This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said âIâm currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,â and he replied âoh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?â and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.
The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.
For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitlerâs rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.
German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this âsocial death.â These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (âyouâre just being hystericalâ etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.
The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husbandâso traumatized from the campâmade no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.
I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.
So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).
Holy fuck. I was raised Jewishâ with female Rabbis, even!â and I did not hear about any of this. Gender studies are important.Â
âso you just threw gender in there for funâ ffs i hope you poured his drink down his pants
I actually studied this in one of my classes last semester. It was beyond fascinating.Â
There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldnât listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.
Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didnât want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husbandâs side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.
(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasnât supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage.Â
The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have.Â
Another interesting tidbit is that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Kristallnacht is a term that historians came up with after the fact, and was not what the event was actually called at the time. Itâs likely that the event was actually called was (Iâm sorry that I canât remember the German word for it but it translates to) night of the feathers, because that, instead of broken glass, is the image that stuck in peopleâs minds because the soldiers also went into peopleâs homes and destroyed their bedding, throwing the feathers from pillows and blankets into the air. What does it say that in our history we have taken away the focus of the event from the more domestic, traditionally feminine, realms, and placed it in the business, traditionally masculine, realms?
Badass women and interesting commentary. Though I would argue that âNight of Broken Glass" includes both the personal and the private spheres. It was called Kristallnacht by the Nazis, which led to Jewish survivors referring to it as the November Pogrom until the term âKristallnacht" was reclaimed, as such.
None of this runs directly counter to your fascinating commentary, though.
READ THIS.
If anyone has books or articles related to these accounts or ones like them, please let me know. These stories need to be told.Â
Every once and a while I come across a Dear Santa letter where the child was very specific in what they wanted - e.g. giving the product ID and page number in the Sears Catalog specific. I always think itâs fun to see the actual item kids wanted - so here are a selection of a few specifically requested dolls from letters I found this year.
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(source: The Chattanooga Daily Times, December 19, 1926.)
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(source: The Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog, Fall-Winter 1926.)
âParty Girlâ was the third most expensive doll in this particular Sears catalog - around $110 today with inflation. Prices of other dolls ranged from $.25 (about $5) to $7.98 (about $150).
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(source: The Bowling Green Times, December 16, 1926.)
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(source: The Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog, Fall-Winter 1926.)
Priced around $30, adjusted for inflation.
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(source: The Bloomsburg (Pennsylvania) Morning Press, December 23, 1930.)
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(source: The Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog, Fall-Winter 1930.)
Price around $50 when adjusted for inflation.
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(source: The Bloomsburg (Pennsylvania) Morning Press, December 17, 1930.)
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(source: The Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog, Fall-Winter 1930.)
The total for the 19.5" doll and the sweater set comes to $5.80 (about $110 dollars with inflation).
fun fact! babies drink milk begause milk is axtually life force. so breastfeeding is babeeey sucking out my life juicesss.
the baby has been on me aaaalll day. normally we get some naps in the crib or bassinet, but recently it’s only on mama with almost constant feeding. the betrayal on baby’s face when we interrupted milkies for a family walk (to give the poor dog some exercise)…i hope this at least means my supply is growing enough to not need to supplement with formula.
Originally, I was considering posting a gofundme after I lost my job right before surgery, but I held off, and then this happened.
On 12/17, the apartment my spouse and I moved into only two weeks prior was devastated when construction crews working in our building ruptured a major water line on the third floor, sending a deluge through our apartment. The flood left our bedroom in ruins and half of our living room in need of repair.
Weâre working with our landlord, and the insurance paperwork is piling up, but nobody can tell us how long it will take to sort things out. Meanwhile, weâve squeezed ourselves, our belongings, and our furry companions into a small room with a single memory foam mattress while we try to make sense of and navigate this mess.
Both sites have links to pages that get more into food storage.
As it is food drive season Iâd like to remind people that while food might be edible past these dates, food banks and food pantries will not use food past those dates, so please donât waste their time by donating things they will not use
once again needing to remind some people that mispronouncing foreign words isnât just about not knowing how to say it; if your language doesnât have that sound, in many cases you canât hear itproperly. You wonât be able to hear yourself say it wrong because you probably canât distinguish between the sounds a native speaker can. It will sound right to you and you will be wrong.
Most languages use relatively similar sound inventories overall, but make distinctions others donât. And the way the our language centers work is they group these sounds together, allowing us to recognize that things within a given range constitute a recognizable phoneme. If your languages groups together sounds another language makes a distinction between, your brain cannot tell.
So everyone on those posts congratulating themselves for looking up pronunciation and saying âItâs Not That Hard?â Surprise, you might have still got it wrong and canât even tell. You can look up the IPA chart and still flub it completely because what sounds right to your brain and what a native speaker will understand are totally different things!
âI might have butchered that, please let me knowâ is sometimes an excuse for lack of research, but it is, unfortunately, also a much more accurate self-assessment than confidently fucking it up after mouthing along to a wav file a few times.
This is one of the reasons that, historically, many people would take on or be granted new names if they stayed any length of time in another culture; itâs very common for the names from one language to simply not map to the sounds of another!
this just in apparently; accents are just affectations and every ESL person who has ever struggled to understand or pronounce a word is a lazy white person
(I first need to say that it is folly to overexamine a slogan, and the slogan as it stands is never intended to be examined; it is a tool for provocation and a rally to do better, and can never be âincorrect.â I am not criticising the intention of the slogan.)
When Black Americans have addressed the genuinely shameful failures of white Americans to pronounce Black names, it is, firstly, absolutely necessary. This has been done in the past with the slogan, âwhite people can pronounce Tchaikovsky and Schwarzenegger.â
This is intended to highlight the entirely correct point that white Americans have made more efforts to address names that are considered âforeignâ and âdifficultâ but are associated with âwhiteâ cultures, than to address Black names. The slogan is provocative, useful, and highlights the hypocrisy of white Americans. It is a challenge to do better. Because Americans often perceive zâs and vâs to be âforeignâ and âdifficultâ it is an especially pointed dig.
However. Let us briefly lump together Americans, all English-speaking Americans of various backgrounds dialects, into one American lump and stand back.
Respectfully: you HAVE to be American to believe that Americans have learned to pronounce âTchaikovskyâ and âSchwarzeneggerâ correctly.
Although Americans firmly and confidently believe that they can take on âSchwarzenegger,â German speakers⌠donât. Thatâs just not how you say those sounds. One particular letter gets mangled.
It isnât even an accent problem; you can say it correctly with a strong American accent. The American reinvention of âSchwarzeneggerâ represents a failure to understand how German sounds work, which is fine - hey, theyâre âdifficultâ and âforeignâ - but it is paired with total unearned confidence on the part of ALL Americans of ALL dialects that âof course we know how to say it. Itâs a celebrity who was on the TV, heâs a governor, thatâs how everyone says it.â
If you listen to Arnold saying HIS OWN NAME, which he does, you can tell that AMERICANS ARE NOT EVEN SAYING HIS NAME LIKE HE DOES. Even British people land a better attempt. It is a function of American cultural hegemony that Americans do not notice this. It is an inherently American view of the world to believe that a consistent, confident mispronunciation of someoneâs name is a respectful, educated and correct handling.
(Tchaikovsky is interesting because itâs an Anglicisation of a French version of the spelling of ЧаКкОвŃкиК, which was possibly settled on because it was the easier way to get English speakers to perceive it. American English tried a different version in his own lifetime, as you can see below, but which would have led to Americans putting a âcowâ in it.)
Again, it doesnât cancel the slogan, the slogan is good-quality - but it shows how this is invisible to those who have not learned otherwise.
Outside of America, all Americans are perceived as American together, and Yanks join the ranks of English speakers. English speakers are famed around the world for having the same âbash and mangle it into something that sounds similar, and insist that itâs correct, because you donât hear the differenceâ approach.
It will help in learning other languages to try. It will help a lot to take the loss with grace and accept correction!
Although the OP sort of accidentally implies that you âcanâtâ hear certain nuanced sounds - it is entirely possible to distinguish and perceive most nuanced sounds even in extremely nuanced languages, with intention and attention and training, especially with the guidance of a native speaker. Even if you canât get it perfect it is still possible to improve and worthy to try!
IMO of the most fascinating ways for an English native speaker, especially an American one, to understand this is to watch how Mr Yang teaches Chinese students how to use American handling. âSoften up on the K soundâ âthrow in a little SpongeBob to itâ you will suddenly hear things you probably werenât ready to hear.
Here is a British person making a respectful attempt at Schwarzenegger, followed by Schwarzenegger saying it himself. One person has a British accent, and Schwarzeneggerâs Austrian accent is considered distinctive to German speakers, but ideally, once you try to notice it, even if you are American, you should be able to hear what Americans are doing wrong.
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