:)

Hm. Ok. So let's start on the basics. Jews are a global ethnoreligious minority. There about about 15 million of us left on the planet, at .2% of the global population. About half of us live in Israel, which means that diasporic Jews kind of have to care about what's going on over there. but don't tell any DSA babies; this type of information makes them projectile vomit while spewing excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the original Russian and shotgunning beer with Rama Duwaji.

Archaeological, textual, and genetic studies indicate that this ethno-religious group originated in the Central Judean hill country, near present day Jerusalem. Over centuries those early Israelite tribes merged with surrounding Canaanite groups, and slowly developed hegemony over the Southern Levant, as well as--by the 6th century BCE--a form of monotheism.

Now the Levant is a very valuable piece of land as it connects Western Asia to Europe and Northern Africa via the Med, so empires have always wanted it; the Egyptian and Hittite Empires were fighting over it before the Israelites rose as a distinctive group, and the cosmological documents of the Jewish people demonstrate successive empires attempting to capture that piece of land. But when empires do that, they're not like, super enthusiastic about letting the indigenous populations stay, so boom diaspora. this would happen multiple times before Joshua of Nazareth rolled up to yell at the temple Boomers.

So, diaspora. We diasporad out to surrounding empires. Now, ancient governments are a lot like modern governments, in that conformity of ideology and belief are important to maintain official control of the populace. Jews got this memo pretty earlier and many of us preferred not to die, so we assimilated as a means of survival, while maintaining our ethno-religious identity. but, that's never enough. because while maintaining our religion, its laws, its Textual Stuff, we're still believing differently than the majority. Not only that, but we're believing differently in concert with one another over political lines.

So now we're challenging to authority, and untrustworthy. those dynamics showed up VERY early in the game. you know the Purim holiday? That holiday is about a piece of historical fiction written Before Christ about how our insistence in maintaining our culture and beliefs in diaspora WHILE assimilating threatens those in power. and then those in power decide to do a genocide, and sometimes don't if we're hot enough. the enduring ties between far flung diasporic communities, and our insistence upon maintaining our ethnoreligious beliefs, practices, and culture is a threat to any government which relies on ideological homogeneity. which, most governments still do. but, when a ruler says that they are descended from gods, or are a god, or were appointed by god/the grace thereof, or are protected by god, or whatever, our desire to keep doing our own thing is dangerous and unholy. and we keep existing beyond and across political borders while doing it.

Understanding race as pure colorism can’t be applied to Jews. With Jews, it’s old-world style. It’s about blood. In the fifteenth century some Spanish priests spoke about Conversos, implying that they can never be trusted because the betrayal and murder of Christ lives on in our blood. And that’s a really spot-on assessment of anti-Semitism: it’s about a set of inherent characteristics which override and transcend skin color.

If you’ve watched short form vids where a non-Jewish creator of any skin color is discussing Holocaust history or issues regarding contemporary anti-Semitism, you will always see comments along the lines of “how much are they paying you bro?” Because that base sentiment that Jews cannot be trusted transcends time and place. It transcends modernity. It transcends contemporary understandings of monotheism.

To be a Jew is to reveal oneself as an Other, who belongs nowhere, and leaves financial carnage wherever they go; who are loyal to one but each other, and who can never be understood as full citizens of any polity. Except their own. But they will never be allowed to have their own (not a commentary on I/P specifically). The Nazis knew that this was about blood and ancestry. The scary inquisition Catholics did too.

Generally, if you have descent in a country which slaughtered millions of Africans for funsies in the 19th century or had an anti-Nazi resistance that simultaneously hated Jews, or said “no thanks stay there and die we don’t want to import a Jewish Problem” I’m not interested in what you have to say about the Jewish people. Wipe your own ass before spraypainting Swastikas on shit.

Oh, “I’m not responsible for the crimes of my ancestors?” you say? Then why the fuck am I responsible for the actions of a country I don’t live in on the other side of the planet.

We are very much not "basically white" in appearance.

On an individual level, let's say you leave your toddler alone for five minutes beside a river and when you get back they're gone. It's a lot easier, psychologically, to have someone to blame (everyone knows Jews kill babies!) than to accept that you left them alone in a dangerous place and it's your fault they drowned.

On a political level, it means that when people get angry at something you can point them at someone other than the rulers. And it also means that you always have an enemy you can use for unification purposes.

So, for example, in most of Europe until the mid-19th Century there were a shitton of restrictions on what Jews could do for a living in most places. Exact restrictions varied, but it was fairly common for them to be barred from owning or renting farmland, for example, in a time when 99% of people were farmers. There would often be just a handful of jobs that Jews were allowed to have. So there were places in Eastern Europe especially where some Jews worked as land agents for wealthy Christian nobles because it was one of the few jobs available (and nobody wanted to do it). The wealthy Christian nobles were the ones who created the system and profited from the exploitation of the Christian peasants. But a lot of the people doing the rent collection and such were Jewish. Guess who got killed when the peasantry rose up in rebellion! By and large not the wealthy Christian nobles who were the ones actually profiting from and controlling the system. Instead, the Jews got targeted--all Jews, including the majority who had never been part of the system. It was really convenient for the wealthy Christian nobles.

A small percentage of Jews were allowed to amass large amounts of wealth as bankers ... at least partly because it was deeply convenient to Christian rulers to have the friendless outcasts be the ones handling the money. If King Spendthrift borrows money from a Christian banker, and tries to cheat the banker or have him killed or whatnot so he doesn't have to pay him back, well, the banker is going to complain to other monarchs and other nobles and King Spendthrift is going to face a lot of negative repercussions. But if King Spendthrift borrows the money from someone everyone hates, and decides he'd rather kill the banker than give it back ... then nobody who matters is going to care and he faces no consequences.

And then there's the unifying force of hatred! We often forget that modern national and ethnic boundaries are not actually that old. To take Germany for an example, until extremely recently people cared more about, for example, Bavarian vs. Prussian than they did about all being Germans together. But everybody hates Jews, so we can paper over our other differences and work together on that basis!

Trump says his entire movement against free speech and protest rights and right to due process as well as his relationship with Netanyahu is because he's a friend of the Jews. He says it's his fight against antisemitism. None of this actually protects Jews or prevents antisemitism btw. All it does is make us an easy scapegoat for everyone who hates what Trump is doing.

Meanwhile on the left in social media comment sections and the words of some media pundits, Israel, AIPAC, and some will even outright say Jews, are controlling the US government, media, and money. These are all classic Elders of Zion conspiracies. None of this is true. Israeli government and AIPAC as well as some other Jewish organizations do have a lot of influence in US politics, but it's similar to like any other foreign power or lobbying group that has influence in the US. The Jewish and Israeli ones aren't special, there are a LOT of lobbying groups that control our legislation and foreign policy. Spreading the idea that Israel and the Jews have a uniquely large influence on our politics isn't pulling the curtain back on some major conspiracy, it's just making Jews a scapegoat.

Hm. Ok. So let's start on the basics. Jews are a global ethnoreligious minority. There about about 15 million of us left on the planet, at .2% of the global population. About half of us live in Israel, which means that diasporic Jews kind of have to care about what's going on over there. but don't tell any DSA babies; this type of information makes them projectile vomit while spewing excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the original Russian and shotgunning beer with Rama Duwaji.

Archaeological, textual, and genetic studies indicate that this ethno-religious group originated in the Central Judean hill country, near present day Jerusalem. Over centuries those early Israelite tribes merged with surrounding Canaanite groups, and slowly developed hegemony over the Southern Levant, as well as--by the 6th century BCE--a form of monotheism.

Now the Levant is a very valuable piece of land as it connects Western Asia to Europe and Northern Africa via the Med, so empires have always wanted it; the Egyptian and Hittite Empires were fighting over it before the Israelites rose as a distinctive group, and the cosmological documents of the Jewish people demonstrate successive empires attempting to capture that piece of land. But when empires do that, they're not like, super enthusiastic about letting the indigenous populations stay, so boom diaspora. this would happen multiple times before Joshua of Nazareth rolled up to yell at the temple Boomers.

So, diaspora. We diasporad out to surrounding empires. Now, ancient governments are a lot like modern governments, in that conformity of ideology and belief are important to maintain official control of the populace. Jews got this memo pretty earlier and many of us preferred not to die, so we assimilated as a means of survival, while maintaining our ethno-religious identity. but, that's never enough. because while maintaining our religion, its laws, its Textual Stuff, we're still believing differently than the majority. Not only that, but we're believing differently in concert with one another over political lines.

So now we're challenging to authority, and untrustworthy. those dynamics showed up VERY early in the game. you know the Purim holiday? That holiday is about a piece of historical fiction written Before Christ about how our insistence in maintaining our culture and beliefs in diaspora WHILE assimilating threatens those in power. and then those in power decide to do a genocide, and sometimes don't if we're hot enough. the enduring ties between far flung diasporic communities, and our insistence upon maintaining our ethnoreligious beliefs, practices, and culture is a threat to any government which relies on ideological homogeneity. which, most governments still do. but, when a ruler says that they are descended from gods, or are a god, or were appointed by god/the grace thereof, or are protected by god, or whatever, our desire to keep doing our own thing is dangerous and unholy. and we keep existing beyond and across political borders while doing it.

Understanding race as pure colorism can’t be applied to Jews. With Jews, it’s old-world style. It’s about blood. In the fifteenth century some Spanish priests spoke about Conversos, implying that they can never be trusted because the betrayal and murder of Christ lives on in our blood. And that’s a really spot-on assessment of anti-Semitism: it’s about a set of inherent characteristics which override and transcend skin color.

If you’ve watched short form vids where a non-Jewish creator of any skin color is discussing Holocaust history or issues regarding contemporary anti-Semitism, you will always see comments along the lines of “how much are they paying you bro?” Because that base sentiment that Jews cannot be trusted transcends time and place. It transcends modernity. It transcends contemporary understandings of monotheism.

To be a Jew is to reveal oneself as an Other, who belongs nowhere, and leaves financial carnage wherever they go; who are loyal to one but each other, and who can never be understood as full citizens of any polity. Except their own. But they will never be allowed to have their own (not a commentary on I/P specifically). The Nazis knew that this was about blood and ancestry. The scary inquisition Catholics did too.

Generally, if you have descent in a country which slaughtered millions of Africans for funsies in the 19th century or had an anti-Nazi resistance that simultaneously hated Jews, or said “no thanks stay there and die we don’t want to import a Jewish Problem” I’m not interested in what you have to say about the Jewish people. Wipe your own ass before spraypainting Swastikas on shit.

Oh, “I’m not responsible for the crimes of my ancestors?” you say? Then why the fuck am I responsible for the actions of a country I don’t live in on the other side of the planet.

Thanks bud. It’s backed off for now.

I try to make things less confusing for the kids, so I introduced myself as Mx. x, but a lot of them heard Ms. x. A day later I heard a couple of them arguing over weather I was a Ms. or Mr. And I was a Mr that day so I said that and we got to have a delightful conversation about how some ppl are not a boy or a girl, some are both, and some are sometimes a boy and sometimes a girl like me.

I also have blue-green eyes (ppl often think my eyes are blue and the look at me later and tell me they are green, I have been accused of having color changing eyes) and the kids have decided that when my eyes are blue I’m a Ms and when they are green I’m a Mr and so far they are 100% on the money and it’s been delightful!