רִבְקָה

Scene from the most famous Yiddish play The Dybbuk by the Vilner Trupe. 1910s.

And it is just another side of the coin. Whether people hate us because they think we're sub-human or they think we believe ourselves to be superhuman, they never see us as human.

In the second, Jews are accused of wielding the power to create divisions, a power which is only used by the majority (read: oppressors). Whereas other distinctions are "real", the line between Jew and non-Jew is invented. This is proven by either the Jews' assimilation into the "real" groups, or the precedence of those groups in a worldview in which Jews aren't a factor. The Jews' forceful (and undeserved) uniqueness creates a new axis on which all previous "real" categories must be reevaluated and challenges the very idea of the categories themselves, hence the charges of Jewish "power" and "supremacy", which are really just bad philosophy

So you know. Nothings gonna change.

The vast vast majority of Zionists and supporters of Zionism in the world come from Christian backgrounds. And they are the ones with the most power to actually influence the situation. You could kill every Jew in the US or UK and it won't meaningfully impact either country's support for Israel. Because neither country was actually supporting Israel because of its Jews reguardless as to whether those Jews were Zionists or not.

We (collective) also need to disentangle the histories of the creation of the State of Israel, with the Holocaust. The conflation of the creation of Israel with some imagined grief/apologetics for the Holocaust is 800% US-based Cold War propaganda; the Southern Levant is and has always been an extremely valuable territorial asset. That’s what it’s about; not Jews or Zionism or righteousness.

One of the most frightening monsters in the Jewish imagination is the shayd, a shapeshifting demon that assumes the form of a living person. It can transform every part of its body except for its feet, which always retain their original form: a chicken’s claws. The Talmud includes a story about the king of the shaydim (a mountain-dwelling demon named Ashmedai) impersonating the king of the Jews (a castle-dwelling lady-lover named Solomon). The sages of the Sanhedrin determined the impostor’s true identity by asking his queens what the king’s feet looked like when he visited the harem. Their ominous answer: “He never takes off his shoes.” Nearly 2,000 years later, some claimed that Hitler refused to remove a certain pair of boots, especially in his last years, proof that he might have been a shayd. The Talmud explains elsewhere that the shayd’s natural enemy is flour, since the most common way to find out if shaydim are on the haunt is to spread some near the disturbed area. If the marks of chicken feet appear overnight, it means that shaydim are afoot and you better hoof it.

Haifa, Israel | May 2016

@angryjewishcockroach you get me

Stavrouakis' work has always meant so much to me, I collect his publishing as I can. I wanted to share some of his depictions of Greek Jews and our clothing, especially the ones I haven't seen shared online.

For the first sixteen years of my life, I was taught to stay away from everything unholy, all the deepest, darkest profanities of the world, the "other side." Sitra Achra is the term used to describe all the things on the "other side" of holiness, like queers, and women who don't fit traditional definitions of femininity, women who go to college and want to have babies outside of marriage and without husbands. Sitra Achra is me. Now, as I sit on the other side, I try and find a way to see the two sides of myself together, to create a conversation between tradition and heresy.