Well…

-XYZ is Catholic

-XYZ is bisexual.

-XYZ is Muslim.

also wikipedia:

-XYZ is of Jewish descent.

-XYZ has Jewish parents.

but later on they clarify that she freed herself from being “ethnically charged” so it’s all good now

This is a parasite that usually causes about 3000 cases of illness per year in the USA, Michigan currently has reported about 2900 (the confusion about “Michigan outbreak” is because Michigan is the first that caught an uptick in cases and has been very proactive about trying to trace them). Last official update from Massachusetts was 18 cases here centered in Greater Boston. The CDC recommends NOT assuming there are no sources of the parasite in your state even if no cases have been reported.

It isn’t an unknown illness but it is an unusual quantity of cases, and the fact that they haven’t been able to pin down the source after weeks of tracking is what makes it particularly concerning this year (harder to contain).

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:

And it ended up not really being suitable for my purposes, as it goes. But part of the book is actually devoted to Kenelm, the author’s oldest son…and man, his dad loved him.

Kenelm seems to have had a fairly typical upbringing for a young English gentleman, although he is a bit slow to read. At twelve he’s sent to board at Stoneyhurst College—often the big step towards independence in a boy’s life, as he’ll most likely only see his parents sporadically from now on, and then leave for university.

When he’s sixteen, however, his father moves the whole family to France, so Kenelm gets pulled out of school to be with them again. Shortly after the move, his dad notices that he seems depressed. Kenelm confides in him that he’s been suffering from “scruples” for the last eighteen months—most likely what we’d now call an anxiety disorder.

And his dad is pissed—at the school, because apparently Kenelm had been seeking help there and received none, despite obviously struggling with mental health issues. So his dad takes it seriously. He sets him up to be counseled by a priest—there were no therapists back then—and doesn’t send him away to be boarded again, instead teaching him at home himself.

And his mental health does improve. His dad describes him as well-liked, gentle, pious, kind and eager to please others; at twenty he’s thinking about a career in diplomacy or going into the military—which his dad thinks he is not particularly suited for, considering his favorite pastimes are drawing and reading. He’s excited about his family’s upcoming move to Italy, and he’s been busy learning Italian and teaching it to his siblings.

Henry Kenelm Beste dies of typhus at twenty years, four months, and twenty-five days. That’s how his dad records it. That’s why his dad is telling this story. It’s not an extraordinary story—Kenelm’s story struck me because he sounds so…ordinary, like so many kids today. And he was so, so loved. His dad tried hard to help him compassionately with his mental health at a time where our current knowledge and support systems didn’t exist. You can feel how badly he wanted his son to be remembered and loved, to impress how dearly beloved he was to the people who knew him in life.

I hope he’d be glad to know someone is still thinking of Kenelm over 200 years later.

The Kingdom of Hawai’i was illegally overthrown with the help of American businessmen and we have suffered under the iron grip of America.

Our land is simply seen as a vacation spot, my people are simply seen as tour guides and hula dancers. We have had our culture, our history, and our people turned into a commercialized joke by America.

The rampant tourism kills our islands with endless hotels, attractions and overcrowding. The housing and living costs are out of control because of the false “paradise” narrative. The Navy poisons our water and destroys our land. Covid has killed so many of my people due to the reckless and selfish nature of tourists. I have lost loved ones to this virus, because tourists “couldn’t stay away”.

My people have suffered. I have suffered.

We are more than your vacation. We are more than an aesthetic.

We are a sovereign nation illegally occupied by the United States of America.

Restore Hawai’i to Hawaiians. End the American Occupation.

See the links below to learn more and to read up on your Hawaiian history.

Contact your representatives, US folx. Yes, even if you're scared. Yes, even if you think it doesn't matter, even if you think they won't listen. Write an email if you can't make a call. Call after hours and leave a message. Call during office hours if you feel up to it, but do something. Call every day. Email every day. Fucking bother your rep. They work for you, not the other way around.

Your single call is not the point. The point is the aggregate of calls and emails. The point is that even "safe" Republicans don't feel really safe right now. The point is that "safe" Democrats are feeling pressure from the left due to the success of DSA candidates. You think they won't listen, and they'll probably try to make you think they're not, but they do, in the aggregate. The midterms have them running scared right now, and now is the time to shut this shit down.

I am a liberal rabbi. Every Shabbat, I lead my congregation in prayers for safety and healing for both Israelis and Palestinians. I have been deeply critical of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. I have protested alongside hundreds of thousands of liberal Israelis in the streets of Tel Aviv.

I donate to organizations dedicated to coexistence and have shared tea in the home of Palestinian peace activists in the West Bank. Last month, 12 fellows from the Task Force on Arab Citizens of Israel visited my congregation, and we listened with deep empathy to their personal stories and struggles.

My views and my activism have sometimes earned me criticism within my community. Some have feared that crying out for the pain and suffering of Palestinians somehow undermines my desperate cries for the peace, safety, and security of Israelis. But I do not believe that is the case.

The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is extraordinarily difficult. Holding compassion for both peoples should not be difficult. To me, this is not a departure from my religious and progressive values; it is the essence of them. The belief that every person’s humanity matters. The belief that suffering deserves empathy. The belief that justice requires us to expand our moral concern, and that Israelis and Palestinians both deserve dignity, security, and self-determination.

For most of my life, I assumed those values were widely shared by the people and movements I considered my political home. Lately, I am not so sure.

What has shaken me over the last two years is not criticism of Israel. It is how noble critiques of Israeli policy have swiftly turned into radicalized calls for Israel’s elimination — a sentiment we never apply to other democratic nations. This obsessive fixation within leftist political discourse has created real fear in many Jews. And yet, when Jews talk about these fears, people in my own political camp stop listening.

That is why I have found myself deeply troubled by the campaign of congressional candidate Melat Kiros.

Over the past year, I have repeatedly found myself wondering whether she understands the fear she creates in Jews like me.

In a column she published on Medium in 2023, Kiros condemned the existence of Israel, effectively calling for the elimination of the only Jewish state.

She has called the atrocities of October 7, 2023, both “resistance” and “inevitable.”

Just this week, in an interview with Kyle Clark on 9News, she refused to call the 2025 firebombing attack on Jews in Boulder antisemitic. She said it was an attack on innocent people marching for the release of hostages, but said of the man accused of murder, “I don’t know. I don’t know what was in his heart.”

When she can’t even name the antisemitism Jews in Colorado are experiencing every day, how can we believe that she will work for our safety? I have deep concerns that the “just” world she claims to want to create does not include Jews like me and my community. She considers Israel an illegitimate, colonialist state and appears to have closed her mind to all other opinions and, indeed, to the human consequences of her rhetoric.

Over the past year, Denver’s Jewish community has repeatedly tried to engage Melat Kiros. We have shared our fears and concerns. Yet time and again, we have been met with dismissal, indifference, or silence.

My fears were amplified by Kiros’s recent decision to organize a rally featuring Hasan Piker and elevate him as a prominent voice in her campaign.

To many people, Piker is simply a provocative political commentator. To me, he represents a growing tendency on the left to speak passionately about empathy and justice while showing remarkably little of either when Jews are involved. He is profoundly dangerous.

I recently watched a video in which Piker laughed as a woman described her fears about rising antisemitism in America. Piker has repeatedly said that he would vote for Hamas over Israel “every time.” Together with a guest, he characterized the firebombing attack in Boulder as similar to anti-Nazi resistance. He also calls Hamas and Houthi attacks “resistance,” denounces many who express positive feelings about Israel, and describes liberal Zionists as liberal Nazis.

Sick. Absurd. Infuriating. When Piker equates most mainstream Jews with the barbaric people who murdered our families, he is flipping the narrative and building validation for Jewish-hate and violence here in America and beyond.

By choosing to elevate Piker and share a platform with him, Kiras made a clear statement. She signaled that this kind of rhetoric is acceptable within her political coalition. For most Jews, including folks like me who advocate tirelessly for peace, coexistence, and for Palestinian dignity and self-determination, that message is terrifying.

When people on the right use antisemitic tropes, those of us on the left are quick to point fingers. Yet when antisemitic discourse comes from within our party, many just shrug and ignore it.

In the past month alone, students in Boulder issued a statement praising the fatal Boulder firebomb attack as an act of “resistance.” (I bet they listen to Piker.) Denver Jewish Day School was forced to cancel summer camp after receiving threats. The ADL filed a civil rights complaint alleging severe antisemitic harassment in Boulder schools. And one of my congregants left his middle-school baseball team because the antisemitic hate speech was unbearable. These are just a handful of examples of what we are facing every day.

When Kiros speaks about dignity and justice for all people, I want to believe she means it. But dignity that excludes Jews and denies the safety of Israelis is not universal dignity. And a politics that embraces voices that mock Jewish fears or demonize Jewish identity does not make my community safer — it makes us more vulnerable.

Last week, Prada named the musician Saint Levant one of its global ambassadors. He is gifted, the campaign is gorgeous, and a fashion house is free to choose any face it likes. But in much of the campaign’s imagery, a gold pendant rests on his chest in the shape of the land from the river to the sea, the whole of it, with no Israel anywhere inside the outline. It is a map of a country drawn directly over the living country it means to replace.

Saint Levant did not stumble into that pendant. In November 2024, days after gangs in Amsterdam ran Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer fans down with cars and chased others through the streets with knives, in what the city’s own officials called a pogrom, he stood on a stage there holding a Palestinian flag and thanked the people who did it. He sent a shoutout to his “Moroccan brothers” for “taking care of business,” and told his fans that Israelis had come to “a land that’s not theirs.” Saint Laurent built a campaign around him anyway. Now Prada has handed him an ambassadorship. The necklace is the courteous version of what he says with a microphone in his hand.

The same photograph reversed tells the story. An Israeli model, same Prada lighting, wearing a gold map of that same strip of earth with no Palestine inside it and no Gaza, the outline filled to its edges with a single Star of David. That campaign would not last the afternoon. The pendant would be called genocidal and supremacist, the model would be dropped by sundown, and every outlet that is silent today would find its voice. In this hypothetical, the shape is identical and the erasure is identical, but the verdict flips. The metal did not change between the two photographs. The neck did. And it is not only a hypothetical. The Israeli actress Noa Tishby, who lives in Los Angeles, has worn a pendant in the shape of that same land, and pro-Palestinian activists have attacked it as a symbol of supremacy and genocide.

That inversion explains the rest of the week.

On to Rachel Accurso, the children’s educator whom the internet calls Ms Rachel. This week, she posted a tearful video(s) about the children of Gaza, anchored on a report she called undisputable evidence that Israel deliberately targets them. Her tenderness toward children is real, and her fans are right about that much. The death of a child in Gaza is a horror and not a point to debate.

The trouble is that the word “undisputable” is sitting on top of a document that almost nobody who shared it has read past the headline. The report comes from the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry. As the name suggests the United Nations itself handed down a verdict. The media coverage, including CNN and BBC, were careful enough to add they “do not speak for the UN.” What it actually describes is a standing panel of three appointed commissioners, set up by the Human Rights Council, holding a distinction no other inquiry in the body’s history has: an open mandate with no expiration date and exactly one permanent subject: Israel. Its finding of genocide is the finding of those three. It has never been the finding of a court.

That gap is the whole story, and it is the part Ms Rachel’s audience is never given. No court has found Israel guilty of genocide. The case that uses the word, South Africa’s, sits at the International Court of Justice, which has issued interim orders and said in plain language that it has reached no conclusion that genocide occurred, with a judgment on the merits still years away. The other court, the International Criminal Court, is no ally of Israel. It indicted the sitting prime minister. And when its prosecutor drew up the charges, he left genocide off the list entirely. The gravest accusation in international law is being narrated to millions of parents and children as a closed question, and the only institutions treating it as closed are the ones built to reach that answer.

Her video is constructed to prevent one question. But that question is not whether children in Gaza suffer, which we know is true and which is terrible. The question underneath is why this report, and why this war which ended, of all the wars killing children on earth right now. In Sudan, the United Nations has verified more than four thousand children killed or maimed. UNICEF says outright that the world has looked away, and the appeal to keep those children alive is funded at sixteen percent. There is no studio lighting for them, and no tearful video. The grief is selective, and it keeps arriving at the same address.

We know why the people who built this report aim it where they aim it. The open question is whether the woman handing it her face and her enormous audience understands what she has been folded into. At her own press event, she gave the microphone to one of the three commissioners himself. Maybe she has never wondered who he is, or why a panel with a single country in its sights would be so grateful for her reach. I wonder if she has.

Which brings me to a state senator in San Francisco named Scott Wiener.

Wiener is Jewish. For years, he held a careful liberal-Zionist line, hard on Netanyahu and unwilling to use the word genocide. In January, the activists in his own primary cornered him on it at a candidates’ forum, his rivals lifted their YES placards, and the room jeered him as a sellout. Within days, he folded. He posted the video and said the word, and he paid for it by resigning as co-chair of the California Jewish Caucus while his own community’s organizations put out statements against him. He spent the most expensive thing a Jewish politician owns. Last week, a man filmed himself looming over Wiener at a bar, calling him a Zionist and ordering him out of the neighborhood, pounding the wall behind his head for half an hour. The word he paid for bought him nothing.

Just today, another video showed Wiener being accosted at a Pride event. His attempts to leave are thwarted as he is surrounded and screeched at.

Side by side, the three show the same pattern. A map that erases a country reads as heritage on one neck and as hate speech on another. A politicized panel’s verdict counts as indisputable when it indicts a Jewish state and turns invisible when the dead children are Sudanese. The label built to describe a foreign policy becomes a mark of shame that no amount of compliance can scrub off, the instant it is pinned to a Jew. In every case, the symbol holds still, and the meaning swings, and the thing that moves it is the same thing each time. Whose hand is on it? Whether he is one of us or one of them.

None of this began with Prada. The practice of carrying hatred of Jews on a culture’s most admired channels is old, and it is deliberate, because beauty and warmth travel where a pamphlet cannot. They reach the young and the many before an argument can begin.

I grew up the grandson of Jews who were pushed out of the Arab world, out of the very map Saint Levant now wears as jewelry, and I have spent my adult life being told that my existence is the provocation. So I know the pattern when I watch it work. The necklace, the report, and the name belong to one story, and this week it ran in the open while most people applauded the parts of it they found beautiful.

Coco Chanel is the cleanest case fashion has. Under the occupation, she lived at the Ritz alongside German officers and took an Abwehr officer as her lover. In May 1941, she wrote to Nazi authorities to seize full control of her perfume house from the Wertheimers, the Jewish brothers who had bankrolled it, on the argument that Jews had forfeited the right to own it. Declassified French files name her as an agent. The house came through all of it, and the name still sells. The glamour did what glamour is for, which was to make the woman behind it impossible to picture as a villain.

The same logic walked straight into the nursery. Julius Streicher, later hanged at Nuremberg, ran Der Stürmer for grown men and also published a children’s picture book called The Poisonous Mushroom, bright and simple, teaching small Germans to spot a Jew the way a parent teaches a child to spot a toadstool in the grass. The aim was reach. A boy raised on a friendly cartoon needs no argument for his hatred years later. It becomes as instinctual as washing his hands, brushing his teeth, and looking before crossing the street.