Alison Rose > Recent Status Updates

Lovingdon glared at her. 'Can he guarantee that you're all right, that you won't die?'
'We all die ... You could walk outside and be struck by lightning.'

[immediately thought "get killed walking your doggie!' upon reading this]

[This is surprisingly boring for a Lorraine Heath book.]

'They're all the same, Alter. We'll never be equals in their eyes. They can grit their teeth and tolerate us, but they'll never welcome us into their white cities, because ambition becomes something ugly when it has a Jewish face ... And no amount of blood, sweat, or fine tailoring will ever change that.'

'You can't look toward the future when you're carrying ghosts upon your back.'

[Did people really use the term "side gig" in the 1890s?]

In other words, the only time [Jews] were interesting was when we were accused of atrocities or being slaughtered in prodigious numbers.

‘You’re one to talk, Dovid,’ Yakov said. ‘When was the last time you danced with a girl?’
‘Just the other night.’
‘Nu? Who was she—your left hand or your right?’

[oh snap]

The story of antisemitism is consistent for thousands of years, and inseparable from the content of Jewish civilization, because it all traces back to the Jewish people’s radical proposition that people don’t need to conform or agree, that people don’t need to bow to tyrants.

The tenure process generally rewards conformity, and students, paying far too much to take risks, also perform to conform. When everyone around you is invested—via billions of dollars of investment from autocratic regimes—in the same old story where the villains are Jews and the heroes are federally designated terrorist organizations, there is zero incentive for anyone to say anything to the contrary.

I thought about the bizarre fact that even though Jews were praying in the equivalent of a parking lot, entire massacres of Jews—not only on October 7, but also the ‘Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades’ that murdered Israeli civilians …—had been named after this site, to rile people up by evoking the terrifying and imaginary possibility that Jews might dare to want to pray in their own holiest place.

Herzl briefly considered a British offer of land in East Africa for a potential Jewish settlement; other ideas were raised involving territory in S America &elsewhere. These ideas, however, were angrily rejected by Herzl's fellow Zionists &Herzl tabled them by 1904. Zionists did not want to be, to use a 21st-century term, settler colonialists. They wanted to be in the only place on Earth where Jews have always lived.

'There's a joke often told about Gentleman's Agreement about a stagehand working on the movie when screenwriter Moss Hart came to visit the set,' Gordan said. 'The stagehand told Hart he really loved the movie & thought it had a wonderful moral. Hart was pleased &asked, 'What do you think the moral was?' The stagehand said, 'I learned that you should never be mean to a Jew b/c he may turn out to be a Gentile.'

...von Leers' great insight was that 'the Jews had convinced the world of a great lie: that all humans are equal'.
That line stopped me short b/c in fact it was true. Not just that all humans are equal, but that even if few ppl have lived up to it, Jewish civilization had indeed brought this into the world: every human being is made in the divine image.
One could see how this concept would be threatening to tyrants.

In the educational resources I explored about the Holocaust, I did not encounter any discussions of sadism--the joy derived from humiliating people, the dopamine hit from landing a laugh at someone else's expense, the self-righteous high from blaming one's problems on others--even though this, rather than the fragility of democracy or the passivity of bystanders, is a major origin point of all antisemitism.

The Yiddish word for the Holocaust, khurbn, is a biblical word referring to the destruction of Jerusalem. The Jews who endured this destruction did not understand it as a new experience, but as an old one.

The timing alone laid the game bare. This mass exhilaration emerged not in response to Israel’s war to take down Hamas and rescue its captured citizens, but exactly in response to, and explicitly in celebration of, the most lethal and sadistic barbarity against Jews since the Holocaust.

Antisemitism doesn't primarily function as a social prejudice; as antisemites for generations have often announced, some of their best friends are Jewish. Instead it is a lie that people use to gain or maintain power. That lie is a very simple and consistent one: Jews are destroying whatever a society values most. The only thing that varies through time and place is what a society values most.

For many American Jews, [October 7] was a profound moment of horror, not merely because of the brutality our friends and family members in Israel had just endured and would continue to endure, but because of the sudden and dramatic revelation of the true thoughts and feelings of far too many of the people in the United States who we thought were our friends.

Mr readers' 'friends' who posted hateful conspiracy theories online, their teachers & professors who derided them in class, colleagues & bosses who belittled them at work, peers & neighbors who vandalized their property, & the strangers who shouted slurs at them on the street all felt like that customer in the Yiddish story who showed up in the shop: not a nuisance, but a herald of something long dormant awakening.

[this is very boring, can some people get dead soon so it at least gets interesting]

[This is...a very slow start. And way too many POVs being all in first person is not the best idea.]

[Hell, Steinbeck just out here trying to demolish our souls 😭]

Jody had wished it might not rain before Thanksgiving, but it did. The brown earth turned dark and the trees glistened. The cut ends of the stubble turned black with mildew, the haystacks grayed from exposure to the damp, and on the roofs the moss, which had been all summer as gray as lizards, turned a brilliant yellow-green.

[There's just something so singular and effective about how Steinbeck describes the land.]

I try to stab him to death with my eyes. Unfortunately, it doesn't work.

[LOLOL]

It wasn't until I stepped out into Beijing Int'l Airport, suddenly surrounded by people who looked like me, suddenly both seen & blended in, that I felt the full weight of that tension as it lifted off my shoulders. I was free to simply be a child again ... to no longer feel the need to constantly hover around my parents in case they needed something, to shield them from the worst of America's many casual cruelties.

All four of the dorm buildings on campus are named after ancient Chinese philosophers: Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, and Mozi. It sounds pretty classy and everything, until you stop and think about the number of horny teens who've hooked up in Confucius Hall.

I had learned, with Poirot, that the less dangerous he looked, the more dangerous he was.

'I know you by name, M. Poirot,' he said. 'You cut quite a figure in the old days, didn't you? But methods are very different now.'
'Crimes, though, are very much the same,' remarked Poirot gently.

Maybe she was right. Maybe I needed to chill. But that was one thing I’d never been good at: chilling.

[lol same…but like, uh, not in the same way 👀]