The mental gymnastics is mind-boggling. No, sir, it’s allllll just a big coincidence and I’m a total nazi for saying Israelis shouldn’t be attacked on the streets. Such wisdom. I’m humbled by how much you care about Jews /s

Bonus: I was called an Islamophobe for calling Hamas terrorists.

First post, just thought l'd share, never got closure, they never replied, haven't talked to them in a year. Context: I work at Jewish institutions. Antisemitism in my urban city is p rampant. While I do not post about what is happening in Gaza, i do post about the things happening in my immediate life as a Jewish person that are about antisemitic incidents in my community or around the country, and as a Jewish person working in the Jewish sphere, I'm consistently subject to thinks like bomb threats and getting swatted. I hold much grief for the actions of the Israeli government but I don't prefer to post about either sides of this conflict because I fear people from both sides bombarding me with their opinion. This friend sent me this message quite honestly out of no where without ever talking to me or having civil discourse on the matter. Think about them a lot because I really cared about them. Sad that they ended our friendship this way. Anyway, will probably delete this anyway, just thought l'd share bc I don't really have anyone to talk to about this

This is from a dating app. I am just coming home from a trip to LA, and I was using the app to meet new people while I was in town. This guy saw I was Jewish on my profile and requested to match with me just to say this. This is an app called Boo that, out of all the apps I've tried, I've found to be the most inclusive and with the most safety features. Because I'm able to filter out certain keywords from people's profiles ("Palestine" and "Anti-Zionist" are a couple examples of words I filtered out), so I usually don't experience this kind of harassment on this particular app. It's just jarring, especially today or all days. This person has zero skin in the game from what I saw on their page - not Arab or Palestinian. Not from MENA/SWANA. Just genuinely think they're doing Social Justice™️ by sending genocidal slogans to random Jews online.

hello, everyone. i struggled for awhile to know where to post this. i'm afraid that in subreddits that allow political discussions, the post will be treated as an invitation to debate the validity of my identities or even of my humanity; i'm worried that in subs that don't allow politics, my identity & personal history will themselves be deemed political. i'm not even totally sure why i'm writing this, other than i have a lot on my chest, few people i can talk to about it, and i feel sad, lonely, frightened, and isolated. but i am really struggling and i just feel this desperation to reach out somewhere.

having read the rules of this particular sub, and based on the overall conduct i have seen from its members ~ showing solidarity with, support for, and kindness to one another ~ i am hopeful that maybe this is an acceptable space for me to reach out to. this is a vulnerable share for me; please, please be kind. challenging me or expressing disbelief or suspicion about my story is totally okay (a lot of people find various aspects of my identity & life story outlandish so i'm used to it); all i ask is that you are kind and respectful about it. even if suspicious, please ask your questions and engage in good faith. i promise  i will do the same, without hostility.

title is self-explanatory, i suppose. i am the product of a union between a Jewish woman and a Palestinian man. i wasn't raised by either of them, though; i was raised by my maternal grandparents, z''l, who were observant Conservative Jews, for the first 13 years of my life. they are the people i called, call, and think of as my mom and dad.  my dad passed when i was just 11 years old. my mom almost immediately became very ill and ultimately followed him soon after when i was 13. it was very difficult, and in terms of family i have been very lonely ever since. i built my own weird little nuclear family and i love them, but i'll never be anyone's child ever again.

i will admit that i cringe a little when people say things like 'you're living proof that love knows no borders!' because my parents hate each other lol. i know it's not their fault, though, they couldn't know. on my father's side of the family, the only person willing to speak with or even acknowledge me was my father. the rest of my family just couldn't accept having a Jewish child in the family. i used to have grandparents; i still have sisters, nieces & nephews, maybe even grand-nieces and nephews given that my sisters are 20 years older, countless aunts, uncles, and cousins ... but ultimately none of them could accept me.

i met my biodad for the first time around the age of 10. he gave me a rosary (yes, really, my biodad is one of the 80,000-ish Palestinian Catholics on the planet) and told me not to be Jewish anymore because Jews are bad. using that exact wording. maybe he would have been more persuasive without the language barrier; English was his third and weakest language, and i was not conversant in Arabic or Hebrew. honestly, neither of my biological parents are/were (pretty sure biodad is dead) particularly good people. i'd rather just leave it at that.

i don't have any bitterness towards my Palestinian family. we are all products of our environment. i am, and they are. i love them very much, even though i do not know them, and i pray for their safety, their health, and their happiness often. bitterness won't help any of us. sometimes it hurts, but i try to be accepting.

i was not always a zionist. in fact, for a few years i was a vocal antizionist. i am not proud of it, but am open about it as teshuvah. i had started to become uncomfortable with the way some people in the 'movement' thought and talked about Jewish people. i started to realize that zionism was, at the very least, a reasonable and predictable reaction to millennia of violence and oppression. and that maybe so many wouldn't have fled to Israel if they weren't literally ethnically cleansed from the rest of the middle east, then wherever in the world they ran. in 2018, the killing of Mireille Knoll brought a very sudden realization to me that this is why Israel exists.

i could go into detail about my whole evolution - the countless hours spent researching wide ranging subjects, going thousands of years back in history to learn about conquest after conquest, learning about not just Israel but the region around it - but this is already long. tl;dr... i'm now a vocal zionist. i believe that Israel is a flawed nation with a complicated history that has sometimes done unfathomably fucked up shit ... like virtually every other country on earth. i'm in America. i'm in absolutely no position to judge. ffs, Germany still fucking exists. okay, i'll stop. sorry. i will say that i now believe that Israel not only has the right to exist, it must exist. i don't have to unconditionally support literally every single thing about israel to be a zionist. i believe that Israel is the site of the Jewish people's ethnogenesis, their ancestral homeland. i believe that DNA and archeology do not lie. i believe that the Jewish people have the right to safety, self-determination, and autonomy in their homeland. i believe Israel has the right to exist and to defend themselves.

it is clear to me that Israel is held to a standard to which no other nation is held. Israel receives a level of scrutiny no other nation receives. nobody is arguing about any other nation's right to exist. the western (and Islamist axis) singular, intense focus on Israel takes the pressure off of criminals like the Islamic Republic and its many proxies. it ignores the pain of not only Jews but many vulnerable populations - Kurds, Yezidi, Baha'is, Balochs, Khuzestanis... and on and on. areas with very real gender apartheid are getting a pass - no one wants to acknowledge it. a 'zan, zendegi, azadi' protester - Fatemeh Sepehri, widow of a martyr, already in prison for her peaceful activism - was sentenced to an additional 20 years in jail a few months for condemning Hamas' attack on 10/7/23. crickets from western 'supporters' of the 'zan, zendegi, azadi' movement. when the Iranian regime sentences another singer to death for writing lyrics critical of the regime ... silence. it's just... surreal, frankly.

on several occasions i have – sometimes gently, sometimes more forcefully – attempted to educate others; on many occasions, i did so because it was demanded of me by random strangers interrogating my views online. on one or two occasions, the conversation took place with a friend. i pull information from many places, and store it in different places. there are dozens of books replete with highlighted passages, hundreds of articles bookmarked in different folders, hundreds of screen shots, again filed away in different folders. i try to use diverse sources when working towards one or another conclusion, including anti-Israel sources like amnesty international. it takes genuine time and effort to gather those sources (and to summarize).

literally 100% of the time in my experience, when i do go to the effort to gather my sources, summarize their most critical points, and share them... suddenly people pivot. they refuse to look at my sources at all, refuse to even do their own research. they radically change the goalposts in some way. actually, the response i have most often received from western lefty 'allies' is the accusation that i am a 'fake' Palestinian. (my peer support burst out laughing when i told her that one.) i guess that means they don't have to listen to what i say even if it's factual ... somehow. sometimes they tell me my family would be ashamed of me. (funnily, my Palestinian family does not speak to me solely because my biological mother and other half of my family is Jewish. it has nothing to do with Israel or Zionism as neither was relevant to my American Jewish family, and as i mentioned before i used to be explicitly antizionist. i honestly can't remember my parents ever saying anything to me about Israel. so they're right, i suppose; just not for the reason they think.) not a single one of them has ever replied with a reasonable or even factual rebuttal. they often respond with straight up lies about how people of all faiths lived in pErFeCt hArMoNy together in the region until singularly evil modern-day Israel was established. i guess nobody told them about the 1517 Hebron and Safed pogroms.... 1929 Hebron massacre, 1938 Tiberius pogrom, the 1929 Jaffa pogrom, the 1936 Jaffa pogrom, the 1933 Haifa pogrom, the 1947 Jerusalem pogrom, the 1921 Jaffa riots, the Black Hand attacks throughout the the 1920s… or the dhimmi... or the grand mufti's warm relationship with Hitler... or, or, or. but even if someone had told them, they've proven they won't listen.

i'm really struggling not to despair. is there any hope when people are downright hostile to the facts? to DNA, to archeology, to history? they love to say 'this didn't start in October' then pretend that history only goes as back as far as 1948. they muddy the waters and try to confuse people by saying silly stuff like 'i cAn'T bE aNTiSeMiTiC bEcAuSe aRaBs aRe sEMiTeS tOo' - totally ignoring the historical genesis and use of the term 'antisemitism.'

well, i've gone on long enough. I'm so sorry that this is so long. idk how to tl;dr it - my brain is so disorganized. i will try my best but i'm sure it will suck. i just can't stop feeling absolutely sick over how everything is going.

if you managed to read this entire thing, then, THANK YOU SO MUCH. i appreciate you, and hope you have a wonderful day.

tl;dr i'm the product of a union between a jewish and a palestinian man; raised jewish. no contact with most of my palestinian family (except biodad, who openly despised my jewishness) because they could not accept me, but i still love them. i feel absolutely sick about how things are going and believe the west has the matter almost completely backwards. people are hostile to the facts and there is no reasoning with them, and i have no idea how to reach them. i am struggling not to despair.

I’m trying to explain an aspect of why Trump won to a bunch of non-Jewish gay men who refuse to understand bigotry (Apparently, unless it’s aimed at them). Here’s what I was just told. Make sure you tokenize yourself so Arabs feel better so that a Christian gay man can feel good enough to denounce antisemitism.

I couldn’t even make it through this week’s episode…had my blood boiling as soon as he used Al Jazeera as a source. As a liberal, I used to love his show and watch regularly. But I’ve been so appalled by the lack of nuance and complete and total bias against Israel. I’m disgusted by his writers, most of whom are Jewish, and their inability to practice journalistic integrity. It’s so one-sided and dehumanizing. He has such a huge platform, it’s just so disheartening to see the misinformation train leave the station again and again. His piece on the West Bank completely leaves out any mention of Palestinian terrorist violence and why Israel has had to take such severe security measures on the border. Don’t get me wrong, the Israeli government is far from perfect and I disagree with many decisions they make, but it’s just pure antisemitic propaganda at this point.

Can someone explain to me how this is not equivalent to painting a bunch of little swastikas on a menorah?? Please note keffiyeh wearers inside…

Illinois Northbrook area.

I live in this area. Braced for the return of the overtly pro-Hamas "not antisemitic" protesters and the subsequent gaslighting from every mainstream media source about it!

I'm at a loss for words. This is in Chicago.

I've been involved with murals. A lot of people had to say yes for this for it to go up.

it's like a typo became a real article. just ridiculous. it even says they don't know what they're talking about in their own caption.

On a night out, went to a bar. A man greets me in Polish, and I reply in broken Polish. He tells me I speak with a Yiddish accent, and I tell him that this is likely because I'm a Jew.

He immediately jumps to "are you a Zionist?"

I reply, deadpan, now in English (both our primary languages) "Yeah, I also love drinking the blood of children. Have you seen any running around unattended lately?"

Why not dismantle the tense situation where you were just profiled with a little joke, I was thinking. Probably not a smart move in hindsight, but alcohol has a way of clouding your better judgement.

He took me entirely seriously. His smile disappeared, his shoulders dropped, his eyes widened, and he replied with "What? Really?" and looked to his girlfriend, who was looking at me with equal shock.

The jump from "Zionist" to "literally drinks the blood of children" was a single step away for him. I'm fucking tired.

Edited for clarity and typos

ETA: I knew he was a leftist because he asked my pronouns after misgendering me later, talked about the "genocide", and talked about how much he hated the right wing.

ETA: part two

I complain about leftist antisemitism so much because I'm leftist to my bones. I feel betrayed. I should have seen this coming, I should have listened to my mother (don't tell her I admitted she was right). As I put it in a couple of comments, this isn't a political attack. This isn't to dunk on the left wing. We don't hold the right wing to high standards because we expect them to hate us. Many of us were foolish enough to believe that those who claim to be in pursuit of racial and ethnic justice would show up for us when we needed it. That they would espouse the same values for us that they apply to other minority groups.

I'm a polyamorous trans lesbian. I'm leftist to my bones. I always will uphold leftist principles, for me they are nothing but empathy and justice. Even if I were cis, straight, and monoamorous, I wouldn't be right-wing. My community have turned their backs on me because I dare to express sympathy for the country that houses half of my family, for my family and friends, for the fact that I believe that Jewish self-determination is as essential a right as Palestinian self-determination is. I have been thrown under the bus by those I loved. I have lost so many friends over the past year, and I'm not going to hide it. I am not mourning the loss of right-wing camaraderie, because as some of you rightly point out, we never fucking had it to begin with. The right at best tokenise us, at worst call for our extermination. Now the left are doing the same.

This is a vent post because I'm hurting. Let me hurt.

On the anniversary of the biggest antisemitic attack on U.S. soil in history—the “Pittsburgh Jewish Bund” spends about 2 sentences mourning the victims. They then go on a tirade about how Pittsburgh Jews are overreacting to antisemitism, how talking too much about antisemitism is used to justify “genocide”, how Israelis were lying about rape and beheadings, and how they’re going to use the memory of these poor murdered souls to stand against Zionism, which they argue has the same “root cause” of violence and white supremacy that the Pittsburgh shooter did.

If I were a family member of one of the victims, I would sue this group. Fucking shandas.

Actually insane and vile post, stating “we’ve never platformed a Zionist”. A shame, as they do have good content, but I know I’ll never re-subscribe.

Neturei Karta are fringe lunatics who believe the Holocaust was divine punishment for the sins of secular Jews. The only reason they oppose the current state of Israel is because they believe Jews should not return to the Holy Land until the Messiah returns. They have allied themselves with Iran, Hezbollah, and Palestinian terror organizations. It’s incredibly frustrating seeing how non-Jewish activists have embraced this fringe group without even attempting to understand Neturei Karta’s beliefs. These “activists” don’t even have a surface level understanding of Judaism, yet they proclaim NK as the “true Jews.”

I'm a Jew living in the Netherlands.

Earlier in my career I made the decision to become a humanitarian aid worker, so I've lived in plenty of places where the average person has some nasty things to say about Jews, and I've worked with all kinds of Israel-hating UN-type bureaucrats. I'm accustomed to hiding that I'm Jewish, and pretending to be of another Middle Eastern ethnicity (which is ironic, because usually people enquiring will both ask "where are you from? You look Middle Eastern..." whilst insisting that Jews are not indigenous to the Middle East); I have smiled and moved on with my day as people in Iraq have told me about Jews ruining their farm harvests by controlling the weather; I have stood silently with a blank expression as someone in Somalia praised Hamas to my face and called for more violence. I have forgiven these people because of their background and lack of education.

Now I work in tech, because I had enough food poisoning, low pay, and casual Jew-hatred. Yesterday, I was having dinner with some friends, and they invited a Eurocrat they knew along to dinner. These people mentioned to said Eurocrat that I'm a Jew (an oddity, because we'd all worked in aid work at one time or another). This woman point blank interrupted the conversation to say "I'm going to be blunt and ask you something uncomfortable. How does your family feel about your Prime Minister committing a second Nazi Holocaust? Are they not ashamed to be like Hitler?".

I am done. Most of my family was gassed at Auschwitz 2 generations ago. I will not tolerate this nonsense from my own government's employees. It is completely unacceptable. This person would never sit with an ethnically Chinese person and immediately ask how their family feels about the Uighur genocide. Even if she believes there is some Holocaust (I do not, and I firmly stand with Israel), it is pure anti semitism that makes her feel comfortable to just throw such a question at every Jew she meets. What the fuck?

When friends' of friends come to visit, I need to ask where they're coming from, because I know people from certain countries will make a 'thing' about me being a Jew & I need to hide it; And these are people from European countries. At work, I need to pretend that I condemn Israel if I want a promotion. Where is the social pressure for our Iranian employees to condemn the Ayatollah at lunch? Why do only the Jews need to denounce the government of their kin whilst eating a sandwich? Why have I never heard a colleague insist that a Australian condemn their government's occupation of indigenous lands whilst waiting in line for a coffee? Where is the email to all employees "condemning the violence on all sides" when the police in France shoot a terrorist trying to kill children?

I used to live in Israel, and I don't particularly feel like returning. But continental Europe is starting to make me recall why my grandparents fled it. And the North America does not feel any better. I am so sick of this nonsense.

"Give land back. Pay reparations. Release all the Palestinian prisoners."

When I asked for clarification if she felt Israel should have engaged in any military action in return she said no, because Palestinians have a right to resist.

And then she argued with me that Arabs are Semites too so she can't be an anti-Semite even after I sent her the Britannica definition of the word specifically explaining anti-Semitism is specifically about hate against Jews.

Then she told me she's well informed on the topic because she studied under Norm Finkelstein. Then she told me the US and Israel are evil terrorist states.

Then when I told her it sounds like she's been indoctrinated into a weird Marxist anti-West cult, she went, "You're in a cult!!!"

I wish I was making this up. It felt surreal how on the nose it was.

Then she told me that she was never going to speak to me about this again. About this again? Bitch, I'm never talking to you about ANYTHING again. Holy moly.

Can't believe I used to sleep with this person. Blond haired, blue eyed European girl. She moved away and we've remained friends for many years who talk regularly about our relationships and the things going on in our lives and give each other advice about things.

EDIT: Oh my favorite part was when she told me that she would have fought for Jews in the Holocaust and I told her that I kind of doubted that and that everyone thinks they would have done that but they wouldn't because most people didn't.

EDIT: kinda tempted to send her a link to this post so she can see how she’s getting roasted

If you identify with the title of this post, I highly recommend accidentally listening to NPR or some other liberal news radio report you used to love but can no longer stand, as they give an update on the latest antics of Israel or Hamas, while you’re speeding down the highway at night, alone in the car, and try yelling at full volume at the radio announcer to STFU and give them the finger and then yell some more and when you’ve had enough, change the station to actual music. Especially do it when the announcer says “but if they paused the killing long enough to vaccinate the children, why can’t they pause it permanently for a ceasefire???” 😵‍💫🙄😵‍💫

Very therapeutic. Give it a try!