Debbie And Carrie.

Tomorrow, October 27th, marks the 5th anniversary of the Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting. For any of those who may not remember or forgot a few details, especially outside of the US: in 2018, a man named Robert Bowers went into the Tree of Life Synagogue during their Shabbat morning services and opened fire. 11 Jews lost their lives. On August 3, 2023, Robert Bowers was sentenced to death for this antisemitic crime. This was the worst mass shooting of Jews in the US to date.

Yesterday, October 25th, Jewish students at Cooper Union, a college in New York had to barricade themselves in the library while 'protestors' banged on the doors and shouted 'Free Palestine'. Note that the students had done absolutely nothing to cause this and have absolutely no power to do anything about the situation in the Middle East. This was an antisemitic attack, not a protest. You don't trap people for a protest. That's basic protesting rules. Disrupting is NOT the same as trapping. Peaceful protesting is defined as not blocking doors. Even if the students had opened the doors the demonstrators were right there and threatening. Not peaceful. It took over 40 minutes for the students to be safely escorted out of the building.

Also yesterday, a 6-person family in LA was woken up at approximately 520am by a man who kicked in their door and was wielding a knife. Blessedly (somewhat) he had entered the master bedroom first where he confronted the husband and his pregnant wife (at 9 months which means any amount of stress could put her into labor and put her baby at risk). All four children were also at home. Luckily the husband was able to fend off the knife-wielding antisemite. Multiple reasons he knew they were Jewish range from the mezuzah on their door to the fact he is apparently a neighbor and had talked to them before a few months previous where he found out they are Israeli. He apparently was drunk but had the wherewithal to state his intentions: he was going to kill them because they are Jews.

October has not been kind to Jews in the past few years and especially not this week in particular. Please, we are not okay. We are very tired and hurt and scared.

Favorite Film from Every Year

1952- Singin’ in the Rain

What’s the first thing an actor learns? “The show must go on!’ Come rain, come shine, come snow, come sleet, the show MUST go on!

👻🎃 hi

becky!!! 🥰🦇✨🎃 i find i am frustrated with tumblr because i thought i followed you when i first set this up the other night, and hitting the button must not have worked, i realized today you were missing! hi!

the brutality is incomparable. i don’t want to even acknowledge the details just released. this was done not by hamas, but by palestinian civilians. they strangled BABIES to death and threw rocks at them to stimulate an air strike. no trigger warnings. you don’t get that privilege. you all must read this and absorb this barbarity, for yarden bibas — for shiri, who is still missing. read it and understand the evil israel and the jewish people are up against.

#i keep thinking about the essay i read by ilan benjamin. daniel pearl's cousin #who has lived so much more life and seen so much more and experienced so much more than i have (but who hasn't?) #(my isolation and frozen state at a much younger age is assuredly part of what has added to this shock and naivete for me) #anyway he listed the allyship he's worked for and believed in and the heartbreak he has willingly forgiven #and the humanity and rights for which he stands. and then he said #“when you killed my idealism i had no forgiveness left” #it's silly but it's lived like a splinter in my head and keeps (bizarrely) making me think of that scene from moulin rouge #when he says: thank you for curing me of my ridiculous obsession with love. #the thing that makes that tragic isn't his misplaced anger at her but rather the shattering of his idealism. he is in many ways an innocent #an artist who believes in truth and beauty and freedom and above all things love. who suddenly understands that's not how the world works#love can't save you. you can work so hard and try and be so compassionate and forgiving #eventually you have to see how the world is built and your idealism is not real and is not enough #that's what the past weeks taught me. because of the jubilation and justification and hatred and reveling in the pain everywhere #and disguising that as righteous. and pretending it's helping people who deserve help (it isn't. it won't) #and knifing people who have done absolutely nothing in the heart simply for being who and what they are#spreading screeds from another era as if we've been transported through time. and not caring what it does to friends or anyone suffering#and not caring that it's making things more dangerous and volatile because you don't really love the side you claim to support#as much as you hate the other. that's unforgivable. thank you for curing me of my ridiculous obsession with love#i don't know what to do. there's nothing i can do

the referenced essay:

https://www.thefp.com/

Once, I Was a Peace Advocate. Now, I Have No Idealism Left.

After terrorists killed my cousin Daniel Pearl, my family called for peace. But after the worldwide celebration of our people’s slaughter, m

via

My beautiful smiling man…do you know you’ve changed my life? Made it better? Comforted me in the lowest moments? I hope you know. You are so special and loved. ❤️

The Jewish Chronicle

If the bodies of babies can’t make the world care about Jewish lives, nothing can - The Jewish Chronicle

It is not the silence itself that is earth-shattering. It is the discretion to be silent about this, but not of other’s suffering.

I thought I had felt all the disappointment there was to feel since October 7. That the indifference of strangers to Jewish lives could no longer surprise me. That well-meaning people choosing to highlight Palestinian suffering and ignore Israelis’ followed a predictable path that I had got used to.

But of course, I was wrong.

Yesterday, the image of Shiri Bibas clutching her two young children as terrorists tore them from their home was joined in our hearts by another horrifying sight.

Confronted with the sight of four coffins, two of which contained the bodies of Kfir and Ariel paraded on a Hamas stage in Gaza surrounded by masked terrorists, some of whom had even bought their children, I thought to myself, this has to be the moment where people wake up.

I watched in complete horror as this spectacle was being televised to the world, and the only people talking about it online were Jewish.

I don’t know any Jew since October 7, who has not felt paralysed with grief and rage about how little Jewish lives matter, particularly in the spaces of people who claim to care about injustice.

I looked online for the response from normally extremely vocal human rights charities. There was nothing from Save the Children UK about the boastful parading of dead Jewish babies, zero from UNICEF UK about the spectacle of evil.

Amnesty International could not even trouble themselves to focus on the direct and deliberate targeting of Jewish children without invoking false equivalence and bothsidesing on a day that we mourned two babies whose only crime was being Jewish.

No one, bar us, marches for our right to life. No one chants for our freedom, not even when our children are forcibly removed from their homes by murderous rapists and held underground for over a year, no campuses are taken over by spoilt students refusing to study, so devoted to our lived experience that they can't bring themselves to eat, and no one takes part in collective mourning, not even for the murder of our babies.

I do not know if the silence from people who have shared information about the desperate plight of children in Gaza interspersed with holiday pictures is deliberate. I do not know what conversations happen internally if at all. I know most of them will have no idea what it feels like to see your community degraded and dehumanised online and in the streets every week by thousands of people across the globe who claim to be moral and decent.

It is not the silence itself that is earth-shattering. It is the discretion to be silent about this, but not of others suffering. It is deliberate, it is considered.

The same people who were convinced Elon Musk is a raving Nazi and were so keen to educate their 201 followers about why his salute was antisemitic, have nothing to say about Hamas kidnapping and murdering Jewish children in cold blood.

More silence when the depravity goes further and forensic testing on the corpses returned by Hamas revealed they were covered in propaganda material and that Shiri is not even the fourth body returned. And nothing when it was revealed that the boys were killed in captivity.

But then if the image of a mother and her children in coffins while the monsters responsible for their death towered over them is not enough to shake the souls of ordinary people into saying something, then what is?

And so here we are again. Another moment in this barbaric timeline of terror and psychological torture where Jews are screaming into a void with mostly each other for company.

Our agony is for the families who have become our own. Shiri was every Jewish mother, her babies were our own. Oded Lifschitz was our peace-loving grandpa. How are generations of Israelis watching this expected to cling on to his unwavering commitment to peace and coexistence.

Meanwhile we have lived, slept and breathed their stories. We have witnessed their families' tireless efforts to get the world to notice their humanity and we have watched ordinary people destroy their posters with a latte in hand.

I will never understand why the image of a terrified mother clutching her babies flanked by frenzied gunmen in plain clothes did not inspire global movements to demand their immediate release. Perhaps if they had we might not be here now.

You will hear Jewish people talk about how October 7 changed everything for them. I fight daily not to let a whirlwind of pain consume me.

I do not want my world to shrink but we are constantly confronting the reality that people are indifferent to our violent murder at best, or defensive of it at worst.

Of course there are friends and allies outside our community who do care, they acknowledge the pain we are feeling, and we cling to them with dear life but they are few.

It feels trite to talk about the people who have spoken out for us and how important they are, because well, only a psychopath doesn’t care about a 9-month-old baby ripped from their bed and murdered by terrorists.

“But Hamas said they were killed in Israeli air strikes” I can see the apologists typing now. And honestly, I pity them.

How devoid of human decency do you have to be to hold anyone other than the murderous terrorist who stole them responsible?

[two notes: 1. I loathe Elon, but the non-Jewish people who were mad about Elon were lecturing us that we weren’t mad enough or performing enough for their satisfaction, and have NOTHING to say about murdered Jewish children. they do not care about antisemitism nor Jewish lives, they are hypocrites.

2. anyone who claims Ariel and Kfir were killed by an airstrike rather than murdered in cold blood by their captors is a vile liar and should be called on their moral bankruptcy, every single time.]

Take time for yourself 🧡

Betty Grable