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If you haven’t heard a National March on Washington in solidarity with Palestine is being planned for Nov. 4. If you can’t make it (like me) consider donating to ANSWER Coalition to cover transportation costs for buses to help get as many people to the march as possible.
(via bizarrequazar)
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the flesh is unwilling and honestly, the spirit isn’t too keen on the idea either
(via naamahdarling)
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Ok I’ve decided to make some basic resources for anti-Zionist Jews who feel really alone and want to connect with each other or with our culture or history.
Reading List
Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race
The Making of Jewish Revolutionaries in the Pale of Settlement
Twenty Years with the Jewish Labor Bund A Memoir of Interwar Poland
Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews
Colonial Paradigms of Violence: Comparative Analysis of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Mass Killing
The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History
With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism
A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York
How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says About Race in America
Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Politics, and Culture, 1893–1958
A History of Egyptian Communism Jews and Their Compatriots in Quest of Revolution
The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging
On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings of Ella Shohat
Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew
When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History
The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity
(Do also check out Decolonize Palestine for the original resources as well as the reading list that centres Palestinians themselves)
News and Magazines
Jewish Currents [United States]
Treyf Podcast [Montreal, Quebec, Canada] (sadly defunct but you can listen to their older, archived podcasts which include some great interviews)
Edit: I think it’s also worth adding The Electronic Intifada. It’s not explicitly Jewish, but it often features interviews with and opinion pieces by anti-Zionist Jews while primarily being an outlet for Palestinians themselves.
Organisations
Jewish Voice for Peace [United States]
IfNotNow [United States]
Independent Jewish Voices Canada [Canada]
Jewdas [United Kingdom]
Jews Against Fascism [Australia]
Dayenu: New Zealand Jews Against Occupation [Aotearoa / New Zealand]
Sh'ma Koleinu – Alternative Jewish Voices [Aotearoa / New Zealand]
Synagogues
Tzedek [Chicago, Illinois, United States]
Chavurah For A Free Palestine at Kehilla Community Synagogue [Piedmont, California, United States]
Edit: Have also been told I can add Kadima Reconstructionist Community [Seattle, Washington, United States] to the list!
if I may, I would also add:
Reading List
Antisionisme, une histoire juive
A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism
There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart: Mending the World as Jewish Anarchists
“Not by Might, Nor by Power:” The Zionist Betrayal of Judaism
Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel
Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism: Stories of Personal Transformation
Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism
Wrestling with Zionism: Jewish Voices of Dissent
Jews Against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism, 1942-1948
Organizations &c.
Jews Against White Supremacy [international]
Judaism On Our Own Terms [North America]
Kavod Boston [United States]
Loud Jew Collective [Australia]
Een Andere Joodse Stem - Another Jewish Voice [Belgium]
Shabbes 24/7 Collective [Belgium]
Junts - Associació catalana de jueus i palestins [Catalonia]
Tsedek ! Collectif juif décolonial [France]
Jüdische Stimme [Germany]
Jüdisch Antikolonial [Switzerland]
TzedekUKI [United Kingdom & Ireland]
while some of these do not describe themselves as anti-zionist, I think it can nevertheless be a good start to meeting like-minded people and building explicitly anti-zionist alliances
Miscellaneous
Disillusioned [podcast]
Matzpen [website, documents, videos]
(via bizarrequazar)
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McDonald’s giving away free fries if you use their mobile app and then updating the terms and conditions to say if you use this app you waive your right to trial in any class action lawsuits and have to do mandatory arbitration is INSANE
(via bizarrequazar)
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Rising With The Wind starring Gong Jun and Zhong Chu Xi is
finallygoing to air on IQIYI starting Oct. 30th. -
The thing about debate is that it’s supposed to be a fair and reasoned and good-faith discussion about The Thing. It’s supposed to be two people of differing opinions attempting, through discussion, to find the truth.
But debating with cult members and trolls only mimics this. It’s a nice shiny flower that also happens to be a praying mantis with bodyparts that look like petals.
You’re not arguing with them about The Thing. You’re arguing with them about their opinion of The Thing. Which is 1) entirely in their control, and 2) really isn’t particularly important to you.
Unless you make it important to you.
Like, by conflating it with the thing it purports to be.
The instant you get invested, the instant you feel the need to convince THEM, the instant convincing them becomes synonymous with successfully defending your own beliefs, they have a hold on you.
And they will use that hold to do what predators do.
They’re not interested in being convinced. They’re not interested in finding the truth. They’re interested in arguing you out of everything you believe using the debate process you’ve foolishly placed your faith in and staked your positions on, and using your own convictions that being right makes you a superior debater and/or that being a superior debater makes you right, to convince you that you owe it to them to change YOUR mind, because you chose to avail yourself of their supposed willingness to change THEIRS.
You can, actually, lose a debate while still being right. Debate is a skill contest, not a magical truth-detector. You don’t owe anyone to change your beliefs to their tune just because they’re more skilled at debating, more sophisticated at finding arguments, or just more unwilling to concede points.
But they’ll try to convince you otherwise. In fact, they run on your entrenched beliefs otherwise.
To say “I still don’t accept this” and walk away, to keep your own autonomy at the cost of mockery on a level you probably believe, takes strength and savviness few people possess, and they absolutely prey on that too.
It’s very helpful to be able to be honest with yourself about whether you’re actually willing to believe/accept their position, and fair to your prospective opponent to avoid debates (or at least avoid calling it a debate) over something when you absolutely are not willing to accept the opposing position. Because being fair in a real debate means you risk accepting the opposing position.
And if you’re the only one being fair in a debate only you believe is real, you’re taking a huge-ass risk with only purely illusory payoff.
The trap is that they’re offering you the illusion of an opportunity to defend your beliefs by convincing them, at the cost of you risking your beliefs on the strength of your ability to convince them. And then they use their refusal to be convinced as the “impartial” judge of victory.
The fight is not what you think the fight is, and it’s time to walk away.
(via seananmcguire)
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“We have many times more empty houses and apartments than we do homeless people, but America can’t have laws limiting investments in single-family residences (which are being snapped up as passive investments by foreigners and Wall Street) because the industry owns so many politicians. Investment companies own about a quarter of all American single-family homes: last year, investors bought 22% of all American homes sold and “donated” millions to politicians. Many were purchased specifically to leave them sitting empty, because real estate goes up in value faster than even the stock market. By pulling all these houses out of the housing market, these investors and speculators are driving up — intentionally — the price of housing. And as the price of housing goes up, so does homelessness: there’s a linear relationship between the two when the price of housing in a community exceeds one-third of the community’s median income. So why can’t we regulate that? Why can’t there be at least some disincentive, some penalty, for this destructive form of investing? Citizens United.”
— This Supreme Court decision is destroying America — and no one is talking about it
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listen to me very very closely: the biblical prohibition against mixing linen and wool is the most SENSIBLE THING IN THE WORLD, do not write it off as silly, unreasonable, or unnecessary. g-d didn’t tell us not to mix linen and wool for no reason, g-d told us not to mix linen and wool together because mixing them is an affront to textiles
This is the fiercest defense of the mitzvah against shatnez I have ever seen, haredi sources included
I will sit down, right this very minute, and spin a nice linen/wool mix yarn, explicitely to affront god. Just you watch.
#handspinning #what’s god going to do about it huh?
g-d doesn’t have to do anything, you’re going to punish yourself enough just making it and then trying to wash it later
it’s true and you should say it
I wasn’t aware that just like modest dress and “don’t eat pork”, not mixing textiles was also just a practical life rule for the time and place. Cool!
But don’t mix linen and wool is probably the most universal and timeless of the rules you mentioned - “modest dress” means somewhat different things to different cultures. Don’t eat pork could have any number of “reasons” for why it makes sense. But I don’t understand why some Jews think this particular mitzvah is “chok” (meaning roughly like…a law without a reason, or I guess some people don’t understand the reason for). ***
the prohibition of mixing linen and wool for a fabric isn’t senseless or weird! it’s completely TOTALLY logical! it’s the most logical!
The commandment against shatnez (mixing linen and wool) is repeated:
Deut. 22:11 You shall not wear a mixture of wool and linen together.
Lev 19:19 You shall observe My statutes: You shall not crossbreed your livestock with different species. You shall not sow your field with a mixture of seeds, and a garment which has a mixture of shaatnez [linen and wool] shall not come upon you.
this is completely reasonable when you know what linen does, and what wool does. Linen wicks away moisture. Linen is lightweight, it doesn’t stretch, and it’s very durable. Linen is a bit “slippery,” it’s shiny, and it softens with age. Linen is easy to clean and repels dirt. Linen has no “memory” so once stretched, it stays that way. Linen wrinkles easily but is stiff when pressed. you can beat the crap out of linen in order to clean it.
Wool, on the other hand – wool can repel water, meaning it works well to keep you warm in winter, but it also absorbs moisture (it can absorb up to 50% of it’s weight and still be relatively “dry’ to the touch; so like, yes it could absorb your sweat in the heat). Wool is naturally flame resistant. Wool is elastic and stretchy, and it easily interlocks with itself. It can felt. Wool has “memory” and can return more or less to its original shape. It can also shrink. But although it’s strong, it degrades in the sun, and if it stays wet for too long it mildews and rots. totally biodegradable. put that ish in a sunny bog and it’s gonzo. wool needs to be washed with delicacy.
they perform COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY when woven, knit, or crocheted!!!!!
these just…should not be mixed. don’t do that. why would you do that.
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*** FOOTNOTE: here’s my feminist drash - a bunch of ancient and medieval men read this mitzvah and were like “this doesn’t make any sense why would Hashem command us not to mix wool and linen? this is a law without reason!” because not a single one of them ever had to think about it. and that’s WHY you see some sources say it’s “chok” it doesn’t make logical sense, because it’s all men writing, men who didn’t learn to weave, who don’t know how fiber works, and who didn’t do the laundry ever in their lives.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
Most of Jewish law makes complete sense when you consider when it was written and who it was written for.
Most of the ancestors were just farmers who needed rules on how to best run their farms and how to not die of avoidable sickness/ injury.
Don’t mix linen and wool- because they are very different fibers and will be a bitch to work with
Don’t crossbreed livestock- because you’ll end up with sterile critters like mules
Don’t plant different crops in the same spot- because each crop has different needs and you can’t tend to both
Don’t eat pork and shellfish- these fucks are full of intestinal parasites and you will die
Dress modestly- because you have 0 cash for fancy clothes and also its a million degrees out so wearing skimpy stuff will give you sunstroke
(via seananmcguire)
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you know what really grinds my gears?
okay, bear with me: so as you may know, harry houdini and arthur conan doyle were friends, at least for a while.
by the early 1920s, both arthur conan doyle and acd’s wife jean, aka lady doyle, believed whole-heartedly in spiritualism, talking to ghosts and all of that. (sidenote: this was of course right on the heels of a devastating world war and a devastating pandemic, both of which had created a huge population of grieving people, so spiritualism was having a moment.)
lady doyle sincerely thought she had the ability to go into a trance state and pass along messages in writing from the dead. she offered to do this for houdini. houdini agreed.
lady doyle attempted to channel houdini’s late mother. she basically drew a cross at the top of the paper and filled it with generic platitudes addressed to “harry.” houdini’s mom was jewish and didn’t talk like that, so houdini knew the jig was up, even if lady doyle didn’t. but not wanting to make the situation awkward, he kind of went along with it to their faces.
then acd decided to publish a glowing account of the seance, and since both he and houdini were super famous, it got a lot of attention, and letters started pouring in for houdini, asking if this was true. ultimately, houdini couldn’t life about it. so he essentially said, like, “yeah, i think lady doyle THINKS she can talk to ghosts but she absolutely can’t.” and it ruined his friendship with acd forever.
and then of course a lot of the people running seances weren’t even well-intentioned like lady doyle, they were just simple charlatans taking advantage of traumatized people mourning loved ones. in houdini’s youth, he and his wife had traveled the carnival circuit where he did an act pretending to commune with spirits, so he knew all the tricks of the trade AND he had lingering guilt over having done this, AND he was infuriated by this increasingly popular wave of con artists so he decided to assemble a team of anti-grifting grifters and together they went on the road exposing whichever spiritualists were preying on the locals.
houdini’s best agent was a young woman named rose mackenberg, who donned disguises to visit the fraud de jour and then importantly sussed out what non-supernatural thing was actually happening, and then houdini would demonstrate the techniques onstage to packed audiences.
(if you want to know more, check out episode 175, “ghost racket crusade” of the podcast Criminal or read Tony Wolf’s book The Real-Life Ghostbusting Adventures of Rose Mackenberg.)
but yeah, what really gets my goat is that all this happened and as far as i know, we still don’t have like four seasons of a Leverage-style historical procedural about rose mackenberg and the rest of the crew having adventures in the 1920s as they unmask craven hucksters all over the united states. (what we do have, apparently, is one season of a show called “houdini and doyle” which is about the oddball friendship of two contrasting men solving sometimes-actually-supernatural mysteries, and whose premise does i think at the very least a real disservice to houdini’s whole quest and also totally erases rose, who is arguably the most interesting part of this story to me.)
i am just steamed about this. steamed.
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ALTI just posted a handful of diary comics from my week at the Appalachian Forest Stewardship Residency over on my patreon! Here’s a free sample. New goal in life: vulture grandparenthood
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