#jewish

[earlymodernlesbian]

the Jewish high holidays are coming up soon!!!!

goyim, these are days to avoid scheduling important events, meetings, etc:

Rosh Hashanah - evening of Wednesday, October 2nd - evening of Thursday, October 3rd (& some Jews will continue observing for an additional day, through the evening of Friday, October 4th)

Yom Kippur - evening of Friday, October 11th - evening of Saturday, October 12th

Jews, you do you and obviously your safety is paramount, but I really strongly recommend TAKING THESE DAYS OFF WORK even if you don't consider yourself particularly observant, even if you won't be spending the day in synagogue, even if you aren't fasting. Most Christians* don't go to work on Christmas even if they aren't going to church that day and are just having a secular celebration at home with family. Holidays mean different things to different people, but especially if your workplace has a policy supporting religious holiday observance, USE YOUR DAYS without guilt. Know that it actually makes it EASIER for other Jews when you do so, because it helps to prevent the whole conversation with a boss of "well that guy is Jewish and he said he doesn't need the day off because he's just going to go to evening services."

yes it sucks SO hard if you are in a type of job where you are put in a position where you are forced to use PTO or just lose pay for something that people of other religions get for free -- i'm more speaking to people who work in offices or similar type of jobs* where they may have holiday time off as a DEI initiative but feel guilty using it because i have been there!!!!! last year i was the only jew at my workplace who took off for yom kippur even though it was paid because the other jews said they didn't feel jewish enough to do it and they had a meeting that day!!!!!!

*obviously if you are an ER surgeon or something like that, YMMV here

[mylight-png]

Today, my school's Chabad held a Jewish joy/pride festival right in the middle of campus. They set up a bunch of booths with Jewish activities. There was a booth for braiding challah, making bracelets with our Hebrew names, various Jewish pride stencils to spray paint Chabad shirts. There were tables to pick up shabbat candle kits or wrap teffilin. Jewish music played loudly (but without disturbing nearby classes of course) and people were dancing along to songs like Am Yisrael Chai, I'm a Jew and I'm Proud, Very Narrow Bridge, and other blatantly Jewish songs.

Most of my friends and I couldn't stop smiling. This spot in campus where just last year people were shouting for the destruction of our homeland and our families and us, after nearly a year of being shamed for our Jewish pride and being told we shouldn't be proud, and so much time spent on a campus filled with hate, we were bringing joy back to campus.

I feel like most of my latest posts have been fairly negative. It's hard not to write my heavy heart onto the screen, especially after the murder of Hersh and the other hostages, and just everything going on overall. But this festival reminded me of how much power Jewish joy holds.

If you're feeling upset about the war, I'm with you. Few days go by without tears shed or pain felt. But remember that being Jewish is infinitely more than antisemitism and loss. Being Jewish is joy, and it is pride. We are our ancestors' wildest dreams, we are all miracles, and we cannot forget this for a single moment.

Be joyful in a world filled with sorrow, and bring light with you wherever you go.

[kosherplasmid]

In a similar vein of my previous post. I just went to a lesbian orthodox wedding. It was normal. No one was rude or offensive. I cannot stress enough how deeply normal and average this wedding was. Aufruf, rabbi, yichud et al.

Religion, acceptance, progress, is very different online than it is offline. When we throw ourselves in great big debates online, it is important to remember that life isn't that complicated, and complex sounding as we make it out to be.

Sometimes people are frum and queer and that just how life is.

[orannotoren]

Bar / Bat Mitzvah Miku 🍬📜🎊

[jewish-culture-is]

Jewish culture is being asked to take off your hat (as per school dress code) and taking it off to reveal another, smaller, hat

.

[that-rad-jewish-girl]

Double standards are the name of the game when it comes to antisemitism “anti Zionism”.

“The pager and walkie attack was a declaration of war and a terror attack!” Okay….then what tf are all the rockets being launched over the northern border? Remember when Hezbollah bombed a soccer field and killed 12 children? What was that?

“The Palestinians are being killed - it’s a genocide!” No, it’s a war. What was Oct. 7th? Was that not a genocide? 1 million people have died from the Russia-Ukraine war…..is that a genocide? Are Ukrainians committing genocide right now by bombing Russia? How many civilians have died (on both sides)? Is that genocidal?

“Israel stole the land from Palestine and they need to give it back!!” I’m tired of this lie - it’s getting old. But even if you were right, what does it matter? I guess everyone who has ever migrated in the history of all time needs to move back? How far back should we go? The early white Americans were from England, sure, but before that they were from somewhere else. This is such an unproductive conversation to have it’s not even funny. I guess every country needs to close their borders and not allow any immigration. Oh wait! - you claim that’s apartheid and xenophobia. So the standard only applies to Israel?

“Israelis are white colonizers!” Again, a lie. A lie I’m tired of. But were we white when you put us in camps? Were we white when we were slaughtered for not being white? Were we white during every genocide to ever take place against our people? If you stuck me in front of a Nazi and said “she’s a Jew”, would that Nazi say I’m white? How dumb of a claim to say that we are white only because the most recent country some of us come from is a white one. Try applying that to any other ethnic or racial group. I guess every black person in the UK is white now. Why? Because they live in a white country. Ridiculous thought process.

Even more ridiculous is to talk of “Israeli occupation and colonialism” without talking about the history of Palestinians. Staging a coup in Jordan? Assassinating the Jordanian Prime Minister? When that didn’t work, they sent their troops to Lebanon instead. That’s why Hezbollah is in Lebanon today. That’s why they have control over Lebanon today. They went in as refugees before staging a coup and talking over the government. Hezbollah has direct control over much of the land there - only because of Palestinians invading under false pretenses and taking over. Native Lebanese people were slaughtered en masse, and many fled for their lives. But yeah, let’s talk about the big, bad, boogeyman Israel.

[aprettyjewishyear]

Austrian Mahzor (Festival Prayer Book). made of pierced, repousse, traced, engraved, and cast silver; and ink printed on paper. dated 1765-1855 and printed by Anton Schmid. now belongs to the Jewish Museum.

[kick-a-long]

i find it so desperately sad that goyim generally would be so much less antisemitic if jews started physically fighting back with guns or sticks in every country. calling for the murder of muslims all over the world, if the jewish population was big enough to have large scary groups of crazy fringe fundamentalist synagogues all over the world, a billion strong, that preached murder and hate so goyim could look down on jews like some noble savage in need of assistance and western education and protection. so we could be reformed in obvious patronizing ways because there were so many of us that we had militant violent fringe extremists, like christians and muslims have, mixed in with the normal jews.

if jews didn't have such a reputation for success and intelligence maybe conspiracy theories would stop blaming us for controlling the world. if we felt less in danger maybe we wouldn't be so obsessed with long term survival.

is antisemitism some warped form of envy? maybe. what sucks is that jews are no better or worse than anyone else. some jews are brutes and some are the most wonderful people imaginable, just like any other group. what sucks is we don't all live up to the reputation of tactical geniuses and wizards with mind control magic. all of us jews are just tired and abused humans who have lived with 2000+ years of generational trauma and the endless fall out from a popular jewish book written 3000+ years ago describing the best practices of jewish culture. It has some great stories, histories, life advice, diet recommendations, hygiene, and rules about how to treat others.

is that such a crime?

trying to show a path forward? not demanding anyone else follow those rules but wanting to do our best to follow them anyway? how to live a good life that makes the world better and makes you proud to have been on earth for the time you were there? jews fail to do this all the time, just like everyone else. I fail all the time. why are people so obsessed with that? people say shylock is a stereotyped antisemitic character but,

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."

so why do jews always have to be the better man? why do we have to apologize for being angry and sad and hating the people that attack us? that was written by Shakespeare, a christian in the 1600s who often was in debt to jewish money lenders, the only profession left to jews at that time. even he saw the double standard. it makes a good point.

now, i don't want vengeance, i don't want violence, but i feel vengeful. i feel angry that i am unsafe because of play actors and terrorist supporters who want revenge for jews existing but scream bloody murder when jews refuse to dig their own graves, beg forgiveness for ever being born, and lay down in them to be mocked and pissed on and abused in the worst ways imaginable for the entertainment and conquest of it. i want peace with them. they are as human as i am, full of foibles and anger. i want nothing to do with them. i want them to never come near a jew again for the rest of time.

i am sad. all i want is to feel my feelings and advocate for what is the most ethical and practical work around to a world filled with unending suffering while i am still alive. i want them on thier side to live in the world they want and me on my side to live in the world i want. why don't these children of all ages, lost in delusions of fantastical battles and ultimate good and evil, see that? why can't I be a human first as well as a jew first? why do they ask me to pick? why am i not allowed to pick?

it's been almost a year. we're all so tired.

I'm going to a music festival. I'm trying to decide whether to wear a star. why is it dangerous to wear a star around my neck?

[ruraljew]

question

to other converts/converts-in-progress,

at what point in your conversion did you begin wearing a magen david?

[a-s-fischer]

Antisemitism and the Nazi Worldview: a Guide for the Perplexed

While most people know the Nazis hated Jews, few people understand just how integral Jew-hate was to the Nazi philosophy. This leads into many of the misconceptions about Nazis and the holocaust that regularly pop up, so it bears discussing what Nazis believed about racism and the Jews.

The Nazi conception of "race" was much narrower and "scientific" than we think of it today. The Nazi conception of race was that humans were split into subgroups with distinct traits, that set them apart from each other and gave them advantages in a great and bloody contest of the races. These races pattern on better to ethnicities, nationalities, or even language groups, than race as we think of it today, which is why it would make sense in a Nazi framework to talk about an Irish race, or a Polish race, for example. And of course in the Nazi mind, these races were a real biological reality, and not a social and cultural construct, and the strength and purity of a fit race might be lost through race mixing.

And of course races were differently fit or unfit, superior or inferior, and through the races warring against each other in a battle of the fittest, the superior race would rise above the rest, and subjugate the earth. Hitler came of age in a time of scarcity, war, and famine, and he believed there was no way to feed the entirety of the human race, so eliminating the lesser races through this perpetual struggle of races against each other was the only way for humanity to survive. It was all very Darwinian except that it completely misunderstood how the Darwinian model of evolution actually works, since the unit of selection was the nonexistent race, not the individual.

This struggle of the races was in Hitler and the Nazis' conception not only natural and necessary, but good. Conquest and the slaughter of inferior races was good. The state of the world with nation states and silly notions like laws, and morals, this was bad and unnatural. Humanity, or the strongest race, needed to do away with this system, or humans would all perish of starvation in a degenerate race-mixed scrum. The Nazis were heros, looking to save humanity from this foul unnatural state it had been tricked into adopting.

Tricked by the machinations of one race. One race had broken away from the others, and learned how to hack the system, to survive over under the rule of other races, when it should have been destroyed as a weaker lesser race. This race figured out how to lie and cheat, and live off other races as a parasite, while controlling them from within with fake, unnatural, vile concepts of laws, ethics, notions of justice and compassion, human rights, and international cooperation. And also with money. That race was the Jews.

In the Nazi mind, other races might be lesser, weaker, worthy only of a slow starvation under Nazi rule, but Jews, Jews were unique, special. Weak but cunning, only the Jews had figured out how to subvert and pervert the noble struggle of the races. The Jews were not only especially hated in the Nazi mind but they also served an explanatory purpose. The Jews were the reason humans were not in what the Nazis viewed as a state of nature, and the reason that the areas hadn't eliminated all the other races and taken over the world already. And anything that went wrong for the Nazis was of course caused by Jewish manipulation. The Jews had to be stripped of their unnatural power and control, and eliminated quickly, to keep them from continuing to undermine the strongest race, the Aryan Germans.

Early on, there was some discussion about how this was to be done. The mass slaughter of Jews under this philosophy might have been inevitable but it wasn't obviously inevitable to all Nazis. The important thing was to reduce the Jews to a state of nature, to take away their unnatural control, and leave them in the position of any other lesser race. This is where ideas, like sending all the Jews to Madagascar, to "build their own state" but really to inevidably die in the wilderness, came from. If Jews were separated from their stronger hosts, the logic went, they would just be one more weaker race and they would die just the same. This was also why so many Nazis took a special delight in simply denying captive Jews the means of survival, leaving them to starve, freeze, and die of disease in a state of nature, without the resources they had parasitically leached out of their host races.

But that process took too long. There were simply too many Jews, and too many (to the Nazi mind) Jewish controlled enemies. As Germany and the Axis' began to lose the war, and then as that loss became increasingly only a matter of time, the Nazis ramped up their efforts to kill Jews, by bullet and by gas, because if they could kill enough Jews, surely that Jewish control over their enemies would break and the Aryans among those enemies what recognize their racial interest, and join with the Germans, giving them victory. Instead the resources poured into the wholesale murder of Jews were resources stripped from the Nazi war machine, hastening the Allied victory.

Antisemitism wasn't simply one more bigotry for the Nazis to tack onto their general racism. It was foundational to the Nazi conception of how the world functioned. It was the explanitory mechanism in the Nazis' conspiratorial framework. And with this philosophy at the core of Nazism, the Holocaust became not only inevitable, but the highest calling of the Nazis, their sacrifice for humanity, or at least what was left of humanity after the strongest race had triumphed over all the others. Very little about Nazism is unique. Their militarism, their glorification of violence and struggle, their racial pseudo-Darwinianism, certainly their conspiratorial antisemitism, all had plenty of precident long before they came on the scene. It was their particularly potent combination of these existing elements that made them Nazis. And in this combination, it was the Jew-hate which held everything together and which provided the energizing force.

[nimrochan]

This is how Jewish voices are silenced.

Literally all I asked was for suggestions from people who heavily criticized the attack on Hezbollah.

[spale-vosver]

Every time goyim bring up "well ackchually the Bible doesn't SAY man it says YOUNG BOY" I go a little more crazy because

1) that's the Greek translation, which is NOT THE ORIGINAL

2) the assumption that we as religious Jews must 100% follow the law of the Torah today as they were written is incredibly reductive and Christocentric

3) they're not actually interested in critically engaging with religious material beyond using it as a "gotcha"

[bobemajses]

Courtyard of a Jewish home in Hara Kebira ("The Large Quarter"), Djerba, Tunisia, 1981.

[kosherplasmid]

Shabbat Shalom everyone,

I know we all have faced the onslaught of irrational and outright offensive takes this week. We all had to deal with extremely online people telling us how we should feel.

And, so, I want to tell you, for this shabbat, take a moment, look back and remind yourself that life is not like this outside of the internet.

I am a visible jew. I live in London, I have peyos and a kippah. Sometimes my tzitzis are visible. I look like this everytime I go outside, to go to the post office, the doctor, grocery store etc. Clearly I would be a prime target and my life would be in danger everytime I step out of my house based on the kind of content we see on tumblr, right? Well.

Have I faced harassment? Yes of course. But you know what? That was 1% of the time. And I won't talk about these 1% occurence this time.

99% of the time when I go out, I get no comments, no hate, no weird looks. People at the post office, at the doctor's, at the grocery store are respectful.

When I took my partner to the hospital, there were kosher meals, a shabbes room, kind accomodating people on the lift on shabbat.

When I go outside, I am a completely normal person living a completelu normal visibly Jewish life and 99.9% of people have no issue with it. Please remember this.

The world isn't as dark as it seems online. Not everybody is out to get you. Reach out to your friends, neighbours, classmates. Share a meal, be generous, do tzedakah.

This will end and it will be ok.

Shabbat Shalom.

[jewish-culture-is]

trans jewish culture is saying shehecheyanu after my first dose of testosterone!!!

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[achainu]

Jewish Queerness