מלכת השושנים

His recent interview seemed to state, if I have this right, that people should care about social causes more than they should care about Jews. And that if you want universal healthcare, or if you give a damn about the climate, or if you want free lunches for poor students … that should outweigh the safety of 7.5 million Jews. What’s so unbelievably bizarre to me, but I can’t fucking fathom, is why the DSA would have ANY opinion about Israel, much less make hating it their platform. If they really cared about the people in the United States, they should focus on the people in the United States. Instead, they spend all their time degrading the one tiny Jewish country in the whole world. The only democracy in the Middle East. The only safe haven for the LGBTQ-plus community in the Middle East. The only country in the Middle East where Jews, Christians, and Muslims live together in peace. They hate this country so much. They say not a word about the countries where women can’t drive. Where women can’t sing. Where a woman wouldn’t be able to go see Jon Stewart filming his show without a chaperone.  I have no idea why someone like Jon Stewart can’t see it.

and I want to engage in jumblr and other jewish communities without constant posts about I/P. we are not defined by how other people label us. we are not that war. why is our existence only contextualized in our relation/difference to palestine, muslims and christians and why are we also doing it to ourselves? our existences aren't political. I want jewish joy. I want to go back to Israel where I don't have to deal with white virtue signalers. we as a people have been through so much.

And the gap between my experience of antisemitism and their perception of things is wider than the fucking ocean, so too often it feels like too large a gap to bridge, and usually I end up not saying anything because it doesn't feel safe to even try

BUT! Today I saw a non-Jewish friend who brought me a queer Jewish sticker from the Pride he went to. And that small act of love and thoughtfulness was overwhelming when I've been drowning for weeks

And so I decided to be brave and try to tell him why this meant so much to me. I asked "hey, uh, have you noticed the extreme rise in leftist antisemitism?"

And he said "uh, no? Tell me more."

And so I did. And he was shocked and appalled. And I sobbed and he held me and he loved me. And we had a really good conversation about it. And he said there were some things he had been wondering about but didn't know how to ask, and had been afraid to bring it up, and it helped a lot to talk about it. And we were able to be honest with each other about things, and trust that our love for each other is strong enough to weather awkwardness and imperfection.

And it was just really really really really important to remember that such a thing can happen. There are good non-Jewish people out there who don't know much about Jewish stuff, but who are ready and willing to learn and put in effort. There are folks who care, they just don't know how to express it.

I know not everyone has such folks in their lives, but I just wanted to share that they do still exist, and that is a beautiful thing!! I know I certainly needed the reminder this week, and I hope this brings y'all some hope as well

If you’re going to make sweeping (incorrect) generalizations at least talk to a single Jew about it first.

My man is like “we’re talking about antisemitism wrong” enumerates the problem of antisemitism in leftist spaces, and proceeds to make us caricatures, apply the western lens of race to Jewish ethnicity, and claim Judaism and Zionism overlapping at all is “the insidiousness of liberal Zionism”

And then invites on 3 Arabs to explain Jewish religious and political beliefs 💀

To an unfortunate number of aggressively ignorant westerners, "Arab" is a skin color/regional identity like "Black" or "Asian", and Kurds, Copts, Bedouin, Yazidi, Druze, Assyrians, and Persians are all subcategories of Arab. I have literally seen them claim that Sepharadi and Mizrahi Jews who fled to Israel from the MENA region are "Arab Jews" who are misled by Evil European Invaders.

And if you try to explain that Arabs are actually a particular tribe in the Middle East rather than synonymous with the whole of it, and what they are saying is the regional equivalent of claiming all Europeans are subcategories of German and any European who doesn't identify as German is either deceived or really from somewhere other than Europe, they insist that you're lying and propagandizing and cannot be trusted.

My surname, Mazzig, comes from Amazigh, the name of the indigenous people of North Africa. You probably know them as Berbers, which comes from the same root as barbarians. For obvious reasons, they prefer the name Amazigh, the name they call themselves, which means ‘free people.’ At the end of the seventh century, when Arab armies swept west across the Maghreb, colonizing every land, an Amazigh queen named Dihya led the resistance against the conquest. The Islamic armies called her a Jewish witch, Al Kahina. Even after the conquest, my father’s family carried the name Mazig through thirteen centuries in Tunisia, through every empire that claimed the place, until they were forced to leave to Israel with what little they could carry. My last name is older than the Arab presence in the land where it was given to me.

I’m telling you all of this because New York Magazine has just devoted its cover story to defining my region, and by its definition, I am not from it.

The piece is called Habibi City. Its centerpiece essay celebrates the rise of what it calls SWANA cuisine in New York, restaurants of Southwest Asia and North Africa, a region the magazine maps as running “from Palestine to Iran to Sudan.” And, don’t get me wrong, parts of this piece certainly deserve praise; the reporting on Little Syria in the 1880s is lovingly done. The portraits of the Persian and Afghan chefs are warm and informational, and those chefs have earned every praise. The history of Arab restaurateurs having to hide behind the word “Mediterranean” to survive post-9/11 suspicion is real injustice that ought not to be forgotten.

I also understand the reasoning behind using the acronym. SWANA exists because older labels erased people. The term “Middle East” was coined in naval strategy to denote a region defined by its distance from Europe. “The Arab world” swallows the Amazigh, the Kurds, the Copts, the Assyrians, the Yazidis, the Druze, the Christians the Zoroastrians, and every people who lived in the region before the conquests and never stopped living there. The magazine notes that letters keep getting added to the acronym so that no one is left out.

But the magazine is wrong. Every indigenous people of the region gets a letter, except one.

One million Jews were driven from Southwest Asia and North Africa in the twentieth century. From Baghdad, where my mother’s family had lived since the Babylonian exile. From Tunisia, Cairo, Sana’a, Tripoli, Aleppo, and Tehran. It was one of the largest forced displacement in the modern history of the region that the magazine has just spent a full issue celebrating— and the essay does not mention it once.

The omission is clearly intentional, and it’s not the only part I have a problem with.

Consider what the essay does say about Jews from the region. It quotes an old joke, “To succeed in Israeli cooking you need a Moroccan grandmother and if you don’t have one you better invent one.” It’s a subtle dig that implies Israeli identity is invented. But I did not invent the taste of my grandmother’s homemade hummus or the way her amba stings my tongue with just enough spice. Those meals she spent hours to prepare were not an illusion, but memories I hold dear. Maybe the food wasn’t first invented by a Jew in Israel, but Israel is the one place Jews can make it in peace, without headlines tearing us apart for stealing our own recipes.

The ridiculous gatekeeping of “Arab” cuisine is a structure that exists only to exclude certain people, in this case Jews. Think about the reality of food, for a minute. Let’s look at Shakshuka, a food my grandmother has made for me many times and a food people have said I have “appropriated” many times. The Tunisian food historian Rafram Chaddad traces it to the Amazigh triangle, the stretch of southern Tunisia and its borderlands where the indigenous people of North Africa simmered vegetable stews centuries before the Arab conquest. Before Amazigh people were forced to learn to pronounce the word “Habibi.”

It is also a dish whose most prominent ingredients are eggs and a tomato sauce. Tomatoes are, of course, from South America. So, obviously, it isn’t an ancient Arab dish, is it? And yet millions of Arabs enjoy it every day because, of course they do. It’s food; it exists to be shared and enjoyed, and when we discover ways to make it better, we make it better. Yet with Jews, our enjoyment is seen as nothing more than a diabolical scheme to steal what isn’t ours.

The essay even profiles an Israeli chef and describes her “Persian and Yemeni Jewish roots” without ever pausing to consider why the chef ended up in Israel. The answer is, obviously, that Jews were exiled from numerous Muslim countries simply because they were Jewish. But the essay fails to acknowledge the history of the region it is trying to educate on because it does not fit a narrative they are trying to spread.

‘Palestinian tartare’ is highlighted in the piece, too. A Levantine dish that Syrian Jewish families in New York have been serving for a century. One of the largest Syrian Jewish communities on Earth lives there, in fact. But the essay doesn’t mention them when it goes on about Syrian food. I wonder why.

Once you see the gatekeeping, you can’t unsee it. What seemed at first like a wonderful deep dive into Middle Eastern and North African history is instead a purity test that the author is determined to pass. Where it once mourned the harsh reality of Arab restaurants rebranding to “Mediterranean” to avoid harassment and violence, it subtly makes jabs at Israeli restaurants doing the same.

Diverse cuisine staying alive and being passed down for generations is great, unless a Jew is doing it.

And, of course, the justification is that it has nothing to do with Jews. Oh no, the New York Jews having their restaurants boycotted and vandalized aren’t suffering because of antisemitism; it is because, as the article claims, “Israel is committing genocide.” A statement made as if you were saying the sky is blue: an undeniable truth. For the record, Israel hasn’t been convicted of any such thing. The International Court of Justice has not once ruled that such a thing is true. But if the article left even any room for the question “Is this being done because of antisemitism,” then they would have failed the purity test they are so desperate to pass.

This isn’t the first time New York Magazine has engaged in the erasure of Jewish people. In early 2024, the magazine published an essay asking whether America was implicated in genocide in Gaza. The cover story came next: Israel indicted for the crimes of the century, published the very week that Iranian ballistic missiles were falling on Israeli apartment buildings, meters from my home. Media watchdogs documented its factual errors, and the editors corrected four of them. But the direction stayed the same.

To pretend that a people don’t have food is a way to dehumanize them. No nation lacks cuisine. Deprive Jews and Israelis of a culture, and you deprive us of our humanity.

We all have memories of tables with food, smiles, and family. It’s the most basic human experience there is. That is why it is turned into something else when it comes to Jews. I wasn’t eating a recipe that my grandmother’s grandmother perfected; I was devouring stolen food for the joy of having stolen it. It’d be comical if it wasn’t so hateful.