#antisemitismkills — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #antisemitismkills, aggregated by home.social.
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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