We have all seen this film. The Noble Gentile in Nazi Germany is so terribly, terribly moved by the plight of the Jews- perhaps he rescues one, a girl. Perhaps they fall in love. (The girl cannot rescue herself- all Jews were unconcerned by the Shoah, or perhaps unable to help themselves without the aid of the Noble Gentile. The film isn’t about her, anyway. It’s about the Holocaust, but it isn’t about Jews. Not really.)
Perhaps, at some point in the film, the Noble Gentile will make a thoughtful remark on the ‘real’ Holocaust- this may be a sweeping statement on technology, or environmentalism, or anything but Jews and Roma. The girl will nod thoughtfully at this wise statement, perhaps readying herself for decades of being rhetoric, a metaphor.
It is Not Allowed for the film to end with the girl making aliyah- although the unnamed girl is fleeing a genocide, this may polarise the audience, and we don’t want to lose sales. If she moves to America, she will be welcomed with open arms. We can lie to ourselves for the sake of narrative. It’s okay.
The girl has no agency. The girl has no narrative. The girl is a prop for the Noble Gentile’s pain- the goyim suffered, don’t you know! The girl barely exists.
We were in a conversation about these kinds of movies, and one observation I made was that Holocaust films typically feature a gentile as the main character, who, while not affected by the events directly, knows a Jew or two, and as such understands their suffering, or learns something about human nature, etc. etc.
This seems like a reasonable, though insensitive premise for a white-centric Hollywood to produce – but the stranger, more unsettling thing about this trope is that it doesn’t stop at observation: the protagonist must be affected by the tragedy, you see! In Schindler’s List, our businessman loses his factory and political power by saving the Poor Jews™. In The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, the aryan child is killed alongside his Jewish Friend™ at the end of the movie – in a gas chamber in which he certainly wouldn’t belong, according to the authorities at the time. This is more than a little creepy, because it makes one realize that not only are these films
- Marketing toward white goyim
But they’re also
- Positioning white goy characters in such a way that they’re (even literally!) subjected to the genocide which was enacted against Jews and Roma
The fact is that this target audience loves their tragedy porn, and the Holocaust has a history as their go-to for sobbing quietly into a movie theatre and later nominating it for Academy Awards because it reveals so much about the “human condition.”
But, the most disturbing thing about their consumption of these stories is that they’ll not only watch something which allows them to, by living vicariously through a character like them, believe they would have been on the right side of history – and also experience a selection of censored horrors of the Shoah without having to identify with a Jewish or Roma protagonist.
Because this way, they can make themselves believe, for a time, that they would have been tortured, killed, made to suffer incomprehensibly too.
And that’s the biggest lie there is – there are two sides to a pressurized door, and they will never have been on one of them.
If you want a summary of why the Right hates us, this works.
And yet, the Right supports Israel, a Jewish state. So I dunno where this is going.
The Right supports the Jewish state for three reasons, none of which have the slightest bit of actually liking Jews, especially American Jews, for our own sakes:
1. Support of Israel allows the American nationalists to continue the narrative of America The Jew Savior, Who Singlehandedly Won World War Two. Nevermind that before and during the war, the US State Department knew about the Final Solution and yet sent boatloads of Jews that were trying to escape right back into the maw—[sarcasm] that kind of ‘Murica-hurting, leftist ‘ganda ain’t taught in our schools! It makes us look bad and feel bad! See, we support Israel! [/sarcasm]
2. The eschatology of the fundamentalist Christians who make up a good portion of the American Right requires that Jews return to Israel. Their belief is that when we all return to Israel, The Second Coming Of Jesus Christ will occur. They actually get massively impatient—at best—with those of us who refuse to go. In essence, they are not supporting Israel for Israel’s benefit, or for the benefit of the Jews, but out of self-serving, explicitly Christian religious belief—a belief that, in many forms, culminates in the mass death of every Jew to herald the return of Christ.
3. And finally, there is another Right Wing narrative—of Israel being the Sole Democracy in the Middle East amidst hostile barbarians (i.e. Muslims; to the typical Islamophobic right-wing American, the two terms are perfect synonyms). So Israel is seen as an ally against the Horde, which, well, [sarcasm], it’s Judeo-Christian tradition, isn’t it, not Judeo-Islamic![/sarcasm], and the Jews are seen as Christian allies against the Muslims. In this narrative, Israel is supported as a proxy state, and not necessarily on its own merits—but because, “it is fighting The Good Fight” ™.
I’ll also note that this is a wonderful illustrative case of “But Israel!” derailment. We talk about Right wing/Republican antisemitism in an American Jewish context, using the above screencaps that are pretty explicitly American in nature and origin, and the conversation is immediately derailed into “But Israel!”
I hate it when white women like to act like they’re not white when they claim to be Jewish. Ummm, you’re white, and being Jewish doesn’t hide your white privilege, it actually makes you more privilege. Being Jewish doesn’t make you a Women of Colour when most Jews are BEYOND white passing.
Jews in the United States and Europe are FAR overrepresented in banking, the media, the justice system, government, ect. Jews also played a huge role in the slave trade where most of the slave ships were Jewish owned. If anything being Jewish is a privilege which has historically and still is favoring their own and benefiting off the struggles of People of Colour which has aided white supremacy. If you’re jewish and want to aid people of colour in their struggles and rape, check your privilege and call out people you know for their racism, sexism, misogyny, ect.Sit. Your. Sorry. Ass. Down.
As a blonde, blue-eyed Jew with an Anglo last name living in metropolitan America I have undeniable white passing/white privilege. But my Jewish friends with dark curly hair, “swarthy” skin, and “Semitic” noses? My friends with last names like Weber and Katz and Rosen? They don’t pass in America, let alone in Europe (and I feel 100% confident in stating that you know jack-all about how Europeans view race, but spoiler alert: Jews definitely don’t make the white people shortlist there, light skinned or not). Ever notice how white supremacist groups always include Jews on their list of “enemies of the white race?” Or how the place where Jews are really overrepresented is in hate crime victim statistics? Millennia of rape and forced assimilation in diaspora may have lightened some of our skins (fun fact: many Jews, including many Ashkenazim, are people of color), but neither we nor white Gentiles have forgotten that our ethnicity and culture stem from the Levant.
It is absolutely mindblowing that you are using antisemitic falsehoods to deny that antisemitism exists. Far from controlling the slave trade, Jews were in fact barred by law from even entering many of the countries involved in the trade and were barred from or limited in engaging in international trade venues by several others. That is a canard heavily promoted in the black community by black antisemitic groups in the 90s, and has been utterly discredited by historians. And you’re going to pull out that antisemitic “Jews control the media, banks, and government!!!!!11!” bullshit, too? Really? Put down the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and read up on the “model minority” myth—and while you’re at it, take a look at how well financial success has shielded Jews from marginalization and violence in the past.
Were Jews often used post-Civil War as racial go-betweens and tools of white oppression against the black community? Yes, and it’s fucking shameful…but when those Jewish minstrel performers, shop owners, and slumlords went home in the evenings, it was to Jewish-only communities. Not because we chose to live there, but because white Gentiles didn’t accept us in their neighborhoods. We were “white” enough to do the jobs white people didn’t want to dirty their hands with, but not white enough to live with or go to social clubs with, God forbid. The entire reason colleges began requiring interviews and essays from admission applicants was to limit the number of Jews on campus, because we’re just so fucking privileged to be Jewish. The U.S. sent Jewish asylum-seekers and refugees fleeing the Holocaust back to Europe and refused to lift the immigration quota on Jews during WWII because it didn’t want any more white people.
Whiteness/white-passingness is a privilege (and yes, we Jews who have it need to be conscious of it). But Jewishness is NOT A PRIVILEGE, least of all “historically.” We look out for “our own” because Gentiles—white or otherwise—sure as fuck won’t.
Kiss my diasporic ass.
Anonymous asked:
oh hey bee tee dubs–ashkenazi jews are not an ethnic minority, and you are not a person of color. you're white. you're straight-up white. and claiming to not identify as such is super racist. you're adorbs, though.
girl-detective replied:
Nope, sorry.
First of all, before I “you know nothing, Jon Snow” your ass on the Jewish front, let it just be established that my Dad is biracial, so even if I wasn’t ¾ Ashkenazi, I wouldn’t be “straight-up white.” I’m part Desi, and you can’t erase that.
Secondly, Jews—be we Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Cochin, Beta Israel, etc.—are all part of a distinct ethnoreligious group that makes up less than 0.2% of the world’s population. This is not just my own personal perception; this has been well-established in the scientific community through genetic testing.
Basically, all Jews (with the exception of people who have converted) are Semitic peoples descended from the Hebrew peoples of the Levant region (again, this is all scientifically confirmed). In this rendering of Jesus, done by anthropologists at the University of Manchester, you can see how the average Jew would have looked in roughly 30 CE:
Surprise! It’s a brown dude! Because neither Jesus nor any Hebrew Israelites were white.
So what happened? Well, in 70 CE The Romans expelled the Jews from ancient Israel, and we were forced into what is known as the Jewish Diaspora. We subsequently scattered all over the world, and through centuries of forced assimilation and rape (have you ever wondered why Jewishness is only passed on through the mother? It’s because of how often Jewish women were raped), we came to break into sub-ethnicities based on where we currently located. Ashkenazim were in Germany and Eastern Europe, Sephardim were in Spain and Portugal, Mizrahim were in the Middle East and Northern Africa, the Cochin were in India, the Beta Israel were in Ethiopia, etc. We no longer all looked alike, however, we still remained bonded by both Judaism itself and our inherited DNA (many of us still possess common traits, even among the post-Diasporic divides).
A recently study of Ashkenazi genes specifically determined that “despite [Ashkenazim’s] close ties with Europe, no more than half [46%] of their DNA comes from ancient Europeans, the researchers found…the rest of the Ashkenazi genome comes from the Middle East.”
Ergo, although most Ashkenazim appear to be white Europeans, our DNA tells a very different story (not even to mention that fact that we are still constantly racialised by gentiles—people love to tell me whether they think I do or do not “look Jewish” all the time).
Moreover, regardless of how Jews look and what part of the world we’ve lived in, we have been and continue to be “othered” by gentiles— particularly white ones—who have gone to great lengths to exclude white-passing Jews from the ranks of whiteness (there are certainly Jews of colour, including Ashkenazi Jews of colour, but you were obviously referring to white-passing Jews), through means of harassment, expulsion, and genocide. Of course, the Holocaust is the most obvious example of Jews being regarded as and killed for being non-white (I believe Hitler’s phrasing involved calling us unclean vermin who were a threat to the aryan race), but the Nazis were far from being the only group to persecute Ashkenazi Jews for being non-whites. In fact, the word “antisemitism” was coined in 1879 by writer and theorist Willhelm Marr, because he thought it sounded more “scientific” than “Judenhass” (Jew hate) and he really wanted to drive home the fact in his writings that we were non-white Middle Easterners.
Ironically (given the current political climate), the European concept of Ashkenazi Jews being non-white Middle Easterners was so common that there are countless examples of Jews all over Europe being told by the majority to “Go back to Palestine” where they came from. Here is graffiti on the window of a Jewish-owned shop in Norway:
It reads: “Palestine is calling. Jews are not tolerated in Norway.”
In 1902, there was a march through the Jewish quarters of London, where protesters shouted “Go back to Jerusalem.” Most likely, these Jews had all come to the UK from Russia or Ukraine, but they were still seen as non-white Middle Easterners in the eyes of the white Britons.
I did some personal genealogy research over the Summer and found the immigration records for some of my family members. Here is the transcription of the record for my great-Aunt Rose (at the time, known as Ruchel):
Did you catch it?
Race: Hebrew
That’s right, even in America, Jews were long considered a separate race from whites. This isn’t some distant relative I’ve never met before. This is my grandmother’s sister, whose kitchen table I used to sit at while she baked mandel bread. This is the sister of my great-Aunt Sophie, who is currently 98 and still remembers when signs in front of hotels said “No Negroes, No Jews.”
Now, I realise that I look white to most people, and there is absolutely no denying that I am a beneficiary of the white privilege that exists in American society. That fact is absolutely NOT in dispute. However, I can and do identify as a white-passing beneficiary of white privilege rather than as a white person—not just because of my genetics, not just because of my history—but because a whole lot of white people have made it pretty damn clear to me over the years that I’m not one of them. I grew up in a somewhat conservative, predominantly white environment, and the number of kids and adults alike who acted like I lied to them upon learning I was Jewish was, in retrospect, kind of disturbing.
And while yes, I have privileges many people of colour do not have, I also don’t have the full range of white privilege, in that I don’t automatically make everybody’s “white person” list and therefore can’t walk through through certain places without wondering if I’m going to have my ass kicked if anybody “finds me out.”
White-looking Ashkenazi Jews are not exactly people of colour, and I never said we were. We live in a strange limbo in which we’re neither white enough for white, or non-white enough for non-white. However, we are an ethnic minority and we do have the right to identify as white-passing given our DNA, our history, and the way white people still regard us and treat us.
I appreciate your concern and I’m sure you meant this from a place of constructive social justice criticism, but you’re 100% wrong about Jewishness as an ethnicity, and hence, you’re identity policing an ethnic minority. That is super racist, so please stop.
And yes, I am adorbs. Thanks for noticing.
Attention: women with BPD who follow fandom blogs
Sorry to spam this around so much but I’m afraid that someone’s safety is at risk.
If you are a woman with BPD who is dating a man who lives and goes to college in Detroit, who is 21 and who runs a fandom blog which you follow, please check the blog exploring-insanity to see if your boyfriend is this blogger. If you have any reason to suspect that your boyfriend might be abusive, please check it even if the personal details above don’t match him, as he might be lying about his age/location/etc.
Over the last few days this blogger has:
- Mocked suicidal people.
- Said incredibly dehumanizing things about disabled and mentally ill people, especially autistic people and people with borderline personality disorder.
- Misgendered trans people.
- Sexually harassed a minor.
- Referred to his current girlfriend as “woman-child” who needs to be “trained” and “controlled” due to her BPD.
- Admitted to raping his ex-girlfriend.
I know his current girlfriend is here on tumblr somewhere and I want to do everything I can to find her because she may be in danger. Certainly, she deserves to know what a horrifically awful person who is posting awful things about her.
I’m going to repost this in the tags for a number of fandoms. I suspect they’re both part of the Fallout fandom because his icon is from that series, but I want to cast a wide net. Please reblog to signal boost. Let’s spread this like wildfire.
Don’t say you care about ppl w/ personality disorders unless you mean all personality disorders. You don’t get to exclude ones you don’t like. That just makes you a sack of shit
To be 100% clear, this was directed at people who exclude NPD and ASPD in their activism because they think they’re “scary”
Fetishisation of autistic people
What it is:
I'm allistic and I only want to date autistic people cause they're so smart and awkwardly cute socially and that's really sexy
What it's not:
I'm autistic and identify with this character so I'm going to read them as autistic
ATTENTION ALL CANADIANS
In 2015, there is no doubt Stephen Harper is gong to try his hardest to make you forget about all the horrible things he’s done in his time as PM. In order to avoid that, let’s try to keep this list circulating.
In no way am I telling you who to vote for. I just hope you take a minute and read just a few of the many reasons why you shouldn’t vote for him.
- He’s homophobic. Harper was one of the few to oppose same-sex marriage becoming legal in 2003. The question is, is he still? Considering he refuses to acknowledge it, we can only assume. That, and on February 16, 2005, he claimed same sex marriage is not a human right.
- On May 6, 2001 in Calgary, he was quoted saying that he is against Canada’s bilingualism. “It has led to no fairness, produced no unity, and cost Canadian taxpayers untold millions.” Maybe there would be more unity if people like him actually took it seriously? And of all the things we pay taxes for, that should be filed under a necessity.
- You want to talk about taxes? How about the fact that he had (has?) his own personal hair stylist to follow him around, that we pay for. No other PM has ever done this.
- He’s done a lot to set women back a few years. Harper has cut funding for women’s advocacy by 43 per cent, shut down 12 out of 16 Status of Women offices in Canada and eliminated funding of legal voices for women and minority groups. Just like his control over the media, I suppose he figures they won’t be a threat to him if they don’t have a voice?
- Do I even need to begin with his treatment to the First Nations? The Harper government refused to sign the UN Declaration of the Rights United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that was adopted by 144 other countries. He scrapped the Kelowna Accord. I will remind you he claimed the outrageous amounts of dead and missing aboriginal women is a sociological phenomenon, but not crimes, and refuses an inquiry. There is written proof he doesn’t care about aboriginal education. He chose to meet with a couple of pandas over the Idle no More peaceful protesters that walked 1,600 km to Parliament Hill, then gets on his high horse when their frustration leads to more drastic measures. Excuse me mister PM, but that tends to happen when people are ignored.
Yes, he made that famous apology. But has he actually done anything to make matters improve? No. In fact, it looks like he does his damned hardest to quiet our voices.
Ugh. I better move on from this one, or I’ll be here all day.- He blindly follows America. Seriously. On March 25, 2002, he was quoted in Report Newsmagazine, “I don’t know all the facts on Iraq, but I think we should work closely with the Americans.” Now, thank god we did end up dodging that bullet, but he admits it himself that he doesn’t bother to check facts. How can we expect him to deal with the current war on terrorism?
- Atlantic Canada, I want you to think long and hard about when the last time it was he even acknowledged our existence, outside of a newsworthy travesty. One of his biggest angles is how he’s supposedly responsible for creating many job opportunities, (which we will get to in a minute.) That falls on deaf ears here, as we have the highest unemployment rates in the country. As you surely know, there are just not enough jobs to go around, and instead of creating more, he encourages us to move out West. My generation can’t afford to stay, and that is awful. Especially considering we have untapped resources! Oil is out there! The very thing we’re all chasing after in Alberta!
- Surely you’ve seen the pseudo “Economic Action Plan” commercials. How the Conservatives have blessed our country with wondrous employment opportunities. But have you ever actually investigated them? Rick Mercer has, and he beautifully explained what BS it is. The only people who actually benefited was the already extremely wealthy.
- He cheated his way through the 2006 election, violating the election spending limit.
- The total mess that was the new Census, that we are still suffering from.
- He’s tainted our foreign reputation, shutting down our aid to impoverished countries, refused to sign the UN’s declaration that clean water is a human right, wasted G20 money on an artificial lake, (may I remind you that we already have over 3 million natural ones,) and of course, the stupidity of our actions in Afghanistan. Richard Colvin admitted we were responsible for six times the amount of captured and tortured prisoners than the British, most of whom were just local, innocent people. Remember a time when Canada was known as the leading peacekeeping nation?
- Need I remind anyone of the recent Veteran’s Affairs scandal? Of all the people we should be looking out for, they should be at the top.
- He has eliminated or weakened almost every environmental law we had/have. He destroyed the Fisheries Act, the Navigable Waters Protection Act, got rid of the Environmental Assessment Act, withdrew from the Kyoto agreement, (making us the only country that originally signed it to do so,) and 3,000 other acts. 500 in BC alone. And to top it off, he refuses to acknowledge the serious threat global warming posses to those of us in the North.
Canada has an unimaginable amount of natural resources that should be protected, not extorted. Otherwise we won’t have any left to use. (Those of us in the Atlantic know all to well what happened when we over-fished. Are we really going to stand back and let it happen with the rest of our country?)- You may be asking, why hasn’t this been circulated already? Probably because Harper controls the media like a dictator, picking the questions that are asked, and ignoring the ones that are against his favour. In fact, he limits freedom of speech all together. This is something the US does. Perhaps Harper has forgotten, but we are not the US. We don’t want to be the US.
As I said, this is just a very short list. For more articles to read, I suggest taking a look at this website.
If anyone has anything to add, please do so! Make this list grow.
Also, if there is anyone who is willing to take the time to translate this to any other language, (because despite with Harper believes, we are bilingual,) you have my permission to do so.
Vote. Just don’t vote Conservative.
Note also what he has done to scientific funding.
He has vindictively cut environmental, biological, and climate science, because they risk calling him out.
He has restructured NSERC to provide fewer $$ to smaller universities for scientific research. He tolerates the existence of some sciences (like physics) but he would rather spend all the money on a few high profile photo ops at the perimeter institute than spreading it around.
He has restructured the NRC so that the only way to get a dollar from them is to provide industrially applicable research.
Crush the ableist as fuck idea that if you mention that your mental illness was the reason you did something in an apology that the apology is automatically invalid
Mental illness effects people. Mental illness can make you do things you yourself don’t think are okay. You’re allowed to say that when you apologize. Stop telling mentally ill people that they have to pretend their mental illness doesn’t exist when they’re owning up to something shitty they’ve done holy shit.
list of music at swerve’s
- what’s new pussy cat on repeat for 4 hours
- 30 minute remix of rodimus saying ‘til’ all are one’
- aggressive but faint beatboxing