It is the year 2017.

The location is St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

The police laid siege against a synagogue, opened fire upon it with rubber bullets, and ensconced it with a gas attack.

The temple opened its doors to shelter those demonstrators who were targeted for violent repression by the police, and they are paying the price still as I type this.

Jackbooted thugs are roaming the streets, hungry for murder, and each and every one of them are on the payroll of the City of St. Louis, Missouri.

A source I found: https://medium.com/@rafaelshimunov/nazis-start-gasthesynagogue-in-reaction-to-st-louis-jews-shielding-protestors-from-police-b3fdf9488593

It’s annoying I have to look through countless “oh poor cops, they’re so brave” articles on google news trash

Stunning how many people can watch police besiege a synagogue and threaten faith leaders with violence and think, “Yeah, the cops are doing the right thing.” We’re getting our very own Gestapo, and they have bipartisan support.

The fucking pigs also assaulted an elderly woman and knocked her to the ground. Instead of helping her up they just continued to walk over her like it was nothing. 

fuck the St. Louis PD honestly

No goyish government will ever have the security of Jews in mind.

My grandparents left their home country as children when they heard the whispering of antisemitism starting in their home town. They got out and fled to America so I and future generations could be safe from persecution and mass murder. Only 2 generations ago.

And now America is becoming that country that they probably would have fled.

If you are not resisting, you are part of the problem.

antisemites know that they can say whatever they want about Jews as long as they call us “Zionists” instead 

if you are trying to be an ally to Jewish people, you have to be conscious of this. if you’re willing to uncritically cosign anything so long as they say “Zionists” instead of “Jews,” your allyship is fucking pointless 

Fun fact: the anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews having lots of money/being greedy/cheap began in the Middle Ages thanks to Christian laws.

The Christian church began forbidding Christians from having professions that involved lending money, banking, or pawn work. It was because the church believed that money was ultimately unclean so although it was considered a necessity, Christians were instructed to deal with it as little as possible.

But someone still needed to run all of those money-based businesses. So these societies which were already run by Christian leadership basically made it a rule that these businesses had to be run by Jews since they were already “unclean”. Furthermore, due to other restrictions on Jewish people in these areas, these money-based positions were pretty much some of the only jobs Jews could legally hold.

This eventually led to numerous stereotypes involving Jews and money. And the acidity of these stereotypes grew when Christian people and leaders became resentful of the livelihood Jews were able to achieve for themselves with these jobs.

So to sum up: Christian society forces Jews to hold down money-centered jobs since, according to the church, Jews were already going to Hell. Then, once they made lives with these roles they were forced into, Jews were mocked and hated for being successful.

History major here, just want to add details to emphasize how damaging these stereotypes are, even to a modern audience. To do so, I need to quote the introduction to “The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous” by Asa Simon Mittman.

In his class, Mittman was teaching his students about the negative portrayals of Jewish people in medieval works, specifically “Demons, Saracens and Jews” which depicts them as literal monsters. Hooked noses, fangs, grimaces, the whole she-bang. He then recounts this anecdote.

“One of my students raised her hand after this discussion, with a look of confusion and anger on her face. She said that she did not understand what I was ‘trying to get at.’ She said, with a quaver of emotion in her voice, that I was making too much out of nothing, since this is what Jews look like, more or less. And anyway, she continued, the Jews are Christ-killers. She then screamed out the text of John 19:15, saying “the Jews shouted, ‘Kill him! Kill him! Crucify him!’

She was quoting, interestingly, from the “God’s Word Translation,” the most violent English translation i have been able to find, since most read ‘take him’ or ‘away with him,’ where this one reads ‘kill him.’ […] The resulting impression, conveyed by my student, was that the Jewish monster was real. The impact of these imagined monsters has all been too real, form the middle ages onward.

I was struck temporarily speechless, but as I soundlessly worked my jaw to formulate a reply, I saw in the eyes of all the other students a shocked recognition that, in essence, answers the question posed at the outset: all of this matters. All of this is relevant. I was trying to show how medieval images were designed to allow medievals to confuse one group of Jews from the first century with all Jews in their own day, and here, in twenty-first-century America, my students saw this same notion quite alive. “

All of this matters.

All of this is relevant.

My coworker’s JCC was vandalized and covered in swastikas today. Bonus–her younger daughter’s bat mitzvah is this weekend.

This is a fucked up world and I am so pissed on her behalf. Ugh.

@chromelesbian thank you for asking. They don’t have a specific page up yet, but they do have a general donation page.

Here’s the donate link: https://memberlink.jccnv.org/OnlineEdge/fundraising.html

And an article about the hate crime: https://memberlink.jccnv.org/OnlineEdge/fundraising.html

http://dcist.com/2017/04/jcc_vandalism.php

This JCC is involved in the community in so many wonderful ways and supports so many programs that help NoVA and DC. If you can spare anything for them or just send a note of support, please do.

Thanks to all of you who have reblogged. Please continue to boost and send donations or messages of support if you can. Love you all!

key takeaways from today

- this wasn’t a “gaff” or “bad PR”. this was open bigotry and a deliberate attempt (yet again) at erasing jewish people from the holocaust, and you need to recognize it as such

- this administration consistently and deliberately downplays and avoids acknowledging jewish suffering during the holocaust. that’s not accidental, that’s part of a concerted movement to marginalize and erase jews

- the trump brand is always about using incompetence as a smokescreen for bigotry and malice. yeah, sean spicer’s an idiot, but don’t let that be as much attention as you pay here

- “good” non-jewish people need to be vocal in confronting this. it’s not enough to tell your jewish friends you have their back and post memes about how stupid spicer is. you need to aggressively confront anti-semitism in your own circles, or else stop asking us to trust you

- finally, don’t let me catch you defending your shitty friends who promote anti-semitism or stand for this administration. if your shitty liberal devotion to “open debate” means shutting down jews so antisemites can have the floor, you and I are finished forever

gentiles can reblog this

actually, i’m not just gonna leave that in the tags: Catholics used the Holocaust as an opportunity to steal and convert Jewish children. Catholic authorities refused to return the Jewish children they “saved” to their families after the Holocaust ended. we have no idea how many children we lost. 

they used our genocide to steal our babies.

This sadly isn’t at all Holocaust-specific, stealing Jewish children to baptise them was really common throughout European history, so much so you had really detailed laws on when it was acceptable since at least the 1200s. I don’t know about France, but in the Habsburg Empire, for example, the practice of clandestinely baptising Jewish children was so widespread that I recall a specific clause banning it in at least one Penal Code after the 1790s (i.e. after the Toleration Edict). Normally is was nominally forbidden and not really practiced by the clergy itself, but since Catholicism allows emergency baptisms to be performed by laypeople, you had lots of landowning nobility or just, like, regular Catholics baptising Jewish children to make them into “good Christians”. The most famous case is probably Pio Edgardo Mortara, who was taken from his Jewish parents in the 1850s when he was six and raised by the Pope himself after a Catholic maid baptised him in secret (it became a huge international scandal that played a pretty significant role in the demise of the Papal States and the reunification of Italy).

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. I’m more convinced than ever that it could happen here. I’m also convinced that if it were to happen here, the left would not support us.

There have been dozens of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers in the US these past few weeks. Yet only two of my hundreds of goyische Facebook Friends said anything about it and one only knew because his niece went to pre-school at a JCC. It’s not common knowledge, but JCC’s actually provide services and facilities for non-Jews as well as Jews, including pre-K and daycare. Which meant that one of my FB friends was aware of it without affecting her.

I’ve seen dozens of articles talking about the ethics of protecting Nazis, but I’ve seen virtually nothing outside of the Jewish media about protecting Jews. I’ve heard nothing anywhere about anti-romani racism.

The American Left seems increasingly blind to antisemitism and has grown moreso over the course of my life. Instead, what I’ve seen is an increasing display of Oppression Olympics in which antisemitism seems to constantly lose. The Left doesn’t de-prioritize antisemitism in favor of other issues so much as utterly ignore it.

When I showed some friends the hate crime statistics from the FBI listing Jews as the number 1 target of religiously motivated hate crimes, being the target of over half of such crimes and being the third largest target overall after Black and LGBTQA people, my well-meaning lefty goy friends’ first reaction was not shock or horror but questioning the methodology of the data. And these are my friends. My actual friends, not internet acquaintances. These are people I went to college with and hang out with on a regular basis. 

Indeed, what I see happening is people continually downplaying Nazi antisemitism, despite the Nazis deliberately murdering 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, in favor of universalizing their hatred to include almost anyone except for Jews. I see dozens of repurposings of Niemoller’s “First they came for…” while somehow leaving Jews off the list.

It’s not like there haven’t been dozens of Swastikas painted all over the place since the Trump campaign kicked into high gear. It’s not like we haven’t had to evacuate our children from JCCs over bomb threats. It’s not like Nazis haven’t tried to organize armed marches to threaten Jews in Montana. 

So today, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, I’m calling non-Romani goyim out. Stop leaving Jews out. Stop talking around us. Stop lying about fighting antisemitism when you don’t even pay attention to it and ignore our concerns. Antisemitism neither began nor ended with the Holocaust, but the Holocaust shows us what can happen to us when hatred of Jews goes unchecked. 

JESSICA PLUMMER 5|26|16

[SPOILERS FOR CAPTAIN AMERICA: STEVE ROGERS #1 BELOW]

Yesterday, Marvel released the first issue of Captain America: Steve Rogers by Nick Spencer, Jesus Saiz, and Joe Caramagna. It’s a pretty boilerplate (albeit beautifully depicted) story of a rejuvenated Steve Rogers back in the field…right up until he tosses an ally to his death and declares “Hail Hydra” in a final page splash. The whole thing is intercut with flashbacks to his childhood of a neighbor inviting Steve’s mother to a Hydra meeting, thus implying that Steve was indoctrinated as a child and has been a sleeper agent of Hydra all along.

This is comics, right? Unleash a shocking twist to get readers to pick up the next issue! Make everything All-New All-Different for a few months until things settle back into the status quo! Have a character behave so incongruously that fans just have to know why!

Except.

Except this is different than having Superman be a jackass to Lois and Jimmy on the cover of some Silver Age issue of Action. This is different than a kiss or a death or a resurrection. This is even different than the usual “wildly out of character” stunts that would normally have readers up in arms, like Batman using a gun.

Quick comics history lesson: Captain America was created in 1941 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby as a superpowered, super-patriotic soldier fighting the Axis forces. He was famously depicted punching out Adolf Hitler on the cover of his first appearance, inCaptain America Comics #1—which hit stands in December 1940, a full year before Pearl Harbor and before the United States joined World War II, making that cover a bold political statement.

You probably already knew that, but I’d invite you to think about it for a minute. In early 1941, a significant percentage of the American population was still staunchly isolationist. Yet more Americans were pro-Axis. The Nazi Party was not the unquestionably evil cartoon villains we’re familiar with today; coming out in strong opposition to them was not a given. It was a risky choice.

And Simon and Kirby—born Hymie Simon and Jacob Kurtzberg—were not making it lightly. Like most of the biggest names in the Golden Age of comics, they were Jewish. They had family and friends back in Europe who were losing their homes, their freedom, and eventually their lives to the Holocaust. The creation of Captain America was deeply personal and deeply political.

Ever since, Steve Rogers has stood in opposition to tyranny, prejudice, and genocide. While other characters have their backstories rolled up behind them as the decades march on to keep them young and relevant, Cap is never removed from his original context. He can’t be. To do so would empty the character of all meaning.

But yesterday, that’s what Marvel did.

Look, this isn’t my first rodeo. I know how comics work. He’s a Skrull, or a triple agent, or these are implanted memories, or it’s a time travel switcheroo, or, or, or. There’s a thousand ways Marvel can undo this reveal—and they will, of course, because they’re not about to just throw away a multi-billion dollar piece of IP. Steve Rogers is not going to stay Hydra any more than Superman stayed dead.

But Nazis (yes, yes, I know 616 Hydra doesn’t have the same 1:1 relationship with Nazism that MCU Hydra does) are not a wacky pretend bad guy, something I think geek media and pop culture too often forgets. They were a very real threat that existed in living memory. They are the reason I can’t go back to the villages my great-grandparents are from, because those communities were murdered. They are the reason I find my family name on Holocaust memorials. They are the perpetrators of unspeakable, uncountable, very real atrocities.

It’s easy, especially if you’re not Jewish, to think that anti-semitism is a thing of the past. It’s not. It flies under the radar, mostly, until suddenly it doesn’t: with graffiti in Spain, hateful party games in American high schools, vicious threats being flung at Jewish journalists for criticizing Trump. With physical attacks—with deaths—in France. Nor is neo-Nazi rhetoric, which hews closer to 616 Hydra’s shtick, a goofy make-believe thing. Not when the Republican presidential nominee spouts fascist ideology that echoes Hitler’s rise to power and spurs a literal rise in hate crimes against Muslims.

But writer Nick Spencer and editor Tom Brevoort are more concerned with making this “something new and unexpected”; with having “fun” and getting readers “invested in Hydra characters.” Because what’s more fun than downplaying genocide?

I’m not going to pretend to be cool here. I’m emotional. This is emotional. Captain America isn’t even my usual guy to get incandescently angry over the erasure of his coded Jewish history— that’s Kal-El, the Moses of Krypton—but reading this comic made me feel sick to my stomach. Reading the flippant responses of many non-Jewish readers—including friends—has brought me to tears. Somehow a community that gets up in arms about whether or not Batman has a yellow circle behind his logo seems to think that being angry about this is stupid, or indicative of a lack of experience with comics.

So let me be very clear: I don’t care if this gets undone next year, next month, next week. I know it’s clickbait disguised as storytelling. I am not angry because omg how dare you ruin Steve Rogers forever.

I am angry because how dare you use eleven million deaths as clickbait.

I am angry because Steve Rogers’s Jewish creators literally fought in a war against the organization Marvel has made him a part of to grab headlines.

I am angry because the very real pain of the Jewish community has been dismissed since this news leaked on Tuesday night as “Twitter outrage.”

If this story doesn’t hurt you? Good. I’m genuinely glad. I don’t want anyone else to have the gorge rise in their throat when they read the entertainment news. I love comics. I don’t want them to make people feel angry and betrayed. But understand that not feeling that way comes from a place of privilege, and don’t dismiss the concerns of those of us who are upset just because you have the luxury not to be.

I’ve been trying to think of how to finish this post, but I don’t think I can say it better than my friend and fellow Panelteer Sigrid Ellis did here:

And knowing that this wound is temporary, that it’s for the sake of sales and money and a story beat, that just makes it hurt more, not less. How little we must matter, the people who needed Steve to be the defender of the underdog and the weak, how little we must matter if betraying us for a story beat is so easy.

How little must we matter. The people who created Captain America, and Superman, and countless other heroes like them. The people who need him. The people whose history and suffering and hope, as we stood on the brink of annihilation, gave you your weekly entertainment and your fun thought experiment, 75 years later.

I hope it was worth it, Marvel.

X

@marvelentertainment

I don’t know man it pisses my ashkie ass off that goyim want to turn the loving brainchild of two jewish men into a Jesus esque messiah figure to the point where they release a movie about him dying on Good Friday. You can’t deny how much of the turn of century jewish experience was invovled in creating the big blue boy scout, taking all that and deciding he’s going to be your ultimate symbol for Christianity feels super disrespectful.

#LMAO Y EAH #AND THEN MAKE SEVERAL REFERENCES TO HITLER AT THE SAME TIME #IT WAS SO NASTY (via @bpdjace)

I want everyone to read these tags and read them again because I was going save this for another post but I’m feeling particuarly angry and jewish right now so you have to listen. 

Superman was based on the American Jewish , specifically American Jewish ASHKENAZI immigration and assimilation experience. This is not a stretch, this is not me reaching. Superman was created by two young JEWISH men in thirties. Deciding that you’re going to make references to Hitler with him is incredibly antisemitic and incredibly disrespectful not only to the legacy of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster but literally the entire community. 

I encourage you reblog this edited version of the post, even if you are a gentile.

Hey, I’d like to get serious for a moment.  Most of my followers are goyim, and I know most of you don’t get a whole lot of exposure to Jewish news.  I think it’s really important that people know about what’s going on in Yemen right now.

Basically, the Yemeni government has declared that all Yemeni Jews must either convert or leave the country.  I’m not sure right now what happens to the Jews who refuse, but I imagine that, at the very least, the government will do nothing to protect them from any antisemitism they face at the hands of their neighbors.  At least one article I have read corroborates this.

Here’s one article discussing the situation currently faced by Yemeni Jews.  Here’s another, from a while ago, predicting this situation.  Here’s a third.

This is obviously a very serious matter.  I hope that people around the world will soon be aware of the dangers faced by Yemeni Jews and other Mizrahi Jewish populations, and that we can work together to fight against this virulent oppression.

“Jews control the media”

Do you know where this old as fuck conspiracy theory comes from?

Jews were not allowed to get most jobs.
Most places wouldn’t even hire Jews, regardless of if they could.
However, at this time, Hollywood was young. And very liberal. And was seen as a joke by factory working America, used to make cheap comedies for rich people.
And Jews found their spot in early cinema.

And cinema turned out to not be a joke.
It got big. And Hollywood became the rich group. But people continued to ignore the Jewishness of the actors. And the writers. And the directors. People ignored the Jewish roots of stories. So Jews had to not be open about it, or the media went down their throat, or completely ignored them.

This trope is literally as old as Hollywood. Fuck yall.

It’s evolved the same way the “Jews control the money” conspiracy theory did. Goyim forced us out of the economical and social model until we had a group of our own, and then when that got big you goyim scapegoated us, claimed we owned everything and are taking over. You know what the old version of this was?

Towns, which became major cities and broke the European feudal system.

Jews don’t control everything, but goyim are fine with taking what we made and making it theirs, then blaming us for being in it.