(may contain light spoilers for my fic "She Never Asked to be Made Strong")

Five-year-old: What's that?

Me: A drink. Would you like some?

@jewishwarriorprincess

One Passover a few years back my father paused the Seder at the point when the Rabbis start discussing precisely how many plagues G-d visited upon the Egyptians, and said something along the lines of: “Imagine having to come up with two hundred and fifty plagues. That’s a lot of plagues. I would never have thought that so many plagues existed. I challenge all of those present to create a list of two hundred and fifty plagues.”

At some point during the holiday my sister and cousin ran off, holed themselves up together for a few hours, and came up with a list of two hundred and fifty plagues, one in which they included such horrors as “inflatable men” and “more frogs.”

On a bus in the afternoon

I saw you walking by.

The bus moved on

and you were gone

but still you filled

Silence and snow

by moonlight aglow,

where true love’s first kiss

escapes

         a snowball

                   gone amiss -

....awDARNit!!!

Roses are red,

violets are blue.

I wish I’d once said

how much I love you.

Roses are red,

violets are blue -

with the tears that I shed

when you said we’re through.

Roses are red,

violets are blue.

The road’s lonely ahead.

Life’s better with two.

Roses are red,

violets are blue...

...your letter I’ve read.

I still miss you...

In the beginning,

there wasn’t a poem.

Everyone was sad.

Then someone bravely

wrote a poem and

everyone was glad!

Then someone bravely

read the poem and

gravely he said:

There’s a particular garbage can on my university campus, on the fifth floor, right near the escalators going up, which contains a ripped-up newspaper, and if you feel like finding it and gluing it back together again - the newspaper, not the garbage can - the newspaper will tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about BDS, including a detailed explanation of why it’s not racist.

Although now that I think about it, you may as well waste your time trying to read the garbage can.

If you’re looking for another lecture about who’s right or wrong, or wondering whether or not it’s morally justifiable to kill Israelis for funsies, go away. It’s obviously not okay to knife Israelis to death, a fact that is - or rather, should be - exceedingly obvious to anybody who isn’t racist or insane. How is this being turned into a Israeli vs Palestinian debate? It’s not okay to walk around with knives, stabbing people. This is an obvious moral truth that I take for granted, and if you disagree with this, then I have nothing more to say to you.

Lecture over.

…no, no matter why you feel like killing them.

No. Just no.

Now please go away, and also stop stabbing people.

Lecture over, again.

Resume.

Everyone seems to feel the need to weigh in on one side or the other, like not stabbing people with knives is a questionable moral norm that requires intellectual justification. For some reason I’m still trying to understand, this appears, to the world, to be a legitimate debate. Odder still, the general public seems to have come to the conclusion that it’s okay to kill Jews if they’re a) Israeli Jews b) pro-Israel Jews c) Zionist Jews d) Jews-who-happen-to-be-in Israel Jews e) evil Jews f) Jews and g) more Jews.

Forgive me if I’ve missed any.

There are probably good reasons for this conclusion. There have been, in every era since Abraham, plenty of good reasons to kill Jews. Jews have committed many unbelievable crimes, such as a) poisoning wells b) murdering Christian children c) owning banks d) starting plagues e) not spontaneously handing over their property to non-Jews or conveniently dropping dead f) being Jews g) existing  h) being French spies. No one’s ever murdered Jews, so far as I can tell, just because they felt like it.

And that’s that. What else is there to say, when people think that the truth is something that exists only so as to be made up? When all people are equal - but not the Jews? When discrimination and hatred and murder is morally acceptable so long as you only target Jews? When racism is justifiable? (”We’re not anti-Semitic! Jews really ARE evil!”) The world appears to be stuck on the notion that Jews ought to be fun and easy to murder. It’s an indescribably odd notion to be stuck upon.