Judaism is not a religion, it’s a relationship

Obviously I disagree with that assessment. She's been seriously depressed, anxious, injured (I said hospitalised but she didn't go for fear of the expense, she probably needed it though) after a suicide attempt though she says she actually wasn't trying to kill herself when she walked into traffic out of work from burnout... And more.

However I think that while we might not be able to immediately fix the homelessness issue, we can prevent the debt issue from spiralling into a bigger problem.

If you would like to help, I will pass on any donations directly to her, and I will tag her if I can wrangle permission out of her.

Permission Wrangled... @sufficient-tenacity, she's in a bit of a self sabotage thought loop. So please tell her here that she is deserving of help, and @sufficient-tenacity you're going to take it and not try to convince people that actually it's wasted on you. You deserve good things.

paypal.me/vardacassr

I'm so grateful for the people who have donated to help my friend 💖

Beyond the Golem & the Dybbuk lies a forgotten world of Jewish magic and folklore myths!

After many preparation we are launching a 50-page, fully illustrated zine exploring the hidden creatures, spirits, and myths of Eastern European Ashkenazi folklore. If you love dark, whimsical lore and handmade art, check it out!

You can grab a digital copy, a premium physical zine, or limited-edition art prints.

Please reblog and support the campaign here:

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.

That's why when people say openly, explicitly, and repeatedly that they want to kill all the Jews, I don't support them.

This is about people who say they stand with Hamas

This is about the Houthis

This is about people who think the Houthis are cool

This is about Hezbollah

This is about people waving Hezbollah flags

This is about people with signs calling for "the final solution"

Both literally (the period of time beloved of shippers where he was close to Charles was when they were both living in Haifa and Erik/Max was working as a nazi hunter) and metaphorically (he has directly created or participated in the creation of between three and four New Homelands for Mutants to Flee To When Flatscans Inevitably Betray Them).

At least one of those Mutant Homelands he founded had a "Troubling Founding" involving a civil war against the previous oppressive literally-kept-mutants-as-slaves human government and the founding in question concluded with the expulsion of even innocent civilian human residents.

The reason fan-tourists insist he be something other than Jewish is very specifically because they love his ideology and uncompromising absolutist leave-no-quarter attitude but do not wish to confront the fact that the ideology and attitude they are praising is literally the Kahanism that they hate (or, if they insist that he changed and got better, that the "got better" they insist is different for Magneto is literally the Liberal Zionism they IRL insist is no different than Kahanism) and having it be Zionism That Never Involved Jews Or The Levant lets them ignore that cognitive dissonance.

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.

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.

WHEN social media influencer Chris Caresnone made his first trip to Israel just over a year ago, he knew very little about the country — including nothing about the events of October 7.

But he is a fast learner and has embraced all aspects of Israeli society, including Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze, on his quest for good food.

“About a year ago, I was invited by a group called Reality to go to Israel,” the Chicago-based food blogger told me. “A lady named Debra Feinberg reached out and was like, ‘Chris, I’ve been following you for a while, and I think you’d be great for this organisation that gets people to Israel’, because my Jewish audience was starting to grow.

“I was thinking that I need to get to Israel because it would be good for the energy, ethos, brand, and content.”

Chris, who has hundreds of thousands of followers across social media, continued: “I’ll be honest, I had heard stuff about Israel and Palestine, but I was ignorant. I didn’t know much about anything until I was in Israel. I was wet behind the ears. I didn’t know about the bombs or October 7. All I knew was, I’ve got to get to Israel.”

Chris, whose real surname is Campbell, said the first thing that struck him about Israel was that it wasn’t all Ashkenazim.

“We ignorantly think that all the Jewish people on Earth are eastern European,” he told me.

“It’s not from a place of hate, just that we don’t know. But then when I went to Israel, I’m like, man, there’s people my colour who are Jewish and Israeli.

“As far as food, I would say excellent. It all felt fresh, even the fried food.”

Chris, who is known as the Babka King, was a little surprised about the lack of babka in Israel.

“There’s some, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not really Sephardic, Mizrahi,” he said.

There was another aspect of Israeli life which surprised him — the driving.

“It’s a little hectic,” he laughed. “I don’t know if I want to drive over there. I personally thought the vibe of Israel was super cool, and I plan on going back as often as I can.”

Despite being a six-foot two-inch black man with a beard, Chris said he has never encountered any problems getting into Israel, apart from being stopped constantly by people who recognise him.

“The reach is getting so big now, so many people notice me in the airport, and it’s not even just Israel, it’s back home too, New York, Chicago,” he smiled.

“I have to stop and take pictures every few minutes, so that’s not really a problem, but it’s something that’s a slight disruption.”

Although it was never his original intention, Chris’ social media feed is now heavily Jewish, leading to many Jewish dinner invitations, including from rabbis for Friday night dinner.

“I’m kind of Jewish now,” he joked, “I’m embedded and I see what’s going on, but my first time in Israel? I heard that this is apartheid, but I see all kinds of people there walking freely. I’m a black America dude, clearly not Israeli, clearly not Jewish and not only do I walk perfectly fine, people come up to me and show me love.”

Chris, who says he grew up Christian but is not very religious, had his babka obsession started by a Muslim.

“And that turned into this movement, so to speak, of humanity, which I think is the most beautiful thing ever,” he explained.

“I started making culture content, showing love to different cultures. I did like 50 cultures. I didn’t even make any Jewish or Israeli content for seven or eight months.

“I feel like I get so much love within the community, and I’m just treating y’all normal like how I treat everyone else.

“I was told the way you have to look at it is, imagine if someone gives you a glass of water every single day.

“Eventually, it’s just another glass of water. But imagine you’re walking through the desert for four months, and then someone gives you a glass of water, it’s a bigger deal. And it’s not because the glass of water is any different, it’s because the context of the situation.

“It’s so big and powerful, yet it’s a matter of just being human and showing humanity.

“And the whole food, the babka was really just life’s way of Hashem, the universe, God, whatever we wanna call it, it was the Trojan horse to get my energy amplified.

“It’s more than food. I don’t feel like a food guy at all. I feel more like a bridge builder.”

During his trips to Israel, he has also spent time with Ethiopian and Druze communities.

He described Ethiopian food as “ridiculously good”, adding: “I have tried other cultures that are mixed within Israel. That’s what makes Israel’s food scene so unique. It’s almost like the opposite of what people are trying to say.”

The 42-year-old was raised around the North Shore of Chicago, which, he said, has one of the largest Jewish populations in America.

“I didn’t really have a lot of Jewish cuisine outside of matzo ball soup,” he explained. “When I got a little older, I started working in restaurants in different areas, and sometimes affluent areas.

“I started trying things that I probably would not have tried had I not worked in a restaurant. So my horizons got expanded because of that.”

He said what he realised about kosher food was that the food was still good despite the restrictions (apart from gefilte fish, which he has never been fond of).

As expected, his videos from Israel, while garnering mainly positive comments, do receive a number of hateful comments.

He had changed his name to Caresnone to reflect the fact that he wasn’t letting hate get to him, but it is a situation that has provoked a lot of thought.

“Here’s something I’ve been asking myself a lot recently,” he said. “Am I trying to be right or am I trying to solve the problem? I have learned that a lot of times I was trying to be right, not trying to generally solve the problem.

“On my birthday, February 2, I went out with some people and I had a buddy bring a girl he had met like once or twice.

“He should not have invited some girl he had just met to my intimate personal birthday dinner, but it is what it is. So we’re all sitting there at this restaurant and it’s a good 10 of us. We were talking about food and I’m like one of my new favourite cuisines is Israeli food. I’ve been going to a lot of Israeli restaurants.

“And this girl who’s sitting next to me, she goes, ‘oh, excuse me, what did you say?’

And I’m like, ‘I like Israeli cuisine, it’s fire, I love it’. And she says, ‘there’s no such thing as Israeli cuisine, it’s all stolen, they steal everything’.

“She invited this new energy when we were just talking about food.

“I’m with my buddy Kareem KWOE Wells, who’s considered King of the Mitzvahs, a black Christian in Chicago who’s known for doing the most epic and powerful mitzvahs in the country. Me and Kareem went at her. We weren’t rude or ignorant, but I was starting to feel myself losing composure, because I’m part of the humanity tribe, but I’m also very entrenched in the Jewish community and Israel.

“Then she made a comment along the lines of ‘I should be able to say whatever I want to say’ and then I matched her with that.

“I’m a pretty intimidating figure. And I looked at her, and I’m like, ‘well, I can say what I want to say, too’. I was giving her energy that wasn’t welcoming. I didn’t cuss her out or anything. And everyone else at the table thought I handled it well.

“But I was trying to be right. I wasn’t trying to solve the problem. So much so that she said, ‘maybe I should get out of here’. And I looked at her and go, ‘yeah, maybe you should’.”

He continued: “Fast forward. I’m on the way to Israel, on a 10-hour flight. I get a DM: ‘F*** Israel, f*** you, you black monkey’.

“I was immediately reminded of my birthday. I thought about that moment and I asked myself, do I want to be right or do I want to solve the problem?

“Being right would be to either call that person a racist or antisemite, or to ignore the person, or to call them an idiot, that you’re wrong, you don’t know anything about nothing. Or am I trying to solve the problem genuinely?

“So I typed to that person ‘I love you, brother’. Then we’re going back and forth, but I’m always bringing it back to humanity. I’m trying to solve the problem.

“And instead of looking at this person as a racist and antisemite, which he’s showing himself to be, I saw him as this person who’s hurt, who believes a narrative, who thinks he understands something, he obviously doesn’t know me, and that’s what I saw now.

“So I was able to not take it personally because I want to solve the problem. I don’t care about being right. I don’t care that he thinks I’m this. I’m trying to solve this.”

He added: “That guy who called me a black monkey. He equated me being aligned with Israel as equal to hating Muslims.

“I know Jewish people for a fact do not hate Muslims. But this person believed that all Jews and all Israel, or anyone who stands for that, hates Muslims. I’m like, brother, a Muslim sent me my first babka.

“A Muslim has created a lot of this, you know what I’m saying? He was the one who sent me the babka.”

The guy eventually apologised for his ‘black monkey’ comment.

Chris has also received death threats because of his Israel content.

He joked: “How you gonna hate me because I’m eating the babka? I’ve never once come out and said I’m pro-Israel or pro-Jewish. I said I’m pro-humanity, which includes Israel.

“I don’t think that’s controversial. I’m looking at a Jewish person, you got arms, you got a head, you got feet, you’re one of us. If the aliens come down, I don’t care if you’re Jewish, Muslim, green, yellow, it’s us versus the aliens?

“Like I said, people coming at me crazy for eating the food, which is interesting, because whoever’s throwing out that slur or that energy, I’ve probably done their culture too.”

Chris describes his job as to move “in a light, which is very Jewish! Very tikkun olam, from what I’ve been learning. And I feel like before I even knew what tikkun olam was, and before I even knew what being chosen people was, and before I knew any of the core premises of Judaism, I align with a lot of this stuff.”

Chris is hoping to spread his wings more. He is keen to “get my butt out to Europe, I know there’s a lot of people telling me I need to go to Australia and Mexico City, where there’s a big Jewish population.”

One of his favourite restaurants in Israel is called Pitmaster.

“I have learned that the Israeli community loves to dance,” he said. “Pitmaster is an experience. Everyone’s dancing. They stop between the meals and they dance and it’s like a vibe. They are gonna bring two more to the United States. And in America, you’re gonna have to make alcohol more of a thing, because these people weren’t dancing because they were drunk, they were dancing because they were joyful. In the States, you’ve got to get people drinking.”

He added: “So when you ask me, am I aware of how what I do affects the Jewish community and the people of Israel specifically. I want to be clear and say I’m not a Jewish content creator. I am not an Israeli content creator.

“I’m a humanitarian creator who happens to also include Jewish and Israel on the humanitarianism, and also, I just happen to be really cool with them like anyone else.”

In one of his newer videos, Chris talks about volunteering in Jerusalem with Colel Chabad.

“It reminded me that sometimes the best part of travelling isn’t just what you experience. It’s what you can give back. If you’re visiting Israel, I genuinely recommend adding this to your itinerary.”

Some act like tznius is an obligation only for women, but it's supposed to apply equally to men too, and we should treat it like that

I think we'd have a lot less young women struggling with this if it wasn't possible to see it as a form of sexism, fostering resentment towards the mitzvah

as someone in a community that would take issue with a woman (of our community ofc) in a sleeveless shirt, i (and the people around me) would be shocked if a man in the community was going around shirtless! and most of the men around me wouldnt wear a sleeveless shirt either.

and i do think this is a fairly common sentiment that people have, so i’m not quite sure which people anon is talking about, who are okay with shirtless guys but not sleeveless women. but i suppose that there’s always a wide range of jews

I do think that what OP has described unfortunately exists in certain circles.

But the bigger problem is that tznius of dress is sometimes (incorrectly) outright taught as being a way that women need to protect men from themselves, rather than the inherent, gender-neutral Jewish value that many sources demonstrate it is. Even in communities where shirtless men at the beach would not fly. The FFBs friends of mine who struggle most with tznius consistently cite that attitude in their explanation for why they don’t take it seriously. And I really can’t blame them given that’s how tznius was sold to them. I wouldn’t have taken it seriously either if that had been my intro to it.

Top 5:

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (Jewish-coded villain doing profiteering)

The Church on Ruby Road (save Christmas by saving a baby about to be eaten by goblins)

The Witchfinders (claims there's no love in the bible until the new testament)

The slitheen as a concept (lizards in skin suits run the world and did 9/11 for money)

The Sun Makers (villain is a Jewish-coded tax collector).

In regards to point 2 [confusion about how the goblins are antisemitic]:

With the Wikipedia article on blood libel as a follow-up, because again the goblins in that episode are trying to eat a baby

All this combined with the Christmas theming and the fact they are killed by being impaled on a church...it leaves a bad taste in my mouth

For point 3 [where the supersecionism is in witchfinders], this is from the transcript:

Also, as someone working with religious texts most days for my degree, I need more people to know that JESUS WAS QUOTING THE TORAH. "Love your neighbour" is not unique to the new testament/Christianity

Also also, they knew this line was bad because it was edited out of the novelisation after backlash