#great story
Why I Live Alone Off Grid (story 33)
During World War II, fighter planes would come back from battle with bullet holes. The Allies found the areas that were most commonly hit by enemy fire. They sought to strengthen the most commonly damaged parts of the planes to reduce the number that was shot down.
A mathematician, Abraham Wald, pointed out that perhaps there was another way to look at the data. Perhaps the reason certain areas of the planes weren’t covered in bullet holes was that planes that were shot in those areas did not return. This insight led to the armor being re-enforced on the parts of the plane where there were no bullet holes.
i always think it’s so fun to be like ~okay well what keeps a vampire away if you’re not christian :3 would a magen david do it for a jew haha*~ but i do also frankly think it’s like. like… moderately deep sigh. we all KNOW why it’s jsut christianity that keeps the blood-sucking fiends away, right? like we’re all on the same page about what the bottom line here is, right? we all get it? before we have fun and get silly… do we all… like… does everyone actually know why we’re here?
#*it would not bc that’s not how cultural differences work. cannot simply copy-paste jewish necklace over xtian necklace & get same result.
and i have said a lot in the replies of this post that i just want to consolidate but essentially: this is not just that (as in the tag) you can’t just copy paste one symbol with very specific cultural connotations to replace another one with very different ones, this has to do with e g what cultural anxieties vampires embody. so like the vampire is a very literal amalgamation of literal beliefs about jews (that they drink the blood of christians, that they are attempting to infiltrate the upper class or that they are in fact already dispersed invisibly throughout it and thence forth exert undue influence, etc) in addition to other cultural anxieties around (in the case of dracula, eg) reverse colonization and concerns around immigration and xenophobia (…in this case: towards eastern european jews), as well as cultural anxieties around sex and sexuality (…not for nothing but this is often a component of antisemitism from medieval times well into the present day)
so like i think it’s fine to be doing this kind of fun thought exercise it just really feels like it’s missing the point to sit down and be like how would a jew fend off a vampire when a vampire Is a jew, in the sense that a vampire is an embodiment Of antisemitic stereotypes and canards and so forth and so on. the horror of a vampire is “jews exist and are out there, invisibly preying on good christians and trying to infiltrate the echelons of power”; that IS the thing that is overpowered by the crucifix (a sign that christianity Is the true religion). the crucifix is “solving” that cultural anxiety around the jewish by positing the supremacy of the christian. that’s its function in this mythology, which makes it doubly ineffectual to simply replace it 1:1 with a jewish religious symbol - the vampire is inherently an interfaith monster in many ways, it is about (among other things) the interplay between differing religious groups, and any kind of Take has to at least partially take that into effect or at least think about these things.
what does it mean that (for example) willow rosenberg, a jew, put a crucifix on her wall to keep out vampires? there’s something to be said there about assimilation, so like i do Get why it’s more fun to be like, well what if she could just use a magen david instead, right? but that doesn’t in any way grapple with what the Source of the horror of vampires is (i.e. the sexual and religious other who preys on the faithful and can be overpowered by christian religious authority).
imo a more interesting Take is, like, the vampire existing In the social space Of antisemitism; the horror of vampires from a jewish perspective being for example the looming threat of violence and retaliation and antisemitism; being forcibly identified As a monster against your will; seeing the living (un-living) stereotype as what it is and being unable to communicate that. something more in that space.
like, this is not to say that jewish folklore doesn’t have these kinds of undead spirits and monsters - obviously, it does, and i am also interested in vampire Takes that draw more on a jewish worldview and existing folklore. but part of the Fun or Impact of the vampire Is its cultural omnipresence and legibility as an extremely Recognizable kind of monster, and playing with the … underpinnings and understandings Of that very specific cultural, like, milieu… is part of. the fun. so i like a jewish take on vampires i am jsut… less compelled by trying to figure out what the 1:1 jewish equivalent of holy water is than i am by trying to actually tweak on Themes and Resonances
have you read the story “Blood Libel” by Leigh Ann Hussey? I think you would like it. Read it once and now I think about it all the time.
“"As I see it,” [Rabbi] Simcha was saying, “your problem is not that you are nosferatu, but that you are a man alone.”
THIS ROCKS THANK YOU
