Dina Roberts > Recent Status Updates

“Things will never be perfect. Society will never be completely just. How will it all end? Is there a Messiah coming to redeem us? Messiahs captivate our imagination because the world is so unfair, history is so fickle. When the Messiah comes, we are told, everything will be set right: good will finally triumph and evil will be eliminated. That would be nice, but is it the way things work?”

Rereading. It seems like Goodreads won’t let you put books in both the read and currently reading section?

“Yuval Noah Harari. The bestselling Sapiens author and Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor has quickly become a top-tier target for conspiracy….”

“But the nature of trolling and online hate is that it’s virtually impossible to separate out the majority of people who are just talking about taking up arms from the small number that will actually take up arms”

“such as the bizarre hoax that young Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg is secretly the great-granddaughter of British banker and prominent Zionist Lionel Walter Rothschild.”

Well… that adds some interesting context.

“as the acceptability of Islamophobia in the post-9/11 era faded, it was replaced by familiar fears of Jewish power, influence, “overrepresentation,” and control.”

Yep.

“Japan in the 1980s was a country seemingly obsessed with Jews and Judaism. Some of it was positive—Fiddler on the Roof became one of the most popular musicals in Japanese history, and Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl sold millions of Japanese-language copies, with her name being appropriated by, among other products, a popular sanitary napkin company.”

Our world is a fantastic dark comedy.

Super empowering. I love learning how everyone is so incredibly obsessed with us!

“Even in regions where neighboring nations constantly warred with each other over religious doctrine and natural resources, they could unite in their hatred of the Jewish people”.

We help to bring people together. You’re welcome!

“What began with ranting and speechifying transitioned into art, literature, and film, all carefully created to maximize revulsion and dehumanization”

“During the tenth through thirteenth centuries, Jews of the Middle East fled the Mongol invasions of Persia and Iraq, with many settling in Western Europe, England, and North Africa”. With everything going on, I’m wondering more about where I come from. I’m Ashkenazi but am wondering when my ancestors left the Middle East.

The sex/romance in this book is making me have extra appreciation for the previous book I read. In the last book, the female protagonist saw the sexiness in an overweight man. In this book, the man is described as not having an ounce of fat on him. Not only that, but he’s an alleged womanizer that is madly in love with the protagonist and has maybe been secretly in love with her for years.

I like how the book shows how manipulation and exploitation goes into creating human-interest news reports. They have a narrative and try to squeeze the people into it.

“For someone who professed to love me, I certainly wasn’t high on his list of priorities today of all freaking days. No doubt he had a perfect excuse though, some cat caught in a tree, or a stranded stranger with a flat tire.”

“No one else will want you, depression brain says. At least he already knows about all your issues”

“When you spend so long imagining your life with someone, after they leave, you don’t just lament the loss of that person. You have to grieve every piece of your life they touched that they don’t anymore. Every image of your future that you planned together.”

“Nor could I announce, as every non-Jewish media outlet would expect, that these people whose hairstyles one dislikes are “canaries in the coal mine,” people whose fractured skulls we all ought to care about because they serve as a warning—because when Jews get murdered or maimed, it might be an ominous sign that actual people, people who wear athleisure, might later get attacked!”

The main villain in the book has OCD… which gives me unsettling feelings, because I have OCD. And it makes me think… how can I handle MY OCD in a way that makes me less a villain in this world.

This is NOT a book that will convince non-Jewish people to reduce their antisemitism. Because that’s an almost-impossible task.

This is a book for Jews… and for their allies… it’s a book that can help us understand why we are angry. Or if we’re not angry yet… why we should be angry.

“That the Holocaust drives home the importance of love is an idea, like the idea that Holocaust education prevents antisemitism, that seems entirely unobjectionable. It is entirely objectionable.”

“The idea was that people would come to these museums and learn what the world had done to the Jews, where hatred can lead. They would then stop hating Jews.”

“He said something like he wasn’t going to leave until God changed the locks. Marriage, he explained, was about more than attraction and emotional ups and downs. It was about commitment”

To me…That doesn’t sound like love or kindness.

There are aspects of the marriage that rub me the wrong way. A sort of message of you’re damaged; you’re sick; but I’m going to find the strength to put up with you.

In a way, I feel like I’m the Robert Reed of my family. To outsiders, my family is seen as picture-perfect, close, fun, endearing… and I’m the one most complaining. I’m the most critical.

“I think that devaluing rescuers who only do a little bit is a way for the person who does nothing to make himself feel less guilty,” he told me. I think that devaluing rescuers who only do a little bit is a way for the person who does nothing to make himself feel less guilty,” he told me.”

“If someone was in a position to choose whether to save person A or person B, shouldn’t whole societies have been in the position to reject the notion of genocide altogether? Why didn’t everyone become Denmark?”

I don’t think I agree with this quote: “None of this is a coincidence. Societies that accept Jews have flourished. Societies that reject Jews have withered, fading into history’s night.” Poland? Germany? Soviet Union? China?

“They were lured into a long game of appeasing and accommodating, giving up one inch after another of who they were in order to win that grand prize of being allowed to live.
Spoiler alert: they lost.”

I’m enjoying learning more about myself. Not sure I appreciate the Sister Act criticism.

This book gives me such a mix of emotions. Admiration is one. Anger is another. And sadness… disillusionment, knowing Cheney is the type of Republican my parents would have admired if they hadn’t been brainwashed by Trump and Fox News.