they are pharaoh. they took 12000 years of stories warning about how authoritarians trick people and inflict colonialism and used the to justify tricking people and inflicting colonialism. it disgusts me that they can eat the same fuckin’ food as me and make it about individualism when the food is meant to be a history of both ourselves and our friends. my teacher taught me that the sacred foods are matzo, latkas, challah, and broscht. there’s more sacred foods, obviously, but those were the big tent poles. the lesson i was supposed to take from borscht being a sacred food is that when our people fled greece and caesar we found ourself in what is today Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and Belarus. particularly in the southern regions, we were not treated as a nuisance but as cherished friends. they fed us their borscht and we fed them our cabbage soup. the point of judaism is not to create an insular society that refuses to acknowlege the influence of our forced diaspora, but instead to provide the services of a temple anywhere we happen to be. we’re supposed to gather food for others, to be pleasant guests and gracious hosts for others, to provide emergency medical care to anyone we encounter who needs it, and above all else, to take on and inherit the techniques of resisting an oppressor from all who we encounter. i look at israel and i see nothing of jewish culture, only of jewish aesthetic. i see a harmful jewish stereotype made physical. i see a nazi propaganda poster made real. i see all this and the only thing i can think of in horror is how this all reads to someone who does not know jews. to someone who doesn’t know us they are seeing the presence of harmful jewish stereotypes and then verbal confirmation from israeli leaders themselves. with a heavy heart i know that people i love will be tricked into hating me because they will see my hair and my nose and see the foods i eat and think i’m on the side of an israeli supremacist apartheid genocide movement. at the same time, i wish to continue keeping my hair curly, wearing it long, and to keep eating the foods i was taught to make to remember the brothers, sisters, and cousins i lost access to when russia forced my ancestors out of the place they had lived for 1400 years.

fuck israel. free palestine. fuck pharaoh. fuck benjamin netenyahu. fuck caesar. fuck the colonizer. fuck the patriarchy. fuck the idf. fuck mossad. fuck nazis. fuck putin. fuck tankies. fuck every single opressor who would stand over me or you or anyone else. i refuse to ever forget who i really am and i refuse to let anyone tell me what my identity is without my say so. i want peace in this world and there cannot be peace without justice and there cannot be justice without peace. russia, israel, saudi arabia, qatar, the united states, north korea, and china all stand in the way of everlasting freedom. so fuck every single one of them. i didn’t spend my life making friends all across the globe for me to not be able to recognize that what’s killing us is killing us all.

and so we’re clear. yes. i’m selfish. i’m selfish because the root of my politics is what i want. i want my people to be happy. i want my jamaican friend to be prosperous and wise. i want my pakistani friend to be a thought leader who helps lift up women’s voices in her homeland. i want my ukrainian friends’ families to call them tomorrow morning to say that they’re okay. i want my sudanese teammate to run a footrace in his native village without being shot. i want to know that each of these people are okay, and i want to eat a meal with them and to sing and to laugh and to dance. these are the things russia, israel, saudi arabia, qatar, the united states, north korea, and china take from me. i do not forgive them. i will not forget. all me and my people ask for is an easy life, one where we watch our daughters grow up and smell clean air. we cannot have this because of pharaoh, caesar, babylon, the colonizer, the patriarchy. and quite frankly, how dare they. who are they to take these basic human dignities away from us? and for what!? what do we get in return? we live in a protection racket. and fuck them for that.