Unknown Playwright J. Klein-Haghani

I often feel cut off and isolated from my Jewish brothers and sisters. I know two prayers in hebrew, and I keep kosher on the high holidays in hopes that maybe I’ll feel less lonely. My grandmother called me bubbeleh growing up. My paternal grandparents used to be fluent in Yiddish and I picked up maybe three words.

I too often feel cut off, isolated, judged. The internet is my siddur when I'm davening (minus tefillin, prayer shawl, etc., but I still cover my head in the presence of G-d). I don't keep strict kashrut but I do avoid pork and (most) shellfish. Do I observe every holiday? No, but I try to remember the important ones. My maternal grandmother (z"l) also called me bubbeleh when I was growing up. Both my maternal grandparents--and all of my maternal great-grandparents!--were fluent in Yiddish; I picked up a tiny store of words from reading Leo Rosten's Joys of Yiddish from cover to cover.

Ukraine? Buuuu, nazis, Bandera, they are oPpReSsInG rUsSiaN sPeAkInG pOpUlAtIoN, muh Azov, muh Hunter Biden! They don't deserve help.

Russia? But it's a greeeeat cooooountry, I understaaaand them, they have to be bruuuutal, but muh NATO baaaases, but sooooovereignty.

Ukraine is a liberal democracy. The Allies of World War Two were the Jim Crow era United States, the Stalin-era USSR, Chiang Kai Shek's military dictatorship in China, and the largest colonial empire in the world.

Ukraine has its problems with racism and violence like any other country, but it's also a post-Soviet republic that's tolerant enough to have elected a Jewish leader and, instead of going the traditional route of blaming him for everything when the invasion happened, rallied around him as a war leader. Imagine 1930s America rallying around a black leader. (Or twenty-first century America, for that matter).

Most large-scale wars include at least one theater of war where you're like "wait, are we the baddies?" and World War Two was no exception. Finland was a democracy that happened to be on the Axis side because the USSR was the more immediate threat. It's... really hard for me to find an equivalent here. The closest I can is Ukraine cooperating with jihadists in the Sahel, but considering that their enemies are mostly foreign-backed military dictatorships, hard to pick a greater evil there.

Ukraine has certainly committed war crimes, if only because every country at war commits them sooner or later. But I'm struggling to think of anything they've done that comes close to the rape of Berlin, the firebombing of Dresden, the firebombing of Tokyo, not to mention... well, you know.

And of course, Ukraine has been a clear and consistent victim of Russian aggression for, at this point, twelve years. Heck, the British and French only waited three years after the Anschluss before deciding Hitler had to go. The forbearance they and their supposed allies have shown the Russians is even greater than that shown to the Nazis.

On the other side is a violent dictatorship, ruling a decayed empire, and trying to reconquer its former colonies. Made up of people so comprehensively corrupt they would shock most historic dictatorships, whose leaders usually at least understood that some of the trains had to run on time. Backed by a psychopathically theocratic church whose marriage of God and nationalism would make an American evangelical blush. Whose only legitimizing ideology at this point, like most modern-day autocrats, is racism and patriarchy. I'm not saying it's worse than the Nazis, but it sure isn't very different from them.

I refuse to believe that we dressed that ugly.

You expect to believe that there was no color, no bead work, no embroidery? Just the most blah and bland item ever.

We have the clothing for Kohanim and Kohan Gadol described in the Torah and it is so beautiful.

Sure regular people aren't going to dressed like that, but seriously I'm expected to buy that no didn't interesting patterns with their weaving.

That no dyed their yarn? That everyone worn shades of brown and tan and white and the occasional light blue.

I know us. I know we enjoy beauty too. I know that it would a way to express ourselves and the areas of the land we live in.

We expect to buy that not single one of use didn't have pomegranate something going on in their clothes or any of the 7 species.

That we didn't go all out for Shabbat wear.

Give me a break.

Now, in classic movies -- the ones where you can almost hear Cecil B. DeMille saying, "Accuracy schmaccuracy, as long as it looks good" -- you'll get color and ornamentation aplenty, even if it looks suspiciously like midcentury hoochie mama temptress outfits. And this was true even into the 1980s! Films and TV have been overcorrecting toward the other extreme since at least the 1990s.

I refuse to believe that we dressed that ugly.

You expect to believe that there was no color, no bead work, no embroidery? Just the most blah and bland item ever.

We have the clothing for Kohanim and Kohan Gadol described in the Torah and it is so beautiful.

Sure regular people aren't going to dressed like that, but seriously I'm expected to buy that no didn't interesting patterns with their weaving.

That no dyed their yarn? That everyone worn shades of brown and tan and white and the occasional light blue.

I know us. I know we enjoy beauty too. I know that it would a way to express ourselves and the areas of the land we live in.

We expect to buy that not single one of use didn't have pomegranate something going on in their clothes or any of the 7 species.

That we didn't go all out for Shabbat wear.

Give me a break.

Now, in classic movies -- the ones where you can almost hear Cecil B. DeMille saying, "Accuracy schmaccuracy, as long as it looks good" -- you'll get color and ornamentation aplenty, even if it looks suspiciously like midcentury hoochie mama temptress outfits. And this was true even into the 1980s! Films and TV have been overcorrecting toward the other extreme since at least the 1990s.

(CW for Shoah discussion, Soviet brutality up ahead.)

In the intervening time between the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact and the Germans violating said pact into oblivion, my zayde (z"l) and some of the other members of his cell in the Resistance in eastern Poland met up with some escapees from the German-occupied western half. My zayde had already run afoul of the Soviets complete with an interrogation (in which he told them nothing of use) and a warning to "watch your step". They'd branded him a counter-revolutionary and noted that he was an active Zionist; one false move and they would likely have sent him and some of his fellow Resistance fighters to Siberia.

Misha (that was his name) and this group of men tried to cross over into Lithuania in late December 1939 to obtain visas from the man they knew as "Sempo" (Sugihara Chiune). Their Lithuanian guide sold them out to the Russians, who ambushed them and forced them to lie down in the snow for several hours. Misha was not a religious man. He was if anything secularist with strong lefty sympathies. But it is worth noting that it crossed his mind during those hours in the snow to recite the Shema.

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

I have some sort of undiagnosed social disorder(I was tested for autism as a kid so I probably don’t have it but I have noticed that I’m not exactly normal in my thought process or in how I emotionally connect to others) and the amount of times I’ve been insulted by leftists for interpreting something too literally or differently from them and asking questions to clarify it is really goddamn high for such a tolerant group.

So what happens? All of a sudden I'm weird and off-putting and I don't know what's good for me or for anybody else. The baseline assumption is that I was born yesterday and don't know shit from fuck.