#inherited anti-semitism

[eretzyisrael]

by Jake Wallis Simons

Therefore, the number of women and children killed was likely grossly exaggerated. If that is the case – if, as Prof Wyner suggests, “the casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters” – where does that leave western outrage? Has the West fallen victim to a monstrous con?

The true ratio of civilian casualties to combatants is likely to be exceptionally low, “at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1”. This, Prof Wyner says, is a “successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians”.

By rights, if the central pillar of the anti-Israel edifice has been discredited, the whole structure should come tumbling down. But don’t hold your breath. The reason why Hamas’s dodgy data is so easily believed is confirmation bias. The drip-drip of Israelophobic propaganda over the years has created a powerful tendency to view the Jewish state, Britain’s democratic ally, as a colonialist aggressor and the Palestinians – even as they butcher children – as the “freedom fighters”. Regardless of the evidence, to many people this has become second nature.

It speaks of millennia of inherited anti-Semitism. A 2012 study by economists Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth found that Germans from towns where Jews were blamed for the Black Death and burnt alive in the 14th century were significantly more likely to vote for the Nazis 600 years later. In his 1945 essay, Orwell recalls a “young intellectual, communist or near-communist” remarking: “No, I do not like Jews. I’ve never made any secret of that. I can’t stick them. Mind you, I’m not anti-Semitic, of course.” Depressingly little has changed.

That is the advantage enjoyed by the jihadis of Gaza. They didn’t even need to keep their strategy a secret. Everyone knows they try to get civilians killed for propaganda gains, aiming to curtail Israeli operations with international outrage. Everyone knows that their censors keep dead terrorists away from the cameras, giving the world the impression that Israel is only attacking civilians (look up former AP reporter Matti Friedman’s seminal 2014 essay, “What the media gets wrong about Israel”, for a sense of how long such games have been played). A gang that murdered and mutilated babies may also, on occasion, be tempted to lie. So much should be obvious. But all this is smoothly eclipsed when a greater narrative is at work.

[wilwheaton]

The GOP wonders why young people (and others) don't want to vote for them. Some wise scribe assembled this list.

1.) Your Reagan-era “trickle-down economics” strategy of tax breaks for billionaires that you continue to employ to this day has widened the gap between rich and poor so much that most of them will never be able to own a home, much less earn a living wage.

2.) You refuse to increase the federal minimum wage, which is still $7.25 an hour (since 2009). Even if it had just kept up with inflation, it would be $27 now. You’re forcing people of all ages but especially young people to work multiple jobs just to afford basic necessities.

3.) You fundamentally oppose and want to kill democracy; have done everything in your power to restrict access to the ballot box, particularly in areas with demographics that tend to vote Democratic (like young people and POC). You staged a fucking coup the last time you lost.

4.) You have abused your disproportionate senate control over the last three decades to pack the courts with religious extremists and idealogues, including SCOTUS—which has rolled back rights for women in ways that do nothing but kill more women and children and expand poverty.

5.) You refuse to enact common sense gun control laws to curb mass shootings like universal background checks and banning assault weapons; subjecting their entire generation to school shootings and drills that are traumatizing in and of themselves. You are owned by the NRA.

6.) You are unequivocally against combatting climate change to the extent that it’s as if you’ve made it your personal mission to ensure they inherit a planet that is beyond the point of no return in terms of remaining habitable for the human race beyond the next few generations.

7.) You oppose all programs that provide assistance to those who need it most. Your governors refused to expand Medicaid even during A PANDEMIC. You are against free school lunches, despite it being the only meal that millions of children can count on to actually receive each day

8.) You are banning books, defunding libraries, barring subject matter, and whitewashing history even more in a fascistic attempt to keep them ignorant of the systemic racism that this nation was literally founded upon and continues to this day in every action your party takes.

9.) You oppose universal healthcare and are still trying to repeal the ACA and rip healthcare from tens of millions of Americans and replace it with nothing. You are against lowering the cost of insulin and prescription drugs that millions need simply to LIVE/FUNCTION in society.

10.) You embrace white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and other groups that are defined by their intractable racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and intolerance. You conspired with these groups on January 6th to try to overthrow the U.S. government via domestic terrorism that KILLED PEOPLE.

11.) You oppose every bill aimed at making life better for our nation’s youth; from education to extracurricular and financial/nutritional assistance programs. You say you want to “protect the children” while you elect/nominate pedophiles and attack trans youth and drag queens.

12.) You pretend to be offended by “anti-semitism” while literally supporting, electing, and speaking at events organized by Nazis. You pretend to hate “cancel culture” despite the fact that you invented it and it’s basically all you do.

13.) Every word you utter is a lie. You are the party of treason, hypocrisy, crime, and authoritarianism. You want to entrench rule by your aging minority because you know that you have nothing to offer young voters and they will never support you for all these reasons and more.

14.) You’re so hostile to even the notion of helping us overcome the mountain of debt that millions of us are forced to take on just to pay for our post K-12 education that you are suing to try to prevent a small fraction of us from getting even $10,000 in loan forgiveness.

15.) You opened the floodgates of money into politics via Citizens United; allowing our entire system of government to become a cesspool of corruption, crime, and greed. You are supposed to represent the American people whose taxes pay your salary but instead cater to rich donors.

16.) You respond to elected representatives standing in solidarity with their constituents to protest the ONGOING SLAUGHTER of children in schools via shootings by EXPELLING THEM FROM OFFICE & respond to your lack of popularity among young people by trying to raise the voting age.

17.) You impeach Democratic presidents over lying about a BJ but refuse to impeach (then vote twice to acquit) a guy whose entire “administration” was an international crime syndicate being run out of the WH who incited an insurrection to have you killed.

18.) You steal Supreme Court seats from democrats to prevent the only black POTUS we’ve ever had from appointing one and invent fake precedents that you later ignore all to take fundamental rights from Americans; and even your “legitimate” appointments consist of people like THIS (sub-thread refuting CJ Roberts criticisms of people attacking SCOTUS' legitimacy).

19.) You support mass incarceration even for innocuous offenses or execution by cop for POC while doing nothing but protect rich white criminals who engage in such things as tax fraud, money laundering, sex trafficking, rape/sexual assault, falsifying business records, etc.

20.) You are the reason we can’t pass:—Universal background checks—An assault weapons ban—The ‘For the People/Freedom to vote’ Act or John Lewis Voting Rights Act—The ERA & Equality Act—The Climate Action Now Act—The (Stopping) Violence Against Women Act—SCOTUS expansion.

21.) You do not seek office to govern, represent, or serve the American people. You seek power solely for its own sake so you can impose your narrow-minded puritanical will on others at the expense of their most fundamental rights and freedoms like voting and bodily autonomy.

22.) Ok, last one. You are trying to eliminate social security and Medicare that tens of millions of our parents rely on and paid into their entire lives. And you did everything to maximize preventable deaths from COVID leaving millions of us in mourning.

Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/e8DBZLH

[mightyflamethrower]

California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.

Governor Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus—gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.

Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.

At a time of an over-regulated, overtaxed, and sputtering economy, Newsom spent lavishly on new entitlements, illegal immigrants, and untried and inefficient green projects.

Newsom was endowed with two of the wettest years in recent California history. Yet he and radical environmentalists squandered the water bounty—as snowmelts and runoff long designated for agricultural irrigation were drained from aqueducts and reservoirs to flow out to sea.

Newsom transferred millions of dollars designated by a voter referendum to build dams and aqueducts for water storage and instead blew up four historic dams on the Klamath River. For decades, these now-destroyed scenic lakes provided clean, green hydroelectric power, irrigation storage, flood control, and recreation.

California hosts one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Over a fifth of the population lives below the property line. Nearly half the nation’s homeless sleep on the streets of its major cities.

The state’s downtowns are dirty, dangerous, and increasingly abandoned by businesses—most recently Google—that cannot rely on a defunded and shackled police.

Newsom’s California has spent billions on homeless relief and subsidizing millions of new illegal migrant arrivals across the state’s porous southern border.

The result was predictably even more homeless and more illegal immigrants, all front-loaded onto the state’s already overtaxed and broken healthcare, housing, and welfare entitlements.

Newsome raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $22 an hour. The result was wage inflation rippling out to all service areas, unaffordable food for the poor, and massive shut-downs and bankruptcies of fast food outlets.

Twenty-seven percent of Californians were born outside of the United States. It is a minority-majority state. Yet California has long dropped unifying civic education, while the bankrupt state funds exploratory commissions to consider divisive racial reparations.

California’s universities are hotbeds of ethnic, religious, and racial chauvinism and infighting. State officials, however, did little as its campuses were plagued for months by rampant and violent anti-Semitism.

Almost nightly, the nation watches mass smash-and-grab attacks on California retail stores. Carjackers and thieves own the night. They are rarely caught, even more rarely arrested—and almost never convicted.

Currently, Newsom is fighting in the courts to stop the people’s constitutional right to place on the ballot initiatives to restore penalties for violent crime and theft.

Gas prices are the highest in the continental United States, given green mandate formulas and the nation’s highest, and still raising, gasoline taxes—and are scheduled to go well over $6 a gallon.

Yet its ossified roads and highways are among the nation’s most dangerous, as vast sums of transportation funding were siphoned off to the multibillion-dollar high-speed rail boondoggle.

The state imports almost all the costly vitals of modern life, mostly because it prohibits using California’s own vast petroleum, natural gas, timber, and mineral resources.

As California implodes, its embarrassed government turns to the irrelevant, if not ludicrous.

It now outlaws natural gas stoves in new homes. It is adding new income-based surcharges for those who dutifully pay their power bills—to help subsidize the 2.5 million Californians who simply default on their energy bill with impunity.

What happened to the once-beautiful California paradise?

Millions of productive but frustrated, overtaxed, and underserved middle-class residents have fled to low-crime, low-tax, and well-served red states in disgust

In turn, millions of illegal migrants have swarmed the state, given its sanctuary-city policies, refusal to enforce the law, and generous entitlements.

Meanwhile, a tiny coastal elite, empowered by $9 trillion in Silicon Valley market capitalization, fiddled while their state burned.

California became a medieval society of plutocratic barons, subsidized peasants, and a shrinking and fleeing middle class. It is now home to a few rich estates, subsidized apartments, and unaffordable middle-class houses.

California suffers from poorly ranked public schools—but brags about its prestigious private academies. Its highways are lethal—but it hosts the most private jets in the nation.

The fantasies of a protected enclave of Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, and the masters of the Silicon Valley universe have become the abject nightmares of everyone else.

In sum, a privileged Bay Area elite inherited a California paradise and turned it into purgatory.

[laineystein]

I am genuinely curious - what is your opinion on practicing streams of Judaism? (Orthodox vs conservative vs reform vs Reconstructionist). I’m aware there are Israelis have the opinion that diaspora Jews- especially Americans, are Jew(ish), and not necessarily Jewish, if that makes sense? I know there are asshats that get quite nasty towards Israelis and I find that to be disgusting.

Me personally, I always found that to be very hurtful. I’m American, grew up Reform. In the sanctuary part of the Temple, we had two flags positioned on each corner of the sanctuary in the front: one was American, one was Israeli. My Rabbi, my Cantor, and my Sunday school teachers raised us to believe Israelis are distant cousins. Different but similar ideas, customs etc, but all part of the same family. So when 10/07 happened I (like many diaspora Jewish people), were shaken to the core.

And no matter what my personal issues are about the process of the military operation, and Bibi and his govt, I wish and hope everyone stays as safe as they can be while trying to get the hostages out and destroy Hamas.

So I was just wondering what your thoughts are about the clashes between the different streams of practice. I always feel that now is not the time to argue about who is or isn’t more Jewish. We are all feeling the after effects of what Hamas did, and the anti semitism that it has sparked. Once we have peace, then people can debate and bicker if they wish (but I really hope less of us do that). ♥️

So I contemplated how (or if) I’d answer this because I really think Am Yisrael needs ahavas chinam right now and I don’t want to do anything to promote sinas chinam. But I think you can disagree with something and still respect it and show love for your fellow Jews who may practice differently than you do and I think that *is* Ahavas chinam.

So I’d just ask that just as I’m affording respect to others who are different that people respect my view points as well.

So here we go…

A Jew is a Jew is a Jew. Even antizionist Jews, those are still Jews. Even atheist Jews, those are still Jews. I do believe in matrilineal inheritance of Judaism but I’m not going to treat someone differently if their father is their only Jewish parent and they were raised Jewish. It is not my place to say who is Jewish and who is not; I can have my viewpoints but ultimately I am not a Rav.

I was raised orthodox. I didn’t meet a “reform” Jew until med school (which was the first time I ever went to school with goyim) — the denominations you’re referring to are mostly western constructs. There are a few reform shuls in Israel but they’re not as common as they are in America. I am going to be very honest with you and share that many reform practices make me incredibly uncomfortable. Do I think that people that practice them are any less Jewish? Absolutely not.

As someone who spent half of their life in the diaspora (albeit in very Jewish communities with little contact with goyim) I absolutely do not subscribe to any belief that diaspora Jews are any less Jewish. That’s abhorrent. I don’t personally know any Israelis that believe that but I’m sure they exist. All Jews, regardless of their location, are valid.

I will say that it is interesting to me to hear that your teachers referred to Israelis as “distant cousins” - all of am Yisrael is a single tribe. I would only ever refer to a fellow Jew as a brother or sister regardless of whether or not they lived in Israel or the diaspora. It seems there might be some anti-Israel bias in that teaching, which is unfortunate. And it’s amusing because your question insinuates that Orthodox Jews and Israelis are less accepting of reform Jews and diasporic Jews and that’s interesting to hear because my experience has always been the exact opposite.

But in Israel we have similar issues where our religious communities spar with our less observant communities. It was very apparent in our most recent elections and the protests that followed. I find myself existing in both communities and it can be challenging sometimes. Some of my secular friends do have negative attitudes toward more frum communities. Those same frum communities may look down on my more secular friends. Because I do and always have existed in both groups I see both sides. I think both of these black and white attitudes are a chillul hashem and will get us nowhere.

But bottom line, how a Jew lives their life and their relationship with Hashem is none of my business. You do you; Jew do Jew.

(This was kind of all over the place and there’s a lot of tangents I actually *didn’t* go down believe it or not so if you want some clarification, feel free to ask. Or you can DM me and I’m happy to chat about it that way too.)

[concretecrisiscompatible]

tldr: Let's stop calling things 'demonic'.

When we as Christians start labeling anything any one of us could possibly disagree with as 'demonic' it takes away all the power that word has and reduces spiritual warfare to something only weirdo conspiracy theorists believe in. It's even more insidious when people use it as a marketing tactic.

"Secular music is demonic, so you should listen to my song out on Spotify!" Are there destructive artists out there? Absolutely. There are artists who write hateful songs and do horrible things outside of their music, too. Does that mean all secular music is bad? No.

"[Insert brand here] is demonic, so you should buy this thing I sell!" Do brands do immoral stuff sometimes? Absolutely. Sweatshop labour, exploitative working conditions, environmental impacts, etc. are all very real things. Does that mean that only Christian brands are good?

Boiling everything down to 'Christian vs non-Christian' is super destructive. When it comes to brands or music or behaviors it assumes that every person in the world has no ability to discern good and evil for themselves. It's never black and white.

Not everyone is able to consume alcohol in a healthy and safe way, so not everyone should have alcohol. Does that mean we should ban it altogether? No. We should empower people to make their own decisions in life.

This 'Christian vs non-Christian' mindset is also super exclusionary and divisive. Who is a "real Christian" and who isn't a "real Christian?" Does this mean that we should treat people of other faiths differently?

There are absolutely forces of evil in the world, just look at systemic racism and poverty, the prison industrial complex, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, etc. Not any one person started that, and not any one person will fix it by making Christian sweatshirts and guilting people into buying them. (And I have SO much more to say about using guilt as a marketing tactic, but that's for another day. And even more about treating evangelism like marketing, again for another day.)

Jesus speaks about lifting up the marginalized, loving your neighbor, and creating a healthy community through which injustices rectified.

The Beatitudes:

“'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

'Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

'Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

'Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

'Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

'Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

'Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.'" - Matthew 5:3-12

And from the rest of Matthew 5:

“So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison." - Matthew 5:23-26 NRSVUE

"But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." - Matthew 5:44-48

That's all I have to say for now.

Happy pride month! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️⚧

[gravedangerahead]

On Palestine, G4S, and the Prison-Industrial Complex Speech at SOAS in London

(Angela Davis, December 13, 2013)

Transcript from the book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

When this event highlighting the importance of boycotting the transnational security corporation G4S was organized, we could not have known that it would coincide with the death and memorialization of Nelson Mandela.

As I reflect on the legacies of struggle we associate with Mandela, I cannot help but recall the struggles that helped to forge the victory of his freedom and thus the arena on which South African apartheid was dismantled. Therefore I remember Ruth First and Joe Slovo, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo, Chris Hani, and so many others who are no longer with us. In keeping with Mandela’s insistence of always locating himself within a context of collective struggle, it is fitting to evoke the names of a few of his comrades who played pivotal roles in the elimination of apartheid.

While it is moving to witness the unanimous and continued outpouring of praise for Nelson Mandela, it is important to question the meaning of this sanctification. I know that he himself would have insisted on not being elevated, as a single individual, to a secular sainthood, but rather would have always claimed space for his comrades in the struggle and in this way would have seriously challenged the process of sanctification. He was indeed extraordinary, but as an individual he was especially remarkable because he railed against the individualism that would single him out at the expense of those who were always at his side. His profound individuality resided precisely in his critical refusal to embrace the individualism that is such a central ideological component of neoliberalism.

I therefore want to take the opportunity to thank the countless numbers of people here in the UK, including the many then-exiled members of the ANC and the South African Communist Party, who built a powerful and exemplary antiapartheid movement in this country. Having traveled here on numerous occasions during the 1970s and the 1980s to participate in antiapartheid events, I thank the women and men who were as unwavering in their commitment to freedom as was Nelson Mandela. Participation in such solidarity movements here in the UK was as central to my own political formation as were the movements that saved my life.

As I mourn the passing of Nelson Mandela I offer my deep gratitude to all of those who kept the antiapartheid struggle alive for so many decades, for all the decades that it took to finally rid the world of the racism and repression associated with the system of apartheid. And I evoke the spirit of the South African Constitution and its opposition to racism and anti-Semitism as well as to sexism and homophobia.

This is the context within which I join with you once more to intensify campaigns against another regime of apartheid and in solidarity with the struggles of the Palestinian people. As Nelson Mandela said, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Mandela’s political emergence occurred within the context of an internationalism that always urged us to make connections among freedom struggles, between the Black struggle in the southern United States and the African liberation movements—conducted by the ANC in South Africa, the MPLA in Angola, SWAPO in Namibia, FRELIMO in Mozambique, and PAIGC in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. These international solidarities were not only among people of African descent but with Asian and Latin American struggles as well, including ongoing solidarity with the Cuban revolution and solidarity with the people struggling against US military aggression in Vietnam.

A half-century later we have inherited the legacies of those solidarities—however well or however badly specific struggles may have concluded—as what produced hope and inspiration and helped to create real conditions to move forward.

We are now confronted with the task of assisting our sisters and brothers in Palestine as they battle against Israeli apartheid today. Their struggles have many similarities with those against South African apartheid, one of the most salient being the ideological condemnation of their freedom efforts under the rubric of terrorism. I understand that there is evidence indicating historical collaboration between the CIA and the South African apartheid government—in fact, it appears that it was a CIA agent who gave SA authorities the location of Nelson Mandela’s whereabouts in 1962, leading directly to his capture and imprisonment.

Moreover, it was not until the year 2008—only five years ago—that Mandela’s name was taken off the terrorist watch list, when George W. Bush signed a bill that finally removed him and other members of the ANC from the list. In other words when Mandela visited the US after his release in 1990, and when he later visited as South Africa’s president, he was still on the terrorist list and the requirement that he be banned from the US had to be expressly waived.

The point I am making is that for a very long time, Mandela and his comrades shared the same status as numerous Palestinian leaders and activists today and that just as the US explicitly collaborated with the SA apartheid government, it continues to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine, currently in the form of over $8.5 million a day in military aid. We need to let the Obama administration know that the world knows how deeply the US is implicated in the occupation.

It is an honor to participate in this meeting, especially as one of the members of the International Political Prisoners Committee calling for the freedom of Palestinian political prisoners, recently formed in Cape Town, and also as a member of the jury of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. I would like to thank War on Want for sponsoring this meeting and progressive students, faculty, and workers at SOAS, for making it possible for us to be here this evening.

This evening’s gathering specifically focuses on the importance of expanding the BDS movement—the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement called for by Palestinian civil society—which has been crafted along the lines of the powerful model of the antiapartheid movement with respect to South Africa. While there numerous transnational corporations have been identified as targets of the boycott, Veolia for example, as well as Sodastream, Ahava, Caterpillar, Boeing, Hewlett Packard, and others, we are focusing our attention this evening on G4S.

G4S is especially important because it participates directly and blatantly in the maintenance and reproduction of repressive apparatuses in Palestine—prisons, checkpoints, the apartheid wall, to name only a few examples.

G4S represents the growing insistence on what is called “security” under the neoliberal state and ideologies of security that bolster not only the privatization of security but the privatization of imprisonment, the privatization of warfare, as well as the privatization of health care and education.

G4S is responsible for the repressive treatment of political prisoners inside Israel. Through Addameer, directed by Sahar Francis, we have learned about the terrifying universe of torture and imprisonment which is faced by so many Palestinians but also about their hunger strikes and other forms of resistance.

G4S is the third-largest private corporation in the world—behind Walmart, which is the largest, and Foxconn, the second largest.

On the G4S website, one discovers that the company represents itself as capable of providing protection for a broad range of “people and property,” from rock stars and sports stars to “ensuring that travelers have a safe and pleasant experience in ports and airports around the world to secure detention and escorting of people who are not lawfully entitled to remain in a country.”

“In more ways than you might realize,” the website reads, “G4S is securing your world.” We might add that in more ways that we realize, G4S has insinuated itself into our lives under the guise of security and the security state—from the Palestinian experience of political incarceration and torture to racist technologies of separation and apartheid; from the wall in Israel to prison-like schools in the US and the wall along the US-Mexico border. G4S-Israel has brought sophisticated technologies of control to HaSharon prison, which includes children among its detainees, and Damun prison, which incarcerates women.

Against this backdrop, let us explore the deep involvement of G4S in the global prison-industrial complex. I am not only referring to the fact that the company owns and operates private prisons all over the world, but that it is helping to blur the boundary between schools and jails. In the US schools in poor communities of color are thoroughly entangled with the security state, so much so that sometimes we have a hard time distinguishing between schools and jails. Schools look like jails; schools use the same technologies of detection as jails and they sometimes use the same law enforcement officials. In the US some elementary schools are actually patrolled by armed officers. As a matter of fact, a recent trend among school districts that cannot afford security companies like G4S has been to offer guns and target practice to teachers. I kid you not.

But G4S, whose major proficiencies are related to security, is actually involved in the operation of schools. A website entitled “Great Schools” includes information on Central Pasco Girls Academy in Florida, which is represented as a small alternative public school. If you look at the facilities page of the G4S website you will discover this entry: “Central Pasco Girls Academy serves moderate-risk females, ages 13-18, who have been assessed as needing intensive mental health services.” G4S indicates that they use “gender-responsive services” and that they address sexual abuse and substance abuse, et cetera. While this may sound relatively innocuous, it is actually a striking example of the extent to which security has found its way into the educational system, and thus also of the way education and incarceration have been linked under the sign of capitalist profit. This example also demonstrates that the reach of the prison-industrial complex is far beyond the prison.

This company that provides “security” for numerous agencies as well as rehabilitation services for young girls “at risk” in the United States, while operating private prisons in Europe, Africa, and Australia, also provides equipment and services to Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank along the route of Israel’s apartheid wall as well as to the terminals from which Gaza is kept under continuous siege. G4S also provides goods and services to the Israeli police in the West Bank, while it offers security to private businesses and homes in illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine.

As private prison companies have long recognized, the most profitable sector of the prison-industrial complex is immigrant detention and deportation. In the US, G4S provides transportation for deportees who are being ushered out of the US into Mexico, thus colluding with the increasingly repressive immigration practices inside the US. But it was here in the UK where one of the most egregious acts of repression took place in the course of the transportation of an undocumented person.

When I was in London during the month of October, speaking at Birkbeck School of Law, I spoke to Deborah Coles, codirector of the organization Inquest, about the case of Jimmy Mubenga, who died at the hands of G4S guards in the course of a deportation from the UK to Angola. On a British Airways plane, handcuffed behind his back, Mubenga was forcibly pushed by G4S agents against the seat in front of him in the prohibited “carpet karaoke” hold in order to prevent him from vocalizing his resistance. The use of such a term for a law enforcement hold, albeit illegal, is quite astonishing. It indicates that the person subject to the hold is compelled to “sing into the carpet”—or in the case of Mubenga—into the upholstered seat in front, thus rendering his protests muffled and incomprehensible. As Jimmy Mubenga was held for forty minutes, no one intervened. By the time there was finally an attempt to offer him first aid, he was dead.

This appalling treatment of undocumented immigrants from the UK to the US compels us to make connections with Palestinians who have been transformed into immigrants against their will, indeed into undocumented immigrants on their own ancestral lands. I repeat—on their own land. G4S and similar companies provide the technical means of forcibly transforming Palestinian into immigrants on their own land.

As we know, G4S is involved in the operation of private prisons all over the world. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (CO-SATU) recently spoke out against G4S, which runs the Mangaung Correctional Centre in the Free State. The occasion for their protest was the firing of approximately three hundred members of the police union for staging a strike. According to the COSATU statement:

G4S’s modus operandi is indicative of two of the most worrying aspects of neoliberal capitalism and Israeli apartheid: the ideology of “security” and the increasing privatization of what have been traditionally state run sectors. Security, in this context, does not imply security for everyone, but rather, when one looks at the major clients of G4S Security (banks, governments, corporations etc.) it becomes evident that when G4S says it is “Securing your World,” as the company slogan goes, it is referring to a world of exploitation, repression, occupation and racism.

When I traveled to Palestine two years ago with a delegation of indigenous and women-of-color scholar/activists, it was the first time the members of the delegation had actually visited Palestine. Most of us had been involved for many years in Palestine solidarity work, but we were all thoroughly shocked to discover that the repression associated with Israeli settler colonialism was so evident and so blatant. The Israeli military made no attempt to conceal or even mitigate the character of the violence they inflicted on the Palestinian people.

Gun-carrying military men and women—many extremely young—were everywhere. The wall, the concrete, the razor wire everywhere conveyed the impression that we were in prison. Before Palestinians are even arrested, they are already in prison. One misstep and one can be arrested and hauled off to prison; one can be transferred from an open-air prison to a closed prison.

G4S clearly represents these carceral trajectories that are so obvious in Palestine but that also increasingly characterize the profit-driven moves of transnational corporations associated with the rise of mass incarceration in the US and the world.

On any given day there are almost 2.5 million people in our country’s jails, prisons, and military prisons, as well as in jails in Indian country and immigrant detention centers. It is a daily census, so it doesn’t reflect the numbers of people who go through the system every week or every month or every year. The majority are people of color. The fastest-growing sector consists of women —women of color. Many are queer or trans. As a matter of fact, trans people of color constitute the group most likely to be arrested and imprisoned. Racism provides the fuel for maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of the prison-industrial complex.

And so if we say abolish the prison-industrial complex, as we do, we should also say abolish apartheid, and end the occupation of Palestine!

In the United States when we have described the segregation in occupied Palestine that so clearly mirrors the historical apartheid of racism in the southern United States of America—and especially before Black audiences—the response often is: “Why hasn’t anyone told us about this before? Why hasn’t anyone told us about the segregated highways leading from one settlement to another, about pedestrian segregation regulated by signs in Hebron—not entirely dissimilar from the signs associated with the Jim Crow South. Why hasn’t anyone told us this before?”

Boycott G4S! Support BDS!

Just as we say “never again” with respect to the fascism that produced the Holocaust, we should also say “never again” with respect to apartheid in South Africa, and in the southern US. That means, first and foremost, that we will have to expand and deepen our solidarity with the people of Palestine. People of all genders and sexualities. People inside and outside prison walls, inside and outside the apartheid wall.

Palestine will be free!

Thank you.

[tipsygnostalgy]

On Grandpa/Jake Harley

you know shits about to be long as fuck when i add the keep reading line like four lines in lol

anyway anon all this is 4 u!! feel free to talk ab this by just tagging instead of rb i dont want 2k words to be posted over n over again

Grandpa Harley being some kind of pseudo-omnipotent deity figure who somehow figures out/guesses (my money's on guesses) extremely intricate details about the game and does everything he can to make things go right is something that we don't talk about enough. It's one of the only plans in Homestuck made that are orchestrated entirely by one person then ends up going right. It's that pattern of hoping that the cards fall into place in the right way (unless we're taking the Grandpa is practically God perspective, which is interesting in its own right)—but notably, he makes a lot of preparations beforehand. He's so... active. It fascinates me. I'll have to talk about this on the Jake English as Jesus Christ trope post (it's coming, I swear, brainrot's a bitch) but the sheer amount of things he does is astounding. But, lo and behold, he wasn't always like this. Cue: the Skaianet Systems Incorporated texts.

Quick note about all that. A very large portion of the things Hussie wrote for SSI is 1) dubiously canon, and 2) a bunch of anti-semitic bullshit that he probably never should have fucking released to the public, at least not like that. Like, holy shit, keep that and your weird comments about sexual slavery in your Notes app dude, we don't need to hear it. For this reason I suggest reading the actual material with extreme caution. Cool? Cool. On with it. Here's a lil' review of Jake Harley before the session.

Funny enough, Jake had always been kind of pathetic in the Beta session as well.

So Skaianet was actually established by HIC as a front for laundering technology from Alternia and Sburbian ruins. The key of SN was not to actually develop tech, but make it look like it so that people will believe you when your company just re-defined gravity for the hundredth time. Jake has to play the "famous genius shtick," but he doesn't do so well. When he fully inherits SN at 21 he runs it hands-on, and "believes" his success is due to hard work and diligence. He also "believes SN is now a considerably more distinct entity from Crocker Corp, and his leadership of the company is a result of his hard work and competence. Neither is true." He's manipulated by his at-the-time boyfriend (Charlie Chaplin, somehow) into letting a rebel force into the Crocker manor, though the effort is ultimately thwarted by HIC.

He also has a disastrous love life. His relationship at sixteen with Chaplin consists of Chaplin finding him "obnoxious and thoughtless" though he "can't seem to quit him," and Jake ultimately "[toys] with his heart, and [abandons] him." This later (much later, think decades) manifests into something way worse when Chaplin appears in an outing Jake has with one of his families (he's had many, though not at once) and tries to kill Jake for not just his involvement with SN/HIC, but for breaking his heart as well. Notably, in this scene, upon having a gun aimed at him Jake reflexively hides behind his wife, who ends up being shot in his stead. He's out-strifed so badly that he'd have died in the jungle (oh yeah he takes his wife and 5yo son to a jungle btw) if Chaplin didn't have a divine intervention moment afterwards.

At 32 he also abandons his post at SN for fucking around Europe. "[H]e's out exploring and adventuring, completely oblivious to whatever's going on in Europe. He hops from site to site, looking for Sburbian ruins to plunder." One, the "whatever's going on" is WW2, again, somehow. Two, he has a daughter there that he "takes custody of, apprentices as an adventurer, and takes all over the place on his adventures." When he takes her to Hawaii she ditches him because she's sick of her "douchebag dad." And there's that Jude family too, obviously.

Oh, and all the Beta guardians are also meteor babies. It's how Jake ends up finding Dirk and Roxy to begin with—he sets them up with trust funds in Texas and New York so that they can be of use to SN later, though whether he knew their importance in the larger context of SBURB is unclear.

All caught up? Great.

The exact details of how every event goes down aren't as important as the lessons you can draw from it, namely: Jake Harley is an absolute fucking mess of a human being. He continuously creates families—notice how he keeps having children with his wive—then is bereaved of them. A few times he abandons them, a few times they abandon him, and sometimes they get killed by your ex-boyfriend. It's a neat little insight into just how neck-deep these commitment issues lie, but it's also fun to consider that he seeks it so desperately. This man has on record has had:

one wife be shot dead in front of him

a son who was technically kidnapped from him by the man who almost beat him to death (his ex-boyfriend)

a daughter ditch him in the middle of hawaii for being a shitty dad

a daughter (joey claire) be teleported by portal to alternia, who hated jake so much she took her dead mom's last name

said dead mom/wife whom upon her death leaves her children "Semi Orphans" because he just straight up ditches his kids to go work on hellmurder island

probably more

And he still considers himself a grandfather to Jade. TBF, I guess the easier way of explaining it is that it's simply the natural explanation—they are sort of related after all. But considering that he once sired an illegitimate daughter and not only took her into custody but tried to raise her as his liege, I still find it the fact that he tries over and over again to the point of rending the family meaningless interesting. I think it's viable that Jake wanted a family—not one where he and Jane were raised by HIC and poorly—but a real one. His attempt to raise that first daughter to mirror his habits reflects the way HIC raised Beta Jane to mirror her. Yet after relationship after relationship goes horribly wrong, this desire fades into a kind of apathetic unsureness to the point where this is what he says about his last "full" family, the Harley-Claires:

He's been making good headway on his quest for the mysterious island in the pacific. Once everything is taken care of here, he'll leave this family behind and set up shop on that island permanently. That's when the real work begins. The discoveries on that island will finally unite him with the destiny he's been in search of his whole life.

Two things of note. One, his first recorded instance of permanently setting up jackshit anywhere is at first with SkaiaNet then at Hellmurder island. Both locations share that theme of "destiny" in common—notice how he considers SN divorced from Crockercorp because of his efforts and tries to make the place overall less HIC-controlled, but ultimately fails. And sure, he later achieves this kind of destiny by having his Sburb plan go "right" but before this not a single "plan" he established went correctly. Jake in either timeline isn't a guy who regularly makes plans for multiple efforts—they zero in on one goal that appears as part of their calling and makes it happen, damn it. To him, that's a success. Whether he "actually does" is up for interpretation.

See, HIC actually wanted the Beta kids to play the game. She'd been using the Beta session as a "testing" timeline, knowing which events and people to avoid and keep in mind so that she can play everything out exactly the way she wants it to. Part of the reason why Crockertier Jane was so firmly for marrying Jake and having children was because that had been HIC's idea of what Beta Jake's purpose was once he landed on a Meteor (after B!Jane). So he saw the "big picture" in a bigger way than quite literally anyone else, but it still isn't enough, at least not in the way he thought it might be at first.

Prior to his discoveries on the island, Jake has no idea this will result in some kids using the software he's unearthing, which will destroy all life on Earth. Nor does he have any idea that those kids will be using this same software to reboot the universe with different starting conditions, thus ending this "trial run" timeline for HIC, and giving her a fresh start. Exactly as she planned.

This implies there is some moment that Grandpa Harley realized that everything he was doing would end up playing into the HIC's hands anyway. This also implies that he carried out those actions regardless, Hoping that Jade would someday win the game in the process. Are you seeing the parallel for my interpretation of Ult. Jake yet? Fuck.

What was the moment he realized? Did he power through anyway, hoping there was a bright light for Jade at the end of this all?

He's also a hoarder. He keeps items and objects instead of people. He hangs onto the past to the point where he's seemingly unable to let go of it—trophies, guns, artifacts—but throughout the entire Harley Manor there is not a single picture of his families. And that's where his dolls come in—dolls are just human enough but not too human, you can control them however you'd like yet delude yourself they are company. I'm not saying all doll-enjoyers are this way, but the specifics in which Grandpa (and Bro to an extent, for that matter) interacts with his dolls makes me believe he's turning them into pseudo-human entities because at the end of the day he again craves company. But, unlike Jake, Grandpa Harley's had a lifetime of experience reinforcing over and over again that this will never happen with a real person. And fuck, don't even get me started on the taxidermy—it's the very act of taking something, bereaving it of life and subjectivity, then keeping it for yourself. You can see how this has even affected Jade in the sense that she thinks about her taxidermied dead Grandpa (who she taxidermied himself, by the way) like a living, breathing person. And Jadebot? A robotic, perfect replica of his granddaughter, designed to monitor her at all times instead of him? And the parallels that has to Brobot. Ughghgh.

Also, quick digression. You know how Beta Dad & Mom were on the Battlefield? And how Grandpa landed just to recover Jade's dead dream body, then left Dad and Mom behind. Sorry, I'm just not normal about that at all. How did we collectively miss the sheer tragedy of that situation, God, I wonder what Roxy was thinking. Digression over.

All in all, what these files tell me is that the way Jake was written was no way accidental. Yeah he got fucked over in the Alpha session, yeah he's tragic, but he's tragic for a reason that I ultimately appreciate even as I clutch my heart and dramatically fall over from pain. He knows just enough about the meta-reality to cause feelings of absurdity but powers through it; he's supposed to be put in seemingly insurmountable situations and emerge, through one way or the other, victorious. He's supposed to have the strangest relationship known to man regarding other people and, as a result, try to find compromise between the two halves of "complete fuck-all isolation" and "the company of any developed adult human ever." He's goal-oriented only when it presents a clear-cut destiny to him, when he can see the significance of it, and otherwise floats around doing fuck-all in this world. This goal is, most of the time, people: Dirk for LE Jake, and Jade for Harley. It's also fun insight into where Jake could potentially end up going—as this post by Cooper already pointed out, Ult. Dirk's actions mirror Bro's need to micromanage and control everything in his life to the point where he, much alike Bro, secludes himself in an apartment while running his inner machinations unknown to most others. I wouldn't be surprised if Jake ends up in a similar way to Grandpa, giving his all to a dreary situation and maintaining Hope through it with the desire that it'll eventually succeed.

It would also be fun if his Hopes only came true after his death.

Alright, analysis over, everyone clock out. Good work, people. [Vaguely gestures to the reader.]

[mornington-the-crescent]

We can debate about if racism is inherited in the us all we want but I think it’s clear that anti-semitism is literally part of us “culture” and that every american has some sort of anti-semitism in them, whether it’s direct or not.

It's hardly an American issue. Just about everywhere in the world has a touch (or more) of anti-Jewish sentiment baked into the culture.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

this is somehow the bitchiest thing i’ve ever seen written in a historiographic* essay [please read full post before engaging/reblogging]

“I do not believe that this anti-Semitic policy was inevitable. Anti-semitic attitudes, like other prejudices, exist everywhere; but policies are the result of conscious decisions. Poland inherited a ‘Jewish problem’. For various reasons the new Polish state rejected the assimilationist Jewish policy of pre-war Hungary or interwar Soviet Russia. I believe that the crucial factor here was the belief among the governing Polish elite that Poland had re-emerged as a nation state, the main mission of which was to advance the interests of the Polish nation - when being a ‘nation’ was defined as being able to absorb certain non-Polish elements but not being able, or not desiring, to absorb the Jews. This self-definition inevitably led to anti-Ukrainian policies...and to anti-Jewish policies and attitudes. Israelis are in a good position to understand that any state which defines itself as a mono-ethnic entity, but which in fact includes within its borders members of other ethnic groups that cannot be absorbed, must act in a way which is deleterious to the interests of these other groups. Again, exactly how adversely the interests of the unassimilable minority' will be affected depends on various local factors.”

Ezra Mendelsohn, “Interwar Poland: good for the Jews or bad for the Jews?” in The Jews in Poland, eds. Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk, and Antony Polonsky, (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1986), 137.

I’ve read a lot of Pointed Things about Zionism is historiographic essays. Sometimes to the point where I’m like “....is bro taking issue with the State of Israel et al or does bro hate Jews because lol this is a book about Indonesia.” But DAAAAAMNNNN EZRA.

*Historiography sections/essays are where historians discuss the state of the literature; ie: how other historians analyze and conceptualize the field. In the larger field of Modern Jewish History, most practitioners are Jewish, and have extremely diverse, passionate, and often conflicting views on the State of Israel, Zionism, Palestine, geopolitics, etc. They often disagree with each other intensely, leading to lifelong grudges and salt-the-lands polemics in obscure journals that no one outside the field would have have reason to read. This excerpt should be understand not as much as commenting on the State of Israel or right wing strands of contemporary Zionism, as it is Dr. Mendelsohn firing shots at certain of his colleagues. 

If you would like to get into Discourse about the political issues and questions Mendelsohn raises here--as they are intellectually and politically provocative, and intentionally so--please copy and paste this into a new post and do it there; I/P etc online discourse gives me hives. I’m posting this simply as a messy bitch who loves historiographic drama.

[theinfernalsanctuary]

Greetings all,

On a lighter note from my last post, I'd like to share with you all the three infernal sins from the Infernal Gospel. These are the three things we can do as theistic Satanists that blatantly go against our doctrine and poison our practice from the inside. They are referred to as sins, but don't worry, Lord Satan understands your humanity and that we sometimes make mistakes. Unless you continually and knowingly make these mistakes and refuse to fix them, you have nothing to worry about. Nevertheless, it is important for all those who wish to inherit the kingdom of Hell to be made aware of these transgressions so we can work on removing them from our everyday life.

The first infernal sin is False Judgment. A judgment is false when it is formed without data, experience, or unbiasedness. It is an opinion that exists based on nothing but emotional disturbance. These judgments are common in society and result in some of the cruelest injustices that could ever harm another person. We are called to assess all judgments we make towards other people and determine whether or not our judgment should be deemed false. For example just because somebody was rude to you once does not make them a bad person to deem them a bad person would be to make a false judgment and could therefore have negativeconsequencesfor that person. Though on the contrary if you see somebody repeatedly using racial slurs, being anti-Semitic, being homophobic, or transphobic it is perfectly fair to make the judgment that they are not a safe or good person to be around. Use your common sense in all things.

The second of the infernal sins is Arrogance, while an exaggerated ego is not uncommon nor inherently negative. It inhibits ones sound judgment. If the ego is nurtured without caution, it will grow into self aggrandizement, and in this arrogance becomes ignorance. We are called to humble ourselves. We are never done learning, and therefore, we should never act as though we are better than those who may have just begun their research. Look to teach and uplift those who may have just begun their learning. We are all Lord Satan's children, and he would only want us to treat each other as such.

The third and final infernal sin is Malice. The left-hand path does not promote violence nor malicious behavior, nor does it support those that bastardize its craft for hateful and ignorant agendas. We are called to always conduct ourselves in a respectful and dignified manner, and this, of course, includes in the way that we address Lord Satan, each other, and the denizens of Hell. It is up to us to seek out those amongst us who shame Lord Satan's name for the sake of bigotry or just to be edgy and contrarian and remove them from our spaces. Theistic Satanism is an actual religion, with actual followers and beliefs that guide us. There is no room for hate for hates sake here, nor is there room for blatant disrespectful actions or verbiage in reference to Lord Satan, the denizens of Hell, or each other.

May Lord Satan's light guide you even in the darkest places.

Ave Satanas!

[eretzyisrael]

by ALAA AL-AMERI

Youssef’s historical sketch conforms to the prevailing narrative of our time. Namely, that the conflicts that have beset the Middle East since the end of the Second World War are the product of decisions made by white Europeans, and imposed on a world filled with passive, innocent ‘indigenous people’. This means that the rampant anti-Semitism in the Middle East is effectively cast as a Western, European creation.

As an Arab and a Muslim, I recognise this story only too well. It is one that I inherited and told myself for a very long time. That was until I could no longer ignore the dishonesty of this account of Arab and Muslim history.

After all, if this tale is close to the truth, why have pro-Hamas protesters around the world been shouting ‘Khaybar Khaybar ya yahud’ – a reference to the seventh-century murder and expulsion of Jewish tribes from the Khaybar oasis in the Arabian Peninsula – rather than something that relates to Deir Yassin? If a massacre and the formation of Israel in 1948 was the catalyst for Muslim anti-Semitism, why did Izz ad-Din al-Qassam – the cleric after whom Hamas names its rockets and murder-brigades – form the anti-Semitic Islamist group, the Black Hand, as early as the 1930s? And why was the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, (considered by both the British and Nazi Germany to be the leader of the Arab world at the time) so keen to bring the Nazi Holocaust to the Middle East?

If you had asked me those questions when I was younger, I would have reeled off a list of grievances about Jewish refugees from Europe infringing on native Arab populations in the 1920s and 1930s. But in recent years, I changed my mind. I looked around at my home city of London, which has been utterly transformed by immigrants like me, and saw the arrogance and hypocrisy of my position.

I was casting Jewish refugees from Europe as villains, while regarding myself as a worthy victim. I was justifying the actions of those who violently rejected Jewish migration into Mandate Palestine during the Holocaust, while considering myself unquestionably entitled to refuge in the West.

This same hypocrisy runs through the ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations that have erupted across Europe. These protests, shot through with pro-Hamas sentiments, have made Jewish communities fear for their safety in countries that promised they would never have to again.

[oldshowbiz]

Charles Koch of Koch Brothers fame was a member of the John Birch Society. He ran a John Birch Society in Wichita, Kansas during the 1960s until he inherited his father's wealth.

His father, Fred Koch, was the cofounder of the John Birch Society.

It was well-known that the John Birch Society "deliberately allows bigots, anti-Semites, and ignorant kooks and degenerates in the organization" despite their constant denials.

[power-chords]

In “Freud’s Theory of Jewishness. For Better and for Worse” Eliza Slavet seeks to mediate how “most scholars” since 1991 have addressed whether Freud, in Moses and Monotheism, “saw [Judentum] as a religion based on spiritual-intellectual ideals or as a racial-ethnic identity based on internalized anti-Semitism”; these scholars, Slavet notes, have chosen to focus “on either his insistence on the biological transmission of memory or his emphasis on Jewish Geistigkeit” (intellectual spirituality or intellectuality; 98-99). She argues that the assumption of incompatible foci is misguided because central to Freud’s theory “is the idea that Jewishness is constituted by the biological inheritance of an archaic memory that Jewish people are inexorably compelled to transmit to future generations” (96). That is, in Slavet’s reading of Moses, these alternative readings of what Freud considers constitutive of Judentum are not mutually exclusive; instead, they are chiastically intertwined: the texts of the tradition “‘awaken’ the memory-traces… such that Jews continue to feel compelled to return to these texts” (104).

[winged-fool]

which books are you reading right now? do you have any queer book recs?

Yeah happy to share what I've been reading! I've only knocked out a few but I have a few more on my list.

The City Beautiful – this is about a young Jewish man (around 18 I think) and takes place in Chicago during the World Fair (sometime in the 1890s). Alter is in the US trying to save enough money to bring his mom and twin sisters from Romania and during this time one of his roommates is murdered and he becomes possessed by his dybuk (like a Jewish soul) and is spurred on to find his murderer. Alter is explicitly gay and has had a few relationships with other boys; the book itself is rich with Jewish culture and deals with homophobia and anti-Semitism of the time. It’s incredibly good.

Siren Queen – this one is a little dark and it’s WLW book. This one takes place in the Golden Age of Hollywood, in the 1920s, and features magical realism. It’s about a Chinese little girl who wants to be a Hollywood star and how she is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve her dream. She is also explicitly gay and has two main relationships throughout the book (and ends in a relationship with another one). Its theme focuses on what does it mean to be a monster and challenges your perceptions of monsters. As a queer Chinese woman, she finds her fame in playing monsters in films and makes connections with others in the industry that don’t fit the mold of Hollywood at the time. This one really hooked me, I couldn’t put it down.

The Once and Future Witches – this book isn’t as queer centric but it has a lot of great representation. It’s about three sisters who are witches and are trying to bring magic back to society. It takes place in fictional New Salem also in the 1890s and ties the witching movement with the suffragist movement which sounds weird but honestly REALLY works. One of the sisters is explicitly queer, she has a relationship with a WOC, while another one is asexual-coded, and there is a trans side character as well. I had a bit of a difficult time getting into this one but once it picks up, it REALLY picks up and I couldn’t put it down.

The Secret Lives Of Country Gentlemen - Okay this was a really fun read that's a little less plot driven but so enjoyable! It takes place in the late 1800s England and is about Gareth whose estranged father recently passed away and he inherits an obscure earldom on the marsh and it's about him trying to fit in with this new society and be accepted by his half sister he'd never met before. Prior to coming to the marsh, he had a brief anonymous relationship who turns out to be a crime big shot on the marsh. There's some mystery with Gareth's father's death but not really the focus of the book haha

Lavender House - this is basically a queer whodunit. It takes place in the 20s or so and follows Andy who was recently fired from the police force after accidentally being outed. He's hired by a woman whose wife was killed and turns out she has this house in the country that's a queer safe place where everyone including the staff are queer. It's pretty easy to guess who the murderer is so what really works is the queer relationships.

Last Call At the Nightingale - this is another murder mystery but definitely has more twists and turns than the precious one. This is the only bisexual book on my list so far so while it wasn't the best book, it's still special to me lol it's about Vivian an Irish working girl in NYC during the prohibition era. Someone is murdered at her favorite speak easy which is also her safe haven so she decides to help the owner, Hux who she may have a crush on, solve the murder so the speakeasy doesn't get closed.

I've also read The Song of Achilles which I think is a pretty well known one so I won't summarize that one. Next up I've got these books:

Giovanni's Room (mlm)

Last Night at the Telegraph House (wlw)

Nothing Sung and Nothing Spoken (wlw)

If you're interested, I'd be happy to update this post once I finish the other books :)

[grandhotelabyss]

If you haven't yet read it, the Edwin Frank interview in the point mag is up your alley, I think. Blake Smith, god bless him, might have steered me in the wrong direction about nyrb classics

Thanks! Yes, a lot of good stuff in there. I like how they start by talking about The Hall of Uselessness, also one of my favorite NYRBs. And then the last few answers: all the civilized, knowingly world-weary complaints (the novel is dead, the MFA programs are awful) at once uttered and dismissed as obvious, not worth repeating. (My case for the continued relevance of the novel is one neither the interviewer not Frank state, however: it's not for the present but the future. Otherwise how will our successors know we were here, how we lived?) I am still thinking about this, which is maybe too European for me:

Writers are not truth-tellers, they are witnesses to the event of their own gift, finally impersonal. Which consumes them. Which may sound romantic. It is, in fact, the least romantic thing in the world.

I like the part about Ulysses:

Ulysses is a place and climate and you have to allow yourself to live there to get a real sense of it. That’s one of the ways it’s essentially different from, say, Mrs. Dalloway, which remains a representation of experience, something that exists at an appreciable, ponderable remove. Ulysses by contrast is an experience in its own right and like experience remains in many ways private, to the author, to the reader: it’s not there to be made sense of entirely, though it is certainly there to enjoy and wonder at. Notoriously, Woolf hated the book—she thought it was, I’m pretty sure this is her word, “underbred,” pointlessly dirty and showy. Woolf thought it was offensive among other things that Joyce imposed his privacy on his audience. Pun intended.

A piece of advice I took to heart years ago came from the critic and poet Donald Davie, who said about Pound’s Cantos: Read them fast. Read them till patterns begin to form in the blur. Don’t nail down the references and try to add them all up.

Read it fast: as advice for Ulysses, this can't be overstated. (It's what Ellen Chandler tells Ash del Greco in Major Arcana: "I recommend just letting it wash over you the first time".) I'll have to try it with The Cantos someday. And, speaking of Pound, the passages on anti-Semitism, on Bellow and Cohen. And about how "the imaginative horizon of the modern world is female." And about the paradox of our inheriting an avant-garde tradition. And his statement, which I myself am always saying: "it's a stagnant period."

I'm not sure the conversation disproves Blake's point about the high-handed attitude with which a certain style of forgotten classic, often in translation, is suddenly forced on us—I don't need to see the hideous phrase "blue lard" again for a while—but it's good to know what a civilized sensibility lies behind the enterprise.

[rockislandadultreads]

Fiction Recommendations: Jewish American Heritage Month

The Matchmaker’s Gift by Lynda Cohen Loigman

Even as a child in 1910, Sara Glikman knows her gift: she is a maker of matches and a seeker of soulmates. But among the pushcart-crowded streets of New York’s Lower East Side, Sara’s vocation is dominated by devout older men—men who see a talented female matchmaker as a dangerous threat to their traditions and livelihood. After making matches in secret for more than a decade, Sara must fight to take her rightful place among her peers, and to demand the recognition she deserves.

Two generations later, Sara’s granddaughter, Abby, is a successful Manhattan divorce attorney, representing the city’s wealthiest clients. When her beloved Grandma Sara dies, Abby inherits her collection of handwritten journals recording the details of Sara’s matches. But among the faded volumes, Abby finds more questions than answers. Why did Abby’s grandmother leave this library to her and what did she hope Abby would discover within its pages? Why does the work Abby once found so compelling suddenly feel inconsequential and flawed? Is Abby willing to sacrifice the career she’s worked so hard for in order to keep her grandmother’s mysterious promise to a stranger? And is there really such a thing as love at first sight?

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter 

It is the spring of 1939 and three generations of the Kurc family are doing their best to live normal lives, even as the shadow of war grows closer. The talk around the family Seder table is of new babies and budding romance, not of the increasing hardships threatening Jews in their hometown of Radom, Poland. But soon the horrors overtaking Europe will become inescapable and the Kurcs will be flung to the far corners of the world, each desperately trying to navigate his or her own path to safety.

As one sibling is forced into exile, another attempts to flee the continent, while others struggle to escape certain death, either by working grueling hours on empty stomachs in the factories of the ghetto or by hiding as gentiles in plain sight. Driven by an unwavering will to survive and by the fear that they may never see one another again, the Kurcs must rely on hope, ingenuity, and inner strength to persevere.

An extraordinary, propulsive novel, We Were the Lucky Ones demonstrates how in the face of the twentieth century’s darkest moment, the human spirit can endure and even thrive.

Eternal by Lisa Scottoline

Elisabetta, Marco, and Sandro grow up as the best of friends despite their differences. Elisabetta is a feisty beauty who dreams of becoming a novelist; Marco the brash and athletic son in a family of professional cyclists; and Sandro a Jewish mathematics prodigy, kind-hearted and thoughtful, the son of a lawyer and a doctor. Their friendship blossoms to love, with both Sandro and Marco hoping to win Elisabetta's heart. But in the autumn of 1937, all of that begins to change as Mussolini asserts his power, aligning Italy's Fascists with Hitler's Nazis and altering the very laws that govern Rome. In time, everything that the three hold dear--their families, their homes, and their connection to one another--is tested in ways they never could have imagined.

As anti-Semitism takes legal root and World War II erupts, the threesome realizes that Mussolini was only the beginning. The Nazis invade Rome, and with their occupation come new atrocities against the city's Jews, culminating in a final, horrific betrayal. Against this backdrop, the intertwined fates of Elisabetta, Marco, Sandro, and their families will be decided, in a heartbreaking story of both the best and the worst that the world has to offer.

Unfolding over decades, Eternal is a tale of loyalty and loss, family and food, love and war--all set in one of the world's most beautiful cities at its darkest moment.

Weather Girl by Rachel Lynn Solomon

Ari Abrams has always been fascinated by the weather, and she loves almost everything about her job as a TV meteorologist. Her boss, legendary Seattle weatherwoman Torrance Hale, is too distracted by her tempestuous relationship with her ex-husband, the station’s news director, to give Ari the mentorship she wants. Ari, who runs on sunshine and optimism, is at her wits’ end. The only person who seems to understand how she feels is sweet but reserved sports reporter Russell Barringer.

In the aftermath of a disastrous holiday party, Ari and Russell decide to team up to solve their bosses’ relationship issues. Between secret gifts and double dates, they start nudging their bosses back together. But their well-meaning meddling backfires when the real chemistry builds between Ari and Russell.

Working closely with Russell means allowing him to get to know parts of herself that Ari keeps hidden from everyone. Will he be able to embrace her dark clouds as well as her clear skies?