Reposting my essay in commemoration of the anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The Spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is Alive in the Al-Aqsa Flood

During the German annexation of Poland in WWII, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees were herded to Warsaw. As the Nazis approached the capital, they pulled the noose tighter and tighter around the Jewish population. They faced growing violence and degradation: the nazis rationed food, banned communal prayer, curtailed business, robbed homes, and so on. As their grip became certain, they forced the construction of a walled ghetto around the Jewish district. The Nazis expelled all Jewish people from the rest of the city, confiscating their land, homes, and possessions.

Conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto were dire and extremely overcrowded with more than 400,000 people forced into a 3.3 square kilometer area, 9 people to a room.1 Rations were carefully kept at or below the survival level.2 Virtually no medical supplies or cultural materials were allowed into the ghetto.3 The means of survival let alone full human life were non-existent.

In 1942, one quarter of the ghetto's population were sent to their deaths in Treblinka under the guise of "resettlement". This lie was uncovered, and the Nazi-imposed Jewish government lost all credibility. The leader, Adam Czerniakow, committed suicide. At this point, resistance factions became the dominant political force. Residents in the ghetto realized anything short of all-out mobilization was tacitly accepting their genocide. They would not do this.

Sparsely armed, on 18 January 1943 resistance fighters engaged the nazis in direct armed struggle. They were able to prevent or delay the deportation of 3,000 people and condemn the silence of the world. Battles continued off-and-on until late April. Rather than quietly shuffle a compliant population into cattle cars. the resistance fighters compelled the Germans to announce their genocidal intent to the world and burn them out, block-by-block.

The remainder of the ghetto residents were martyred as they would have been without struggle, but the world could no longer ignore the Nazi genocide. The partisans of the Warsaw Ghetto will be remembered as heroes for all time. They proclaimed their pride, their dignity, and their humanity until the end.

Now the Zionist Fascists invoke this memory and the holocaust to justify their own genocide. The Zionist fascists invoke this memory and order over a million people to move into a smaller section of their own walled ghetto. Now the Zionist Fascists invoke this memory and bomb hospitals. Now the Zionist Fascists invoke this memory and call Palestinians "subhuman animals".4 It is an abomination. It is every Jew's responsibility (mine included!), to condemn this anti-Semitic invocation of our past. We must declare ‘NOT IN OUR NAME!’ as the Zionist Fascists do everything in their power to play out the role of the Nazis.

The tragedies the Zionists inflict on Palestine mirror the tragedies the Nazis inflicted on the Jews. As the Nazis cheered the demolition pf the Warsaw Synagogue, IDF soldiers recorded themselves applauding the demolition of the Palestinian Justice Palace.5 It is important to note that Judaism is not Zionism and Zionism is not Judaism no matter how loudly the Israelis proclaim it. Nor was the special feature of Nazism anti-semitism. Instead their special feature was fascism: the construction of a ethnonationalist garrison state organized for the destruction of a racial enemy as a false solution to its internal contradictions.

The Zionists do not have the same enemy as the Nazis, but their ideology is the same. We should not see resistance against one any differently than resistance against the other.

While aspects of the resistance actions of October 7th are horrible, they must be understood in the context of a people facing genocide. The reaction of the Zionist entity confirms this. They have shown the world who the true 'terrorist', the true fascist, the true victim is.

At time of writing, more than 18,000 Palestinian people—principally non-combatants and children—have been killed under weeks of relentless bombing.6 Every institution of Palestinian civil society is labelled a ‘Hamas Base’ and rendered into dust. And when international investigators fail to find the promised evidence of military installations hidden below ruined hospitals, ruined lives, the Zionists shrug.7 At most, one or two squeamish Americans shoot and cry while Washington and Berlin proclaim “an absolute right to self-defense”.

As the Seleucids turned our Second Temple into a stable, settlers in the West Bank evict Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque to proudly hold and record dance parties.8

One popular slogan holds “resistance is justified when people are occupied.” This sentiment is encapsulated in a speech given by PFLP Leader George Habash to western hostages taken as a reprisal for refugee camp bombings in June 1970 titled "Our Code of Morals is Our Revolution."

He begins:

I feel that it is my duty to explain to you why we did what we did. Of course, from a liberal point of view of thinking, I feel sorry for what happened, and I am sorry that we caused you some trouble during the last 2 or 3 days. But leaving this aside, I hope that you will un¬derstand, or at least try to understand, why we did what we did. People living different circumstances think on different lines… After 22 years of injust¬ice, inhumanity, living in camps with nobody caring for us, we feel that we have the very full right to protect our revolution. We have all the right to protect our revolution. Our code of morals is our revolution. What saves our re-volution, what helps our revolution, what pro¬tects our revolution is right, is very right and very honourable and very noble and very beautiful, because our revolution means justice, means having back our homes, having back our country, which is a very just and noble aim.

Now the occupation is in its 75th year. Unlike Habash’s day, the recent decades of resistance have taken the form of political negotiations and peaceful protests. They did nothing to gain the world's attention or support for Palestinian liberation. Clearly, only armed struggle against imperialism can win liberation. Thank God the Palestinians have more than the few handguns and makeshift explosives available to my people 80 years ago.

The Spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is alive in the Al-Aqsa Flood!

Long live Palestine!

Footnotes & References 1 — Compare to 2.3 million people sharing 360 square kilometers (about the size of Detroit) in the Gaza Strip concentrated into a few overcrowded cities void of open space. https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-hamas-war-90e02d26420b8fe3157f73c256f9ed6a 2 — Israel (which controls all imports into Gaza) closely restricts the amount of food allowed in to survival levels calculated at 2,300 calories per day per person. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/17/israeli-military-calorie-limit-gaza 3 — Regular and acute drug shortages in the occupied territories were a fact of life prior to the 2023 invasion. Article below for-instance. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-06-08/ty-article/.premium/palestinian-authority-blames-israel-for-acute-medicine-shortage/00000188-9773-df21-a1b8-b7ffbba40000 4 — Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Arieh King: “They are not human beings and not even human animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated.” https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/israeli-municipality-official-calls-burying-alive-subhuman-palestinian Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu (A Philly native) on the will of the Israeli people: “They are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world,” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/benjamin-netanyahu-amalek-israel-palestine-gaza-saul-samuel-old-testament/
SS Solider Jürgen Stroop describing slain ghetto fighters: “180 Jews, bandits and sub-humans, were destroyed.” https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-stroop-report-may-1943 5 — Demolition of the Justice Palace https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/footage-shows-idf-demolishing-main-hamas-courthouse-in-gaza/ 6 — Palestinian Death toll https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/12/14/israel-hamas-war-live-rain-brings-misery-to-displaced-in-gaza
Even the most skeptical Israeli sources place the Palestinian death toll at 4x the number of Israeli dead. https://www.newsweek.com/real-gaza-civilian-death-tollwhat-we-know-1849655 7 — No evidence of ‘Hamas Command Center’ found below IDF-bombed Al Shifa hospital https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/16/what-has-israel-found-in-gazas-al-shifa-hospital IDF soldier claims a calendar found at the hospital is a ‘Hamas Names List’. One instance of the farce. https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/truth-or-fake/20231116-idf-claims-to-find-list-of-hamas-names-but-it-s-the-days-of-the-week-in-arabic
8 — Israeli settlers hold dance party in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque April 18th https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gS_jgsd4JM https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220419-israel-closes-ibrahimi-mosque-to-palestinian-worshippers-holds-concert-for-settlers/

"Like many others, I now find myself standing outside ​“the Jewish community,” fearing that there are few Jews I can be shoulder-to-shoulder with in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza if they can call only for the release of hostages without a word for the many, many, many Palestinians killed by bombs and dying of starvation."

Happy Purim to all my Hexbear comrades! Have a joyous holiday however you celebrate. In spirit, I’ve baked a special batch of hexentaschen for all of you.

The good part about history repeating itself is that you can know that the warmongerers will get themselves all killed, and the quiet, more studious part of Yisroel will get to keep chilling.

In the 17th century, the simplicity and elegance with which Isaac Newton had succeeded in explaining the laws governing the motion of bodies and the stars, unifying terrestrial and celestial physics, dazzled his contemporaries to such an extent that mechanics came to be considered complete. By the end of the 19th century, however, the relevance of certain phenomena that classical physics could not explain was already unavoidable. It fell to Albert Einstein to overcome these shortcomings with the creation of a new paradigm: the theory of relativity, the starting point of modern physics.

As an explanatory model completely removed from common sense, relativity is among those advances that, at the dawn of the 20th century, would lead to a divorce between ordinary people and an increasingly specialized and unintelligible science. Nevertheless, either during the physicist's lifetime or posthumously, even the most surprising and incomprehensible aspects of relativity would eventually be confirmed. It should come as no surprise, then, that Albert Einstein is one of the most celebrated and admired figures in the history of science: knowing that so many barely conceivable ideas are true (for example, that the mass of a body increases with velocity) leaves no choice but to surrender to his genius.

Origins

Albert Einstein was born in the German city of Ulm on March 14, 1879. He was the first-born son of Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch, both Jews, whose families came from Swabia. The following year they moved to Munich, where his father established himself, together with his brother Jakob, as a dealer in the electro-technical novelties of the time.

Little Albert was a quiet, self-absorbed child, and his intellectual development was slow. Einstein himself attributed to this slowness the fact that he was the only person to develop a theory such as relativity: "A normal adult does not worry about the problems posed by space and time, because he considers that he knows everything there is to know about them from early childhood. I, on the other hand, have had such a slow development that I did not begin to ask myself questions about space and time until I was older".

In 1894, financial difficulties caused the family to move to Milan; Einstein remained in Munich to finish his secondary studies, joining his parents the following year. In the fall of 1896 he began his higher studies at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, where he was a student of the mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who later generalized the four-dimensional formalism introduced by the theories of his former student.

On June 23, 1902, Albert Einstein joined the Confederal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, where he worked until 1909. In 1903 he married Mileva Maric, a former fellow student in Zurich, with whom he had two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard, born in 1904 and 1910 respectively. In 1919 they divorced, and Einstein remarried his cousin Elsa.

Relativity

During 1905, he published five papers in the Annalen der Physik: the first of these earned him a doctoral degree from the University of Zurich, and the remaining four would eventually impose a radical change in science's picture of the universe. Of these four, the first provided a theoretical explanation in statistical terms of Brownian motion, and the second gave an interpretation of the photoelectric effect based on the hypothesis that light is composed of individual quanta, later called photons. The remaining two papers laid the foundations of the special theory of relativity, establishing the equivalence between the energy E of a certain amount of matter and its mass m in terms of the famous equation E = mc², where c is the speed of light, which is assumed to be constant.

Einstein's efforts immediately placed him among the most eminent of European physicists, but public recognition of the true scope of his theories was slow in coming; the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he received in 1921, was awarded to him exclusively "for his work on Brownian motion and his interpretation of the photoelectric effect". In 1909 he began his university teaching career in Zurich, then moved to Prague and returned to Zurich in 1912 to become a professor at the Polytechnic, where he had studied.

In 1914 he moved to Berlin as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The outbreak of World War I forced him to separate from his family, who never joined him again. Against the general feeling of the Berlin academic community, Einstein was then openly anti-war, influenced in his attitudes by the pacifist doctrines of Romain Rolland.

On the scientific level, between 1914 and 1916, his activity was focused on perfecting the general theory of relativity, based on the postulate that gravity is not a force but a field created by the presence of a mass in the space-time continuum. The confirmation of his predictions came in 1919, when the solar eclipse of May 29 was photographed; The Times presented him as the new Newton and his international fame grew, forcing him to multiply his lectures around the world and popularizing his image as a traveler of the third class railroad, with a violin case under his arm.

Towards a unifying theory

During the following decade, Einstein concentrated his efforts on finding a mathematical relationship between electromagnetism and gravitational attraction, determined to advance towards what, for him, should be the ultimate goal of physics: to discover the common laws that were supposed to govern the behavior of all objects in the universe, from subatomic particles to stellar bodies, and to group them into a single "unified field" theory. This research, which occupied the rest of his life, was unsuccessful and ended up by making him a stranger to the rest of the scientific community. After 1933, with Hitler's accession to power, his loneliness was aggravated by the need to renounce German citizenship and move to the United States; Einstein spent the last twenty-five years of his life at the Graduate Institute of Princeton (New Jersey), where he died on April 18, 1955.

Einstein once said that politics had a fleeting value, while an equation had value for eternity. In the last years of his life, his bitterness at not finding the formula that would reveal the secret of the unity of the world was accentuated by the need he felt to intervene dramatically in the political sphere. In 1939, at the urging of the physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Paul Wigner, and convinced of the possibility that the Germans were in a position to manufacture an atomic bomb, he addressed President Roosevelt urging him to undertake a research program on atomic energy.

After the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions in World War II, Einstein joined scientists seeking ways to prevent future use of the bomb and proposed the formation of a world government from the embryonic United Nations. But his proposals for humanity to avert threats of individual and collective destruction, formulated in the name of a unique amalgam of science, religion and socialism, received from politicians a rejection comparable to the respectful criticism among scientists of his successive versions of the idea of a unified field.

Albert Einstein continues to be a mythical figure of our time; even more so than he became during his lifetime, if we take into account that the photograph of him showing an unusual mocking gesture (sticking out his tongue in a comical and irreverent expression) has been elevated to the dignity of a domestic icon after being turned into a poster as common as those of song idols and Hollywood stars. However, it is not his scientific genius or his human stature that best explain him as a myth, but, perhaps, the accumulation of paradoxes contained in his own biography, accentuated by the historical perspective. Einstein, the champion of pacifism, is still remembered as the "father of the bomb"; and it is still common to attribute the demonstration of the principle that "everything is relative" precisely to him, who fought fiercely against the possibility that knowing reality meant playing blind man's buffalo with it.

Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein

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There are a lot of Trotskyites in my synagogue with the explanation 'Stalin was a special evil guy' which does not feel adequate. Nor does it explain later Soviet opposition to Zionism/Israel. See for instance the linked article. The extent of the explanation relies on the syllogism 'the USSR did a bad thing because it was failed socialism headed by the vile man Stalin'; no explanation is attempted:

A few days later, on May 17, the bureaucratized Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin also recognized the Zionist State after initially expressing support for the creation of a Jewish state. The following day, May 18, Czechoslovakia, which was already part of the Soviet Bloc, added its recognition and later sent weapons to the Zionists.

My Rabbi shared this brief philosophical outline of Reconstructionist Prayer which has helped me develop my framework. Reconstructionism seeks to strip back Jewish Spirituality to a nucleus which is compatible with the Materialist conception of the modern world while still keeping a vibrant spiritual life and concept of divinity.

To me, God is an abstraction for talking about the universe entire. It is a call to grounding humility. From that perspective, the typical prayer-call for intercession does not work. This paper outlines an approach of tapping into divine love and divine consciousness for the strength to take agency rather than a request for intercession.

It keeps the profound contemplative outlet of prayer without needing an omniscient and personified God figure.

publicação cruzada de: https://hexbear.net/post/1739765

publicação cruzada de: https://hexbear.net/post/1739466

Yes, Zionism is folkism. You can't say you're for anti-folkism if you're for Zionism

Jewish UPenn Students Could Face Discipline For Screening Film Critical Of Israel

by Matt Shuham, HuffPost

University of Pennsylvania administrators told a student group it could lose funding and organizers could face consequences for screening "Israelism."

A Jewish student group at the University of Pennsylvania is facing potential disciplinary action for screening a documentary critical of the Israeli government.

Multiple universities have now attempted to stop student screenings of “Israelism,” an award-winning film that features the stories of American Jews who have traveled to Israel and subsequently reexamined their relationship with the country and with their own pro-Israel religious educations in the United States after seeing how Israel treats Palestinians.

Students from Penn Chavurah, a progressive Jewish group on campus, hosted a screening of the film Tuesday night, even though the university refused to permit access to a venue. Nearly 100 people packed into a classroom to watch the documentary, according to Jack Starobin, a board member and organizer at Chavurah.

“It’s moments like these where we’re counting on strong leadership to stay true to this university’s values, and that’s where I think the failing has been on the part of Penn administrators,” Starobin, a senior at Penn, told HuffPost.

A screening of the film, which was released in February, was scheduled for Oct. 24 but was postponed after Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent retaliatory attacks on the Palestinian territory of Gaza.

Starobin said he’d been in talks with university administrators for weeks about holding a screening this month instead. A few days ago, the university denied organizers’ request for event space to hold the screening, suggesting it be delayed until February. Administrators never provided any specifics behind their reasoning, Starobin said. Erin Axelman, a co-director and producer of the film who participated in a question-and-answer session after Tuesday’s screening, said administrators referred “vaguely only to campus safety.”

When administrators found out that organizers planned to hold the screening this week anyway, they told Starobin that doing so could jeopardize Chavurah’s status and funding from the school, and could lead to disciplinary action against organizers, he told HuffPost.

Harun Küçük, the director of UPenn’s Middle East Center, which ultimately arranged a room for the screening, resigned from that post Tuesday over “inappropriate pressure from administrators” regarding the screening, according to a letter from the school’s chapter of the American Association for University Professors. Küçük, who did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment, confirmed his resignation to The Daily Pennsylvanian, telling the paper, “I would not have resigned if I had any comment left in me.” He is still an associate professor of history and sociology of science at UPenn.

A university spokesperson who declined to give his full name acknowledged to HuffPost that administrators sought to postpone the screening until February ― citing “the safety and security of our campus community” without explaining further ― and said that student organizers had “disregarded” the university’s direction by hosting the screening this week.

“Consistent with University policy, the student organizers will be referred to the Office of Community Standards and Accountability to determine whether a violation of the Code of Student Conduct occurred,” the spokesperson said.

Axelman accused the university of a “profound lack of academic integrity” and of attempting to intimidate and censor student organizers.

“We are honestly baffled and deeply disappointed by UPenn’s continued attempt to censor progressive Jewish voices, at the exact time when nuanced conversations about Jewish identity and the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are most needed,” Axelman said.

Since Oct. 7, Penn has come under significant pressure from politicians and benefactors who have pushed administrators to fight antisemitism, broadly defined.

Earlier this month, more than two dozen members of Congress wrote to Penn President Liz Magill condemning “your institution’s silence in condemning the terrorist attack that took place by Hamas on October 7, 2023.” (Magill had been far from silent, releasing numerous statements that condemned the attack and antisemitism.) Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a signatory, sent similar messages to Yale, Columbia and Harvard, CNN reported.

That letter, and various donors to Penn, also condemned the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, which was held on Penn’s campus in September.

On the other hand, some professors, students and pro-Palestinian activists have criticized Magill for statements that, as the Arabic literature scholar and Penn professor Roger Allen told The Daily Pennsulvanian, “vastly under-represented opinions and status” of Arab and Palestinian community members.

Starobin criticized what he viewed as a double standard at the university. Earlier this month, he noted, Rabbi Shmuel Lynn commented during an event hosted by Penn Hillel and Meor Penn, another Jewish group on campus, “It is not trite to say that there’s a war, there’s another frontline, there’s another camp of battle that we’re all fighting ... there’s a two-front war, in this sense, for the heart and soul of us, the people, [and] for the existential threat, the survival.”

The Penn student said he regretted that Penn Chavurah’s decision to hold the “Israelism” screening had turned oppositional and noted that organizers had cooperated with police who were on hand the night of the screening. His organization’s goal, he said, was to provide an opportunity to discuss a controversial topic in an open environment. The university’s action to prevent the screening, he argued, boded poorly for academic freedom.

“It suggests that the university feels it has the license to shut down any dialogue on campus if it conflicts with the preferences of its donors or the dominant current of national politics,” Starobin said. “And that kind of caving toward the dominant strain of thinking on a controversial issue is precisely the kind of intellectual tunnel vision that a university should seek to avoid, combat and provide space to escape.”

“That kind of caving toward the dominant strain of thinking on a controversial issue is precisely the kind of intellectual tunnel vision that a university should seek to avoid.”

• Jack Starobin, UPenn senior

Fights over the film, which have played out on various college campuses, are part of a larger public debate over the limits of acceptable criticism of the Israeli government. On Oct. 7, Hamas militants based in Gaza killed about 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostage in a surprise attack, according to Israeli authorities. Israel responded with devastating airstrikes and a ground invasion on the Gaza Strip that have now claimed at least 15,000 lives, according to Palestinian authorities, and led to the displacement of nearly 2 million people, according to the United Nations. Several Israelis held in Gaza have now been swapped for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel as part of a cease-fire agreement that continues to be negotiated.

Hunter College canceled a scheduled screening of “Israelism” earlier this month. The New York City college’s interim president, Ann Kirschner, said that the decision was made in the interest of ensuring “the safety of our learning community” and that administrators wanted to avoid “targeting any students, faculty or staff based on their identity: the essence of bigotry.”

“In the current climate, we seek to balance our commitment to free speech and academic freedom with the danger of antisemitic and divisive rhetoric,” Kirschner said, noting that police were investigating the drawing of swastikas on posters surrounding school buildings.

The school’s senate, composed of students, faculty and staff, subsequently passed a resolution criticizing what it called “an egregious and illegitimate violation of the academic freedom necessary for departments to pursue their academic missions and institutions of higher education to operate with integrity.” The university rescheduled the screening for Dec. 5.

Daniel J. Chalfen, one of the film’s producers, told The New York Times that Hunter’s initial decision to cancel the screening was the result of “a very organized campaign to shut it down.” The Times noted at least two email campaigns that produced hundreds of messages urging Hunter administrators to cancel the screening, including one originating from a Facebook post that described the film as “antisemitic.”

The following day, The Forward, the nonprofit Jewish publication, reported on a pattern of similar email campaigns attempting to prevent screenings of the film at several colleges, including Oberlin and Yale. The publication also reported that Dov Waxman, the director of UCLA’s center for Israel studies, said he’d come “under intense pressure from numerous organizations and individuals,” including calls asking for major donors to the center to push for his firing, because he’d decided to host a screening of “Israelism.”

“The opposition is not from students,” Sam Eilertsen, who co-directed the film with Axelman, told The Forward. “The opposition is coming from just people on the internet.”

Hello friends. If this post is inappropriate, please tell me how to fix it or feel free to remove it. I am here because sometimes The Algorithm presents me new information, but especially when it's about Judaism in the current global climate, I want to make sure I'm not being told something inaccurate or harmful.

• When I was a kid, I thought Judaism was a religion
• As I got older, I learnt people also treated it as an ethnicity, it was both
• Now I am seeing some people (I am unsure of their intentions) say Judaism is not an ethnicity, it is a religion

For example, this guy: https://www.tiktok.com/@yuvalmann.s/video/7317661422694026529

Who is a Jew, from Israel, who is now an anti-Zionist. He says "a Jewish person from Morocco, a Jewish person from Ethiopia and a Jewish person from Germany or Hungary have absolutely nothing to do with each other but one thing, religion". And later explains that the idea of Judaism as an ethnicity itself was an idea of Zionists.

I'd be curious to hear what people here think about that take, whether it's accurate, if it's harmful/inaccurate, etc. Thanks very much!

Has anybody had any luck? Most of the spiritual Jewish musicians I have found have been committed Zionists which is gross.

My friends and I are working on an arrangement of Eli Eli by the martryed poet-soldier Hannah Senesh. The song is a simple, reverent prayer of gratitude for nature. The author, a Hungarian Jewish refugee in then-Palestine was a zionist. The song is an 'unofficial anthem of Israel' and plays a prominent role in non-Haredi Shoah Rememberence.

Senesh wrote it when she was overcome while walking to the beach in Palestine before she became a paratrooper in an attempt to liberate more Jewish people from Hungary.

The last line of the song is 'Tefilat ha'adam' or 'The Prayer of Man(kind)'. The hebrew can change nicely to 'Tefilat sh'falasteen' which means the 'Prayer of Palestine'.

The song transforms into a prayer for the endurance of Palestine. Lyrics below in English. We could also change 'water' for river as a reference to 'From the River to the Sea' but the words for 'sky/heavens' and 'water' rhyme in Hebrew.

My God, My God

May these things never end:
The sand and the sea

The rustle of the water
The lightning in the sky

The prayer of Palestine.

One of my jewish friends sent me this on discord and i thought it might interest yall

I promised last night to post a photo. My goodness, this was hectic. I got 3 hours of sleep the night before and was really running on empty. Yet I also promised to throw together a dinner for 2-3 of my friends (and partner). Well, all three showed up! With the power of friendship we managed to juggle cooking scuffed teriyaki tofu (they still liked it), roasted butternut squash, matzah ball soup from a box, and latkes from a box all at the same time in a small apartment kitchen. We didn't even have enough chairs for the five of us lmao. How the hell do people put together actual big dinners? The Manischewitz matzo ball soup is unironically extremely good. Also my friends brought donuts but not sufganiyot. Then after dinner some of us saw the new Ghibli film and honestly? I didn't love it. Well, now I need to get ready for overmorrow's Christian-side-of-the-family Christmas-get-together-slash-funeral-for-my-grandpa-that-died-recently crossover event. Wish me luck!

Norman Finkelstein was born on December 8, Brooklyn, New York City in 1953 to Holocaust survivors Mary and Zacharias Finkelstein. Finkelstein's parents were Jewish Holocaust survivors. His mother grew up in Warsaw and survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp. His father was a survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz. After the war they met in a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria, and then emigrated to the United States, where his father became a factory worker and his mother a homemaker and later a bookkeeper. Finkelstein's mother was an ardent pacifist.

Finkelstein has said of his parents that "they saw the world through the prism of the Nazi Holocaust. They were eternally indebted to the Soviet Union (to whom they attributed the defeat of the Nazis), and so anyone who was anti-Soviet they were extremely harsh on".

Finkelstein grew up in Borough Park, then Mill Basin, both in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended James Madison High School. In his memoir he recalls strongly identifying with the outrage that his mother, who witnessed the genocidal atrocities of World War II, felt at the carnage the United States wrought in the Vietnam War.

He attended James Madison High School followed by Binghamton College, where he graduated in 1974 with a degree in History. Finkelstein enrolled at Princeton University where he earned a Master's degree in political science and a PhD in political studies in 1988. He also studied at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris.

As a young man, Finkelstein identified as a Maoist and worked for The Guardian, a Maoist newsweekly. After the 1981 trial of the Gang of Four, Finkelstein had a falling out with Maoist politics.

Following this experience, Finkelstein decided to develop his worldview with meticulous scholarship. Finkelstein recounts spending an entire summer in the New York Public Library comparing historical population records of Palestine to the claims made in the Joan Peters Zionist text "From Time Immemorial".

Finkelstein's work largely debunked the text, which was well-regarded at the time, winning the National Jewish Book Award in 1985. Finkelstein's skepticism of scholarship regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict would continue to characterize his academic career.

In 2003, Alan Dershowitz published "The Case for Israel", which Finkelstein called "a collection of fraud, falsification, plagiarism, and nonsense". Dershowitz began campaigning to block Finkelstein's tenure bid at DePaul University. In 2007, Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University. In response, Finkelstein resigned, and students staged a sit-in and hunger strike in protest.

In 2008, Finkelstein was denied entry to Israel. In 2009, a documentary film about Finkelstein's life and career was published, titled "American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein".

"My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies."

• Norman Finkelstein

Norman Finkelstein - Israel and Palestine

An Unpopular Man - Norman Finkelstein, TNR

FINKELSTEIN: Misadventures in the Class Struggle -

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

• ❤️ Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
• 💖 Come talk in the New Weekly Queer thread
• 💛 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
• 💚 Come and talk in the Daily Bloomer Thread
• ⭐️ September Movie Nominations ⭐️

reminders:

• 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
• 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
• 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
• 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
• 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
• 💚 Resources for Palestine
• 🐌☕ Zapatista Coffee

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

Ḥanukkah's probably not going to be much fun this year, but it's mostly just me and a bunch of cousins so I don't really care if they yell at me. We never really talk politics so maybe they'll actually turn out to be cool, who knows.

A younger cousin's Bat Mitzvah is upcoming, and with the recent heroic efforts of the Palestinian Freedom Fighters I have felt called to deepen my relationship to Judaism beyond my family's rout holidays and the shame and revulsion that Zionist Fascism has inspired in me.

A local friend pointed me to a progressive synagogue in my area and they accepted me at the last-minute into their adult B'Mitzvah classes!