So, I am furious and sad and furious again about the Tree of Life shooting and basically everything around it. But it has been some relief to see so many people, both Jewish and gentile, posting about fundraisers and looking for ways to help in the aftermath.
Unfortunately, the notes of those posts are often full of anti-Semitism, whether from the overt hatefulness of alt-right neo-Nazi shitheads, or the concern-trolling of self-proclaimed leftists who think this is a great time to start up the I/P debate.
(Hint: It is not.)
(I just saw, with my own actual eyeballs, a post in which someone asked whether the shul and the victims were Zionists or not, because they didn’t want to support or mourn for them if they were.)
After a while, it’s hard to see the point of trying to refute the shitty arguments of shitty people, and you can only say “fuck you” so many times before it starts to lose all meaning.
Fortunately, there is something to fall back on. Gentile allies, may I introduce you to the wonderful world of
Yiddish curses
Some of my favorites:
May you turn into a blintz and be snatched by a cat.
May you either have to use the toilet every three minutes or every three months.
May I have the pleasure of sewing your funeral shroud.
May all your teeth fall out but one and may that one give you a toothache.
May you have thunder in your belly and lightning in your pants.
May he have a hundred houses, each house with a hundred rooms, each room with twenty beds, and may a delirious fever toss him from bed to bed.
May you eat chopped liver with onions, shmaltz herring, chicken soup with dumplings, baked carp with horseradish, braised meat with vegetable stew, latkes, tea with lemon, every day – and may you choke on every bite!
Yiddish curses: For when “fuck you, you fucking fuck” lacks sufficient flair.
“Go shit in the ocean” is always a reliable classic.
Saturday morning, on the 26th of October, a Nazi walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue, shouting “All Jews must die!” and opened fire. He killed eleven Jewish people, including grandparents, husbands, wives, and a doctor remembered for his compassionate care of his patients during the AIDs crisis. Several of them were there celebrating a baby-welcoming ceremony for a gay couple’s newly adopted twins.
This was the deadliest antisemitic attack in all 364 years of American Jewish history. Jews all over the world are shaken, upset, and scared. We know that this could have been any of us, but beyond that, this attack struck at the heart of our people. We were attacked in a place of safety and sanctity. We were reminded that as Jews, we are not safe in America. And we lost eleven Jewish souls.
Some of us are grieving, some of us are angry, some of us are devastated, some of us are numb, some of us are crying, some of us are terrified, some of us are anxious, and some of us can barely walk up the stairs because this doesn’t make any sense and yet it makes so much sense because we all, on some level, imagined this was coming. Our history has taught us that our safety is never guaranteed, and over the past two years we have watched the sickening rise of Nazism and antisemitism all over the world, including in America, where, despite our history, many of us had been lulled into believing it could never happen here.
We lost a third of the world’s Jewish population within living memory. So many Jewish families, in every country, fled antisemitic violence within the past few generations. The tragedy we just experienced is visceral, it’s terrifying, it’s devastating.
So please, check in on your Jewish friends and ask how they are doing. Please, take a moment to understand and absorb this tragedy. Please, understand how this is not just yet another mass shooting (that while theoretically tragic, you don’t really have the space for another one, what with compassion fatigue), but rather an attack that pierced the heart of a group of people already carrying centuries of pain and trauma. Please, make space for this one. Please, when you talk about this, don’t use generalized language about hate and about how no one should be killed for their religion. Please speak the words: Jewish. Antisemitic. Say this was an antisemitic attack, on Jewish people. And please, keep us in your thoughts today.
Folks who aren’t Jewish, you can reblog this. In fact I’d be grateful if you did.
The Bully-Thranduil-Day has been established as a national dwarven bank
holiday shortly after Thorin was crowned King under the Mountain. The official khuzdul name for the day is o’lij which literally translates to ‘the art of cheek’. The
date varies, depending on when the dwarves feel most festive, but it
usually happens shortly after the beginning of spring to mock Thranduil’s crown blossoming again – an equivalent to an infant dwarf growing a first bum fluff.
Culinary delights include roasted stag, and thin wine that they generously refer to as ‘grape juice’. Traditionally the halls of Erebor are decorated with branches and brambles, and the children paint incredibly thick caterpillar eyebrows on each other and try to scare the grown-ups. They also come knocking on doors yelling “GEMS OR WAR!”.
It is Thorin’s favourite holiday, right after Durin’s Day.
Shout out to my Arabic teacher that looked at us yesterday mid-lesson and said, “I’m worried. You all look exhausted and depressed.”
Of course we were all like, “Oh yeah we’re dead inside, you haven’t noticed?”
And he snapped shut the textbook, threw up his hands and said, “That’s not healthy! No more vocab! Time for dancing!”
And he taught us a dance from Iraq and we danced instead of doing vocab. We didn’t stop dancing until he saw all of us laughing and was satisfied that we were all feeling better. It was perhaps the coolest, most kind-hearted thing I’ve ever seen a college instructor do.
Death By Catchphrase 