Zee

homochadensis:

fortunatelychaoticphantom:

chiribomb-deactivated20220820:

Unfriendly reminders about “progressive” antisemitism:

- “Judeo-xtian” is a false term made up by xtians to diminish their culpability in trying to erase Jewish culture, legitimise their supersessionist (fundamentally and inescapably antisemitic) beliefs that xtianity “completes” Judaism, and is also sometimes used to exclude Muslims from xtian-dominated Western society. Do not use it to describe Judaism. Do not use it to describe xtianity. Do not use it to describe religion. Do not use it to describe western culture. Do not use it to form your beliefs about structures of power. Just do not use it. It is a lie.

- Jews are a tiny, persecuted minority, and Judaism is an indigenous ethnoreligion. Efforts to deny this are ahistorical at best and genocidal at worst.

- Jews are not the ones responsible for the xtianity that oppressed you or others, and they are not responsible for the xtian fundamentalism you are angry about. This comes from the incorrect and antisemitic belief promoted by those same xtians that Judaism is 90% the same as xtianity. It is not. Not even of the texts we “share.” Our interpretations are very different. When you yell about “Old Testament law” being the source of your oppression, you better always fucking follow that up with “according to fundamentalist xtianity,” because blaming Jews for things like homophobia and anti-abortion movements shows that you have zero understanding of Judaism.

- If you are not Jewish, Judaism is not yours to “reclaim” or say your people invented. Doing so is violent appropriation. This is true even if you are not white and/or xtian. It is not the radical stance against xtian dominance that you think it is. You do not have the right to trample on a minority ethnic group anymore than they do to trample on you. They have the right to call you out on it. Respect this. The “real Jews” are Jews. Period. When you say otherwise, you are contributing to the worst antisemitic tropes about how Jews are not legitimate and that Judaism is defined by theft and deceit. You do not have the right to perpetuate this, regardless of what white xtianity has inflicted on you. Take that up with white xtianity.

- Antisemitism is not religious bigotry. Antisemites do not hate Jews for their religious practices. Antisemites hate Jews for their existence as a culture and a people, regardless of whether an individual Jew is religious. Judaism is an ethnoreligion and it does not work like xtianity or Islam with regards to cultural identity. Antisemitism is racialised. If you think “the Holocaust was a crime against white people” is an edgy take, it shows that you’re a moron who doesn’t know the first thing about the Holocaust and therefore should probably not open your mouth. Antisemitism is racism, and antiracism that tolerates antisemitism is not antiracism. Do fucking better.

- Conspiracy theories about “the new world order,” shadowy global elites, reptilians, worldwide Zionist string-pulling etc are antisemitic. You cannot be antiracist and promote these things. You cannot be progressive, radical, or leftist and promote these things. If you think you’re a leftist and you promote these, you are a hypocrite and you’re kidding yourself.

- Jews are not white. White is a social category, not based on complexion. Some Jews are conditionally white. Many Jews are not conditionally white or white-passing in any way. Many Jews consider themselves to be in multiple ethnic or racial categories. None of these things change the fact that Jews are an ethnoreligious group. Jewish identity is a complicated topic because white people don’t consider us one of them and PoC don’t consider us one of them and we are constantly left in the middle space. If you are not Jewish, you should not be butting into these discussions. And even in intra-Jewish conversations, there is still an obligation for people in one subcategory to respect the way other Jewish subcategories may define themselves. Ashkenazim don’t have the right to talk over Sephardim about Sephardic identity and so on. It is not a matter of one group having more power than another, because that is very context-dependent. That’s just a matter of respect and applies to all subcategories with regards to every other subcategory.

- Dictating Jewish identity to Jews or talking over us about antisemitism is an act of oppression and unacceptable, period. This is the case even if you are part of a marginalised group yourself. Marginalisation in one area does not give you a free pass for bigotry and violence in an area where you are not. It is not less harmful coming from a marginalised person than from a non-marginalised person, because you are still contributing to the spread of these hateful beliefs. Every person in the world, regardless of what their identities are, has an obligation to clean up their own houses when it comes to being complicit in bigotry against a marginalised group.

- Jews are not your enemy. Marginalised groups need to work together. Do not fall easy prey to the manipulative propaganda of abled cishet white xtians who are more than happy to see us blame each other for our problems than the real culprits. If you have found yourself repeating stuff like the judeo-xtian lie, do not get defensive or loudly bewail it. Just listen to Jews and do better in the future. It’s that simple. But a lot of you would rather side with the privileges you have than with the marginalisation we share. Remember that privilege is not a ladder. Any non-Jew has the privilege of not being subject to antisemitism, even if they are also a religious or ethnic minority (this works for all kinds of specific oppression in all directions; a Muslim in the US has the privilege of not facing antisemitism at the same time as a Jew has the privilege of not facing islamophobia and at the same time as both face the oppression of being a religious minority. Whenever you are on the majority side of a specific oppression, you are potentially able to reinforce that oppression, because these oppressions do not take identical forms and are not held up by the same tropes. Do not think you are immune). So when you talk over Jews, what you’re doing is siding with your privilege of not facing antisemitism. Telling non-Jews to deal with their antisemitism is not to make them feel bad, but it’s also not our responsibility to comfort you and assure you that it’s ok to be antisemitic. Put on your big girl pants and deal with it. We need to be allies. The white xtian establishment has told you we are your enemies because they know we are an easy target you already hate. Don’t prove them right.

- Grabbing for excuses as to why you don’t have to care about antisemitism IS antisemitism. If your support for the rights and safety of a minority indigenous ethnoreligion is contingent on them appropriately grovelling and proving themselves, or on there being no Jew who does anything you don’t like, or on the basis of your half-baked opinions on some distant geopolitical conflict you only know through propaganda, the blunt truth is that you don’t care about minority rights at all. Human rights are not conditional, and if you use excuses to keep Jews out of your definition of social justice, you’re a fraud and a hypocrite. Leftist movements and spaces have waaaay too much of this happening and it is disgusting. I shouldn’t have to add that I also include Jews and every other group in this expectation, but leftist whataboutism is so strong that I know if I don’t, none of you will understand that it’s because I shouldn’t have to and will choose to latch onto it by deflecting from your own crimes into accusations about Jews. I can’t even say “it’s sad that Jewish civilians died in a hate crime” without you disingenuous dumbasses screaming OH SO YOU UNCONDITIONALLY SUPPORT ALL THE ACTIONS OF THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT unless I add a disclaimer that says I don’t.

- Latching onto the one minority Jewish voice as a way to legitimise a position the majority of Jews are telling you is antisemitic is, you guessed it, antisemitic. This is not functionally different for antisemitism than it is for any other group. How would you like it if someone who was not a part of your group kept running their mouths with excuses and crap and said that they were allowed to do so no matter how many people told them to knock it off, just because they found some fringe member of your group who agreed with them? If you’re part of a marginalised group, you probably already know very well how frustrating and offensive it is when outsiders do this to you. It is no different when you do it to us. Watch yourself to make sure you are not centring a token who agrees with you at the expense of everyone else telling you to stop being so fucking racist. Everyone can benefit from this.

I encourage non-Jews to share this, but do not talk over us.

Also, most of this is directed most heavily at people who consider themselves to be left-wing, because they’re the only ones I have even a slim hope for. That should not be taken as saying that antisemitism ONLY comes from the left. If you are a leftist whose kneejerk response is “but we’re not as bad as the nazis!” you’ve missed the point by a mile, and you need to read the second-to-last point again until you understand the meaning of personal responsibility for your hand in perpetuating bigotry. If you think this about attacking/blaming a single group, or if you don’t think it includes your group, you’re wrong. It is not “someone else’s” problem. It is your problem. If you are right-wing and smugly consider this justification of your claims that antisemitism is a left-wing problem only, consider taking a walk out of an aeroplane without a parachute instead.

Just a couple of days ago I’ve had a lovely exchange with someone here who referred to the author Leigh Bardugo (half Ashkenazi, half mizrahi) as a “white woman” and claimed they stopped reading the first Grisha book because it “felt a bit too white” and “the way white people write oppression always make [them] upset”. Now we don’t have time to unpack all of that, and every Irish author in history (and many others) will have to forgive me. Like I told that person, I don’t care if someone likes or doesn’t like a book, I haven’t even read it yet myself, but Bardugo is a Jewish woman, therefore not a white woman, and a half Mizrahi woman on top of that, who’s story is specifically inspired by the persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe. As a response, that person kept calling Bardugo a “white jew” and didn’t understand what that has to do with anything they said, was appalled that I had the nerve to say something like this (I shit you not) on Black History Month (because apparently talking about racism and oppression is very much not in the spirit of said month. Also, glad to know the entire world needs to operate and behave according to US calendars or something?) and then threatened to bully me if I dare answer back.

Anyway, there is a long and complicated history regarding Jewish people, and especially Ashkenazim (but not only), and especially-especially Ashkenazim in the US, calling themselves white, which amongst other reasons includes 2000 years of oppression and self hatred and trauma from not being allowed to be a part of the societies we lived in and being persecuted for that as well as the rather simplified view of ethnicity in the US particularly and its reliance on mostly skin color. But the simple fact is that we are an ethnoreligious group, and unfortunately there simply is no word in English for “Ada” and the complexity of Jewish ethnicity. We are first and foremost a Levantine people, and as a people we are genetically and culturally more closely related to each other than we are to the people we’ve lived among throughout history (there’s a reason why in genetic testing you get “Ashkenazi” and not white. Also, so many genetic mutations… do NOT search “Ashkenazim” in google scholar if you want to live in a fantasy land with no higher risk for particular cancers and other wonderful inflictions). And if not for that simple truth, then like op said, we are not white because white people never viewed us as their own, and treated us accordingly, and non-white people around the world basically did the same, even if less violently (usually…).

The “whitefication” of Jews in recent decades is inherently antisemitic, and like every time our ethnicity is put to question (Inquisition flashbacks anyone?), it is never to our favor. We have been denied “whiteness” for millennia because being white in Europe was equivalent to being human, and Jews were simply not humans to them, but sub-human and therefor more easy to harm. And right now, in the post-modern leftist circles, being white is the “bad” thing, and so our minority card in predominantly white countries is being revoked and our access to leftist discussions and places is being restricted and conditioned (you know, Israel and all that…). And so we are usually referred to as white to, at best, block our access to leftist circles and from speaking about our history and reality, and at worst, to deny our connection to our ancestral homeland as “white colonialists invaders” (since god forbid there were TWO native peoples coming from, in broad strokes, the same place! That’s a bit too complicated for people to comprehend, so let’s just stick to black and white worldviews. It’s easier to cancel people on twitter that way…). And all of this is done for the exact same reason we were denied whiteness in the first place – it’s antisemitism baby. It’s about dehumanizing us again and again, framing us as the monsters in whatever terminology is most popular at the moment.

So for that reason and that reason alone, not to mention the complexity of being Hebrew as a whole, that I refuse to let non-Jewish people talk about us, ANY of us, as white (and frankly, even within the Jewish community I beginning to question the usefulness of such a term, since there seems to be some disconcerting directions this conversation is starting to go in in some circles).

And I will NOT refer to my political ideologies as a shield to speak about basic facts regarding Jewish people since THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS.

The whole “Ashkenazi/Eastern Euro Jews are European :^)))” argument can just be defeated with milk. Look at lactose intolerance rates in Europe and compare them to Israel, a country with 90% of its population being lactose intolerant - in which, 80% of Ashkenazim alone are lactose intolerant. This is why were Cheese™ people and not milk people. 

academia-core:

nothing is as tender as annotating your favourite books. it’s like leaving a piece of your heart on the pages for somebody else to find.

radioheaddyke:

why don’t you read a poem about the sunrise written 5 centuries ago and contemplate the fact that we have been writing about the same sun for centuries upon centuries and then maybe you’ll calm down

radioheaddyke:

why don’t you read a poem about the sunrise written 5 centuries ago and contemplate the fact that we have been writing about the same sun for centuries upon centuries and then maybe you’ll calm down

glasswaters:

i’m thinking tonight about masterpieces. michelangelo looked at the sixtine chapel and saw; nothing to preserve. virgil wanted his aenid burned and forgotten; only to be saved at the behest of an emperor who thought it flattery. kafka instructed his friend to burn everything he’d ever written - too personal was it, too unfinished.

they were ignored.

instead, their work was taken and held and published and thrown to be gawked at. instead, an emperor, a pope, a friend, took from within the cavities of them their choices; their art.

tumblr rolls out post+. twitter rolls out tip jars. youtube takes half of what creators earn. on social media, there is a ko-fi or a patreon and a polished face in every bio. i show my poems to my mother and she asks if I will publish them before she says anything else. emily dickinson instructed her sister to burn her poetry.

her sister did not listen.

we are a community, says tumblr, we should give back to creators. my last poem had 50 notes. six of those were reblogs that weren’t mine. i lie in bed at 2am and stare at my bright phone screen and the way netflix’s library grows thinner and thinner. the first ad on tumblr that i can reblog is for amazon. amazon takes more than half of what authors earn.

kafka’s friend took barely finished work and hammered it into structure. he is the only reason we know of him.

my father wrote a book and a play when I was barely big enough to reach his knees. when i try to talk to him about writing, he shrugs.

no one wanted to publish it, he says. so i don’t write anymore.

i am filled with poems I have never published, books I haven’t written. There are little snippets of them scattered throughout my life. I link to my ko-fi on my tumblr.

-

asked capitalism of the artist: what is art, if not for consumption? who does art benefit, if it is not consumed? why create at all if you do not market it? who are you, frothing at the mouth about someone publishing someone else’s poems? who are you to hate your magnum opus? what is art, if not in relation to its reception? if no one sees it, how is it art?

said the artist, baring their teeth: it’s mine.

classically-lit-memes4u:

I hate it when I talk wistfully about the ancient world and then people are like “you wouldn’t survive back then” yeah obviously I would die immediately but do you think achilles would be able to survive in the modern world if he had to send one polite email? no