Shitface54

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul *

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux *

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote *

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman *

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan *

Why I Write - George Orwell *

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland *

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag *

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag *

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger *

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger *

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo *

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall *

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon *

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls *

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato *

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae *

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom *

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore *

The Anti-Che - Jay Nordlinger

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert *

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson *

All By Myself - Martha Bailey *

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History) *

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History) *

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar *

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based *

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman *

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha *

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way *

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs *

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield *

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu *

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman *

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal *

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad *

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin *

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream *

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter) *

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales) *

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales) *

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas *

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries) *

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell *

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard *

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia *

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

This is a Roman mosaic, from when Rome controlled Syria, depicting an elephant (presumably the Asian species, Elephas maximus) interacting with a tiger (the Caspian tiger, a distinct subspecies of tiger, lived in Mesopotamia, the shores of the Black Sea, and Anatolia up until the mid-1900s). This mosaic is striking to me, because I guess you could say that this is clear evidence of the higher biodiversity and more-dynamic ecology of the Fertile Crescent in the recent past, until expanding militarism and empire led to extensive devegetation. After all, does the popular consciousness really associate elephants and tigers with the modern-day eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia? Not really. But for the majority of human existence, lions, tigers, elephants, and cheetah were all living alongside each other in Mesopotamia. Pretty cool.

Anyway, I wanted to respond to this:

Which was in response to a thing I posted:

Pina: Thanks for the addition! I don’t know much about the technicality Rome’s devegetation of the Mediterranean periphery, but - like you - I’ve read some cool articles about it, and then forgotten to bookmark them. (I know that I have at least one good article in print form, about Roman devegetation; I’m going to try to find it.) I’m glad you mentioned it!

The first image is in the public domain and depicts a rhino-shaped ritual wine vessel made of bronze, from about 1100 to 1050 BC, during the Shang era. (The piece is housed at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.) The second image is another bronze wine vessel from a site in Shaanxi Province, this time inlaid with gold and hailing from later in history during the Western Han period, about 205 BC to 10 AD. (Photo by Wikimedia user Babel/Stone.) The rhinos in both of these pieces are depicted with two horns, meaning that they likely depict the Sumatran rhinoceros; this is corroborated by the existence of fossil remains of Sumatran rhinos from across China prior to 1000 AD.

On devegetation in the ancient world:

Yes, it feels like the ecological effects of empires prior to the Middle Ages are not just “under-discussed,” but dramatically overlooked. Some “quintessential and iconic African fauna” like lions and cheetahs lived throughout the Fertile Crescent, until devegetation during the late Bronze Age and, a few centuries later, the ascent of Rome. Caspian tigers (a distinct subspecies of tiger) also lived nearby, in Anatolia, the Caucasus, the shores of the Black Sea, and Persia - right up until the 20th century, in fact! (Other iconic species present on the periphery of ancient Mesopotamia were Asian elephants; leopards are still present.) Aside from the devegetation of the Fertile Crescent and the later landscape modifications of Rome, I also don’t see a lot of popular discussion (there is academic discussion, though, obviously) of ecological change in Zhou-era and early imperial China, either. While early Mesopotamia is famous for the amount of social prestige ascribed to irrigators and engineers, who were evidently essential to maintaining the domesticated crops so important to “hydraulic civilization,” early China (apparently) also revered irrigators and engineers. At least according to folklore and written histories, before the Han period, seasonal floods, especially in the Yangtze watershed, would regularly destroy human settlements. Also, there far more tigers, leopards, rhinos, and elephants present; rhinos and elephants lived as far north as the Yellow River until empire really expanded, and the animals lived as far north as the Yangtze River into the European Renaissance era. So, those people with the technical expertise to “tame the wilderness” by damming rivers or calming floodwaters were given prestige and sometimes treated as folk heroes. [Chinese history is not a subject that I really know a lot about. I’m just relaying the observations made in one of the better books on environmental history in East Asia, which is Mark Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants - 2006.]

——

On empires’ use of soil degradation to “sever connections to land” and “indirectly” destroy alternative or resisting cultures:

Seems that empire uses ecological degradation to enact a “severing of relations” (in Zoe Todd’s words). Basically: If you destroy somebody’s gardens, then they have to come to you to buy food. Furthermore, destroying someone’s connection to land will also harm their cultural traditions rooted in that land, eliminating a threat to the imperial cultural hegemony and erasing “alternative possibilities and futures” from the collective imaginary. (And destroying the imagination doesn’t just harm the invaded cultures, it also prevents the relatively privileged people living in the metropole or imperial core from “achieving consciousness” or whatever, wherein someone living in 150 AD Rome or 1890s New York City might imagine an alternative system and potentially dismantle the empire from within.)

It’s violence; destroying soil, cutting forests, it’s violence. But when empires destroy soil, they get to maintain a little bit of plausible deniability: “Ohhh, it’s not like we outright killed anybody, we just accidentally degraded the soil and now you can’t grow your own food. Damn, guess you have to rely on our market now, which also means you have to assimilate/integrate into our culture.”

Europe, the US, and the World Bank did this in West Africa after “independence.” They said “oh, yea, sure, we’ll formally liberate you from colonial rule.” But since the palm and sugar plantations were already installed, and many of the ungulate herds of the savanna had already been killed, what were new West African nations supposed to do? Miraculously resurrect the complex web of microorganism lifeforms in the soil? So what the US and its proxies are essentially doing is saying: “If you want loans, you have to keep the plantations and also install supermarkets to sell Coca-Cola.”

Todd: “The Anthropocene as the extension and enactment of colonial logic systematically erases difference, by way of genocide and forced integration and through projects of climate change that imply the radical transformation of the biosphere. Colonialism, especially settler colonialism – which in the Americas simultaneously employed the twinned processes of dispossession and chattel slavery – was always about changing the land, transforming the earth itself, including the creatures, the plants, the soil composition and the atmosphere.” [Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017.]

—–

On the use of non-native plants as a sort of “biological weapon”:

The use of non-native plants and agriculture to enforce colonization and empire is the whole focus of this influential book from Alfred Crosby. (I have some issues/criticisms of some of his work/theories, but his work is generally interesting.) Crosby popularized the term “neo-Europes,” and he proposes that European empires attempted to subjugate the native ecology of landscapes in Turtle Island, Latin America, Australia, etc., while attempting to introduce European species, cattle ranches, pastures, dairy farms, gardens, etc. in an effort to “recreate” a European landscape.

—–

Speaking of Rome’s devegetation of the Mediterranean: One of the famous cases of Roman devegetation that made the rounds recently was that of silphium. A couple of excerpts:

[From: The Original Seed Pod That May Have Inspired the Heart Shape This historical botanical theory has its roots in ancient contraceptive practices.” Cara Giaimo for Atlas Obscure, 13 February 2017.]

Silphium, which once grew rampant in the ancient Greek city of Cyrene, in North Africa, was likely a type of giant fennel, with crunchy stalks and small clumps of yellow flowers. From its stem and roots, it emitted a pungent sap that Pliny the Elder called “among the most precious gifts presented to us by Nature.”

According to the numismatist T.V. Buttrey, exports of the plant and its resins made Cyrene the richest city on the continent at the time. It was so valuable, in fact, that Cyrenians began printing it on their money. Silver coins from the 6th century B.C. are imprinted with images of the plant’s stalk – a thick column with flowers on top and leaves sticking out – and its seed pods, which look pretty familiar: 

[End of excerpt.]

Silphium is extinct now. There is a lot of conjecture about what, specifically, caused the extinction. But it looks like the expansion of Rome across the North African coast of the Mediterranean, and Rome’s development leading to soil degradation, is a likely cause.

—–

Thanks @pinabutterjam​  :3

by  Rum T Franco

Contact:  [email protected]

1. Stories

Outside you can barely tell it is day time the sky is so full of clouds. Somewhere in a cloud is a dream I let go, that tells a story I have forgotten.

I  like to tell stories, but I was never good at a stream-lined narrative. I always want to tell you another story before I have got to the end. I miss things out. I add things in. I highlight moments I might never have highlighted when the story took place.

I have wallowed too long in this almost empty river. We have wallowed together, never acknowledging each other. Where does the rain go, if not here?

I do not want to admit what I have allowed people to say to me, to do to me, for being ‘too much’. Too much loud. Too much chub.Too much hair. Too much Jew. 

I want it to be that when I close my eyes and lie face down, that the soil is clean and smells like real good dirt, that the grass is fragrant, and my sense of smell is keen enough to find water. That I will not taste bitterness where there is none. A sign of depression, says my mum. I always did experience things very viscerally. I didn’t want this to be about me, I wanted this to be about a Jewish feminist queer utopia. 

I feel my feet are wet. I look down and see I’ve stepped into a puddle. It’s no longer raining.

2. My Jewish Pussy

CN: antisemitism, abusive relationships, physical threat

I was 16. I met the guy (Kev) in Asda where he worked. He had long dirty mousey hair, blue eyes (pretty aryan, Kurt Cobainesque), and a girlfriend. He used to stuff the holes in his shoes with newspaper. Him and his mum funded their cannabis habits breeding kittens. 

We had a date round the back of the supermarket during his break. He rolled a joint on the palm of my hand. Called it a table. I fell in love. 

He said he wanted to fuck my Jewish pussy. I had never thought of my pussy as Jewish. Imagine – does my pussy light the candles on a Friday night? Does she humbly cast aside the challah? Does she cook cholent? Is she also a vegan or is she ravenous for meat? I realise now he must have thought my Jewishness made me exotic: kinda treyf, but for goys. 

-

One night, when my parents were away, I invited Kev and Jim over for drinks. Jim insisted on bringing a friend. They were already drunk. The friend recounted a joke about Madeleine McCann and I told him he couldn’t say that shit in my house. He threatened me with a knife. We threw him out. He started shouting DIRTY JEWS outside my front door.

Months later the same man came into Pizza Hut where I worked and I served him. He didn’t show any signs of recognising me. He even tipped.

3. Minha Queerida

I just got back from visiting my friends on their farm in central Portugal. I was happy there. I lit Shabbat candles with P and explained the rituals. I sang Shalom Aleichem and we saw a moth lying in the waxy pit below the shabbes flame. Later, P designed me a tattoo of that moth and her memory resides between my shoulder and armpit. 

Maybe I want utopia to be a place like that, where there is time to take a row-boat down the river and paint ornamental gourds. Where the local bread is made with flour from the mill next door, and as long as you are friendly and willing to give being part of the village a try, then people will come to accept you for who you are. Where neighbours give you fruit and vegetables from their quintas, practise speaking with you, call you when you are sick, bring you medicine. There, if you are queer you are pretty odd but it doesnt mean you are left behind. You have neighbours that kiss your cheeks and invite you in for cake and ice cream. But there aren’t any Jews. I want to be somewhere like there but with a Jewish community too, you know? I have been on this long Jewish journey figuring out how I want to engage Jewishly and I can’t leave it all behind to live in a Catholic village in Portugal. I don’t want to do things just to escape anymore. But sometimes I wonder if that is what most of us are doing anyway. Waiting for the next moment to come, so we don’t have to think about this one.

4. Pomegranate

That Rosh Chodesh, before Elul, a fire was lit in the Northern skies. A signal. An ancient tradition, now reclaimed by queer Jewish priestesses afar. Across the valley I saw her, her dark curls glistening in the flicker of the flames. I caught her gaze, turned away quickly, scared she would know what I was thinking. Her light tread. Her hand pulling my chin towards her. She wanted me to look and not stop looking until she was done. How did we become so close when I swear she was stood upon the other mountain? Time has changed. We no longer play by old time. We are no longer restricted. She stretches out the moment, twirls it around her elegant fingers, brushes it past my lips.

She takes my hand and leads me to boughs laiden with rich fruits; skins bursting with sweet liquid. She sits beneath the intermittent flow. I follow the trail of pomegranate juice with my tongue, above her navel to the soft well at the crook of her neck. This, this is where shekhina resides. I stir her and she tips forth: a delicate, flowery scent that seeps provocatively. My breast to her breast. My palms to her palms. There are rituals in everything that we do. There are brachot in everything that we touch.

5. Sunflower Seeds

When I was very small, I held a public ritual upon the green between our houses, where we used to eat ice pops and push each other in toy cars. I did not really know much about how plants grew and it was hard to dig the hole, but I was adamant that I would see a sunflower there one day.

Now I’m here, on the mountain, and you think I am alone. I had been told back then that there was not sufficient evidence for divinity. But I have encountered the divine countless times here. I saw a toucan watching over a human child! A she-wolf took on an abandoned litter of kittens! I tell you this now, because you wouldn’t believe me if I met you in real life. Nobody wants to admit their utopias. Nobody wants to live them. I wonder how many hand-prints are still pressed into the window here? I wonder how far back we can trace these skin cells? 

I perch at the edge, one hand stirring a simmering pot and the other reaching out for yours: the many yous out there whose dreams intertwine with mine. We have danced together in another life. Now, when I say another life, I do not mean it in a historical sense, but rather, I believe we are all living multiple lives at once. This must mean, then, that our utopias are already out there somewhere. 

The way that East Asian men are emasculated and denied manhood, the way East Asian women are objectified and hyper sexualized, the way that Black men are hyper sexualized and hyper masculinized, the way Black women are also uniquely hyper sexualized and hyper masculinized, the way that SE Asian men are seen as dirty sexual predators, the way SE Asian women are fetishized and treated as oriental decoration, the way Indigenous men are completely denied manhood and gender as an extension of personhood, the way Indigenous women are stolen and silenced, the way ethnically Jewish men are seen as impotent non-humans, the way Jewish women are treated as monstrous and abrasive, it goes on it goes on.

These are unique positions that people of these demographics experience at the intersections of their races and genders that are not experienced by white gender conformity.

Disgust. Disappointment.

Y'all are "against AfD" because it's not very cash money amirite xDD to vote the open fascists into power, but you don't consider Muslims or really ANYONE who isn't white Western European even a full human.

And in 10 years time you'll hold a fucking memorial to feel sorry about yourself and sob, "We just didn't know!"

You DO know and you're tormenting all of us with your "but it's FINE actually, they DESERVE it actually, they're not WORTHY to be saved by our divine enlightened civilized grace" this very instance.

Jewish people in Germany aren't safe FROM (FELLOW!!) GERMANS here, WHICH IS DISGUSTING, white-as-snow-and-very-much-NOT-Muslim neonazis are marching in the streets, wear their fucking insignia in the open, organize without anyone REALLY giving a fuck until it gets fashionable - but you want to scapegoat an ENTIRE CIVILIAN POPULATION for that shame on your heart (instead of confronting that no, your family was certainly NOT "in the resistance and really sooooooo against Hitler"). Do you think that when 2 million Palestinians are dead, you will finally feel better? Do you think that crying "but Hamas is SO MUCH WORSE than my own nazi great-grandparents" enough time will make the Holocaust go away, be forgotten, be washed out?

Or do you just enjoy "those savage brown people" cradling their dead kids, in pieces, and you were waiting out SO LONG to finally find an excuse to share these sick feelings inside of you with the world?

Here I have compiled All Of The Links(TM) for fellow Palestine supporters and generally anti-genocide folks. I'll try to keep this updated when I have the spoons.

Here are some ways you can help Palestine; a masterpost.

Here's another masterpost.

And another one.

If you've donated recently or are a regular donator, keep an eye out for this.

Debunking the assumption that these accounts are all scams.

Another debunk, and useful notes on identifying actual scammers.

A reminder of what we are dealing with, and some useful links.

Individual fundraisers below the cut, from Palestinians that have reached out to me in my inboxes. These are all vetted by association, they and more vetted fundraisers can be found here, here, here, here and here.

Ok to reblog and add your own additional updates and resources; they are very, very appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Putting these tags into their own post so as not to diverge farther from the original conversation of this post [ x ]. These tags are in response to saying that that some Jewish ethnicities have been folded into whiteness (which was very intentional phrasing) — while speaking very specifically about being folded into US American white identity.

I do think saying "some people" instead of "some ethnicities" could have better exemplified what I meant and that's on my own failure of word choice, but I said that speaking from my perspective as an Ashkenazi Jew with fair skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair, who navigates the world as a very white person despite the fact that I am very openly reform and will take many opportunities to talk about my own Jewish identity.

I live in a progressive city where well meaning, generally accepting white liberals still see my physical appearance before my religion or ethnicity, even when they are aware that I am Jewish.

Obviously this is not a universal experience. Jewish ethnicity is racialized and Jewish religion and culture is racialized. People who are immediately, visibly identified as Jewish are racialized and put in danger by antisemitism and White Supremacy.

That truth, however, exists simultaneously with the fact that there are many Jewish people in the United States who have been folded into US American white identity (usually by virtue of their geopolitical circumstances), and/or seek out American Whiteness and intentionally assimilate into white identity in spite of discrimination much like the Irish and Italians of the 1900's.

And both of those truths simultaneously exist at the same time as the fact that racial / ethnic / skin color based hierarchies that echo and rhyme with white supremacist hierarchical preferences also very much exist in Jewish spaces when we are, again, discussing the scope of US American white identity specifically. I cannot stress this enough that I am talking about an analysis of race and ethnicity specifically in the United States of America.

There is a LOT of nuance to this conversation but I do think that it's ignorant of what white assimilation/imposed white identity means to just flat out say there are no Jewish ethnicities, or people, who are considered to be (not "are" as a definitive statement, but "are considered to be") white under their geopolitical circumstances in the USA.

My fellow anti-Zionist Jews, don’t give up hope and don’t give up the good fight of fighting against fascism and Zionism. We need to keep doing what we can to see a free Palestine.

Source: I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!

I will quote two tweets in response that I think are applicable to Finkelstein's condescending attitude to Said's valid critique:

The neighborhoods it withdrew from are no longer neighborhoods. No homes, no hospitals, no shops, no streets, no trees, no water wells. Everything is flattened. Nothing remains but rubble, the smell of death, and the bodies of martyrs under the ruins.

Those who survived the bombing now face another kind of death: hunger.

Children are crying from hunger, mothers weep in helplessness, and fathers are crushed by their inability to provide even the basics.

Feeding a single family for just one day now costs over 150 dollars because of the extreme scarcity and the unbearable prices under siege.

The world is watching but doing nothing. Have we become just numbers? Is their silence a quiet approval of our suffering?

But here on Tumblr, there are still people who care. People who feel. People who are still human. You are the hope that wasn’t bombed.

With deep sorrow, we say goodbye to little Abdullah Abu Zorqa (5 years old), the child whose heartbreaking cry “I’m hungry” shook the world. He passed away today in a hospital in Adana – Turkey, after his fragile body gave in to illness and hunger, deprived of medicine and proper treatment in Gaza.

Abdullah is gone, but hundreds of children in Gaza are still facing the same fate — slowly fading away without food, without medicine, without hope. Just imagine watching your own children die of hunger before your eyes… how would you feel?

Do not let the children of Gaza face death alone. Donate now , your help could be the lifeline that saves an innocent soul. We are dying… but you can help keep us alive.

Chris Smalls is finally released.

Note: Vetted by:

1. @el-shab-hussein and @nabulsi # 151 on the spreadsheet of Vetted Gaza Fundraisers List]

2. @riding-with-the-wild-hunt Here .

I contemplate the happy faces of people around me here in Ireland and reminisce about the happy normal life my family and I had before the war. A life that turned into a distant memory for us and was replaced by an unending series of horrible nightmares.

Unlike my family in Gaza, people here have access to drinking water, all types of food, electricity, and a roof over their heads. Above all, they are safe, and I cannot help but wonder if they genuinely do appreciate these blessings in their lives enough.

People seem relaxed and laughing wholeheartedly around me in Ireland. I wish I could laugh too, but I am crushed way beyond recovery on the inside. I was evacuated by my Irish college after five months of living the horrors of war in Gaza. I hope you will never know what it feels like to live in constant fear and worry and be horrified by the most sickening and scary nightmares every single night while you are far away from your family in such circumstances.

When did my people in Gaza cease to be human beings worthy and deserving of a normal life? Has it become normal now for my family in Gaza to be starved and killed while the whole world is watching the genocide? If that is the case, then you will have to excuse me if I seek every avenue to bring them to Ireland and start a new normal life like all people here around me.

I was assured by the Irish Reugee Council (IRC) and lawyers in Ireland that there is hope I can reunite with my family in Ireland. In difficult times, it is hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. For me and my family, you are literally our light and hope for a better life.

SOS!

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@sar-soor @akajustmerry @annoyingloudmicrowavecultist @feluka

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  @autisticmudkip @furiousfinnstan @batekush @nerdyqueerr

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@willgrahamscock@strangeauthor @bryoria @shesnake