עזה כמוות אהבה
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Shylock, the titular merchant and Jewish character, is perhaps most famous for his “hath not a Jew eyes” speech. This soliloquy is often cited by scholars and laypeople alike as exonerating the play (and by extension, Shakespeare) from accusations of antisemitism. If the Jewish character in question has a whole soliloquy on the inherent humanity of Jews, doesn’t that prove the play’s innocence?
The issue with this argument is that it ignores the last line of the soliloquy, the thesis of Shylock’s argument: “And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”
Shylock argues that if Jews are human, then they seek revenge when they are wronged, just like everyone else. There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong or inhuman in a desire for revenge. But this definition of humanity as being founded on revenge is stated by a Jewish character, set in contrast to how the Christian characters in the play define humanity. That’s a problem.
[ … ]
An Elizabethan Christian audience member might have seen Shylock’s downfall as poetic. Watch as Shylock, the Jew, is undone by the very justice system which he prioritizes over human safety. A Jew confronted with the text, however, whether in Shakespeare’s time or in ours, is struck with the disquieting realization of just how futile it would be for a Jew in 16th century Venice to seek redress against a Christian defendant before the court. Shylock is fighting a losing battle. As a Jew, he has no grounds on which to demand justice, mercy, or morality. Even when in the right, he is perpetually wronged by the very system that is supposed to uphold justice. This discomfort, however, would likely not have occurred to Elizabethan Christians. The concept of the Jew as a scheming villain in theater was previously established by Marlowe’s ‘The Jew of Malta’, and the categorization of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ as a comedy makes it unlikely that the Elizabethan audience would have sympathized with Shylock, the villain in the story. Nobody mourns when a monster is defeated when the monster looks nothing like them.
So how do Jews deal with this text?
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never ask a man his salary a woman her age and a popular marxist blogger their opinion about russia’s invasion of ukraine
(via tikkunolamorgtfo)
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I love reading a book you are slightly too stupid for
shlomo ganzfried really was like “i know this, and i still love you” and then he wrote the whole ass kitzur shulchan aruch
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I am politely asking transmascs (and specifically non-Jewish transmascs) to think for a minute if their favorite Jewish male celebrities actually have “tboy swag” or if they’re just. Jewish men.
And why is it that you find Jewish men to be less “threateningly”/traditionally masculine than their nonJewish counterparts.- 4 days ago
- 5 notes
- #This is not about “well Jewish masculinity is intellectual! Because 1. I am not even going to have that convo with you unless you can
- #Demonstrate that 1. Your community is jewish and sufficiently culturally isolated/self-sustaining for that ideal to even come into play
- #2. That you can talk about the sabra masculine ideal vs the stereotype of diaspora Jewish men
- #3. That you can talk about what exactly it means for a society to associate intelligence primarily or exclusively with masculinity
- #And that just because a culture’s patriarchal power is derived from something other than physical strength doesn’t mean that that power
- #Isn’t used to uphold patriarchal ideals and systems
- #Anyway this post is kicking a hornet’s nest of both Jewish and nonJewish transmascs but I’m grumpy about this so
- #Consider the nest kicked
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okay maybe it’s just me but i keep seeing that post that’s like “europeans have racial categories like shrimp colors” which i suppose is funny but i can’t help but hear the undertone that’s like “unlike us enlightened americans, who understand The Races only as nature herself has divided them”
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the philip roth/chaim potok binary
- 4 days ago
- 3 notes
- #Is your Upbringing the only way to Be American Jewish and what is that upbringing
- #awe fear and logical abstraction of the female form vs sexual objectification of it
- #assimilation as taken for granted or as a choice
- #and a choice you can chose not to make
- #How do you relate to your mother
- #how do you see your ancestors
- #how do you see yourself in the chain of inheritance/מדור לדור
- #Is America the only place you could ever live or do you grow up to find it suffocates you
- #how do you approach wealth
- #and moreover
- #What duty do you owe to your community and what duty do you owe to yourself?
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Asher Lev
Hi mutuals have any of you read Chaim Potok’s My Name Is Asher Lev? I need to scream about Themes to someone
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Okay, so: in early drafts of Jules Verne’s 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo is a Polish guy bent on revenge against the Russian Empire for the murder of his family in the January Uprising. Verne’s editor objected on the grounds that Russia was a French ally at the time of the book’s writing, and in the actual, published version of the story, Nemo’s national origin and precisely which empire he’s pissed off at are left unspecified.
Later, in the 1875 quasi-sequel The Mysterious Island, Nemo is retconned as an Indian noble out for revenge against the British for the murder of his family in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 – basically the same as the original plan, simply substituting a different uprising and a different empire. Verne’s editor raised no objections this time around, because fuck the British, right? Though Twenty Thousand Leagues and The Mysterious Island aren’t 100% compatible in their respective timelines, this version of Nemo has customarily been back-ported into adaptations of Twenty Thousand Leagues ever since.
Now here’s the funny part: perhaps as a jab at his editor, Verne made a specific plot point in Twenty Thousand Leagues of Professor Aronnax repeatedly trying and failing to figure out where the fuck Nemo is from. At one point his attempt to pin down Nemo’s accent is frustrated by Nemo’s vast multilingualism. At another point, he tries and fails to trick Nemo by quizzing him about latitude and longitude.
(To contextualise that last bit, at the time the book was written, there was no international agreement on which line of longitude should be zero degrees, and many nations had their own prime meridians; Aronnax hoped to identify Nemo’s national origin by calculating which meridian he was giving his longitudes relative to. Nemo, however, immediately spots the ploy, and announces that he’ll use the Paris meridian in deference to the fact that Aronnax is a Frenchman.)
The upshot is that at no point in the course of any of this Sherlock Holmes bullshit does Aronnax ever bring up the colour of Nemo’s skin as a potential clue. In light of the book’s publication history, this is almost certainly simply because Verne hadn’t decided that Nemo was Indian yet. However, taking into account The Mysterios Island’s retcon, it retroactively makes Aronnax the least racist Frenchman ever.
(via wombatking)
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do NOT get into fibre arts!!!! you try one and then all of a sudden you have 10 hobbies and wanna try 10 more
(via jabberwockypie)
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Thematically speaking, the most important thing Terry Pratchett taught me was the concept of militant decency. The idea that you can look at the world and its flaws and its injustices and its cruelties and get deeply, intensely angry, and that you can turn that into energy for doing the right thing and making the world a better place. He taught me that the anger itself is not the part I should be fighting. Nobody in my life ever said that before.
More lessons from Pratchett:
- Good isn’t always nice (i.e. sometimes appearing nice is a luxury you can’t afford if you want to do the right thing) (this refers to setting bones and fighting evil, not to being pointlessly horrible)
- Evil can appear very nice indeed (watch out for people who smile while they deny your basic humanity)
- People can suck, be rude and actively work against their own best interests, but personkind is still something we must protect so they can keep being wonderful in between all the stupid
- “Person” is always a broader category than you think
- It’s not about who’s best for the job - it’s about who shows up and does it
- Be very aware of how you treat those in your power; you will be judged on it
- Respect women, which explicitly includes trans women (with or without beards and steel-toed boots)
- Kings: no. Hard-boiled eggs: yes
- No one - not military leaders, not kings, not patricians, not gods - no one is beyond consequences or above justice
- Addendum: those who think they are are often the worst of the worst
- Kids understand more than we think and sometimes the best way to protect innocence is to arm them with knowledge, confidence, and skill
- How you’re born is intrinsically less important and less relevant than who you make yourself into
- I can’t put it into a pithy sentence but that bit where Magrat is like “let’s toss [Lily] off the tower” and Nanny answers with “go ahead then” and Magrat hesitates bc it’s easier to do something like that together than to make the decision alone… impactful.
- Evil begins when we treat people like things.
(via jabberwockypie)
