Que Será, Sarah

I refuse to believe that we dressed that ugly.

You expect to believe that there was no color, no bead work, no embroidery? Just the most blah and bland item ever.

We have the clothing for Kohanim and Kohan Gadol described in the Torah and it is so beautiful.

Sure regular people aren't going to dressed like that, but seriously I'm expected to buy that no didn't interesting patterns with their weaving.

That no dyed their yarn? That everyone worn shades of brown and tan and white and the occasional light blue.

I know us. I know we enjoy beauty too. I know that it would a way to express ourselves and the areas of the land we live in.

We expect to buy that not single one of use didn't have pomegranate something going on in their clothes or any of the 7 species.

That we didn't go all out for Shabbat wear.

Give me a break.

This one just about kneecapped me, though.

For context: I'm researching a list of every pogrom and massacre and anti-Jewish riot in the past 200 years.

It's already just annual mass murders peppered with, "At the time, this country had limited Jews to only 6 years of school, and school exams were purposely held on Shabbat, and also they were just getting beat up in the streets all the time?"

And yet, one bullet point still managed to jump out and sucker-punch me a lil bit.

Those examples I just gave were ALL from Syria.

Now, first of all: In 1947, Syria had a 2,500-year-old Jewish community.

This painting of Moses parting the Red Sea is from the Dura-Europos synagogue in Syria that was in use about 1,800 years ago.

Then the United Nations voted to create Israel and Palestine. And Aleppo rioted against its own Jews.

Rioters killed at least 75 Jews; set ten synagogues, five Jewish schools, a Jewish orphanage, a Jewish youth club, several Jewish shops, and 150 Jewish homes ablaze, destroying them. Thousands of Jews illegally fled Syria, including half of those living in Aleppo.

The Aleppo Codex, also called the Crown of Aleppo, disappeared for a decade. It was the earliest known Hebrew manuscript comprising the full text of the Torah. And, as the Israel Museum puts it, it was also "the most authoritative, accurate, and sacred source document, both for the biblical text and for its vocalization, cantillation and Masorah (literally, 'transmission' of the Bible, the oral and written tradition by which the Holy Scriptures have been preserved and passed on from generation to generation).... It was probably the manuscript used by Maimonides when he set down the exact rules for writing scrolls of the Torah."

When it resurfaced, 40% of its pages were missing.

But that's nothing.

You see, Arab Palestine was plagued by a godawful fascist the Brits had installed as a leader in 1921 -- before anyone knew what a Nazi war criminal was, much less that this guy would become one.

His name was Amin al-Husseini. And instead of having Palestine declare independence alongside Israel in 1948, he got all the surrounding countries to invade en masse and try to destroy it. To reclaim the land for the Arab world. Including Syria.

Syria was not a hard sell. It was voluntarily harboring a major Nazi war criminal: SS captain Alois Brunner, who rounded up and deported the Jews of occupied Austria, Greece, Macedonia, France, and Slovakia.

In fact, Syria was SO on board with al-Husseini's plan that it ALSO introduced a whole bunch of new laws for Syrian Jews!

It stripped them of Syrian citizenship. It shut down Jewish schools. They couldn't have driver's licenses. Or passports. Or buy real estate.

In 1949, it seized Jewish bank accounts. The following year, it banned them from working in agriculture too.

They had to be inside by 10 pm. They couldn't work in public service, in public institutions or in banks. People who worked in the government/military were forbidden from buying anything in Jewish shops.

And Jews were very much forbidden to leave Syria.

They could travel for business or health... if they received permission from the Mukhabarat (secret police), left family members behind to essentially serve as hostages, and left a deposit of $6,000 with the government.

Many people managed to flee the country anyway.

If your kids managed to flee, the Mukhabarat would torture you, and possibly imprison you for several years. Some people died from torture long before it got to that point.

There were repeated instances of Jews getting caught escaping the country and being not only murdered, but dismembered.

(In 1958, when Egypt and Syria briefly joined forces, the curfew became even worse. Now it was at 7 pm. And the Mukhabarat would arrest and torture any Jews who didn't make it home.)

You might wonder why Syria kept them there if it hated them so much. The answer is twofold.

First, along with the rest of the Arab League, it had invaded Israel in an attempt to reclaim the land for the Arab world, and failed. It didn't want its Jews to go strengthen Israel.

And second: for a while, it was more profitable to keep them there and exploit them.

In 1953, and again in 1958, Syria temporarily allowed Jews to emigrate.

But only as long as they handed over all their property to the Syrian government first.

(See?)

All of this mirrored not only what other Arab countries were doing, but much of what the Nazis had done in the 1930s. They stripped Jews of their citizenship, their businesses, their jobs, their bank accounts, and forced them to leave their money and property for the Nazi government if they managed to flee.

In 1964, Jews were prohibited from going further than 3 km (less than 2 miles) from their homes without getting special permits from the Mukhabarat.

In 1973, Jews were forbidden to own radios or telephones, or to maintain postal contact with outside world.

Plus, there was constant intense violence against them.

One Syrian Jew described going to the funeral for a neighbor who had been shot, point-blank, by a random Arab man who just knocked on his door and immediately killed him. (And also described having been aggressively questioned by secret police at that same funeral.)

There were many, many murders of Jews which went unremarked and uninvestigated.

But what got me was one last twist.

When Jews died, their property was confiscated by the Syrian government. If their heirs could afford to lease their homes from the government, they were allowed to.

If they couldn't, the property was handed over to the Palestinian refugees in Syria.

So just to summarize:

The Syrian government, along with every other surrounding country (plus Iraq) invaded Israel to reclaim the land for the Arab world. It failed.

It took revenge on the Syrian Jews, who by definition weren't in Israel.

The Syrian government targeted a Jewish population that had been there for at least 2,500 years.

There was widespread, extremely violent antisemitism. Intense restrictions on who could buy from Jewish shops. On what jobs Jews could have.

Jews were demonized. Deliberately forced into poverty and out of their family homes. They were isolated from the world. They were killed for everything from leaving the country to answering the door.

And once they left their homes, left the country, or were killed, it gave their homes to Palestinian refugees.

There were as many as 35,000 Jews in Syria and Lebanon in 1928 - almost entirely in Syria. The population dropped rapidly when the persecution started: by 1957 there were 5,400. In 1989, only 4,000 were left: 90% had fled. Today, there are somewhere between 4 and 100, depending on whose guess you go with. Syria has successfully ethnically cleansed over 99% of its Jews.

But here's the thing about that plot twist.

At most, 75,000 of the Palestinian refugees went to Syria. The numbers are impossible to fully track; there's great research about how many people left, but not so much on where they each ended up. It could have been significantly lower.

In fact - setting aside, for the moment, the fact that at least four other countries had invaded with it, and at least - hang on, let me count -

at least 10 other countries Acting Like This who hadn't even been involved in the 1948 war -

Basically, Syria started a war to yeet the Jews that displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. And then it turned around and yeeted and attacked its own Jews, confiscated their homes, and gave those to Palestinians.

You can kind of see this as compensation. Maybe. If you squint real hard, tilt your head 39 degrees to the right, and see the presence of Jews as the sole actual problem here.

This is why the social media version of this history is such a successful mindfuck.

It's so far off from the truth, and leaves out such an incredible amount of what happened, that it's almost impossible to counter.

People confidently claim that the Zionists invaded in 1948; that the Zionists attacked in 1948; or that Britain gave Jews the land as some kind of pity gift for the Holocaust.

Nobody has any idea that Britain watched every other country on earth agree that the Jews were about to get killed off if someone didn't take in Jewish refugees - someone else, not any of them - and then turned around and effectively banned Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1939. That it even made boats full of Holocaust refugees turn around and go back to Europe. That sometimes, it just unloaded them and put everyone in its own detention camps.

That if it had followed the League of Nations Mandate for this little chunk of former Ottoman Empire land, and encouraged Jewish immigration, it could have taken in all the 6,000,000 Jews who were instead slaughtered.

Yes, fine, that would have quadrupled the population of the entire country, caused immediate food rationing and massive refugee camps, and terminally pissed off Amin al-Husseini, but it would also have saved six million lives.

Nobody knows, somehow, that Palestine was supposed to be, mandated to be, a place where both Arabs and Jews lived in equality and shared in governing. Or that (if you prefer a two-state solution) it was supposed to be partitioned into Israel and Palestine in 1947. After al-Husseini attacked enough people that Britain gave up on the Mandate.

Nobody knows or wants to believe that no, there wasn't a good fucking reason for all these countries to invade. That THIS was where colonialism and imperialism came in.

When 1,300 years of empire ends, and people who have been marginalized under it get rights, there is an inevitable backlash.

oh…

…you know what, no, the frothing rage about this is too over the top, there are some mild rebuttals, at least.

I refuse to look at any other platforms about this because it’ll probably be even worse, but shall we read these apparently blasphemous passages that normalize atrocities?

Bestselling American author Rebecca F Kuang is facing anger from some of her fans after her upcoming book Taipei Story apparently includes a sympathetic portrayal of an Israeli character.

The Chinese-born author of works including Yellowface and Babel is facing anger from some readers after advance reader copies of her upcoming book – set to be released this September in the UK – were apparently circulated to a select audience.

According to Pakistani outlet The Express Tribune: “Readers on X and TikTok claim a two-page sequence featuring an Israeli pianist is described within religious and artistic contexts, which some interpreted as a positive or neutral depiction.”

Some social media users criticised the apparent inclusion of the Israeli character on Kuang’s Instagram page.

“EXTREMELY disappointed. Heartbreaking to think I raved about your work and your stance on colonialism and then you go and add a Zio narrative in your book… please please remove it”, said one comment.

“What was the logic behind the deliberate choice to mention Israel in your latest novel?”, another added.

Another wrote: “We don’t want Zionist propaganda!! Do you even know your audience?”

A different user accused the author of effectively selling-out her fan-base: “Good luck selling your books now girl you literally built your whole audience on your whole anti-colonialism thing just to end up normalizing Israel’s existence that’s just disgusting”.

Last year, Kuang announced her withdrawal from the Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature in Dubai following a call by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

According to outlet Middle East Eye, she shared her email to the event organisers saying that she was “no longer able to travel to Dubai” and that she “always respected organized calls for cultural boycotts against genocide from communities affected”.

ever-jovial barnaby

the great archibald

shrewd percival

timid constantine

for your reference, i tracked down one of my original posts; which had a notes section that looked like this:

and here is what it looks like now:

holy shit. by my math, that is not even two percent of the amount of aggregate notes my writing actually has. i am not able to see any of the literal hundreds of replies, comments, or tags.

maybe this is a bit presumptuous but i consider myself to be fairly popular on this site. i still remember the first time a large blog "picked up" my work - how quickly all of a sudden i was getting seen. notes on my poetry jumped from like 10 to 300 to 3k. overnight. that was the magic of tumblr, and the incredible writing community i found here.

but now if i answer any of my fellow writers, if i say please go check this out or even if i add additional context to my own work - the artist is removed completely from their own content.

do you want to reply to an "ask game"? do you want to reply to a story prompt? do you want to just make a funny joke with your friends? well, that sucks - you might be depriving them of literally 98% of their notes.

it isn't about clout chasing. it is about giving creators control over their own materials. even a silly post deserves to be connected directly with the person that thought it up.

What's NOT unique is hiding reblogs behind separate "chains." That just makes navigating this site even worse. Not only that, but it kills engagement.

We say “bon appétit,” and we also say “judgement,” “military,” “government,” “general,” “sovereign,” “authority,” and “dominion.”

And, at home, you’ll notice it’s “cuisine” when “food” is fancy. It’s “beef,” “pork,” and “poultry” when some peasant has killed and cooked the cow, pig, and bird. “Manners,” “etiquette,” “formality”… all French.

We speak a Germanic language that got astroturfed in every formal register by French.

looks better than this

Pointed nose buses are decended from trucks, and have their engines located in the front. This requires the larger nose in order to provide the space for the engine as well as adequate ventilation.

Meanwhile, flat nosed buses are actually descended from city buses (which in turn descend from trolleys), and were domesticated due to their greater maneuverability and capacity.

Contrary to popular belief, flat nosed busses typically do not experience breathing problems. Their engines are located in the back of the bus, with a large breathing vent located in the rear.

have not been able to get this out of my head since I saw the initial screenshot

The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra’s concert at the Philharmonie de Paris descended into chaos Thursday night when protesters ignited a flare inside the packed concert hall, filling it with smoke and fire.

The incident came amid growing anti-Israel demonstrations across France. Before the performance, the Confédération Générale du Travail had demanded that organizers acknowledge claims against the Israeli government, Slipped Disc reported.

During the first half of the program, multiple protesters stood up shouting anti-Israel slogans. One lit a red flare, setting nearby seats ablaze and forcing firefighters to rush in. Despite the smoke and confusion, the orchestra continued playing Beethoven’s Fifth Concerto under the baton of András Schiff.

Security officers and police flooded the aisles, standing guard as the musicians pressed on. Schiff ended the first half with a Chopin waltz, earning a defiant standing ovation from the audience.

this is so scary, it very easily could’ve caused a massive fire, or a mass injury incident if people had panicked and tried to escape the venue. it endangered everyone in attendance.