my fathers are my sovereigns

wait

because I asked him what the Austrian pledge of allegiance was (because he’s from Austria)

and he said “we don’t have a pledge of allegiance”

and I said “why not?”

“honey, think about what training your children to mindlessly pledge to a flag, without really knowing what they’re talking about, sounds like to Austrians”

“oh. hitler.”

Republicans attack Jewish candidates across the U.S. with an age-old caricature: Fistfuls of cash by Eli Rosenberg

Scott Kendall, the chief of staff to Alaska Gov. Bill Walker (I), said the week after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting was not easy for him.

A Jewish Republican, Kendall had just spoken to his 7-year-old son about why it was important to continue to go to synagogue, so the “bad guys” wouldn’t win. Kendall had been to memorials at synagogues in Juneau and Anchorage, where he lives, in a state that is home to a Jewish population numbering in the couple of thousands.

And then he saw the mailer from a local Republican group attacking Jewish state Senate candidate Jesse Kiehl with the image of a man stuffing a fat stack of hundred dollar bills into his suit.

“I was revolted,” Kendall recalled in a phone interview, saying he believed the ad was blatantly anti-Semitic. “Jesse is proudly and prominently a member of Juneau’s Jewish community… . It is tough for me to process through that and not see an ill intent.”

…In North Carolina, the state Republican Party depicted Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) with what appeared to be a stack of bills in his hand.

In a hotly contested race outside Seattle, Republicans illustrated Kim Schrier, a Democratic candidate for Congress who is Jewish, with a wad of $20 bills fanned out in her hands.

…In Pennsylvania, a Republican state representative ran an ad that painted Democratic challenger Sara Johnson Rothman with money in her hands. It also dropped Johnson, her maiden name, from the graphic while leaving the one she took from her Jewish husband, Scott Rothman.

And national outcry ensued last week after a Republican state senate candidate’s ad against his Jewish challenger in Connecticut was digitally altered in a way to play off classic anti-Semitic tropes. Democratic state Rep. Matthew Lesser was depicted holding a wad of cash in front of him, with a crazed look in his eyes.

…“What’s stunning is that these are old images that are very similar to those from other eras and other places,” said Pamela Nadell, a history professor at American University and the director of its Jewish Studies program. “But I will say I have not seen images like this in 21st-century America before.”

Nadell sent The Washington Post an unflattering image from a 13th-century Spanish manuscript that depicted Jewish money lenders handing over bags of coins to unhappy loan seekers.

…“There’s some famous Nazi posters that have exactly the same images but with different people,” Omer Bartov, a professor of European history at Brown University and the author of a book examining Jewish stereotypes, said of the recent crop of ads.

…Kendall, the Alaska governor’s chief of staff, said he phoned the group that created the flier, the Republican Women of Juneau, and asked what they were thinking after he was flooded with calls and emails.

“I’d like to believe it wasn’t intentional,” Kendall said he told them. “But whatever you do, you need to put out a statement that you condemn anti-Semitism.”

The group, which did not return messages The Post left for its president and another member, has not put out such a statement, Kendall said.

Seth Klayman, a North Carolina resident who has a doctorate in Jewish studies from Duke, flagged the Schumer ad when it appeared in the middle of a news article he was reading online.

…Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, dismissed questions about the Schumer ad in an email.

“The question itself, not the mailer, is a racist anti-Semitic smear,” he wrote. “It is just one more final disgusting attempt to Kavanaugh Republican candidates and activities. We don’t track people’s religion here or lack thereof.”

He called questions about the ad “the single dumbest and most outrageous inquiry I’ve ever had from a member of the media” but did not answer questions about whether the state party had ever run ads against any other candidates with money in their hands.

Kyle Fischer, a spokesman for the Washington State Republican Party, which sponsored the Schrier ad, said that the ad was meant to highlight her support for costly government policies.

…Schrier spokeswoman Katie Rodihan said Republican ads for other candidates in Washington did not feature the same imagery. (Fischer did not answer a question about whether the party had run ads that showed any other candidates with cash in their hands.)

“It’s an outrageous characterization of a candidate that draws on centuries old anti-Semitic stereotypes,” she said. “Kim’s whole platform is focused on lowering costs for families. This is a complete mischaracterization.”

…Bartov, the Brown professor, said that these narratives echoed classic Nazi propaganda that tried to paint Jews as both capitalists and revolutionaries seeking to subvert the social order.

“Much of the rhetoric is about how the left is going to destroy everything, destroy the economy, bring this invasion of barbarians — all of this was very much part of fascist and Nazi xenophobia,” he said. “It’s this combination of things: speaking about them undermining order on the one hand, bringing in hordes of invaders, and on the other hand, manipulating the economy.”

…Bartov said he didn’t believe that the ads could be blamed on naivete.

Jared Polis will be the first Jewish governor of Colorado as well as the country’s first openly gay man elected governor.

The 43-year-old Democrat, who has been representing the state in the House of Representatives since 2009 … ran for governor on a three-pronged platform: to ensure Colorado uses only renewable energy by 2040, provide free preschool and kindergarten across the state, and fight income inequality.

In an interview with JTA last year, Polis said that his Jewish background has a large influence on his political beliefs.

“I derive a lot of the values that I try to bring into the public sphere from my private faith,” Polis said. “Certainly for me I focus a lot on education, and I’m running for governor to bring [free] preschool and kindergarten to our state and improve our schools, and that’s an important Jewish value.”

1. WE TOOK BACK THE MOTHERFUCKING HOUSE. Look, in a perfect world we would have flipped the Senate too BUT this means that things are not just going to materialize for our dear friend Donald McTrump. This means oversight and investigations and a better grip from our legislative branch on a system wide check and balance. BOOM.

2. The fact that we got so close in states that Republicans have been gerrymandering the fuck out of for YEARS now is actually really impressive and it just means that we have to keep working but we’re whittling away at things. It can be done, is what I’m saying.

3. SO. MUCH. DIVERSITY. Women in record numbers! People of different faiths, younger people, native people, LGBT people, gang’s all here! We’re slowly dissolving the old white dudes in power thing.

4. So many AMAZING proposals are passing. Massachusetts upheld trans rights. Florida restored voting rights. Michigan legalized marijuana AND took the most comprehensive voting reform IN THE FUCKENING COUNTRY AND MADE IT LAW!

Good things are happening. They are. They. Are.

A Jewish mother in Texas says the local school district forced her to provide documentation from a religious establishment in order to excuse her child’s absence on Yom Kippur.

Lauren Gordon had asked for her child to be excused last month, but the Garland Independent School District, just north of Dallas, told her to “send documentation from the religious establishment you attended,” according to CBS 11 in Dallas Fort Worth.

“That response basically told me that they didn’t believe that we were Jewish. That they needed proof,” Gordon told CBS 11. “Honestly, it upset me just as much as it made me angry.”

Gordon said her friends told her it had happened to their children as well.

“It is surprising because that has never been a request from schools until recently,” said Andrew Paley, senior rabbi at the local Temple Shalom.

Gordon said she read the district’s student handbook and it stated that all religious holidays are excused.

She took her issues to the principal, who apologized and said it was not mean to be offensive and would not happen again.

sephardi 

sephardi (ladino) 

ashkenazi 

moroccan

juhuri/kavkazi

bukharian

You pass by a small crowd of hungry children, and decide you’d rather 455 apples go rotten than give them to some snotty brat who isn’t your problem.

It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked for your 500 apples, or that you aren’t the parent of any of those kids. in the moment you decide to walk away, it doesn’t matter why they’re hungry, or who owes who what.

You had the opportunity to help people, you had the ability to help people, you had the resources to help people. You had everything you needed to make a small, tiny little difference in someone’s life, and you decided not to.

anyway here’s thomas sanders destroying some homophobe on instagram

The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.

For the last year, the Department of Health and Human Services has privately argued that the term “sex” was never meant to include gender identity or even homosexuality, and that the lack of clarity allowed the Obama administration to wrongfully extend civil rights protections to people who should not have them.

The administration is trying to argue that 1.4 million people should not have civil rights protections. This will only result in even more violence and even more brutality to trans people. 

Why has Trump [X, X, X] and his administration repeatedly pushed to ban transgender people from military service?

here are all of the scum who control oil, coal, and natural gas

here are the ones who run the factories