shrine to the prophet of americana

#diaspora blues (4 posts)

See the real deep cut Taylor Swift lyrics to get tetchy about would've been Begin Again, the "you're helping me get over a...

See the real deep cut Taylor Swift lyrics to get tetchy about would’ve been Begin Again, the “you’re helping me get over a breakup by being everything to me he couldn’t” song off Red, the album about breaking up with Jake Gyllenhaal, where her examples include “talking about your family’s Christmas traditions”

(the Gyllenhaals are Jewish)

Tagged: taylor swift red taylor’s version jake gyllenhaal antisemitism diaspora blues

Jews: do you maintain a capacity to return to your hometown for a funeral on 24 hour notice? How close to you does the death...

Jews: do you maintain a capacity to return to your hometown for a funeral on 24 hour notice? How close to you does the death have to be that you’ll use it (or that you’ll be expected to use it?)

Tagged: diaspora blues

The Thing is Jewish, right? So he's the circumcised Thing

The Thing is Jewish, right?

So he’s the circumcised Thing

Tagged: diaspora blues

You know if we're lazily smearing things as anti-Semitic based on long-forgotten historical resonances can we do people who...

You know if we’re lazily smearing things as anti-Semitic based on long-forgotten historical resonances can we do people who complain about the commercialization of Christmas?

This really started at the 19th Century dawn of the German Empire, contemporary with the growth of a thick commercial retail culture – “Christmas” as we know it is essentially an epiphenomenon of the department store – and much early criticism focused not on how it detracted from a religious cast the holiday had once had, but on how it was becoming a yearly ritual of riches flowing from Christian pockets into the tillers of Jewish retailers, manufacturers, and traders.

As time progressed and the Second Reich fell, this was the theme of infamous interwar antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer’s editorial cartoons at Christmastime every year.

(This was also, coincidentally, when and where the traditionally minor Jewish holiday of Hannukah was glowed up into a rival gift-giving celebration, so as to undercut Christmas as a draw for [then much more common, often with secular motives of cultural belonging] conversion.)

Tagged: antisemitism holidays history deutschland diaspora blues