I want more Jewish protagonists who have nothing to do with the Holocaust. Let us have cool powers and prophecies and regular lives and /stories/. Rabbis who fight Cthulu or something idk.
Judaism doesn’t begin and end with our persecution.
Honestly I am still a lil ??? at the viscerally negative reaction to Vashti because like, there is nothing, in the Megillah, at all,
Vashti is…. the white dudes in the background that everyone ships with each other even though they were only briefly on screen in one scene and never showed up again
Except she’s a woman so people either hate her or have to be all ~PROGRESSIVE!~ about their headcanon and it’s like whoa there what is happening here. She ain’t that deep
That’s my Vashti opinion
ok logically i can kinda see this opinion
but then emotionally/ideologically i feel like we can/should analyse everything, that the texts are like this for a reason
but then on the THIRD hand, i do really hate how it’s either “I’m a feminist and Vashti is the best!!!” or “I’m Orthodox and Vashti was awful” and there’s never an in between or any other option! (and, as a sorta-Orthodox feminist, I’ve never come across a satisfying Orthodox feminist response to this)
I’m Orthodox and feminist, and Vashti gets a super raw deal from her life and is demonized by the Talmud in ways that look unjust to me, but that doesn’t make her a feminist hero.
I just don’t see how Vashti is not a feminist story. This is a woman who is faced with a no-win situation—she can disgrace herself (and also Achashvarosh, although he’s too drunk to notice) by acquiescing to his request, in a culture in which women’s public presence and sexuality is tightly controlled.Or she can say ‘eff off’, and stand the consequences. And she is replaced with Esther, another woman with intensely limited control over her body and her options, and even higher stakes.
I don’t know if Vashti is a feminist hero, but this is a situation with feminist resonance. And I certainly can’t see her as a villain.
The midrash I like is that Haman was out to get her, because she humiliated him, and would slap him in the face with her shoes. First, it creates a series of beautiful symmetries in the story, but I also just love imagining a tiny, gorgeous Indian princess (in my imagination, Vashti is always Indian) whapping her husband’s schmuck vizier across the face with a jeweled flip-flop.
I’ve been thinking a lot about compassion in Judaism, and being kind. In that light, I would like everyone to know that my current favorite Jewish supernatural headcanon is that, instead of driving vampires away with crosses or stakes through the heart, we say the Mourner’s Kaddish for them. I mean, that’s just so adorable. You see this threatening undead creature, and instead of yelling murder, you feel bad for them, and you mourn for them. Imagine being a vampire at the receiving end of that, having been chased away for years and years and told you’re a monster when you come across someone who sees you and your existence and accepts that you’re in a pretty bad place and offers help in the best way they can. I’m actually tearing up about this a little. If someone adds to this post I’ll love them forever.
It doesn’t work for zombies.
This is one of the hardest things she learns, in the business. Saying the Mourner’s Kaddish will slow a vampire, to stare at you with wide shocked eyes (and once, memorably, to weep blood-tinged tears), unable or unwilling to lift a hand against you. It will calm a dybbuk, enough to make it stop whatever destruction it’s begun, and almost always enough to start a conversation about why it clings so desperately to the world of the living, what it’s left undone, how it can be freed to move on. You have died, the Kaddish says, and we mourn you as we would mourn our own dead, because someone must.
But there is no soul and no mind left in a zombie, no vestige of the self it once was, nothing left for the Kaddish to speak to.
She says it anyway, with every head-shot, with every flung grenade.
Not because she still hopes one might hear her, but because they are dead, and the dead should be mourned.
In the last four weeks, there have been 57 bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers in the United States.
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly NOW. Love mercy NOW. Walk humbly NOW. You are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to abandon it.
Lo Alecha haM’lacha Ligmor, veLo Atah Ben-Chorin leHivatel Memenah / לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמוֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה / It is not your duty to complete the task, but nor it is your freedom to withdraw from it
– is something which is not shared nearly enough, something which is not repeated nearly enough, something with is not SHOUTED FROM THE FREAKING ROOFTOPS nearly enough.
Peggy’s first Christmas season in New York is
both delightful and depressing – it’s so lovely to see America’s bounty
and good cheer on such vivid display, especially after how England spent
the last few Christmases. But she misses her family and she even misses
the way misery and fear of the Jerries so close by made every bright
spot shine all the more. Her own preoccupation (self-absorption, if she
must be honest) leaves her only surprised and curious when the
candelabra appears in the one window in the main lab that’s not bricked
over from the outside. It’s high up – they’re underground, after all –
and needs a ladder to get to, although they keep a ladder handy because
this is a lab with chemicals and there are times when extra ventilation
is ideal. The candelabra is not a fine one; it’s tarnished silver of a
low quality, battered and dented, and Peggy’s embarrassed that she has
to be told that it’s a chanukia and not someone’s odd attempt at giving
the lab a touch of class for the Christmas season.
Gloria, who is the one to tell her, does not know whose it is.
Most
of the scientists are Jews here, but their relationship with their
faith is complicated and Peggy generally chooses to say nothing lest she
inadvertently poke at a sore spot. And that goes for Howard, who views
his Jewishness as an annoying childhood nickname he can’t get rid of, as
much as it is for Abe or any of the other refugees who have lost
everything – up to and including their families – because of it. Yiddish
might be the unofficial second language of Project Rebirth and the lab
was unofficially closed in the fall for the Jewish New Year and Yom
Kippur, but most of the men work into the night on Fridays and the
biggest dogmatic disagreements usually end up being about food – what is
the appropriate method of preparation of a brisket, not whether Walker
should eat his ham sandwich at his workstation.
Steel Phoenix Studios 