🪽🎗️🕯️🧿 🕍🪬 🦢

Yeah. So many people (especially Europeans) act like the Nazis just randomly invented antisemitism in the 1930s. That's a convenient fiction because it absolves other countries of the responsibility to acknowledge, confront, and make amends for their own antisemitism but it has no basis in reality.

Jew hatred was rampant across Europe for centuries before the Nazis existed and was deeply embedded in many European cultures. It was out of this cultural milieu of systemic and ingrained Jew hatred that the Nazis emerged. That's why a lot of the Nazis' propaganda relied on antisemitic tropes that already had existed in Europe for centuries, though they sometimes repacked it in new language (for example misusing Darwinism). The Nazis were particularly effective in their systematic murder of Jews, but their Jew hatred was not an aberration. In addition to domestically produced propaganda Nazi publications regularly promoted the work of antisemites from across Europe - from France to Russia.

For example, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the most damaging pieces of antisemitic propaganda of all time (and one widely disseminated by the Nazis) was created not by a German but by a Russian Tsar in order to blame the Jewish people for his own failings as a ruler.

(And European immigrants to the U.S. also brought their antisemitism with them, though it was somewhat less virulent and violent in the U.S. than in Europe).

Spain's history of antisemitism is legendary. Centuries of state-sanctioned butchering of Jews by mobs as well as by agents of the government. Spain has expelled its Jews, taken their possessions, torn them apart and burned them for sport in acts of mob violence, tortured them to death in prisons, etc. Spanish soil is drenched with Jewish blood and has been for centuries.

Imagine if after WWII Germany had just gone about its business, never banned any Nazi things or tried to deprogram Nazi ideology? Imagine how wildly antisemitic it would be there today. That's basically what happened with Spain. They have never admitted their antisemitism or tried to remove it from their culture or educate their populace about it. There's literally a "fun" tradition in one part of Spain where they drink a drink called "killing the Jews" and then call to other people to ask "how many Jews did you kill?" The tradition traces back to when Spanish mobs would hunt Jews for sport. And don't forget. During WWII Spain was fascist and pro-Nazi.

This one was in Belgium :-)

Spain

Good news! There are multiple Running of the Jews actually :-)

To be clear, that guy is a direct descendant of Ferdinand and Isabella, who exiled their Jews.

it took until 2015 for this village to change their name back--not that they have many Jews, but, you know

As of 2023:

it is under sixty years since this:

and this was only because the Vatican allowed it:

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/spain-closes-airspace-us-planes-involved-iran-war-el-pais-says-2026-03-30/

It’s a tourist attraction. The vending machines are overpriced, you need a ticket to get in, there are pamphlets for it in the hotel, we had to pay for the bathroom

Most of the groups were not Jewish and I could tell because they were staring at us. At least one person took a photo of us. We’re not getting the same tour as them, three groups would pass us while we were learning about the story of one of the photos. We had some stops for people to tell the stories of family members who survived of stories that our tour guide has been told and at all the sites we sing something or do mourners kadish. And on one hand I want them to see us and realize that this all still affects us. But on the other hand, at every site it feels like we’re part of the exhibit. There’s always a goyische group watching us and there’s always a few of them who have this weird confused look like they’ve never seen Jews before. We’re mourning, and we’re part of the exhibit.

And at Aushwitz it was the worst. There were two spots in Aushwitz where I felt the museum itself was trying to respect the dignity of the dead Jews. There’s block 27 which is dedicated to the Jews and has one room with videos of Jews before the war, one room with Nazi speeches and a thing about radicalization and antisemitism, and the book of life. Our tour guide told us the story behind block 27 is that Aushwitz was going to put up a memorial where every country could put the number of victims of the Nazis from their country. Israel wanted to put the number of Jewish Holocaust victims, and Aushwitz said no because Israel wasn’t a country during the war. So Alex Danzyg fought for there to be a memorial for the Jews. The second is the cattle car in Berkenau. The cattle car was donated by Frank Lowry. He learned from another survivor the exact spot his Dad was killed in Aushwitz. He wanted a plaque but Aushwitz said that they didn’t have individual plaques they only recognized the victims as a whole all together, but he could donate a cattle car that a collector was selling on E-bay. So the car has a plaque saying donated an maintained by the family of Hugo Lowry. Those are the two places where it feel like Jews are respected, and those are the two things a Jew had to fight for.

Even beyond how disrespectful it feels that Aushwitz is a tourist attraction, it’s the worst Holocaust museum I’ve ever gone to. There’s one (1) room talking about why this was allowed to happen. one room about the rise of Nazis, one room where antisemitism is talked about. There are piles of shoes and hair and suitcases but very little context to go with it. And I don’t know what they talk about in the polish tours. My tour guide wasn’t one of the ones who work full time at Aushwitz she just did the courses so she can give tours anyway. So I don’t know what the average tour is like. But they were going so much faster than us that I am inclined to believe they did not get nearly as much context for these photos and piles of stuff as they really should. We got half our context for this before the day of tour, if anything the other groups should be going slower. And then we were told not everyone even goes to Birkenau. Just going to Aushwitz one you cannot understand what the camps looks like for Jews. There’s no point in going for Holocaust education if you’re not going to go to Birkenau and see what the Jewish side looked like.

The way Aushwitz treats the Holocaust, at least how the museum is set up, feels a lot more like cool morbid history facts than anything else. Not a cautionary tale about radicalization, not a memorial to the people who died and the trauma of everyone in it, not a way to remember as many stories as possible or to restore the dignity of the dead. Walking through Aushwitz as a Jew, I don’t feel like they care about Jews at all.

My family is from Czestochowa.

From their Yizkor book--transcriptions are at the end, below the cut:

And again:

And I have no reason to believe this was at all unusual.

I’m going to give a few examples that i think would be cool for me, as a low-vision / blind person, to see (yeah, haha) in Daredevil fanart. This is not an exhaustive list and isn’t intended to describe every possible presentation or manifestation of eye conditions.

Strabismus is a big one, where the eyes don’t align properly and don’t move in tandem; it can be unilateral (one eye) or bilateral (both eyes). Eyes can point inward toward the nose, outward, up, or down. Each eye can have its own presentation of strabismus. It can be more apparent when someone is tired or stressed.

There’s also nystagmus, or “dancing eyes” where the eyes move rapidly around and don’t stay in one place. This in itself can cause legal blindness as the person’s vision is constantly shaking, but it’s also common with muscle/nerve damage.

The eyes can also bulge a bit out of the sockets if there’s scar tissue or inflammation inside / behind them.

Ptosis (drooping or closed eyelids) is another one caused by muscle weakness or nerve damage.

These can all be observed in some people who have been blind for any length of time, either as the primary cause of blindness or as an associated condition.

"But it was in Australia. You live in the USA. You didn't know any of them."

Doesn't matter.

"They were Chabad. You're reform. Aren't you on the opposite side of the spectrum?"

Nope. Doesn't matter.

"You are a convert. No one in your family was ever Jewish. You barely just got a handle on the holidays."

Still doesn't matter.

We are so few and community is such a big part of what being Jewish is.

If you wound one of us, you wound all of us. Those might as well be my brothers and sisters taking those bullets when they were just trying to bring light into an already pained tribe.

When one synagogue hurts, we all stand up and cry with them. We learned long ago what happens when we break apart into 'us vs. them'.

Some people will say "How can you publicly light candles after this? How insensitive to celebrate in this tragedy."

They do not know what it is to be Jewish. We light the candles out of defiance. We light the candles because hundreds and hundreds of years ago someone stood up and said "I'm tired of this bullshit" and took back the right to exist.

If this logic is sound, all Islamophobia is similarly justified by the wildly disproportionate amount of terrorism and war committed in the name of Islam and/or the more than 1,000,000 killed by Muslim armies in Yemen, Syria, and Sudan.

Of course, the logic isn't sound, but they'll continue to loudly preach the former while dismissing the latter as Islamophobia.

This is what it looks like when people make moral judgements based on emotional resonance and social media instead of making them on consistent moral principles and facts.

Only Jews are held responsible as the source, cause, and justification of the hatred they endure. Only Jews are disallowed to define and identify the bigotry against them.

Those in the West taking this position have a broken moral compass. They have lost the plot.