Samantha Bee’s 1st segment last night hit home the truth about the prevalence of antisemitism in America.
Trump speaks in dog whistles and anti-semitic coded language with the greatest of ease. It is second nature for him. He sells white victimhood just as easy.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION is considering whether to grant a South Carolina request that would effectively allow faith-based foster care agencies in the state the ability to deny Jewish parents from fostering children in its network. The argument, from the state and from the agency, is that the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act should not force a Protestant group to work with Jewish people if it violates a tenet of their faith.
The case being made by South Carolina is an extension of the debate around RFRA, which is more commonly associated with discrimination against LGBTQ people, but by no means applies exclusively to that group.
If granted, the exemption would allow Miracle Hill Ministries, a Protestant social service agency working in the state’s northwest region, to continue receiving federal dollars while “recruiting Christian foster families,” which it has been doing since 1988, according to its website. That discrimination would apply not just to Jewish parents, but also to parents who are Muslim, Catholic, Unitarian, atheist, agnostic or other some other non-Protestant Christian denomination.
Miracle Hill covers Greenville, Pickens and Spartanburg counties, and its foster care services have becoming increasingly in demand as an opioid epidemic has torn through a generation of young parents. The fight over its policy has been written about in the local press and was first covered nationally by The Nation.
Watch Republicans still try and call this a “Religious Freedom” issue despite the fact that this is literally about them trying to legalise bigotry AGAINST religions
Midterm elections are coming up
REMEMBER THIS GARBAGE
AND VOTE THE FASCIST REPUBLICAN TRASH OUT OF OFFICE
I don’t understand what’s Jewish about mother gothel… she has a typical Disney face doesn’t she? Is it the curly hair..? I mean her nose and everything else seem normal?
I’m sorry, I’m just trying to figure it out, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.
dark curly hair – long hooked nose – darker complexion than the blond blue eyed heroine 9and really the rest of the cast – portrayed as greedy and evil.
Lisa Edelstein is Jewish. As are Idina Menzel and Amy Winehouse, both of whom I have seen compared in looks to Gothel. Gothel’s design is a pretty clear caricature of ethnically Jewish women.
This is a pretty good contrast between Rapunzel and Gothel. Rapunzel has the “typical Disney face”:
Here’s a more close up look at her features.
The hooked nose becomes even more pronounced as she becomes “eviler.”
If you wanted to claim that there was noting out of the ordinary for Disney animation when it came to Gothel’s features, you would have to find at least one Disney princess or heroine with similar characteristics (long hooked nose and dark curly hair, etc).
But here is what we have is –
small noses that turn up at the end:
wide, flatter noses (though cheers to Disney for not putting button noses on their characters of color, although Esmerelda’s clothing design deserves another essay on Rromani stereotypes and there are some major issues with Pocahontas as well)
And then a few misc noses (again, props for Jasmine’s nose not being a button):
Apart from just the design of Gothel, there’s also the whole: “obviously ‘other’ (read Jewish) woman kidnaps the pretty blonde (read: gentile) kid to use her for ritualistic/magical purposes”
Like that right there on top ofthe aesthetic Jewish-coding is what pushed the antisemitic caricature over the top for me. It harkens back to antisemitic blood libel that claimed that Jews stole gentile children for all manner of nefarious reasons. Even when Gothel is in “mother” role to Rapunzel, she’s is shown as nagging and passive aggressive, both antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish women.
There is no one thing that makes her an antisemitic caricature, but the design, plus the storyline she plays out, plus her characterization cement the overall character as antisemitic.
Jew-coding a villain is not in itself always antisemitic when there are also Jewish coded heroes. Rapunzel does not have that.
Having a villain steal a baby for magical/ritualistic reasons is not always antisemitic as long as the villain is not Jew-coded. Rapunzel fails this as well.
Having a nagging and passive aggressive mother character is not antisemitic provided that she is not, again, coded as Jewish. Rapunzel fails once again.
Hope this helps.
EDIT: @ariminak pointed out that some of my wording made it sound like Gothel’s features only stereotypically caricatured Ashkenazi women when in fact that is not the case. I changed the language to remove that phrasing and make it clear that any ethnically Jewish women can be affected by this type of aesthetic trope. If you reblogged the old version, could you please delete it and reblog this one instead.
Spread this version so people recognize that this stuff harms all Jewish women.
omfg can y’all chill the fuck out, any race can be portrayed as hero or villain, it’s a fucking kids movie not a political statement
So I’m guessing you’re white and a gentile. As such, you’ve more than likely grown up looking at tv and movies and fairytales and seeing your face in those of the heroes.
Jewish people don’t get that. When we are portrayed in live action, our characters are more often than not whitewashed and in other media, our features are used and caricaturized to create “evil looking” villains.
You don’t see it because you’ve been ingrained with the idea that “ethnic” features are just “how you make a character look evil.” You don’t look at Gothel and see your mother. You don’t see yourself and your people. You don’t see decades of propaganda aimed at fostering hate against you and ultimately seeking to destroy you.
So really, you need to chill the fuck out and stop telling marginalized people to stop talking about the tools of our own marginalization.
Let’s play a game I like to call: Movie Villain or Antisemitic Propaganda:
Many “evil witch” tropes were built on European antisemitic stereotypes, not just in appearance but in the storylines they play out as well. Greediness, stealing children, killing children, hunger for power, etc. Every time a movie villain design uses stereotyped Jewish features to communicate “evilness” to an audience, they perpetuate the marginalization of the people they are using.
One big issue I have is that Gothel’s didn’t start out as the antisemitic caricature that made it to screen. Much of the early concept art has a more dark romanticism feel.
They changed the original design. Presumably to make Gothel more “other” from the good characters in the movie. At some point, a decision was made that dark curly hair and a hooked nose wound better convey their villain.
It really doesn’t matter if any of this was intentional, I’d actually bet that it wasn’t. However, antisemitic tropes are so engrained in our societies that people like you, even when confronted with a step by step break down of what it is, feel comfortable thinking that there’s nothing wrong with it and mocking those calling it out as if we are overreacting.
You seem to have completely ignored the majority of my post. It is the character design, plus the characterization, plus the story line that mirrors blood libel that makes Gothel an antisemitic character. It’s not just about someone of a certain race or ethnicity being a villain. It’s about how stereotypes of a certain ethnic group are understood as “villainous” due to villains being repeatedly coded as Jewish over decades of film and tv.
And contrary to your naive belief, all media is political to some extent. Every time a historically present minority is not included in film (ex: lily-white Harlem in Fantastical Beasts) or when a minority character is whitewashed, or when the “ethnic” features of a minority are used almost universally to portray bad guys, it is a political and social issue. When you never see yourselves as the people who play the hero or even see your people existing in a portrayal of a place where they should be, it is not benign.
Reblogging again for these additions.
I’m not Jewish, but I can imagine seeing yourself villanized again and again must wear on you so hard (like queer coded villains do on me). The stereotypes are so insidious, I didn’t even realize she was Jewish coded until I saw this post for the first time, and since then I’ve been able to pick up on more anti-semitic media.
Stay cognizant!
This is a writing blog so fellow writers! Please take a good look at your villains— even if they’re not Jewish, it can be antisemitic. Thanks. – A Jew™️
It does not go unnoticed that there is this smearing of a Jewish woman to make her seem like she is white supremacist sympathizer. Especially seeing as this same Jewish woman was harassed and sent death threats along with images of her photoshoped in Holocaust images for writing an article on Melania Trump that was not sycophantic.
This smearing of her is not just this there is also:
What is happening here is the willful misconstruing of facts in order malign and smear a Jewish person and to make them appear as a white supremacist sympathizer.
This is antisemitism plain and simple.
Also if you look at the date on the tweet in the first post you will see that is not even how twitter does their dates and times.
I don’t know if OP is the one who messed with the image or they got if from somewhere else all I do know is that what we have here is antisemitism.
I hope that this version with the correct information spreads as fast and as far as the false antisemitic original did.
GUYS PLEASE READ THIS AND STOP SPREADING THOS POST AROUND UNCRITICALLY
Reblogging bc i’ve only seen the original dumb ass post before this
Julia Ioffe has been harassed 24/7 by neo-nazis because she wrote an article about Melania a year ago. They leave Hitler speeches on her voicemail. But by all means, keep making assumptions based on a picture and falling for a neo-nazi propaganda campaign.
This is another one from a Russian account, from June of 2017. They didn’t stop when the election was over, they continually turned you against trustworthy sources of information.
Russian bots can spread the lies but it won’t help unless we fuel it. So fucking stop, check your sources.
I’ll take this one since I’m the blog’s resident Jew. Oy vey, where do I start…
SJ community loves to police Jewish identity and silence actual Jews when they talk about their own identities. This usually happens in context of either “Are Jews White?” or “Jewishness is just a religion” conversations. In reality, Jews are an ethnoreligious group that ethnically originated in the middle east, and while some ethnic Jews have light skin, it’s actually due to centuries of forced assimilation in European and Slavic countries through rape, which is a big reason why Jewishness is matrilineal. Furthermore, there exist Jews who do not look white at all. There are black, brown, and asian Jews who are all ethnically Jewish, and these conversations erase them.
“Jewish privilege”. Fact: It’s not a thing. It’s actually a very common anti-semitic trope that says that Jews run everything so they are not oppressed. Jews are oppressed, and face anti-semitic violence.
“Anti-semitism is not just about Jews, there are other semitic people.” While yea, there are other semitic people, the term “anti-semitism” was created by Germans in the 19th century to refer specifically to the hatred of Jews because it sounded more scientific.
Blaming anti-semitic violence in Europe on the actions of Israel. I see this literally every single day on this site, and it’s very upsetting. Jews that live in the diaspora are not responsible for Israel’s actions, and especially should not be suffering at the hands of white people in Europe under the guise of anti-zionism.
Finally, and this is a big pet peeve of mine. The only people I ever see reblogging posts about anti-semitism are other Jews. Even a lot of my non-Jewish followers will reblog posts about racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. but ignore posts about anti-semitism, and that as a Jew makes me feel unsafe.
That’s enough for now. If you’re interested in learning more about Jewish identity and anti-semitism, you are welcome to check out my personal blog: yochevedke. I discuss that stuff a lot.
-Yeva
Another Jew reblogging about anti-semitism. I’ve seen some increase in concern about this from goyim, but it’s been slow going. Hopefully we’ll pick up a big head of steam soon.
“The only people I ever see reblogging posts about anti-semitism are other Jews. Even a lot of my non-Jewish followers will reblog posts about racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. but ignore posts about anti-semitism, and that as a Jew makes me feel unsafe.”
the amount with which this point in particular resonates with me is unreal
The bold is especially important.
I don’t think I suffer a lot from anti-Semitism, and I certainly don’t face anything close to the degree of oppression that many of my peers have to face because of their gender and sexual identity and the color of their skin. That being said, The previous posters are absolutely right on all counts.
Again, The only people I ever see reblogging posts about anti-Semitism are other Jews, while many blogs I follow reblog every post under the sun relating to racism, sexism, and homophobia. This issue has on occasion made me feel pretty isolated, because I have seen a lot of people reblogging posts related to recents events in Gaza that reflected extremely anti-Israel points of view. There’s nothing wrong with that, people have every right to hold those opinions, and I even share some of them. However, as the original poster said, a lot of recent anti-Semitic violence in Europe stems from the the willingness of anti-Israel Europeans to hold Jews in the Diaspora responsible for the actions of the state of Israel. This is not ok. This is anti-Semitism, and this is part of what American Jews are seeing as anti-Semitic in what tumblr users say and do.
The average American Jew on tumblr doesn’t think “I support what Israel is doing in Gaza, and the horrible things people say about Israel are anti-Semitic attacks”.
The average American Jew on tumblr thinks “I don’t support what Israel is doing in Gaza, and even though there wasn’t a single popular protest in Europe over civilian deaths in Syria, Libya, or elsewhere in the Middle East caused government violence, but as soon as Israel did it Europe was outraged, and tumblr exploded with anti-Israel posts covering the protests and Israel’s actions.”
Fantastic points. Bravo everyone.
I am specifically asking my non-Jewish followers (and Jewish followers if you’d like) to please read and reblog. It would mean a lot to me since I identify with pretty much all of this post. It addresses the complexities of modern antisemitism as a form of racism. We’ve done important work in in social justice already, but there is so much more to do. Thank you.
In the year 1905 my paternal great-grandmother, a Jewess from Austria-Hungary, left her homeland–although perhaps “fled” would be a better word–with nothing but a suitcase, the clothes on her back, and the potential promise of finding work with a distant cousin who had been living in the slums of Victorian Glasgow in Scotland since the 1890s.
During that time she married my great-grandfather, an Irish Catholic immigrant who lived in the notorious “Rat Pits”–so called because the Irish (and therefore inherently Catholic) residents “bred like rats”–and worked as a boat smuggler (meaning he smuggled people and other commodities into Scotland from Ireland on a boat, he was not in fact a smuggler of boats), a shoe maker, a wood carver and general jack of all trades master of none, with a stereotypical love of drink and a violent temper to go with it. But he provided for her and didn’t force her into sex work like so many girls her age were, so she forgave a great many things that would no longer be forgiven and had lots of children, many of whom died.
Dad tells me he remembers her “singing” their names and lighting candles at specific times, but only when his grandfather was “out” (smuggling, or visiting another woman, he never elaborated on this) because she sang her prayers in Yiddish and they’d spent many years trying to hide her Jewishness.
Being a Catholic in the turbulent streets of Glasgow where Protestant faith is still practiced militantly in some areas, was troublesome, but it was infinitely less trouble than being Jewish during the years that would lead up to two world wars. So she hid behind his Catholicism and his large family, and watched as the world turned against her and her people once more. And despite her pale skin and bright eyes and her passing status as an equal among the Irish matriarchs of the slums, they still woke to blood smeared over their front door more than once, or were spat on in the streets. She told my father, jokingly, it was her nose, though to look at photos you’d never notice she was different from anyone else. That was the joke.
After her husband died she became unapologetic about her Jewishness. She spoke Yiddish at home and made sure my father, who had been living with her from the age of seven, knew some words too. He was fourteen years old when he heard her “sing” his mother’s name and
watched her tear the clothes she was wearing, having now outlived all of
her children. She outlived many of her grandchildren too. And when no one was left to make the meal of condolence, my mother–a gentile girl from the neighboring street–found out, she tried her best to make one.
Dad tells me it was largely inedible, not least of all because it wasn’t kosher, but for his Maw (Scots slang for mother) it was one of her first memories of someone not of the faith acknowledging her Jewishness with kindness. She was sixty years old and had been living in Glasgow for forty five years.
And she spent the majority of that time forced to move from slum to slum by her faith, until eventually in post World War Two Glasgow, the local authorities either had to dig mass graves or deal with the conditions of the poor and chose to be merciful and built better housing instead. She was eventually moved to a housing estate where she could look out and see a garden rather than squalor and degradation and no one charged her extra rent because everyone knows people like her have secret stashes of money and will pay anything not have their windows broken or pigs blood slashed over the door. The history books never tell you that sort of thing. They only tell you about the selective moments in history when tyrants had the audacity to threaten other tyrants, and only then does mass discrimination, abject poverty and genocide through the former become an unpalatable evil that needs to be stopped.
Nothing much has changed.
She lived long enough to hear about Holocaust deniers and my father tells me, spat
their names with all the vitriol of an ancient curse held dormant in the fires of the earth. And when she was buried, the man who cut her tombstone informed my father it probably wasn’t a good idea to put a Star of David on the stone, because those were the stones that were the most often attacked, the graves desecrated and the grass salted so nothing would grow.
And this is no ancient history. This was in the UK, in 1979. This was less than forty years ago. And still whenever my father visits he will find some form of vandalism enacted on her tombstone. It’s her name you see, even in death it doesn’t sound right.
Margarethe Ingrid Fehrenbach Patton. Or “Maggie Patton” as she was known for most of her life, never hearing her own name save for the few times she went back to the degradation of the Gorbals, usually when someone had died and there were traditions to be kept. And forty years on some dull and depraved bastard still feels the need to paint a swastika on her grave in neon paint or tip it over and smash the urn of flowers, because not even death is free of persecution.
And this is not just my family history, it is many family histories told over and over again, and I get to recount it from the safety of 2015, with my gentile name and baptized gentile faith.
So yes, it matters that we are seeing a new wave of antisemitism, online and in the physical world. It matters that there are blogs being set up for the purpose of sending images of dead bodies and gore to Jewish people and their friends. It matters that those people are losing friends because it’s the only way to not also be harassed and retain their own freedom of communication the way theylike it. It matters that people feel the need to ask what is wrong with Nazism in the same way one might ask what is wrong with a little rain. It matters that Jewish characters in popular media are stripped of their ethnicity and faith and made not only into Neo-Nazi sympathizers, but volunteers to a Neo-Nazi regime (if you can’t work out why this is horrifying, here). It matters that a family in Houston Texas found the mezuzah of their door violated with the symbol of a Nazi swastika. It matters so much because this is not the past, nor is it some distant land you can pretend you can neither see nor hear. We live in the age of constant communication, we are no longer blind, except to things we do not wish to see.
We cannot pretend that horrific acts of violence are not enacted against others on a daily basis, because if we do so then we are enabling these acts. You cannot stand silent against hatred, otherwise you enable things like this:
It’s happening in the way in which people insist on calling the black people being murdered by police “thugs” while white protesters are cited the rules of Baseball (three strikes and you’re benched with a fine or jail time, not murdered), it’s happening every time someone says “well maybe they shouldn’t name their children ghetto names" as a means to dehumanize another human being, it’s happening whenever someone cites free speech in the protection of hate crimes. It happens every time you think “well it’s not happening to me so it can’t be that bad” and close your eyes and make the horror of it all into a mere inconvenience interrupting your enjoyable browsing time between mainlining netflix and cat gifs.
It’s happening. And we don’t have the excuse of ignorance to hide behind, it’s there.
And I don’t know what the fuck to do. I can block and report all the live long day, but it doesn’t solve the issue of tumblr and other social media platforms being like “just ignore it, dont feed the trolls”, like sticking a band aid over a gaping sore in need of urgent surgery in the hope that it will somehow go away. You might think someone receiving gory images and threats is not the same as an act of physical violence, but it is undoubtedly violence. It’s people painting pigs blood over my Great Grandmas door and telling her she doesn’t belong in the country that she thought was safe and being told snidely to be thankful it wasn’t worse.
To you it might be petty and mildly distressing, but to another person it’s salted earth and the promise that not even death is safe.
And you are either complicit in this, or you are against it.
Decide.
I’d say sorry for reblogging this again, but I just had to read Nazi apologism with my own two eyeballs in the year 2017 and I’m this close to hauling off with an axe.
I reiterate my previous statement from two years ago: you are either against these atrocities, or you are complicit in them. Decide.
[edited to fix the use of language in original post, if you reblogged this earlier, please delete and reblog without the unintentional use of a slur word used to describe sex workers.]
If you don’t get why Captain America being secretly a Nazi-affiliate or out-right Nazi is a big deal, please read about it here, because Jessica Plummer articulates it far better than I ever could.
The suggested donation is $3.99, or the price of the comic. If you buy, consider posting a screen-cap of your receipt (with your info blacked out of course) and tag @marvelentertainmentto show them what you think of this “new spin” on Captain America.
For those who don’t have the cash to send, also consider emailing Marvel’s feedback email for the Marvel Heroes comics:
mheroes@marvel.com
Also consider tagging @roachpatrol because she’s the source of the idea to donate specifically to the Holocaust Memorial.
HEY NICK SPENCER’S UP TO EVEN MORE BULLSHIT SO LET’S SEND THIS AROUND AGAIN.
if you feel up to making a larger donation than 3.99, the hebrew word ‘chai’, life, is numerically equivalent to 18 and giving gifts in that amount or multiples therof is a traditional wish for the recipient to have a good, long life.
What do we expect from an administration that All Lives Matter-ed the Holocaust?
Watching the video, he trips over his words and said the Assad regime gassed the “innocent” before he cuts himself off. Apparently, the Jewish people, disabled, LGBTQ, mentally ill, Romanis, Serbs, Catholics, etc… they were not innocent.
Spicer slipped up and told the truth in regards to his own repugnant beliefs and the beliefs of those around him.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 