Stopping yourself mid-conflict to change your perspective is allowed! It’s okay and normal to be mid argument with someone and realize you disagree with your own stance. Often I find myself and others caught up in trying to win the argument (not the point of arguments!) or too embarrassed to back down and be wrong. I promise there is so much more pride in going “Stop! I’m wrong. I hear you and I see how I wasn’t in the right and I want to amend my view” than digging your heels in.

"We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality." Ayn Rand.

PSA: There is no such thing as a "white Jew"

There are Jews who have European backgrounds and *some* of them have benefited from eurocentrism or being white passing, but in moments of crisis or need the social tides that create white privilege have never seen Jewish people as part of that group. Whiteness is a social category which has changed with time and attitudes and, at least for now, it has never and still doesn't include Jewish people.

Continuing to use the term "white Jews" is ignorant at best and harmful at worst. Even converts once converted are othered and can no longer rely on any previous white background to save them if they are identified as Jewish.

[ Non-jews please reblog]

Bible Belt hoes really out here confusing Herod the Great and Pontius Pilate.

01-02-24 | s.b. "Southern" (stupid). misterlemonztenth.tumblr.com/archive

Just a little PSA: I'm deleting every reblog I have talking about Israel and Palestine.

I knew I didn't know very much about what was going on, but seeing the horrors of what was happening, I felt compelled to try and help. One way I thought I was helping was by reblogging things I thought seemed important/worth sharing as a way to spread the word.

It's since been pointed out to me that this wasn't actually helpful and was actually quite the opposite. What was actually happening, unfortunately is that I was spreading misinformation and hate. That was definitely not my intention and I want to sincerely apologize for doing so.

Until I've completed the much needed research I need to do on the subject, I'll remain quiet and on the sidelines. Reading posts by Jewish people and learning real ways to be helpful.

I am so genuinely sorry for my ignorance, and I cannot believe my actions may have contributed to getting people killed. That's not my intention and it never will be. ❤

If anyone would like to chat privately - whether to vent or whatever - please feel free! I want Jewish people (and other minorities) to feel nothing but safe talking to me/on my blog. I'm here to listen, if needed.

Honestly fuck these antisemitic cowards. I wish we all lived closer together so we could protect each other!!

I reposted this on my instagram story:

Someone I have been in classes with responded with:

“An intifada does not incite violence against Jews. Intifada means revolution. A revolution is necessary when Palestinians are being actively massacred and forcibly removed from their indigenous land. It is called Genocide.”

So I replied:

“Do you know what the intifada was? It was suicide bombings and violence and destruction. You can isolate a word all you want but it doesn't change the meaning to a group of people who it hurt”

They left me on read. Either they didn’t know and didn’t know how to respond or they knew and don’t like that they were called out for it. Either way they clearly didn’t understand the message of the post which was: “what you are participating in is making me feel unsafe”

"In a recent Harvard-Harris poll, 53 percent of Americans between 18-24 said that October 7 was justified by Israel's wrongs torward the Palestinians.

Those most likely to say so were also the most likely to know nothing about the history of Israeli-Palestinian conflict: e.g. that Gaza has not been occupied since 2005; that it is Hamas, not Israel, that limits the import of food and medical supplies; that far from committing genocide against Palestinians, the Palestinian population grew rapidly under Israeli rule, with life expectancy skyrocketing and infant mortality plummeting; that the Palestinians have been repeatedly offered a state since the original UN Partition in 1948; that far from being colonizers, Jews are indigenous to Israel, and purchased, not conquered, all the land on which Israel was originally founded; that at the time of the Second Aliyah of Jews, the land was desolate and largely unpopulated, and only when the Jews had drained the swamps and caused the deserts to bloom was a large Arab population attracted to live there; and that most of Israel's Jewish population today is descended from Jews of color ethnically cleansed from Arab lands."

-Yonoson Rosenblum, Mishpacha Magazine, Issue 993, page 38, January 3, 2024

Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are the true sources of superstition.

David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary

NEVER ARGUE WITH IGNORANGE

There’s a saying, “Queens don’t argue with peasants.”

"The most violent element in society is ignorance." Emma Goldman.

(please don't take it as a dig at all #notallwesterners, but just as silly fun and illustration how some people can be stupid regradless of where they're from)

People from other countries also have amazing stories to tell:

Yuxiao Ran — Ignorance Buried Here (oil on calico fabric, 2022)

😱😱😱

"It is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice. For they cannot live in any country where virtue and knowledge prevail."

Samuel Adams (1722-1803) U.S. statesman and founding father.

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

 Isaac Asimov, 1980.