#antisemitismhurts — Public Fediverse posts

The last eight evenings, so long, so dark, were a practice in attempting to trick my despairing mind into seeing some light by writing 8 Hanukkah stories as I lit my candles. Fire as muse, words as fire.

(For those who’d like to read or share them as a whole, the 8 posts are “Hanukkah 5783: Ritual as Resistance” at https://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2022/12/26/hanukkah-5783-ritual-as-resistance/.)

In the end, as the last of my 44 candles went out, I came away with illumination but not light. Or to borrow words posted by Kathy R. Bunny on FB, “I don’t actually believe that light will return, but I’m acting as if it could.”

I tried acting “as if it could” because usually that works, and I almost felt a bit of the promise yesterday. It’s hard not to be warmed by the brilliance of a full menorah! Sometimes, though, the reality interrupts our acting, and what gets illuminated is exactly the darkness, the danger, we fear and abhor.

On the one hand, there was the light of the many kind responses to my Hanukkah posts here. So unexpectedly many—enough that it should have overshadowed the small number of fascist responses. But on that other hand—the hand that does a Nazi salute so publicly now—someone called me a “kike” in the comments (an antisemitic insult, which I deleted and blocked). And two fascists started “following” me, with one proudly listing a neo-Nazi code number in his profile; I blocked them too.

It’s not that I fear three cyberspace fascists. It’s that they, more than we, define and shape the present, and I despair for what that means, now and ahead.

My friend Ami Weintraub’s words (in my “There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart” anthology) keep returning to me:

“Our practice teaches us to fill our cemeteries with rocks.

“I want to take the pebbles that we set on graves and join the children who throw stones at the men who murder in my name. I want to throw them at the men who want to murder me too.
We arm our dead with weapons of resistance.

“I imagine running into Jewish graveyards, fleeing from the hatred that haunts me. And even when death surrounds me, I find the tools I need to stay alive.”

We must resist, but there’s no light in the reasons why.

(photo: Jewish grave, Pittsburgh, 2020)

#WeMustOutliveThem
#FascismKills #SmashFascism
#AntisemitismHurts #AntisemitismKills
#RitualAsResistance

Feeling this today:

I’m tired of seeing “The Jews” trending on Twitter for what is now, at least on my computer screen, going on two weeks. It’s never good. It’s actually getting worse.

I’m tired of what I see, watch, and hear when I go down the traumatic rabbit hole of why “The Jews” are trending. (Yes, I should stop, but we all also need to understand how Christian fascism is not creeping but rather racing forward—the better, I hope, to fight and smash it.)

I’m tired of how it feels when I see a swastika or Nazi or other fascist symbols. I’m tired of the disconnect too many non-Jewish anarchists and antifascists have fallen into these past few years of not seeing symbols like the swastika or words like “Nazi” as having anything to do with us Jews and antisemitism—as somehow only meaning “fascism”—and not appearing to understand, much less show empathy about, how it must feel for us to see and hear and experience those increasingly commonplace markers.

I’m tired of non-Jewish anarchists and other antifascist radicals rarely including us Jews and antisemitism in their lists of those many different peoples/identities being targeted by the Christian fascists and the intertwined -isms driving that fascism.

I know we—all of us who despise Christian fascism—are all tired, are all traumatized, all have different (though I’d argue, interrelated) histories, and it’s impossible to take on all the many fights we need to wage on so many fronts. Yet our destinies—all those of us “trending” with Christian fascists online and especially off—are bound up together. They always have been, especially since Christianity set sail to colonize and dispossess and brutalize the whole world over 500 years ago.

I want to be a little less tired because we can all rest in the knowledge that there’s a whole lot more solidarity that embraces us all—that sees and names and shares in each other’s tiredness.

So that we may all live.

(photo: graffiti of a swastika that’s been crossed out, as seen on stolen Anishinaabeg lands)

#AntisemitismHurts #AntisemitismKills