רִבְקָה

Operation Solomon • Jewish Museum London

Ethiopian Jews being airlifted from Addis Ababa to Israel on May 24, 1991, as part of Operation Solomon. This covert operation involved 34 jumbo jets of the Israeli air force, hundreds of soldiers and the evacuation of 14,200 Jews. It was prompted by the worsening political situation in Ethiopia under the government of Mengistu Haile Mariam.

A Jewish community was first established in Ethiopia sometime after the destruction of the First Temple in around 587 BCE. The origin of the Ethiopian Jews is unclear though most believe that they are the descendants of King Solomon and Queen Sheba. Throughout its history, the community has been referred to by numerous names like ‘’Falasha’’ which means ‘’stranger’’ which shows how their Christian neighbours viewed them as strangers in their land and ‘’Beta Israel’’ which literally means ‘’house of Israel’’. This name shows the community’s own deep connection to the Torah and their faith.

In retrospect, I think probably there are a lot of American Jewish people on this post because they've been interrogated about zionism nonstop for months and they've been made afraid through acts of terror on American soil.

Years. We've been interrogated about it for years. It is the defining purity/litmus test for Jews of any affiliation. I have been kicked out of both real life and online spaces for refusing to denounce Israel as the source of all evil and the destruction of it and my entire ethnic identity as a prerequisite for the coming of peace on earth.

When I pointed out that it was not a genocide back in November of 2023, because of the actions being taken by the IDF to reduce civilian casualties, I had someone who I believed had been a friend for six years summarily block and ghost me. In the time since, I have seen them make the claim that I personally have killed Palestinian children "and laughed". How that's possible when I live in Europe and have never been to Israel is apparently left for the jury to determine.

We've all lost friends, social circles, entire political affiliations, jobs, financial opportunities, and more because we're Jews, and thus are treated with suspicion because of our ethnic heritage, and if we're not willing to bark "Israel Is The Source Of All Evil In The World And Must Be Destroyed And All Of The Israelis Murdered As Painfully As Possible In Order To Achieve Justice" without prompting, we're looked upon with suspicion of being "secret Zionists". Members of our community have been murdered and given a pass by the population at large because the murderer claimed that they're "not antisemitic, just antizionist". The legal system in Europe has given offenders who have engaged in conspiracy to assault and kill Jews benign sentences that were little more than slaps on the wrist. And more and more.

So seeing someone like yourself actually stand up and say, "Yeah, no, that's BS. There have definitely been crimes committed and they need to be investigated and prosecuted, but this histrionic labeling of people as 'Zionists' is just in opposition to everything I stand for," is something that practically drives some of us to tears. When people you once thought of friends, colleagues and allies show that they will abandon every principle they claimed they had on the altar of Jew-hate, seeing someone actually hew to their principles is worth cherishing.

I've gotten a couple asks like this and I want y'all to know I'm chewing on them.

I'm very good at poking my way through my own thoughts, so I've been doing a lot of thinking since that post about why I'm so sure that this is a bullshit purity test and not what many people believe it is -- a dogma of colonialist, racist, violent ideology.

Is it just because I know a lot of Jewish people? I mean, I do know a lot of Jewish people (lawyer, notorious Jewish prestige profession), and I'm like, those guys? Nah. That one's a Jewish lady with the biggest purse I've ever seen and we won a case together on behalf of some siblings; that one's an old Jewish guy who went to the same drama school as my mom like ten minutes after she left and knows all her friends and tells a great story.

I've felt for a long time that Jewish people are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to burgeoning fascism, but that's not all of it either.

I have posted a fair amount about liberal purity culture, the foolishness of driving off imperfect allies, the joy of embracing people where they are and broadening your own world as a result, so there's some inherent hostility to liberal and leftist exclusion.

Words and attitudes can certainly contribute to harm. Even across the globe. And I've seen things on here that speak to a defensiveness about Israel from Jewish folks that seems... well, honestly, seems just defensive. Reactive.

On top of this, there was a literal point when I knew that some of this debate was just a business that was none of mine, and that was when a Jewish friend of mine told me that zionists were missing the point of being Jewish because Jewish people were supposed to wander, that was what it was about. (PLEASE DON'T ARGUE ABOUT THIS, unless you are being respectful and informative. I'm only using this as an example of a thing that surprised me and showed me wow, I have only scratched the surface of understanding this shit.)

Then there's what I've done with my life and career. It took ages for me to start seeing the big picture in the criminal justice system, and start feeling out the shape of how state violence is creating the exact problems it's claiming to be solving. Whenever I read anything about Israel, it seems to me like I see the same thing happening there, like a perpetual motion machine: each side (speaking specifically of the ones making the violence-related decisions), in reacting with violence, ensures the future violence that will react to them, and in so doing perpetuates the need for retaliation, forever, forever. From what's happened over the last few years, it seems to me that Israel has given Hamas recruits for decades, and Hamas has inspired Israel to new atrocity.

But we can't forget the humanity in all of the killers and torturers and bombers. They see themselves as a guardian of the weak, an avenger of the fallen, a bringer of justice. That's why they do this. So what good do I do in calling someone an ideological enemy? What even is an ideological enemy? Is it someone I would kill in the name of ideology? That's no one. I'm a pacifist.

...That went a little far afield. But, also: the trappings of bullying include anonymous harassment and accusations without evidence, both of which are pretty telling. If you're on the side of knowledge and clarity, I'm gonna be kinda suspicious when you're apparently afraid to stand behind your words. (Anonymous questions are a totally different thing from anonymous accusations, that's about giving people an environment of openness without judgment where they can ask the things they're genuinely wondering about.)

Sort of a final note. I don't have an overriding theme here, as you may have figured out, I'm just sort of having thoughts.

People who have spent a while in one career or working hard on one hobby and who got good at it understand: when you interact in a space with certain concepts, you get skilled at dealing with those concepts. Talented costume designers understand the structure of the human body and how bits of things fit together in clothes in a way I don't know. Scientists have huge dimensions of knowledge where I can, at best, skim the surface.

Second, I don't know what else to say other than offer educational resources for you to learn more, if you wish, giving you more history and context, because you obviously have questions.

I will say to the associate of yours who said that "Jews are meant to wander"... *sigh* No, I'm not going to address them, because I know better than to try. So to you, the thing there is that, a hundred and fifty years ago, there were two general schools of Jewish thought regarding the Diaspora and our homeland in the Levant.

The first was Bundism--the idea that we were Germans/Frenchmen/Italians/Russians/Americans/etc who just so happened to be Jewish, and that our goal was assimilation and integration into those societies as part of rich, multi-ethnic, multi-religious cultures. This was the more popular view, especially in Western Europe.

The second was Zionism, named for Tzion, an archaic/poetic name for Jerusalem (Mount Zion is literally just a hill in Jerusalem, to give context there). This was the idea that Jews would always be an embattled, oppressed minority in the Diaspora, and that for our own safety, we would need a state of our own to be able to be safe.

The Bundists were pretty much all slaughtered by the Nazis, and the survivors became Zionists because it had been made abundantly clear, by the remains of six million dead Jews out of a population of less than 18 million worldwide, that the Zionist perspective was correct. Sadly. But when the Canadian response to Jewish refugees from the Holocaust on how many they would take was "None is too many" and the "Voyage of the Damned" was sent back to Europe because America refused to take them, and the 1943 Bermuda Conference had the Allies actively betray the Jewish refugees and survivors while they knew that the Holocaust was ongoing...

Bro, you gotta trust me, this time they ARE actually a force for evil that we need to eradicate!

Regular reminder in light of the popularity of that article about entryism subverting the DSA and now the democratic party that that is not the only front:

It. Literally. Doesn't. Matter.

Spoiler alert: trans people can be antisemitic!

Franz Kafka was a real person who died not too long ago, and just because a trans person relates to his writings doesn't mean they can claim he's trans. It's not the same as relating to a fictional character. You can't 'headcanon' an actual person. I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman. He was an actual person, not a fictional character you can project on. An treating Franz Kafka like a fictional character you can project any label onto and separate him from his actual life is dehumanization and *also* antisemitic.

It's no different than queer people co-opting Anne Frank's memory and erasing her story to just herald her as a "bi icon" when she never had the chance to live long enough to label herself. Queer gentiles need to stop dehumanizing Jewish people and turning them into blank slates they can project onto.

I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman.

At some point relatively recently, people seem to have come to the conclusion that you can't empathize with a character (or real fucking person, in this case, and I cannot stress how gross that is) unless you're just like them. "Oh, I, a nonbinary person can identify with this cishet man? He must actually be nonbinary!" "Oh, I, an autistic person, can identify with this Ambiguously Quirky™ person? She must actually be autistic!"

Being able to relate to a person--real or fictional--who isn't just like you is a good thing. It's good that you see yourself in the writings of a cisgender man! Maybe it will teach you that cis people aren't the enemy. It's good that an autistic character resonates with NT people! Maybe they'll gain new insight into their autistic friends and family!

It's called empathy, and it's so important to understand that you are going to see your experiences reflected in people who are unlike you. Those connections are important. Deciding that Kafka must be a trans woman because you're a trans woman is missing the entire fucking point. It means that you do, in fact, have some things in common with a cisgender man, and conversely, it means that cisgender men have things in common with you. To flatten them out so they're just like you is missing out on so much of what they have to say.

People are beautiful and rich and layered and the fact that we can connect with other people and share experiences despite how different we are? That's the whole fucking point. That's what makes life worth living.

Because we've seen that before. We see it very often because it's a fundamental premise of some incredibly antisemitic forms of Christianity, and when it turns out that we're real people with real opinions and real beliefs and real feelings who don't just exist to validate someone else's perception of who and how we could be, people don't just abandon their pretense at allyship, they get violent.

It's also a common failing in how the Holocaust is taught. People like to present this lens of "it was random violence that came out of nowhere and could've happened to anyone. It could've happened to you! Imagine if you'd been one of the victims! That would've been a tragedy wouldn't it?" And the thing is, that's bullshit. If you were just a random German citizen at the time? You would've been one of the perpetrators. And it was a tragedy in and of itself; it doesn't become a tragedy by imaging a scenario in which people who were perfectly safe would've actually been potentially in danger (never killed, of course, because Holocaust education is also commonly sanitized, which is a different rant).

Edited to take out a rant that was in drafts and got added to this by mistake, but. Well, the Tl;dr, since that's been reblogged

But in the Kafka conversation there is an element I think so many non-Jews just straight up refuse to understand. That is the fact that Jews have our own culture.

The societal gender ideals non-Jews in the West grow up with ... Aren't really in Jewish communities the same way. (Though cultural osmosis means we've picked up a lot along the way).

ALL our masculine role models, the ones we're told to admire, are shepherds. That's important bc shepherds lead the heard from behind, not in front. It speaks to a different leadership mindset. Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Solomon, etc. we're soft spoken, humble, slow to action, intellectually inclined. Even when they have tempers or are warriors, those aspects are critiqued or minimized. (It's why when Jews depict King David, he's playing his harp or herding sheep. When non-Jews depict him, he's fighting Goliath.)

Compared to the very Roman/Western ideal of masculine power might-makes-right, Jewish masculinity is inherently softer.

That's not to say we DON'T value male strength. But it's just one factor and mostly understood that physical prowess has a time and place. It's not the ultimate standard for our masculinity.

Especially when you consider femininity in Jewish communities. Our matriarchs were all outspoken, all defied their husbands/men at key moments without punishment (some were even rewarded by God.) Some were prophets, judges and leaders (Miriam, Judith, Devorah, Hannah) in their own rights. Jewish women certainly do not fit the mold of a Roman/Western quiet, docile, submissive woman.

And don't forget, while there very much is misogyny in Jewish communities, our traditions often challenge it. Men are expected to praise their wives every Friday night in front of the family (Eshet Chail), men are halacically responsible for their wives' physical pleasure, Rabbis have denounced marital rape as a sin far longer than it's been illegal in MOST modern nations and women are excempt from time based religious obligations as they are considered closer to God (though that comes with it own problems).

In short, religious or not, Kafka would have grown up with that different understanding of gender norms and what it means to perform gender. He would have understood gender completely different to how a modern non-Jew in the West would.

To erase his Jewishness from the conversation - to ignore the cultural difference between how you see gender and how he likely would have - is a pretty severe historical distortion. And makes this weird history AU even more problematic.

How is Itamar Ben Gvir a real person

But NOW I have to be like "yeah the one where they keep Palestinian prisoners in a complex surrounded by a moat filled with alligators is real" ?????

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:

If they’re not alive, halacha doesn’t apply to them.

So 

pesach

rosh hashanah

simchas torah

sefirah

after the nine days

lag baomer

tu bishvat

bonus: purim

when you need those 18 minutes on Friday

entering the holiday season