Not a bot, just too lazy to customize

You do not get to profit, financially or attention wise or another way, off of a *potentially* queer jew whilst we are banned from pride events.

We do not know if she was questioning her sexuality but ultimately straight or if she was actually queer because she was killed for the crime of existing as a jew before she could come out. Queer rights obviously matter. Anne Franke is not the person you should be using.

You need to protect alive queer jews. You need to love all jews, not just the dead ones.

"But they banned zionists not jews", they banned jewish organizations, who refused to say they disavowed israel. That's like asking a local Chinese diaspora group to disavow the CCP or they can't be at pride.

thought about this because it's so frustrating when people argue that 'dying in childbirth' is a historical sort of event that doesn't happen nowadays (false) and therefore is irrelevant to the legal status of abortion, since it's not a real danger.

except it super is, and i think a lot of people haven't noticed that this argument in addition to simply being incorrect is basically the same as when people say we don't need vaccines for deadly diseases because no one gets those now anyway.

#including my freedoms as a gay person

#so I'm really touchy about keeping it

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

there have never been enough jews in the history of the world, there are not enough resources, there is not enough time for it to be even remotely possible that we do unto you what you have done to us

secondly:

and what if we did? would it not by your own estimation be justified?

thirdly:

this only comes to your mind because if this happened to YOU, then YOU would want to take exact revenge. we aren’t like you. we want to live. all we have ever wanted is to live and be free to determine our own futures. we want independence, self-determination, and peace.

we are not like you. and even if we took revenge in some impossibly small and limited capacity, it would never be enough. i don’t know that enough suffering has ever existed for you to be punished for what you’ve done to us.

by Roy K. Altman

I have witnessed the way the British Museum has been quietly participating in the erasure of Jewish history for some time now. A few years ago, I visited the British Museum with my wife to see the Lachish bas-reliefs and the Kurkh Monoliths—ancient stone carvings from the Assyrian empire, centered in what’s now northern Iraq—which provide unambiguous evidence of ancient Jewish rule in the Land of Israel. The Lachish bas-reliefs depict the siege of Lachish—an ancient Israelite town, a few miles from Jerusalem, destroyed by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 701 BCE. The mesmerizing scenes, carved in gypsum, progress from the initial invasion of the Kingdom of Israel on the far left to the siege and battle reliefs in the center, culminating in the destruction of Lachish and the enslavement of its Jewish inhabitants on the extreme right.

Archeologists have now corroborated this Assyrian depiction of the destruction of Lachish—which is described in the Bible, twice—by excavating in and underneath Lachish itself. Geologists have established that a fire consumed (and then destroyed) the settlement toward the end of the eighth century BCE—which is consistent with the Assyrian destruction of the town in 701 BCE. In addition to uncovering the telltale signs of an ancient battle—arrows and spears, for instance—at that specific historical layer in the underground sediment, archeologists have shown that the civilization the Assyrians vanquished was indisputably Jewish. In fact, Lachish is one of the only places (outside Jerusalem) where archeologists have unearthed the now-famous LMLK seals, bearing the Hebrew letters Lamed Mem Lamed Kaf, meaning “belonging to the King.” The king these seals refer to is Hezekiah, the ancient Israelite monarch who ruled toward the end of the eighth century BCE in Jerusalem, when Sennacherib’s Assyrian army came knocking.The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, depicting military campaigns and receiving tribute, 858–824 BCE. (PHAS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

You would be hard-pressed to find any connection to Jewish history in the museum’s labels—and the Lachish bas-reliefs are not the only example. The Kurkh Monoliths—giant limestone stelae—provide even older evidence of Jewish indigeneity in the Land of Israel. They record the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III’s account of defeating Ahab, the king of Israel, at a battle fought near the ancient city of Karkar in 853 BCE. And Shalmaneser’s Black Obelisk depicts a long procession of enslaved Israelites, their king bowing before his Assyrian conquerors—what most scholars consider the oldest image of a Jew anywhere in the world, a Jewish prince who lived not in Poland or Belarus or Brooklyn, but in Israel. But most of the descriptions I’ve provided here cannot be found on any of the museum’s inscriptions. And these priceless items of ancient Jewish history don’t appear in a wing dedicated to Israel or Judaism at all. Instead, they’re all on display in the Assyrian section of the museum—far removed from any mention of Israel or its pesky Jewish inhabitants.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter. In all its many rooms and floors, covering thousands of years of human history—and featuring plenty of now-extinct peoples like the Etruscans (Room 71), the Lycians (Room 20), and the Anatolians (Room 54)—the British Museum doesn’t actually have a dedicated wing to the people who brought us monotheism, Jesus, and the Bible. There are, it’s true, individual items of ancient Jewish origin. They just aren’t displayed with descriptions that make clear the ancient and continuous connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. Here’s a photograph I took of an absurd sign at the entrance to a room full of ancient Israelite artifacts:Phoenician sign at the British Museum. (Courtesy of author)

(“Where are you going?”) “I’m going to Tiananmen square.” (“Why?”) “Because It’s my duty.”

Duty is a powerful thing. It is not a sense of obligation towards the government or the state, but to your country, or county, or even your community. These young men and women were patriots, eager to fight with words and their very presence against tyranny.

I have written that the Israeli government is failing us and that the settlement project is a moral and strategic disaster. I have said harder things than that in public, under my own name, more than once.

Nobody called me an antisemite for it.

I bring this up because the claim of the season is that you cannot criticize Israel. It is a serious claim, and I am a useful test of it, because criticizing Israel is a big part of what I do in public. If the accusation were really triggered by criticism, I would be its most obvious target. I am not. So something else is going on.

Let me concede the real part first. Sometimes claims of antisemitism are thrown in bad faith. People have been smeared over ordinary political speech, and Jews who oppose the occupation or the war have been called nasty names by other Jews. That is wrong every time it happens. Anyone who reaches for this word to win an argument cheapens it for the day a real antisemite walks into the room.

Then there is the part almost nobody wants to look at.

This week, Britain barred streamer Hasan Piker and his uncle, commentator Cenk Uygur, from entering the country. The Home Office said that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good.” Both men went straight to audiences of millions and said the same thing: they were being silenced for criticizing Israel. Piker said it was done at Israel’s command.

But when you look at the facts, you get a different story. Besides saying that America deserved 9/11, Piker has also said he prefers Hamas to Israel, that he loves Hezbollah’s flag, and has no issue with them. Both are banned terror organizations under British law. He has compared Zionists to Nazis, said Israelis are Nazis, and called Orthodox Jews inbred. That is not criticism of a government, if you couldn’t tell. It is contempt for a people and admiration for the men who murder them. And the UK Home Secretary who signed off, Shabana Mahmood, is a British Muslim who has publicly criticized Israeli conduct in Gaza. Calling her a servant of Netanyahu is ridiculous.

Susan Sarandon tells a version of the same story. She says Hollywood blacklisted her for calling for a ceasefire. What actually happened is that she stood at a rally and said American Jews were getting a taste of what Muslims endure. She apologized for the line herself and called it a terrible mistake. Her agency dropped her over what she said at that rally. In the telling she gives now, the offense was the ceasefire comment. The blacklist did not keep her off the stage at Coachella two months ago, where Sabrina Carpenter cast her in what became the most talked-about moment of the festival's opening night.

The pattern holds every time you check it. The criticism of Israel is the alibi. The bad conduct is the actual offense. Everyone involved knows the difference and agrees to pretend they don’t.

Take the bad conduct away, and you are left with Ms. Rachel.

She is the biggest children’s entertainer in the world. Eighteen million YouTube subscribers and a Netflix show, and the Washington Post calls her the Mister Rogers of our era. For two years, she has used that platform to talk about Gaza without pause, in front of the most brand-skittish audience there is, the parents of toddlers. She is still doing it now. She has said she would risk her whole career to keep going. The career keeps growing. Netflix signed her up in the middle of it.

Which brings me to the strangest venue for a silencing campaign in history.

At Cannes last month, a member of the jury used the opening press conference to announce that Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem, and Mark Ruffalo had been blacklisted by Hollywood. Hannah Einbinder, fresh off a standing ovation for her new film, told a packed panel she was not afraid of being blacklisted because the cost of staying quiet was higher. Months earlier, she had closed her Emmy speech with “Free Palestine,” on live television, to applause.

I want to be fair to her. She may actually believe that she is taking a risk. But a blacklist you can describe from a stage at Cannes, to a room of journalists who will quote you admiringly, is not a blacklist. The Hollywood Ten could not publish essays about being blacklisted. That was the entire point of the thing. The test of silence is whether you can still be heard, and every name on this list is heard constantly, by millions, with a publicist setting it up.

There is an actual, organized refusal-to-work list in film right now. It is called Film Workers for Palestine, and more than five thousand people have signed it, pledging not to work with Israeli film institutions they accuse of complicity in Gaza. Javier Bardem signed it. The man named at Cannes as a victim of blacklisting helped build one. The targets are Israelis and Zionist Jews.

The people who took a real risk in that room were the ones who refused. Debra Messing and Mayim Bialik put their names to a letter calling the boycott what it is, and got called McCarthyists for objecting to McCarthyism. They are not on Hollywood’s magazine covers for it.

And then there is the kind of silence that does not come with a profile.

On a Sunday last June, a group of mostly older people walked through Boulder, Colorado, the way they did every week, carrying signs for the hostages still held in Gaza. A man threw firebombs into them while shouting, “Free Palestine!” He told police he wanted to kill every Zionist there. A dozen people were injured, the oldest in their eighties. One woman later died of her burns.

A few weeks before Boulder, two young Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead as they left a museum in Washington. The man who did it chanted the same words.

Those people were criticizing nothing. They stood in public as Jews who would not disown Israel, and that was enough. None of them will be asked by a magazine how it feels to be silenced. They already have been, in the older sense of the word.

So here is where I land. I criticize Israel constantly, and the sky stays up. The settlements and the men running the war are fair game, and saying so has never once cost me the thing these people insist it costs. Being argued with is not being silenced.

There is a harder question under all of this, and I think we keep avoiding it because the answer stings. You would believe every word of this if it were any other group. If a minority said its elderly were being burned at a weekly vigil and its kids shot leaving a museum, the response would be grief and alarm. When Jews say it, the response is a request to see our work. We are asked to prove that we are not exaggerating and that the dead were killed for the reason we name. I just spent this whole essay doing that. For any other group, the dead would have been enough.

Similar things happened in Uganda and Ethiopia.

How to spring-load your bow!