#child of Holocaust survivors

[girlactionfigure]

Diane von Fürstenberg (née Diane Simone Michelle Halfin) is a Belgian-American fashion designer best known for her iconic wrap dress design — a timeless staple in women’s fashion. Born on December 31, 1946 in Brussels, Diane was raised by Jewish parents who had just survived the Holocaust. Her father Leon was born in Moldova and escaped the Nazis in Switzerland. Her mother Lily was born in Greece and joined the resistance in Belgium, where she was eventually arrested. She survived 13 months in the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps, and weighed a mere 49 lbs at the time of liberation. Against all odds, Lily gave birth just 18 months after the war. Her little girl was a miracle and would one day become a household name. “I used to feel great admiration watching my mother get dressed to go out…she looked at herself in the mirror with a smile of confidence.” -DVF Contributor: @jggoltz

sephardiccommunity

[cruelsister-moved2]

sorry if that makes absolutely no sense but like there needs to be major reform in the education system and also a lot of the entities that exist around it like museums and publishing and film etc because there is a mytholicised holocaust which is very set in now so even if like certain individuals educate themselves it doesn't really eradicate the danger of it being erased when those groups are much smaller and quieter than the people (hollywood, schools, governments etc) who actually get to define what it was and what it means. like its really good if some people went and read maus or something but that's more something thats like (still necessary) personal duty that does very little to fix the problem overall so like I don't want to disparage that but it is very much the bare minimum

[todaviia]

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[theredandwhitequeen]

Book 33 of the 50 book challenge. The Daughter of Auschwitz by Tova Friedman and Malcolm Brabant. Tova was born in 1938 a year before the Nazis took Poland. She survived the Holocaust and left Auschwitz when she was 6. She was in a ghetto, a labor camp and a death camp and survived which is miraculous, because most children were killed when they arrived at Auschwitz immediately. She spent months in a childrens block until the place was liberated. Both of her parents survived as well, her mom in Auschwitz and her father in Dachau. Her mother lost over 150 family members and her father had 3 sisters survive. 1 was later murdered by polish antisemetic people. Her family moved to a displaced persons camp in Germany then to the US. Her mother died when she was 14 in the US. Her father died much later in Israel. She married, had children and became a social worker. The book is fascinating.

[iritfelsen]

Reminder: Today at 1:00 pm EST, like the last Sunday of each month, child survivors of the Holocaust from across the globe meet

Dr. Jenni Frumer and I lead these regular monthly gatherings, which are hosted by MorseLife Health System, in partnership with the Hidden Child Foundation. The gatherings are offered at no cost, and are specifically and uniquely for child survivors. The meetings take place from 1:00 – 2:30 pm EDT. Child survivors who wish to receive regular notices and links to future meetings should contact me…

[mariacallous]

“Did they really decapitate babies?” my 14-year-old daughter asked me yesterday. She was pointing to a text message on her phone from a friend. “They’re saying they found Jewish babies killed, some burnt, some decapitated.” And I froze. Not because I didn’t know what to say—though in truth I didn’t know what to say—but because for a moment I forgot what century I was in. All of the assumptions I had made as a Jewish father, even one who had grown up, as I did, with the Holocaust just a few decades past, were suddenly no longer relevant. Had I adequately prepared her for the reality of Jewish death, what every shtetl child for centuries would have known intimately? Later in the day, she asked if, for safety’s sake, she should take off the necklace she loves that her grandparents had given her and that has her name written out in Hebrew script.

The attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians last Saturday broke something in me. I had always resisted victimhood. It felt abhorrent, self-pitying to me in a world that seemed far away from the Inquisition and Babi Yar—especially in the United States, where I live and where polls repeatedly tell me that Jews are more beloved than any other religious group. I wasn’t blind to anti-Semitism and the ways it had recently become deadlier, or to the existential dread that my family in Israel felt every time terrorists blew up a bus or café—it’s a story whose sorrows have punctuated my entire life. But I refused to embrace that ironically comforting mantra, “They will always want to kill us.” I hated what this tacitly expressed, that if they always want to kill us, then we owe them, the world, nothing. I deplore the occupation for both the misery it has inflicted on generations of Palestinians and the way it corrodes Israeli society; when settlers in the West Bank have been attacked, it has pained me, but I have also felt anger that they are even there. In short, I wasn’t locked into the worldview of my survivor grandparents and I felt superior for it.

But something in me did break. As I was driving on Tuesday, I heard a long interview on the BBC with Shir Golan, a 22-year-old woman who had survived the attack at the music festival where more than 250 people were killed, her voice sounding just like one of my young Israeli cousins. She described, barely able to catch her breath, how the shooting had started and how she’d begun to run. She’d found a wooded area and tried to hide. “I got really into the ground,” she said. “I put the bushes on me.” Covered with dirt and leaves, she’d waited. A group of terrorists had shown up and called for anyone hiding to come out. From her spot under the earth, she’d seen three young people, whom she called “children,” emerge. “I didn’t go out because I was scared. But there were three children next to me who got out. And then they shot them. One after one after one. And they fell down, and that I saw. I saw the children fall down. And all that I did was pray. I prayed to my god to save me.”

I pulled my car over because my own hands were shaking as I listened. She then described waiting, hidden in the dirt under bushes for hours, until she saw the terrorists begin to light the forest on fire. “I didn’t know what to do. Because if I’m staying there, I’m just burnt to death. But if I go out they are going to kill me.” She crawled over to where she saw dead bodies and lay on top of them, but the heat soon approached, so she found more bushes to hide in until she could run again. Burnt bodies were everywhere, and Shir looked for her friends but couldn’t find them, couldn’t even see the faces of those killed because they were so badly burned. “I felt like I was in hell.” She finally escaped in a car.

Her story flung me back to my grandparents’ stories. My grandmother hid in a hole for a year in the Polish countryside, also under dirt, also scared. My grandfather spent months in Majdanek, a death camp, and saw bodies pile up in exactly this way. Stories are still emerging of families burnt alive, of children forced to watch their parents killed before their eyes, of bodies desecrated. How was this taking place last Saturday?

But these stories aren’t what broke me. What did was the distance between what was happening in my head and what was happening outside of it. The people on “my side” are supposed to care about human suffering, whether it’s in the detention camps of Xinjiang or in Darfur. They are supposed to recognize the common humanity of people in need, that a child in distress is first a child in distress regardless of country or background. But I quickly saw that many of those on the left who I thought shared these values with me could see what had happened only through established categories of colonized and colonizer, evil Israeli and righteous Palestinian—templates made of concrete. The break was caused by this enormous disconnect. I was in a world of Jewish suffering that they couldn’t see because Jewish suffering simply didn’t fit anywhere for them.

The callousness was expressed in so many ways. There were those tweets that did not hide their disregard for Jewish life—“what did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? Losers”—or the one that described the rampage as a “glorious thing to wake up to.” There was the statement by more than two dozen Harvard student groups asserting, in those first hours in which we saw children and women and old people massacred, that “the Israeli regime” was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” And then there were the less explicit posts that nevertheless made clear through pseudo-intellectual word salads that Israel got what it deserved: “a near-century’s pulverized overtures toward ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude—these things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia.” I hate to extrapolate from social media—it is a place that twists every utterance into a performance for others. But I also felt this callousness in the real world, in a Times Square celebratory protest promoted by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, at which one speaker talked of supporting Palestinians using “any means necessary” to retake the land “from the river to the sea,” as a number of placards declared. There were silences as well. Institutions that had rushed to condemn the murder of George Floyd or Russia for attacking Ukraine were apparently confounded. I watched my phone to see whether friends would write to find out if my family was okay—and a few did, with genuine and thoughtful concern, but many did not.

I’m still trying to understand this feeling of abandonment. Is my own naivete to blame? Did I tip too far over into the side of universalism and forget the particularistic concerns to which I should have been attuned—the precarious state of my own tribe? Even as I write this, I don’t really want to believe that that’s true. If I can fault myself clearly for something, though, it’s not recognizing that the same ideological hardening I’d seen on the right in the past few years, the blind allegiances and contorted narratives even when reality was staring people in the face, has also happened, to a greater degree than I’d imagined, on the left, among the people whom I think of as my own. They couldn’t recognize a moral abomination when it was staring them in the face. They were so set in their categories that they couldn’t make a distinction between the Palestinian people and a genocidal cult that claimed to speak in that people’s name. And they couldn’t acknowledge hundreds and hundreds of senseless deaths because the people who were killed were Israelis and therefore the enemy.

As the days go on, the horrific details of what happened—those babies—seem to be registering more fully, if not on the ideological left, then at least among sensible liberals. But somehow I can’t shake the feeling of aloneness. Does it take murdered babies for you to recognize our humanity? I find myself thinking—a thought that feels alien to my own mind but also like the truth. Perhaps this is the Jewish condition, bracketed off for many decades and finally pulling me in.

When news broke of the Kishinev pogrom in 1903 that took 49 lives (compare that with the 1,200 we now know were killed on Saturday), it caused a sensation throughout the world. “Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob,” The New York Times reported. “The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.” In response to that massacre, the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews to the United States began in earnest; the call of Zionism as a solution also sounded clearly and widely for the first time.

In his famous poem about the massacre, “In the City of Slaughter,” the Hebrew writer Haim Naḥman Bialik lamented, even more than the death, the sense of helplessness (“The open mouths of such wounds, that no mending / Shall ever mend, nor healing ever heal”), the men who watched in terror from their hiding places while women were raped and blood was spilled. I can’t say I know what will happen now that this helplessness has returned—if I’m honest, I also fear that Israel’s retaliation will go too far, that acting out of a place of victimhood, as right as it may feel, will cause the country to lose its mind. Innocent lives in Gaza have been and will be destroyed as a result, and competing victimhood is obviously not the way out of the conflict; it’s the reason that it is hopelessly stuck. But in this moment, before the destruction of Gaza grabs my attention and concern alongside fear for my relatives who have been called up to the army, I don’t want to forget how alone I felt as a Jew these past few days. I have a persistent, uncomfortable need now to have my people’s suffering be felt and seen. Otherwise, history is just an endless repetition. And that’s an additional tragedy that seems too much to bear.

[zvaigzdelasas]

Protesters demanding a cease-fire in the Israeli war in Gaza blocked a U.S. military supply ship leaving the Port of Oakland for hours Friday by locking themselves to the vessel. The protesters also blocked the entrance to Berth 20 where the container carrier Cape Orlando is moored. Protest groups say the ship is bound for Israel after being loaded with weapons and military equipment in Tacoma, Washington.

The protest was organized by the San Francisco-based Arab Resource Organizing Center. Police were at the scene of the protest which appeared to number about 200 people, many holding Palestinian flags and signs demanding an end to U.S. military aid to Israel[...]

Three Palestinian supporters were holding on to a rope ladder and refusing to let workers close a door to the military ship. A U.S. Coast Guard negotiator tried to convince them to get off the ship, but protestors refused..[...] Abushamala was one of many demonstrators that blocked a port entrance to the ship. She said she lost several relatives in the war. "One missile killed three generations. An uncle, their son, and their child," said Abushamala. "I'm enraged that our government is still sending aid, missiles to Israel."

Another Palestinian protestor, Noura Khouri, said she also lost a relative in a bombing last week. "It's literally impossible for any of us to sleep, to eat, to work, to carry on with our lives," said Khouri.

Some Jewish people also joined in the protest. "I'm here as a Jewish person, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. And I grew up hearing the stories of my grandmother surviving the Nazi's Holocaust, losing her entire family. And today, Israel is weaponizing my history, the history of my family that was killed, to kill Palestinian families in Gaza," said Alameda resident Anna Baltzer.

Just before 3 p.m., authorities removed the three protesters who held onto the rope ladder, and the ship made its way out of the port. Abushamala and other protestors were disappointed. They hope their action will have a lasting impact on lawmakers.

"No more U.S. military aid to Israel. It is within your power. Do not let the fear stop you," said Abushamala.[...]

According to a release from AROC, three protesters who climbed onto the vessel were detained by the U.S. Coast Guard -- the federal agency with jurisdiction on the water. As it is an ongoing investigation, Coast Guard Petty Officer Hunter Schnabel said Friday evening that he could not provide specifics but confirmed "multiple individuals are currently under investigation." The release from AROC called on "communities in cities around the country and across the world to be on alert for vessels carrying similar cargo."

3 Nov 23

[matan4il]

Today is Family Day in Israel.

This post is dedicated to every Jewish family destroyed, in part and especially in whole, by anti-Jewish violence in the Israeli-Arab conflict. It's dedicated to the Kutz family, who were murdered to the last one by Palestinian terrorists on Oct 7. When their bodies were found, they were still embracing.

It's dedicated to Rachel Hiller and her fiance Yossef Weissman, who were each the last surviving member of their families, and were murdered in the Kfar Etzion massacre, which took place before the State of Israel was even established, before they had a chance to marry, and start a family following the loss they experienced in the Holocaust, and to a total of 144 Holocaust survivors who were the last ones, and when the Arabs killed them during the Independence War, these families were wiped out as well, finishing what the Nazis started.

It's dedicated to Livia Dikman, an only daughter, who was pregnant with her first kid, and was murdered in Jerusalem by Hamas terrorists on a day when Israel and Hamas were supposed to have a truce as part of the hostage deal. Livia's sister in law is a colleague of mine at our museum.

It's dedicated to my own relative, Yitzchak Roller, who was an only son to a family that survived the Holocaust in Romania, a baby survivor. He and his mom came to Israel when he was 8, and even though they barely had anything, while giving private lessons for a living, Yitzchak insisted on not taking any money from those in need. Everyone who knew him remarked what an exceptionally good person he was. He also wrote a research paper on the pogrom that was carried out against the Jews of Iasi, which my grandmother had survived (but in which she lost family, something she never fully recovered from). The paper was published by our museum, though Yitzchak didn't get to see that. Being an only child meant he didn't have to serve in the army, but he felt that he had to do his part in defending our country. He was killed in the Six Day War, before he got the chance to marry and have kids. That branch of our family is gone forever.

May all of their memories be a blessing. We will never forget that we are not whole without you.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[creature-wizard]

What's up with the Satanic Panic, in a nutshell.

Around the 1970's, conservative Evangelicals began weaponizing a number of conspiracy theories against anyone who wasn't a conservative Evangelical. These conspiracy theories were essentially repackaged witch hysteria (IE, the conspiracies pushed by early modern witch hunters) and antisemitism (especially blood libel).

The core conspiracy theory was that a global satanic cult was working behind the scenes to manipulate politics and lead people away from Jesus. The exact practices of the cult depended on who you asked, but common allegations were practicing human sacrifice (including plenty of child sacrifice), drinking human blood, engaging in sex slavery, producing CSE and snuff films, doing drugs, and having orgies.

Numerous people stepped forward claiming to have been either former cult members, or cult survivors. Pretty much all of their accounts are full of blatant absurdities, and anytime someone was actually investigated, pretty much all of their claims fell apart. For example, Mike Warnke, one of the earliest self-proclaimed ex-satanists, was found to have made up his entire story. One woman, Lauren Stratford, was not only revealed to be a fraud, but afterward claimed she was a Holocaust survivor to collect benefits.

Some examples of claims made by people who claimed to be ex-members/survivors include:

Neopaganism was created by the global satanic cult, and Aleister Crowley was their main agent in this.

All neopaganism and modern witchcraft is a slippery slope to human sacrifice and "hardcore satanism."

All media that depicts magic or the supernatural in any way is part of the satanic agenda. Yes, literally all of it. Yes, even that.

Homosexuality is part of the global satanic agenda.

Rock and heavy metal music are part of the global satanic agenda.

Fluoride, artificial sweeteners, and various food additives are actually mind control drugs.

Electromagnetic waves are used to control people's thoughts.

Marxism was created by the global satanic agenda.

If you know anything about QAnon conspiracy theories, you might notice that some of these look awfully familiar. This is because QAnon was another manifestation of Satanic Panic. They updated "electromagnetic waves" to 5G, and largely replaced homosexuality with transgender, but it's the same thing.

The conspiracy theory about cultists creating mind controlled slaves by inducing dissociative identity disorder through torture (all that Project Monarch stuff) is purely a product of the Satanic Panic. People's supposed "memories" of this abuse were generally produced via recovered memory therapy, which is now known to be more effective at implanting memories rather than recovering them. No serious investigations ever produced any evidence of the supposedly widespread and incredibly elaborate torture of tens of thousands of children.

Now, there have been actual isolated cases of what might be considered satanic ritual abuse. But they do not constitute evidence of a global satanic conspiracy. Rather, they constitute evidence that the perpetrators were inspired by the conspiracy theory.

Additionally, they had a very pseudoscientific view of DID, and the horrible practices allegedly used to induce it and create mind controlled alters were pure pseudoscience, as were the alleged symptoms that someone might be a victim of satanic ritual abuse and just didn't remember it. Everything from autism to having conflicted feelings about your abuser to liking BDSM could be construed as a sign that you had been ritually abused. With a bunch of therapists fully convinced that thousands of people had been ritually abused and armed with hypnotic techniques that allowed them to implant memories of abuse, you can see where things could turn messy in a hurry.

Those who claimed to be former satanists/SRA victims were extremely clear in their assertions that this global satanic conspiracy really did exist, and that the only way to escape and stay safe from it was to accept Jesus. Tales of demonic attacks that could only be stopped by the power of Jesus were common, as were other claims of grandiose supernatural power.

In short, the Satanic Panic was - and still is - a means of demonizing anyone who isn't a fundagelical Christofascist, and scaring anyone who already is, into remaining such. Many of the conspiracy theories have made their way into supposedly progressive circles, so you'll occasionally come across the Project Monarch stuff in DID communities, or see pro-LGBTQ people subscribing to conspiracy theories about the wealthy elite drinking blood or adrenochrome.

But make no mistake, there is no "grain of truth" to these allegations of a global satanic conspiracy. There was no "time before all of this was corrupted by evil agendas." It was all created by people with with hateful agendas, and continues to be perpetuated by people with hateful agendas. And that's all, folks.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

"I tell about what happened to me during the war, because it is important to me that the hearers retain something of my memories, but the most important thing is that they understand that hatred for the Arab child is the same as the hatred that there was for the Jewish child."

-Holocaust survivor and courier for the Jewish resistance in Poland, Chavka Folman-Raban (1924-2014); survived the last 3 years of WW2 in Auschwitz disguised as a Pole. Quote from pg. 328 of her memoir, They Are Still with Me.

[alwaysbewoke]

NINE HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS COMPARE ZIONIST POLICIES TO THOSE OF THE NAZIS

“Sometime after [1956] I heard a news item about Israelis herding Palestinians into settlement camps. I just could not believe this. Weren’t the Israelis also Jews? Hadn’t we – they – just survived the greatest pogrom of our history? Weren’t [concentration] camps – often euphemistically called ‘settlement camps’ by the Nazis – the main feature of this pogrom? How could Jews in any measure do unto others what had been done to them? How could these Israeli Jews oppress and imprison other people? In my romantic imagination, the Jews in Israel were socialists and people who knew right from wrong. This was clearly incorrect. I felt let down, as if I was being robbed of a part of what I had thought was my heritage. …

I have to say to the Israeli government, which claims to speak in the name of all Jews, that it is not speaking in my name. I will not remain silent in the face of the attempted annihilation of the Palestinians; the sale of arms to repressive regimes around the world; the attempt to stifle criticism of Israel in the media worldwide; or the twisting of the knife labelled ‘guilt’ in order to gain economic concessions from Western countries. Of course, Israel’s geo-political position has a greater bearing on this, at the moment. I will not allow the confounding of the terms ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘anti-Zionist’ to go unchallenged.”

Dr. Marika Sherwood, ‘How I became an anti-Israel Jew’, Middle East Monitor, 7/3/18. Marika Sherwood is a survivor of the Budapest ghetto.

-----

“Israel, in order to survive, has to renounce the wish for domination and then it will be a much better place for Jews also. The immediate analogy which a lot of people are making in Israel is Germany. Not only the Germany of Hitler and the Nazis but even the former German Empire wanted to dominate Europe. What happened in Japan after the attack on China is that they wanted to dominate a huge area of Asia. When Germany and Japan renounced the wish for domination, they became much nicer societies for the Japanese and Germans themselves. In addition to all the Arab considerations, I would like to see Israel, by renouncing the desire for domination, including domination of the Palestinians, become a much nicer place for Israelis to live.”

Dr. Israel Shahak, Middle East Policy Journal, Summer 1989, no.29. Israel Shahak was a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

-----

“I am pained by the parallels I observe between my experiences in Germany prior to 1939 and those suffered by Palestinians today. I cannot help but hear echoes of the Nazi mythos of ‘blood and soil’ in the rhetoric of settler fundamentalism which claims a sacred right to all the lands of biblical Judea and Samaria. The various forms of collective punishment visited upon the Palestinian people – coerced ghettoization behind a ‘security wall’; the bulldozing of homes and destruction of fields; the bombing of schools, mosques, and government buildings; an economic blockade that deprives people of the water, food, medicine, education and the basic necessities for dignified survival – force me to recall the deprivations and humiliations that I experienced in my youth. This century-long process of oppression means unimaginable suffering for Palestinians.” 

Dr. Hajo Meyer, ‘An Ethical Tradition Betrayed’, Huffington Post, 27/1/10. Hajo Meyer was a survivor of Auschwitz.

-----

“As a Jewish youngster growing up in Budapest, an infant survivor of the Nazi genocide, I was for years haunted by a question resounding in my brain with such force that sometimes my head would spin: ‘How was it possible? How could the world have let such horrors happen?’

 It was a naïve question, that of a child. I know better now: such is reality. Whether in Vietnam or Rwanda or Syria, humanity stands by either complicitly or unconsciously or helplessly, as it always does. In Gaza today we find ways of justifying the bombing of hospitals, the annihilation of families at dinner, the killing of pre-adolescents playing soccer on a beach. …

There is no understanding Gaza out of context – Hamas rockets or unjustifiable terrorist attacks on civilians – and that context is the longest ongoing ethnic cleansing operation in the recent and present centuries, the ongoing attempt to destroy Palestinian nationhood.

The Palestinians use tunnels? So did my heroes, the poorly armed fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Unlike Israel, Palestinians lack Apache helicopters, guided drones, jet fighters with bombs, laser-guided artillery. Out of impotent defiance, they fire inept rockets, causing terror for innocent Israelis but rarely physical harm. With such a gross imbalance of power, there is no equivalence of culpability. …

And what shall we do, we ordinary people? I pray we can listen to our hearts. My heart tells me that ‘never again’ is not a tribal slogan, that the murder of my grandparents in Auschwitz does not justify the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians, that justice, truth, peace are not tribal prerogatives. That Israel’s ‘right to defend itself,’ unarguable in principle, does not validate mass killing.

Dr. Gabor Mate, ‘Beautiful Dream of Israel has become a Nightmare’, Toronto Star, 22/7/14. Gabor Mate is a survivor of the Budapest ghetto.

[movietimegirl]

Morph: Someone's daddy didn't get pony on for his sweet 16th.

Magneto: My parents perished when I was a child...

Morph, Magneto is a holocaust survivor...

[djuvlipen]

It's so hard being a Romani lesbian. It feels contradictory at best, unthinkable at worst. You are raised with the explicit goal to become a wife and to have children one day. I can't remember the first time my mother talked to me about marriage, but I remember being around 6 and being told that I will have a wedding one day, that it will be the most important day of my life and that I would make my family so happy. Growing up I'd constantly, almost daily hear about having children and having a boyfriend and getting married some day. It was always one of the most important topics of conversation. Your relatives - even your female relatives - don't seem to think you can make decisions by yourself, for yourself. Everything you wear, everything you say, everything you do is about appealing to men. When I was 5 I asked my mom if I could wear a dress to go outside because it was very sunny and she just told me I wanted to dress that way because I was in love with the male friend that I had. If you want to wear jewellery, if you wear "revealing clothes", that means you want to flirt with a man. This is not even an inconscious, internalized mindset: it is very overt and I was explicitly told that anything I did was because I was in love with a man - a classmate, a friend, a neighbour, an adult family friend (yes, even if I was 8), a male relative. I felt disgusting anytime I wanted to dress the way I wanted because I felt I was inviting men to have sexual thoughts about me.

As a Romani little girl you are groomed to accept relationships with men, especially older men. When I was about 8, my then 15yo sister invited me to her bedroom and showed me condoms and told me that I would need them one day. When we were 12, my female cousins all had boyfriends. My female cousins usually got their first serious relationship at 14-15yo. Two of my cousins had their first kid before they turned 17 (one was with a 28yo man). And this is seen as normal and you're weird for criticizing them. Any heterosexual intercourse is seen as good, as a positive value. The majority of my Romani female relatives sided against another relative of ours who had been raped by her stepfather. My mother and my sister also sided with my abuser and told me that I was being unfairly mean to him because he is my stepfather and I should be nicer, actually.

When I was 12, I had never had a boyfriend. All my other relatives, both male and female, started piling on me. We had family gatherings almost every couple of weeks, and the conversation would always somehow land on me. I was told I was weird, I was a dyke, I was probably a lesbian, my mother usually said she didn't want me to be some ugly dyke but she would also say that I was so mean to her for not coming out to her. This was discussed among my relatives while I was in the room. My mother usually pressured me every couple of nights to tell her if I was a "dyke". Because even though my group doesn't practice child marriages anymore, it's still the norm for Romani girls to be in serious relationship with (older) men when they are in middle school, and you are the weird one for not fitting that norm.

When gay marriage was being debated in my country, I was in middle school and my mother's favourite joke was about a gay teenager committing suicide. It was a joke made by a stand-up comedian and she would listen to it once in a while when driving me to school.

And I am so lucky because my family isn't even very traditional. They aren't even religious. Most Roma are very intense about religion. In my country, there are a lot of Evangelical Christian Roma, who told me that lesbian Roma should be murdered, should be ousted, that gay Romani teenager should be beaten by their parents, should be thrown on the street, that lesbian Romani Holocaust survivors should have been killed. All under the guise of "culture". Because a lot of those people have a "let it be" attitude when it comes to non-Romani LGBT people, but they don't extend that attitude to their own kids.

And then I talk to antiracist and "progressive" Romani activists, usually male, usually straight, who tell me that "being Romani is about being raised with Romani culture and embracing and respecting that culture", but what does that mean for LGB Roma who are constantly being bullied and abused by their own family and community? Heterosexuality lies at the core of Romani culture and LGB Roma won't be free until we start challenging religions and the patriarchal and homophobic bias engraved in Romani culture

[iritfelsen]

My Presentation at the Upcoming In-Person Gathering in St. Louis of Child Survivors and Descendants

My Presentation at the Upcoming In-Person Gathering in St. Louis of Child Survivors and Descendants

The 32nd Annual World Federation of Jewish Child Holocaust Survivors and Descendants (WFJCSH&D) Conference, in conjunction with Kindertransport Association and Generations of the Shoa International, will take place at the St. Louis Grand Marriott Hotel (800 Washington Avenue, St. Louis, MO, 63101) from November 4-7, 2022. After two years of meeting virtually, the conference will take place…

[youthoughtiwasfeelinyou]

Redacted Headcannons (Shaw Pack and Solair Clan)

Asher is Chilean (meaning his parents are from Chile)

Sweetheart is Chinese (born in China, their parents were farmers, Sweetheart helped their father grow crops)

David is half American (his dad) and half middle eastern (his mom is Syrian)

Babe is half Japanese (their father) and half Dutch (their mother), but their father was abusive to their mother when she was pregnant, so the mom was scared he would hurt her child too when it gets born, so she abandoned Babe somewhere in Japan, and a Korean family visiting Japan found them and took them in, but the Korean family lives in Australia, so now Babe mostly and usually identifies as Korean and Australian, but when they found out about their bio parents, they learned Dutch and Japanese on top of them already knowing Korean and English

Babe and Angel have known each other since they were six, they kept the friendship for their whole lives but they couldn’t always be together since they had different lives, but when they started dating Asher and David they didn’t know about each others parter until David and Ash decided to introduce them to one another, they realized that life had brought them together yet again and from that moment on they knew they were soulmates They were like “omg this is the guy you were texting me about” “who knew that our boyfriends are best friends” “I didn’t know that when David said Asher now has a mate it meant YOU” “how have you been? it seems like fate keeps bringing us back together, my soulmate”

Gabe met David’s mom on a trip to Syria, a trip that he happened to take along with William, they coincidentally met at the airport and decided to might as well do the trip together

Lovely is half Punjabi (their mom) and half Iraqi (their dad)

Alexis had a daughter when she was human, but when she turned her daughter was still growing, her daughter died a 16 years old in a CAR ACCIDENT with her mom in which the daughter was a really good healer and promised her mom that she could heal herself and that she didn’t need to be turned but died before she could even try

In the early days of Vincent’s vampiracy, he lost control of his emotions with William a few days after William evoked him to feed, and ended up killing a pregnant woman by snapping her neck (stole this from the vampire diaries)

This might be controversial but what if Porter was a Jew survivor of the Holocaust (when he was human)

Babe and Angel both know 20 languages, they studied them together, but there are two sets of languages in which they differ, Angel knows Russian and Spanish but doesn’t know Dutch and Korean (but they know a little cause they used to hang out with babe and their Korean family, and babe is starting to officially teach them Korean now), while Babe knows Dutch and Korean but not Russian or Spanish ( Asher is teaching them a few words in Spanish, and they have an awful accent in it, I mean they speak 20 languages fluently and with barely any accent but their Spanish accent is god awful lol)

William has only been in love 3 times in his entire 500 years of living

That’s it for today but I got more I need to share, so maybe next time!

[mariacallous]

On Sunday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson went on television and mixed up Iran and Israel. “We passed the support for Iran many months ago,” he told Meet the Press, erroneously referring to an aid package for the Jewish state. Last night, the Fox News prime-time host Jesse Watters introduced South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as hailing from South Carolina. I once joined a cable-news panel where one of the participants kept confusing then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions with Representative Pete Sessions of Texas. I don’t hold these errors against anyone, as they are some of the most common miscues made by people who talk for a living—and I’m sure my time will come.

Yesterday, President Joe Biden added another example to this list. In response to a question about Gaza, he referred to the Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as the president of Mexico. The substance of Biden’s answer was perfectly cogent. The off-the-cuff response included geographic and policy details not just about Egypt, but about multiple Middle Eastern players that most Americans probably couldn’t even name. The president clearly knew whom and what he was talking about; he just slipped up the same way Johnson and so many others have. But the flub could not have come at a worse time. Because the press conference had been called to respond to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents, which dubbed the president an “elderly man with a poor memory,” the Mexico gaffe was immediately cast by critics as confirmation of Biden’s cognitive collapse.

But the truth is, mistakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career. Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining “why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, “Look, here’s what happened.”’” The only problem with this story, Slate laconically noted, was that “FDR wasn’t president then, nor did television exist.”

In other words, even a cursory history of Biden’s bungling shows that he is the same person he has always been, just older and slower—a gaffe-prone, middling public speaker with above-average emotional intelligence and an instinct for legislative horse-trading. This is why Biden’s signature moments as a politician have been not set-piece speeches, but off-the-cuff encounters, such as when he knelt to engage elderly Holocaust survivors in Israel so they would not have to stand, and when he befriended a security guard in an elevator at The New York Times on his way to a meeting with the paper’s editorial board, which declined to endorse him. And it’s why Biden’s key accomplishments—such as the landmark climate-change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s first gun-control bill in decades, and the expected expansion of the child tax credit—have come through Congress. The president’s strength is not orating, but legislating; not inspiring a crowd, but connecting with individuals.

That said, although Biden’s Mexico mistake might not be a demonstration of dementia, it is a warning sign of a different sort that his campaign would be wise to heed. Recently, the White House declined to have Biden participate in the traditional pre–Super Bowl interview this coming Sunday. The administration framed this decision as part of a broader strategy favoring nontraditional media, but it was reasonably seen as an attempt to shield the candidate from scrutiny. The president’s staff is understandably reluctant to put Biden front and center, knowing that his slower speed and inevitable gaffes—both real and fabricated—will feed the mental-acuity narrative. But in actuality, the bar for Biden has been set so laughably low that he can’t help but vault over it simply by showing up. By contrast, limiting his appearances ensures that the public mostly encounters the president through decontextualized social-media clips of his slipups.

As Slate observed in 2008, the frequency of Biden’s rhetorical miscues helped neutralize them in the eyes of the public. In 2024, Biden will have an assist from another source: Donald Trump. Among other recent lapses, the former president has called Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “the leader of Turkey,” confused Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley, and repeatedly expressed the strange belief that he won the 2020 election. With an opponent prone to vastly worse feats of viscous verbosity, Biden can’t help but look better by comparison, especially if he starts playing offense instead of defense.

But none of this will happen by itself. If the president and his campaign want the headlines to be something other than “Yes, Biden Knows Who the President of Egypt Is,” they’ll have to start making news, not reacting to it.