#many sephardim are white

[earthytzipi]

as much as Zionism is a colonial project (though I tend to take the view as expressed in "Decolonizing Jewishness" re: Zionism as failed decolonization attempt) I think it's extremely reductive to claim that Ashkenormativity is to blame for the colonial nature of the Zionist reality. as more and more people from outside of Jewish spaces are introduced to the concept of Ashkenormativity, "Ashkenazi" is being used as a synonym for white and for colonizer.

this is not the whole picture. first and foremost, a large percentage of Ashkenazim are not white, though of course many of us are. conflating Ashkenazim with whiteness, both inside and outside of the Jewish community, contributes to the erasure of Jewish People of Color. additonally, the first Jews in the western hemisphere, arriving with conquistadors and colonizers, were, in fact, Sephardi. in the US, almost every Jewish person was Sephardi until the second half of the 19th century. Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews have also historically participated in and currently participate in Zionism, including in the settlements. furthermore, when we're talking about Israel's suppression of diasporic culture, a very real phenomenon, we need to discuss how many Ashkenazi cultural elements were also suppressed - including Yiddish and Ashkenazi Hebrew. in fact, Ashkenazim from Europe who wanted to hang onto their diasporic cultures were considered weak and effeminate. this reality should make sense to everyone who is aware of how Holocaust survivors are treated in Israel. in Israeli society, there is contempt for EVERY Jewish culture that is not Israeli, and of course that is compounded and exacerbated by racism for Mizrahi, Ethiopian, Indian, and other Jewish groups of color.

it's not the same dichotomy as the Black vs white dichotomy set up by US/UK/French/Spanish/etc colonization, and the term "Ashkenormativity" being taken out of Jewish contexts and applied to Zionism just makes Ashkenazim a convenient scapegoat for all the evils of Zionism. the main consequence I'm seeing is the idea that Ashkenazim are "fake European Jews" in contrast to the "real Middle Eastern Jews." this idea hurts us all. Jewish people are from every corner of the globe, and every Jewish person is a real Jewish person. I'm asking those of us who are pro-Palestine to tread very carefully when discussing this issue, and maybe retire the use of "Ashkenormativity" when it comes to discussing the racism of Zionism, which Jewish people from every diasporic background can and do participate in. Ashkenormativity refers to the centering of Ashkenazi history and customs when discussing Jewishness, and I'm really concerned that the way I'm seeing it used does not meet that definition and is not helpful (and maybe ends up centering Ashkenazi "evilness" or "Europeanness" while still not discussing Sephardi, Mizrahi, and other Jewish diasporic group's histories at all outside of their interactions with Ashkenazim in Israel). there's a lot of racism Jewish spaces, in Zionism, and in Israeli society, I just think we should call it racism and white supremacy.

#Zionism #free Palestine #asking this as a pro palestine ashki jew #just please consider that this situation is not equivalent or the same as western european colonization #while it is accurate to say that Zionism started in Europe and centers a European jewish experience #Ashkenazi is not a direct equivalent to white or european #many sephardim are white #the are other Jewish diasporic groups who are white or european #and you are spreading antisemitism when you say or imply that Ashkenazim are not really Jewish or aren't real Jews #or are less real than other Jewish diasporic group's #also looking at the politics of Israel if you removed every single Ashki person from the country the politics would likely swing far right #it's just not as black and white as yall want to make #and taking jewish conversations about very real issues within our community and applying those terms outwards as stand ins #for issues within colonial societies like racism #doesn't really work

[intern-seraph]

[goy voice] ashkenazim are all white europeans mizrahim are all arab and sephardim are all hispanic

#seraph speaks #i'm losing my mind this is so funny #for further context: no #they are not #jumblr #try telling sephardim from turkey or like. north africa. that they're hispanic #or persian (iranian) jews that they're arab #nevermind telling black ashkenazim that they're uh. white europeans. #i am vaguing about a braindead i/p post in case you can't tell #unfortunately it prob has waaaay too many notes #considering it's flat-out misinfo

[notaplaceofhonour]

I understand and agree with pointing out that the Holocaust didn’t just affect the Jews that lived in Europe, and shedding light on the stories of Jews in other territories under Axis control. Every life lost or uprooted in the Holocaust matters and deserves to be remembered, not just Ashkenazim.

However, I’ve been seeing a bit of an overcorrection to the point that this valid & important point get twisted by some into the idea that Ashkenazim weren’t actually all that affected by the Holocaust at all and may have actually been safer than other Jews due to being White/European*, and I wanted to walk through exactly why that is so far from the reality and gets into really dangerous Holocaust Distortion.

The fact is that the vast majority of Holocaust victims were Ashkenazim. How do we know this? Well, first and most obvious without even getting into the numbers: the Nazis were most active in Eastern Europe, where most Jews were overwhelmingly Ashkenazi. Germany had colonies elsewhere and the affect the Holocaust had on Jews living in Africa and Asia is not any less important (and the fact remains that their stories are a genuine gap in Holocaust education that needs to be filled), but this doesn’t change the fact that the center of Nazi activity was Europe, and thus that is where their impact on Jews was most intense. But it’s important to not just go off of what seems “obvious” because what’s obvious to any given person is subjective and subject to bias. So let’s look at the numbers:

Estimates prior to the Holocaust put Ashkenazim at 92% of the world’s Jewish population (or roughly 14 million of the 15.3 million total Jewish population), meaning that it would be physically impossible for less than 4.7 million (or 78%) of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust to be Ashkenazim.

Even that number is only possible to reach by assuming that only Ashkenazism survived and literally every non-Ashkenazi Jew died in the Holocaust, which we categorically know is not the case due to the continued existence of Sephardim & Mizrahim, as well as other Jews. So the number has to be higher than 78%.

Additionally, the fact that the proportion of the world’s Jewish population that was Ashkenazi fell so drastically during to the Holocaust and still hasn’t recovered (from 92% in 1930, only recovering to close to 75% in the last couple decades) means that not only a higher overall number of deaths were Ashkenazim, but that a higher proportion of the total Ashkenazi population died than from other groups.

We also know that 85% of Jews killed in the Holocaust were Yiddish-speakers. The fact that Yiddish is endemic to Ashkenazi culture (and not all Ashkenazim would have even been Yiddish-speakers) due to assimilation means that at least—and most likely more than—85% of Jews killed in the Holocaust were Ashkenazi.

So, no, Ashkenazim were not some privileged subcategory of Jews who avoided the worst of the Holocaust. They were the group most directly devastated by it.

That doesn’t change the fact that the devastation the Nazis and their allies wreaked on other Jews is every bit as important to acknowledge and discuss, and must not fall by the wayside. The stories and experiences of all victims & survivors deserve to be heard, remembered, and honored, not just the most common or most statistically representative of the majority of victims. However, we can (and must) do that without allowing the facts of the Holocaust to be distorted or suggesting Ashkenazim were somehow less affected by the Holocaust or more privileged under the Nazis. The Nazis hated all Jews. Antisemitism affects all Jews. Period.

*without getting too deep into how categories like Ashkanzi/Sephardi/etc. don’t map neatly onto race like so many people seem to want them to. that’s a different post, but just pointing that out

#antisemitism #holocaust distortion #tw shoah #tw holocaust #ashkenazi #ashkenazim #minhag

[magnetothemagnificent]

Is it true that is used to be forbidden for sephardi to marry ashkenazi? Or like, any group to marry into a different subsection? I mean from both sides not one being biggoted against the other.

It was never forbidden halakhically, but there was (and in some places still is) taboo and intense social wariness against such marriages.

Ashkenazi and Sephardi marriages have been happening ever since there became a split dividing diaspora Jews into "Ashkenazi" and "Sephardi". Historically, the families of important Rabbis and community leaders especially would often marry into each other, regardless of whether one was Ashkenazi or Sephardi. Rabbi Yitzchak Luria (the ARIZaL), a famed medieval Kabbalist, for example, was the child of an Ashkenazi father and Sephardi mother.

It is unfortunate that there was and still is a taboo- there's a huge issue of racialized white Ashkenazi Jews having colorist and racist attitudes towards Sephardi, Mizrachi, Ethiopian, and other non-Ashkenazi Jewish populations (not all Ashkenazim are racialized as white, though, and not all Sephardim are racialized as non-white). Some Jewish communities, regardless of whether they're Ashkenazi, Sephardi, etc, are more insular and frown upon marriage with any Jew outside of their group, for example; some Chassidic sects might socially forbid marriage with someone from another Chassidic sect.

Intermarriage between Sephardim and Ashkenazim has become more common and accepted, and sometimes even encouraged- I remember vividly sitting in Jewish health class in high school (presentation about genetic diseases and screening many Jewish high schools and seminaries give) and the person presenting all the information to us told us that Ashkenazi-Sephardi marriage is good because it diversifies the gene pool.

TLDR: No it was never forbidden according to Jewish law for Ashkenazim and Sephardim to marry each other, but there was and still is taboo regarding it.

#jumblr #if jew know jew know #goyim don't touch #judaism #jewish identity #jewish history #halakha

[frithwontdie]

Are Ashkenazi Jews white? Short answer, No!

Ashkenazi Jews may appear white, but are not. Some identify as white and some don't. Even many jewish news articles claim their not white.

But what do the facts say?

Ashkenazi Jews are a genetically and culturally Middle Eastern people, who only began to “integrate” into European society after the rise of Liberalism in the 17th or 18th Century. Their history in Europe has been full of conflict. Being continually massacred, and expelled from every single European country that they have ever inhabited. It was clear that white Europeans considered jews to be categorically separate race from them. (plus the Jews also considered themselves separate from white Europeans as well). Plus the overwhelming majority have distinctly non-European phenotypes that are obviously Middle Eastern in origin.

Plus, the claim that they're white, is not supported by scientific, genetic evidence.

Despite their long-term residence in different countries and isolation from one another, most Jewish populations were not significantly different from one another at the genetic level.

Admixture estimates suggested low levels of European Y-chromosome gene flow into Ashkenazi and Roman Jewish communities.  Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations were not statistically different. The results support the hypothesis that the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population, and suggest that most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora.”

The m values based on haplotypes Med and 1L were ~13% ± 10%, suggesting a rather small European contribution to the Ashkenazi paternal gene pool. When all haplotypes were included in the analysis, m increased to 23% ± 7%. This value was similar to the estimated Italian contribution to the Roman Jewish paternal gene pool.

About 80 Sephardim, 80 Ashkenazim and 100 Czechoslovaks were examined for the Yspecific RFLPs revealed by the probes p12f2 and p40a,f on TaqI DNA digests. The aim of the study was to investigate the origin of the Ashkenazi gene pool through the analysis of markers which, having an exclusively holoandric transmission, are useful to estimate paternal gene flow. The comparison of the two groups of Jews with each other and with Czechoslovaks (which have been taken as a representative source of foreign Y-chromosomes for Ashkenazim) shows a great similarity between Sephardim and Ashkenazim who are very different from Czechoslovaks. On the other hand both groups of Jews appear to be closely related to Lebanese. A preliminary evaluation suggests that the contribution of foreign males to the Ashkenazi gene pool has been very low (1 % or less per generation).

Jewish populations show a high level of genetic similarity to each other, clustering together in several types of analysis of population structure. These results support the view that the Jewish populations largely share a common Middle Eastern ancestry and that over their history they have undergone varying degrees of admixture with non-Jewish populations of European descent. We find that the Jewish populations show a high level of genetic similarity to each other, clustering together in several types of analysis of population structure. Further, Bayesian clustering, neighbor-joining trees, and multidimensional scaling place the Jewish populations as intermediate between the non-Jewish Middle Eastern and European populations. These results support the view that the Jewish populations largely share a common Middle Eastern ancestry and that over their history they have undergone varying degrees of admixture with non-Jewish populations of European descent.

A sample of 526 Y chromosomes representing six Middle Eastern populations (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Kurdish Jews from Israel; Muslim Kurds; Muslim Arabs from Israel and the Palestinian Authority Area; and Bedouin from the Negev) was analyzed for 13 binary polymorphisms and six microsatellite loci. The investigation of the genetic relationship among three Jewish communities revealed that Kurdish and Sephardic Jews were indistinguishable from one another, whereas both differed slightly, yet significantly, from Ashkenazi Jews. The differences among Ashkenazim may be a result of low-level gene flow from European populations and/or genetic drift during isolation.

Archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites, who extensively mixed with Egyptians, Mesopotamian and Anatolian peoples in ancient times. Thus, Palestinian-Jewish rivalry is based in cultural and religious, but not in genetic, differences.

One study 2010 study stated that Both Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic jews share only 30% European DNA with the rest being of middle east decent. And by a recent 2020 study on remains from Bronze Age (over 3000 years ago) southern Levantine (Canaanite) populations suggests Ashkenazi Jews derive more than half of their ancestry from Bronze Age Levantine populations with the remaining 41% of their ancestry being European and 50% being Middle Eastern.

#jews #facts #dna

[stealth-liberal]

While Jumbler on this site focuses massively on left wing issues and left wing sins (of which Jew Hatred is paramount) I live in a red area, so my life and the lives many other Jews just like me are different.

Jews like us have MAGA nutbags come up to us, apropos of NOTHING, and try to get us to agree with them about the CRAZIEST islamphobic bullshit you've ever heard in your life. For Jews like us, this is the only time right wing antisemites try to do anything other than terrify us or try to bully us out of our homes and neighborhoods, or to bully our children out of the schools. And it's so clearly a trap that they actually think we're stupid enough to fall for, that we might actually play respectability politics for them. That we'll be the "good Jew" that they can point to that they know, so as to defend themselves from accusations of antisemitism or straight being a neo-nazi.

I haven't met a Jew yet who plays along. For Sephardim, MENA, Mizrahi, and Beta Israel Jews... it's so very clear they want them to play "the good darkie" and for many Ashkenazi Jews, it's so clear they want them to twist themselves into knots to prove that they're "white like you". It's a losing game. No Jew can be "the good darkie" enough for them. No Jew can be white enough for them. They will ALWAYS toss us into the fire.

In my city, we have Jews and Muslims, and we don't have the option to tear each other apart. There is an embedded hate element here, and for the most part, we watch each other's backs. It isn't always perfect, but I don't mind watching my Muslim neighbors back, and they don't mind watching mine, and so on and so forth.

Why am I writing about this? Because since the war in Israel began, I have had some stomach churning experiences in my town. Many of them some right wing fuck nugget trying to get me to agree that we should do some sort of violent act towards Muslims in this country because... blah, blah, blah. And when I back away and vehemently don't agree, they practically turn purple with rage and yell at me. I live in a city that Marjorie Taylor Greene visited on her Jewish Space Laser tour. So it's just a day ending in Y for me. It's clear they want to scare me, but I used to be a Marine, don't let the makeup fool you, I can take care of myself easily. That kind of thing doesn't scare me.

But I want to be clear. I hate Hamas with every fiber in my body. I support Israel's right to exist and to defend itself. I do not, nor have I ever hated Palestinians. They're just people, individuals. I do not, nor have I ever hated Muslims. They're just people, individuals. No Muslim that I've ever known has made me feel unsafe, hated, or in any way fearful. I've spent too much of my adult life in areas with small or even tiny Jewish populations to turn away someone who's willing to reach out and watch my back. I think most of the Muslims I know have had the same situations.

So if one more fucking right-wing antisemite/islamaphobe comes up to me and tries to get me to agree to some Muslim hatred nonsense... I swear to G-d, they're getting my hands in their teeth. Same goes for online encounters. Though instead of hands, you'll get blocked and reported.

I have been dealing with intense antisemitism both in my real life town and online. I refuse to add islamaphobia to that shitty cocktail. Go find some other putz, I'm not the one. I'm heartbroken and enraged right now. Don't try me. I'm not your fucking pawn. Jews are not your scape goats nor your pawns.

#sl speaks #jumblr #jewish #israel #right wing antisemitism

[osmanthusoolong]

I appreciate what the post about ashkenazi supremacy within Israeli is trying to do but I would like to add that the majority of Likud voters are sephardic. I am not trying to deny the racism or anti-blackness of Israel at all but I think it does dissemble a little bit about the current state of Israeli politics. Definitely I think Ashekenazi jews do see themselves as superior within israeli politics but from a left/liberal stance -- many of them came from Soviet politics and have a chauvinist posture and racist beliefs. I would also say Israeli Sephardic identity has been captured by Zionism. The Shas party -- the Haredi Sephardic party that is the fourth biggest party in Israel -- is pro-settler pro-genocide. The chief Sephardic rabbi has called many times for genocide and so did his father (who, might I add, was born in Baghdad.) These people hold tremendous political sway and I think it's important to talk about white supremacy when it comes to israel but my stomach kind of turns when painting non-ashkenazi jews as not being beneficiaries of the genocidal state of Israel and who actively want to eliminate the Palestinians from the face of the earth because they do have something to be gained from a state of jewish supremacy. And I do think it's true that ethnic lines blur too. There are arab sephardim and european sephardim. It's really unfortunate but it's the reality at this current moment. Sorry if this is a lot I hope you have a good day.

Absolutely no need for sorries, I really appreciate this addition, thank you. I hope you have a good day/evening/tomorrow as well 💜

#anon asks

[hadarmarkin]

Beyond Latkes: Sephardic Hanukkah Recipes and Traditions 🕎

Hanukkah is here and if you are already tired from Latkes dipped in sour cream, here are  some traditional alternatives from the Sephardic kitchen. 

For a healthier version of Latkes, try Keftes de Prasa- leek patties-  popular among Sephardim in the Balkan communities, such as  Bulgaria and Turkey. Here the dominant flavor is leek, which is paired with herbs and sometime feta cheese. The use of leek is ubiquitous in the Sephardic repertoire from ancient times. In fact, according to Jewish folklore, being caught cooking leek or smelling of it during the Spanish Inquisition, immediately revealed one’s Jewish identity and led to a sentence of death by torture. Despite this dark chapter, Sephardim remained loyal to their favorite allium for its tender flavor, abundance and low cost. Leeks are the main ingredient in many Sephardic holiday dishes, and here is the Hanukkah one. 

Leek Fritters (adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty)

For the sauce (optional but recommended)

-½ cup greek yogurt (I increased to almost 1 cup)

-½ cup sour cream (I reduced to 2 tbsp)

-2 garlic cloves

-2 tbsp lemon  (I used 3 tbsp)

-3 tbsp olive oil

-½ cup parsley leaves

-2 cups cilantro leaves 

-Blend all the ingredients together in the food processor until they turn green.

For the fritters

-3 leeks cleaned; white and light green parts sliced into 1 inch slices

-5 shallots finely chopped

-⅔ cup olive oil (you may use less depending on need)

-1 fresh red chili pepper, seeded and finely chopped

-½ cup parsley - leaves and thin stalks finely chopped

-¾ tsp ground coriander

-1 tsp ground cumin

-¼ tsp ground turmeric

-¼ tsp ground cinnamon

-1 tsp sugar

-½ tsp salt

-1 egg white

-¾ cup +1 tbsp self-rising flour

- 1 tbsp baking powder

-1 egg

-⅔ cup milk

-4 tbsp melted butter

-Sauté the leeks and the shallots for 15 minutes or until soft on medium heat.

-Transfer into a large bowl and add the pepper, all the spices, sugar and salt. Mix well and allow to cool.

-Whisk the egg white until foamy and add into the veggie mixture. 

-In another bowl mix together the flour, baking powder (I recommend sifting dry ingredients to avoid bulks), whole egg, milk and butter to form a batter. Gently pour the batter into the veggie - egg white mixture. 

-Put 2 tbsp of oil in a frying pan over medium heat. Spoon half of the mixture into the pan and form 4 large patties. Fry each side for 2-3 minutes or until golden and crisp. Transfer to a platter with paper towels to absorb the oil. Repeat the process to create 8 patties total. 

-Serve warm with a spoonful of the green yogurt sauce on top.

On the sweeter side of things, the Israeli national obsession with Sufganiyot (traditionally jelly and nowadays extremely sinful) is definitely rooted in the diaspora. Almost each Sephardic and Mizrachi community makes its own variation of a sugary fritter using the spices common in their country of origin. In India, for example, Jews celebrate Hanukkah with Gulab Jamun- also a popular street food- that is yogurt based and often flavored with cardamom and rose water.

In Greece, Turkey and the Balkans, Jews made Bimuelos often scented with orange blossom, dipped in honey syrup and fried in olive oil. The Iraqi-Syrian’s Zengoula is closer in texture and shape to an American funnel cake.

Last but certainly not least- is the Sfenj- the ultimate North African competitor to the Ashkenazi Sufganiyot. Similar to its French cousin the beignet, Sfenj is simply pastry dough randomly shaped and coated with powdered sugar. It’s extra delicious when eaten fresh off the frying pan.

Ditch the Deep Fryer for Ricotta Pancakes

If frying is not your thing, rest assured that Hanukkah is also celebrated with dairy. Apparently, the miracle of the everlasting oil in the temple and the bravery of the Maccabees is not the only Hanukkah story. In fact, many Sephardic communities honor the heroic act of Judith - Yehudit. According to the Book of Yehudit and Talmudic tales, Judith lured into her home the Syrian Greek General Holofernes, who was attempting to besiege the city of Bethulia. She offered him salty cheese and wine. Once sedated, she killed him and displayed his corpse at the city gates. Seeing what had been done to their commander- terrified the soldiers, and they fled immediately. The liberation of Bethulia raised morale among the tired Maccabee fighters, and helped bring victory one step closer. 

'Judith and Holofernes,' 1605, by Jan de Bray.

The crucial role of cheese in the story of Judith gave reason for certain cultures to celebrate Hanukkah with a variety of dairy dishes.  A particularly decadent one is the Ataiyef-  the Syrian answer to mundane breakfast pancakes. These are stuffed with ricotta cheese, dipped in rose water syrup, sprinkled with pistachio pieces and deep fried, in honor of Hanukkah of course. 

A similar and more attainable recipe is the Roman-Jewish Cassola. This simple gluten-free sweet ricotta pancake is perfect for a weekend breakfast on Hanukkah and throughout the year.  

Cassola (adapted from Claudia’s Roden Book of Jewish Food)

-1 lb (500 g) ricotta

-1 cup sugar (recipe calls for 200 gram I reduced to 170, and it was still a little too sweet)

-5 eggs

-2 tbsp oil (I subbed for 1 tbsp butter)

-Grated rind of 1 lemon (optional but adds significantly)

-Blend the ricotta and sugar with the eggs in a food processor. 

-Heat oil/ butter in a large ovenproof pan.

-Pour mixture into the pan and cook on medium-low flame until the bottom has set firmly. 

-Put under the broiler and let it brown for a couple of minutes. 

I served it with cherries and berries and a spoonful of homemade granola. No syrup needed!

A Women’s Fest

The story of Judith inspired several Jewish communities to add other customs in addition to the dairy feast. In North Africa, the sixth (and sometimes seventh) night of Hanukkah was known as Chag Ha’Banot - (Eid Al Bana', in Judeo-Arabic), or The Festival of Daughters.  During this night, women went to synagogue to pray for the health of elderly women in their community, and to ask for a good match for their single daughters.  They lit the Menorah recalling remarkable Jewish heroines, such as Judith and many others. The praying sometimes turned into a lively party featuring singing, dancing and drinking wine.

The feast usually included dairy foods, followed by several desserts, such as sweet couscous with chopped nuts and dried fruit.  

This ritual is representative of the endless number of mini traditions existing in the Sephardic-Mizrachi world around Hanukkah. To that point, I am sharing one last non-food tradition- the extra candle.  Ladino speaking communities and in Aleppo, Syria, had the custom to light an extra candle each night of the holiday in honor of their ancestors, who were exiled during the Spanish expulsion of 1492. A popular song that accompanied the candle lighting was Ocho Kandelikas (8 little lights in Ladino). Enjoy listening!

#sephardic

#Hanukkah

#Youtube

[dailyfreier]

Trapped: Sephardim from Ashdod forced to eat Ashkenazi Host Family's food

“Try the farfel!” By Chava Ewa Last Updated10/15/2023 at 3:50 PM Tel Tzion:  “There. Was. Sugar. In. The. Fish. I’m traumatized. ” Ruti N. of Ashdod sobbed. “Also, the rice was just plain and white…. is there a nationwide turmeric shortage?” Ruti’s Sephardi family is among the many evauated from the South of Israel due to the war and placed with host families around Israel….. many of them who are…

View On WordPress

#Ashkenazi Problems #Ashkenazim #Chava Ewa #Farfel #Gribenes #Hamas #herring #Israel #Israel news #mayonnaise #Shin Bet

[dikleyt]

There’s a weird false narrative going around where it’s “Nazi race science” to talk about Jewish genetics and how they demonstrate that almost every Jew is related. And how, for example, Polish Jews are more related to Iraqi Jews than to non-Jewish Poles, and vice versa.

Nazi race science involves using physical traits to determine a person’s ancestry. For example, saying that someone with a big nose and dark hair and brown eyes must be a Jew. Or that everyone with white skin who isn’t a Jew comes from the same place. Or that the skull shape of a person determines whether they are “pure Aryans.” The heirs of Nazi race science today are the people who say that Ashkenazim must have originated in Europe because many of us have light skin (although, inconveniently for these people, so do many Sephardim and Mizrahim, and so do many Palestinians).

Genetics are a legitimate science that helped to disprove race science by showing that, for example, there are groups of white people who are more related to groups of Black people than to other white people, and vice versa. People who insist that Ashkenazim must be from Europe because of certain physical traits are defending race science against legitimate genetics.

Not only that, but genetics actually help the Palestinian argument that they are descended from the Canaanites (including Jews) who lived in the land in ancient times, and many pro-Palestinian activists have already started using this to their advantage. It just also helps the Jewish argument of being the descendants of the ancient Jews, which complicates the whole “white European settler colonialism” narrative that people are still trying to push.

#jews #ashkenazi Jews #genetics #genetic studies of Jews #genetic studies of Palestinians #false narrative #Nazi race science #ashkenazim

[lgbtunis-moved]

honestly I think a lot of activists are baffled and confused by a lot of Jewish ethnic identities and experiences because they try to fit them into specific racial categories that they’re familiar with and there’s a reason it doesn’t work. this isn’t exclusive to gentiles, btw, I’ve seen this done by (white American) jews as well.

while ‘ashkenazi’ means “community originated around Germany” and ‘Sephardi’ means “community expelled from Iberia” (mizrahi” includes Persian jews, Bukharan jews, various Sephardic jews...), Jewish communities were shaped by immigration (fleeting persecution) and the existence of “European” jewish communities outside of Europe seems to confuse many. are Moroccan Sephardim white because they “originated” in Spain? are Armenian ashkenazim white?

let me put it like this. racists don’t care. how are Sephardic Tunisians are treated in France you ask? as Tunisian jews. a large amount of antisemitic hate crimes in France is against Sephardic maghrebis, because they don’t CARE. you won’t see someone stopping before a hate crime asking a Moroccan Jew for their family tree, going 500 years back and saying ‘oh shit my bad you’re actually from Europe I’ve decided to not beat you up my white brother’ like. (not to mention the assimilation of sephardim and connections with older communities)

the existence of west asian ashkenazim (like Turkmenistani, Uzbek, Armenian and Georgian ashkenazim) confuses you? the whiteness/lackthereof of asian and north african sephardim confuses you? Latino Sephardim? African-American ashkenazim? southwest asian jews that identify as arab? southwest asian jews that don’t? good. learn more about jewish history. educate yourself. and leave our identities to us.

(gentiles are encouraged to reblog, don’t clown tho)

#refael.txt #judaism #hate crime mention #racism #antisemitism

[peasantexchangeprogram]

im gonna b honest. the um, white jewish communities’ (as in those that are detached from joc communities so like. mostly americans.) approach towards mizrahi traditions that are not as common among yt jews (specifically hamsas and the ayin) is so weird. like, youre claiming them as “pan-jewish” but we both know your grandaddies called mizrahim superstitious and ~pagan~ for those exact practices.... also treating mizrahi/sephardic as two completely separate identities like black/white is so so ignorant like. for so many communities mizrahi/sephardic is a joint identity (mizrahi sephardim have way more in common w other mizrahim then with white sephardim). anyways. yall tire me.

#gentiles dont rb. all jews should rb this.

[nevermindirah]

Non-Jewish friends, y’all might be wondering right now: Israel is doing clearly unacceptable shit to Palestinians. So, why are some Jews ardent Zionists, and why do some Jews seem to feel personally attacked by criticism of Israel?

A lot of (non-Palestinian) non-Jews have asked me where I stand on Israel/Palestine over the years, apropos of nothing, just because I’m Jewish. For the longest time I felt so stuck because I just didn’t know much about Israel/Palestine and what little I did know turned out to be largely misinformation and I felt so much pressure to say The Correct Thing That All Jews Should Say About This Issue. Obviously the violence Israel is committing against Palestinians is horrific and the interpersonal weirdness individual Jews might experience as people discuss Israel’s horrific violence doesn’t compare. I’m making this post as a small supplement to the important conversations going on about what Israel is doing to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian refugees and their descendants living outside land Israel controls. I’m making this post because non-Jews might be feeling confused by conflicting messages about Zionism as either settler colonialism or Jewish self-determination. It sucks feeling like you have to choose only one oppressed group or another. It’s possible to support Palestinian liberation and Jewish liberation at the same time! Here’s some context that might help.

Palestinian friends will probably want to ignore this post, y’all shouldn’t have to deal with your oppressors’ feelings, and especially not right now.

Zionism is the ideology behind the devastating violence Israel is committing against Palestinians right now and has been committing against Palestinians since 1947-48. It’s heartbreaking and messy to talk about this reality, because Zionism originated as a strategy to protect Jews from antisemitism.

Any oppressed group can turn into oppressors under enough pressure, because humans are flawed. Jews fleeing antisemitism turning into Israelis ethnically cleansing Palestinians happened because Zionism is profoundly influenced by its time and place of origin: 19th century Europe.

Europe invented antisemitism, and basically every European country has done at least one very very bad structural antisemitism, like expelling all the country's Jews (the monarch and/or the church then stole all the wealth the expelled people had to leave behind), looking the other way when peasants murdered a bunch of Jews as an outlet for their frustration with the actual (non-Jewish) ruling class, banning Jews from owning property or holding certain jobs or being members of guilds etc, and of course the big horrific state-sponsored mass-murder operations the Inquisition and the Holocaust. From the 1790s through the 19th century different European governments emancipated their Jews, ie removed legal barriers to full citizenship and economic participation. But this didn't end antisemitism. Just like the legal improvements of the 19th and 20th centuries didn't end antiblackness in the United States.

Also happening in this time: nationalism swept Europe. From the French Revolution through the end of World War I, Europe’s predominant form of government transformed from multiethnic empires to nation-states, countries led by and for a particular ethnic group.

So this Austro-Hungarian dude Theodor Herzl came up with this idea for Jewish nationalism. Every other European ethnic group is getting their own country, so why not Jews? Maybe this is the solution to antisemitism! Maybe we’ll finally be safe if we just all move en masse out of Europe to a place that will take all of us and never expel us!

But also also happening in Europe and around the world in this time: European imperialism and white supremacist settler colonialism. Chattel slavery saw its height and then its end (legally, at least) during this era, but white supremacy entrenched itself across the planet in post-slavery economic practices and cultural imperialism as well as national and international laws.

I believe countries have a moral obligation to take in as many refugees as they can squeeze in. International law protecting refugees has evolved a lot over the past century, but we’re still devastatingly far from every refugee getting a safe place to call home, and the main reason for that is white supremacy. The Biden administration didn’t undo the Trump administration’s horrifically low cap on refugees until like last week and it’s because Democratic party leaders treat centrist white people as more valuable voters than the huge and growing numbers of people of color, immigrants, LGBT people, unmarried women, and working class people who want to vote for elected leaders who get that nobody’s free until we’re all free. Ahem. Back to the topic at hand, the US and many other countries turned away untold numbers of refugees fleeing the fucking Holocaust, so odds are slim they’d be more welcoming in less desperate times. Moving from places where Jews are an unwanted minority to places where Jews are still a minority and either still unwanted or little understood and unlikely to win revolutionary levels of support from a largely non-Jewish public seems like a bad plan.

In the mid to late 19th century, lots of Jews took the kernel of Zionism and ran with it in different directions. Maybe this ideology could mean Jewish cultural flourishing alongside stronger political/economic integration into the societies where we’re already living! Maybe it could mean a particular kind of socialism that advocates for the liberation of Jews both as Jews and as workers! Maybe it could mean a revitalization of Jewish religious practice both in Jerusalem where we have important heritage sites and everywhere we live across the world!

Eventually Herzl’s vision of Zionism won out over the others: Jewish nationalism in the sense of a Jewish nation-state, a country that has a Jewish demographic majority and/or that legally privileges Jews over non-Jews.

Problem is, if you want to do that, you have to find a piece of land on which to do it, and Earth was already a pretty crowded place a hundred years ago. Many locations were considered, and the one that ended up winning that debate was Palestine. Where a shit ton of people, mostly non-Jews, were already living. They were forming their own nationalist movement at the time: in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire they began to organize for local self-determination in Palestine.

The Herzl types who developed Zionism as an ideology and built institutions to advocate for and create a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine were a small subset of European Jews, mostly men, mostly with significant economic privilege within what Jews were able to achieve in their particular societies at the time. They were just as Orientalist as the non-Jews around them, just as antiblack, just as racist generally for all that Jews were (and sometimes still are) considered non-white in much of Europe. They had a cool idea (put a lot of effort into something that could protect Jews from antisemitism) floating in a bathtub full of shit, and they did practically nothing to protect the cool idea from absorbing that shit. Results of this include thinking about the millions of people already living in Palestine as if they were either like the rocks and the trees that will go with the flow and accept a new ruling class, or indistinct Arabs who would just leave for other Arab countries because what could be the difference — in the staggeringly small amount of time they considered the existing residents of Palestine at all.

This racist hand-waving extended to Zionist leaders’ attitudes about Jews outside Europe as well. White Jews in settler colonies like the US were largely anti-Zionist at the time (not wanting their own countries to accuse them of dual loyalty was a common reason) but European Zionist leaders took what help they could get from Jews in the US, South Africa, Australia, etc. Jews across the Middle East and North Africa, however, barely heard from Zionist leaders about any of this until Zionist militias had removed enough Palestinians from the land and it was time to repopulate it with whichever Jewish bodies were convenient. You might have heard "all the Arab countries expelled their Jews in 1948" but lots of first-person accounts tell a different story of Israel coercing Jews who’d lived securely for a long time in places like Morocco to immigrate to Israel and then confiscating their passports and forcing them to live on less-fertile land with fewer resources while serving as a buffer between Palestinians and European Jewish immigrants. Ella Shohat is the best-known writer on Israeli racism against non-European Jews and I strongly recommend Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Perspective of Its Jewish Victims as a starting point to learn more about this.

Which brings us to today. We still haven’t eradicated antisemitism, several European governments that did a lot of structural antisemitism they still haven’t made meaningful reparations for get to feel good about themselves for “giving the Jews a state” as if carving up the former Ottoman Empire was up to them and not the people who lived there, and millions of people across the world who previously either lived peacefully enough alongside Jews or hadn’t really thought about us much at all now have very valid reasons to be pissed at this country that claims it represents all of us.

Zionism was supposed to protect Jews from antisemitism. And Israel has saved Jewish lives! But if we hadn’t sunk the past 70+ years into an ethnostate we could’ve been putting that energy into other political and economic activity to create adequate international support for refugees while we work on ending root causes of refugee crises, like antisemitism, racism, climate change, and capitalism. Meanwhile Zionism has killed, maimed, incarcerated, stolen from, traumatized, and erased the history of millions of Palestinians just because they happened to be living on land that some dudes who had a lot more in common with Thomas Jefferson and Donald Trump than with you or me decided needed to be cleansed for a Jewish ethnostate.

White nationalists in the US love Israel because they want American Jews to go away. Fascist leaders across Europe love Israel for the same reason, so much so that Israel’s prime minister is buddy-buddy with Trump and the equivalent shitstains of several European far-right parties. And I don’t know what it’s like in other white supremacist countries that are close allies of Israel, but the overwhelming majority of Zionist lobbying that pushes the US to give so much aid to Israel comes from Evangelical Christians, because they believe all the Jews have to be in the Holy Land for Jesus to come back. No thanks.

This whole thing fucking sucks. Jews and Palestinians, like all human beings, deserve to be free. Many Jews are understandably afraid of what might happen next if Israel decided to give up on ethnonationalism, allow Palestinian refugees to return, make reparations, and establish a pluralistic democracy that represents and protects all its residents — will some Palestinians murder Jews in revenge? That’s genuinely fucking scary. And it’s genuinely fucking scary to be a Palestinian in Israel/Palestine, and has been for over 70 years. We’ve gotta do something different. I say that as a white person sitting on land stolen from Piscataway people who has thought in detail about what portion of my income would be reasonable for my government to tax in order to fund reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.

Ok. One final piece of context before I wrap this up.

Most Jewish institutions in the US are explicitly Zionist, teach children that Zionism is THE way to ensure Jewish safety, and increasingly tell non-Zionist Jews that we're unwelcome or even that we’re not “real” Jews. This comes in a context where it’s only been 76 years since the latest and most gruesome of several attempts to wipe our entire people off the face of the planet. If you grew up in that environment, you, too, might be jumpy about even hearing the words Zionism or Israel, let alone considering the devastation this ideology and country have caused Palestinians.

Jews have a right to exist. Jews have a millennia-old connection to this scrap of land in the Levant, and we have a right to access religiously and culturally important geographic landmarks. What we don't have a right to is murdering or expelling other people in order to make an ethnostate, on that land or any other. Zionism is settler colonialism, but it’s settler colonialism by and for people who have a valid need for protection from structural antisemitism, which means that it’s going to take a lot of messy empathy to undo. The members of my extended family who voted for Trump (non-Jews in my case, though Jared Kushner isn’t the only Jewish Trumpite) are afraid that ending white supremacy will demote them from a privileged class to equal footing with everyone else — that’s the kind of fear individuals work on in therapy, not the kind that’s reasonable for a whole society to prevent from happening. I and millions of Jews do deserve for whole societies to work hard to end antisemitism.

I would never and will never ask a Palestinian to gently request their liberation. But if you’re not Palestinian, and you’ve got a little extra empathy to spare this week, I ask you to remember what I’ve shared here when interacting with Jews about Israel/Palestine.

If you’re a fellow Jew reading this and you feel like Israel is the only way to guarantee our safety, all I ask of you is to sit with the idea that what Israel is doing to Palestinians is too high a cost for safety that’s still not guaranteed, and start to imagine real-world ways we can protect our people from antisemitism without an ethnostate.

I made this post for people who know me (or know of me I guess?) in Old Guard and Cap fandom, despite my better judgment, because talking about Jewish Booker and Jewish Bucky and Jewish Natasha makes me so happy and I think some of the people I love on these characters with might appreciate this perspective. I didn’t provide any links in this post on purpose (to decrease its usefulness, so fewer people will reblog it) because the risk of anon hate when talking about Zionism outside my immediate fandom circles is so high. You’re welcome to reblog this post if you find it helpful! Unless you’re not within a few concentric circles of me, in which case, maybe don’t? If seeing this post makes you want to send me anon hate, no need: many people who share your perspective have already done so on Twitter.

Reliable sources on all this info are a few googles away, and I apologize for the things I know I oversimplified as well as any things I might have misremembered. I’m an American who’s never lived in Israel/Palestine who is posting this on my fandom blog.

TL;DR: This is a short ‘n pithy post about the same idea.

TL;DR, fandom edition: The shortest distillation of this anti-Zionist Jew’s feelings on the matter can be found in segment 4 of Five Times Booker Got Wasted on Purim and One Time He Didn’t.

#palestinian liberation #hi i'm an antizionist jew no i don't really want to talk about it #and yet #here we are #long post #mine #antisemitism #settler colonialism #racism #european imperialism #genocide cw

[writingwithcolor]

Patrilineal Jewish girl, Sephardic culture

@feminismandsunflowers said:

hi! my character is a patrilineal Jewish girl in the usa, she didn't convert but still considers herself Jewish. her mom is Christian. her g-grandmother/father were undocumented refugees from Europe (antisemitism) and her g-grandmother was v closed off abt her origins but my character's dad thinks she said something abt being Sephardic. her fam has a fair amount of Sephardic culture. but could she claim Sephardic culture to any extent if they don't know? trynna get a handle on how to present her.

"My character's dad thinks she said something about being Sephardic"

and

"her fam has a fair amount of Sephardic culture"

are inconsistent statements. 

The first statement sounds like the only indication Dad has of which Jewish culture they are is a statement he's not even sure about ("thinks"?) and the second statement sounds like Dad considers himself Sephardic and practices Sephardic traditions.

So, to me personally, this would depend on the level of Sephardic cultural practice she grew up with. If she grew up with those traditions and Dad sharing them with her, then yes, that's who she is. If Dad isn't even sure he's Sephardic and what she practiced in her upbringing wasn't distinctively Sephardic in any way, I have a hard time seeing why she should claim the culture if she's not even sure if her ancestors were Sephardic.

Disclaimer that the Reform position is to 'count' patrilineal Jewish people as long as they were raised in the traditions. This is not the Orthodox position but I am Reform.

--Shira

I'm also a bit confused about this situation. I think it would be helpful if you start by specifying where in Europe the family comes from and what anti-Semitism they were fleeing from. I'm Ashkenazi and not the most knowledgeable about Sephardi history, but as far as I know it wouldn't make sense for a Sephardi family to be seeking asylum from the pogroms in Russia or Poland, for example. I guess it could make sense if they were from Spain, France or Italy, but we would have to know more, and I'm wondering if this isn't a 'trace your logic' situation. Why do you want them to come from Europe? *Quickly cracks open a Claudia Roden book* Sephardi Jews have origins in many North African and Middle Eastern countries, such as Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Syria, Iran and Iraq just to give a few examples. If you want Sephardi characters, why not represent those cultures instead of re-hashing the same Euro-centric Jewish stories?   

In terms of whether she could claim Sephardi heritage of any sort if they don't know, I'm interested in what Sephardi followers think. Religion-wise, I don't think there would be too much of a problem with it. Yes, Sephardim are more lenient on some things and stricter on others, so by picking the wrong one she may be following some of the rules wrong, but that's just a matter of tradition really. If someone was a ba'al teshuva and had no way of finding out which population their family came from, I imagine a rabbi would advise to choose one and stick to it without worrying too much about which one. I don't know 100%, though. 

Culture-wise, I don't know if this is what Shira was getting at but I wonder if it would be cultural appropriation due to Ashkenazi Jews being more likely to be white-passing and getting more media representation. Is Jewish lineage enough to claim Sephardi traditions and culture, or do you need to know for sure that you're Sephardi - that will be for Sephardi followers to decide. 

To build on Shira's disclaimer:

I'm Modern Orthodox and I would describe your character as someone who is not halachically Jewish, i.e. not in Jewish law. In most situations, this would be a technicality for me and I wouldn't hesitate to treat her as Jewish if she identifies as such. In particular, with her family history it makes sense that she considers herself ethnically Jewish and the legacy of discrimination is part of her identity - that's not something we can erase or overlook. It would be different if my kid wanted to marry her, I think (not that I ever plan to be one of those parents who would disown their kid or something for marrying out but I'm not going to pretend I completely wouldn't care, either). Then I might be hopeful that she may formally convert, especially if she had always lived as Jewish anyways.

 Other things she may experience if she hangs out in Orthodox circles: a few people might act like jerks and be iffy around her like she's 'not really Jewish', probably the same people who are pro-Trump and mansplain why women's exclusion from parts of Orthodox worship is actually protecting us. On the subject of women's exclusion, if you have any male characters with a similar parental background, they can't get an aliyah in shul or count towards a minyan - the character you're describing couldn't anyway, though. 

Hopefully if your other Jewish characters are nice people, they take to heart the teaching that you should rather throw yourself into a fire than humiliate someone else in public. When I was a student, there was a patrilineal man in our community who once entered the shul just in time to be the tenth man, making a minyan. A Chasidic man in the congregation quickly stood up and said "Oh no, I left the gas on!" and left. That way no one had to make a whole song and dance about the other guy not being allowed to count. Patrilineal Jewish followers, feel free to add more! 

-Shoshi 

I'm going to add some things here, about the terms Sephardi and Ashkenazi, that I think might be partially tripping the author up.

Sephardi and Ashkenazi are terms used to describe the traditions that a person follows. Those traditions are heavily linked to the land where they rose up, and to parentage, as people are typically encouraged to follow the traditions they grew up with. However! Converts exist, and converts are usually encouraged to join in on the traditions in their community. So, as an example, a person can be from anywhere in the world, of any racial or ethnic background, convert in a Conservative synagogue, and follow Ashkenazi traditions. A person can be from a place that is usually seen as very Ashkenazi-heavy, like Germany, and then end up converting in an esnoga (synagogue) in Spain, and practice Sephardic traditions. Either of those converts might have children, and those children will take on their minhagim (traditions), and will be a part of the culture their parents joined just like their parents were.

It can be confusing for many people because the terms are so often conflated with ethnicity, which is in turn conflated with genetic lineage. The trouble is, the groups they describe are older than the modern, western conception of race, and ethnicity,  and we don't completely fit into these categories. Ashkenazi Jews don't all come from Europe, even their ancestors might not. In the US it's been estimated that at least 12-15% of American Jews are Jews of Color, and those JoC are very, very often Ashkenazi. Some converted, some didn't, but they are still following the traditions, and are still Ashkenazi.

So it's fair to say that the traditions of Sephardim grew in the Iberian peninsula, and North Africa, but they also moved along with those Jewish people as they dispersed, and were expelled. Jews from Portugal fled to the Azores, but also to the Netherlands, where there is a large Sephardic presence, right in the middle of a space that is assumed to be all Ashkenazi! Scores of Jewish people from Morocco moved to France. Then too, people marry folks from other groups. Often they will pick one family's traditions to follow, but sometimes they mix and match, and sometimes they end up moving somewhere else and taking on those traditions.

Because so many people have traditions that match their genetic background we've begun using the term Ashkenazi to mean strictly white, European Jewish people. Sephardi we have taken to mean strictly white, Iberian Jewish people (which doesn't even include the massive number of North African Sephardim). We've forgotten entirely to cover Mizrahim (a tradition associated with the Middle East), or the Romaniote, or Cochin Jews, or any number of other groups. Yes, genetic background accounts for a large portion of those people, but it doesn't map completely, and it's important not to forget that.

This complexity is why the statements Shira drew attention to:

"My character's dad thinks she said something about being Sephardic" "her fam has a fair amount of Sephardic culture"

Don't make sense. You would know you are Sephardic, because it's something you do first, and may be, secondarily, directly linked to something in your ancestry.

Finally, since you are showing a patrilineal Jewish person, I really encourage you to show them consistently engaging with their Jewishness, and actively participating in Sephardic culture. I'm the Conservative one here, and my movement, and Sephardi tradition (there are no movements for Sephardim, just varying observance) don't allow patrilineal descent to give a person Jewish status halachically. This is not something I endorse. Patrilineal descendants really struggle outside of Reform communities, to be seen as Jewish, and often to just be treated with respect, so it's important that you give this character every opportunity to participate, and show who they are.

-- Dierdra

#Jewish characters #Jewish culture #Sephardi #Ashkenazi #Jewish #Judaism #terms #asks

[laineystein]

Who are we were never lost team?

A bunch of Jewish badasses!

We Were Never Lost is a documentary (in-progress) that explores and honors small Jewish populations in Africa. They’re currently filming but everything was put on hold when the filmmakers (Rudy Rochman, Andrew Noam Leibman, Edouard David Benaym) were detained in Iqbo, Nigeria because the government claimed that their visit was politically motivated…which it obviously was not. They were held in terrible conditions but were finally released 2 weeks ago. The whole ordeal only highlighted the fact that these minority communities in Africa experience extreme persecution.

Insta:

https://www.instagram.com/wewereneverlost/

Honorable Mention:

Rudy Rochman AKA one of the most beautiful Jewish men in existence for so many different reasons. (Okay but his love for Judaism and the Tribe and he was a Lone Soldier (Paratrooper!) and he went to Columbia University and is a proud Zionist and HAVE YOU SEEN HIS FACE?)

Please support the project if you can! Even if it’s just sharing posts on social media. The work they’re doing is so important, especially as the rest of the world continues to emphasize this belief that Jews are “White”. Ashkenazim are merely one subset of the Jewish people. It is so important that we highlight and celebrate not only Sephardim and Mizrahim but Ethiopian Jews and any lesser know Jewish populations, no matter where in the world.

✊🏼✡️🗣

#we were never lost #rudy rochman #aka the love of my life Rudy Rochman #Jewish things #jumblr #jewblr

[mikhalsarah]

The Converts Are Tired (well, this one is):

Reasons To Think Twice About Choosing (Liberal) Jewish Life

Most of the time when you read a popular article about a convert complaining about Judaism it will fall squarely into the genre of “Orthodox Judaism Bad”. This is because (as in most small communities) a tiny, elite, group controls the public discourse. In the case of Judaism this is mostly a cadre of wealthy, educated and firmly progressive-bubble ensconced Ashkenazi Jews who are either secular-atheist ethnic Jews of the “Jews are not a race we’re a culture” variety (Bagels and lox and the reading of Vox). This means they don’t like the religious generally and the Orthodox specifically, and love to publish any story that makes the Orthodox look bad.

Or they’re liberal Jews who believe exactly the same things as secular Jews but go to synagogue occasionally to learn how the things liberal Gentiles decided to believe only just last week are actually authentic Torah-approved tikkun olam, straight outta Sinai, so Jews really believed them first. 

This last one illustrates the competitive streak in Jews that means that whatever you mention, Jews always believed it first, or had it first, or did it first, and are always much better at it than the Gentiles. In the Orthodox world there are some compensatory attitudes, a sense of awe and humility at having been chosen for the awesome spiritual responsibility of wearing the yoke of heaven, of bringing Light to the Gentiles. There is no such counterweight for the secular and the liberals often end up burying it with the counter-counterweight of pride in their “superior” politics. The result is that a lot of prominent left-leaning Jews today spend most of their time bringing Spite to the Gentiles, instead. (Here’s looking at you, Bette Midler)

That may well be the first thing you get tired of.

That competitive streak also extends to other Jews, like the Sephardim, Mizrahim, Yemeni etc etc. Whatever an Ashkenazi Jew finds to be worthwhile and admirable, you can bet that they will assert that Ashkenazi Jews did it or had it first, or are better at it, or possess that quality in greater amounts than other Jews. Orthodox Ashkenazim value piety, so of course the non-Ashkenazi Jews are never pious enough, their women never cover enough, their halakhahic understanding is deficient. Secular and liberal Jews value progress and modernity and universalism, so the non-Ashkenazi Jews are too religious and superstitious, too backwards, too parochial and clannish.

“Ashkenazi supremacy” might be the second thing you get tired of. There’s so much of it around that perhaps it’s understandable that so many Jews now find it reasonable to assume that “White Supremacy” is lurking about in the Gentile world to the same degree. (White Hegemony perhaps, but having greater numbers and wealth does not equal a widespread attitude that whites are intrinsically superior.)

In a rare instance of agreement, both the frum and frei (religious and liberal/secular) Ashkenazim find non-Ashkenazim to be Not Quite Smart Enough. As you will hear over, and over...and over... in the Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish world, Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 115, the highest of any ethnic group.

That you will not only tire of, but may start to roll your eyes in exasperation at, after the umpteen-millionth time you are informed of the fact.

 If, like me, your IQ has been measured quite a bit higher than that, you may even have to bite your tongue not to sarcastically ask when you can be expected to be appointed the local Pooh-Bah of Judaism due to your superior intellect, since, clearly, they’re implying that IQ scores leads to the right to dominate and rule others and tell them how to go about their business. You’ll get tired of hearing about Freud, and Marx, and famous actors, and Nobel-prize winners and when everyone is praying asking for the merit of their ancestors to accrue to them, you will sincerely hope, for the sake of their descendants, that the Jews of yore had some hardcore leanings toward humility. 

You will get particularly tired, even in Orthodox synogogues, of having the Jews who left Judaism held up in admiration, even when they stabbed Judaism and Jewry in the back, like Karl Marx did. It will soon become clear that many Jews are so interested in admiring others of their race that they would rather have famous atheists like Sarah Silverman or Seth Rogen in their congregation than the most committed converts.

Now, the liberals aren’t completely wrong about the Orthodox, they can be right schmucks sometimes. One poor man, a friend of a friend, who was halakhically Jewish but not raised with any religion, decided to show up unannounced at my local Orthodox shul on the grounds that if he was going to do Jewish, he wanted to do it “right” ie Orthodox. He was asked if he was Jewish (normal at a shul), to which he answered yes, then he was asked his last name. For those who don’t know this is the butt-sniffing phase of Jewish interactions...an attempt to find out what part of the Jewish world, if any, a person descends from, how illustrious their ancestors might have been, and who they are related to that you know, in order to figure out who is above whom in the unwritten hierarchies of Jewish life. As a product of a mixed marriage, he naturally had his father’s non-Jewish last name and was told by the inquirer that the last thing the congregation needed was another “safek mamzer” (a possible bastard). The man had no idea what a safek mamzer was, thus no idea how to defend himself from such a hot mess of a take on Halakhah, but he knew he was being insulted and never returned...to any shul.

The liberal and secular Jewish conceit is that they don’t do any of those boorish and clannish things, and are “open and accepting”. Well, they do. They cloak it better, but they do. The interrogating of names is the start. Then all the questions about education and occupation. In all but the most competitive elite Gentile circles, you will rarely be asked what you do or what your level of education is, mainly because people don’t feel a driving need to know, and at churches it’s a “worldly concern” which interferes with the fellowship of believers. Even in the elite circles, there’s a sense that it will come up naturally in conversation, and that outright asking, or dropping the info like a bomb, is gauche...like asking new acquaintances about their salaries or tax returns.

Then it’s the attacks on anything that smacks too much of Orthodoxy and too little of being on trend with the elite Gentiles, like wearing kipot outside of shul or wearing tallit katan/tzitzit at all, or dressing too modestly if you’re a woman or, chas v’shalom, valuing marriage....or anything that anybody remotely religious or conservative might value.

Then the politics. Oh, you simply must want to joint my Progressive Jews Facebook group! You really need to come to this left-leaning social justice event. What? You’re not a Progressive? You’re a what? A Communitarian? (puzzlement) A conservative? (disgust) You’re not a liberal? You’re a Zionist? (ugh!) You’re not a Zionist? (horror!) You don’t think all Muslims want to kill us? (Are you insane?!) You think some Muslims do want to kill us? (Are you an Islamophobic bigot?!)

Oh yes, you will get very, very tired of the underlying assumption Jews have their their way of doing Jewish, voting, and thinking, is the only possible correct viewpoint to have.

And the intersection of that with being a convert is a fun game called Schrodinger’s Jew. Whenever you agree with another Jew politically you are, to them, a “real Jew”. Whenever you disagree with another Jew politically you are suddenly “not a real Jew anyway”. So for every Jew you meet, you’re a strange cat in a box with a question mark on it, and they’re waiting until you open your mouth to decide whether you deserve (metaphorical Jewish) death or not. 

You will get so tired of this you’d want to puke, if you had the energy.

You will get tired of annoying older Jewish men flirting “harmlessly” with you, if female, or constantly ribbing you if you are male. You will get tired of Jews either completely ignoring you as a dating prospect (with liberal Jews, you’d have stood a better chance of marrying one of them if you’d stayed a Gentile) or foisting every broken misfit Jew or other convert at you, hoping to make a shidduch. I like misfits, I just like to choose the compatible ones myself and not have them awkwardly shoved at me, “This is Aaron, he’s single too. I’ll leave you two to get acquainted”, or more likely stand there red-faced and horrified, before making excuses to escape and never making eye-contact again. Ditto for your natural social contacts with the opposite sex. Some Jew, probably a Boomer man, will spot you and, eyes twinkling, make a beeline right for you to make a Big Deal out of Things and embarrass both participants into avoiding each other like the plague henceforth.

You’ll get tired of sitting alone every Shabbat and holiday, except for some reason Pesach, when everyone suddenly remembers you exist, and that they have unfilled table-places, and invites you to their home. They don’t, of course, remember that you’re trying to be Sabbath-keeping (so quaint!), and that their house is a 3 hour walk away from the synagogue you live 5 minutes from. In fact, it’s actually past city limits in the incorporated adjacent village and there are no sidewalks. Because they don’t keep those mitzvot, they think you shouldn’t bother keeping them either. 

So drive on Pesach you will, because persisting stubbornly with the mitzvot makes them accuse you of thinking you’re better than them. I’ve lived long enough to realize that this is an accusation mostly lobbed by people who spend a great deal of time contemplating who is better than whom, and where they stand in a hierarchy, and can’t imagine that anyone has intrinsic reasons for doing anything. Therefore everything you do is unpacked as attempting to signal superiority and how dare you not know your proper place and try to trump me, a born Jew, or usurp my place!

You’ll get tired of envying those older married Jews who keep sabotaging your dating life, who met at a time when Jews still wanted to marry other Jews, and when liberal Judaism still wanted to help them do so. Thanks to the push to be “inclusive” of intermarried couples, you will tire of envying the Gentile spouses, too. They can’t go up on the bimah like you can, but in every other way they are far more accepted and integrated into the community than you will ever be. They will never want for a place at a Shabbat table, even though they don’t actually want it, or else they’d be a convert, wouldn’t they? Now that we all seem to be allowing all sorts of non-Jews to be synagogue members, not just the intermarried spouses, you will also get tired of wondering why the hell you bothered investing so much time, money and energy in the conversion process at all. The non-Jewish members and spouses have the right education, and the right jobs, and the right politics and you have.... a nice certificate that is worth the water you paid good money to be dunked in.

And you’ll get tired of explaining Jewish behaviour to Gentiles.

Yeah, yeah, the weird Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox stuff because all the Gentiles are watching Unorthodox and My Unorthodox Life on Netflix but that’s a curiousity that will be short-lived and they’ll all move on to the Amish, or Mormons, or the Real Housewives of ISIS or something.

It’s the everyday stuff you’ll tire of. Explaining Zionism, and non-Zionism, and anti-Zionism, and BDS, and whether and to what degree it might be Antisemitism and under what circumstances. Explaining the Israeli government’s latest idiocy even though you don’t live there and most likely never will. Explaining why Jews harp on about it being “the Jewish State” and the center of Jewish life and donate loads of money to it, and lobby their Diaspora governments to support it but still get mad when anyone intimates that they could possibly be in any way associated with or responsible for whatever idiot thing the Israeli government has just done. Explaining the never-ending dramas between different Jewish denominations going back to the Victorian Era, if not the Roman Occupation, between secular and religious Jews, between different ethnicities of Jews, and colours of Jews, and economic classes of Jews. and between Israelis and Diaspora Jews.

And explaining the clueless, classless and classist behaviour of various publicly Jewish celebrities and talking-heads. Explaining the subtle anti-Gentilism and elitism of them...sometimes the not-so-subtle kind. It is difficult to explain to Gentiles how it is that someone who hasn’t done a Jewish thing since their bar-mitzvah in 1950 can still believe that “the worst Jew is better than the best Gentile”, an actual quote, aimed at my Gentile sister-in-law, by her ex-boyfriend’s grandfather, which was the first time I heard the phrase...unfortunately not the last.

 It’s also difficult to explain to the regular, non-liberal-elite Gentiles among whom I live and work why a Jewish singer born in one of the wealthiest American neighbourhoods  who will never need a drop of the Build Back Better money (net worth $250 million) feels so personally betrayed by a politician on her own team, that it justifies mocking all the inhabitants of the poorest state in her country, mocking unemployment, depression and drug addiction, and mocking illiteracy rates that are actually lower than in her own state. And basically blaming them for voting Trump, thereby causing and deserving their situation, as though they haven’t been the poorest state since they joined the Union, and through most of that voted Democrat.

Oh yes, you will get very tired of running interference for the boorish and bigoted atheist Jews, as well, and their smug attacks on Christianity and the Christians who today overwhelming support Jews and Israel. Which extends even to wanting to mock and desecrate and otherwise gleefully ruin Christmas for those who are merely nominally or culturally Christian. And who not only stir up actual pre-existing antisemites, they leave such a bad aftertaste in the mouth of every ordinary Gentile in their orbit, that they overwhelm all the cultural goodwill toward Jews that took decades to build. The privileged secular and atheist and liberal Jews have platforms such that their every flippant temper-tantrum tweets gets far more press than any number of Jews delivering Christmas gifts to first responders or Xmas care packages to poor, sick or elderly Christians .

If you’re working-class yourself you’ll get tired of the subtle awkwardness, exclusion and put-downs that are personal. As in, aimed at you personally. And being treated as much like an exciting curiosity as the ex-ultra-Orthodox are. You are an amusing and flattering but lesser imitation of Jewishness, like the Chimp’s Tea Party at the Zoo. Aren’t you sooo cute all dressed up in your kippah and tallit, tapping away with the yad up on the bimah just like a real Jew!

And the Wokeness... a word which I only use because I am so old and decrepit and out of touch with the youth of today... and also because calling it Critical Social Justice evokes puzzlement from the same people who hate you calling it by the very word they themselves called it until sometime last week, being “Woke”. Even before Wokeness hit, the Conservative Seminary was churning out 20 times as many “activist Rabbis” as ones actually interested in Halakhah and scholarship. Apparently intellectual pursuits just weren’t compelling to the young...yet Orthodox youth who go into the Rabbinate don’t seem to find Talmudic study dry, boring and irrelevant. Hmmm....

Well, maybe I’m wrong about Progressivism and Wokeness, anyway. Maybe if you’re a smugly self-hating elite liberal white person, you will really like joining a synagogue full of smugly self-hating elite liberal Jews who aspire to nothing more than to be smugly self-hating elite white people. Personally I think it’s a lot of work just to come full-circle, but knock yourself out.

You might like being handed a copy of White Fragility on Shabbat. I mean, what convert who has already been treated to the subtle anti-Gentile bigotry, and the anti-convert bigotry, and the classism, already been automatically assumed to be dumber than the average Ashkenazi Jew, worse that the worse Jew, and had a little Rashi quoted at them to remind them that they are a ‘sore’ troubling the pure Jewish people, doesn’t also like to get a little second-hand Black-power bigotry directed at them at shul telling them they’re a “white devil” who needs to be “less white”. If I enjoyed that I’d have tried to join the Nation of Islam or the Black Hebrew Israelites, instead. And how the fuck do I be less of something that is an immutable characteristic involving my dermis? You are conflating race with culture. If being punctual were a racial trait linked to European melanin levels every participant at an Irish or Ashkenazi event would be there on time, which I can tell you as a frequent flyer at shuls and Irish language or music events is laughable, and every Japanese event would start late and UK newspapers would not muse about the excessive Japanese devotion to precise train departure times.

And what convert, sitting amongst Woke Jews, doesn’t feel warmed in the cockles of their heart to hear that “people should stay in their racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious lanes”? I mean, it’s not like conversion is a MASSIVE life-changing lane change involving peoplehood, religion, language and culture or anything, is it? What’s to be offended by?

Who knows, you might kvell with pleasure when your hyper-Zionist straight-pretending-to-be-Queer Rabbi-couple harangue you, a lesbian, gay or bisexual, and the whole congregation about 2SLGBTQQIAA+*$#!!!! issues, or post up on Facebook about your country “sweeping Indigenous genocide under the rug” on Canada Day, incidentally the same day that Israel had planned to annex the West Bank, which said Rabbis didn’t condemn. You know, that Indigenous genocide that was swept so far under the rug that our Prime Minister apologizes for it publicly at least once a month and for which we just had the flag at half-mast for four months, making it rather convenient that Prince Phillip, the husband of our Head of State, opted to kick the bucket several months beforehand or we’d possibly have had to bury the flag in a shallow grave, which I’m sure the Rabbis would have applauded as appropriate, and Trudeau would’ve made a moving speech about. Of course it’s all performative; his government drags out Indigenous land claims through the courts and has done nothing about housing, clean water or the continuing fallout from the Mercury-poisoning at Grassy Narrows, but if you’re Woke yourself you already know that it’s all virtue-signaling bosh and you’re ok with that. 

It’s not about doing better, it’s about pointing out how others are doing worse. It’s my Plymouth Brethren auntie hitting someone’s car in a parking lot and slinking away to park elsewhere because nobody saw her, but saying Grace at the top of her lungs in a fish and chips shop and exclaiming, “Praise the Lord” every five minutes, as though the Lord somehow doesn’t have the precise measure of people like her, whose lips praise Him but whose hearts might as well have been shot into space with the Voyager 1 probe.

Speaking of hyposcrisy while circling back to the topic, apparently liberal Judaism is no longer abiding by, “ Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper. “ Instead they are publicly attacking and condemning the countries they live in, and calling for them to be “dismantled”. And when the citizens who don’t have another country waiting for them with open arms point to this lack of loyalty with disgust, these same Woke Jews will be quick to scream, “Antisemitism! That’s the canard of the rootless cosmopolitan Jew with no loyalty to Diaspore countries!” 

No mate, a canard is “an unfounded rumour or story”. When you post it up on your public Facebook feed It’s not a canard, it’s a fact.

You might not even mind when your Rabbi tanks the entire shul and the building goes up for sale and you have nowhere to pray. Because who needs a synagogue? You can recite the collected works of Ibram X. Kendi as a congregation anywhere, if that’s your Torah.

You’ll get tired of hypocrisy. Tired of rising antisemitism at both ends of the political spectrum, and tired of making excuses to rightly-offended white, Christian Gentiles, and rightly-offended Black and Brown Gentiles (and Jews) that white and Jewish Wokism infantilizes and subjects to the soft-bigotry of low expectations, or whose religion we insult in our haste to show the goyishe Elites how cool we are by dissing Christianity and Jesus. 

Because guess what? Lots of Black and Brown people in North America, Europe and the Middle-East are Christians. There’s even some in Asia. And a lot of the ones who aren’t are Muslims who consider Jesus an honored Prophet. Christianity is growing rapidly in Africa, and by 2025 there may be some 760 million believers there...and not the wishy-washy liberal sort, either. The great white and Ashkenazi-Jewish Progressive Elite sport of dunking on Jesus and Christianity/Christians, smugly calling them backwards, and superstitious primitives, is going to become racially problematic with astonishing rapidity. One might even say that it will soon be A Very Bad Look.

But indeed, the entire point of conspicuous Wokeness is not to actually be less racist, but to deflect criticism on to others who “aren’t doing the work” (ie saying their approved lines) in the hopes that nobody will notice that you aren’t actually doing any work either. Imagine thinking that when you put up a Black Lives Matter square on your synagogue website people will forget that three years ago the Black French teacher you hired for your day school quit in outrage, after students called him a word which, were I to actually write it out, my writing it even in passing  would generate more Jewish outrage than the students who actually wielded it aggressively in the first place. Imagine thinking I will forget you whispering in my ear that the Moroccan Sephardi cantor and the Bene Israel Torah-reader and their families were “taking over the shul my grandfather built”. Nobody will forget the hypocrisy, especially when it goes viral on Twitter. The chickens, and the tweets, will come home to roost eventually.

It’s one thing to be killed for practicing your religion, or because some liberal Jews helped Syrian refugees. I’d be honored to die for a good cause. Not happy about it mind, but honored. Even dying because the Rothschild’s were super rich, and some moron thinks they still rule the world is merely boring. It’s quite another to think you might one day be murdered because Israel decided to annex the West Bank or invade Gaza, again or drop a bomb on Iran because they volunteered to get roped into another religion’s sectarian proxy-war. Or because another Seth Rogen decided to gleefully poke the bear, and attack Christmas, white people and old men (you know, like my Dad, an old, white Christian) with another abysmally unfunny movie in the genre “White People Bad”, something assured to rile up not just actual white supremacists (for god’s sakes let sleeping bears stay sleeping as much as possible until they die off), but also apt to annoy and offend all sorts of ordinary people (even the Muslims were offended) that he can then cite as proof that white supremacy is everywhere and he is some sort of Jewish St George, out bravely slaying it. In short, that you’re now most likely to be murdered as a Jew because some other Jews decided to be drama-stirring douchebags in as public a way as humanly possible. Or because another Rabbi decided that since you can be anything you want online, he should be an Antisemitic Canard.

And it’s no way to behave. Punching down at the lower classes, the rural, the less educated, ingratitude towards those who’ve supported us, and Israel, making classist, racist, sexist anti-immigrant remarks at people who don’t share your politics, including belittling the opioid epidemic, an utter lack of empathy or forgiveness. This is not just elitism, it’s a chillul haShem (a desecration of God’s name). It makes Judaism, Jews and God look bad. I’d try to help God out here, but for some reason God has seen fit to give the Jews making Him look like a schmuck more money and bigger platforms in this world.

 So this will be my final post on the blog I originally began to document my Jewish life. And it’s not a critique for the liberal secular Jews, who of course are oh so clever Ashkenazim, and could not possibly be on the wrong side of history here. They are about as likely to learn from a critique as the U.S. Democratic party, which is to say, not until they lose everything. They don’t want to hear a bad word about themselves. They only want to hear all the good things that drew converts in, not about the things that alienated and drove us away. The endless gaping hole in the soul of liberal Ashkenazi Jews that always needs to be filled with praise and adulation and goyishe acceptance. That’s why they love interviewing converts and writing books about us. We exist not to serve God alongside them, but to be served to the gnawing pit of collective bad self-esteem. We’re their narcissistic supply. We’re like an Oscar given to Sally Field, proof that they are loved.

This is a warning for other (potential) converts, because if you’re anything like me, and were drawn in by love of God, you will not be happy in Liberal Judaism long. You will regret other paths you could’ve taken, whether to Orthodoxy, or to other religions that would’ve served you better in serving God.

The thing you will end up most tired of is getting dragged further from God.

Since I’m officially resigning the Jewishness that Jews who disagree with me tell me I never had anyway, Merry Christmas.

Postscript: I decided to add an addendum to this, as I missed a rather crucial point: In this current climate of antagonism from Gentiles on both political sides exacerbated by the big mouths of Jews on each political side who are too busy virtue signaling and scoring political brownie points with “their side” to forget that all Jews are supposed to be ultimately on the same side, you’ll be exhausted worrying about the Jews you care about. Especially the ones who are visibly Jewish. 

That might be because they are Orthodox or otherwise intentionally dress Jewishly, wear identifying jewelry, have bumper stickers on their car, or mezuzot on their front doors...or it might be because they are like my best friend, who my Dad referred to as “the single most Jewish-looking person I’ve ever met in my life”....which is neither here nor there for my Dad, who’s merely stating a fact, but is definitely here or there for others who I’d rather didn’t notice. Maybe with the beard we could pass him off as a Syriac Orthodox priest but that’s about it. I don’t think even a kilt, a Guiness t-shirt and a MAGA hat would cut it.

Unfortunately that’s the one worry that I won’t be able to lose along with my religion, because I’m keeping the token Jewish friend. 

#Judaism #liberal judaism #conversion #wokeness #seth rogen #santa inc #bette midler #tired of this shit #merry christmas