A l'entrada del temps clar

WILLOW (1988) dir. Ron Howard WILLOW (2022 - 2023) Season 1, Episode 8

+ Bonus

Di Luna's clearly horrified and regretting it all, but we only see the very beginnings of his attempt to process it...

The Saami people are nomadic. The Buryats are nomadic. Uyghurs are not. Jews are not. Many Native American groups, including the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek are not. This distinction may seem small and academic but it is absolutely vital to understanding modern day conflicts involving these groups.

I’ve even seen people say nonsense like, eg. “Roma are nomadic because they are likely originally from India but most people within the culture have no desire to return to their original ancestral homeland.” Which… what??? By that definition, the entire Irish American community of Boston would be “nomadic”. Hell, by that definition literally every white person in Australia would be “nomadic”. Like truly wtf do you think nomadic even means at that point???

And look, it’s admittedly sometimes a bit complicated with ethnic groups that have such a long and repeated history of violent expulsions that itinerant movement has become part of the culture of most of the communities which have survived. I can understand why people might be confused on first look. But frankly, when you look at the historical record and find centuries old sedentary communities that were violently displaced, and you find that multiple places and multiple times, I think you really need to examine your motives for reading any resultant itinerant movement as being nomadism rather than, you know, just economically driven migrant labor being performed by a disenfranchised community.

Because like, for the record? Seasonal migrant farm labor in California isn’t an indication that Latino immigrants to the USA are “nomadic” either. That’s not what that word means!

By way of comparison, a lot of Jews got into the jewelry business, specifically because of our long history of violent expulsions – being able to sew your entire inventory into the lining of your coat was a matter of survival for an awful lot of people. And that attitude still affects the culture of a lot of communities! I know a lot of Jews whose most precious family heirlooms are jewelry that they keep in a safety deposit box, because you can freeze a bank account and you can seize a house, but you can’t stop someone from using a pearl necklace you didn’t know they had to bribe a border guard, and a lot a families see keeping that possibility open as a matter of safety akin to never letting their car drop below half a tank of gas.

But like. Holy shit, if some gentile asshole went around using “kike-y” or even “Jewish” to mean “hoarding diamonds”, I think it would be pretty obvious to literally anyone and everyone that it was some extreme, off-the-charts, wildly out of pocket antisemitism. No one except the most extreme antisemites is going to die on the hill of “stereotyping Jews as greedy and jewelry obsessed is fine, actually.”

My illustration for the charity art book "Botanichnyi sad" *The Botanical Garden*

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