לעשות דווקא

Tonight begins Yom HaShoah.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is the day the international community remembers the horrific atrocities, the world’s indifference, and the victims of the Holocaust. Ideally, anyway, but that’s a conversation for another time.

This is not that. This is the day Jews around the world mourn our 6,000,000+ dead. Two-thirds of European Jews. One-third of the world’s Jewish population.

Our population still has not recovered.

Those are big numbers. So let me bring them home to smaller ones. My grandmother (z”l) was born into a family of eight (she made the ninth). My grandmother and four others survived the Shoah. Four perished. Two in KZ Ravensbrück. Two more at the hands of the SS Politzei. May their memories be for a blessing.

The survivors? Two hidden children. A young seamstress that survived brutal work camps. A boy told to ride his bike as far away as he could that found a way onto a kindertransport. A young woman who’d been on a teen trip to the British Mandate who heeded her parents warnings not to go back home. Two of them are still alive today, and the rest lived to ripe old age and saw their lineages pass down to children, grandchildren, and, in my grandmother’s case, a great-grandchild.

They were the lucky ones, but what they survived left permanent marks. They cannot forget the Shoah and neither shall I.

There are only two of them left, and their biggest fear is that the Shoah and its tragedies and lessons will be forgotten.

Remember them. Remember their family. Remember the Shoah.

Remember.

Never forget. Never again.

May the names of the millions be for a blessing.

Feels all the weightier this year.

May their memories be for a blessing.

מיר וועלן זיי איבערלעבן.

Pick based on your normal habits– not including rare special occasions where you might do something different.

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

“Leave it alone” should have multiple options too, since people do that for a variety of reasons: some to make a deliberate statement about how we shouldn’t have to shave, some because they like how it feels/looks, some to signal that they’re non-hetero (if they’re femme for instance; constantly have to explain this to my hetero mom who hates that I don’t shave), and some out of laziness/just not feeling like it. Though often we are some combo of the above.

taking action in order to feel less complicit doesn’t mean you are any less complicit than anyone else. isn’t that fun

put another way: feeling complicit and being complicit are different things.

goyim you can touch but don’t clown: wildest transition over the last six months has been watching Israeli friends who were on some level probably once Zionist increasingly decide that the country/Zionism has failed and get increasingly despondent about needing to get out of here NOW while friends in the diaspora (many of them on some level antizionist) have had a falling out with the goysiche works and if not actively looking up aliyah have certainly started to get a lot more comfy with that idea

The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls – and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. The gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.

  —  People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (Dara Horn)

Also, because it's Tumblr I have to spell everything out. Use your own personal definition of what constitutes a major versus a minor holiday

if you’re calling to tear down a faulty load-bearing pillar you better have something to replace it with

i don’t know if you’re taking propaganda for her right now but these are literally THEE best brownies you will ever have. katharine hepburn knew what she was talking about

Behind a paid subscription wall. I HATE paywalls. After a lot of cricking my neck to see what I could make out, finally managed to put it together. Added normal measurements as it’s originally in US.

Yield: 12 brownies

*I have a nut allergy, so I would replace the walnuts with something else. Things I have used in the past:

Most of the conversions were taken from here - https://coolconversion.com/ because I have no idea what the hell a “cup” means. All the cups in my cupboard are different sizes.

Kidnapped and experimented on by aliens but I was in the control group so nothing happened

Oh wow the antisemites insisting theyre "just anti(((zionist))), not antisemitic!" reached peak levels of antisemitism?? shocker, outrageous! This pic in particular is beyond disgusting:

can you IMAGINE coming to AUCHWITZ of all places wearing mock yellow stars and doing this shit, while simultaneously claiming "its not about Jews sweaty, its about (((Israel))) :^)))))"??? I can only guess these girls are Polish which unfortunately means the apple didnt fall very far from the pogrom tree on which their grandparents hung their Jewish neighbors after the end of WW2

i love one (1) disaster wizard

It’s a good metaphor tho, because the situation is never going to get better if you don’t eventually pull the door. And afterwards, no matter what the damage was, you’ll have a working cabinet, whatever plates you could salvage, and a place to start putting new plates.

Reblogging for that comment ^

Hats off for negative jokes turned to wholesome posts

So this was me for a long time. Afraid to open the door, certain that all that I was would crash and break. That I could never be repaired.

But I opened the door.

And what fell out and crashed to the ground was not me. They weren’t my dishes.

They were other people’s dishes.

Put inside we without my permission, when I was too young to know that I could not hold them all.

I opened the door, and I’m still here.

It turns out, I’m not that fragile.

Oh damn it got better

THANK YOU TWO FOR MAKING OUR LIVES A LITTLE BETTER

[Image ID: A screenshot of a twitter post originally from user @IHLaking. It was retweeted by user @VoiceOfOBrien. The original post reads,

“therapist: you need to open up more

me: i can’t

therapist: why not

me: let me visualize it for you”

Attached is an image of a cabinet filled with bowls that have tipped over in a way that makes them sure to fall out and shatter if the cabinet is opened. The text added when the post was retweeted reads, “Widogast.” /.End ID]

Its also a good reminder that therapy can feel like it made everything worse for a while, you know while you clean up all the broken shards.

light a candle. remember their names.

i would love for you all to reblog with the name(s) you lit candles for and any information you can find about them. gentiles are highly encouraged to do this as well, we need you to remember them with us. the shoah is so mythologized that people don’t seem to see it as affecting real people anymore, but every single person who died had a life, a family, a mother, they laughed and cried and deserved a kinder world than this one. so please help us remember that these people were more than just numbers. please help us remember them.

I don’t think most non-Jews understand how disappointed we are in the left right now. How completely abandoned we’ve become. How our contributions to progress for other groups have been erased or disavowed or hidden. How the actual tangible things that Jews have contributed to black rights and civil rights are being ignored. How we’re being told we contribute and have contributed nothing.

How we are being told that the world has been kind to us when it never has. As if my mom didn’t grow up getting called a Kike and getting beat up for being Jewish. How I thought I had friends until I caught them saying “xyz was beautiful until Jews showed up.” How people told me I was pretty “for a Jew.” How I grew up hearing stories about bombs being set off in Israel in buses and markets. How I couldn’t even go two weeks without hearing that and how nobody cared and somehow, every time that happened, the whole world became more hostile to me for some reason.

I just don’t understand. I don’t understand what leftists are doing. Or why. I hate that I have to say—of course, I support a free and self determined Palestine (which I truly do)—in order for you to decide I’m worthy of care and support.

We showed up for you. All of you. And the entire movement is abandoning us at best or targeting us at worst. Celebrating our deaths. Saying we deserved it. How are we supposed to trust you ever again? How are we supposed to feel safe ever again?

A very few select people who are in my life have taken the chance to actually learn about and dismantle their own unconscious antisemitism during this time. And I’m eternally grateful for them. But most people haven’t reached out at all. Most people are still sharing hateful things that could get me hurt and they don’t care. Most people Reblogging my posts are still Jews. Because we are alone. And it sucks. You need to be as loud about antisemitism as you are about Palestine or you’re an antisemite (unless you’re Arab/Muslim/Palestinian—I totally get that these groups are also doing damage control in their own communities just like Jews are).

But we are all in tremendous pain right now.

This moment will pass. And when it does, I will remember how many people let me down. I will remember that when I needed support more than I’ve ever needed it in my life, people fucking vanished. They pretended violence against my people wasn’t happening. They ignored and rewrote the history of Israel to suit their own narratives.

You don’t know what it feels like to be hated this much for opposite things. PoC hate us for being too white. White supremacists hate us for not being white enough. Europeans hate us for being middle eastern. Middle easterners hate us for being western/European. Everyone hates us for being settlers but continually kicks us out of their countries so that we have to settle somewhere else.

I saw a post going around from a Black person who said that the reason he and his fellow black activists go protest for Palestinians instead of fighting antisemitism (as if it’s a binary, which it’s not) is that Jews don’t show up. Muslims and Palestinians do. And honestly? Fuck that guy. Heather Heyer died standing shoulder to shoulder against racism in 2017. [CORRECTION: When I first wrote this post I was under the impression that Heather Heyer was Jewish. I want to correct to avoid spreading misinfo. She was just the first (and incorrect) Jewish civil rights activist I thought of. However there are plenty of other actual Jewish civil rights activists to choose from. If you have reblogged this post from me, please feel free to add a link to the permalink version of this post with my correction to your reblog.]I have devoted substantial time and effort and money that I don’t even get paid a lot of because I don’t get paid a living wage. I have continually reached out to PoC people in my life of all religions to ask how they are doing and what I could be doing to help more—both for them personally and how they would best like me to help their community. I have elevated their voices at every opportunity. And not one person I checked in with has done the same for me or for my community.

And it’s bone chilling. It’s awful. And it’s even worse knowing that when it’s over, people will want to go back to normal. They won’t apologize. They won’t self reflect. They’ll just live their lives, maybe a little more aware of how much they hate us and completely indifferent to the harm they’ve caused us. How disposable they made us feel. And the thing is…it’s not hard for you to know. You just have to ask.

Too many people are cowards. Too many people care about looking good than actually learning something or making the world better. And to those people: you should be ashamed of yourself.

I don’t have any hate in my heart. Truly. Not a drop for any group of people. But I have a tremendous lack of trust that anyone would actually lift a finger to keep me safe.

Note: A reply I got on this very post.

The current date is 3/7/2024

Experiment: I have started putting the hate I and other Jews receive into my queued posts. I do not seek it out. I only reblog or post what I just stumble upon. And I will see how long it takes for the queue to run out. I think my queue posts like twice a day. These things antisemites do and say live in our minds for a long time, often forever. Antisemites post a hateful thing to us and get a little rush of adrenaline before forgetting we exist and that they engaged in hatred. But to us, it’s an eternal reminder that we will never be safe. No matter how temporarily accepted we may be at a given time, we are always on the verge of mass calls for our death.

It's frustrating because activism shouldn't be quid pro quo. Those Jewish people who turned up for other causes did so because it was just, nobody is expecting treats for good deeds. But one would hope solidarity would go both ways.