Beth McCarthy gives trans fan new name

Queer joy detected!

tumblr should add a feature where instead of liking your mutuals' posts you teleport to their house and give them a biiig hug and tell them everything will be ok

There are ten trillion pictures of flowering trees to the point where they sometimes seem trite and overdone. But then you see a tree in full flower and go holy shit this rules and I've gotta show this to everyone so they can experience the same magic and wonder and there are ten trillion and one pictures of flowering trees

i've noticed that there is a bit of ingrained antisemitism in some non-jewish fiddler on the roof fans and im not gonna lie it really rubs me the wrong way. like they probably don't even know they're being kinda antisemitic in this way

here's what i mean. fiddler on the roof is about (shocker) jewish tradition and change. when you see tevye who cannot accept his daughter for marrying a non-jew, do you think, "oh, he's set in his ways, he's bigoted, he's just not modern enough, his (jewish) tradition is making him blind." ? whereas every time someone in my family would see it for the first time, literally everyone said, "it's a shame, but i absolutely understand why."

i think that's the most important thing -- do you understand why a man like tevye, a jewish man whose judaism is incredibly important to him, a jewish man who lives in the pale of settlement and whose village is under constant threat of pogroms, a jewish man who is alive in this period literally 2 years after the infamous kishinev pogroms (assuming this story takes place in 1905), a jewish man whose ancestors were constantly persecuted for being jewish (ESPECIALLY in the pale), a jewish man who is so remarkably proud to be jewish despite all of this --- do you understand why this man might be rightfully upset at his daughter for breaking the tradition that he and his people have paid with their lives to keep?

you can disagree with tevye's decision all you want -- i do too -- but like. if you don't see this you need to check yourself. fiddler on the roof is not just about the breaking of tradition -- it's about the breaking of tradition that is been their only method of survival for generations because they are Jews.

Yeah that's why I absolutely hate it when people try to make a "progressive" retelling of Fiddler and have Fyedka be a woman and Chava a lesbian. It completely misses the point of the plot to paint Tevye as merely a bigot rather than an anxious father who objects to his daughter marrying a man who is *part of the oppressor class*. As a non-Jewish Russian, Fyedka is in a position of immense power over Chava and there is a long and bloody history of non-Jewish men taking Jewish women to do as they please (and in Fiddler itself it's heavily implied that another one of his daughters is assaulted by a pogrom, considering that's what historically would happen). Tevye is not a narrow-minded old man set in his ways, he's a father with very real fears about his daughter's life.

Thank you @cursedwithgloriouspurpose and everyone who got me to 3000 reblogs!

i don’t know how to explain to my non-jewish audience what it means that two torah scrolls were destroyed in an arson attack but what i can tell you is that during the los angeles wildfires, three staff at the synagogue in pasadena made 4+ trips each back into the building to rescue torah scrolls while the fire was close enough that ashes were falling in the parking lot.

what i can tell you is that we have a holiday once a year where we hold the scrolls and hug them and dance around them. what i can tell you is that they are written with love by hand by trained scribes who take exquisite care to make sure each word, each letter, is perfect. when we read from them we do not touch the parchment directly so that it won’t be harmed by the oils from our fingers.

we make beautiful clothing for our torah scrolls, embroidered cloth coverings and shining worked metal crowns to sit atop them or carved wood cases plated with gold and silver. the torah is to us the words of the living God, the tree of life, the record of who are and where we’re going, and the torah scroll is our most holy ritual object.

the torah scroll never touches the floor. if it is dropped accidentally, everyone in the room must fast for forty days in mourning. the desecration of a torah scroll is the utmost level of desecration that can be done to a jewish community, short of killing its members. nazis burnt and destroyed torah scrolls as part of their campaign of terror against the us even before widescale mass deportations began. in ancient times, the romans wrapped the rabbis who led our community in torah scrolls when they burnt them at the stake.

this past shabbat, in the middle of the night, a synagogue in jackson, mississippi was intentionally set on fire. the library was burnt to ashes and five torah scrolls were damaged, with two of completely destroyed.

i don’t know how many books were burnt, how many jewish holy texts and how many stories of jewish life and philosophy and love and resilience flew up with the smoke. i do know that the library was where the congregation had shabbat services and torah study. it was a sacred space. this is not the first time that people who hate us have destroyed our sacred spaces and our holy texts and our torah scrolls in order to terrorize us. i dearly wish it was the last.

we've got a life to love living.

advice that has literally saved and improved my life

you asked chatGPT? well i asked shimon bar yochai and he set me on fire with his eyes

writing is so fun

i hate writing so much

this is so frustrating

i’m a literal god at writing

Gut shabbos

Remember this when people say "nothing that requires someone else's labor is a human right".

When something is ridiculously expensive while the laborers who provide it are grossly underpaid, those who demand it be classified as a human right aren't demanding more of the laborers. They're demanding that the needless profiteering be cut out while the laborers are justly compensated.

Do not forget the other victims of ICE

as much as we must mourn and stand in solidarity with Renee Nicole Good, please do not forget the other victims of ice raids, who are not white. Silverio Villegas González, a cook from mexico who was dropping his son off at daycare and was murdered Jaime Alanis, a farmer from mexico who fell off a green house at the farm where he worked to send money to his wife and daughter Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez, a father and grandfather from Guatemala who was hit by a car Josué Castro Rivera, a garden from Honduras who was struck by a car And so many others who were killed or are dying in detention centres, prisons ect racial bias is always something we must be aware of, Renee will be focused on because she was a white woman and a US citizen, but do not forget all the other victims of ICE, may they all rest in power