So Listen to my Declaration

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.

The West used the holocaust to promote Zionism. That's 100% true. I went to a predominantly Jewish day school (Pre-K through 12), which meant that there was a Bar/Bat Mitzvah every single weekend of seventh grade. And late into the service, an old guy would stand up and talk about the Birthright Trip and always throw in a line about the holocaust. Guilt over letting the holocaust happen (by the Greatest Generation and their children, i.e. Boomers) is why people like Biden, Pelosi, and the entire right wing of the US can't imagine ever saying something negative about Israel.

There's also the factor that it was the grandparents of millennials who went into hiding, fled to America, or survived the concentration camps. As a little girl I met some grandparents who had numbers on their arms. Those were often the (deceased) great-grandparents of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. It's "history," not "memories" to them. So because one side conflates the two, the other side also conflates the two.

The question, if you recall is: How does defacing Holocaust Memorials help Palestine?

All you did here was explain how 2 things are bad.

No one is arguing that point.

Mispocha I am an American Jew living in Germany who did volunteer work in Israel for October 7th Recovery during the Israel/Hamas War while bombs were literally dropping.

Of all the people on this site who you are going to need to convince? Me. I’m the one that you are going to literally need to convince.

Because I am living and working on top of dead Jews everywhere everyday in every U-Bahn and S-Bahn station I use, in the synagogues I pray in.

There are Holocaust memorials everywhere in Europe. You can barely get through a major city without tripping over somewhere that used to be important to Jews and now it’s just a museum. A memorial and that is where this happened.

Because Europe is where the Holocaust happened and that’s where this defacing happened.

Sorry but Gen Z and Gen Alpha Jews not remembering their holocaust grandparents is not relevant to this.

Especially as survivors are being actively silenced by American institutions. Read the news.

But even if that weren’t happening? And it is.

That has nothing to do with people defacing memorials to the most famous and industrialized genocide the world has ever seen that killed 6 million Jews in 6 years just for being Jews for a war that Hamas started through a mass murder, torture, rape and kidnapping of 1200 people that has been in ceasefire since October 2025 that had between 30 and 60,000 casualties over 2.5 years in an area with a population (assuming Hamas is telling the truth.)

And again!

I don’t just say that!

I actually picked up and got on a plane and flew to Israel to help - non-violently - by picking food in the empty farms where Palestinians once worked but Hamas made sure they could not reach anymore and getting things for people in the community run furniture banks for victims whose homes were destroyed and cleaning up debris in homes in a kibbutz where people were murdered. And I stood vigil in Hostage Square. More than once. Which is nothing at all compared to the years that Israelis did.

I went to the Nova Memorial and walked through the forest of faces of the murdered while artillery went off across the border. We could see the smoke on the horizon.

It’s real. I went there.

It’s not a fucking genocide.

It was a war for people with faces.

And none of this makes war good.

War is not good.

But I saw the Sukkah set with a table set with 250 places in Hostage Square. I talked to soldiers who were going in and who had come out.

The world stopped for Israel. And the world stopped for me too.

Because I am a Jew and what happens to Jews in Israel happens to me.

And what happened to Jews in 1939 to 1945 happened to me.

And I’m going to be honest with you?

I don’t see the complication. I see you failing to understand the messages that people were attempting to convey to you. I see you failing to understand 80 years of Middle East politics. And I see you speaking in sweeping statements.

This is lacking nuance and proof.

But you still didn’t answer how defacing a Holocaust Memorial helps Palestine.

All you did was say that people have hurt feelings.

So. Go back.

Get better at arguing.

Look at the original question.

Try again.

Because I have told you where I stand.

You need to bring me more than “I heard someone talk about the Holocaust during the Birthright spiel and it made me feel some type of way ☹️ Biden didn’t have cut off Israel cuz he was guilty 😔 I think both sides think the Holocaust is for Israel so that means it’s fair game. 😠

For me to buy that defacing a Holocaust memorial the Netherlands helps Palestinians.

PS you do know when you talk about Biden and Pelosi like that you sound like a MAGA conspiracy theorist, don’t you? Coming from the other direction but same anti-Israel anti-Biden anti-Biden conspiracy as MAGA.

Oof. 😅

I was explaining why they do it. They think it makes a statement.

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.

The West used the holocaust to promote Zionism. That's 100% true. I went to a predominantly Jewish day school (Pre-K through 12), which meant that there was a Bar/Bat Mitzvah every single weekend of seventh grade. And late into the service, an old guy would stand up and talk about the Birthright Trip and always throw in a line about the holocaust. Guilt over letting the holocaust happen (by the Greatest Generation and their children, i.e. Boomers) is why people like Biden, Pelosi, and the entire right wing of the US can't imagine ever saying something negative about Israel.

There's also the factor that it was the grandparents of millennials who went into hiding, fled to America, or survived the concentration camps. As a little girl I met some grandparents who had numbers on their arms. Those were often the (deceased) great-grandparents of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. It's "history," not "memories" to them. So because one side conflates the two, the other side also conflates the two.

I think this might have started once he tried his hand at writing other main characters in the same series as percy and realized a) it was hard for him to make them look quite as interesting as the character people had been following for a entire series focused entirely on him and b) despite his best (?) efforts, people still cared more about percy than his other protagonists, which showcased his failure as a writer, and would suck particularly bc hoo was one of his firsts projects after pjo, and one of his first attempts at writing not-percy's.

With his other series, I think he had already learned some lessons (such as not having too many pov's, continuing with the first person pov, basically, sticking with what he's good at). Meanwhile hoo (to me) is the series he took a risk and tried to challenge himself as a writer by having multiple main characters, writing 3rd person pov, trying to expand his worldbuilding - but I don't think he was ready for that. Mostly, I find it hard to believe that the idea was even entirely his - some of it does feel like a pitch his editors might have made for him bc they wanted him to continue milking this universe, and he thought, yeah, that sounds about right, I totally can do that. Except, he couldn't, bc it didn't suit his writing style, his strengths and limitations as a writer, or even the arcs he had already written for some of these characters in the first saga.

If you read the first two hoo books, there's not a lot of percy bashing going on, and truly, I started to feel that more intensively by the end of the saga, when things needed to get resolved and he didn't want them to get resolved by percy - this wasn't percy's saga after all, it was supposed to be a team assemble, people were supposed to be interested in the other protagonists by now! But still, Percy's character was the one that received the most focus by the fans, and I think he might have become more and more irritated by that - especially bc there was a lot of stuff people were excited about that he didn't plan to follow up on (case in point: tartarus). Throw in the fact that he has a tendency to write people in a relationship as not being allowed to care that much about anyone else except their partner (unless he's building a love triangle), which means that a lot of characters who had important relationships with percy now had to start not thinking very highly of him (i.e: nico, who he couldn't write getting over percy without diminishing his role in his life and making so the solution for him letting go of his hero worship was making him start finding percy annoying and dumb), and yeah, he started to get more and more comfortable with using percy-bashing as a new writing tool to spice things up.

There's also something to be said about how this percy-bashing was most notably used in hoo to prop nico's character, and nico ended up one of his most popular characters after that, alongside percy, so...

There were two key problems with HoO:

The editor didn't do her damn job. She claimed that Richard's drafts were "pretty well polished" by the time she got them, but in saying that she's admitting that she didn't thoroughly edit them and give constructive notes. So they were just want Richard wanted, not what the best thing was for the story.

As much as I love Piper and Hazel, Richard heard the criticism that all of his main characters were white and then created four POV characters who were non-white...AND EVERY SINGLE ONE IS A MASSIVE HARMFUL STEREOTYPE. (Leo is the son of a FREAKING MECHANIC and the "ugly god" and flirts with every single girl, Frank's main power is transforming into ANIMALS (when animal transformation/strengths are the stereotype of Chinese mythology), Piper IS the Disney Pocahontas WHO WEARS FEATHERS IN HER HAIR, and somehow, even though Hazel grew up in a city that is 2/3 Black, she *had* to be the daughter/granddaughter of a VooDoo priestess and then went onto serve the magic goddess. REALLY?!)

Don't even get me started on Nico.

Or the travesty of a TV show

One recent example: My novel Turtles All the Way Down was banned from being taught in English classes because one school board member claimed it "romanticizes mental illness."

(It does no such thing, of course. TAtWD makes mental illness seem really unpleasant and not at all either lowercase-r or capital-r romantic. To acknowledge something's existence is not to romanticize that thing. But part of co-opting this language is misusing it for the end of removing books thematically centered on mental illness, or physical illness, or sex, or anything else that might be deemed insufficiently inocuous for Educational Literature.)

But the question of when writing about something veers into romanticizing it IS actually a very important question for contemporary literary criticism, and one that's been explored a lot (sometimes with generosity and care, sometimes not) in book discourse online. So the Christian Nationalist Right is using the language of analysis that we are using in ways that are at best misguided and at worst disingenuous.

It's really discouraging--I mean, on a personal level obviously but also just as an American who believes teachers should be allowed to teach--to see such widespread book bans in American high schools and libraries. But it's not surprising, really. Books retain a lot of power--to deepen our empathy with those who are suffering, to connect us to ourselves and to others, and to see the full humanity of those who might be dehumanized or marginalized by the social order.

Luke Thompson: istg pronounced istiguh, aka Instagram 🤣🤣🤣

The Yerin and Luke duo needs to continue their world tour!

It really was love at first sight, but she didn’t go to the ball hoping to find love. She just wanted a night of fantasy and to be in that world. She didn’t even know his name. She just saw a gentleman and actually fell in love with him for who he is … But I think after that, it was a little bit unlucky, in the sense that that night forever changes her and actually makes her yearn for love even more, that she never asked for. — Yerin Ha

Poetry is the art of revealing precious truth with words.

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