It’s amazing how the words “we can’t afford that” get stuck in a kid’s brain. I think most of us heard that to one degree or another growing up, but it meant vastly different things for all of us - and we all took different meanings than what our parents intended in a lot of cases, too, I think.

Now, my daughter and I have lived a pretty frugal life. No big vacations, small house, one tv. Her dad’s house, on the other hand, multi-story, flat screens in every room, new cars. Very different. One day she asked me if we were poor. It made me so sad because until then I had hoped she wasn’t conscious of all that,…

Why is Shailene Woodley in acting? She seems like she should be a dog-walker, or the manager of a smoothie place.

Its up to the individual Jew to decide if they are white or not, and many many Jews are not white. There are the Sephardiem and the Mizrahi and the Beta Israel. White nationalist groups have never considered Jews to be white. Generally “white” is defined by those groups since it is a fairly useless distinction. A…

If you want to reach out, make a donation to the repair work at https://www.chesedshelemeth.org/how-to-donate.html. Your church could even do a fundraiser in solidarity.

The St. Louis Jewish community is largely pre-Shoah, so I don’t know that there would be many, if any, survivor graves there. My friend whose grandparents’ graves were desecrated has her roots in St. Louis back into the 1800s. But even for families with no Shoah connection, this is still a brutal experience,…

Why would you think “the West” was 65 years past this? These things happen in Europe literally all the time.

It reminds me of the bombing of elementary schools in Ireland. I just can’t imagine the amount of hatred -of a religion, FFS- it could take to drive someone to kill innocent children. To murder children, or make children live in fear of being murdered, or to make seniors feel the way they did when the Nazis came to…

The cemetery is taking donations at https://www.chesedshelemeth.org/how-to-donate.html

For a lot of the very recent past, I think antisemitism was so totally taboo that, paradoxically, it was easier to call just joking. “Obviously I don’t really hate Jews, what, do you think I’m a Nazi?” Then the 4chan edgelords mixed in with the sincere neonazis, and they looked from anon to nazi, and from nazi to…

So much economic anxiety right now. 

I’ll also add that, for a while, it seemed like anti-Semitism in the US was only relegated to people in hardcore hate groups. This upswing in anti-Semitism, particularly among younger Americans, is a pretty new thing.

Nazi soldiers would use the tombstones of Jewish graves for target practice. The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague is still in existence only because Hitler wanted to later convert it to a museum after his genocide was complete.

I say Jews are the easiest target because no other group has had such a network of conspiracies built around them over the centuries. You’ve heard them all. Jews control the banks. Jews controlled the African slave trade. Jews control Wall Street. Jews control Hollywood, therefore the media. Jews over threw the Tsars…

Thank you to the link to the cemetery, bout to click. Will be looking into their preferences on benches, statues, topiary, too. How horrible.

During the last bomb threat, there was a Hartford Courant photo of freezing, wet children huddling in towels outside my local JCC. They had jumped out of the pool and run straight to a designated spot outside. So every time I see news of another antisemitic incident, I picture chubby little girls in arm floaties and…

Abe Simpson may have been on to something.

Bomb threats to JCC’s nationwide are reaching near 100 incidents since January. They frequently are sites with preschools, which then need to be evacuated for several hours. Nothing has happened thus far , but I cannot imagine the lingering fear that parents experience sending their kids there after an event like this.

It really personalises these stories, doesn’t it?

A friend’s grandparents’ graves are among the desecrated. She found out today, on her grandfather’s yahrzeit. It’s so heartbreaking.