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rainbowfractals · 1 month

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This post is about antisemitism. I'm going to put my cards on the table here. I am not Jewish, I am a Muslim. I have been spending a lot of time in predominantly left and leftist spaces for some years. I've been paying attention to what's being going on on this site too. I think the left, the right no matter what your politics are has a big problem with antisemitism. I've seen people constantly dismiss it, claim it isn't a priority, claim the effects aren't that bad.

Within the last 4 months, I have seen many Jewish people on the Internet , on this site and others leave or take down anything relating to being Jewish because of constant harrasment. This harrasment has had an upsurge but it is not new, I remember hearing the same canards and same false claims years and years ago. I keep seeing people betray a callousness to effects this political enviroment and hostility has on Jewish people.

They refuse to even push back against statements like 'they care more about the jews' or 'being a member of the chosen people means your better than everyone else and they're your slaves', 'there are too many jews in the government', 'there are no palestinians who are of jewish descent, have jewish family members or are jewish and this is propaganda''. I've seen people unable to speak about grief about those they trusted and respected turning out to be antisemites without being harrased over the ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

I've seen a lot of antisemitism in Muslim spaces too, ranging from 'we're tolerant and this is how they repay us', to condenscension to 'some aren't bad but others are bloodthirsty and vengeful', and denial of any antisemitic attacks or crimes done by Muslims. I have also seen attempts to put a stop to this and defend against this and correct misinformation.

But the biggest problem I've seen is that their are a lot of people, who see this is wrong but don't do much about it, or think that it will somehow take away from calling for Palestinian liberation some who have saying this line for years others who have only just started saying it recently. In my experience it is generally not Palestinians saying this who are far more likely to push back against dehumanzing rhetoric than those who say , 'Oh we can't focus it now, Palestinians are dying.' In fact I seen anger against using phrases like 'free palestine' to hurt Jewish people as using the oppression of a people to be antisemities.'

People [in general] keep adding all kinds of caveats 'oh some are good', 'oh some are kids', like acknowledging the humanity of the Jewish people takes the lifeblood away from a Palestinian. In my experience openly saying one should listen to and defend Jewish people and Jewish communities from antisemitism without question is getting increasingly a volatile response. Simply saying that 'Oh what if they're a Zionist?' to just horrific biogtry is antisemitic and you should never deny what's happened to them is bad on that basis. Its used a dogwhistle to justify anything.

And here's the thing, I've spent the last 5 or so years trying to learn all I can about Judaism and Jewish culture, and the dissonance between what I now know and what I see around me has grown very wide. I don't know that much, but I keep seeing the same misinformation and lack of care as to how destructive it is. I keep seeing people assuming that antisemitism is someone else's problem to deal with. I keep seeing all kinds of monolithic, flattening and caricatures that bear no resemblance to the reality.

The most jarring thing was that there are people on this very site that if you had one should support and stand with Jewish people against antisemitism to make a fairer world that had learned a lot about why it is so rampant are now shying away from these statements. Jewish people are spoken about as if one event has obliterated any past or present of discrimination. As if their lives they have led have ceased to exist. The things that caused that atrocity and the current horrors were still around 5, 10 years ago. It wasn't out of nowhere.

I have seen those who have no issue with agreeing with neo-nazis and just violent hate and doxxing and shootings and so on and simply unpersoning Jews in their mind. This has happened many times before and unless there is a big change will happen many times again.

More and more Jewish people are ailenated and leaving places there otherwise went, changing how they live their lives and so on. To all those who are suffering from this. I'm sorry that this happening you shouldn't be treated in such a cruel way.

And to those of us who seen or noticed this withdrawal, we should try to prevent it. Its not enough to say that's wrong to some hateful statements we have work against a hostile and suspicious enviroment this hate flourishes in and give it no air to breathe and to water to drink from.

Antisemitism is not someone else's problem, its all of our problem. We should be vigilant in spotting it and then doing something about it. Many say this but there is a great need for action. Everywhere, on the social media, on the schools and workplaces in the place sof worship in the businesses, in the politics, in the media and so on.

I'm going to say this again, as because I am not Jewish I cannot be claimed to be priveleged and looking for attention by those denying the case. When I say volatile reaction, I mean there are people who viewed me talking about differences in theology between Judaism and Islam and the work of David Bar-Tzur in sign lanaguage interepretation Jewish settings and writings and community work with the Jewish Deaf community and how Judeo-Christian does not exist and is antisemitic and so on.

As first distaste 1 as I spoke to them about it over multiple conversations and was met with increasing hostility and eventually claims that I was following 'degenerates' and that I was too 'kindhearted' and had become 'brainwashed' by 'Zionist media'. Which quickly changed from condescending pity to cold anger when I protested against this. When said I wasn't going to get disclaimers that some 'Jews are bad' all the time whenever I said anything about them and deemed what they were saying to be antisemitic, the conversation devolved from there.

In their eyes I'm object of suspicon for essentially sympathising too much with Jewish people and knowing 'too much'. Yes they considered the amount I knew to be a sign I was brainwashed. It was even insinuated that I lack faith in my own religion and so on. If I didn't like this, I could just walk away and ditch everything I have said and done then keep my head down. But those suffering from antisemitism can't do this as they are being targeted.

That's all I have to say. Please respond if you have anything you'd want to say to me.

This was someone I've known for years who had over time more and more negative reaction, by distaste I mean there was a distinct sense of when I brought the topic up. Perhaps naively I keep trying to talk with them knowing what I know now I would have disengaged sooner and stopping trying act like this was a two-sided good faith discussion earlier, but the past is the past.

I also did not expect this post to get so much traction, I assumed some of my mutuals would read it and it would get some likes and a few reblogs and replies then the attention would leave my blog. I've been reading the responses, thank you for what you've had to say.

Also there are many people doing good work fighting against this in Muslim communities all over, I fear perhaps my original version this post didn't focus on that much, I was talking more about people causing and keeping up this issue.

#antisemitism #leftist antisemitism #muslim #antisemitism in muslim communities #fractal posts

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judaismandsuch · 4 months

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On...This Nonsense

So, I saw this graph in a group I am a part of, and it is so increadibly wrong that I need to rant about it:

K, this is dumb for .... a lot of reasons. I am sure Muslims and Christians can see a load of issues that I can't, but that aint my focus.

I'm just going to talk about the Jewish religions, the flow, and use Christian and Muslim religions as comparisons.

First of all, the term of the parent religion: "Judaism". The term comes from "Judean" or basically members of the tribe of Judah.

The first definite use of it as a general term for Hebrews is in the Scroll of Esther where it calls Mordechai "a member of the tribe of Benyamin, a Jew" (paraphrased for clarity). That takes place around 480-350 BCE (scholars argue about which Emperor is the one mentioned).

(the term is used elsewhere/earlier, but usually a refrence to a member of the tribe of Judah, or else in a way that could go either way).

Now the reason I mention that, is because:

"Northern Tribal" would never have used the term, as they are from the ten lost tribes, and had a separate kingdom (Israel) VS Binyamin and Judah who had the southern kingdom (Judea).

Samaritans consider themselves to be descendants of the tribe of Manasheh and Ephraim, so wouldn't use the term either.

So the top religion should really be Bnei Ysrael, or Hebrew, or Isrealite.

Next: what the fuck is "Northern Tribal"? The split b/w the ten tribes and the 2 was political, not religious. They remained the same religion until they stopped existing/were lost/ the Samaritan split happened.

I even googled "Northern Tribal Judaism" (and variations) and couldn't find jack shit. It really shouldn't be on there.

Now, when/how Samaritanism and Judaism split is both a theological and historical debate. (to the point that talmudically there were issues with drawing lines between the 2). Hell, I have hear people use the term "Samaritan Jew" before. But tbh, it is innacurate, and insulting to both religions imo.

But either way the first split should be: Judaism-Samaritanism

On the same level in the chart it has Saducee, Pharisee, Eseen, and Christianity.

Which is bonkers. There were difference between the three groups, but they were not on the level of being schisms or seperate religions like christianity.

If you wanted to argue that they are, then Christianity would be descended from one of them (or all three). Because there wasn't a monolith religion for all 4 of them to come from. The split was there when Jesus was born.

So After Judaism you either have "Christianity" Or you have "Pharisee" "Saducee" "Essene" and then a line below you get christianity.

Next Line: "Karaite" "Orthodox" "Sephardic"

That is the most bat shit thing I have seen in my life.

First of all: "Sephardic" isn't a religious movement or theology. It is a culture and set of traditions. Putting it in a flowchart as its own heading, the same way Christianity and Islam do is insane.

Secondly, even if you do so, the others in the split should be: "Ashkenazi" "Temani" "Mizrachi" and a couple of others. not "Karraite" and "Orthdox" Next, while Karraite does deserve it's own spot (I can do a dive into the theology of it later) It Should be as a descendent of Pharisee with the other branch being Rabbinic.

Next: "Orthodox" with descendents of "reform" "conservative" etc.?

No! The term "Orthodox" exists as a counter to those! And only (until very recently) in Ashkenazi Judaism!

Now maybe the reason that they divided Sphardic it's own heading was to indicate that they don't have sects like the Ashkenazi do, but still, wtf?

And Splitting Hasidic that way? like it is equivalant to any of the splits in Christianity or Islam is batshit.

So really after "Rabbinic Judaism" you should get: "Ashkenazi Sectarianism" and "Not that"

And put all that shit under Ashkenazi Sectarianism.

Anyway, this graph sucks, Maybe I'll improve it later.

#judaism #jewish #jumblr #Christianity #religion #Samaritanism #karaite #reform #orthodox #rabbinic judaism #Maybe one day I'll do write up on the issue with orthodox and reform #or karaite #but that'll be a lot of effort

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daughter-of-sapph0 · 1 year

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so some terf made a video that said "feminism doesn't have to include everyone" and someone commented "so you're saying it's okay to exclude black women?" and op respond by saying race was never mentioned, so I said:

and we got in an argument

and in comes this blank profile. we'll get back to her later.

continuing our argument. she blocked me after this

but let's get back to that blank profile

they had no pfp, no videos, a private account, and only one follower (which I assumed was op, but I couldn't check because they were private). also, speaking as the sole authority of all Black people because she likes the video, and no one else can ever say anything bad about the video or how it's racist is EXTREMELY sus, especially when she has nothing at all on her profile to indicate she's Black. now I'm not saying that all people must have evidence on their profile to immediately let everyone know what minority groups they're a part of. that's just dangerous. but the fact that she goes through so much effort to hide everything about her and has only one follower (who's likely op) and talks like she's the queen of all Black people ever... something just tells me that she's non Black, and is actually just an alt account for op, a conservative white woman.

so I called her out on this. I said she was faking being Black and doing digital blackface. and she responded to me twice

1) the only person treating Black people like a monolith is you. you think that because you like the video, all Black people must like the video.

2) also, you aren't Black. you're a white woman who's pretending to be Black online. that's called digital blackface

3) I'm not a liberal. ew.

4) again you're treating Black people as a monolith by saying that all Black people hate all liberals

but wait, there's more. she went to my profile and noticed that I'm Jewish, and...

blatant antisemitism.

scratch a terf and a nazi bleeds.

#dostxt #transphobia #racism #antisemitism

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urboymutual · 2 years

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hello, hi! for the upcoming national hispanic heritage month i'm having a sobrenatural celebration from september 15th to september 20th! if you are interested in participating, please tag your creations with either #sobrenaturalcelebration or @ me!

if you have any questions at all, my askbox is always open.

rules:

any form of creation is encouraged! from amvs to webweaving to fics and more!

please only be latine/hispanic for participating in this event. this is meant to be a space for latine/hispanic creators to share their culture and uplift their voices. nonlatine/hispanic people are encouraged to reblog and like creations though!

i use hispanic/latine interchangeably but no spain content please 😭 we've been colonized enough

this is an event for all latine/hispanics! that means afro latines, white latines, asian latines and indigenous latines :)

no w/nc/st content or jack/anyone from team free will shipping please. and w/nc/st shippers please do not participate.

prompts:

day 1: flags/country/monuments

day 2: language/slang/dialect

day 3: folklore/religion/spirituality

day 4: dancing/music/clothing

day 5: food/family/holidays

prompts expanded below!

prompts in depth explanation

day 1: flags/country/monuments

this prompt is meant to explore the different countries latine/hispanic people come from. we are not a monolithic we have our own different flags, countries, and monuments. (man made and natural!)

day 2: language/slang/dialect

this prompt is meant to explore relationships with language. many of us may have a disconnection from spanish and/or native languages of our home countries which is worth exploring! there is also slang and/or dialect that may be only central to your own home country that would be interesting to delve into. spanglish included!

day 3: folklore/religion/spirituality

this prompt is meant to explore folklore of countries like duendes and la llorana. it's also meant to investigate relationships with religion (catholic/christan colonization anyone...) and uplift less talked about jewish latines and muslim latines. lastly, its meant to delve into spirituality including negative and positive experiences!

day 4: dancing/music/clothing

this prompt is pretty explicit but there are so many dancing styles, music genres and traditional clothing from latine/hispanic countries worth exploring and celebrating!

day 5: food/family/holidays

another explicit prompt, this one is about delving into relationships with family (a complicated matter for many latine/hispanic individuals) and celebrating traditional food and holidays that mean a lot to our identity.

again, these are just prompts you don't have to follow them nor do you have to follow them to the t. it's just a guide to help and inspire your creations. if you ever have anymore questions about them, again my askbox is always open.

#idk if this is enough time for creations 😭#or if many people are going to participate #but its worth a try #umm #spn event #sobrenatural #latinenatural #supernatural #spn #idk what else to tag this with #sobrenaturalcelebration

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ari-does-epi · 5 months

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Let's Talk Zionism And Anti-Semitism

There was a good post floating around earlier, but it's unrebloggable now. So, here's some common anti-Semitic rhetoric that's been floating around in anti-Zionist circles and how to tackle it!

1. Conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism

Judaism is a religious belief, whereas Zionism is (usually) a political view that Jewish people have exclusive rights to the land of Israel/Palestine. It's worth noting there are other meanings and understandings of Zionism, particularly within the Jewish community, that are less blatantly ethnocentric. Those are absolutely subject to criticism as well, but those are mostly intracommunity discussions.

2. Claiming Jewish people should simply "go back home" or be deported.

Jewish people have a legitimate claim to Palestinian land. There was an extant, peaceful Palestinian Jewish community in that region prior to 1948. If the Israeli occupation ends, it's possible many Jewish Israelis will choose to leave Palestine, but it's also likely many will choose to stay and help build a more equitable society.

3. Insisting Jewish people must talk about Zionism before discussing anti-Semitism

This gets tricky! All people in positions of privilege (those of us who are White/non-Black and Indigenous, Western-born, middle class, etc.) have an obligation to speak out against the oppression of those without those privileges. This includes an obligation for American Jews to speak out against the oppression of Palestinians. That said, not every conversation is going to be about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and that's okay. Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are intrinsically tied. Muslim and Jewish communities need to stand in solidarity with each other, and that includes holding space and time for dismantling anti-Semitism within anti-Zionist spaces. No one is free until we're all free.

4. Holocaust denial/ignorance

It's worth reading up on the history of the Zionist movement! The U.S. (and essentially all other countries) were complicit in the Holocaust, and this precedent fuels the fears of many Jewish people who think Israel is the only thing preventing another Holocaust. White supremacy plays on this fear to pit minoritized groups against each other.

5. Identity Politics

No group is monolithic! We should be analyzing our positionality, but simultaneously it's important to understand that every group is comprised of diverse individuals with widely varying opinions. That includes me! I'm speaking as an ethnically and religiously Jewish person of color, an American, and as a queer person. Those positions and experiences certainly influence my views, but at the same time, you can 100% find people with exactly those identities who have very different opinions. Be wary of anyone who claims that they alone speak for the Jewish community. The way around this is to interact with lots of Jewish people (especially Palestinian Jewish people!) What views seem to be common? Who seems to have good points?

#free palestine #jumblr #anti zionisim #history #politics #politics are public health <3 #no racist clowning thx. I'm just gonna block you #global health #violence

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rowanswoods · 6 months

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I was going to wait until I felt I could put together a coherent commentary on this to say anything. Apparently 4 am after the busiest haunt night of the season is that time. Fuck it, I'm here, let's go.

I have thoughts on the situation in Palestine right now. What is happening in Palestine right now is not just a war crime, it is a litany of war crimes. It is inexcusable. It is a humanitarian nightmare and a travesty. The Israeli government has committed and continues to commit war crimes. They are terrorists. Hamas are terrorists, but so is the Israeli government.

HOWEVER, that does not mean that all Jewish people are terrorists or evil or whatever word you might use. First off, Jewish people are not a monolith and neither are Israelis. You will find assholes and horrible people in any group if you look, that does not make the whole group bad. It does not make the whole group terrorists - unless you're looking specifically at a terrorist organization, like the KKK for instance. The bad guys here are the Israeli government. Not the entire Jewish people. Not the Jewish diaspora. Not the Jewish people living in Israel. "But what about -" No. Nope. Not even them. Unless the people you're targeting with that comment helped to construct the current situation or are aiding it on a string-pulling level, no.

I also want to be clear that this does not even include the rank and file soldiers of the Israeli military. Not even they are at fault for what is happening. Military service is compulsory for many people in Israel. You can't be held accountable for the actions of an organization you were forced to join. This goes for rank and file solidiers of any military. And yes, we like to glorify the ones who refused to follow orders, but that ignores the consequences and why that may not be an option for people. M*A*S*H, for all that it was meant to be a comedy, was right on the nose with the line that, "With the exception of a few of the top brass, nearly everyone in war is innocent." Not everyone has the option of disobedience.

And for anyone saying that Palestine deserves this treatment because of Hamas, first of all fuck you, but secondly, no they do not. Hamas is a terrorist organization. The Palestinian people are just people. Israel has been wiping entire family trees off the map. There is no excuse. None. Not a thing. There is no excuse for what is being done to the Palestinian people. There is no excuse for the civilian lives senselessly taken in any armed conflict. That is why targeting civilians is a literal war crime. And just like the Jewish people, the Palestinian people are not a monolith. Arabs are not a monolith. Muslims are not a monolith. If you're not treating every white guy you come across as a Klansman, you have absolutely no excuse for treating every Muslim and every Arab as though they're Al Qaeda or Hamas or whatever. (If you are treating every white guy as a Klansman, you still shouldn't be treating all Arabs and Muslims as terrorists, and you should stop treating every white guy as a Klansman while you're at it. And yes, there is a difference between reasonable caution and racially-based overgeneralization.)

And to be crystal clear, I do not condone my government's part in this tragedy. I'm from the US. Our government should be ashamed. Our government should be held accountable. And our government was also founded as a colonial force that stole land from its existing inhabitants and that committed and continues to commit atrocities and war crimes; I am not excusing that either, make no mistake. Israel is also a colonial government that stole land from its existing inhabitants and that committed and continues to commit atrocities and war crimes.

The real problems in this situation are the governments and organizations that are controlling all the moving pieces here. The problem is not and will never be the people who have to live with the consequences of the actions taken by those in power.

#politics tw #Israel #Palestine #israel palestine conflict

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vaveyard · 2 years

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I always found it weird how white Americans say "I'm Italian", "I'm Irish", "I'm Polish" and yet don't speak the language, read the literature, know the history, or the different cultures (Italians aren't a monolith) besides a few skin deep details. It's almost like a fetish. Unless your relatives or ancestors are from specific native ethnic groups, or unless you grow up with that culture (language, stories, traditions, history, etc.), Italian, Irish, Polish are just nationalities. Tell an Italian "I'm Italian American!" and they'll start speaking to you in Italian, because if you don't speak the language why would you say you're Italian at all, right?

The obsession is even weirder considering how people of color struggle to trace their ancestry and find their culture because their ancestors were mostly brought to the US against their will, or in the case of Natives, their communities and cultures were wiped out 🤦🏾‍♀️

Now that you're an "influencer", you should be more careful and less ignorant. Ignorance spreads like a disease. There's enough white Americans already using ancestry as something that makes them "special". With the boom of 23andMe I've seen so many white Americans excited to find out they are 0.8% Native, completely ignoring the implications of that.

Considering that the vast majority of your following seems to be white and privileged (I wonder why), and how you can influence them, it'd be nice to see some effort to fight ignorance. This liberal approach of exclusively talking about issues that personally affect you and people like you, the refusal to talk about the racism in publishing, for example, (or to call out publishing at all, really), or how a few authors getting 6 figure deals means others (mostly poc and queer) get almost nothing, or how you're always ready to scold readers of color or queer who rightfully complain about the representation in your books, how you say they dehumanize you (when people of color and queer are literally dehumanized to the point they get beaten and killed in the streets), speaks volumes. Add this fetish to all of it, and of course liberal racist women are going to flock to you. You can say you're anti-racism all you want, but until you you put action behind your words, it's empty virtue signalling. Retconning a character's ethnicity because your work is otherwise all white is racist (like JKR making one character gay when the series is over, and saying there's one Jewish character at Hogwarts). Just like creating queer characters just to serve the straight ones/get them together, or to portray how evil the society is, is homophobic (unless you're writing from experience, which you're not; you're just associating queerness with suffering and abuse, which are big stereotypes).

Everywhere I turn there's people wearing their alleged ancestry like a trendy bag. "I'm Italian :) wait that's not cool anymore? I'm also 5% Irish! No? I'm 4% French! 15% Scottish Gaelic!"

I know white Americans who say "My family is Italian from Sicily" but the few Italian dialect words and songs they know are in Neapolitan (Sicily and Campania are two completely different regions, with over 700km/400 miles between them). Or white Americans who say "I gesticulate a lot because I'm Italian!" but don't know anything about the country's history and cultures.

It's like you are constantly looking for something to make you special and "not like other Americans" when the truth is that most white Americans have ancestors from other countries, and they arrived to the US by choice.

Italian-American is a very specific ethnic subgroup, with its own literature and working class culture, of immigrants who've faced poverty, starvation, racism (in the beginning, Italians in the US were considered poc) and who've had to climb their way up to a decent life.

You're a privileged white woman, who got published through connections made at an expensive college, who brags about how rich she is to her audience of kids and who airs her dirty laundry against air companies online, all the while managing to brag about how she travelled first class to another continent, so she's entitled to better treatment than other people (I mention this because that's how I discovered you, people in reading circles where shocked at how you were trying to use your audience to call out and shame a company for an inconvenient, but common and not world ending mistake. First world problems).

Your Italian ancestors are rolling in their graves.

Lots of people like to say I'm this, I'm that, and yet can't even find the country on a map, or know the names of its regions.

You said your mother (?) is Scottish and you regularly visit family in Scotland, yes? You're much closer to Scottish than Italian. Or is that not quirky and exotic enough?

ma’am this is a Wendy’s

please focus on yourself, this fixation you have with me seems really taxing on you

(p.s. when my grandmother came to the US she wasn’t allowed to go to school unless she could speak English, so she sat in silence for years before she felt it was safe to speak in her classroom, it caused her a huge amount of trauma so she never taught her children and grandchildren Italian, I don’t think policing people’s backgrounds and how they identify, especially based on language, is terribly useful)

#ask #that anon

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jaanusbooktalk · 2 years

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Tell Me How You Really Feel by Aminah Mae Safi - Book Review

9.5/10 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️🌟

TWs: car accident, cursing, sexism, panic attacks, abandonment

(TWs are ranked in order of severity, please take them seriously!)

Summary

“The first time Sana Khan asked out a girl-Rachel Recht--it went so badly that she never did it again. Rachel is a film buff and aspiring director, and she's seen Carrie enough times to learn you can never trust cheerleaders (and beautiful people). Rachel was furious that Sana tried to prank her by asking her on a date.

But when it comes time for Rachel to cast her senior project, she realizes that there's no more perfect lead than Sana--the girl she's sneered at in the halls for the past three years. And poor Sana--she says yes. She never did really get over that first crush, even if Rachel can barely stand to be in the same room as her.

Told in alternative viewpoints and set against the backdrop of Los Angeles in the springtime, when the rainy season rolls in and the Santa Ana's can still blow--these two girls are about to learn that in the city of dreams, anything is possible--even love.”

TL;DR Tell Me How You Really Feel is an ode to romantic comedies, following two girls on opposite sides of the social scale as they work together to make a movie and try very hard not to fall in love. Cheerleader meets film nerd, enemies to lovers.

I found this book through one of those tik tok videos where someone is flinging books off a pile at light speed under a caption “queer SA (South Asian) books you need to read”. I absolutely love those videos, even though they test my screenshotting abilities.

It’s been a while since I updated this blog(?) and that’s because I’ve been very busy finishing out the school year and reading every gay book I could get my hands on over the course of pride month. I will be posting reviews of those books soon, but in a quick review so far this month I’ve read:

• Last Night At The Telegraph Club

• Unearthed (graphic novel)

• Café con Leche

• Eighty Days (graphic novel)

• Tell Me How You Really Feel (this review!)

• The Raven Cycle (yes all 4 books, no I will not be reviewing)

Honorable mention: All 50 episodes of The Untamed (SUCH a good cdrama) & Season 1 of Stranger Things

I’ve realized over the course of this book binge that I prefer my enemies to lovers to have good reasoning - or at least understandable reasoning on both sides. My favorite part is seeing how that can morph into love without either realizing until it’s too late *cue evil laughter*

Tell Me How You Really Feel does that perfectly. I especially loved how it was written - the characters were flawed, raw and dynamic, and the writing style reminded me of books by Nicola Yoon (The Sun is Also a Star, Everything Everything). The romance isn’t necessarily the focus - it’s shoved in on the shelf along with everything else happening in the characters lives. The story simply starts (ish) and ends with the life of their romance within that.

And because this is a gay high school romance between a cheerleader and a film nerd, of course there are a million movie references, from Pakeezah to Pretty in Pink.

Meena Kumari 😩🧎🏽‍♀️

But real quick, let’s talk

Representation

Sana Khan and Rachel Recht, the main characters, are both into women. Although their sexualities aren’t explicitly stated, this part is made very clear.

Sana is desi, and Persian and Indian if I remember correctly? Her family is very mixed and has a lot of languages (Bengali, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, French, etc). She is second-gen American, while I’m pretty sure Rachel is first-gen (at least on her mom’s side).

Rachel is Mexican and Jewish, and her family consists of just her and her father (and their larger community) in comparison to Sana’s many cousins and aunties/uncles. Her full name is Rachel Consuela Recht, which I’m guessing is to show her mixed cultures.

For Sana I can somewhat call this an own voices review on representation, but please keep in mind the Indian (and larger desi community) is not a monolith & we won’t all agree on my own interpretation.

What I really liked about representation for Sana and her family was it is very women-centric. Her grandmother, Mamani, is very clearly the matriarch, and Farrah, Sana’s mom, is a single mother working in the film industry. In western literature desi culture is typically portrayed as oppressing women, especially in Muslim households, but this stereotype is flipped on its head by Sana’s family. It also showed how within a religion certain family members can be more religious than others - Sana & her Mamani are more religious (praying regularly, not drinking, etc) while Farrah is less so - and there’s no negative connotation on it.

Rachel and Sana both engage in religious holidays over the course of the book (Norwuz for Sana, Passover for Rachel). Since I’m neither Muslim or Jewish, it was interesting to learn more about the holidays and how they’re celebrated.

Single parenting rep (Rachel raised by her dad, Sana raised by her mom) was also really good. As someone being raised by a single mom & at one point a single dad, the struggle is portrayed really well.

Finally, I love that Sana fills the character of pretty perfect Gilmore-girls-esque cheerleader. Brown women don’t often get to be portrayed as lovely and soft and also raw and real at the same time. It really hit my heart 💗 Sana’s features are seen as beautiful by everyone around her - like a commonly accepted fact. She’s the official “pretty girl” of her school - and so much more beneath that.

What I Loved:

Aside from the good rep, the way the book is written is just ✨ poetic ✨

“Sana smiled, and suddenly Rachel understood every stupid love poem comparing the beloved to the sun.”

HOW DO I RECOVER??

Mainly though, I think this book came at the right time for me. Sana’s situation was really relatable to me, and her storyline actually helped me figure out some stuff in my own life (no spoilers!)

If you’re worried about the future, or planning to become a doctor or lawyer - read this book.

I’m also a sucker for big movie style gestures so this was a plus. I could see how the book was going to end generally way before the end, and that made it more of a comfort read than an “intellectual” read. I loved the character development as well - some serious words of wisdom in there!

As someone who wants to go to college in LA, and can’t afford to visit, this is as close as it gets to seeing what life there is like for me 😂 I’m curious to see what those Santa Anas feel like!

Why I couldn’t give it a 10:

I wasn’t the biggest fan of Rachel’s character to be honest. She hated Sana so much at the beginning, for something that had happened in their freshman year (the story takes place in their senior year). I could understand animosity, but it was another level. It made me think Rachel had anger issues - she seemed really self pitying and insecure. Which would have been fine - I’m all for character development - if she had realized that. But Rachel never seemed to come to terms with the fact that she had treated Sana like sh*t at every turn for nearly 4 years. It’s not that they don’t fall in love (this is a love story) but she doesn’t really feel remorseful for how she acted.

On set, when she’s directing the crew, the way she treated them reminded me of Michael Scott from the Office 😭

I also wish there had been more focus on the other characters in the book. Farrah, Sana’s mom, and Daniel, Rachel’s dad, kind of felt like glorified plot devices, especially near the end. Same goes for Diesel, Sana’s so-called best friend. We don’t actually see a lot of their relationship aside from Diesel giving her rides from school and then playing video games with her. In the end, his purpose was also a little plot device-y, a little serving the main ship, etc.

I liked that Diesel subverted the dumb insensitive jock trope, but I would have loved to see more of him and Maddie (another cheerleader)!

^unrelated but I love this scene (very scary cheerleader)

Overall, the book was a satisfying beach read (as in, I literally read it on the beach). Feel good, decent character development (on Sana’s part), and it gave me something I’d really been searching for: an enemies to lovers story between queer women of color in high school. Like babe- this is my niche!!

And yes, I cried at the end.

I sincerely recommend to fans of:

The Sun is Also A Star

Everything Everything

Movies (if you’re a movie nerd, you’re going to get wayy more of these references than I did)

But I’m A Cheerleader (movie)

Sense 8 (show) especially if you like the wlw couple

Most of my reviews for this month are going to be LGBTQ+ stories between PoC 🏳️‍🌈 so stay tuned!

#book review #bipocbookstagram #poc books #booklr #diverse reads #lgbtq books #tell me how you really feel #aminah mae safi #lets go lesbians #everything everything #the sun is also a star #queer enemies to lovers #enemiestolovers #cheerleader #film nerd #happy pride 🌈#queer bipoc #queer desi

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freebiblestudies · 1 year

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Biblical Archaeology Lesson 01: The Old Testament

There are many skeptics who believe the Bible is a book of legends, myths, and even fairy tales. However, the Bible speaks of real people, real places, and real historical events. How can we be so sure of this? The answer lies in biblical archaeology.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, archaeology is “the scientific study of material remains (such as tools, pottery, jewelry, stone walls, and monuments) of past human life and activities. Biblical archaeology is a historical discipline that uses relevant archaeological discoveries to shed light on the historical and cultural setting of the Bible.

Let’s examine ten fascinating archaeological discoveries with relevance to the Old Testament of the Bible.

Let’s read together 2 Kings 17:5-23.

The Assyrian Limmu List (also known as the Assyrian Eponym List)

The Assyrian had devised a calendar system where they named each year after a prominent Assyrian official. The Limmu List is a clay tablet with a list of those names in chronological order, dealing with years 858 to 699 BC. The Limmu List is important because it establishes the chronology of Assyrian kings, which can be used to cross-reference and reconstruct the chronology of the kings of Israel.

Let’s read together 1 Kings 16:29-33.

Kurkh Monolith of Shalmaneser III

This is an Akkadian inscription on limestone. It speaks of the military campaigns of the Assyrian King Shalmaneser III. One campaign of note is the battle of Qarqar in 853 BC. There is a reference to “Ahab the Israelite.” This may be a reference to king Ahab of Israel who reigned from 874 to 853 BC.

Let’s read together Daniel 1:7; 2:49; 3:12-30; 2 Kings 25:8-9; and Jeremiah 39:9-14; 52:12-26.

Nebuchadnezzar II prism

This is an eight-sided clay cylinder with inscriptions on each column (side). The prism has an inscription telling of its completion in 598 BC. Only six columns are preserved. Column six is a list of Babylonian officials. Nergal-Sharezer and Nebuzaran, two Babylonian officials mentioned in the Bible are on this list. More notably this list also has the names of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego, the Babylonian names of Daniel’s friends Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael!

Let’s read together Numbers 21:29; 2 Kings 3:4-5; and Jeremiah 48:46.

Moabite Stone (also known as the Mesha Stele)

This is a stone inscription written by Mesha king of Moab around 840-860 BC. It confirms the Moabites worshiped the god Chemosh. It also mentions Mesha winning a victory over Omri, king of Israel.

Let’s read together 2 Chronicles 36:22-23 and Ezra 1:1-8.

Cyrus Cylinder

This clay cylinder is a propaganda account of Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon created around 539 BC. In addition to establishing Persian rule, the Cyrus cylinder proclaims deported people may return to their homelands. This proclamation gives credence to the Bible’s claim the people of Israel were allowed by Cyrus to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple.

Let’s read together 2 Kings 24:8-20.

Jerusalem Chronicle

This describes the history of the kings of Babylon from 605 to 594 BC. It records the first deportation of the Jews in 605 BC. It also mentions the second deportation of the Jews in 597 BC, the destruction of the Jewish temple, the capture of Jehoiachin, and the appointment of Zedekiah.

Let’s read together 2 Kings 18:13-25 and 2 Chronicles 32:9-10.

Lachish Relief

This is a gypsum wall panel relief dating to 700-681 BC. It depicts Sennacherib’s victory over the kingdom of Judah at Lachish. This relief is significant in that the kingdom of Judah was formidable enough for Sennacherib to commission the relief in the first place. Secondly, it is telling that the relief does not depict the defeat of Jursalem, meaning Sennacherib never conquered it, just as the Bible declares in 2 Kings chapter 18 and 19.

Let’s read together 2 Samuel 2:1-4; 5:3 and 2 Kings 8:25-29.

Tel Dan Stele

This stele was erected by an Aramaic king dating to approximately 900-801 BC. The inscription boasts of the king’s victory of “the king of Israel” and “the king of the house of David.” The significance of the Tel Dan stele is that it testifies to the historicity of King David in the Bible.

Let’s read together Psalm 12:6-7.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

This is the most well-known biblical archaeology discovery. Fragments of all the books of the Bible (except for the book of Esther) have been found in the caves of Qumran in Israel. These fragments date from roughly 250 BC to 68 AD. The Dead Sea Scrolls prove that the Old Testament we read today is the same Old Testament Jesus read over 2000 years ago.

Let’s read together Numbers 6:24-26.

Ketef Hinnom Silver Scroll

This is the oldest record of the Scriptures. It records the blessing in Numbers 6:24-26. The Ketef Hinnom scroll predates the Dead Sea scrolls by hundreds of years, dating to approximately 600 BC.

There are so many more archaeological findings of relevance to the Old Testament. If you are interested, you can look up the Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, the Merneptah victory stele, Hezekiah’s tunnel inscription, the Lachish Letters, the Nabonidus Cylinder, the Berlin Pedestal, and the palace of Sargon.

These biblical archaeological discoveries show that the Bible is not a book of legends, myths, and fairy tales. These archaeological finds show that we can trust the Bible when it speaks of historical things. If we can trust what the Bible says about historical things, then we can trust what it says about spiritual things.

Friend, are you willing to put your trust in the Bible?

#bible study #biblical archaeology #dead sea scrolls #Psalm 12:6-7

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cruelsister-moved2 · 2 years

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its just constantly so extremely frustrating to be made aware of how absolutely awful most peoples holocaust education is/was (unless they are of a group who was directly affected) like in most cases it isnt really those peoples fault because they were never taught & in some cases taught actively badly so they were led to believe that they do know whilst actually being very ignorant; so how can you rectify what you don't know that you don't know. and the market is so saturated with ~inspirational gentile hero saves a handful of sympathetic acceptable passive jewish victims~ stories and other such Relatable Heartwarming content that even if you did try to educate yourself you could easily do more harm than good.

it feels like we have reached a point where there are now two holocausts, a specific historical one which is largely relegated to a niche academic field, and a monolithic cultural one that appears constantly as a shorthand for fantastical horrors & exists with little specificity or objectivity because it has become a spectre, a mindset,a cautionary tale, a 2D villain, rather than a real historical event which happened to (&was done by) millions of real human beings, thousands of whom still live today. (and also the 3rd which exists in the lives and minds of those who experienced it directly + their families). people can happily detach it from a long & currently thriving continuity of european antisemitism and anti roma racism because it has become just an abstract manifestion of Evil.

no space for the realities of camps liberated by segregated american regiments, of the holocaust of bullets, of the regular families who held their children up on their shoulders to get a better view of murders in the street while they sang the national anthem, operation paperclip, transports that continued to be used in poland for decades after the war to move regular goods and livestock until they were bought by american museums, gentiles quietly moving into the homes of their vanished neighbours once it seemed like they weren't going to come back, jewish labour movements, displaced persons camps, escapees from camps and ghettos who brought their stories to governments and international media from the start, anticipatory pogroms in occupied countries before the nazis even arrived, etc. no there was just one very evil guy, maybe 3 or 4 max, who with the help of advanced modern technology was able to kill millions all on his own just because he felt like it. and im sure people will draw very normal and intelligent conclusions from this understanding of things and it will lead to no problems at all

#it was weird when the maus thing was very big and everyone cared for like a couple of days and there was like #a lot of noise about people planning to educate themselves but then I still hear all the same misconceptions and ignorance as before #so it seems like they didn't actually at all #I don't want to come off preachy at all im just like. sits down and sighs very deeply and lays my head on the tavel #table*#shoah tw #im always somewhat wary of the like we should learn about the holocaust to like see how it is relevant in our own lives or w/e #because like. everyone should learn about it because it is one of the most major events in history it doesn't need justification #but we are living in the same world it happened in like 2/3 generations removed from the people it happened to and from and amongst #there is a sense that there is no continuity from it when in fact it is literally responsible for the entire shape of the modern west #looking at stuff from the 60s and realising they were like ~20 years removed from it like it's part of EVERYTHING #it makes 0 sense to spend more time learning abt Alexander Hamilton or whatever #it has all these psychological repercussions too even if it was something that happened 300 years ago #but it is also like..... all of our very foundational history and it is sooo not treated as that in the education system #for us I rmbr being taught abt ww2 as all like oh the great depression and d day and pearl harbor etc #and then the holocaust as like this completely isolated aside as though it wasn't part of that world and by extension our world but it was #like an obligation to teach us about it as its own like almost a curiosity #anyway.. I'm just like so tired and frustrated

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paddysnuffles · 3 months

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Does what's happening in Palestine fit the steps for genocide? (Spoiler: Yes): Part 1/2

A lot of people have been taking issue with calling what Israel has been doing to Palestine a genocide, so I thought we’d go over the 10 steps experts say take place before/during a genocide and see if Israel’s actions qualify.

To be clear: I’m NOT saying that all Jewish people are complicit in Israel’s actions nor that they all agree with it. Jewish people are no more monolithic than any other group and people should be judged based on their personal beliefs and actions, not as a group. In fact, most Jews outside Israel have been speaking out AGAINST Israel's actions.

I’ll be using the Montreal Holocaust Museum’s resource on the ten stages of genocide and will link to sources for all the claims that I make (if I forget to link anything by all means remind me to fix it).

Step 1: Classification

Groups in a position of power will categorize people according to ethnicity, race, religion or nationality employing an us versus them mentality.

According to Pew Research, slightly more than half of Israelis think that Arab Israelis should be expelled from the country.

Step 2: Symbolisation

People are identified as Jews, Roma or Tutsis, etc., and made to stand out from others with certain colours or symbolic articles of clothing.

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have different colours of IDs from those of people in East Jerusalem and Israel to set them apart (those in the west have green IDs, those in the east have blue IDs.)

Step 3: Discrimination

A dominant group uses laws, customs, and political power to deny the rights of other groups. The powerless group may not be granted full civil rights or even citizenship.

In the occupied West Bank, Palestinians must have their IDs for internal travel, due to the checkpoints interspersed within the territory. This system has drawn comparisons to laws in apartheid South Africa designed by whites to control the movement of blacks and mixed-race people and to keep them in inferior positions.

It is illegal for a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank to travel to Gaza and Jerusalem unless they have a special travel permit from Israel. Likewise, Palestinians in Gaza are forbidden from going to Jerusalem and the West Bank unless the Israeli military issues them a permit.

“Israeli law had different military orders in the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” Elayyan said. “Each territory was administered by a different Israeli military commander. The point of that was to maintain the division between the two territories, to make them easier to control.”

Step 4: Dehumanisation

The diminished value of the discriminated group is communicated through propaganda. Parallels are drawn with animals, insects or diseases.

The Prime Minister of Israel tweeted from his official account that Palestinians are “the children of darkness” and implied that they were animals by saying that Israelis are fighting for “the way of humanity” whereas Palestinians are fighting for “the law of the jungle”.

Step 5: Organisation

“A state, its army or militia design genocidal killing plans.”

This one is harder to discuss because we don’t have access to that kind of government information. That being said, however, 300 rifles were handed out tto Israeli civilians.

Make of that what you will.

Step 6: Polarisation

Propaganda is employed to amplify the differences between groups. Interactions between groups are prohibited, and the moderate members of the group in power are killed.

The Israeli government employs a tactic it calls “hasbara” in the news it puts out.

Hasbara has its roots in earlier concepts of propaganda, agitprop, and censorship. Like them, it is communication calculated to influence cognition and behavior by manipulating perceptions of a cause or position with one-sided arguments, prejudicial substance, and emotional appeals. Unlike its progenitors, however, hasbara does not seek merely to burnish or tarnish national images of concern to it or to supply information favorable to its theses. It also seeks actively to inculcate canons of political correctness in domestic and foreign media and audiences that will promote self-censorship by them. It strives thereby to decrease the willingness of audiences to consider information linked to politically unacceptable viewpoints, individuals, and groups and to inhibit the circulation of adverse information in social networks.

The “Hasbara Handbook” explains many standard techniques of propaganda and deceptive rhetoric. It rehearses specific arguments and counter-arguments and outlines a program of training for advocacy and rebuttal. It also stresses the importance of labeling or “name-calling” – the linking of a person or idea to a negative symbol. The handbook places itself in a larger context. It commends the work of “CAMERA” – the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America – an organization notorious for the viciousness of its efforts to blacken the reputations of those who criticize Israel or advance accounts of events that deviate from the official Israeli narrative by branding them as “anti-Semitic” or “self-hating Jews.”

#free gaza #gaza strip #gaza genocide #i stand with palestine #palestine #free palesitne #israel #genocide #steps to genocide #holocaust museum #israel palestine war #i'm just saying

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dwellordream · 2 years

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“The ancient world was divided fundamentally between rulers and ruled, in culture as well as in political-economic structure. A tiny percentage of wealthy and powerful families lived comfortably in the cities from the tithes, taxes, tribute, and interest that they extracted from the vast majority of people, who lived in villages and worked the land. We must thus first examine the historical dynamics of that fundamental societal division in order to understand the circumstances in which the early Jesus movements formed and expanded.

At the time of Jesus, the people of Israelite heritage who lived in the southeast corner of the Mediterranean world, Judea in the south, Galilee in the north, and Samaria in between, lived under the rule of Rome. A Roman army had conquered the area about sixty years before Jesus’ birth. The Romans installed the military strongman Herod as their client king to control the area. He in turn kept in place the Temple and high priesthood. The temple-state and its high priestly aristocracy had been set up by the Persian imperial regime centuries earlier as an instrument of their rule in Judea, the district around the city of Jerusalem. Subsequent imperial regimes retained this political-economic-religious arrangement for the control of the area and collection of revenues.

With the decline of Hellenistic imperial power, the Hasmonean high priests extended Jerusalem’s rule over Idumea to the south and Samaria and Galilee to the north, little more than a century before the birth of Jesus. After the Roman conquest, however, the high priestly aristocracy at the head of the temple-state in Jerusalem was again dependent on the favor of the imperial regime. Dependent, in turn, on the favor of the high priesthood were the professional scribal groups (such as the Pharisees) that worked for the priestly aristocracy as administrators of the temple-state and custodians of the cultural traditions, traditional laws, and religious rituals in which its legitimacy was articulated.

The old construct of a monolithic Judaism glosses over the fundamental division and multiple conflicts that persisted for centuries in Judean and Galilean history. Conflicts between rival factions in the priestly aristocracy, who competed for imperial favor, and the corresponding factions among scribal circles came to a head in the Maccabean Revolt of the 160s BCE. Further conflict developed as the Maccabean military strongmen consolidated their power as the new high priestly regime. The groups known as the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, whom we now understand to have been closely related to the Qumran community that left the Dead Sea Scrolls, cannot be understood in early modern terms as sects of Judaism. They were rather rival scribal factions or parties who competed for influence on the high priestly regimes or, in the case of the Essenes, withdrew into the wilderness when they lost out.

The history of Judea and Galilee in the two centuries preceding and the century immediately after Jesus’ mission, however, was driven by the persistent conflict between the peasantry and their local and imperial rulers. In fact, according to our principal sources for these centuries—such as the books of the Maccabees, the Jewish War and the Antiquities of the Jews by the Judean historian Josephus, and later rabbinic literature—it was actions by Judean and Galilean peasants that drove most of the major historical events. The period of history around the time of Jesus was framed by four major peasant revolts: the Maccabean revolt in the 160s BCE, the revolt at the death of Herod in 4 BCE, the great revolt against Roman rule from 66 to 70 CE, and the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132–35 CE.

In the immediate period of Jesus’ mission and the first generation of Jesus movements, furthermore, peasants and ordinary people in Jerusalem mounted numerous protests and formed a number of renewal and resistance movements, most of which the Romans suppressed with brutal military action. Almost all of these revolts, protests, and movements were directed both against the foreign imperial rule of the Romans and against the Herodian and high priestly rulers in Jerusalem. Such popular revolts are rare in most areas of the world and periods of history. In response to their perpetual subjection to exploitative practices of the elite, peasants regularly engage in hidden forms of resistance, such as sequestering portions of their crops before the tax collectors arrive.

Peasants generally do not mount serious revolts, unless their backs are against the wall or they are utterly outraged at their treatment by their rulers. They do, however, organize vocal protests against their conditions and treatment. We can see the remarkable level of organization and discipline that popular protests were capable of generating in the strike against the emperor Caligula mounted by Galilean peasants a few years after Jesus’ mission there (Josephus, Ant. 18.269–84). Gaius Caligula, incensed that diaspora Jews refused to render him divine honors, ordered his statue installed in the Jerusalem Temple by military force.

As the military expedition prepared to march through Galilee, large numbers of peasants organized a strike, refusing to plant the crops. The Roman Legate of Syria as well as the Herodian officers in control of Galilee knew well that they faced the prospect of a “harvest of banditry” instead of the crops on which their expropriation of tribute depended. Gaius’s timely death prevented an escalation of the conflict. Clearly, Galilean and Judean people were capable of mounting serious widespread protests and other movements of resistance. As the Galilean peasant strike illustrates, most of the widespread peasant revolts, urban protests, and popular renewal-resistance movements were rooted in and inspired by Israelite tradition.

The central social memories of the origin and formation of Israel as an independent people focused on their liberation from foreign rule of the pharaoh in Egypt and on their Covenant on Sinai with their true, divine king (God), to the exclusion of oppressive human rulers (“no gods other than me”; “no images”). Judeans’ and Galileans’ loyalty to these formative traditions shaped their very identity as a people and led them to oppose foreign and Jerusalem rulers who conquered them and interfered with their community life directly under the covenantal rule of God.

Perhaps the most vivid example is the Passover celebration of the exodus from foreign oppression in Egypt. Jerusalem rulers had long since centralized this celebration in Jerusalem so that it would associate the formative memory and identity of Israel as a people with the Temple and its priesthood. Celebration of the exodus by pilgrims to Jerusalem, however, became a time of heightened awareness of their own subjection by the Romans and intense yearning to be independent again, in accordance with God’s will and previous deliverance.

In response to regular outbreaks of protest at festival time, the Roman governors made a habit of posting Roman soldiers on the porticoes of the Temple courtyard to intimidate the Passover crowds. But that merely exacerbated the intensity of popular feeling. Under the governor Cumanus at mid-first century, the crowds burst into a massive riot, provoked by a lewd gesture by a Roman soldier—and were slaughtered by the troops (War 2.223–26; Ant. 20.105–12). Most distinctive and widespread resistance and renewal efforts among the Galilean, Samaritan, and Judean people were the popular messianic movements and the popular prophetic movements.

The many movements that took one or the other of these two distinctively Israelite forms are surely most important in understanding why the Galilean and Judean peoples, more than all others subjected by the Romans, persisted in mounting repeated resistance against Roman rule. These movements are most important for understanding the social forms taken by the Jesus movements. Both the popular prophetic movements and the popular messianic movements were following distinctively Israelite “scripts” based on memories of God’s original acts of deliverance led by the great prophets Moses and Joshua or by the young David as the people’s “messiah.”

Memories of these founding events were still alive in villager communities, ready to inform the people’s collective action in circumstances of social crisis. When Herod finally died in 4 BCE, after a long and intensely oppressive rule over the people he had conquered with the aid of Roman troops, widespread revolts erupted in nearly every district of his realm (War 2.56– 75; Ant. 17.271–85). In Galilee, Perea across the Jordan River, and Judea itself, these revolts were led by figures whose followers acclaimed them king, according to Josephus. They attacked the royal fortresses and storehouses, “taking back” the goods that had been seized and stored there, and they raided Roman baggage trains.

In Galilee the movement led by Judas, son of the famous brigand-chief Hezekias, was suppressed within a few months, with great slaughter and destruction in the general area around Nazareth—shortly before Jesus came to live and grow up there. In Judea the movement led by the strapping shepherd Athronges and his brothers managed to maintain the people’s independence in the Judean hill country for three years. Roman troops were finally able to ferret it out, again with much slaughter and the crucifixion of thousands as a means of terrorizing the people into submission.

Again in the middle of the great revolt of 66–70 CE, Judean peasants acclaimed Simon bar Giora as king (War 2.652–53; 4.503–34, 574–78; 7.29– 36, 153–55). The Romans having been temporarily driven out, he moved around the countryside in the area of Hebron, where the young David had gotten his start. He liberated (debt-)slaves, restored people’s property, and in general effected justice for the people. Having amassed a peasant army of thousands, he entered Jerusalem, joining other forces from other areas of the countryside that had taken refuge in the fortress-like city to resist the inevitable Roman reconquest. After being captured in the Roman reconquest of the city, Simon was taken in chains to Rome. There he was formally executed as the vanquished enemy general (the “king of the Judeans”) by the emperor Vespasian and his son Titus in the lavish celebration of their glorious triumph.

All of these movements appear to have been patterned after the messianic movement led centuries earlier by the young David. As the Philistines continued their attacks against the Israelite peasantry, the people acclaimed David as their messiah-king (2 Sam. 2:1-4; 5:1-4) to lead them against the oppressive foreign rulers and to reestablish justice among the people. In his accounts of the movements in 4 BCE and 66–70 CE, Josephus does not use the term “messiah” (“anointed”), probably because he was writing for a Greek-speaking audience. But if we translate his accounts back into the Hebrew-Aramaic culture of Judea and Galilee, these movements must be understood as messianic movements patterned after the liberating revolts led by David and other popularly acclaimed messiah-kings in formative Israelite tradition.

That several such messianic movements emerged a generation before and a generation after the time of Jesus’ mission is significant when we recognize that literature produced by the Judean scribal elite rarely mentions a messiah. This is in sharp contrast to previous Christian understanding, according to which the Jews were eagerly expecting the Messiah to lead them against foreign rule. But as scholars finally began to recognize about forty years ago, there was no such job description just waiting for Jesus to fulfill (in his own way). The Judean elite, of course, would not have been interested, since their positions of power and privilege depended on the Romans, who appointed oppressive kings such as Herod.

Perhaps it was against just such an illegitimate king set in power by the Romans that the memory of the popularly acclaimed messiah-king David and other popular kings was revived among the Judean and Galilean peasantry and came to life in numerous movements for the independence and renewal of Israel right around the time of Jesus. After the revolt led by Judas, son of Hezekias (4 BCE), this Israelite cultural “script” of a popular messianic movement would certainly have been alive in the area around Nazareth, the very area in which Jesus supposedly grew up. And its brutal suppression by the Romans would have left a collective social trauma of villages pillaged and burned and family members slaughtered and enslaved by the Romans.

Such historical events and cultural memories cannot have been without their effect on popular life in Nazareth and other Galilean and Judean villages. In another distinctively Israelite form, a number of popular movements led by prophets in anticipation of new acts of deliverance by God appeared in mid-first century. According to the ever hostile Josephus, “Impostors and demagogues, under the guise of divine inspiration, provoked revolutionary actions and impelled the masses to act like madmen. They led them out into the wilderness so that there God would show them signs of imminent liberation” (War 2.259), and “For they said that they would display unmistakable signs and wonders done according to God’s plan” (Ant. 20.168).

The first of these movements led by prophets was among the Samaritans (circa 36 CE). A prophet led a crowd up to Mount Gerizim, the most sacred mountain, promising that they would recover the holy vessels from the tabernacle of the formative exodus-wilderness experience of Israel, buried at the spot where Moses had put them. But the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, dispatched cavalry as well as infantry, killed some, took many prisoner, and executed the leaders (Ant. 18.85–87).

Perhaps the most famous prophetic movement was led about a decade later (circa 45 CE) by Theudas, who “persuaded most of the common people to take their possessions and follow him to the Jordan River. He said he was a prophet, and that at his command the river would be divided and allow them an easy crossing. . . . A cavalry unit killed many in a surprise attack [and] having captured Theudas, cut off his head and carried it up to Jerusalem” (Ant. 20.97–98; also mentioned in the Book of Acts 5:36).

About another decade later (56 CE), just prior to Paul’s visit to Jerusalem after his mission in Corinth, Ephesus, and Macedonia, a Jewish prophet from Egypt rallied many thousands in the countryside. He led them up to the Mount of Olives, opposite Jerusalem, declaring that the walls of the city would fall down and the Roman garrison would be overpowered, giving them entry into the city. The Roman governor Felix, with heavily armed cavalry and infantry, killed hundreds of them, before the prophet himself and the others escaped (Ant. 20.169– 71; War 2.261–63). As with the messianic movements, so these prophetic movements were peasant movements clearly patterned after formative events in Israelite tradition.

In the general characterization by Josephus (who called those who performed signs of liberation in the wilderness “prophets”) and in the case of Theudas, who told his followers to take their goods along and expected the waters to be divided, these figures stepped into the role of a new Moses (or Joshua), leading a new exodus (or entry into the land, which had been more or less collapsed with the exodus in popular memory). The Judean prophet from Egypt patterned his role and the anticipated divine act of deliverance after Joshua’s leadership of Israel in taking over their land from oppressive kings in their fortified cities, particularly the battle of Jericho.

Judging from the terms used in Josephus’s hostile accounts, these prophets and their followers were acting under inspiration. The most noteworthy aspect of these movements to the ruling elite, of course, was the threat they posed to the imperial order. Josephus says that they were out to make “revolutionary changes.” The Israelite traditions they were imitating, the exodus led by Moses and the entry into their own land led by Joshua, moreover, suggest that these movements anticipated a restoration of the people as well as a liberation from alien rule. Given our limited sources, of course, we have no indication of how they imagined the future of an Israel again living in independence of foreign domination.

Although Josephus claims that the Samaritans were armed, his accounts of the others suggest that, unarmed, they were acting in anticipation of God’s action to deliver them. The Roman governors, however, saw them as serious threats to the imperial order and sent out the troops to crush them and kill their prophetic leaders. In all of these protests and movements the ordinary people of Galilee, Samaria, and Judea were taking bold action, often involving considerable organization and discipline, in making history. The people, facing acute economic distress and a disintegrating political order, took control of their own lives, under the leadership of popular kings (messiahs) like Judas ben Hezekias or popular prophets such as Theudas.

These movements of social renewal and political resistance put the Roman and Jerusalem rulers on the defensive. The peasants were challenging the Roman imperial order! In response, the Roman governors, along with the Jerusalem high priesthood in some cases, took brutal, sometimes massive military action, often symbolically decapitating or ceremonially executing the prophetic or messianic leader. Most striking is how, with the exception of epidemic banditry, these protests and movements took distinctively Israelite social forms. The protests were driven by outrage at the violation of traditional Mosaic covenantal principles.

Both the messianic movements and the prophetic movements were decisively informed by (or patterned after) social memories deeply embedded in Israelite tradition. That there were so many of these movements that took one or another of two basic social forms strongly suggests that these distinctive cultural memories, these “scripts” for movements of renewal and resistance, were very much alive in the village communities of the peoples of Israelite heritage in Palestine around the time of Yeshua bar Yosef. It is in precisely this context of persistent conflict between the Judean and Galilean peasantry and their Jerusalem and Roman rulers that we must understand the origins and development of the earliest Jesus movements.

Given how prominent the popular prophetic and messianic movements were in the immediate historical context, moreover, we might expect that the earliest movements that formed in response to Jesus’ mission would exhibit some similar features and patterns. Several closely interrelated factors in the traditional Christian theological scheme of Christian origins, however, have worked to isolate Jesus from his historical context, even to keep Jesus from having any direct relation to Jesus movements. First, since he was supposedly a unique person and revealer, Jesus is treated as separate from the social roles and political-economic relationships in which historical figures are usually engaged.

Second, rather than being read as complete stories, the Gospels have been taken merely as containers in which to find individual sayings. Jesus’ sayings are then understood as artifacts that have meaning in themselves, rather than as genuine communication with other people in historical social contexts. Third, Jesus is viewed as a revealer, separated from the formation of a movement in the context of the village communities in which people lived. Not Jesus himself but the disciples were supposedly the ones who established a community—in Jerusalem after the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, from which they then founded “churches” in Judea and beyond.

The net effect of these interrelated factors of theologically determined New Testament interpretation is a combination of assumptions and procedures that would be unacceptable in the regular investigation of history. When historians investigate popular movements and their leaders (for example, the civil rights movement and its leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr.), they consider multiple contextual and relational factors. Since there are no leaders without followers and no movements without leadership, leader-follower interaction is central. Leader and movement would not emerge in the first place, moreover, unless there were a problematic historical situation.

Yet we do not understand why the leader and followers who form a movement find their situation intolerable unless we know something of the previous historical developments that led to the problems. And we cannot understand why they found the situation intolerable unless we have a sense of their cultural values. Indeed, we cannot understand how and why the leader’s message and program resonate with followers such that they form a movement without a sense of the cultural traditions and values that provide the media in which they communicate.

To investigate the earliest Jesus movements, including possible similarities with contemporary Galilean and Judean movements, we will follow just such a relational and contextual approach—simply bypassing the problematic assumptions, approaches, and concepts of previous New Testament interpretation. We will focus mainly on what are by consensus the earliest Gospel sources, the Gospel of Mark and the sequence of Jesus speeches that appear in closely parallel versions in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark, and known as Q (for Quelle, the German word for “source”).

Both of the earliest Gospel texts, Mark and Q, represent Jesus and followers as a prophet-led movement engaged in the renewal of Israel that condemns and is condemned by the Jerusalem (and Roman) rulers. The people who produced and used the sequence of Jesus speeches that is called Q understand Jesus as—and themselves as the beneficiaries of— the figure whose activities fulfilled their yearnings for a prophet who would heal and bind up the people and preach good news to the poor (Q/Luke 7: 18-35). They even see his exorcisms as manifestation of a new exodus, done “by the finger of God,” a clear allusion to Moses’ divinely empowered performances in the exodus (Q 11:14-20).

In the longest speech of Q (6:20-49), moreover, Jesus speaks as the new Moses, enacting a renewal of the covenant as the guiding principles for cooperation and solidarity in community relations. Jesus’ speech sending envoys out into villages indicates that the movement of renewal of Israel is expanding by sending delegates to more and more village communities. In speeches that take the distinctively Israelite form of prophetic woes and oracles, Jesus pronounces divine condemnation of the Jerusalem rulers and their representatives. He pronounces a series of woes against the scribes and Pharisees and prophetic oracles of lament over the aristocracy who presume on their lineage, the Jerusalem ruling house (Q 11:39-52; 13:28-29, 34-35).

The speeches heard by the Q people thus represent Jesus as the latest in the long line of Israelite prophets to be killed by the oppressive rulers. The people who produced and used Mark’s Gospel had an even more vivid sense of Jesus, his disciples, and themselves as engaged in a renewal of Israel against, and under attack by, the Jerusalem and Roman rulers. Jesus called and commissioned the Twelve as the representative heads of the twelve tribes of Israel as well as disciples who extend his mission of renewing Israel in village communities. The hearers of Mark’s story resonated to the clear allusions to the origins of Israel under Moses and the renewal of Israel led by Elijah in the sequences of sea-crossings, exorcisms, healings, and wilderness feedings in the middle of the Gospel (3:35— 8:29).

That a renewal of Israel is under way is confirmed by the disciples’ vision of Jesus with Moses and Elijah on the mountain. And in a series of dialogues (Mark 10:2-45) Jesus presents Torah-like instruction to the communities of his followers, teaching that constitutes a renewed Mosaic covenant, indicated by the recitation of the covenantal commandments. After he marched up into Jerusalem with his entourage, he had condemned the Temple itself in a forcible demonstration reminiscent of Jeremiah’s famous pronouncement that God would destroy the Temple because of the rulers’ oppressive practices (Mark 11; Jeremiah 7 and 26).

Finally, just before he was arrested, tried, and executed by the Romans, Jesus celebrated the Passover at the “last supper,” a meal that renewed the Mosaic covenant with the Twelve representatives of Israel, and announced that the cup was “my blood of the covenant” (an allusion to the original covenant meal (Exodus 24). Mark and Q are different in overall literary form, the one a complex story in a sequence of episodes, the other a series of speeches on different issues. They appear, moreover, to have been produced and used by different communities or movements.

Yet they both represent Jesus as a Moses and Elijah-like prophet engaged in the renewal of Israel in its village communities and pronouncing prophetic condemnations of the Jerusalem Temple, its high priestly rulers, and its Pharisaic representatives. That the two earliest Gospel sources, so different from one another in form, share this portrayal of Jesus as leader of a movement suggests the same role and relationship with followers at the origin of the respective communities or movements.

Within the overall agenda shared by both texts, we will focus our investigation on a few key aspects of both movements: the sending of workers on the mission of building and expanding the movement, covenant renewal, and persecution by hostile authorities. Before moving to those key aspects, however, we may note some distinctive features of Mark and Q that seem to distinguish their communities from other movements of Jesus followers. Mark appears to be setting its movement’s identity off against the Jerusalem community headed by Peter and others of the Twelve. The story portrays the disciples as increasingly misunderstanding Jesus’ mission and, in the crisis in Jerusalem, betraying, denying, and abandoning him.

Mark represents Jesus’ role as in a sense patterned after a messianic role in addition to his dominant prophetic role. Yet the narrative qualifies and criticizes the messianic role in decisive ways. Mark also downplays Jesus’ resurrection so seriously that it is merely instrumental to calling the hearers of the story back up to Galilee to continue the movement that Jesus had started. The Q speeches indicate no knowledge of a resurrection at all. Jesus’ death is understood as the climax of the long line of prophets killed by the rulers. And Q’s Jesus demonstrates virtually no messianic traits in his dominantly prophetic agenda.

In these ways and more Mark’s story and the Q speeches appear to address movements that originated in Galilee and spread into the bilingual villages of nearby areas (Aramaic and Greek). They are both different from other communities or movements of Jesus loyalists, such as the Jerusalem community known from Acts and the assemblies that Paul addresses in his letters. Before we explore these earliest sources and Jesus movements, however, it makes sense to have a more precise sense of the historical conditions in which the Jesus movements developed.”

- Richard A. Horsley, “Jesus Movements and the Renewal of Israel.” in Christian Origins

#richard a. horsley #religion #ancient #jewish #christian #christian origins

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johnrossbowie · 3 years

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LEAVING TWITTER

I wrote this earlier in the fall, before the election, after dissolving my Twitter account. I wasn’t sure where to put it (“try up your ass!” – someone, I’m sure) and then I remembered I have a tumblr I never use. Anyway, here tis.

How do you shame someone who thinks Trumps’ half-baked policies and quarter-baked messaging put him in the pantheon of great Presidents? How do you shame someone so lacking in introspection that they will call Obama arrogant while praising Trump’s decisiveness and yet at the same time vehemently deny that they’re racist? How do you shame someone for whom that racism is endearing and maybe long overdue?

You don’t. It’s silly to think otherwise.

Twitter is an addiction of mine, and true to form, my dependence on it grew more serious after I quit drinking in 2010. At first it was a chance to mouth off, make jokes both stupid and erudite and occasionally stick my foot in my mouth (I owe New Yorker writer Tad Friend an apology. He knows why, or (God willing) he’s forgotten. Either way. Sorry.) I blew off steam, steam that was accumulating without booze to dampen the flames. Not always constructive venting, but I also met new friends, and connected with people whose work I’ve admired for literal decades and ended up seeing plays with Lin-Manuel Miranda and hanging backstage with Jane Wiedlin after a Go-Go’s show and exchanging sober thoughts with Mike Doughty. When my mom passed in 2018, a lot of people reached out to tell me they were thinking of me. This was nice. For a while, Twitter was a huge help when I needed it.

I used to hate going to parties and really hated dancing and mingling, but a couple of drinks would fix that. Point is, for a while, booze was a huge help, too.

But my engagement with Twitter changed, and I started calling people my ‘friends’ even though I’d never once met them or even heard their voices. These weren’t even penpals, these were people whose jokes or stances I enjoyed, so with Arthurian benevolence I clicked on a little heart icon, liked their tweet, and assumed therefore that we had signed some sort of blood oath.

We had not. I got glib, and cheap, and a little lazy. And then to make matters much worse, Trump came along and extended his reach with the medium.

There was a while there where I thought I could be a sort of voice for the voiceless, and I thought I was doing that. I tried very hard to only contribute things that I felt were not being said – It wasn’t accomplishing anything to notice “Haha Trump looks like he’s bullshitting his way through an oral report” – such things were self-evident. I tried to point out very specific inconsistencies in his policies, like the Muslim ban meant to curb terrorism that still favored the country that brought forth 13 of the 9/11 hijackers. Like his full-throated cries against media bias performed while he suckled at Roger Ailes’ wrinkly teat. Like his fondness for evangelical votes that coincided with a scriptural knowledge that lagged far behind mine, even though I’m a lapsed Episcopalian, and there is no one less religiously observant than a lapsed Episcopalian. But that eventually gave way to unleashing ad hominem attacks against his higher profile supporters, who I felt weren’t being questioned enough, who I felt were in turn being fawned over by theirdim supporters. If you’re one of these guys, and you think I’m talking about you, you’re probably right, but don’t mistake this for an apology. You suck, and you support someone who sucks, and your idolatry is hurting our country and its standing in the world. Fuck you entirely, but that’s not the point. The point is that me screaming into the toilet of Twitter helps no one – it doesn’t help a family stuck at the border because they’re trying to secure a better life for their kids. It doesn’t help a poor teenager who can’t get an abortion because the party of ‘small government’ has squeezed their tiny jurisdiction into her uterus. It doesn’t help the coal miner who’s staking all his hopes on a dying industry and a President’s empty promises to resurrect it. I was born in New York City, and I currently live in Los Angeles. Those are the only two places I’ve ever lived, if you don’t count the 4 years I spent in Ithaca[1]. So, yes, I live in a liberal bubble, and while I’ve driven across the country a couple of times and did a few weeks in a touring band and am as crushed as any heartlander about the demise of Waffle House, you have me dead to rights if you call me a coastal elitist. And with that in mind, I offer few surprises. A guy who grew up in the theater district and was vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage or felt you should own an AR-15? THAT would be newsworthy. I am not newsworthy. I can preach to the choir, I can confirm people’s biases, but I will likely not sway anyone who is eager to dismiss a Native New Yorker who lives in Hollywood. I grew up in the New York of the 1970s, and that part of my identity did shape my politics. My mom’s boss was gay and the Son of Sam posed a realistic threat. As such, gays are job creators[2] and guns are used for homicide much more often than they are used for self-defense[3]. I have found this to be generally true over the years, and there’s even data to back it up.

“But Mr. Bowie,” you might say, though I insist you call me John - “those studies are conducted by elitist institutions and those institutions suck!” And again, I am not going to reason with people who will dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their limited world view as elitist or, God Help Us, fake news. But the studies above are peer-reviewed, convincing, and there are more where those came from.

“But John,” you might say, and I am soothed that we’re one a first name basis - “Can’t you just stay on Twitter for the jokes?” Ugh. A) apparently not and B) the jokes are few and far between, and I am 100% part of that problem.

I have stuff to offer, but Twitter is not the place from which to offer it.

After years of academically understanding that Twitter is not the real world, Super Tuesday 2020 made the abstract pretty fucking concrete. If you had looked at my feed on the Monday beforehand – my feed which is admittedly curated towards the left, but not monolithic (Hi, Rich Lowry!) – you’d have felt that a solid Bernie surge was imminent, but also that your candidate was going surprise her more vocal critics. When the Biden sweep swept, when Bernie was diminished and when Warren was defeated, I realized that Twitter is not only not the real world, it’s almost some sort of Phillip K. Dickian alternate timeline, untethered to anything we’re actually experiencing in our day to day life. This is both good news and bad news – one, we’re not heading towards a utopia of single payer health care and the eradication of American medical debt any time soon, but two, we’re also not being increasingly governed by diaper-clad jungen like Charlie Kirk. Clouds and their linings. Leaving Twitter may look like ceding ground to the assclowns but get this – the ground. Is not. There.

It’s just air.

There are tangible things I can do with my time - volunteer with a local organization called Food On Foot, who provide food and job training for people experiencing homelessness here in my adopted Los Angeles. I can give money to candidates and causes I support, and I can occasionally even drop by social media to boost a project or an issue and then vanish, like a sort of Caucasian Zorro who doesn’t read his mentions. I can also model good behavior for my kids (ages 10 and 13) who don’t need to see their father glued to his phone, arguing about Trumps incompetence with Constitutional scholars who have a misspelled Bible verse in their bio (three s’ in Ecclesiastes, folks).

So farewell Twitter. I’ll miss a lot of you. Perhaps not as badly as I miss Simon Maloy and Roger Ebert and Harris Wittels and others whose deaths created an unfillable void on the platform. But I won’t miss the yelling, and the lionization of poor grammar, and anonymous trolls telling my Jewish friends that they were gonna leave the country “via chimney.” I will not miss people who think Trump is a stable genius calling me a “fucktard.” I will not miss transphobia or cancelling but I will miss hashtag games, particularly my stellar work during #mypunkmusical (Probably should have quit after that surge, I was on fire that night, real blaze of glory stuff I mean, Christ, Sunday in the Park with the Germs? Husker Du I Hear A Waltz? Fiddler on the Roof (keeping an eye out for the cops)? These are Pulitzer contenders.). Twitter makes me feel lousy, even when I’m right, and I’m often right. There’s just no point in barking bumperstickers at each other, and there are people who are speaking truth to power and doing a cleaner job of it – Aaron Rupar, Steven Pasquale, Louise Mensch, Imani Gandy and Ijeoma Oluo to name five solid mostly politically based accounts (Yes, Pasquale is a Broadway tenor. He’s also a tenacious lefty with good points and research and a dreamy voice. You think you’re straight and then you hear him sing anything from Bridges of Madison County and you want him to spoon you.). You’re probably already following those mentioned, but on the off chance you’re not, get to it. You’ll thank me, but you won’t be able to unless you actually have my email.

_______

[1] And Jesus, that’s worse – Ithaca is such a lefty enclave that they had an actual socialist mayor FOR WHOM I VOTED while I was there. And not socialist the way some people think all Democrats are socialist – I mean Ben Nichols actually ran on the socialist ticket and was re-elected twice for a total of six years.

[2] The National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, “America’s LGBT Economy” Jan 20th, 2017

[3] The Violence Policy Institute, Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self Defense Gun Use, July 2019.

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thevividgreenmoss · 4 years

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Though Fisher recognises that capitalism has reached an ever greater height of interfering in our everyday lives, taking with it all possibilities of resistance, when he refers to Bill Gates and George Soros as ‘liberal communists’, or when he writes, after detailing the inhumanity and facelessness of call centres, that ‘market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than one in which there is a central authority’, (Capitalist Realism, p. 64) you almost wait for the penny to drop. As a writer critiquing the totality of capitalism and looking for viable alternatives, these conceptions of communism should concern us. After all, to quote Fisher himself, ‘postmodernism’s supposed gestures of demystification do not evince sophistication so much as a certain naivety.’ (Capitalist Realism, p. 47)

Capitalist realism falls ‘under the rubric of postmodernism’, as a more specific stage of capitalism that has intensified the reach of its totality to determine our interiority and consciousness – whether this is strict adherence to what is realistic or the inability to articulate the possibility of anything new itself. For Fisher, capitalist realism expresses the new global hegemony of capitalism after the dissolution of the USSR – after what he called ‘Really Existing Socialism’ ostensibly collapsed, and ‘a generation has passed since the collage of the Berlin Wall’. No alternatives to capitalism can be entertained anymore, and here Fisher quotes Alain Badiou: ‘to justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is awful.’ (Capitalist Realism, p. 5) But what separates postmodernity from capitalist realism, for Fisher, is that postmodernity must forever exorcise modernism; it must forever undo its crude dichotomies, presenting itself as a democratisation of culture as it leaves the categories of high and low behind. Capitalist realism, in contrast, for Fisher, has left the vestige of modernism and its antagonisms behind and, contrary to postmodernism, even ‘takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted: modernism is now something that can practically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never an ideal for living.’ (Capitalist Realism, p. 8)

But, already, Fisher has internalised this logic of postmodernism. When was modernism last an ‘ideal for living’? Even by 1945, with Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, modernism itself recognises the ends of its ideals amid World History, amid total war and violence. And hasn’t postmodernity always shown itself as victorious over the defeat of modernism and its strict, formal categories? The division of high and low culture in modernism is dissolved as postmodernism makes a caricature of each of them, a caricature that supposes its victory is one of democratisation where high art consumed by the wealthy can now be broadened to welcome those who had been excluded from its loftiness. But this is a false democratisation; as a failed promise to resolve art’s contradictions in modernism, with the culture industry’s ‘purposeful integration of its consumers from above … [h]igh art is deprived of its seriousness because its effects are programmed; low art is put in chains and deprived of the unruly resistance inherent in it when social control was not yet total.’ (Theodor W. Adorno, Culture Industry, p. 20) J.M. Bernstein crucially recognises that ‘postmodernism is … a contingent procedure for continuing the project of modernism, the project of negation, by other means’; (p. 26) postmodernism removes the content of this negativity that is so determinate in modernism, that negates what exists in an attempt to overcome it, and takes it for granted to such an extent that its presupposition of overcoming crude dichotomies and rendering them antiquated becomes the very content of postmodernism. And so it’s no surprise when we read David Harvey puzzling that postmodernism totally and uncritically accepts ‘ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic that formed the one-half of Baudelaire’s conception of modernity.’ (David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 44)

Capitalist realism then is not a concept distinct from postmodernism and postmodernity, or even one that succeeds it, but one that succumbs to it; Fisher correctly derides Francis Fukuyama for his thesis that world-history culminated in the capitalism of the ‘90s, and though Fisher points out that this is now accepted and assumed in our cultural consciousness, his own thinking is unable to overcome this new stage in the totality of capitalism. Modernism becomes monolithic, without the contradictions and antagonisms that developed it and moved it forward, and entirely without content – content that is far more self-aware than its postmodern critics grant it, whether it’s the brazen negativity of Dadaism, the democratisation that was at the heart of Bauhaus, or the mournfulness of Brideshead Revisited. Fisher praises Foucault and his attempts ‘not to recover our “lost” identity, to free our imprisoned nature, our deepest truth; but instead, [to recognise] the problem is to move towards something radically Other.’ (Acid Communism) But this succumbs to the critical logic outlined by Fisher in Capitalist Realism when he writes that ‘capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its “system of equivalence” which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value.’ (Capitalist Realism, p. 4) In postmodernity, the thinking subject takes the role of the entrepreneur; looking to fill a gap in the market, the subject turns to what has been overlooked and refused – whether this is an unknown work of a famous author, an entire culture that has been decimated and lost, or the everyday itself, as this ‘Other’ holds the key to our overdetermined totality.

Taking Lyotard’s thesis that postmodernism has a suspicion of grand narratives and their overdetermination – and that, within this suspicion, the ‘Other’ is necessary to overcome this – there is almost a moment in which Fisher recognises this misrepresentation when he questioned whether, in the past, people really believed this. But he soon takes them up again. ‘We need to begin, as if for the first time, to develop strategies against … Capital.’ (Capitalist Realism, p. 77) All previous critiques of capitalism developed over the past century are dismissed as developing from ‘a harsh Leninist superego.’ This misrepresentation is a conceptual indeterminacy that extends to Fisher’s critique of bureaucracy in capitalism, which he unironically dubs ‘market Stalinism’, a phrase is entirely ‘without hyperbole’, he notes. More severely, however, is that the USSR – in this indeterminacy – becomes identical to the imperialism of the US and European powers; Marx, Lenin, and Stalin become dead white men who may as well be T.E. Lawrence – in spite of the contradictions of the concept of whiteness that very much excluded each of them during their lives; Marx as a Jewish man whose paternal and maternal grandfathers were rabbis (Marx’s paternal grandfather had the surname Marx Levi), who was exiled from his home country and lived in poverty; Lenin as a Russian with an often caricatured ‘swarthy face with a touch of the Asiatic to it’; and Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili – Stalin – as a Georgian born to a peasant family and the only child of four to survive past infancy.

In establishing this false genealogy of homogeneous and Other, the content of those genealogies themselves are made indeterminate; without recognising the objectivity of concepts themselves, they are each made into their own caricatures as history and its antagonisms become an indeterminate vacuum while what is new becomes a categorical imperative. And what is this obsession for the new except an inability to come out the other side of postmodernism? To take postmodernity’s obfuscation of history at its word, and to lean into it? Achieving communism, Fisher supposed, ‘will require a range of strategies, and new kinds of intervention are being improvised all the time’; ‘thinking and discussing new strategies, continuing to build a “new politics” that has nothing to do with the dead neoliberal consensus that the coaliton [sic] is seeking to resuscitate.’ He laments ‘the “establishment” no longer commanded automatic deference; instead, it came to seem exhausted, out of touch, obsolete, limply awaiting to be washed away by any or all of the new cultural and political waves which were eroding all the old certainties.’ (Acid Communism)

Fisher relies heavily on the countercultural elements of the 1960s that were appropriated to form a new spirit of ‘post-Fordist’ capitalism, but at the same time the stakes and history of those struggles are given up by him freely and willingly. He takes issue with Margaret Atwood’s observation that ‘The past is so much safer … because whatever’s in it has already happened. It can’t be changed: so, in a way there’s nothing to dread,’ (Acid Communism) and rightly contends that ‘the past has to be continually re-narrated’, and in that retelling the past that holds its own potential that is ‘ready to be reawakened,’ but still the old struggles are dismissed as old – not as essential lessons or even gains. In postmodernity, a ‘new breed of worker’ exists, one that is part of a generation separated from ‘the old tradition of the labour parties’, writes Franco Berardi of the situation in Turin in 1973 that attempted to carry the same youthful energy of the 1968 protests across Europe and the US – one with nothing ‘to do with the socialist ideology of a state-owned system. A massive refusal of the sadness of work was the leading element behind their protest. Those young workers had much more to do with the hippy movement; much more to do with the history of the avant-garde.’

Fisher writes that ‘the failure of the left after the Sixties had much to do with its repudiation of, or refusal to engage with, the dreamings that the counterculture unleashed.’ And what was the goal of acid communism, of organising these new ‘convergence[s] of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness-raising and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movements with a communist project’? A world ‘unimaginably stranger’ than anything Marxism-Leninism had worked towards. But if ‘the counterculture thought it was already producing spaces where this revolution could already be experienced’, who is this revolution for? Fisher offers us a glimpse:

To get some sense of what those spaces were like, we can do no better than listen to the Temptations’ ‘Psychedelic Shack’, released in December 1969. The group play the role of breathless ingénues who have just returned from some kind of Wonderland: “Strobe lights flashin’ way till after sundown… There ain’t no such thing as time… Incense in the air…”’ It is in these spaces that you are ‘as likely to come upon a crank or a huckster as a poet or musician here, and who knows if today’s crank might turn out to be tomorrow’s genius?

In desiring an adjective communism, in which the necessary content of communism is diluted to appear more palatable to its critics who won’t even entertain concessions to basic social reforms, Fisher calls for a libertarian communism, or an acid communism – where the gains of international communism are reduced to a part of that monolithic history that must be overcome, and the image of Soviet communism never develops beyond the oppressive and authoritarian caricature granted to it by its most fierce opponents. This is the precise moment that Fisher’s attempt to outline an alternative to capitalism, to declare the poverty of imagination under capitalism, succumbs to a postmodernity that he supposes he has already overcome. Though he recognises the degradation of a ‘weak messianic hope’ into a ‘morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen’, this hope is only restored insofar as it is a return to the messianism of the new.

Postscript to Capitalist Realism

#I really think fisher's best when writing specifically about music and shit but #is really fucking flawed as like a broader theorist/analyst of systems/historical trends and w/e #kinda like zizek is fun when saying insane shit about movies and whatnot but a bunch of ??? comes out his mouth otherwise #also the notion that capitalist realism is the defining characteristic of the post 1989/1991 time doesn't hold up at all like it's not even #clear how it's essentially distinct from jameson's conception of postmodernity (itself flawed) and idk like it very much does arrive at the #same conclusion of post-USSR end of history fukuyama people except it takes a different path to get there but like either way that #conclusion that there's no alternative to neoliberal capitalism that can be viably pursued let alone be believed in by a significant amount #of people hasn't been borne out by what actually goes on in the real world at any point during that time #like shortly before his death fisher said that the rise of corbynism/the emergence of sanders as a majorly influential figure represented #decisive breaks with capitalist realism/the neoliberal consensus but like if that's the standard than already in the 90s/00s the pink tide #in latin america alone far exceeded these recent developments in terms of pushback against neoliberalism and pursuit of a broader left-wing #political program and even as they eventually became diluted and beaten down by reaction they more concretely reshaped society & the lives #of millions of people than corbyn/sanders-esque social democracy have or even intend to #and then from the other end of things the entrenchment of the bjp/hard right authoritarian nationalism in india or the persistence of #clerical reactionary rule of iran or however the fuck you might describe the taliban's grip over afghanistan and on and on like all over the #fucking world there are alternatives it's almost like any specific economic forms arise because of the particular historical condition of #that society + the social relations/arrangements that develop from that and any analytical frameword that homogenizes that diverse landscape #is ultimately empty #like the aspects of capitalist realism as a theoretical framework that actually hold up aren't novel in the context of marxist analysis of #ideology & the parts that have some claim to being unique and new don't hold up #I did not expect to write all this bullshit in the tags but I've been feeling some 'read another book' impulses when it comes to all this #and I hate that shit cause it's useless and condescending so I guess I needed to work it out in a relatively constructive way for myself lma #o #essays #mark fisher #capitalist realism #*

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sophieakatz · 4 years

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Thursday Thoughts: 8 Things I Loved About the Elena of Avalor Hanukkah Episode

Disney Channel animated series Elena of Avalor is already groundbreaking storytelling. Since 2016, viewers have journeyed alongside Elena, a Latina princess of a magical kingdom inspired by Latin and Hispanic cultures and folklore.

This holiday season, Elena’s story ventured down another road rarely taken by Disney or any other major media company, by introducing a Jewish princess.

In the episode “Festival of Lights,” the royal family of Galonia shipwrecks in Avalor just before Hanukkah. As they are now unable to get home in time for the holiday, Elena and her family offer to help Princess Rebecca celebrate Hanukkah in their castle instead.

Here are eight things I loved about “Festival of Lights” – one for each night of Hanukkah!

[Elena, left, and Rebecca, right. Image is a screencap from the episode found on disney.fandom.com.]

1. IT’S NOT A CHRISTMAS EPISODE!!!

At a young age, I noticed that Jewish characters on TV only seemed to appear during Christmas. The show would have a Christmas episode, and one character who had never before mentioned their culture would suddenly show up in a sweater with a menorah on it. Hanukkah, and Judaism as a whole, tends to play second fiddle to Christian norms.

In this show, however, Christmas is never once mentioned! It’s a Hanukkah episode through and through. This greatly surprised me, and it was a big relief.

2. The Jewish vocab!

This episode is sprinkled with Hebrew and Yiddish terms, to the amusing confusion of the local goyim. It’s frankly awesome to hear words like bubbe, mitzvah, and nosh used in a Disney cartoon. Also, the candleholder the Jews use is referred to as a Hanukkiah, instead of a menorah – a rare distinction.

I have to pause for a moment here to point out the places this episode falls short in its representation. For one thing, Judaism itself is never mentioned in the episode, instead providing the name of a made-up kingdom and the occasional “our people.” Also, pre-release media stated that Rebecca is from a “Latino Jewish kingdom.” This indicates that she would be Sephardic, not Ashkenazi, which makes the Yiddish terms out of place. Ladino would be a more appropriate language, making the grandmother not “Bubbe,” but instead “Nonna” or “Avuela.” Check out this article about this and other missed opportunities in the representation of Latino Jews.

3. It’s the first night!

On TV, it always seems to be the eighth night of Hanukkah – the very end of the holiday. The Hanukkiah is typically depicted with nine candles lit, and there’s usually no mention of how a new candle is added each night. And since Hanukkah only appears in Christmas episodes, the effect created is that the eighth night of Hanukkah is the only important one and that it always falls on Christmas – incorrect!

In “Festival of Lights,” it’s explicitly the first night of Hanukkah. While a musical-imagination sequence shows Hanukkiahs with all nine candles placed in them, when it comes time to light the candles in the actual Hanukkiah, only two are lit: the shamash at the center, and the one on the farthest right. It’s a little detail, but it meant a lot to me.

4. The Jews run the show!

Elena’s name may be in the title, but it couldn’t be clearer that this episode is about Rebecca – she has the emotional journey of the episode.

What’s more, as they rush to make a perfect Hanukkah party, Elena and her family are constantly taking cues and asking for input from Rebecca, her brother Ari, and their Bubbe. The Jewish family is not othered, but rather treated as people who can and should be respected and learned from.

This could have easily turned into an “Elena saves Hanukkah” story, but it didn’t. Elena is a supporting character in this episode. The Jews here may need a little help, but they certainly don’t need to be saved!

5. Rebecca!

Our Jewish princess is a delightful combination of perfectionist-anxiety (with her very relatable desire to turn this unforeseen misadventure into the perfect Hanukkah celebration) and flat-out-badassery (she chops down the ship’s mast to save her family during the wreck – wow!). I really hope we get more stories about her.

6. Bubbe!

I was a little nervous going into this episode that the “Jewish grandmother” character would devolve into unfortunate stereotypes. However, Bubbe Miriam is an absolute delight, and the source of nearly all the times I laughed during the episode – not at her, but with her. The show makes a point of noting the similarities between Bubbe and Elena’s abuela while still maintaining her as her own person, who cares about tradition and her family and admirably bounces back from difficulties.

7. Showing how traditions can be shaped and shared!

In many ways, this episode is a very simple, surface-level portrayal of its topics, appropriate for a twenty-minute children’s show. The definition of mitzvah as a “good deed” put me in mind of how the concept was explained to me when I was tiny, rather than the more complex view of it I have now.

But there are ways in which this episode takes a step deeper, including its portrayal of tradition and how that tradition can be shaped and shared. Despite Rebecca’s eagerness to have this Hanukkah celebration be exactly like the ones at home, some details are out of her control. She’s in the wrong place, and with the wrong people. They don’t have all the correct ingredients for the food, and an accident breaks the family Hanukkiah.

Ultimately the not-quite-traditional Hanukkah party they end up holding is neither stated to be better nor worse than the way things usually are. Again, this isn’t a story about Elena “saving” Hanukkah, nor is it about “improving” the holiday. Instead, Bubbe describes it as “making the most of what we have.” The traditions of Hanukkah remain the core of the celebration, and it’s also clear that Bubbe, Rebecca, and Ari will carry the memories of this unusual Hanukkah celebration and the new friends they made with them into the future.

8. Differentiating between cultural norms and family tradition!

There’s a quick bit of dialogue while Rebecca is fiddling with the dinner table, making sure everything looks exactly right, right down to the placement of the cups and bowls.

Elena asks her, “Does it have to be a certain way for your holiday?”

“No,” says Rebecca, “this is just the way my family always does it.”

This exchange is another way that this episode delves deeper into its portrayal of culture than other shows generally do. The Hanukkah celebration we see here isn’t what all Jews do. It’s what Rebecca’s family does!

With this line, “Festival of Lights” marks a differentiation between broader cultural practices and specific family traditions. While this episode could have done more to portray Rebecca as a Latina Jew, it left the door open for children watching the show to realize that Judaism is not a monolith. We are diverse.

#elena of avalor #hanukkah #chanukah #festival of lights #disney #disney princesses #reviews #thursday thoughts #listicles #judaism #media representation #latinx #hanukkiah

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