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i’m willing to believe some people are genuinely idiots who don’t know that 90%+ of polish jews were killed in the holocaust (and made up half of all poles killed in wwii), but. it’s almost like this shit helps nothing and no one

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For those who asked: i don’t think all jvp (and similar orgs) types are jewfakers, but i do think the (few?) jews in their ranks are not only tokens happy to strip down or outright change elements of jewishness and judaism they feel are incompatible with their outlook, but are deeply uncomfortable with jewishness and judaism, which explains their general isolation from the rest of the jewish community (even antizionist israelis)

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Absolute chaos in the los angeles edition of campus madness, wherein the police largely seem to have abdicated their responsibilities to let protesters and counter protesters try to kill each other

The major scuffles apparently stem from when a jewish girl was beaten by the protest crowd to the point of unconsciousness—she was taken to the hospital and is in recovery.

https://x.com/mihaschw/status/1785427542012285429?s=46&t=z53oXC164_q-TRbGTtE8Cw

Apparently, she’s mizrahi—persian to be exact, and la is heavily mizrahi itself. The community decided to take matters into their own hands and retaliate by attacking the campus in turn, including launching firecrackers at tents and brawling with protesters.

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I would be very interested in hearing the museum design rant

by popular demand: Guy That Took One (1) Museum Studies Class Focused On Science Museums Rants About Art Museums. thank u for coming please have a seat

so. background. the concept of the "science museum" grew out of 1) the wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), also known as "hey check out all this weird cool shit i have", and 2) academic collections of natural history specimens (usually taxidermied) -- pre-photography these were super important for biological research (see also). early science museums usually grew out of university collections or bequests of some guy's Weird Shit Collection or both, and were focused on utility to researchers rather than educational value to the layperson (picture a room just, full of taxidermy birds with little labels on them and not a lot of curation outside that). eventually i guess they figured they could make more on admission by aiming for a mass audience? or maybe it was the cultural influence of all the world's fairs and shit (many of which also caused science museums to exist), which were aimed at a mass audience. or maybe it was because the research function became much more divorced from the museum function over time. i dunno. ANYWAY, science and technology museums nowadays have basically zero research function; the exhibits are designed more or less solely for educating the layperson (and very frequently the layperson is assumed to be a child, which does honestly irritate me, as an adult who likes to go to science museums). the collections are still there in case someone does need some DNA from one of the preserved bird skins, but items from the collections that are exhibited typically exist in service of the exhibit's conceptual message, rather than the other way around.

meanwhile at art museums they kind of haven't moved on from the "here is my pile of weird shit" paradigm, except it's "here is my pile of Fine Art". as far as i can tell, the thing that curators (and donors!) care about above all is The Collection. what artists are represented in The Collection? rich fucks derive personal prestige from donating their shit to The Collection. in big art museums usually something like 3-5% of the collection is ever on exhibit -- and sometimes they rotate stuff from the vault in and out, but let's be real, only a fraction of an art museum's square footage is temporary exhibits. they're not going to take the scream off display when it's like the only reason anyone who's not a giant nerd ever visits the norwegian national museum of art. most of the stuff in the vault just sits in the vault forever. like -- art museum curators, my dudes, do you think the general public gives a SINGLE FUCK what's in The Collection that isn't on display? no!! but i guarantee you it will never occur, ever, to an art museum curator that they could print-to-scale high-res images of artworks that are NOT in The Collection in order to contextualize the art in an exhibit, because items that are not in The Collection functionally do not exist to them. (and of course there's the deaccessioning discourse -- tumblr collectively has some level of awareness that repatriation is A Whole Kettle of Worms but even just garden-variety selling off parts of The Collection is a huge hairy fucking deal. check out deaccessioning and its discontents; it's a banger read if you're into This Kind Of Thing.)

with the contents of The Collection foregrounded like this, what you wind up with is art museum exhibits where the exhibit's message is kind of downstream of what shit you've got in the collection. often the message is just "here is some art from [century] [location]", or, if someone felt like doing a little exhibit design one fine morning, "here is some art from [century] [location] which is interesting for [reason]". the displays are SOOOOO bad by science museum standards -- if you're lucky you get a little explanatory placard in tiny font relating the art to an art movement or to its historical context or to the artist's career. if you're unlucky you get artist name, date, and medium. fucker most of the people who visit your museum know Jack Shit about art history why are you doing them dirty like this

(if you don't get it you're just not Cultured enough. fuck you, we're the art museum!)

i think i've talked about this before on this blog but the best-exhibited art exhibit i've ever been to was actually at the boston museum of science, in this traveling leonardo da vinci exhibit where they'd done a bunch of historical reconstructions of inventions out of his notebooks, and that was the main Thing, but also they had a whole little exhibit devoted to the mona lisa. obviously they didn't even have the real fucking mona lisa, but they went into a lot of detail on like -- here's some X-ray and UV photos of it, and here's how art experts interpret them. here's a (photo of a) contemporary study of the finished painting, which we've cleaned the yellowed varnish off of, so you can see what the colors looked like before the varnish yellowed. here's why we can't clean the varnish off the actual painting (da vinci used multiple varnish layers and thinned paints to translucency with varnish to create the illusion of depth, which means we now can't remove the yellowed varnish without stripping paint).

even if you don't go into that level of depth about every painting (and how could you? there absolutely wouldn't be space), you could at least talk a little about, like, pigment availability -- pigment availability is an INCREDIBLY useful lens for looking at historical paintings and, unbelievably, never once have i seen an art museum exhibit discuss it (and i've been to a lot of art museums). you know how medieval european religious paintings often have funky skin tones? THEY HADN'T INVENTED CADMIUM PIGMENTS YET. for red pigments you had like... red ochre (a muted earth-based pigment, like all ochres and umbers), vermilion (ESPENSIVE), alizarin crimson (aka madder -- this is one of my favorite reds, but it's cool-toned and NOT good for mixing most skintones), carmine/cochineal (ALSO ESPENSIVE, and purple-ish so you wouldn't want to use it for skintones anyway), red lead/minium (cheaper than vermilion), indian red/various other iron oxide reds, and apparently fucking realgar? sure. whatever. what the hell was i talking about.

oh yeah -- anyway, i'd kill for an art exhibit that's just, like, one or two oil paintings from each century for six centuries, with sample palettes of the pigments they used. but no! if an art museum curator has to put in any level of effort beyond writing up a little placard and maybe a room-level text block, they'll literally keel over and die. dude, every piece of art was made in a material context for a social purpose! it's completely deranged to divorce it from its material context and only mention the social purpose insofar as it matters to art history the field. for god's sake half the time the placard doesn't even tell you if the thing was a commission or not. there's a lot to be said about edo period woodblock prints and mass culture driven by the growing merchant class! the met has a fuckton of edo period prints; they could get a hell of an exhibit out of that!

or, tying back to an earlier thread -- the detroit institute of arts has got a solid like eight picasso paintings. when i went, they were kind of just... hanging out in a room. fuck it, let's make this an exhibit! picasso's an artist who pretty famously had Periods, right? why don't you group the paintings by period, and if you've only got one or two (or even zero!) from a particular period, pad it out with some decent life-size prints so i can compare them and get a better sense for the overarching similarities? and then arrange them all in a timeline, with little summaries of what each Period was ~about~? that'd teach me a hell of a lot more about picasso -- but you'd have to admit you don't have Every Cool Painting Ever in The Collection, which is illegalé.

also thinking about the mit museum temporary exhibit i saw briefly (sorry, i was only there for like 10 minutes because i arrived early for a meeting and didn't get a chance to go through it super thoroughly) of a bunch of ship technical drawings from the Hart nautical collection. if you handed this shit to an art museum curator they'd just stick it on the wall and tell you to stand around and look at it until you Understood. so anyway the mit museum had this enormous room-sized diorama of various hull shapes and how they sat in the water and their benefits and drawbacks, placed below the relevant technical drawings.

tbh i think the main problem is that art museum people and science museum people are completely different sets of people, trained in completely different curatorial traditions. it would not occur to an art museum curator to do anything like this because they're probably from the ~art world~ -- maybe they have experience working at an art gallery, or working as an art buyer for a rich collector, neither of which is in any way pedagogical. nobody thinks an exhibit of historical clothing should work like a clothing store but it's fine when it's art, i guess?

also the experience of going to an art museum is pretty user-hostile, i have to say. there's never enough benches, and if you want a backrest, fuck you. fuck you if going up stairs is painful; use our shitty elevator in the corner that we begrudgingly have for wheelchair accessibility, if you can find it. fuck you if you can't see very well, and need to be closer to the art. fuck you if you need to hydrate or eat food regularly; go to our stupid little overpriced cafeteria, and fuck you if we don't actually sell any food you can eat. (obviously you don't want someone accidentally spilling a smoothie on the art, but there's no reason you couldn't provide little Safe For Eating Rooms where people could just duck in and monch a protein bar, except that then you couldn't sell them a $30 salad at the cafe.) fuck you if you're overwhelmed by noise in echoing rooms with hard surfaces and a lot of people in them. fuck you if you are TOO SHORT and so our overhead illumination generates BRIGHT REFLECTIONS ON THE SHINY VARNISH. we're the art museum! we don't give a shit!!!

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gonna expand on my other post bc it seems some gentiles are having difficulty understanding this conversation.

i see the sentiment "well jews can hide the fact they're jewish, but black people can't hide the fact they're black!!!!!!" all the time in progressive spaces in response to jews talking about antisemitism (most often from non black people....) and it's bullshit for several reasons, even outside of the idea that people should be able to wear culturally significant items and not face discrimination.

black jews exist. we are not two completely separate groups.

while there is no one way to look jewish, there are a lot of physical features that are very common among jews with jewish heritage (things like curly hair, darker skin, larger downturned noses, darker body hair) that have been specifically targeted by antisemites for centuries. a lot of jews have been bullied or harassed specifically because of these features and the fact society considers them outside of the white norm.

you're setting a horrible precedent for mixed and light skinned folks. at what point is it their "responsibility" to pass as white if they technically could? should they straighten their hair? change their name? use skin lighteners? use double eyelid tape every day? get a nose job? never go out in the sun? never post pictures of their darker skinned family? at what point are their natural features considered changeable enough that the onus is put on them to hide them?

for people who have features they can't hide or change, are you only giving them a pass because they physically can't do anything about their bodies? are you seeing their bodies as an unfortunate problem you can't solve? a stain on the carpet you've accepted you'll never be able to get out so you just put a coffee table over it and hope no one notices?

yes, there are times to talk about situations where some folks can access conditional safety and some folks can't. but the overarching conversation about rejecting assimilation into whiteness cannot and should not be centered around "choices." because "hide who you are or risk violence" is not a choice, it's a threat.

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Other notes of insanity from the "JVP Haggadah":

Adonai elohenu melekh ha-olam is translated differently literally every time it appears. First it's "spirit of freedom" then it becomes "the source" and "the eternal determiner of the universe" and "the one who sustains all life". Y'all. It's the same phrase in every blessing. Jews would know this. Pick one translation and stick with it!

Wine is typically a symbol of joy in the Seder-- it's often a joy for our liberation from Egypt. However, I've also seen it represented as joy despite the hardships and captivity many of us still face. JVP does away with all of that and dedicates each glass of wine to a different theme: Education, solidarity, boycotting Israel, and community. Wine is a symbol of joy in Judaism because drinking four glasses of Maneshewitz in a night gets you drunk. The symbolism is inherent to the wine itself. I don't see how getting shitfaced helps you boycott Israel.

Yachatz is fully gutted. The Hagaddah is supposed to detail how and why you break the matzah-- you can't just break it! There's symbolism and meaning to breaking specific pieces and creating an Afikomen. JVP says fuck an Afikomen, everybody just breaks a cracker and thinks about systematic oppression. They try to (incorrectly) address the Afikomen issue later, but it's nonsensical at that point because we never made one to begin with.

There is no Maggid. There's a section called Maggid, which includes a single verse from what I'm almost certain is the Christian Old Testament, not the Torah. There's no story. It literally just goes Bible Verse > Shitting on Israel > Four Questions > Plagues. They literally took out the longest and most important part of the Seder. I'm not shocked that they couldn't figure out a way to make the story of Exodus seem anti-Zionist, but still...

There's no Chad Gadya. Instead, you're supposed to go around the table, wish each other good night, and ask what they learned. This might actually be an interesting way to further involve attendees in the Seder if there were... you know... a Maggid. There's nothing to take away from this because there's zero substance. The story wasn't told. It's just there to force attendees to verbally shit on Israel before they're allowed to leave.

I'm sure there are other major issues with it; feel free to add them if you find any. I'm just personally still too baffled by the stupidity of it all to go through it a second time.

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alizalichtxo

I hope everyone will read this and share it. I posted the full piece. Hamza Howidy is a Palestinian from Gaza City. He is an accountant and a peace advocate. I follow Hamza on X and his tweets are very important. Unfortunately, he is being blocked. In his words, “But the protesters aren’t interested in peace. Some of the groups have been blocking Palestinian peace activists like me—and I am from Gaza, the very place they claim to care about! Instead of blocking peace activists, they should be inviting us to join these protests and guide them in the right direction—a place without hatred with a focus on calling for the release of the hostages who have been held captive by Hamas for more than 210 days.”

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If your goals basically amount to "after The Revolution everything will be great because people will all have the Good Ethics and work together in my Perfect System and the Evil People with Bad Morals and Bad Behaviour who are making this world bad will be gone (killed/imprisoned/exiled/all converted to agree with us when they see our Perfect System)" then that's just fascism. I hate to say it but you've put a gay socialist hat on fascism.

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woz_art

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Misidentifying us Israeli Jews as "Arab Jews" is an ongoing imperial & colonial means to erase the cultural identity & historical heritage of the last surviving Middle Eastern community of Jews.

Jews were the pillars of societies across the Middle-East way before Arab/Muslim imperialism had its fabulously bloody run. About 99% of their daily cultural life is based on appropriating our Jewish historical legacy, heritage, and culture.

But we're not your fucking dhimmis anymore. Neither is our legacy, heritage, and generations of ancestors oppressed by Islamic colonization. They deserve acknowledgment and respect. ALL of the indigenous people who were eradicated by Arab imperialism across the Middle East deserve acknowledge and respect.

So, "Arab Jews," you say..? I'll give you this much: It's not us for people to label as "Arab-Jews." But, if anything, it's for them to be labeled as "Jewish-Arabs."

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I can't believe this is a radical opinion in these current times.

If a part of your group is being violent towards jews, physically or emotionally or chanting for violence, and the group as a whole does not call those people out and prevent antisemitism and instead ignores them, tries to say they aren't really apart of the group or tries to sweep them under the rug, then the whole group has a problem with antisemitism.

Ignoring and sweeping antisemitism under the rug means that the group does not view it as a problem.

If you do not prevent or call out antisemitism, it means the group is fine with it existing in the same spaces you do.

If you truly do not want antisemitism in pro palestine movements, you will do everything to prevent and stop it from existing in those spaces, same for any groups. If you do not, you are fine with it existing in pro palestine spaces.

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i’ve seen a few people posting about how we don’t need cops at these protests. i respect that and i wish we didn’t, but a lot of what is going on rn is purposely hidden from you. that’s why i’m posting videos here.

these protestors do not want peace. they have shown themselves to be violent extremists with nazi aims.

here’s a video from montana tucker showing when she tried to talk to some. this is ucla, where the screen showing oct 7 is.

you cannot talk to them. they don’t listen and they don’t want to.

police outside of texas have treated these brats with patience honestly. no one’s gotten batton’d or water cannoned. or shot.

police have had to be rough with protestors because they refuse to cooperate.

do i love police? no. i don’t. but i value the safety of my people and see no other way right now.

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Dog toy plushies have fundamentally different souls than that of regular plushies. Unlike regular plushies, which are content with just existing (and just go to regular heaven when they get destroyed and don’t mind being resurrected), dog toys seek Valhalla. This is why you don’t need to feel bad when your dog/cat/especially strong bird rips it to shreds, because this was the warriors death they were seeking all their life

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On a Jewish owned shop..."Palestine is calling. Jews are not tolerated in Norway." Norway, after April 1940.

Historically, when people referred to Palestine, they were talking about the Jewish homeland.

This is just the slave name Romans forced upon the Jewish Kingdom of Judea after they took over and that is what every imperial occupier thereafter referred to this land that the Jews originally came from and view as Holy.

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Based on the conversations I've had with some of the people making this claim, they believe that the Palestinians are a multi-religious umbrella group composed in either equal proportions (or with a slight Muslim majority) of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. There's no evidence for this belief, but they need to believe it in order to square the circle that that they're "not antisemitic, only antizionist", by casting Jewish Zionist Israelis as persecuting their own co-religionists in the Palestinian population.

In effect, think of it as the mirror inverse of how Republicans in the US will claim that migrants are all Young, Physically Fit Drug Mule Rapists, despite every bit of evidence to the contrary--they're making up a demographic that needs to exist for their beliefs to have veracity.

I think the most incoherent pro Palestine argument I've seen is the concept of Palestinian Jews. It's genuinely completely made up--I'm not even sure who they're talking about when they invoke 'Palestinian Jews exist!' Do they mean Arab Israelis? Maybe Jews of Palestinian descent, because they do exist, though their voices are mostly ignored by those same pro-Palestine leftists. Do they mean Jews who lived in the Mandate and became Israelis? Or maybe a hypothetical group of Jews who live in the West Bank and Gaza, accepted by the Palestinians and living there in harmony? Because that last one literally does not exist. I'm pretty sure that one is who they're referring to, but I'm honestly not 100% sure. There are Jews living in the West Bank, but uh, they pretty famously don't get on well with the Palestinians.

Unironically, genuinely don't know who they're talking about. If one of you know with confidence, please let me know.

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"It’s interesting to me that the only time where we have to do this both sides-y rejection is when the victims are Jewish. When we saw a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes over the last couple of years, there was no immediate pushback that said, now you have to reject these other forms [of hate]. In fact, after George Floyd, when we were talking about Black Lives Matter, there was a clear distinction that if you responded by saying, “All Lives Matter,” that yes, that’s true that all lives matter, but if you were doing it reflexively you are denying the real pattern and problem of what was happening in the African American community."

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hi, fellow Jew here

what's antisemitic about the genocide claims? i've heard this a lot, and aside from being Horrific Misinformation, i don't... see why this is antisemitic? like it's bad and wrong but i don't know if it comes from Jew-hate if ykw i mean.

sorry, this could be a stupid question-

When it comes to Jewish institutions, all misinformation, false accusations, and conspiracy theories are inherently antisemitic. Charging Jews with "genocide" in these circumstances - when they are shooting back in a two-sided war, aimed at an armed group, taking steps to encourage and allow civilians to flee - requires a false accusation and a minimization / inversion of terms.

David Schraub:

"For thousands of years, for much of the world, part of the cultural patrimony enjoyed by all non-Jews—spiritual and secular, Church and Mosque, enlightenment and romantic, European and Middle Eastern—was the unquestionable right to stand superior over Jews. It was that right which the Holocaust took away, or at least called into question: the unthinking faith of knowing you were the more enlightened one, the spiritually purer one, the more rational one, the dispenser of morality rather than the object of it. To be sure, some people were better positioned to enjoy this right than others. And some people arrived onto the scene late in the game, only to discover that part of the bounty they were promised may no longer be on the table. Of course they’re aggrieved! The European immigrant who never owned a slave but was at least promised racial superiority is quite resentful when the wages of Whiteness stop being what they once were. Similarly, persons who lived far from the centers of Christian or Muslim power where Jewish subordination was forged are nonetheless well aware of what was supposed to be included in modernity’s gift basket. They recognize what they’ve “lost” as acutely as anyone else.

“The Germans,” the old saying goes, “will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” And not just the Germans. Many people deeply resent the Jews for what Auschwitz took away from them—the easy knowledge that their vantage point was elevated over and superior to that of the Jews, the entitlement to be able to talk about Jews without having to listen to Jews. The desire to neuter the Holocaust is a desire to return to that old state of affairs. And so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Jews exhibit a special ferocity over the meaning of “genocide.” As noted above, the controversy of this MBL language has in large part played out in terms of whether it is even proper for Jews to register an objection. Are we valid contributors to the conversation? Are we equal players in this struggle? This is no coincidence. When people charge the Jewish state with genocide, part of what they are doing—with varying degrees of explicitness—is telling Jews “this concept which obliged us to listen to you no longer can underwrite that duty.” And in that brave old world, they can return to the baseline that had existed for thousands of years—where it was unthinkable, outrageous, blasphemous, for a Jew to have the temerity to contest a non-Jewish articulation of Jewish experience."