why5x5

[why5x5]

[why5x5]

a conversation that probably happened as the jewish people were leaving egypt

person A: oh shit theres no time for my bread to rise we aren't gonna get out of here on time

person B: so just?? dont let it rise. bake it like that.

person A: itll be flat and weird though? do you really think that's a good idea

person B: yeah, it's just a few fucked up loaves of bread. in a couple years no one will even remember it!

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I am a terrible combination of “whatever happens, happens” and “If everything doesn’t go according to plan, I will vaporize”

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Okay this is a question that has been on my mind for the last few days

no nuance allowed unless you add tags/comment

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Do you know this Jewish character?

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Does anybody remember Dragon Tales? 🥺

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Yo, fellow chronic pain having fiber arts doing Jew squad!!

We had to be nerfed somehow, otherwise we'd be too powerful

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As I gaze at the structural column in Copley Station, cracked nearly in two and held together with zip ties that have been carefully painted over to match the column underneath, I feel my soul intertwined with that of a small Italian boy of days gone by, who also stopped to look up at a large, groaning, newly painted tank full of molasses

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that.jewish.activist: this isn’t my usual activism post, but rather it’s a little post about the history of kaifeng jews 

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so there’s this story that my grandmother loves telling (well, in recent years. for the first seventy years of her life she did not talk about her childhood at all.)

the story is that a family friend of theirs was Austria’s finance minister*, and Jewish, and after the anschluss he realized he was in trouble, but like many of Austria’s Jews he seriously underestimated how much trouble. by the time he realized it was too late to get out safely. He was also old and in failing health, so dramatics weren’t ideal.

so he asked a family member to drive him to the mountains on the Italian-Austrian border, and he’d cross there. It was easy enough to avoid the Austrian authorities going out, but you didn’t have a chance of avoiding the Italian ones, and they stopped him. 

“Oh,” he said to them, “Benito knows me. Tell him I’m here and he’ll call me a car.” And indeed, they called Mussolini and he called him a car. My reaction the first time I heard this story - and the reaction of everyone I’ve told it to - has been “so Mussolini opposed the Holocaust? He was helping smuggle Jews out of Austria?” And, no, he didn’t and wasn’t. But he knew this guy, they were old friends, the guy was in town, so Benito called him a car. Which is more characteristic of humans than the version where Mussolini was secretly a decent person, really. A million is a statistic, but this guy? I know this guy. He’s a great guy. There’s the phrase ‘the banality of evil’, and I think it applies, but the word that’s always come to my mind is the myopia of evil, the tendency to treat People well but just not look out at the world and see billions of People, not believe that the principles you apply to the ones you know apply to all of them everywhere.

[why5x5]

Currently working on an artistic project dedicated to abandoned jewish cemeteries (in Hungary) and their amazing symbols, such as these lions! Please check the Art of Abandoned Jewish Cemeteries site to follow for more details of the project.

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The other day I told a friend of mine that I never forget to take my ADHD meds because I fucking love my ADHD meds. I'm in my late 30s, I didn't finally get a diagnosis and meds until less than two years ago, and they have changed my entire life.

And he raised his eyebrow at me. We'd been discussing addictive medications a few minutes before, like the Tramadol I finally got from the pain specialist to take once a week or so to give me a break from my chronic pain, so I reassured him that methylpenidate (Ritalin/Concerta) is not addictive (at least not in people with ADHD).

His response? To raise his eyebrow even harder and say "Well it sure SOUNDS like it's addictive!"

And I had to explain to this man - who works in a healthcare related job by the way - that just because medication makes you feel good and helps you, just because you look forward to taking it, that doesn't make it addictive or dangerous. And he wasn't convinced.

The simple fact that I was excited to take a daily pill that has literally changed my life, after decades of fighting to get that medication, made him think I shouldn't be taking it so often. That it must inherently be dangerous.

I'm not even in America, but I'm pretty sure this attitude began there and then spread over here to Europe. This Puritan idea of "if something feels good, you must beware of it. Pleasure is dangerous, it is sinful, it is addiction, it is evil."

I know too many people who subconsciously believe that pleasure = addictive = dangerous = bad. Joy is a slippery slope to hell.

So here is your reminder for today that you don't need to be afraid of feeling good. If something improves your life, use it. Even if it is addictive - learn what that addiction means, whether the addiction is inherently dangerous or not, and whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks and risks.

My ADHD meds are, in fact, not addictive. But I will take them every day because they make my life orders of magnitude easier. I will enjoy them every time I take them.

My tramadol is addictive. I will still take it. I will keep it on a schedule to avoid becoming addicted, primarily because addiction in this case would mean reduced effectiveness. But I am not afraid of my painkillers. They are life changing.

Take your meds, everyone. Don't let anyone scare you away from doing something that improves your life.

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hey elodie, what is it that you enjoy about teeth?

top six things:

1. Issued twice in one human lifetime and used to signify health, wealth and social class

2. She was a young woman whose countenance owed more to the peculiar animation of her face than any bone structure or classical beauty; her coloring and features lacked distinction, though her figure was such as must please; but she was graced with a set of very fine teeth, and a wide mouth which could be used to show them all at once, so that Society thought that she must be pretty, as she had so ready and so generous a smile. 

(or so says your internal monologue as you brood pointlessly over your tongue in the bathroom mirror, running five minutes late in the morning)

3. In our pre-labor class, we were all asked what traits of ours we wanted to pass on to our unborn babies. Everyone else said things like “love of fishing,” “love of learning,” and I was just like “I wanna pass down my TEETH,” and then, because I felt like that was weird to just say in the middle of a groupshare without qualifying it further, I stated “They Have Never Given Me Any Trouble, Not Even A Cavity,” and everyone stared at them with respect,

4. “Don’t worry,” I tell Glassbab as they cry over their teething pain, sitting up while holding them against my chest all night, and dipping only lightly into passages of sleep, “It’s only the feeling of your skeleton becoming external, and you won’t remember it,”

5. the human mouth is an omnivore’s toolkit, with a clever microbiome and great evolutionary heritage, and is very interesting

6. better than the alternative

[why5x5]

Passing Strange

Ellen Klages

San Francisco in 1940 is a haven for the unconventional. Tourists flock to the cities within the city: the Magic City of the World's Fair on an island created of artifice and illusion; the forbidden city of Chinatown, a separate, alien world of exotic food and nightclubs that offer "authentic" experiences, straight from the pages of the pulps; and the twilight world of forbidden love, where outcasts from conventional society can meet. Six women find their lives as tangled with each other's as they are with the city they call home. They discover love and danger on the borders where magic, science, and art intersect.

(Affiliate link above)

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Unfortunately I’m a massive dork and the most prized possession I have is the envelope that came from a Christmas gift from a friend.

Because whenever you order something from the Discworld Emporium, the official home of Discworld merch, it’s stamped and stickered with Discworld stamps and stickers and it’s very cute and fun. The last time I got a package from the Emporium I steamed off the stickers and put them on my laptop.

And when a very beloved friend of mine ordered a couple shirts for me through the Emporium, they gave them to me in the paper envelope they received them in because they were stamped and stickered to hell and back.

And I still have that same envelope because I know that somewhere this is just someone’s job. They stamp and sticker everything that leaves that shop.

But when I held it in my hands for the first time. I don’t know, it just hit me that this was proof that so many people really, truly loved this man’s work. Someone designed the stamps. Someone made the stickers. Someone who probably liked the same books that were so important to me across my life packaged those shirts and chose the stamps and stamped and stickered it and added the slip to let me know it was inspected by the Thieves’ Guild.

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You know how I know that the anti-Israel hate is deeply rooted in antisemitism, and not just "social justice" or whatever people are calling it right now?

Let me tell you a common situation I encounter:

So, being a college student away from home, I don't have a car here. This means that if I ever need to go anywhere, I need to get an Uber or Lyft or something along those lines.

I always tuck in my Bring Them Home tag, magen david, turn my "am Yisrael chai" pin to the inside of my clothes, etc. I hate doing it, but I have heard of violently antisemitic drivers, and I'd rather not risk it, considering I'm alone in the car with them.

Every time, I call my mom. It makes me safer to have someone on call. And every time, she makes the same two recommendations.

The first is to put in an address of a neighboring house for pickup, because the house I live in has my landlord's car out front, and his car has stickers in Hebrew on it.

The second is, if asked where I'm from, to say Russia. I don't get asked where I'm "really from" unless I'm with my parents usually (they both have strong accents). But it's a warning my mom repeats every time anyway. The choice of Russia isn't random, I was raised fluent and can back up the claim if need be with random knowledge. But I have never been to Russia, except for the airport once to catch a connecting flight to Israel. I was, however, born in Israel, and I've been there multiple times (unfortunately not since 2014 though). So to say I'm from Russia is a lie, and to say I'm from Israel is the truth.

Both are countries at war. Russia, unlike Israel, actually started the war. Unlike Israel, Russia actually does have a history of colonialism, genocide, imperialism, and worse.

So why is it safer for me to lie about being from an aggressor country than to tell the truth about being from a country caught in a war it didn't want?

Antisemitism. Anti-Russian hate crimes globally didn't spike, Russian women haven't been raped as "justice" for Ukraine. Russian businesses weren't commonly vandalized simply for being from Russia. Meanwhile, all of these things were done to Jews as a result of a war Israel did not start.

If this global response to the war wasn't antisemitism it would be equally safe or unsafe for me to give either answer.

But in reality, it's safer for me to lie about being from Russia than to tell the truth about being from Israel.

That's how I know it's antisemitism.

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