asherelbein - Tumblr blog

[asherelbein]

I wrote about Magneto, Holocaust memory culture, and the vexed question of what “never again” actually means

[asherelbein]

I'm asking this in good faith, but also in an admitted lack of full understanding. If you don't have the energy to engage with this topic anymore please disregard it.

Someone on your post noted the comparison of Israel-Palestine to that of the Native Americans, but the way I read it it seemed like they were putting Palestinians in the role of the native Americans and Israel as the colonizing force, but historically wouldn't it be the Jewish people who are the Native Americans in that comparison? I ask because from what I know it would be the Jewish people in what is now Israel at the same time in history as the Natives in the Americas. Am I misinformed about that? I'm not trying to say Palestine would be the colonizing force in that comparison btw, just that if we're talking about natives to the land, it seems to me like it'd be the Jewish people.

tbh neither maps on exactly

the expulsion of jews from what is now israel/palestine started in 70 AD and then was a gradual process over the next few hundred years as people moved out due to oppression by various rulers, poverty, etc

palestinians, as far as i understand it, likely descend from a mix of some of the jews who were left behind and arabs who conquered the land. they've been there for hundreds of years, and some families have owned the same land for all of that time

the thing about indigeneity as it's been explained to me is that it's not about origin so much as relationship to colonization. and the founding of israel was colonization -- herzl actually used that word himself in his writings.

you know the jnf? the original purpose was to exploit a feature of ottoman land law. if you planted a tree on someone's land and they didn't remove it for a certain number of years, you could claim ownership of that land. this and other methods were used to steal parcels of land from palestinians.

"your ethnicity stole the land from our ethnicity, to whom the land belongs" is a fucked up framework that seems really akin to blood and soil (as does "our ethnicity has rightful ownership of this land from ancient times, so your ethnicity needs to clear out"), but genuinely wresting ownership from individuals owners really can be said to be stealing land.

also, the nakba was a series of massacres and fighting that led to a huge influx of palestinian refugees from many areas in israel/palestine, and israel seized control of the land and homes they vacated to hand over to jews. israel used the jnf, again, to cover the ruins of many palestinian villages with trees to obscure the fact that they were ever there. in general israel built over many palestinian villages and the mindset in israel is not to know and not to think about it.

personally i think the indigeneity debate is not useful. it feels sometimes that jews think that if we can prove we lived in israel in ancient times (we did, a lot of people insist we didn't because it is inconvenient), we can justify things like the above. my position is that it does not justify it, because it is not an excuse for causing human suffering.

however, many people use a framework that is not about human suffering, but about how invading foreign jews stole the land from the "rightful" ethnic group. i don't agree with that either. especially when it becomes an excuse to support ethnic cleansing in the other direction. that is to say: they locate the crime not in the invasion but in the foreignness. such people are motivated to deny the historical fact of jewish origins in israel, because their argument is based on jewish foreignness.

but anyway, the comparison to indigenous peoples in the americas refers to the way that palestinians experienced the establishment of the state of israel -- starting with small groups of settlers, involving violence early on and then massacres, and later ethnic cleansing and displacement. cities and towns destroyed. shoved into small areas with few resources. lack of power and autonomy.

in addition, the way the early zionist leaders conceptualized themselves as enlightened europeans colonizing land with disdain for the existing residents.

[asherelbein]

The Gift

I think sometimes of epic days

When Megaera a colored dream-cloak wove

And pressed it into heroic hands. “Cease your labors! Here is home. And with it

Strength!

Abandon now these roads you’ve roamed

your madness punished,

no debts left owed—

your might lies now in homespun cloth. In its lengths

find glories that befit the bold.”

A godly gift! He pulled it on

And draped himself in venom’d thread:

Each fiber soaked in the blood of foes

Mixed with fearsome toxins brewed

From the shafts he kept to fuel his bow.

He’s burning still. What strength was there?

While across the wine-dark waters cold—

That restless myth-encircled sea—

Our ancients sought a prophet old

And begged him to spin them up a king. “Why so?”

“To match our many tribal foes! And hold this, our land, eternally.”

So they were ruled. The dream-cloak gleamed.

The sovereign seat for which they strove

Was a reddened tide. It fell and rose —

and sickened those who ate the ocean’s meat. 

That fest’ring dream lies in us still

A homespun gift from unintending hands:

Woven with poison, love and blood

Into the heart of every wandering stray

cast out from mythic gardens green

And left to make our way.

Why do we rush to take such gifts? There are cloaks un-magicked and crownless lands. 

There are worlds beyond the desert shore

(Where millennia we may rest, or more!)

And lives to live outside the seams

of technicolor’d cloaks of dreams.

[asherelbein]

Hey, Tumblr! Do you like dinosaurs? I'm the cowriter on a new book about the vanished animals of Texas' biggest, coolest and most fossil-rich park.

When you buy this book, YOU GET: * profiles of multiple species of dinosaurs, sea lizards and weird ancient mammals * a rundown of the park's fossil history * operatic descriptions of changing landscapes, dancing seas, and churning volcanoes * "time travel notes" reconstructions of the Big Bend's prehistoric landscapes. (Those last bits were the most fun to write, and include some fun set-pieces: a Cretaceous clam reef, a feeding frenzy around a rotting sauropod, battling camels, and more!) And, of course, wonderful field-sketch style illustrations by the great Julius Csotonyi!

Come one, come all! Order below with code UTXM25 for 25% off your purchase and free shipping!

[asherelbein]

[asherelbein]

It’s like “gender” is *actually* a social construct or some shit.

And not only is what any gender means very specific to a specific culture, regardless of the phenotype current people link it to, but even then not everyone in that given culture expresses it the same way, and some people *always* push what that gender and gender expression means.

Because “gender” is not only a social construct; it is a *continuously evolving* social construct.

Queer historians are good at noting that “although we might call x a trans man/a gay man/a nonbinary person etc etc if they lived today, these ideas did not make sense in the social context they lived in”. Historians in general need to get better at realising and elucidating that our modern Western concepts of “man” and “woman” are very different from, and in many ways may not even be recognisable, in, say, medieval Europe, Ancient Rome, medieval/early modern Incan societies, early modern Madagascar, prehistoric Pacific Islander societies, Heian period Japan etc etc, just because we are broadly applying them to many people with similar biological phenotypes.

[asherelbein]

"Kill yourself" is basic. "I hope your fandom gets a new installment that is objectively a great work but also tonally dissonant from the previous ones in a way that generates a huge newbie boom of people uninterested and hostile towards the history of the franchise" is smart. It's possible. It's terrifying. It's happening right now.

[asherelbein]

I think a lot of discussions of antisemitism in the American Jewish community are rooted in what we might call “semitopessimism.” To wit: the idea that integration/acceptance in other lands is impossible, based on the notion that the pogrom is the basic unit of Jewish history.

And there were quite a lot of pogroms, as it happens. There were also long periods of peace, tolerance, integration and acceptance, from Babylon to Cordoba, in Russia and Europe. Or in America. These are the parts of our history that semitopessimism seeks to elide. Semitopessimism instead holds that antisemitism is a forever evil, unchanging in its fundamentals, reoccurring from the Fertile Crescent to Rome to Russia to Germany. It reads the specific, historically contingent antisemitism of the late 19th/early 20th century back into the past. It casts it as an inevitable result, wherever Jews go.

But antisemitism *isn’t* inevitable, except inasmuch as any minority group is likely to face occasional friction and oppression — to varying degrees — whenever among an unrelated majority. That’s always a risk. It also doesn’t always happen! Historically, integration occurs just as much as conflict; there are as many periods of quiet tolerance, or productive friction, as there are explosions of violence.

Now, antisemitism exists. There are people who hate us, and who we must protect ourselves from. The recent upswing of right-wing violence toward Jews in America is part of a real phenomenon, One that grows from reactionary right wing movements that are increasingly powerful. That's the backwash of the specific, vicious explosions of hatred in late 19th/early 20th century Europe, like the Russian Pale of Settlement or the Holocaust. (That same antisemitism gave birth to the Zionist project, incidentally, and fueled both its initial supporters and the European nations who were only too happy to pack off their Jews somewhere else.)

So Jewish trauma also involves clutching tightly to the notion of semitopessimism, for historically understandable reasons. It’s a trauma response to those specific horrors. But frankly, lots of trauma responses aren’t healthy, even if we cling to them for understandable reasons. It can be comforting to cling to terror, to paranoia. It can feel validating to believe the worst is always coming. Rage and fear are addictive, all the more so when they have over seventy years of communal support keeping them at a low simmer. It's easy in those circumstances to create a bubble to try and shield yourself from pain, and to react viciously and irrationally to people who try to raise the possibility of processing it and moving on.

But here's the thing about semitopessimism: it fundamentally agrees with the antisemitic position. To wit: That we cannot live among others. That we cannot hold multiple identities. That we cannot stay. That we have no place here. That we can be safely cordoned off somewhere far away. That if it's not us, then it's going to have to be someone else, and that it's natural for us to oppress others out of our own fear.

And honestly? Fuck that. It's no way for us to live.

This past Saturday, an antisemitic mob hundreds strong in Russia rioted and shut down an airport. They were trying to find, catch, and murder Jews entering the country. That same day, a Jewish community centre in a different part of Russia was burned down, and "Death to Jews" was painted on the rubble. [1] [14]

On October 9th, protestors in Sydney, Australia chanted "Gas the Jews." [2]

There has been a 300% increase in antisemitic incidents in the UK, including kosher grocery stores being broken into and vandalized, and cars shouting "Kill Jews" at London Synagogues. [3]

Over the past month in Germany: Holocaust memorials have been defaced. The phrase "Jewish pigs" was spray-painted on a Green Party office after a party member spoke out about antisemitism. A teenager at a rally shouted "I want Adolf Hitler back. I’m for Hitler, for gassing the Jews." Molotov cocktails were thrown into synagogues. [3] [4]

On October 21st, Italians shouted, "Open the borders so we can kill the Jews." [5]

In Canada, a Jewish Community Center was egged by a man shouting antisemitic slurs, a Jewish business was, and a local Rabbi had a swastika drawn on his window. [11] [12]

Over the past month, synagogues have been defaced or raided in Austria, Colombia, Chile, France, Portugal and Spain. A historic synagogue was burned down in Tunisia. [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [13]

All that happened this month, this year. I'm not even touching on the past twenty years of global antisemitism. I'm not even mentioning the United States.

Who told you the proponents of antisemitism and the enemies of Jews were dead? Who told you that our culture and religion were respected in the diaspora? Who told you we could be safely Jewish in “our own countries"? Who lied to you?

[asherelbein]

New, on Heat Death! Firehawks! The semi-domestication of cassowaries! A long-range feather trade in ancient macaws! Icelandic ducks that pay rent in eggs! The roots of human management of birds go way, way back. We talk about them with a smattering of folklore, archeology, anthropology, and some very good modern dinosaurs

[asherelbein]

"My name is Ariyava Iroko, and I am a killer. Every year since leaving the brotherhood of the road, I mark the lives I’ve taken in little brush strokes on a fresh prayer ribbon. Sixteen I took by honest battle; seven in dishonest brawls; thirteen by client’s order; five more to get out. They fill the crimson fabric, these dabs of ink; each life recorded in a flick of the wrist, a precise twitch of the fingers. Black slashes marching down a red road. Every year, I sit in the garden with the ribbon in my fingers until dusk comes over the hills. Then, up. The ribbon goes around the lowest branch of the thornwood tree, where I hold it briefly to my lips and then burn it. Every year, a bright line of fire marches up the fluttering fabric, eating up the marks. Gone.

Mercenary Ari Iroko has wasted her life, and is headed for an ugly death. Nobody knows that better than her. But there's a way out: the great god on the battlefield told her so. Just as long as she’s willing to give something up… How Ari Got Religion is a 7000-word fantasy tale about mercenaries, the horror of religious awakening, the lingering rot of vocational violence, and dinosaurs. I wrote it. @tiffanyturrill illustrated the shit out of it, with four feature illustrations and a packed bonus section of concept sketches.

And at $3 for 50 pages? It's a steal.

Buy yourself a PDF copy right here!

[asherelbein]

The Phantom Pain

New, on Heat Death! Anthropologist Annika Tara joins us with a fascinating deep dive into "phantom illnesses," the tangled roots of chronic disease in America, and the entities getting away with making us sick.

[asherelbein]

Had a great time talking to journalist Ben Goldfarb about his new book, CROSSINGS, a wide-ranging account of how roads reshape the natural world. Discussed: Wildlife adapting — or not — to the open road! Building a better wildlife crossing! Why green transit and AI cars are as bad for animals as the internal combustion kind! What life after cars might look like!

It's Heat Death!

[asherelbein]

My New York magazine debut! For Jurassic Park's 30th anniversary, I wrote about the long shadow Spielberg's film casts over cinematic dinosaurs, even those ostensibly trying to do something different. I spoke with Jurassic Park's concept artist, Crash McCreery, as well as paleontologist Steve Brusatte and paleo-journalist Riley Black. Give it a read! It's fun.

[asherelbein]

Cypress knees in lowcountry swamp. Photo by James Morden.

[asherelbein]

happy glorious 25th of may

[asherelbein]

Today I visited one of the most interesting and peculiar homes I’ve ever had the chance to see.

Imagine this being your living/dining room:

And when you give guests a tour of the rest of the house, it’s like this:

Talk about 60 years of special interest! The collector, Klaas Nanninga, does his own taxidermy, although he’s more specialised in creating displays these days. His house does not have fixed opening times, so you practically call him when in Groningen and ask if he’s around. Luckily for me he was!

I’m going to reblog this post later with more detailed pictures.

[asherelbein]

阿里磅瀑布