Ian Stone, Doubting Thomas, oil on linen, 12x16 in, 2023
"If you know the painting by Caravaggio, Doubting Thomas, it was my direct inspiration for this piece.
A doubting Thomas is a skeptic who refuses to believe without direct personal experience. 50-60 years ago, it was not uncommon for people to think or believe that being gay was a phase or a mental illness or deviance in some shape or form. It's embarrassing that the same things are being said about trans people today."
Such a good reminder that there are people out there who enjoy doing seemingly silly little inconsequential jobs. It’s not the job they hate, it’s being treated like undervalued shit.
CW: antisemitism, pale of settlement, pogroms, genocide, cultural erasure
I don't think goyim can really conceive of how much Jews actually hold back in our criticism of antisemitism in media, and when you hear us it is often because we see a dangerous message that you don't... Yet.
I have a complicated relationship with Tim Burton's rendition of The Corpse Bride. I love it as a beautiful piece of stop motion art, but it isn't what it should have been, he took a Jewish story from the Pale and with intention stripped it of its Jewish origins. This alone is incredibly antisemitic. The criticism you will hear has probably been "this is a Jewish story, it should have retained its Jewish elements" but have you heard why we feel strongly about this story?
The story of the corpse bride is incredibly important to me and was born from Jewish trauma and Christian violence. Mobs would routinely attack Jewish weddings, they would murder brides and they would bury them in unmarked graves by the roadside still in their wedding clothes, they reasoned that without Jewish wives there are no Jewish mother's. Jews are intrinsic to the story.
It is antisemitism to take our story, about our pain, at the hands of non-jews and strip it for "useful" parts, in fact it is heartbreaking every time.
We are often forced to pick our battles and fighting a battle over a movie that has already been released by a director with a cult following is not worth it, you only hear us speak up in numbers when the antisemitism may lead to another century of violence, because raising our voice means picking a fight, because so many of you already see our pain as inconvenient and it is exhausting to never be heard.
Reminding everyone that antisemitism is one word. No space, no hyphen. Semitic is a linguistic category, a language can be Semitic but people can't be.
The term antisemitism was popularised by white supremacists who wanted to replace the term JudenHaas (Jew Hatred) and make their hatred of Jews sound more scientific. The term antisemitism was popularised by the proto-fascist Wilhelm Marr in his 1879 pamphlet, “The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism,”.
This doesn't mean that you shouldn't use the term antisemitism, but you should use it correctly, knowing that it has only ever meant hatred of Jews and can only mean this. It's been the term under which thousands of years of violence against Jews was codified into and justified by the new antisemitism of the 20th century and onwards.
(Tumblr don't nuke this addition again, it's educational and written by a Jew.... Me.... to explain correct use of terms)
FYI if your employer does this, if they have done it for a long time especially, you and your coworkers could be owed huge amounts of unpaid wages and it would be an easy suit if there is a paper trail like this and your employer is placing strict requirements on your behavior while not at work. Employment lawyers generally work on contingency. Just food for thought.
