tired

People Without History Are Dust

Queerness remains one of the most stigmatized and overlooked aspects of Holocaust history, often erased due to the lingering homophobia of survivors. People Without History Are Dust challenges this silence, weaving together compelling stories of German, Dutch, Czech, and Polish Jewish Holocaust victims and survivors - including Anne Frank, Molly Applebaum, Margot Heuman, and Gad Beck - whose experiences help illuminate the hidden history of queerness in a time of genocide.

Drawing on extensive archival research, this groundbreaking book uncovers the lives of those who were doubly marginalized, not only persecuted as Jews but also as queer individuals. In doing so, it confronts the ways in which history has excluded or minimized their experiences, urging us to question normative accounts of the Holocaust.

By shedding light on these long-overlooked stories, People Without History Are Dust deepens our understanding of identity, survival, and memory, reminding us why an inclusive and complex approach to history is essential - not just for the sake of the past, but in service to the present and the future as well.

Imagine ID: #no but fr wtf is those tags in that screenshot

The tags in question are "#gee I wonder why Jewish victims didn't talk about being persecuted for being queer #maybe because being Jewish was the more pressing issue"

I am going to start assuming you're asking in good faith and not writing off Jews talking about the Holocaust.

Being Jewish was the more pressing issue. The Nazis were going after Jews and Roma. The reason gay people were targeted was because the Nazis believed Jews wanted to destroy the nuclear family and had created queers to destabilize families. Does that make a lick of sense? No, but nothing about Nazism does. Queer people died because of antisemitism.

Furthermore, queer people could hide. Hiding isn't a privilege, but it did allow people to survive the Holocaust without being put in a camp. There were plenty of closeted German men who never saw a death camp because they never dated a man. Hiding being Jewish, though, was a different matter.

It does not matter how observant you were. Your ethnicity, which was Jewish, was written on your birth certificate. You were listed as Jewish in census records. That's how Nazis knew who to round up. It's why the resistance blew up records offices. There were people who converted out of Judaism who were still marked because they had Jewish blood. They still lost rights. Your best bet to avoid this was to shed your identity and move to a different town but a) it's hard to leave your family behind, b) it looked suspicious if you move suddenly, and c) no one knew how bad it would get for Jews. So people didn't shed their birth identity, and they died. It doesn't matter if they were Orthodox or fully assimilated; they were murdered for having Jewish genes.

Being Jewish was seen as a genetic disease. The Nazis wiped out whole families because everyone has Jewish DNA. Meanwhile, being queer was a moral failing. If you were caught with another man, your wife and children weren't going to the camps. Just you.

I've spoken about the difference in how queer people and Jews were treated during the Holocaust here.

Ultimately, the deaths of queers was a side project. It was a fun little detour, rounding up people who might destabilize Germany, but it wasn't the goal. And to make that point, please consult this graph:

I don't know how to do an image ID for graphs. But the graph shows the Jewish death toll at 6 million, non-Jewish Polish death toll at 3 million, disabled and Romani deaths at least than a million each, and gay arrests are barely visible. There are no exact numbers given.

Please note that the other columns are deaths. That tiny orange blip? That's ARRESTS.

Anne Frank was not persecuted for being Queer. She was persecuted - and murdered - for being Jewish

Anne Frank, by today's standards, may well be considered Queer, to the delight of everyone who thinks discussions of the Holocaust are a matter of representation, but she never got to determine that, because

Anne Frank was murdered for being Jewish

You could, if you don't think a child being murdered for being Jewish is tragic enough, argue that it's a tragedy that she never got to fully explore that part of herself, but that's about as far as you can go.

And this is in fact exactly what the tags in the screenshot seem to be talking about - Anne Frank did not talk about being persecuted for being Queer because being Jewish was the more pressing issue.

i HATE self-censorship for a lot of reasons, but being in crisis work makes it even more frustrating. who are you censoring for? like i am being so fr, WHO are you censoring for? have you even thought it through? people who have been raped know that they have been raped. if someone attempts suicide or is grieving someone who did, saying "sewer slide" isn't going to protect them from any of the feelings. a murder victim's family isn't going to feel better bc you said "unalived" instead of murdered. if anything, it's just extremely invalidating and othering. it's saying "what happened to you is so bad that i won't even say the word," which is NOT trauma-informed care. you are not protecting survivors/victims when you self-censor. the ONLY things you protect when you self-censor are the puritanical ideologies that are being encouraged by rich fascists who want your money and obedience

(All good faith questions are welcome, Anon - thanks for this one!)

TLDR: Because words change meanings over time and Herzl wasn't psychic.

In the 1890s, "colony" just meant a planned settlement or concentrated community. This included Jewish agricultural colonies in the Pale, temperance colonies in Colorado, and utopian communes everywhere.

It was basically the Victorian word for "intentional community," with absolutely no imperial baggage required.

The specific meaning activists now deploy (colony as racial domination, metropole extraction, indigenous suppression) is a 20th century framework that didn't exist when Herzl was writing in 1896.

So a reader of the 21st century finds the word "colony" in an old text and assumes it carries a technical definition that was coined decades later.

It's a little like finding the word "trauma" in a Civil War field report and concluding the surgeon was diagnosing PTSD.

Meanwhile, 'settler colonialism' as applied to Israel isn't a neutral analytical tool that happens to fit badly. It's a framework specifically constructed to exclude the features that distinguish Jewish return from actual settler colonialism...and it still fails on its own stated terms.

Jewish immigrants to the Levant were never agents of any empire. They were overwhelmingly refugees from empires who were fleeing Russian pogroms, Eastern European persecution, and later Nazi Germany. No metropole sent them. No metropole would take them back if the project failed.

That's not a minor quibble about definitions, either - it's the primary distinction between settler colonialism and every other form of large population movement in history.

There's also the matter of indigeneity. The Jews returning to the Levant weren't arriving in a place with which they had no connection.

Jewish presence in the region is documented continuously from ancient history, including in Egyptian records dating to roughly 1210 BCE.

The religious, linguistic, and ancestral connection to the land is what distinguishes this case from the British in Kenya or the French in Algeria, who had no such ties - and it is some of the best-documented, most indisputable history humans have ever gathered. (This is why they're so constantly engaged in historical revisionism.)

So when proponents of the settler colonialism framework of accusation encounter these objections, what do they do?

They move the goalposts.

The absence of a metropole gets explained away as an "exception."

The indigenous origin of the Jewish people to the Levant gets ahistorically dismissed or ignored, despite the fact that the Jewish people are the only group whose national identity, language, and religion originated in and remained oriented toward that specific land throughout their entire existence.

The framework gets rewritten and the history is revised until Israel fits the allegation.

So, one word in Der Judenstaat doesn't settle* any of this.

From The Atlantic: The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism (paywall bypassed)

Much more in this post.

It's completely correct that the semiotics of "colony", "colonization", etc., have evolved over time, and that back in the late 19th Century when Herzl was writing the connotation was more neutral than it became in the 20th Century. (I also need to stress that that one "it is something colonial" quote-mine you see shared everywhere is from a letter that was never even sent, because Herzl realized it was a bad idea.)

But more to the point: the old guard Zionists were fully aware of accusations they were European colonizers - and they actively refuted those claims.

— Jews and Muslims in the Arab World: Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined (Jacob Lassner, Ilan S. Troen, 2007)

— Hebrew Repatriation to Eretz Yisrael (Samuel Kruglikoff, 1930)

— Eliahu Eliachar, Testimony to UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) Regarding Jews in Arab Countries (1947)

— Ber Borochov, Poalei Tziyon Peace Manifesto (1917)

— David Ben-Gurion, Statement to the Elected Assembly of Palestine Jewry (1947)

Zionists wrote copious volumes about the indigeneity of Judeans to Eretz Yisrael, and denying accusations that they were merely pawns of an imperialist agenda (initially it was claimed they were Russian agents, and then later British colonists) or seeking to conquer or to exploit the land or its people. Contrary to the popular claim that Zionists thought (or promoted the concept) the land was uninhabited, a very substantial amount was written about the Palestinians (particularly from the perspective of class analysis), and how the return and liberation of Judeans must go hand-in-hand with class solidarity and the liberation of Arab workers. In other words: the exact opposite of colonialism. What we today would call decolonization - and specifically decolonization via proletarian revolution.

That isn’t fair. It isn’t just. But it is reality. If Otto Frank had let this be included in the published version, there’s a large chance the homophobic backlash would have prevented the book from reaching the audience it did and spreading the message it needed to. It was NINETEEN. FORTY. SEVEN. The Holocaust had ended TWO YEARS AGO. The acceptance of LGBT identities was basically nonexistent. Otto Frank made a decision based on the time and place he was living in, about what the world at that time was and wasn’t ready to accept. 

Let me say this as bluntly as I can - I am a bisexual Jewish girl and I would have made the same decision Otto Frank did. Making sure Anne Frank was unambiguously seen as sympathic and heroic was more important. Making sure people weren’t sidetracked from the main issue of the Holocaust was more important. He shouldn’t have had to make that decision, without doubt. Anne Frank’s sexuality (however she would have identified in modern terms) shouldn’t be considered relevant to her status as a hero or a sympathetic victim. But in 1947, it undoubtedly would have been.

im bisexual and i had experiences like that, kissing other girls at sleepovers specifically, and it not only took me another half a decade to start identifying as bi, but all the girls i did that with grew up to be straight women.

Yeah let me pull it up

here

This from Matthew 5:13-16. 😐. The first book of the new testament, gospel of Matthew. Look me in the fucking eye jvp and tell me you're a serious Jewish org.

Also some other things I unfortunately had to see while searching for it. (Their haggadah is littered with mistakes.)

Not correct grammar. It should be chag pesach sameach. Unless you're telling the 'concept of pesach' chag sameach. This is like writing: happy holiday, Easter. Instead of: happy Easter holiday.

I can barely read their atrocious handwriting. (Maybe make the circle bigger instead of shoving it all in there.) But what's checked in red is an incorrect translation. Unless there's some extra meaning I'm missing here truth ≠ מלכות. (Truth = emet／אמת.)

מלכות means kingship/Kingdom