fresh homegrown veggies! 🥬🥒🌶🥕🥔
this tweet is such a perfect encapsulation of what the brain trust on twitter considers activism at this point, i swear to god
- she was a child
- she was a child trapped in a legendarily abusive studio contract where she was being pumped full of drugs and sexually abused by producers
- what is the point? “think about this the next time you watch the wizard of oz”? and do what? this tweet is so pointless
- not for nothing but she was also a lifelong advocate of the civil rights movement and held a whole press conference to denounce white supremacist terrorism after the 16th street baptist church bombing
- there are politicians who did blackface in office right now
- judy garland has been dead for 50
slutty, sluttyyears
If you want to use this information to actually learn about minstrelsy I would recommend the chapter “Past Imperfect: Performance, Power, and Politics on the Minstrel Stage” from Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts by Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Gottschild covers the Africanist dance influence in minstrelsy, the re-appropriation of and resistance in minstrelsy by Black performers, the legacy of minstrelsy, and much more.
In a similar vein I would also recommend the Marlon Riggs documentaries Ethnic Notions, which covers anti-Black stereotypes in popular culture from the antebellum period through the Civil Rights movement, and Color Adjustment, which covers the representation of African Americans on television from its advent through the 1990s.
You’re not going to raise your consciousness by watching The Wizard of Oz and feeling bad that Judy Garland did blackface (in not just Everybody Sing, but also Babes in Arms and Babes on Broadway, for the record) because she was a minor under the thumb of her abusive stage mother and legally obligated to perform in these films because of her contract with MGM. Engage with the work of Black activists on the subject instead and think about or criticize how the stereotypes from minstrel performances still manifest in popular culture today in different forms.
this isn’t showing up in my replies because of the links so i’m boosting it, tumblr user thehours2002 is smart and thoughtful as always
Jewish People Problem #20
When you can’t find a single book with a Jewish protagonist that isn’t about the holocaust
I actually read a really nice novel that had decent Jewish representation when I was in college and its story was about a murder mystery.
Due to how my memory works, I lost the book and I forgot the title :( :( :(
okay I wrote a really long thing and my phone deleted it so here is take 2 of my MASTERPOST OF NON-HOLOCAUST-CENTRIC JEWISH MC’s:
Historical Fiction
“All Other Nights” by Dara Horn - Jewish spy for the union in the civil war
“Shylock’s Daughter” by Marjam Pressler - retelling of the Merchant of Venice with a sympathetic Shylock and a historically accurate look at the Ashkenazi AND Sephardic Jewish community in 16th century Italy
“The Chosen” by Chaim Potok - Hassidic + Modern Orthodox Jewish boys ‘friendship’ (lbr we all ship it) in 1945-1948 NYC
“My Name is Asher Lev” by Chaim Potok - ultra-orthodox Jewish boy takes up art, paints a crucifixion scene, and sh*t hits the fan
“The Museum of Extraordinary Things” - Jewish photographer + (non-Jewish) daughter of a sideshow owner meet and fall in love in turn of the century Brooklyn, and also a subplot about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
“Escape from Egypt” by Sonia Levitin - retelling of the Passover story
“Daniel Deronda” by George Eliot - it’s like Jane Austen. With Jews! (And while everything is not all hunky-dory, it’s also not the antisemitic travesty I’ve come to expect from 19th century gentile writers).
Contemporary
“Hacking Harvard” by Robin Wasserman - 3 nerds take on a bet to get a slacker/stoner into Harvard (also a really nice critique of the college admissions process tbh)
“The Pact” by Jodi Picoult - (suicide tw) A tragedy hits 2 families. The novel centers on a trial and flashbacks to the event in question.
“Someone to Run With” by David Grossman - set on the streets of Jerusalem, a boy tries to return a lost dog to its owner, a girl who has run away from home in search of her brother (this is the English translation, obviously, but if you can read novels in Hebrew I highly recommend reading the original, משהו לרוץ איתו)
Urban Fantasy/Fantasy/SciFi
“The Mediator” series by Meg Cabot - teenaged girl starts seeing ghosts / YA romance (although the fact that the MC is Jewish is not even remotely relevant to the plot, it is mentioned outright several times which is more than most books)
“The Cure” by Sonia Levitin - futuristic dystopian society tries to cure one young man’s appreciation of music by sending him to a Jewish shtetl in 13th century Poland (fair warning for dystopian fans, though, the middle 2/3rds reads like historical fiction, so.)
Children’s (Middle Grade) Books
“All of a Kind Family” by Sydney Taylor - the classic “1920s NYC Jewish family”
“Dave at Night” by Gail Carson Levine - boy sneaks out of an orphanage in early 20th century NYC
“Witness” by Karen Taylor Hesse - told in free verse, the KKK visits a small town (I’m including it because it’s not a Holocaust book, and it’s really good, but it still might will set off your antisemitism sensors so fair warning)
“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” by Judy Blume - Classic. (Also, takes on an interfaith family in a really interesting and nuanced way!)
“Samir and Yonatan” by Daniella Carmi - two boys (one Israeli, one Palestinian) end up in the same hospital and learn that they have more in common than they thought
Plays
“Angels in America” by Harold Kushner - I can’t even begin to describe this one just google it. (or: Jewish and Mormon gay people in NYC during the AIDS epidemic, and also angels)
“Thirteen: The Musical” by Dan Elish and Robert Horn, music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown - Jewish boy’s parents get divorced and he moves from NYC to Appleton, Indiana right before his Bar Mitzvah
Also for children’s books: Rebecca in the American Girl historical collection is a Russian Jewish immigrant.
Also for weird epic romances, I remember Cynthia Freeman having a lot of Jewish protagonists. One of her books (Illusions of Love) slightly discusses the Holocaust but it is from the perspective of an American Jewish character who served in World War II and it’s not presented as *the* thing that defines him. (Most of that book is a love triangle between this character, the Nice Jewish Girl his parents want him to marry, and an Irish-Catholic woman from a poor background who works her way into an advertising career.)
I haven’t read them [yet? to-read list miles long, concentration about an inch long] but if you’re down with indie-pub check out @shiraglassman who authors a series of fantasy novels featuring f/f couples. I’ll bet she knows more novels t add to the list too!
(sorry hope it’s cool i @’ed you ms glassman)
It is definitely cool! I actually didn’t get the @ notification for some reason but I found this post just poking around Jumblr and then checked the notes to see what people were saying on it. I do have books to add to this list; not just my own–as you said, fluffy f/f-focused fantasy starring Mostly Jews–but also:
Miss Jacobson’s Journey by Carola Dunn (review) - Regency-era spy romance about escaping from France and getting back to England. Hero and heroine are both Jewish and although they’re Ashkies, it has Sephardic rep as well
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (review) - 1900′s fantasy set in the immigrant communities of NYC. Beautiful epic drama about friendship.
…and wonderful graphic novels like The Rabbi’s Cat, the Rabbi Harvey books (our legends told as if they were set in the American Wild West), and the Mirka books (fantasy starring an Orthodox pre-teen girl.)
The YA LGBT contemporaries Gone Gone Gone by Hannah Moskowitz and My Year Zero by Rachel Gold have Jewish MC’s. And non-LGBT but YA about Orthodox teenager is Playing with Matches by Suri Rosen.
By the way, @dappercat, your concentration may have an easier time with the standalone short stories in my universe than my full-length novels: Tales from Perach. They range from 900 to 9000 words and 6 of the 7 of them have Jewish MC’s.
The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay - very thinly-veiled account of life in the waning days of Golden Age Spain, with adventures and political intrigue, starring a Jew, Muslim, and Christian
Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon - A pair of 10th century Jewish mercenaries (who are almost certainly a couple) go on a quest to return the kidnapped prince of Khazaria to his empire.
(I want to echo the recommendation of The Rabbi’s Cat, and of Shira Glassman’s Mangoverse stories, which are so lovely)
I haven’t read it yet but I’m desperately trying to get my hands on an audiobook of “He, She and It” by Marge Piercy
None of the books listed under Jewish here are about the Holocaust, and only The Spy With the Red Balloon is set during WWII: https://lgbtqreads.com/representation/religion/
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