jessicalprice - Tumblr blog

[jessicalprice]

The biggest stumbling block for Christians (practicing and cultural/former) in regards to understanding Jews seems to be this weird inability to understand that it’s possible to love a text and take it seriously and still have a playful relationship to it.

Like, they don’t understand play at ALL.

"lol jews find so many loopholes in their own religion they must hate being jewish" damn just say you're uncreative and have never examined your own religious texts further than the exact words written down on the paper. just say you take everything at face value and you never enjoy reading between the lines to gain a new understanding of something. it's ok, we all see it already

[jessicalprice]

The masks are coming off hard.

The Star of David isn’t a symbol of the modern State of Israel. It’s on Israel’s flag because it’s a symbol of the Jewish people.

you were asking to be called a zio. Don't wear a star of david if you can't handle it.

This one sounds kinda familiar I wonder where I've heard it before?

Oh that's right! "Women don't dress in a revealing way or else you're asking to be SA'd/raped"

The thing is, with both how you dress and wearing a magen david, it's not the wearer who made the decision to be harmed, it was the perpetrator who decided to take the action of harm.

Whilst dressing not revealing and not wearing a magen david do prevent experience harm, do you not think that the burden should fall on the person doing the harm? Do you not think that as a society we should be moving towards not shaming victims and instead punishing perpetrators?

Also - I can handle it. I was making a post about an experience to prove a point

[jessicalprice]

Okay, but “find the country on an unlabeled map” and “understand issues currently affecting it” have been shown time and time again to be an inaccurate (and highly ableist!) method of evaluating understanding of current events, so I’m pretty uncomfortable with using this anecdote to symbolize anything.

And if Boomers going down the Qanon rabbit hole have shown us anything, it’s also not tied specifically to youth.

"The Left is no longer safe, and the Right never was."

I see this sentiment often from progressive Jews (so most of us in some way). Let me be very clear. The left was never safe either.

Do you think that so many people were radicalized overnight? That on the early morning of October 7, leftists across the West opened their phones and in that moment became antisemites, able to fall for the clearest of propaganda and simultaneously cheer on and deny Jewish suffering?

The left was always capable of this. They only began to clearly enunciate how bloodthirsty and how fundamentalist they were out loud when the right minority was targeted. Their exception, so they can still enjoy the luxury of ganging up on an 'underdog' usually reserved for the right.

October 7th could have been last January 7th. It could have been in 2018. It could have been in 2006 if social media algorithms were as developed, and would have had the same response.

The left has never been safe. They've just been easier to ignore.

[jessicalprice]

"The Left is no longer safe, and the Right never was."

I see this sentiment often from progressive Jews (so most of us in some way). Let me be very clear. The left was never safe either.

Do you think that so many people were radicalized overnight? That on the early morning of October 7, leftists across the West opened their phones and in that moment became antisemites, able to fall for the clearest of propaganda and simultaneously cheer on and deny Jewish suffering?

The left was always capable of this. They only began to clearly enunciate how bloodthirsty and how fundamentalist they were out loud when the right minority was targeted. Their exception, so they can still enjoy the luxury of ganging up on an 'underdog' usually reserved for the right.

October 7th could have been last January 7th. It could have been in 2018. It could have been in 2006 if social media algorithms were as developed, and would have had the same response.

The left has never been safe. They've just been easier to ignore.

[jessicalprice]

Nah. Conservatives always wanted the same things Trumpists want. Reagan and his ilk just didn’t feel empowered, in the wake of the civil rights era, to be as open in their violent white supremacy.

So they used “polite” language to build a world in which they could feel comfortable saying it out loud.

I have issues with very real antisemitism on the left, but don’t you dare pretend cops beating Black kids to death for breathing and most conservatives cheering them on and the rest of y’all who “lean conservative” Homer Simpsoning quietly into the nearest bushes so you don’t have to say out loud whether you agree or disagree was somehow a reaction to the left yelling at you.

Don’t you dare pretend that Charlottesville and Tree of Life and Poway were just that you were forced to become neo-Nazis because some kids on the internet called you Nazis.

Miss me with this bullshit.

It’s still the right that kills Jews in the US, that forces your disgusting misogyny and queerphobia and oligarchy on us.

As I keep saying, the Right will succeed in killing Jews, and the Left will explain why we deserved it, but don’t mistake that for those two things being equal harm.

"The Left is no longer safe, and the Right never was."

I see this sentiment often from progressive Jews (so most of us in some way). Let me be very clear. The left was never safe either.

Do you think that so many people were radicalized overnight? That on the early morning of October 7, leftists across the West opened their phones and in that moment became antisemites, able to fall for the clearest of propaganda and simultaneously cheer on and deny Jewish suffering?

The left was always capable of this. They only began to clearly enunciate how bloodthirsty and how fundamentalist they were out loud when the right minority was targeted. Their exception, so they can still enjoy the luxury of ganging up on an 'underdog' usually reserved for the right.

October 7th could have been last January 7th. It could have been in 2018. It could have been in 2006 if social media algorithms were as developed, and would have had the same response.

The left has never been safe. They've just been easier to ignore.

[jessicalprice]

people are really out here confusing “hearing about this made me feel feelings” with “I care about this cause”

American culture actively works to stunt our relationship to our own emotions so much that we don’t understand activism or even investment

[jessicalprice]

Oh my god, once again reminding people that Jews in the SWANA region being scared of being murdered if Israel is dismantled are not comparable to white Americans and Canadians being scared of indigenous sovereignty. The entire world, and that includes Muslim countries, has a very very long history of violently expelling and brutally murdering its Jewish communities; Israel itself has many, many refugees and descendents of refugees from other countries in Asia and Africa, countries that do not want those people back.

The comparison to white North Americans is absurd, cruel, and ahistorical; the claim that Jewish people lived in happiness and peace and safety in SWANA countries before Israel's founding is a complete fabrication and blatant victim blaming. Many of the countries surrounding Israel and throughout the SWANA region have Jewish populations that can literally be counted on one hand and that isn't because people just abandoned their homes and friends and communities to move to Israel for funsies, it's because many of them were brutally murdered or expelled from their homes, with the rest fleeing out of fear for when they would be next.

I am saying this as a Native person who is 100% in favor of indigenous sovereignty in my home country and who is fully against the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government. If you cannot acknowledge how antisemitism is still very much alive and an active danger to Jewish people all across the world and how many people fled to Israel specifically to escape violence, then you really cannot have any sort of meaningful conversation about Israel.

[jessicalprice]

Yeah so I need to learn to just stop going on Twitter but this specific tweet pisses me off

Fuck you

Anyone who believes this? Fuck you

This is literally Nazi rhetoric. You are saying that Jews will just kill anything they can, because they want to, because they want to rule the world

THIS IS LITERAL NAZI TALKING POINTS

"the Jews won't stop at Palestine!!! They're gonna go attack some place else, just because they can, because they're EVILLL!! It's not enough to just free Palestine, we must have a *final solution* so the world will be free of evil!!!!"

Actually fuck anyone who believes this

"punch Nazis" YEAH RIGHT

You're the fucking Nazis and yet you act like you still care about Jews

I would feel safer around a proud Hamas member.

[jessicalprice]

I mean, dehumanizing anyone is also bad because it divides the world into Evil People I Am Nothing Like and Good People Who Would Never Do Anything Like That which… isn’t great for self-awareness and understanding the ways in which you may be complicit in harm without recognizing it.

It’s what leads to the reaction that accusing someone of being antisemitic/racist/misogynist/etc. is a worse harm than saying or doing something antisemitic/racist/misogynist/etc.

Some common leftist beliefs

I've been seeing some peculiar beliefs in leftist spaces recently.

• Nazis are literally subhuman and deserve to die.

• Zionism is a Nazi movement

• All Jews are secretly zionists

To an outside observer, these beliefs can look innocent (I am far too guilty of number 1, honestly) but the problem is a lot of people believe all three. By the transitive property, they believe that all Jews are subhuman and deserve to die. That is a very familiar and terrifying sentiment to us Jews.

Be careful dehumanizing literally anyone. Once you accept that Nazis, or pedophiles, or other evil people are subhuman, your definition of "Nazi" can be expanded. It can even be expanded to include groups that were originally targeted in the Holocaust. Do better.

[jessicalprice]

We’re just going to ignore the large, old, thriving Sephardic communities in the US, I guess.

(Not to mention that “I hate the way antisemites and Jews alike present Ashkenazi culture as pale & stale & monolithic” + “and it kinda is” + “how dare you say I am saying that” is like Trumpian levels of shameless gaslighting.)

thinking about how utterly and completely and uniformly ashkenazi worldwide judaism really seems to be, and especially how current antisemitism focuses a lot on ashkenazi judaism and its stereotypes -

and the stark contrast with judaism inside israel... mizrahi judaism (which is on itself extremely generalizing - yemeni judaism and iraqi judaism and persian judaism and turkish judaism and libyan judaism and syrian judaism and the 100 other shades of mizrahi jewish cultures, each standing on its own, rich and unique), then ethiopian judaism, kurdish jews, sephardi jews, indian jews, old yishuv jews - it is so colorful, and it's everywhere. and each community stands on its own but they mix together with each other and compliment each other because they're all different flavors of the same people. so everywhere you see people put hummus and amba on their schnitzel and listen to shlomo artzi while going out for sabich/listen to zohar argov while going out for friday schnitzel challa (you wouldn't believe all the ways you can eat schnitzel) and put matza ball soup in bowls decorated with khamsas and evil eyes and everyone craves piping hot jachnun on saturday morning (gosh, jewish culture has really got a lot to do with food, doesn't it? or maybe i'm just hungry).

literally the majority of jews in israel are mizrahi. and the percentage of mixed mizrahi-ashkenazi families is massive too.

and no, it's not all butterflies and sunshine, inter-jewish racism exists and it's ugly and prevalent and a central topic in israeli socio-political discussions and activism. but still, israeli jewish culture is still SO global... sometimes i look at the way people (especially antisemites but not only them) present judaism - all ashkenazi and pale and solemn - and it just seems so damn... stale. (the fact that i'm ashkenazi myself makes it even more bizarre, and obviously ironic, but i'm very secular from a very secular household so we never really cared much about our own ashkenazism).

jewish culture really deserves better than any of that.

[jessicalprice]

This is important.

I don’t believe I’m going to hell if I eat pork. I don’t believe G-d will punish me if I eat pork. I don’t need anyone to “prove” to me that it’s okay to eat pork.

(Although I’ll note that if you don’t eat pork for a long time, and then you do, it can have very unpleasant effects on your digestive system, so doing this to someone is harmful in a myriad of ways.)

I’m not afraid to eat pork: I choose not to eat it. I find the idea of eating it distasteful and a violation of my ethics and identity. It’s not about being afraid of divine wrath.

But I fear that’s too nuanced for the average Christian to understand.

The Goyim are fucking wild, the way I would have dumped that casserole over that woman's head, also divorce that wife.

[jessicalprice]

Elica is an Iranian activist and lawyer, for some perspective on why and how she knows and cares so deeply about pan-islamism.

[jessicalprice]

Amazing to think the only reason any Jew might have to disagree with you on Israel is a lack of self-reflection.

You realize Jewish antizionism is as diverse as Jewish Zionism, yes? And has its own long history?

Self-proclaimed 'antizionist' jews give serious 'not like other girls' energy.

The goyim won't pick you babe. They'll tokenise and exploit you, feeding their rancid justifications to dehumanise us and you're handing them the keys to this door 🚪

[jessicalprice]

Oof, let’s not do this.

White Gentiles come from a variety of cultural backgrounds with a variety of different approaches to remembrance, ancestors, etc.

Pro tip: Whenever you’re like “only people like ME have a Real Relationship with [basic human function],” you’re lowering your own EQ.

(And I’ll note he could have made this same point just as poignantly and powerfully just by talking about the Jewish relationship with memory and not getting outside his lane by making sweeping statements about a lot of cultures he’s not part of.)

"JEWS HAVE SIX SENSES

Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing … memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks – when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain – that the Jew is able to know why it hurts.

When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?"

-- Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

[jessicalprice]

I mean, also:

“Ashkenazi” isn’t just “the white(st) Jews.”

The sub-ethnicities within Judaism are just that, ethnicities, not races.

Ethnicity is shared history, language, practices, traditions, culture, etc.

It often also includes shared descent, but it doesn’t have to.

Whether you’re Ashkenazi or Sephardi or Mizrahi is about which community you participate in, which variants of Jewish traditions you follow, where in the diaspora (or not in the diaspora) your ancestors spent the most time, which Jewish language your community uses, etc.

It’s not defined by skin color. If you’re a blonde Jew who grows up in a Sephardic community, you’re Sephardic. If you’re a Black Jew who grows up in an Ashkenazi community, you’re Ashkenazi.

I am begging people to stop trying to apply white supremacist Victorian race “science” to Jewish communities. Our traditions and concept of peoplehood predate that nonsense.

Full disclosure: I am an Ashkenazi Jew with pale skin, so I encourage any Mizrahim who see this post to comment their own views if they disagree or want to add something that I may have missed.

“Jews are white!”

I truly marvel sometimes at how many levels of stupidity are displayed in just three words. First off, the statement is wrong on the face of it—biological races don’t exist, even if the social construct of it does.

But secondly, when leftists say this, they’re completely ignorant of the 3000 years of our history which very much says we are in no way shape or form members of the “white” social category. We are white people, despite the word “ghettos” having originated as a term for the impoverished Jewish segregated areas in European cities? Nazis didn’t invent ghettos, by the way, the first mention of them dates to the early 16th century to refer to a Jewish ghetto in an Italian city state.

American Jews suffer the supermajority of religious based hate crimes in the United States, despite making up like 2% of the total population. We are having to put armed guards outside our synagogues. A quarter of hiring managers don’t want to employ Jewish people—and that’s just how many admit to that. Not a century ago, we were literally murdered for not being white enough. And now goy Americans want to come in, glance at Israel, and announce we’re white colonizers?

This whole discussion doesn’t even begin to touch on the rich history of the Mizrahim and Beta Israel and the Bene Israel and the Cochin Jews and the Kaifeng Jews. Left wing antisemites will only mention Ethiopian Jews and Mizrahim to say that they’re discriminated against by the evil White Jews in power. They ascribe no agency to them—they just infantilize Jews of Color to being two dimensional victims of evil Ashkenazi Jews.

But Israel doesn’t fit neatly into this Americanized narrative of white oppressors against brown natives. Do Mizrahim and other Jews with brown skin—who make up the majority of the population—experience racism in Israel? Yes, of course. There was a full civil rights movement in Israel over it—look up the Israeli Black Panthers. But the way their experiences are only trotted out by left wingers to score points against Israel and then hushed away again is obscene. And anyway, even Ashkenazi Jews aren’t white either—Europe has made it clear to us, over and over again, that we are not white.

In short, no, we aren’t white. Not the Jews who pass as white, nor those of us who don’t.

[jessicalprice]

Amazing to mock the idea that members of a culture that created its writings and still reads them in the original language are likely to know more about them than members of the culture that appropriated and mistranslated them.

“Educate yourself”, said the non-jewish person to the jewish person about jewish history, legacy and ancestors. 

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE, AMIRITE??

[jessicalprice]

I am going to keep pointing out that he’s Jewish until queer Christians stop being so smug and grabby.

You’ve been stealing Jewish shit for 2000 years.

Leave our gays alone.