it’s worth considering that anti zionists who don’t focus on class issues still might not consider the jewish bourgeoisie the enemy. that’s what worries me. that when the sides are finally drawn up, it will be shown that their anti-zionism was based in sentimentality and notions of jewish liberation.
Is anybody here talking about DeSean Jackson? He posted a (false) quote from HITLERwith extremely anti Semitic rhetoric demonizing American Jews.
Apparently Jackson has issued an apology after the NFL called his post “inappropriate”, and that was the end of the story? The post was:
So he’s quoting a mass murdering genocidal maniac, in hopes to call attention to racism? And now the world has forgiven him after one mediocre apology?
Oh, and Stephen Jackson chimed in to say that DeSean was “speaking the truth”
The Jews don’t forgive you, DeSean and Stephen. Hoping the social media world can spare some “cancel” juju on this guy right here.
Christians (specifically Protestants): we have little versions of our sacred text that we carry around in our pockets to pull out if we encounter something and want guidance. The version used during sermons and in church are the same ones that we carry with us
Jews: you can read the torah and Tanakh in a normal book if you want. But if you want a torah you can use as a congregation? *cracks knuckles* you must prepare paper made from the skin of a kosher animal and special ink and a quill made from a turkey feather and you must use no metal in the preparation process because metal is used in the creation of weapons for war and before you even think about actually started to write you must take The Holy Bath to purify yourself and ritually blot out the name of Amalek, the sworn enemy of the Jewish people and every time you write the name of god on the scroll you must say it out loud and recite a special prayer and if you mess up one letter you have to start over and when the scroll is finished you must wrap it in tapestries and pretty cloth and shit and then put little crowns on the end and then put it in a Super Special Box in the synagogue so every time it’s time to read it you can open the Super Special Box and everyone can gawk at the Ultra Big Boy Important Text and the words of god within the scroll. this entire process takes about a year to complete and is done by special sofer’s that devote their lives to making Torah’s specifically and when you read from the torah you must use a little tiny pointer in the shape of a hand so your hands don’t mess up the paper. Oh, you think I kid? You think I jest?
Think again.
(rb encouraged for everyone. Share the sacred baby hands with the goyim. Everyone deserves to know about the sacred baby hands)
I’ve spent years making post after post trying to pinpoint the exact thing that Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket) did differently than J.K. Rowling, which caused him to somehow turn Olaf into an amazingvillain while Snape is still causing hatred and controversy in the fandom a decade later.
And after mentioning something in passing in another post, it suddenly hit me what that difference was.
J.K. Rowling approached her character with the mentality that a person can be redeemed if its revealed that they couldhave been a good person but circumstance and tragedy got in the way. She sees the fact that you could be forced into being a horrible person as a huge tragedy and tries to emphasize what could have been. She doesn’t just do it with Snape (Dumbledore’s another great contender) but Snape’s arguably her biggestvictim when it comes to this. She shows you what his life was like and lets you know what couldhave been if only this had changed or that had changed. And she does so in a way that makes you feel sympathetic towards Snape, enough so that you’re supposed to totally agree with Harry when he names his childafter him. Because sure he wasn’t that great but he couldhave been had the situation been different.
And Daniel Handler begins doing the same thing with Olaf. After books upon books of building him up to be this evil guy, he abruptly releases one of the most tragic backstories in villain history, making you realize that Olaf‘s life could have been a lot different had he not been forced into certain situations due to tragedy and circumstance. And like Rowling, Handler also presents this as something that’s tragic. But here’s where he differs.
Because Rowling’s stance is: “This character could have been this instead and can you imagine how wonderful that would have been, had it not been for these circumstances?”
Whereas Handler’s stance is, “Well yeah, this is what the character could have been but this is what he ended up becoming and like it or not, this is who he is and this is who he’ll be remembered for.”
Rowling wants you to know that doing horrible things doesn’t make you a horrible person because there could be a rhyme or reason to your actions. A solid grey morality.
Handler wants you to know that doing horrible things doesmake you a horrible person because no matter what the motif is, you’re still doing horrible things and will be remembered for said horrible things.
Which is infinitely more tragic, infinitely more morally ambiguous, and infinitely more interesting.
J.K. Rowling tried to redeem Snape.
But Handler? Handler managed to redeem Olaf and not redeem him at the same time. Handler made his backstory tragic and he showed the reader exactly how things could have ended up, causing you to sympathize with the villain. But he also showed the reader exactly how things didend up, reminding you that no matter what could have been, it’s not what happened; instead we have this evil man who has done horrible things that are far too heinous to take back, no matter how much he may want to.
And while Rowling and many other YA authors took the approach that it’s never too late to redeem yourself and become the good person you should have been all along, Handler straight up took the, “Nope, for some people it’s far too late and no matter how much they may want to redeem themselves, they never will and they’ll have to die knowing that they are hated.”
And I don’t care how much you love Harry Potter, Handler’s approach to this character and the overall bleak philosophy and moral implications is on a whole other level of writing! I think the only other piece of fiction I’ve ever seen that approaches this philosophy of un-redemption is Bojack Horseman and you can still argue that Handler does it better because he’s able to scale it down so that kids can understand it, even if they don’t want to.
And yet, at the end of the day, Handler’s entire philsophy of how you might not be able to redeem yourself can really be summarized in one gif:
I feel like this stems fundamentally from Handler’s Jewishness as opposed to Rownling’s Christianity. Christians believe we’re all sinners, but we can be saved at any time in life through Jesus (details vary by sect). On the other hand, Jews believe that there ARE things that cannot be forgiven, evil deeds that you cannot be redeemed from after they’ve happened…
Because forgiveness involves being forgiven, and you can’t forgive someone for murdering you (because you’re dead)
Equally important is that Christianity tends to think that not being forgiven is the worst possible thing that can happen, since it results in eternal torture. Judaism doesn’t have eternal damnation, so it doesn’t have the same need for everything to be forgiven.
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
Hey everyone, uhhhh, my partner just got furloughed due to the pandemic so if anyone was thinking about grabbing something from my store, now would be an excellent time. Sharing this post would be highly appreciated as well. https://gumroad.com/roseberrycomix
Edit January ‘22 because for some reason this post is still getting notes: this was originally posted in summer ‘20. My partner and I have new jobs now. I appreciate shares and sales always, but please don’t feel obligated because that particular financial crisis has passed.
Your friendly Black History Month reminder that Black Jews are JEWS.
Born Jews, Jews by choice, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Ashkenazic, Sephardic, Mizrahi, Israeli, diaspora…they are an integral part of all of our communities and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.
We still have work to do as a community to uplift Jewish POC, particularly Black Jews, but to my Black Jewish friends out there know that I see you and I will keep trying to do the work.
im singehandedly repairing jewish-goyische relations through my outreach with my facebook friends
I briefly forgot there were normal humans named Elijah and wondered why this person thought they were getting messages from Actual Prophet and Messiah-Herald Elijah the Tishbite.
….yeah me too.
Me three.
Imagine getting visions of someone else’s holy prophet and having to text your friends like “….what am I supposed to do with that?”
“hey he’s back did you study this”
Getting a message from a prophet telling you to do things and instead texting your friends “wtf is this?” is very, very Jewish.
Naomi Ellis and her her husband Seth spent Friday morning — the morning after the sixth night of Hanukkah — trying to explain to their three young sons why someone had vandalized the menorah the family had put out on their yard by twisting the metal pieces into the shape of a swastika.
The Ellis family had only built the 7-foot-tall menorah on the front lawn of their home in Chandler, Arizona, because their sons, ages 5, 7 and 9, had asked their parents if the family could decorate their home like the neighbors did for Christmas, the Washington Postreported.Read more.
The Ellis family had only built the 7-foot-tall menorah… because their sons, ages 5, 7 and 9, had asked their parents if the family could decorate their home like the neighbors did for Christmas.
This is America in the 21st century. Please reblog, even if you’re not Jewish. Especially if you’re not Jewish. Spread awareness and let your Jewish followers know that we’re not alone.
Purim: They tried to kill us, we survived. Let’s tell the story, wear silly costumes, and get wasted. (Optional: have a carnival or a play!)
Passover: They enslaved us, God freed us. Remember this via a big ceremony/feast and then don’t eat bread for a week. This is a big one; you’re going to have to clean your house and host all your relatives.
Tu B'Shevat: It’s Earth Day, let’s eat some fruit.
Simchas Torah: We read the entire Torah every year, and we got to the end! Let’s have a dance party and then start all over again!
Tisha B'Av: They destroyed our temples. That sucked.
Rosh HaShanah: Happy New Year! It’s time to ask (and grant) forgiveness for the wrongs done in the past year, pledge to do better, and wish for a sweet new year. And go to synagogue for HOURS.
Yom Kippur: Rosh HaShanah’s somber counterpart. God decides on this day your fate for the next year. Repent your sins, hope for forgiveness, and fast. (And go to synagogue for HOURS.)
Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Sukkot: Harvest festival! Sleep in a hut under the stars.
Shemini Atzeret: Man, I don’t even know?
Shavuot: God gave us the Torah! That was pretty nice of him.
Chanukah: They busted up our temple and tried to forcibly convert us. We responded with guerilla warfare. Let’s eat some fried food. Candles!
So basically the entire Jewish holiday calendar is giving the middle finger to death and high-fiving, with or without various combinations of prayer and foods.
Yup. Or as we say, “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.”
thank you for the desc’s bcs they are beautiful and i am now educated
A handy table for everyone:
Y’all have no idea how happy it makes me to see my goyim followers reblogging this. Really. It means the world to me.
