”Open up your heart/like the gates of hell”

"'fandom' is a vehicle of marginalized subcultural groups (women, the young, gays, etc.) to pry open space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations; it is a way of appropriating media texts and rereading them in a way that serves different interests, a way of transforming mass culture into a popular culture"

Jenkins, Henry. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5, no. 2 (1988): 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295038809366691.  

"I'm not disabled in any way but I always go out of my way to avoid doing this completely normal everyday thing able-bodied people can do because doing that causes me physical pain."

Dude.

"I'm not gay or anything, but on average you really do see more good-looking men than you see good-looking women."

Bruh.

"It must really suck to have ADHD or something, I mean I forget what I was doing every 30 seconds and get yelled at about it at least twice a day, it would suck if that was like a clinical thing."

Brother.

"I'm perfectly happy being a cis man but wouldn't everyone rather be a woman if they had the chance?"

“I honestly think that it’s adorable that you actually believe these children’s stories. But there is nothing magic about the waters.”

“Without the Creed, what are we? What do we stand for? Our people are scattered like stars in the galaxy. The Creed is how we survived.”

-Bo-Katan Kryze and Din Djarin, The Mandalorian Chapter 18: The Mines of Mandalore

When I was thirteen, my grandparents took the family on a big anniversary trip to Israel.

As a Jewish American kid in the early 2000s, growing up where there weren’t a lot of other Jews and spending my summers at Reform Jewish summer camp, I was told a lot of things about Israel. The big thing was always that Israel was important – that it was our home. That I should go there, and that when I went there, I would have an amazing feeling of connection, and I would know that it was my home.

So, as a recent bat mitzvah, I was excited about this trip. I was ready to go to Israel and have my big moment of feeling connected with the world.

I remember standing in the airport in Tel Aviv, minutes after stepping off the plane, and asking my dad, “When does it start to feel like Israel?”

Because it didn’t feel like Israel. It felt like an airport.

And then we stepped out into Tel Aviv, and rode around on a bus, and it felt like a city. I’d been to cities before. It was cool to see the street signs and graffiti were in Hebrew and Arabic just as much as they were in English, but it was a city.

Over the course of our trip, we went everywhere we could possibly go. We floated in the Dead Sea. We climbed Mount Masada. We saw the archaeological sites at Megiddo. We went to Caesarea, and Ein Gedi, and Yad Vashem, and Tzfat. We rode camels, we ate falafel, we learned just how unbreakable Druze glass is.

And, again, it was cool. I enjoyed the trip. It was beautiful everywhere we went, and we were surrounded by history everywhere we went. I remember thinking that the dust of history was gathering in my boots, because this is a place where people have lived for as long as there have been people.

But I kept waiting for it to feel like Israel – to have that big magical moment of connection that everyone said I would have – and it just wasn’t happening.

Then, we went to Jerusalem. And I thought, “Okay, here it is. This is where I’m going to have my big moment.” We went to the Western Wall, the last remaining piece of the platform that surrounded the ancient temple, the holiest place any Jew could visit in the world. I saw people there, pressed against the wall, eyes shut, in fervent prayer, clearly feeling something amazing. I walked up through the crowd in the small women’s section of the wall. I found enough space to reach forward, and I put my hand on the wall.

It felt like rock.

I remember thinking, “What is wrong with me, that all I feel is rock? Where is the connection I’m supposed to feel?”

And then, on our last day of the trip, we went to the Diaspora Museum (Beit Hatfutsot, now called the Museum of the Jewish People). It’s all about the Jewish people – our exile from that part of the world, and all our journeys since then. I’d never seen such a comprehensive look at the diversity and history of Judaism before. I’d certainly never been to a museum before that provided such an honest critique of the United States – it’s where I first learned about the SS St. Louis.

There was one room in the museum that caught my attention. I don’t know if it was a permanent installment or a temporary exhibit; I haven’t been back there since. In the room, there was a screen on the wall, rotating through pictures in a slideshow. Some of them were drawings, while others were photographs. All of the pictures were of the insides of people’s houses – their kitchens and dining rooms. Each picture was labeled with a place and a time. This was Poland, this was Spain. This was the fifteenth, eighteenth, twentieth century.

These pictures were from all across the world and all across history. And, in every picture, three items were circled in red: the challah loaf, the kiddush cup, and the Shabbat candlesticks.

As I stood there, watching these pictures, it hit me – slowly, and then all at once – that I had those things in my house. I was connected to every single place, and every single time, all across the world, all across history.

That was it. That was my moment, the completely mind-blowing and earth-shattering realization. That connection through tradition – that’s what it meant to be a Jew. I felt then a supreme sense of belonging, of being grounded, of being a part of something so much bigger than myself – something that mattered, something that was made of love, something that could never die. That realization has stuck with me ever since.

ty for monke!!

im so sorry youve had this experience, as far as my own experiences go, this sort of treatment is extremely unusual for any liberal or leftist jewish circles in the us. i myself am not versed in the israel/palestine conflict but my rabbis are, and they CONSTANTLY speak out against the injustice happening over there, and they offer unbiased tours of israel where you go talk to palestinians and israelis both

i dont consider myself zionist or antizionist and i really have no energy to go into the whole shebang debate, so i will publish this and see what my followers have to say :) pls no vitriol or meaningless political fighting on this post this person is genuinely confused and hurt

Jews are tired of the conflict being brought up, especially by goys. Even though the community is familiar with you, they don't see you as Jewish because you haven't converted. So, in their eyes, a jewish community in Germany, a guest is coming in and bringing up the IP conflict in a way that isn't understanding the importance of Israel to the Jewish people AND doesn't understand Zionism. A lot of Jews feel like Israel is necessary because of events like the holocaust. So a non-Jewish German person coming into a German Jewish space and telling them that they don't like Israel is offensive and tone deaf.

Jews everywhere have faced persecution, especially European Jews, and we view Israel as a place that we can run to if anything were to ever happen again. Antisemitism is back on the rise, so the need is greater than before.

That community will not open up to you again. If it were me, I wouldn't either, and I would look upon your conversion with suspicion, because I don't understand how you can separate Judaism and the yearning for a homeland.

Yeah, being a Zionist and leftist isn't mutually exclusive either.

There is so much about that Anon message to be dissected (torn apart, lbr), but the overall impression I get from it is that they did not enter Jewish spaces with the intention of integrating into the actual culture. I get the feeling the majority of their "knowledge" about Judaism comes from what they gleaned and romanticized from online sources--likely gentile ones--instead of from real Jewish communities.

Like, the entire bit where they said they were actively worried about having to hide their leftism from the community... I know there are right-wing Jewish sects out there, but the majority of the Jewish community hold left-wing beliefs, including Zionist Jews. Speaking of Zionism, it is pretty clear that Anon has no idea what Zionism even is (hint: it isn't patriotism), nor what the actual goings on in Israel are.

Anon has zero nuance about a community they are not a part of and they have a lot of gall to feel offended that they--a goy--are not being treated like a Jew by actual Jews.

That community will not open up to you again. If it were me, I wouldn't either, and I would look upon your conversion with suspicion, because I don't understand how you can separate Judaism and the yearning for a homeland.

Yeah, I'm with hindahoney on this. Anon has no business entering Jewish spaces, let alone converting, with the attitude they currently hold towards Jews and Judaism. They clearly have a very romanticized image of us, our issues, and our culture, not to mention a very entitled and Western view of how culture works.

(reposted from Twitter)

When I have the emotional bandwidth to look at Christians and ex-Christians flailing at Jews and Jewish stuff rather than just wishing they’d tend to their own process and practice and leave us alone, the thing I want most for them is to learn to encounter cultures and traditions and practices that are different from theirs without immediately trying to force them into an analogy or paradigm with something that’s familiar to them.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s even any actual spirituality in authoritarian Christianity, because the one thing I understand about engagement with the sacred is that it’s a way to cultivate awe and learn to face mystery without rushing to reduce it to something comprehensible.

And that matters in every area of life. It matters for loving people. Every other person you encounter will always in some ways be a mystery, and if you can only love what you fully understand about them, you love a reflection of yourself, not them.

It matters for learning—ESPECIALLY in science. If you rush to force what you’re seeing into a paradigm you’re familiar with, you often end up with either incomplete data or bad interpretations of data.

It matters for engaging with cultures you’re not part of. If you’re not willing to stop demanding that they immediately make sense to you, you end up misapprehending them and, often, disbelieving people about their own worldview and experiences.

I remember the first time a massage therapist worked on my psoas muscle.

I immediately tensed up and literally started involuntarily crawling across the massage table away from her.

She asked me, “I want you to take a moment and think about whether this actually hurts or whether it’s just an intense, strange sensation and you expect pain.”

It’s hard, when it feels like someone’s touching an internal organ or something to relax, back up, and just be receptive and feel rather than trying to categorize and react. But she was right. It didn’t hurt, I didn’t need her to reduce the pressure. It was just new.

It’s really, really okay—I promise, you can take the time and space!—to encounter something in another culture and just absorb without immediately trying to understand. I don’t know that I can explain how to get there beyond, just let go for a minute and be.

Like when you taste something new, you don’t immediately have to categorize, oh, this tastes like chicken! You can just sit there for a moment and let it be new. If you don’t, I don’t think you’ll actually fully taste it.

When I have a sensation experience like that and I can just sit and absorb for a bit, I feel like I can feel parts of my brain that didn’t talk before connecting. If it’s something like a wine tasting where I'm supposed to describe and compare immediately, I don’t sense that.

And I just wish people deconstructing Christianity, who often seem really prone to demanding Christian paradigms for everything, would try that. You can do it with people things as well as sensation things.

I think sometimes that you can’t really perceive other people, both on an individual level and on a cultural/societal one, if you expect to fully understand them. You definitely can't have an I-Thou encounter with them, in the Buber sense, or be face-to-face, in the Levinas sense. Understanding usually grows, but it has to have space to do so.

It’s not easy, of course, and it’s not something any of us can do all the time. There are important reasons our brains look for patterns and analogies and categories.

We can't constantly be in an I-Thou relationship with the Other and we don’t need to. But I dunno, I think it’s important to learn to

oscillate, maybe?

just let go sometimes and perceive absorptively rather than categorizingly?

Today, I definitely should have been using my cane at school, but was I going to? No. Absolutely not. Being physically disabled in highschool is very hard and I am not at a point in my disability journey where I am comfortable just using my cane out and about in public, especially in school.

That being said, I was doing my normal thing and talking to some friends and being like oh yeah today I would’ve benefited from using my cane whilst out and about. After saying that, one if my friends, who is not physically disabled and has never experienced being physically disabled or using an aid, started going on and on about how I should just use it if I need to and not care about what people think. While I do agree to a certain degree, its a lot easier said than done. I am already mocked and made fun of, being a trans and neurodivergent person in high school.

I might be overreacting, but I don’t think people who aren’t physically disabled or use aids should be able to dictate what we do to help ourselves or when we do it. You are not in my shoes, you do not experience what I experience, do not tell me what to do.

like... yes, there is a very real phenomenon of the adhd tiktokker with perfect makeup reacting with disgust towards the wheelchair user in their space

this is because that adhd tiktokker is able to fit into normative abled hegemony. their symptoms do not, currently, present as a significant barrier to engaging in abled hegemony to the extent that they exist entirely outside of it and therefore have to question its very roots. they are still able to be seen as productive, attractive, and therefore socially valuable under abled hegemony, and so they find value and utility in that hegemony and are able to use it to punch down on other disabled people who cannot.

this is still true even if their adhd manifests as what many refer to as a "physical disability" (for example, it's not uncommon for adhd to manifest with invisible breathing and heart problems, which i'm not going to get into the methodology behind here because it'd be derailing). i've encountered scores of people with what would generally be classed as "physical disabilities" who exist in this space--asthma, joint hypermobility disorders, chronic pain, limb replacements, hearing disorders--i have seen people whose "physical" disorders do not disqualify them entirely from acceptance into abled hegemony, time and time again, enact violence on people who are incapable of conforming to abled hegemony. i see this in the "spoonie" and "zebra" communities, i see it in "chronic illness" spaces that accept capitalist class interests and breed liberalism.

equally, i've encountered scores of people labeled as solely "mentally ill" or "mentally disabled" who experience the kind of disenfranchisement that is associated with "physical disability" separatism right now--people with ID and autism who are nonverbal/use AAC or who experience severe mobility issues causing them to use mobility aids for purely "mental" reasons, for example. people who tic visibly/audibly in ways that subject them to social violence. schizophrenics who are subject to physical violence simply because of their body language, even if they don't interact with anyone at all. people who uncontrollably faint at certain stimuli due to panic disorders and face public access barriers as a result.

there's a pattern being picked up on, in that what we classify as "physical" symptoms tend to actually be visible symptoms, and what we classify as "mental" symptoms tend to be invisible symptoms. but that is a false and arbitrary dividing line; there isn't a hard and fast line between the brain and the body. as with the sex binary, classifying something into two dialectic categories extremely rarely works as anything other than a thought exercise.