It Makes More Sense If You Interpret "pro-Palestinian Political Action On Tumblr" As Just Another Fandom

It makes more sense if you interpret "pro-Palestinian political action on Tumblr" as just another fandom these people have joined.

It makes even more sense if you realize that they understand very well that they cannot free anybody with their fandom activities... so they must be trying to accomplish something else. Otherwise, what's the point? Drawing your favorite character in the pan-Arabic flag colors and spamming pro-Hamas and anti-Jewish slogans in fandom spaces frees no one.

What it does do is:

Make Jews in their fandom feel unsafe enough to continue interacting with them, silencing their voices

Allow themselves to choose to continue pretending to believe that they are Good People Doing Good Work and that fanworks which only a few dozen people on a niche social media site view will Free Palestine

And.... ahhh. Now it all makes sense.

people will have "this is my art/fandom blog!!! nothing else!!!! just a sideblog for art or fandom!!!!" and then every other post going back the past six months is "i want all jews dead. coexisting on the same planet as a jew makes you complicit in their evil jew crimes and you must atone by giving yourself heart palpitations on twitter dot com" like what about that is fandom dipshit

I wouldn't call this ironic, but it is rather funny to me that the jewish idea of not proselytizing drew me to judaism in the very beginning of me thinking about judaism

A Yemenite Habani Family Celebrating the Passover Seder at their New Home in Tel Aviv. April, 1946. Photographer: Zoltan (Zvi) Kluger (1896-1977). לע''מ/GPO

Tumblr LOVES cameras, and my lovely model is holding a Polaroid 420 camera. I had to figure out how to open -- then close, which was more challenging -- the bellows, but no equipment was harmed in the making of this photo. This was produced 1971-1977 and you could still get film for it until 2016. The flash unit is really interesting because what you see at the top right is just a holder for a FlashCube, which filters the light more evenly.

YOUR JEWISH FRIENDS HEAR YOUR SILENCE

You know that feeling when you're in a space and you see someone visibly queer like you and you just feel joy and peace and safety, just seeing someone like you out in public?

I was walking out of the pharmacy today and passed by an elderly couple walking in arm in arm. The man was wearing a kippah.

And the second I saw this visibly Jewish couple, I just immediately smiled the brightest smile I've felt all week. An immediate surge of joy and peace.

And something must have registered with them too, seeing a man like me, disheveled and drenched from rain and clearly having a day, suddenly light up at their sight, because they smiled right back.

We exchanged our "hello's" and "have a good day's" and I'm still thinking about them.

About how they must have been in their eighties. Maybe not Holocaust survivors themselves, but so close in time that they would remember almost the entirety of Jewish history from then up till now. And how brave it is to be openly Jewish these days. And they're in their eighties and clearly in love and openly Jewish and so alive.

I love that.