Jews Have a Right to Exist

because it isn’t true, and knowingly conceding to a lie is a shame i couldn’t live with.

I’m not abandoning that label because people who hate women want to lie about what it means.

It's not "understandable" and it's not a "nuanced situation". It's antisemitic. Those who say anything along the lines of "it's nuanced" are making the world less safe for Jewish people.

And like, idk. Maybe rent a billboard? Put up posters. Pay for a social media ad. Actually organize for once and do a flash mob to raise awareness.

Because you do not have to deface a memorial dedicated to jewish trauma to raise awareness for palestinians. You do not need to put down jews to uplift Palestinians. And vice versa too but this is about antisemitism so the focus isn't on that.

"Oh but the israeli government didn't learn their lesson from the holocaust"

Cunt it was a genocide not school.

The class was an average size for the school, maybe 20 to 25 students. It was also a fairly good mix of ethnicities and races. I was however, the only Jew in the class. For that class we had to do a presentation on some racism related historical event or movement, so I chose the Holocaust (I had prior knowledge and access to first hand accounts). There were students in this high school class who told me they had not really known what the Holocaust was, just that it was something bad. Almost none of them had ever heard of kristallnacht. It shocked them that I couldn't tell them when I learned about it because I can't recall a time I didn't know. There was a Holocaust memorial on my Preschool/Kindergarten campus. We were told what it represented.

Tangent aside, I was the only Jew in this class, and it was common knowledge that I was Jewish. One day the teacher showed us a film. I can't remember the exact title or premise but it was about a white supremacist group and the man who ran it (I don't remember if it was about the KKK and David Duke, it was many years ago). What I do remember is being a depressed teenager with rock-bottom self esteem and sitting in this dark classroom watching a man smile and laugh as he proudly said that "No, Jews aren't rats. They're lower than that. They're bacteria. They're stupid and ugly and the world would be better off without them".

That was the point in the video I realized I was crying.

The teacher came over and told me to go to the office to sit and take some deep breaths. That I wasn't in trouble but I should go there to sit or read until the class was over. The woman at the office asked if I wanted to help her fold letters and stuff envelopes for a while to take my mind off of it, which did help. A few minutes before the end of class they told me to go back to the classroom so I could pick up my bag and books for my next class. When I entered the classroom everyone looked over (as one does when someone enters a classroom mid class). The video was over and they might have all been writing a reflection on it, I honestly don't remember.

What I do remember is the two or three Black students in the class all got up and walked over. They asked if I was okay. The girl put her hand on the back of my shoulder and rubbed slightly. I don't remember what I answered. But remember realizing, "Oh. They understand. They know what it's like. They know what it's like to hated for something you can't change. To be stripped of rights and killed within living memory." No one else got up. No one else asked.

After October 7th, after fire bombings, shootings, stabbings, and arsons, no one has ever asked "Hey, are you okay?" No friend, online or in person, Jewish or gentile, has ever asked me. And it gets harder every time. Another little bit of weight gets added to my heart and no one has ever stood up and said "Hey, that looks heavy. Let me help you with that." And they don't have to. It's not their job. It's not a kindness I'm expecting. But sometimes when it get's really heavy, I feel a phantom hand rubbing the back of my shoulder. I don't remember her name, but over a decade later she carries just a little bit of that burden.

When I was in college, I took a sociology class called Social Inequalities. For our midterm and final project, we were asked to choose a topic. One regarding social inequalities, and how it affects entire groups of people. When I proposed antisemitism, my professor said “oh we don’t talk about that here.”

I, too, was the only Jew in the class.

I asked why not. She stuttered and said we simply didn’t have time to speak on every topic. I said, “well all the more reason I should be able to touch on it for my midterm and final.” She told me no one wanted to hear about it.

(As a side note, she also told the class that the “A” in LGBTQIA stood for ally rather than asexual, and that I couldn’t discuss neurodivergence for my project, either. She assigned a paper at the end of the semester where we had to write about our own intersectional identities, something that’s completely inappropriate to ask of your students. You better believe I went HARD on all three of those topics.)

In a class about social inequities and biases, not one other time in my college career did I feel as singled out as I did in that class. When this straight white woman talked about communities she was not a part of being marginalized, she used the term “we.” But when I opened my mouth, I was ALWAYS “them.” And the rest of the class saw it. They said it to me. They said they didn’t know why she hated me, but that it was abundantly clear to them all.

And I don’t know if anyone ever caught on. I don’t know if anyone ever figured out why. I told them what she had said, that no one cared about antisemitism, that no one wanted to hear about it. That it wasn’t a topic worth discussing. And I don’t speak to any of those students anymore. But I do often wonder if any of them registered it. Registered how evil Jew hatred was. Because the class was packed full of black and Latino students, queer students, first generation immigrants, and students from a large variety of economic backgrounds. But it was the first time most of them had seen Jew hatred in action. Antisemitism and antisemitism denial. And I don’t think they knew that it wasn’t a one-off deal. Not for me. Not for the world.

That was also the only class I’ve ever almost failed in 23 years of school. I had to GROVEL for a C, and she still barely passed me. It was the only class that kept me from graduating magma cum laude, and the only time in my life I’ve gotten anything less than a B on a class, including grad school. So I think it’s safe to say, it wasn’t due to lack of effort.

The announcement came shortly after a Jewish doctor in London told ITV news that colleagues had told him they would not treat patients who come from Israel even if their life was in danger. The UK’s Department of Health called the comments “shocking” and said that “it is unacceptable that people do not currently feel safe working in and using the health service,” according to The Jewish Chronicle.

Mann was commissioned in October 2025 to lead a review into how the NHS and its regulatory system report and handle antisemitism and other forms of racism. The report was ordered “in the wake of a series of horrific attacks on the Jewish community across the country, including shocking examples of intimidation and abuse within the health service,” the Department of Health and Social Care said in a press release.

''The founding of Israel was based on displacement of Palestinians''- Look, I don't want to minimize that at all because people losing their homes is fucking terrible but that doesn't mean the solution is expelling Israelis now. There was a population exchange between Greece and Tuurkey in 1922. Both sides ethnically cleansed people. It was a terrible thing to do. But both Turkey and Greece exist now as two seperate states with clearly defined borders (if you ignore some shit erdogan tries to pull in the agean). And you don't question Greece's or Turkey's right to not be wiped off.

''Israeli identity is fake because it was based on smth that happened 3000 years ago!!!''- Ok sorry to break it to you but us Greeks have made our entire national identity revolve around who we were 3000 years ago. And if you want to argue abt fakeness of identity I would argue ours was a less organic one. Jewish people maintained the same religion and basic belief systems for 3000 years. They continuously felt the connection with Eretz Yisrael. We switched to Orthodox christianity from whatever 12 god shit we had, we lost most of our literacy that allowed us to keep tpuch with ancient texts, we embraced so many customs from the Ottomans and YET it was still valid when we tried to reclaim our ancient greek identity to build a nation partly on the basis of that

''European colonial powers helped prop up Israel which means it is an imperialistic state!''- Do you think Greece got independence or gained more land purely through OUR military strength lol?

I went into detail on the blockade by Israel and Egypt about a year ago, around the same time I explained how full of shit Greta's flotilla was.

The claim that the blockade is a violation of international law completely ignores how the laws of war actually work.

Under Article 51 of the UN Charter, every country has an inherent right to self-defense. In an ongoing armed conflict, a blockade is a standard, legally recognized tool used to cut off an enemy's supply lines and stop them from importing weapons.

International law regulates blockades. According to the San Remo Manual, a blockade is perfectly legal as long as it is officially declared, actually enforced, and doesn't have the sole purpose of starving civilians.

Because this maritime blockade is specifically designed to stop military contraband (like rockets and dual-use materials) while allowing inspected humanitarian aid through, it ticks every legal box.

The United Nations itself thoroughly investigated this and published the Palmer Report.

The UN panel explicitly concluded that the naval blockade of Gaza is both legal and a legitimate security measure to prevent weapons smuggling.

I'd argue it isn't as effective as it should be - but it's legal.

When you add the land borders to the mix, the argument collapses entirely. Egypt is a sovereign nation. Under international law, a sovereign state has an absolute right to control its own borders. Egypt has no legal obligation to keep its frontier open to a territory run by an armed group it considers a national security threat.

my grandfather, after 10/7/2023, would watch the news and lament, “we’re cousins, our people are cousins” at the unfolding violence. and he would also shake his head at the ceasefires, negotiations, and diplomacy, and he would throw his hands up at the accusations of genocide, ethnic cleansng, starvation, intentional targeting etc because he knew, he KNEW, he experienced firsthand, exactly what israel and other minorities in the region are dealing with — including persians — to this day. it hasn’t truly changed at its root, at all.

- about 582 BCE

The last part about Jerusalem has been recited in Jewish weddings, the earliest document example of that is from around the third century and has lasted till this day.

My heart is in the east, and I in the uttermost west-- How can I find savour in food? How shall it be sweet to me? How shall I render my vows and my bonds, while yet Zion lieth beneath the fetter of Edom, and I in Arab chains? A light thing would it seem to me to leave all the good things of Spain -- Seeing how precious in mine eyes to behold the dust of the desolate sanctuary.

Was written during the middle ages

I don't label my politics, but I'm what someone would call on the left. I spent my teenage years when Tumblr social justice was at its height. I learned things, checked my own biases, and I would like to think became a more empathetic person because of what I learnt from online progressive spaces.

The way these spaces have treated Jewish communities over the past 2.5 years has been nothing short of fucking appalling.

The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust was minimised, denied, justified, or outright celebrated.

Jewish people were immediately told to put their grief and trauma over this to away, because Palestine's pain was more important to talk about.*

Jewish and Israeli people were told they needed to try and understand why armed men raped, tortured, and killed members of their community. Because, you know, the murderous rapists are who we need to have sympathy for here. Anyone can be pushed to the point of, I don't know, murdering a young woman and parading her corpse around a street for men to spit on her dead body. If you really think about it, isn't that actually kind of an understandable thing to do?

When raising concerns over the rising antisemitism that was starting to look a lot like the build-up to that little historical tidbit called The Holocaust, Jews were told they were selfish for raising the issue.

When asking people not to call for intifadas that have historically resulted in thousands of dead Jews, they're told they're taking it all the wrong way.

When Israeli victims spoke of the abuse they received on Oct 7 and in captivity, they're told they need to stay silent because otherwise they risk justifying the genocide of Palestinians.

When 15 people were murdered at a Hannukah festival, there were no social media icons, no surge from progressive groups to find out what support they needed.

To be clear here, progressive groups seem more concerned with antisemitism in the Harry Potter books than they are about the actual, you know, string of dead Jews that have been murdered over the past few years. If you condemn antisemitic representations in diction and then turn around and completely ignore real-life fucking murder, then I'm sorry I genuinely do not think you ever gave a shit about fighting antisemitism, you just wanted to fight Jk Rowling. **

Absolutely fuck everyone who has justified or denied what happened on Oct 7th. There were ways to advocate for both Israeli and Palestinian victims, but the people who should have known better have ensured that Oct 7th wasn't just one day of hell for Jewish communities, but that its been currently 2.5 years of hell that seems to just be getting worse.

And the most infuriating part is the people who did justify Oct 7th will never admit they were wrong, because that would mean admitting they argued that the murder rape mutilation torture and kidnap of a Jewish community was acceptable, and that would break their brains. I mean it. The cognitive dissonance between believing you are someone who cares for human rights, whilst also being someone who justified all of that, is too great. The brain will always protect itself. Its why people are currently doubling down on there being no rapes on Oct 7th. Rape is not resistance, it is not self defence, it is not landback, it is not right of return, it is not decolonisation, it is not any of the shit people tell themselves Oct 7th was. Rape is just rape. It is just men torturing people (mainly women) for no other reason than because they enjoy it. You will never see these people admitting rape occurred, because the second they do is the second they realise just how horrifically they have behaved.

And it's not getting better. Hate crimes and murders of worldwide Jewish communities are rising. Jewish people are looking to leave places like the US, UK and Australia, which were once considered some of the safest places for them to live. A KKK slur (zio) is now common online usage. Jewish people are expected to sever any connection to an important part of their culture (Israel/Hebrew) in order to be treated somewhat civily. The more IDF crimes are uncovered in Gaza, the more worldwide Jewish communities bear the brunt of the anger. Typing 'Jewish' into any social media brings you into an absolute clusterfuck of the most horrific things you can possibly see people say about their fellow human beings.

I am just sick and exhausted and furious and it feels like I'm hitting my fists against a brick wall that is not knocking down. How do you even get people to realise how bad this is????

I am not Jewish. I know full well that Jewish people talking about all of this get ignored. I know full well that a Jewish person standing up for Palestine gets thousands of notes, and a Jewish person standing up for their own people barely breaks 100. I know full well that Jewish people are being smeared as paranoid or crazy or selfish. I know full well that non-Jewish people speaking up about antisemitism is taken more seriously than Jewish people talking about their own experiences.

Can you all just start fucking having some fucking empathy for Jewish and Israeli communities who have been facing the worst 2 years of their lives. Fucking please. It is not that fucking hard to feel empathy for lots of groups at once. To empathise with both Palestine and Israel, Muslims and Jews. Empathy for all is part of what brings us away from just being animals and makes us human.

If you can't do it, it is not an issue with Jews or Israelis or Zionists or the IDF, it is an issue with you.

*I am not saying Palestinian pain isn't important to raise awareness of, and the people fearing what the IDF would do immediately after Oct 7th were right to raise it. I'm saying asking Jewish communities to take on the trauma of Palestinians, when they were still reeling from their own inter-community trauma, was wrong and unhelpful. I wouldn't ask Palestinian communities to have centered the trauma of Oct 7th either. Trauma is not a competition and everyone deserves to have their respective pain treated fairly.

Emily braced herself when she posted a video of her weiner dog Sprinkles wearing a kippah and posing with a challah earlier this month to celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month.

She wasn’t girding herself for the kind of “cute overload” responses that once littered online posts about adorable animals.

Instead, she was expecting exactly what happened: Her Instagram post quickly drew dozens of antisemitic comments, including one user who wrote “kike” six times and another who commented “HEIL AUSTRIAN PAINTER.”

Emily, the Jewish content creator behind “Sprinkles the Weenie,” an account with 240,000 followers that chronicles her dog’s life, said she had come to expect that kind of response whenever she posts Jewish content of Sprinkles online.

“I’ve been posting Jewish content for years. I’m never surprised,” said Emily, who requested anonymity because she does not publicly post her full name. “Part of being a Jewish content creator, you’re opening yourself up to, you know, there’s a lot of ignorance out there.”

While many Jewish content creators, including Jewish children’s music creator Ms. Sara, drew a similar flood of antisemitic comments this month, the backlash was hardly limited to Jewish accounts.

“F–ck Israel and f–ck Jews,” wrote one user on an Instagram post featuring President Donald Trump’s statement commemorating Jewish American Heritage month.

“F–ck all these motherfu***** j**ish artists and f–ck u too,” wrote a user on a post by the Grammys honoring Jewish American “artists, producers, and innovators who helped shape the sound of music as we know it.”

The comments were not isolated examples. According to an analysis of 537 “high-visibility” posts about Jewish American Heritage Month by the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, a nonprofit that monitors and fights antisemitism, 33% of the comments on them were either antisemitic or “hostile.”

Among the hateful comments analyzed by the group, 45% were “direct hate speech,” including comments praising Hitler or accusing Jews of being “satanic,” while another 21% consisted of anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian “deflections” on otherwise apolitical posts, according to Steven Fransblow, the chief data and technology officer at the Blue Square Alliance.

“The original poster could be ‘Sesame’ Street, could be a political group, could be a politician themselves, or any other group. They could be posting [something] that’s quite supportive, but then you get down to the comments, and it becomes very hostile very quickly,” Fransblow said.

Israel has been an online third rail for years. But Fransblow said the spate of antisemitic comments on seemingly “innocuous” posts commemorating this year’s Jewish American Heritage Month has added to what his group has flagged as a growing trend: mainstream social media comment sections becoming flooded with anti-Jewish rhetoric, even on posts unrelated to Israel.

The same trend appeared around Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Fransblow said. For the first time this year, the Blue Square Alliance’s analysis of Yom Hashoah posts found that comments denying or distorting the Holocaust outnumbered those that commemorated the day by two to one.

Fransblow said his group had indications that the phenomenon has chilled posts in support of Jewish communities, a powerful form of representation at a time of rising antisemitism. He said the Blue Square Alliance, which was founded by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, had been working to engage with “sports clubs and partners” that said they stopped posting about Jewish holidays because of “fear and their expectation of this type of reaction and comments.”

Fransblow said the hostility has consequences beyond the comment section. “It raises our concern, because this, again, is something that the average American is going to see versus folks that are just in that ecosystem of a hateful bubble because they’re following hateful accounts,” he said. “This is now coming into more and more of the mainstream.”

The Blue Square Alliance was not alone in noticing the surge of antisemitic comments on Jewish American Heritage Month posts.

In a post on Instagram, the Jewish creator behind the account “Sleepy Librarian” posted a carousel of comments left on Penguin Random House’s Jewish American Heritage Month post, including “Mossad campaign” and “I’d rather be antisemite than an anti-human.”

“Antisemitism? During Jewish American Heritage Month? Groundbreaking,” the creator behind the account, Eytan Kessler, wrote in the caption. “I am not surprised by the comments under the Penguin Random House JAHM post, it’s expected at this point. It’s just exhausting to see it every year.”

In another post on Instagram addressing the trend, Rachel Steinhardt, who runs the account “yidlitkidlet,” urged organizations whose posts had drawn antisemitic comments to “vigilantly delete” them, call them out, or turn off their comment sections altogether.

“If you don’t do these things, it begins to look like you invited the hate speech,” Steinhardt wrote. “If your response is to stop posting content because it’s too much trouble, well, you’re lazy and not a true ally. But it’s preferable to leaving the hate speech to fester on your page.”

Moderation can have its own effects, as hate speech is removed but its relics remain in the form of comments rejecting antisemitism or explaining that American Jews should not be seen as all supporting Israel.

Emily said she would not let the barrage of hateful comments change how she posts about Sprinkles. In fact, she said, the opposite was true.

Usually zionists (a lot of 'em) are all for this stuff. Just tryna figure out if you're one of 'em? (PS: ignoring this is basically a yes in my book.)

Okay first of all. "Ignoring this is basically a yes in my book". Stop. Like seriously, stop. I, like everyone else, don't owe you an answer to anything. You don't get to (mis-)interpret my potential silence as anything but that. Silence. Do you hear yourself??? Do you seriously think this is a normal way to interact with strangers on the internet??? You're not even off anon. Do you know how many anons I get asking me stuff like this over and over again? You are not my priority at all. The only reason I'm replying to you is because you managed to genuinely make me mad with how entitled to my time you act and because I can now link to this ask when the next person is clowning in my inbox. Stop putting me in a situation where I have to answer to your insane and baseless accusations or be misrepresented in the worst faith possible. This is absolutely unhinged and chronically online behaviour. I have a life outside of Tumblr. And I don't perform at your will simply because you "want to know if I'm one of them". That's your problem, not mine.

Second: Your idea of Zionism is 100% wrong and comes from an ill-informed place. That's not my fault. You would not be asking this question the way you did if you actually had done research instead of parroting antisemitic propaganda you read online. Maybe try actually listening to Zionists instead of baselessly accusing us and you will hear over and over again that no, we actually don't love seeing people dying and want to turn all of Gaza into a parking lot. Zionism is not about Palestinians, the modern state of Israel or its government. It's about Jewish sovergnity. Period.

Zionism has existed long before there even was the idea of a unified group identity called "Palestinian". It also - obviously - has existed way before the modern state of Israel. It's not about any actions of the current Israeli government at all. Because none of their actions, no matter how awful, could ever negate Israels right to exist. Therefore it's just 100% irrelevant to the discussion. We don't do that with any other country, not France, the UK, Sudan, Germany, Iran, Russia, China, Syria etc. Every other country gets to have the most heinous history and/or their government and/or people get to currently commit the worst human rights violations imaginable and NO ONE calls for an abolishion of those states and for their citizens to become not just stateless but at the mercy of their neighbouring terror organisations who put murdering them as their top priority. I'm literally living in the country whose crimes against humanity informed the very concept of genocide and not once, not one single time has anyone ever said to me: "You don't deserve to have a state because of the Shoah. Your state is not real because of the Shoah. You don't live in """Deutschland""", you "live in" (occupy) DeutschNotRealLand. You don't deserve to have citizenship. You should be stateless". That is a double standard somehow only ever applied to the only Jewish state on earth and that's — shocker — uhhhhh antisemitic. This also doesn't even take into account that those aren't even comparable because unlike a dismantling of e.g. Germany, active Anti-Zionism would result in roughly 50% of living Jews being murdered, making it not even slightly comparable to any of the examples listed. Hamas etc. are very, very clear about that and they have proven on October 7th, that they mean it. There simply is no non-antisemitic way to call for the murder of half of the world Jews, even if that's not your personal motivation.

This is literally "I don't want half of the worlds Jews to become stateless again and be certainly genocided. Also Jews deserve sovergnity over at least part of their native land like any other indigenous people" — "Soooo, like are or are you not personally really into murdering innocent people? I know you never ever said anything in that regard but I came up with this particularly horrible definition of Zionism in my head and I need you to know if you agree with it??? I also don't actually know anything about Zionism but I will present my misinformed straw man as a fact. No, Jews don't get to define their own terms. I get to do that. If you don't text "NO" within 24 hours, I will consider you a genocidal maniac. Btw I don't know you and I don't even bother to come off anon but unless you are totally fine with being fully misrepresented as a horrible human being who thrives off of human suffering you owe me an answer like right now."

This came up again and again in last support call. People describing how much harder it has become to trust.

Not just romantically. Socially. Professionally. Emotionally.

A lot of Jews are quietly walking into rooms now trying to assess:

Is this safe? Can I say what I really think here?

That kind of hypervigilance changes people.

And the exhausting part is how many people thought they were the only ones feeling it.