The recommendation from some website quoted on the news is to rape, cut the throats of, and throw female Jews off a cliff. But how far are the cliffs of Ithaca from Cornell, where the raping and throat slashing is supposed to occur? And if you don’t have a car, are you supposed to borrow one or can you Uber a body to a cliff and ask the driver to wait while you chuck it off? And what if you’re afraid of heights? It’s time we address the shocking lack of detail in antisemitism. It’s one thing to hate Jews but another to ask me to hate Jews without telling me how to hate Jews or why I should hate anyone when loving everyone is an option.…
Last week was Chanukah, which means I had dreidels lying around, hence this sketch from life. If anything demonstrates my progress over the last two years of sketching, this is it:
In real life, a dreidel is a roughly rectilinear solid that’s basically a modified cube, each side of which is bears a roughly rectilinear character, inscribed squarely on that face. The whole thing has radial symmetry along a central vertical access (or else it wouldn’t spin).
In a drawing, there isn’t a single 90º, nor a single non-angled line. Drawing it accurately to life means making everything about it wrong on the paper. Two years ago that simple fact made me batshit insane; my stupid eyes saw 90º angles all sorts of places where they were not actually visible, and even when I convinced my eye to see what it saw instead of what it knew, my traitorous hands kept drawing the 90s they knew to be true in life, rather than the 85s and 95s and 142s the eyes could see from where they were sitting.
This time? None of that sturm und drang. I spun a dreidel, I saw a dreidel, it fell, and I drew:
Tonight I’m told is Erev Kristmas. May it be a joyous one to those who observe, and a peaceful Nittel Nacht for the rest of us.
Rosh Hashanah is fast approaching, so last week’s sketches were all High Holiday themed, as that’s what’s in my head right now.
My son felt strongly that this lil Jew rocking out on an apple was the best sketch of the week; he loved those groovy arms:
I, on the other hand, preferred this lil Honikmensch, ready to rock you with a big ole honey-smack:
Meanwhile, my daughter (who just her her her bat mitzvah this past summer) felt strongly that this mighty little fella was the sketch of the week:
One way or the other, may your coming year be good and sweet 🍏🍎🍯 (regardless of whether or not you observe; all you goyim deserve good years just as much as anyone else).
Some readers are thrown by a reference in my latest story to the protagonist, home inspector and minor-TV celebrity Sadie Espinoza, who describes getting bullied in high school, noting that:
Jewish Espinozas weren’t remotely “wetbacks.” They weren’t even “immigrants”: they’d been in New Mexico—where her dad and his brother grew up—since before it was “New Mexico.” The only thing calling her “wetback” did was make it clear how stupid those girls were, like a house cat strutting around thinking it caught a snake when all it had was a shitty old lizard tail.
Some folks are confused because they had an American public school primary education east of the Mississippi (as I did), and thus don’t know that Santa Fe is the oldest state capitol in the US, having been establish 150 years before the country was founded.
A much greater portion of readers are confused because they think of all Jews as European shtetl folk who came here in the late 19th and early 20th C (as mine did), and thus know nothing about the extremely long history of Jews in the New World (short version: we’ve always been here, and you’ve never liked us).
Anyway, if you’re curious about any of this, the graphic novel El Illuminado is a good introduction to Crypto-Jews and the impact the Inquisition had on world Jewry. Maybe more importantly, it’s really fair in how it illustrates the divisions and discomforts within and among Jews of different traditions/colors/descents, as well as the way that even established, assimilated, respected, modern, “White” Jews often find themselves alienated no matter where they try to stand or sit.
It’s my town’s bicentennial year, and the local library graciously granted me the opportunity to write about The Old Jewish Burial Ground here—which was, in fact, the first Jewish cemetery in the state, despite being a fair distance from the Detroit Metro Area (which is where most Michigan Jews have lived).
SPOILER ALERT: the old Jewish burial ground is mostly underneath a big university building that was built in the 1930s, long after that first Jewish community had mysteriously left entirely of their own free will and not for any unpleasant or embarrassing reasons.
An advertisement that ran in the local Ann Arbor newspaper (spring 1852)
Kudos to the library, who agreed to go forward on this endeavor, even though the working title I pitched it under was “We’ve Always Been Here, and You’ve Never Liked Us.”
I’m mostly posting this for archival/documentary purposes. But I’m also posting this because I think that the “Is anti-Zionism antisemitic?” argument is stupid; you can go to these protests and demonstrations yourself, or look at comprehensive coverage, and decide for yourself if what you see is primarily motivated by a love of the Palestinian people or a loathing of Jews.
I captured all of these video at the weekly protest held outside Beth Israel Congregation each Saturday, during morning Shabbat services. This protest has been held mostly weekly for the last couple decades, and has been mostly the same throughout that period. The pictures show all of the signs that were on display that day. Some have been the same for years (I’ve lived less than one mile from this site for 20+ years), others are relatively new. I think only “Jews Bomb Hospitals” and possibly “Jews Bomb Churches” are new since the pogrom of October 7 and intensified bombings of Gaza. The entire video of my stroll past the demonstration is included at the bottom, for those curious.
I never spoke a word to these men, nor was I wearing anything inflammatory. I had on a plain black shirt and this hat, which I wear basically everywhere:
I wouldn’t rule out that these two protestors knew I was a Jew: the “Jewish Space Lasers” button on my hat is pretty legible (folks have complimented me on it) and, besides, I’m active in Jewish communal life here, and it’s just not that big of a community.
I mention this because near the beginning of the video you can hear the mustachioed protestor begin by talking about dead Palestinians (reasonable, at a nominally pro-Palestine demo) and then abruptly switching gears to talk about the “fact” that gas chambers never existed. I don’t know why he jumped topics like that, although I’d been warned that these two men (who both wear GoPros) would try to goad me into a fight. A portion of their signs are clearly intended to offend, and especially to offend Jews–like the families with small children who were arriving to attend religious services as I arrived.
Holy Moses! The “suave devil look” for magicians (goatee, tuxedo, etc.) was invented by a Jewish magician named “Herrmann” (which I think is German for “Mr. Man”—which just so feels like a name assigned by a census taker who was fed up with weird Yiddish shtetl names he couldn’t spell) who performed for Lincoln!
In fact, Herrmann (shown in the picture at the top, courtesy of his Wikipedia entry) is so synonymous with the look that if you prompt an A.I. with “create a poster for an 1800s stage magician. The magician needs a goatee” it gives you a picture of this otherwise obscure 19th Century French stage magician:
“The upshot is that the least antisemitic Americans are mainstream liberals and conservatives. The most antisemitic are the extreme left, the extreme right, as one of the theories noted above suggests, but also low information voters, who skew survey results by often self-identifying as “moderate.””
In other words, modern Jew-hate in America isn’t a right-wing thing (as most progressives insists), nor a horseshoe (as often seems to be the case on the ground, as a Jew), but instead a “W,” where the Left and Right peaks correspond to strongly ideological folks blaming Jews for this or that social ill (e.g., Jews are both the all-controlling capitalist puppet-masters AND the socialist-communist shadow agents driving the Great Replacement), and the middle peak is composed of average/moderate/centrist folks who mistrust the “mainstream” media, don’t identify as anything, and get their news from increasingly biased and ignorant spheres.
The thing that I most connect with in this comic is that the Jews look like ghosts. I identify with that, as I’ve often felt like a ghost here in my Homeland. I guess the big change for me since October 7 is that before I felt like a ghost passing largely unnoticed or unacknowledged. That was sometimes annoying, but usually fine. Or, at least, I was used to it, which made it seem fine if I didn’t think about it too much.
Now I feel like some portion of the population has noticed us and decided we need to be exorcised and banished, while another portion has noticed us and wants us to summarize 3000 years of history in seven words or less and then explain what the hell is up with a bunch of other ghosts in some other country who we don’t even know, while a third portion have noticed us and insist we aren’t ghosts at all—just pale “regular” people who should get over whatever unpleasantness happened in the 1930s and 40s in Europe, or last October, or last week, or last night, or tomorrow, because it’s all the distant past and in our heads and maybe didn’t even happen or certainly isn’t or wasn’t or won’t be as bad as we say it was/is/will be.
But the biggest portion look at me and say “You’re a ghost? I had no idea you were a ghost!”
![“Who’s Coming to Hurt Us?”[UPDATE] ✡︎](https://www.davideriknelson.com/sbsb/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/LordSkeletor_hurt.jpg)
