but also lost their whole family, and my family still deals with that trauma today.

Please take 60 seconds for the victims. They were people too, and deserve to be remembered.

hey um. If y’all see this post. Take a minute. Yes, a full sixty seconds. If that’s too hard, thirty. Today is international shoah/holocaust Memorial Day. Take a moment for the victims. It is needed more than ever.

I’m remembering my great grandmother and grandfather, who lost everyone but survived. And lived to make my grandmother, my mother, and me.

I'm maybe remembering to post this on the last day of the month, but here is an interesting fact about DC Comics for Jewish history month:

Harley Quinn canonically has a relative that was at the Holocaust.

When she accidentally came back to the past and came across Nazis, she recalled her and was filled with anger about her story on took that on the Nazis.

She kicked Nazis ass's to avenge her aunt (and also because they were Nazis and she hates them).

What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole Torah; the rest is just commentary.

Hillel the Elder

Traditionally religious people often claim that the Torah requires them to exclude, exile, or condemn transgender people, but the Torah never commands or encourages that kind of behavior. None of the Torah's laws requires the Israelite community to treat people whose appearance or  behavior doesn't fit binary norms as defiled or defiling.

— Joy Ladin, “The Soul of the Stranger: Reading G-d and Torah from a Transgender Perspective”  

Something I think a lot of xians don’t get is that while Judaism and Tanakh are absolutely essential to xianity and it making any kind of sense, Judaism in no way needs anything xianity has to offer, nor is modern rabbinic Judaism dependent on the existence of xianity. We exist entirely outside of and independent of xianity and Judaism (both as it was before the fall of the Second Temple as well as modern rabbinic Judaism) would have continued just fine without xianity. If xianity somehow disappears from the earth entirely, Judaism will still be here and will still make sense. 

On the other hand, if Judaism and all of its texts were to disappear, xianity is no longer intelligible. And that is what I mean when I say that xianity is parasitic on Judaism. This is not a mutual or symbiotic relationship, no matter how hard xians seem to want to think it is. 

by yiddishfeminist

It's a cruel subconscious ingraining of double standards, really. I absolutely suggest looking into actual, unbiased history of all this and only then can people reach an educated conclusion. But I doubt that many people would take that advice...

This probably won’t be super coherent, because I haven’t slept in 24 hours and I’m basically 80% caffeine, but I’ve been thinking about how western (usually white, though not always) goyim get mad whenever a Jew says “antizionism is usually a cover for antisemitism.” And how their answer is always, “my problem is Israel! Not Jews!”

Because here’s the thing: the west has a long, long history of culturally ingrained antisemitism. You may not think your hatred towards Israel and the diaspora Jews who have any connection to Israel is because it’s a Jewish state. But society has subconsciously primed you from birth to see Jews as inherently shady liars who have all the power and money and control, and who claim victimhood to hide this. You have been groomed to mistrust us, to see us as oppressors, to see us as intrinsically unethical. And you are aware that Israel is a Jewish state, regardless of whether you consciously think it matters. So when literally anything goes down in Israel/Palestine? Your first thought isn’t that these are two marginalized groups of people who were forced into the situation by both the west and the Middle East, then pitted against each other. Your first thought is that of course the Israelis are evil oppressors. They’re over-privileged white colonizers who have all the power and money and control. We need to make sure they all leave Israel, live under a second age of pogroms, or die (which they won’t, according to you, because they’re rich white people with a mansion in New Jersey). And you may believe that you don’t feel this way because they’re Jewish, but you don’t seem to realize that it’s the subconscious, ingrained antisemitism that not only leads you to all of these conclusions, but that also leads you to independently attach historically diaspora-focused antisemitic tropes—tropes that’s existed for thousands of years and have nothing to do with Israel—to Israelis and beyond.

And then you wonder why we don’t trust you.