Is it already Monday?<\/p>\n
I am going to write a series on Jewish writers.<\/p>\n
Why?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m so glad you asked!<\/p>\n
I spend a lot of time each week fighting hate. Some people don\u2019t hate so much as think my whole life should be spent fighting the cause their heart is with, which is, in Australia right now, fighting everything about Israel, including its existence.<\/p>\n
I am not Israeli (I fight the bad things it does and cheer on the good, just as I do with any other country), however most Australian Jews are dealing with unprecedented levels of antisemitism. This should leave me free of the need to articulate shibboleths, since I\u2019m already one of the bad people in their eyes, right? Entirely wrong. Just over the weekend, these folks have been saying (if they\u2019re nice) \u201cYou\u2019re looking at this all wrong. I\u2019ll explain to you how you should think.\u201d If they\u2019re not so nice I learn many things about myself I did not know.<\/p>\n
Mostly the bad language and accusations fall into two categories: what I like to think of as new DoubleSpeak, or accusations. I asked someone if I could use their words here to illustrate the DoubleSpeak, as I wanted an example of the particular language they used \u2013 it was gloriously fake \u2013 and they disappeared from the discussion entirely. The insults can be mild, but they\u2019re usually more dramatic. I\u2019m learning how to handle them better. When someone calls me a child-killer I generally tell them to let the police know and to hand over all the evidence, for instance.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m trying to work out what kind of mind hates in this way. This is a marvellous opportunity to find out, because there\u2019s so much hate directed at most Jews. In Australia, we\u2019ve even got \u2018good Jews\u2019 and \u2018bad Jews.\u2019 I\u2019ve seen people labelled this way three times in the last two days. Last week there were even more labels, because of a literary festival that went terribly awry.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know about you, but I need a break from this shambolic mess. This is why I\u2019ll introduce books for the next few weeks.<\/p>\n
Several groups of Jewish writers gave me details of their books to share (and I\u2019m watching out for more!). The sadness is that I can\u2019t read them until I\u2019m caught up with all my backlog. I\u2019ve been unwell again so the backlog is severe. My normal \u201cLet me read everything first so that I can introduce it properly\u201d will not work. If I\u2019ve read and enjoyed something, I\u2019ll let you know, I promise. Otherwise I\u2019ll tell you what I can.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll share books right up until Jewish New Year. If you want more books after that, I\u2019ll happily continue. I might not be the only person who needs books to distract them from the rather scary everyday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Is it already Monday? I am going to write a series on Jewish writers. Why? I\u2019m so glad you asked! I spend a lot of time each week fighting hate. Some people don\u2019t hate so much as think my whole life should be spent fighting the cause their heart is with, which is, in Australia […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[335,6,636,56,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-fiction","category-life","category-life-experiences","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4183"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4184,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4183\/revisions\/4184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}