Baby Dyke

burden of the past

I have finally finished my OC design without armor

Reminder that this weekend downtown New Orleans will simultaneously host GalaxyCon, Naughty N'awlins, the American School Counselor Association Annual Conference, and the Running of the Bulls. That's roughly 30,000 superheroes, 3,000 swingers, 5,000 counselors, and hundreds of people voluntarily being chased by roller derby skaters dressed as bulls.

The overlap of those worlds is where the real magic happens. It is entirely possible that somewhere in the French Quarter, Batman and Catwoman will successfully recruit Ms. Jones from some place called Crabapple Middle School to be their third, moments before all three instinctively scatter as a roller derby skater dressed as a bull rounds the corner.

Shavua Tov

A New York City “neighbourhood passport,” created by the city’s official marketing group and available at libraries in the Big Apple for tourists, has been criticised after it excluded Jews from a map of the city’s immigrant neighbourhoods.

The map identifies 30 neighborhoods associated with New York’s “thriving international communities and cultures”, including “Little Palestine” (Bay Ridge, Brooklyn), “Little Egypt” (Astoria, Queens), “Little Pakistan” (Newkirk Plaza, Brooklyn), and multiple Chinatowns.

However, the graphic, which is sourced from the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, does not note any Jewish neighbourhoods, though the immigrant affairs office also doesn’t include official posters for “Little Palestine” or “Little Egypt”.

The lack of depiction of Jewish neighbourhoods, as well as Irish and Italian ones, has drawn criticism from local community members.

“They just couldn’t figure out how to represent 11 per cent of the city,” stated Avital Chizik-Goldschmidt, a writer and New York resident. “Couldn’t decipher where the Jews are from. Asked everyone. Huge riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

The map was intended to show parts of the city that have “substantial foreign-born populations from regions and countries around the world,” according to City Hall. “It does not highlight religious groups.”

It added that a map of Little Odessa depicts a neighbourhood with a substantial Jewish population.

“Also, no Italian or Irish enclaves in New York City? Interesting,” stated Karol Markowicz, a prominent, Jewish conservative columnist. “The two Staten Island flags look funnier the longer I look at this. Two small ethnic populations and absolutely no others in the whole of Staten Island.”

“The major Sephardi corridor of South Brooklyn, Syrian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and others, from the East side of Avenue J down toward Avenue V, gets left out completely,” added Isaac Choua, a board member of the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America. “So does the Bukharian Jewish community in Queens, largely from Uzbekistan and Central Asia.

"The Brooklyn community is not some tiny side community.

“Flatbush, Midwood, and Gravesend alone have roughly 54,000 people living in Jewish households, comparable in size to the Pakistani community being recognised here.”

“This is not a small omission,” he went on. “It is one of New York’s most distinctive immigrant-descended Jewish communities, and it gets erased from the story. Weirdly enough, Zohran Mamdani’s office wanted to speak with me about this very issue and has not followed up since the election.”

However, others dismissed the purported controversy.

“The Chasidic neighbourhoods are overwhelmingly composed of American citizens, who have been here a long time,” said journalist Jesse Singal. “I don’t get this. It comes across like looking for something to get mad about.

"Could just as easily 180 this and be, ‘Oh, so you’re saying they aren’t quite American?”

Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone, a Chabad rabbi, added that he finds “the absence frustrating as well”.

“But what exactly would we call it and where?” he asked. “Little Israel? Surely not the right name for Borough Park, the largest enclave of Jews and Jewish culture. Doesn’t really work for the Upper West Side or the Lower East Side either.”

the argument is that these groups are fully assimilated over a century or more of history and no longer immigrants, which is true to an extent when speaking about generations of residents, but there are still tens of thousands of current Jewish immigrants (and others from the excluded groups) living in New York.

an Italian and Jewish New Yorker said: “it was so obvious that you could have included us here, and it felt like you made the choice not to.”

this may not have been malicious, but because of the sentence “it does not highlight religious groups,” this is relevant food for thought:

There absolutely is a Jewish Quarter in New York (and that's what you fucking call it, Mamdani). It's an area full of kosher bakeries, restaurants, and grocery stores; several synagogues; there's an eruv; and so on. It is a place settled by a certain ethnicity.