All posts by rosza

from Yidishistn Mit Palestine / Yiddishists With Palestine:

כּדי אָפּצוגעבן כּבֿוד דעם אָנדענק פֿון די אַלע פֿאַרשניטענע, מוזן מיר אָפּהאַלטן דעם איצטיקן חורבן – النكبة, און שטיצן דעם פּאַלעסטינישן געראַנגל צו באַקומען זײער פֿרײַהײט און צו מאַכן אַ סוף צו דער אַפּאַרטהייט. מיר שרײַבן אױף ייִדיש װײַל מיר גלײבן אין אַ צעבליִענדיקן ייִדישן גלות, פֿרײַ פֿון דעם ציוניזם און אַלע אַנדערע מלוכה-נאַציאָנאַליזמען. מיט דערמעגלעכן דאָס חרובֿ מאַכן פֿון עזה – غزه – קען מען נישט באַװײנען די אומגעקומענע. מיר מוזן פאַרהיטן דעם גענאָציד. פֿאַראײניקט זיך מיט אונדז.

kedey optsugebn koved dem ondenk fun di ale farshnitene, muzn mir ophaltn dem itstikn  khurbn – nakba, un shtitsn dem palestinishn gerangl tsu bakumen zeyer frayheyt un tsu makhn a sof tsu der apartheyt. mir shraybn oyf yidish vayl mir gleybn in a tsebliendikn yiddishn goles, fray fun dem tsionizm un ale andere melukhe-natsionalizmen. mit dermeglekhn dos khorev makhn fun aze – gaza – ken men nisht baveynen di umgekumene.  mir muzn farhitn dem genotsid. fareynikt zikh mit undz.

To honor all the dead, we must stop this next catastrophe. We must struggle alongside Palestinians for their liberation and to end apartheid. We write in Yiddish because we believe in the thriving of a Jewish diaspora free from zionism and all other state nationalisms. Enabling the destruction of Gaza is not a way to grieve. We must interrupt genocide. We must do this together.

Pour honorer tous les morts, nous devons empêcher cette nouvelle catastrophe. Nous devons lutter aux côtés des Palestiniens pour leur libération et pour mettre fin à l’apartheid. Nous écrivons en yiddish parce que nous croyons en l’épanouissement d’une diaspora juive libérée du sionisme et de tous les autres nationalismes d’État. Permettre la destruction de Gaza n’est pas une façon de vivre son deuil. Nous devons interrompre le génocide. Nous devons le faire ensemble.

about Andor: don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining

piss on my leg and tell me it’s piss! how i respond will depend entirely on you, not on piss.

i just watched Andor, and now i’m having thoughts, and even opinions. i knew it was a bad idea. up til now, after a bone-deep enthusiasm that didn’t really last past 1988, i’ve been immune to the siren song of lucasville (aside from the visual design, which always looks great and makes no fucking material sense of any kind).

i know that makes me odd. but let’s get real, here.

Continue reading about Andor: don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining

abolition and the state

this is mostly comment-bait, to see whether the folks looking for spaces off twitter for some of the conversations that happen there are interested in talking here (which i’d like)!

there are exciting conversations happening about whether abolition (of the prison-industrial complex: cops/cameras/courts/cages) necessarily implies opposition to the state as such. (spoiler: it does.)

here are a few of of them:

Continue reading abolition and the state

you can’t support both trans liberation and medical ‘expertise’

i’ve been talking about this for many years now (here, here, here, and even here – rejection emails not included).

but here we go again:

the main structuring fact of so-called trans healthcare is that the exact doctors who trans liberals hold up as “the best” (cohen-kettenis, for instance) have decades-long collaborative relationships with the exact doctors who trans liberals hold up as “the worst” (zucker, for instance). those two, for example, regularly co-author academic and clinical papers, textbook chapters, and such, and have for as long as they’ve been working in the field.

and what these supposedly “good” doctors’ practice (always remember: practice is purpose), especially when it comes to young people, is the same old gatekeeping with shiny liberal rhetoric. wanna get a trans clinic to question whether you should be there? all you need to do is let them find out you’re wearing a kind of underwear that’s marketed to your originally assigned gender group! (this recent example taken from one of the “best” clinics in the u.s.)

Continue reading you can’t support both trans liberation and medical ‘expertise’

something beautiful

as part of my last night of a week of relaxation and dodging work, i just watched Raise the Roof [through that link; pw: movie], and you should too! i’ve known about the recreated painted ceiling of a wooden synagogue at the Polin museum in varshe/warszawa for as long as the museum’s been open (a bit under a decade, now), but i had no idea there was a film about the process of creating it. deep thanks to @shvlman of twitter – a badass visual artist and inveterate researcher of yiddish jewish visual culture – for pointing it out!

the film does something unusual: it documents the process of studying history through collective, participatory embodied practice, through the life of a ten-year research/building project that had the resources (by which i mean: funding) to be completed on a majestically ambitious scale.

Continue reading something beautiful

diasporic hebrew? diasporizing ivrit

a first line of thinking after reading maya rosen’s fascinating interview with tal hever-chybowski, published this week in Jewish Currents. to be clear, i like what THC (can i resist? no.) has to say a lot, and adore the cultural project he and his journal, Mikan Ve’eylakh [From Here Onwards], are pursuing. i’m thinking my way into the gaps i find in this interview because that helps me understand how it all fits into my own yiddish-anchored diasporist thinking.

Continue reading diasporic hebrew? diasporizing ivrit

when you say what the right says, you are the right

i’m always impressed at how often, and how consistently, liberals & progressives repeat right-wing marketing rhetoric as if it were not just true, but self-evident.

lately, i feel like i’ve heard these floating around (all bullshit invented in the late 1900s, some of it in my lifetime):

the right (or, sometimes, the far right) “moved from the margins to the center” between the 1960s and the 2000s. just absolute crap: if there’s one constant in u.s. politics since 1776, it’s the depth of white (especially wealthy white) support for the overtly white nationalist far right, which has never been separate from the rest of the u.s. right in anything but aesthetics.

the right used to have an intellectually rigorous, morally grounded wing that kept its less respectable side in check. bill buckley’s patrician accent doesn’t make what he said, wrote, believed, and advocated – and who he was allied with – any different from what you’re hearing from any other rabid death-cultist, from calhoun to cohn to roof.

the democratic party is in some way affiliated with the left. the least-justified fantasy since the faeries at the bottom of arthur conan doyle’s garden. perhaps such an alliance could could have been made at the 1964 democratic party convention, if it hadn’t refused to seat the multiracial Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation. it says everything you need to know that in ’68, when a not-lily-white delegation was seated, it no longer claimed to represent “freedom”: it was the “Loyal Democrats”. that loyalty – still driving electoral progressives near you! – is part of why we do need a name for identifying with people who are actively trying to kill you instead of folks trying to keep you alive (“stockholm syndrome” is a misogynist lie invented to curb criticism of the police).

the “elites” of our society are media workers and the professoriate (who’re supposedly liberal: also generally a lie), not the people with actual economic and political power (including the ones who own media corporations and control universities).

it’s more disappointing (if less common) for folks who’re actual radicals to do this, of course. in that zone, the one i see coming up all the time lately is this:

the right, or the far right, or some parts of the right, are “anti-state”. now, there is a small slice of the libertarian right that might in fact oppose state structures as such. but most libertarians, and all neocons, paleocons, and other rightwingers who use an “anti-government” rhetoric base their whole political program on the existence of the state. some don’t want the current state, based on the slaveowners’ constitution of 1787, but all of them are aiming to maintain, and to control, a hierarchical, centralized, territorial structure of rule that legitimizes violence (by its agents, its supporters, and at times others) in service of its policies. you can tell because they want borders, they want enforced order, and they want “free enterprise” to be “protected”. that, my friends, is a description of a state and its policies, not of an “anti-state” position.

aside from making me annoyed, when liberals, progressives, and radicals parrot these various lines of bullshit, it strengthens the right. it turns their lies into “common sense”. and it makes them harder to fight. don’t do it. talk with your friends who do. and treat any analysis based on this junk as what it is: a right-wing analysis that supports and assists the right, even – especially – when it comes from liberals & progressives.

lesbians, fascists, & Bears (o my!)

i just finished watching a 2015 anime series, and now i Have Thoughts.

none of this will make much sense to anyone who hasn’t watched Yurikuma Arashi – Love Bullet [“Lesbianbear Storm”], which i’m not going to try to explain because it would take about as long as watching it (~4 hours). yes, really: kunihiko ikuhara doesn’t really direct things that summarize properly (and the wikipedia page will hand you a ton of spoilers without really helping you make sense of what happens in the show – just like this little essay!).

Continue reading lesbians, fascists, & Bears (o my!)

outfit notes

well, after the first few weeks of Continuous Outfit – Altered Daily, a few things became clear. i’m only writing them up now because i’m bad at documentation, not because it took me this long to grasp them.


the most important was that my original understanding of the analogy the piece is making had been a bit off. i’d thought in terms of making consecutive alterations to one fixed set of garments, but hadn’t really considered how modular Continuous Project – Altered Daily was. but actual practice led me right back to a structure that’s much closer to rainer’s piece than what i had imagined before starting.

Continue reading outfit notes