fake [submission]

I feel like a fake

I don’t feel jewish enough

I feel like I want to hurt the people that made my great grandma and great grandpa and great great uncle feel so ashamed and scared

That they forced their children to stop practicing. And they stopped.

And they left behind G-d because they said She had turned Her eyes from them

And I want to cry because when my grandma tried to be jewish her husbands

One after the other

Every failed marriage

They beat her down over and over and over

And when my mom taught me about Passover

Passover

Not Pesach

Passover

Because my goyische father

And his goyische family

And all of the goyim in my life

Made it bad to do anything that wasn’t christianized

And when I wanted to be jewish and I wanted to learn my great grandma took that internalized HATRED and called me

Shiksa Goddess

and she hit me

(a small eight year old with big watery blue eyes and the longest tangle of blonde hair to be found for miles)

(no one on my mothers side has hair like mine)

until I cried the bitter tears that she could never let herself cry

Because she had to be Strong.

And I want to scream and cry and hurt them like they’ve hurt me

And I want to hate my great grandma but

Sarah just did what she had to do

So aptly named

She took life in stride and looked for other solutions and I want to be Sarah but I am not that strong

And I am not strong

I am not strong

And I just want to cry.

• damnatians.tumblr.com

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diaspora quote

Being part of a diaspora is the feeling of never wanting to forget, but being incapable of remembering.

• fireofashk.tumblr.com

passover [submission]

passover (poem) [submission from hamletrash.tumblr.com]

remember when your skin first felt like a

disease, like every pore if you squeezed it

would spit cold cyanide

remember when you were a slave in the house of bondage

remember the blood on your thighs. remember

the plague of boils, the plague of blood,

the plague of cattle disease

(you used to have a toy a

cow with a button on its foot

push the button and its joints buckled

and collapsed)

pretending as you

scrubbed your sheets

that this was the blood of a man you’d killed

remember that spring when god peeled your skin off and ate it like bread

the terror of how your zipped coat

looked when you sat down

the waves and bubbles the zipper made.

like eve under trees

the sudden alien weight of her body

this is the bread of affliction

god spits blood in the river, god

whispers into your bed

kisses your neck full of boils

god in a breath of lice that squirm through

your firstborn’s hair

god bound between your eyes and

upon the doorposts of your houses

god’s blood in the nile

lamb’s blood on the door

cows’ blood in the fields

your blood in the sink

stick your smallest finger in the wine

take heart

In times of sorrow, take heart, even

though you stand at deaths door: the

candle flares up before it dies,

and wounded lions roar.

• Samuel Ibn Naghrila/ Samuel haNagid

anonymous submission

“diaspora poem?” [anonymous submission]

some nights when i’m alone, my thoughts run strange:

that my heart is a homeland,

pumping culture and language and identity

through rivers, over mountains.

nearer to my heart are the organs that are strong:

my lungs are my ancestors, receiving the most blood,

next my digestive system is my parents—

not as rich, yet not as poor as me—

because i am housed within my hands and feet.

i am choked by the circulation problems i’ve had since i was born,

and my hands and feet are cold and weak

like my sense of identity

like my connection with eretz yisrael

like my understanding of those other jews.

at which point can the dysfunctional body flourish,

when the heart is a homeland that cannot reach over distances,

when there are far more important places

for that blood to reach?

i want to reach out in the dark for answers,

but my feeble hands clutch at nothing

nothing but the drowning call of diaspora.

“in which ways is Hermione coded Jewish?”

askjellybean.tumblr.com: “I’m asking because I’m genuinely curious here: regarding your comment about Hermione being ‘coded Jewish,’ in what ways is this the case? I’m not doubting you, I’m just curious as to what you mean by it.”

littlegoythings.tumblr.com:

“Oh boy, in what way is she NOT

In terms of physical characterisics, things like bushy hair and even brown eyes are all stereotypical “Jewish features.” Even the bad teeth thing is a not uncommon stereotype attached to Jews. (Snape also is coded Jewish, in his ~olive skin tone, lanky hair, and hooked nose. His presentation as a dangerous foreigner with uncertain loyalties is standard British anti-Jewish xenophobia as well. The goblins too also are very Jewish-coded – small hunched over hooked-nose money counters who are greedy with their posessions. Another post for another time, I think.)

Hermione’s extreme bookishness is very much “Jewish coding”, her being shrill to the point of alienating most of her peers (a big point in the first book, and touched upon continuously as the series goes on) is a direct relation to the “unnatural woman” stereotype attributed to Jewish women. (And that it took average British dude Ron Weasely to “teach her” how to tone that down says a LOT.)

And let’s not forget that Hermione faces brutal oppression for her blood – her BACKGROUND – in a racism analogue that is directly lifted from the Holocaust. JK Rowling doesn’t even try to hide it – the Nazis of the wizarding world, the Death Eaters, who are obsessed with blood purity, literally carve it into her arm in a direct analogue to the numbers tattooed on the arms of Jewish and Rroma inmates in German death camps.

JK Rowling made Hermione a Jew in all but name, but she removed all aspects of Jewishness from her. It’s an insult.”

Wagner’s Anti-Semitism Still Matters

Wagner’s Anti-Semitism Still Matters

“What are we to do with Wagner’s anti-Semitism? The recent Wagner anniversary has brought a predictable amount of equivocation and hand-wringing about the German master’s role in the history of hate. We know by now not to read history backward. A nineteenth-century composer who died in 1883 cannot logically be accused of personal complicity in a twentieth-century genocide. Yet that does not mean that the broader question of his responsibility for the spread of modern anti-Semitism can be simply ignored. … The real legacy of Wagner, one with which we are still living today, is nothing less than the sweeping imprint of racial ideology across the length and breadth of modern classical music.”

“But, ironically, the more we learn of banned composers, the harder it is to hear their music outside the framework of the Holocaust. The ending we all know and cannot forget reverberates backward. This is regrettable. For when the composer’s music is permanently coupled to his victimhood, Jewishness becomes merely a negative condition. That generation upon generation of Jewish musicians confronted racism at the heart of classical music does not mean that every work they wrote must be heard as a Semitic cry of despair. Not every knock at the door means the secret police. Not every minor-key passage is lachrymose. Still, the sonic shadows prove hard to elude. We may think we inhabit a post-Holocaust soundscape, but we still very much live in Wagner’s world. “