Not Anonymous

I am Jewish today!

I was Jewish yesterday too, and I'll continue to be Jewish... forever, I guess.

I'm going to leave the Jewish navel gazing for the Days of Awe, when that's supposed to happen.

For now, to all who celebrate have a good evening and a happy new year, to all those who don't, a good Wednesday to you!

If you find a nice Jewish family that will take you in and feed you, do so! We make awesome food. Also, there's wine, honey and apple crumble/pie most of the time.

Enjoy a video, different from years past:

A big thank you to my BFF for introdusing me to these videos, they are amazing and moving. Check the rest out over at Symphony of Science.

Contains spoilers to "Blink" of season 3 and "The Time of Angels" of season 5 Doctor Who:

( No one wants to be invaded )

I've been trying to write a post about "What is a Jew?" for a few days now.

I've read two articles about the "genetic proof" of Jewishness.

Both articles are dubious at best, being published in Ha'aretz and the Telegraph, but they show a disturbing trend.

I do not believe genes hold the proof of identity. Genes provide information regarding ancestral history, they can tell us where we come from on the geographic level, they can tell us what we have in common with other organisms... they can even tell us how we're going die.

They cannot tell us why we are, who we are.
Biology does not superimpose culture in humans. That isn't how we work. It was never how we worked.
The search for the "Jewish gene" is ultimately as Antisemitic as searching for the "homosexual gene" is homophobic.

Why is proof that some of ancestors inbred, of any or more importance, than if my ancestors mixed with other people in their surroundings? How is "proving" a tribe in Zimbabwe is Jewish of any significance?

Being Jewish is being a part of a tribe. Tribes are human groups that create and put together traditions that hold a historical memory, members of tribes are generally not requires to be familiarly related, but related by blood rite (i.e. circumcision, tattoos, piercings, scarification and other body mods).

Jews became Jewish by blood because of science being used to prove racial divides.

Race cannot be biologically proven. Ethnicity is a bunch of cultural markers shared by a bunch of people, with a shared history!

I'm Jewish, because I was raised Jewish. Because I have a history of the written language, of interpreting words, of being persecuted and of being a separatist and isolationist - is it any wonder that there is a common ancestor to many a far flung people?!

That ancestor means exactly that. A commonality of genetic markers. Because Jews preferred to marry amongst themselves there are a few diseases that can be found at a higher degree within certain population, with a certain geographical history.
Let us also remember that a great portion of European Jews were wiped out and along with them a great portion of genetic multiplicity.

What does it mean, pray, that beyond the fact that my peachy white ass has a lot in common with my classmate who has as ass of chocolate brown, I have just as much in common with my classmate who has a peachy white ass and wears a hijab?

I do not find these kinds of scientific discoveries to enlightening, because their meaning is completely forced upon by parties of interest who believe that there are different kinds of human. As I said, race cannot be biologically proven. The fact that certain ethnicities, who come from certain geographical areas, share a bunch of genes tells us absolutely nothing about what it means to be that ethnicity.

Nothing.

My body is Jewish because the history of my people is ingrained into my mind, just as much as my body is Queer and my body is that of a cis Woman.
The only thing "natural" that I can say about my body is that it is able to carry a human offspring to term within a ready made container.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not in the opinion that genes hold no significance to understanding the human condition, we've changed a lot over the past centuries, especially the past two hundred years, but more than anything we've seen that genes hold a lot of potential and not so much the secrets to our existence.

This may come as a surprise to a lot of you, but I'm not a scientist (shocking, I'm sure), I'm positive many of my scientifically inclined readers can (possibly will) tell me that genes hold a whole lot more than potential, that with them humanity can achieve a great many things - eradicate a whole slew of diseases and defects that cause suffering.
That's not what I'm talking about.

Genes cannot tell us who we are. Who we are is dictated by a great number of things that cannot be quantified, or qualified. Mainly, they are made by us and our minds, because we don't actually know how much our human-manipulated environment affects our biology - because I tell you what, we certainly don't know how much our severely manipulated biological bodies affects our minds.

And so, for fuck's sake, stop trying to reassert to good ole' social Darwinism! It doesn't work when all we have to work with is made by humanity! Everything is artificial, including that dichotomy of "nature" and "culture". We don't actually know where one starts and the other begins. Trying to prove Jewish identity by way of the fact that I share my great-great-great grandmother with my Yemeni, Ethiopian, Iraqi, Irani and Palestinian classmate is bullshit.

And that's what I have to say about me having "Jewish genes".

I was looking through my tags this winter morning, it is raining buckets and I'm all nice and cosy in front of the radiator and the cat is purring next to me shedding hair on my black track suit pants and sweatshirt.

I was looking through my tags, specifically the spirituality one and I sometimes wonder if I'm right in the head. Well, ha, if you read this post you know I'm a bit wonky when it comes to my brain.

After the Lebanon war I had a crisis of faith, not surprising, I wanted something to believe in. As a teen I had been interested in paganism and even did a few rituals and all that, but comic books and the philosophy of Belief being the basis of Faith and not the other way around kind of ruined me for religion.
( Cut for Length )

I conduct my life as a Jewish Atheist. I love my holidays, they hold no religious significance to me. The history of my people is an interesting and brutal one, the stories in the Bible of my mythology along with the Odyssey and The Sandman.

Were I able to, I'd rather go through my life not needing to explain all this to people and make myself out as an Aggressive Atheist rather than the Apathetic Agnostic that I am.

Religion is used in far too many ways to excuse bad behaviour, from Creationism to Terrorism, from Occupation to Jihad, from Misogyny to Transphobia.

In the words of Eddie Izzard (who paraphrased Martin Luther):
Ein Minuten, Bitte. Ich habe einen kleinen problemo avec diese religione.

Two interesting and related stories showed themselves to me in my News Reader this week:

"Israel moves toward allowing egg donations among lesbian couples" and "Health Ministry mulls letting gay couples use surrogate mothers".

I have a few friends who are Lesbian mothers, both biological and not. Every one of them that has spoken to me on the issue, told me that with becoming a mother, they feel that they have become more accepted as people and specifically as women.

A good friend of mine is a self-identified Butch Lesbian, as such she's dealt with a whole lot of prejudice, been threatened with violence and has had to force herself to conform to certain gender norms in order to retain her job - now that her hair is longer, she doesn't have to work as hard as she once did.
A couple of years ago she and her partner had a baby and she said that she finally felt that she got a validation of womanhood.
By becoming a mother, she finally became - somewhat - of an insider.

Israel is a hugely and somewhat aggressively, pro-natalist country. We have, what is called, a "demographic issue" - we have to keep the Jewish Majority, otherwise we risk ruination. So goes the ideology.

Same-Sex couples have lots of privileges in Israel, due to common-law partnership agreements that were originally drafted for "un-marriageble" couples (like a Cohen and a Divorcee, or a Bastard who wants to marry anyone), not to mention that all marriages are religious (as in a Jewish person can only marry another Jewish person, a Muslim person can only marry another Muslim person - pardon the gender neutrality, I'm just used to writing that way, obviously it is also a marriage between a man and a woman).

Like most trends, the "Gayby" Boom arrived 15 years after the rest of the world to Israel and over the past half-decade I've seen huge amounts of Queer women become mothers.

Once you're a parent, you gain legitimacy for your existence.

One of the things often hurled at queers as a fault is our "hedonistic" Lifstyle^tm. We're nothing but bodies having sex, of course.
If you have a baby, you're a help to the nation.

Beyond the fact that women, once again, are made to be incubators for future soldiers, I'm not convinced this assimilationist strategy is the way to go - because it is assimilationist. Gays are not going to be accepted via marriage, might as well make babies and be accepted that way!

I mean, beyond the fact that the non-biological parents are going to have to go through the adoption process in any case, I don't think this is going to bring about more acceptance of queers - we're having kids in any case - but it is buying into the nations demographic paranoia.

This pic was taken at some point in 2007 and is from a random pic search.

I saw it yesterday over at Mark Allen via my brother.



My whole family are fans of Turing.
And of sarcasm.

I love sarcasm and parody.

Something to laugh at on this here Yom Kippur!

See, I was going to write this whole overview about the Survey that brought about the Epic Fail.
Just fyi*.

But there is a nice concise post about the Fail for Newcomers benefit over at Geek Feminism - Who wants to play Evolutionary Neuro Cognitive Research FAIL?

Really, the train wreck is massive, and as time goes on and as I read more and more of everything, it just seems that the two researchers have no effing clue on a)how to handle the Internet and b)how to actually respect the people they are supposedly researching.

There is info about how much this piece of research is NOT approved, and is basically a book deal.

The main Livejournal that this whole fail actually occurred has been locked, to no ones surprise, but this was the post I wanted to link to.

Note the use of "Shemale" in the title.

Fandom set them on FIRE!

I'm happy.

Now I'm waiting for the fallout and off to try and help salvage some of the info!

*There are many more links to read.
Back to text.

Once again we have scientific research detailing the differences between the "Straight" brain and the "Gay" brain.
Turns out, surprise, surprise, that the brains of gay men and straight women have similarities in the area of the brain that has to do with emotional response and communication, while the brains of gay women and straight men have similarities in the area that focuses on spacial perception.
The source of this oh so progressive info: The Guardian - Gay men and heterosexual women have similarly shaped brains, research shows.

I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous.
Seriously.

Scientists at the prestigious Stockholm Brain Institute in Sweden also found certain brain circuits linked to emotional responses were the same in gay men and straight women.

Biology doesn't count for much in our modern society.
Emotional responses were similar in two segments of the population which are by default considered "Other" and lesser than the ruling population?
Gosh, I wonder.

The results could explain a University of London study earlier this year that found gay men and straight women share a poor sense of direction compared with heterosexual men, and were more likely to navigate using landmarks alone.

Don't you just love the way they phrase things.
Yes, all gay men and all straight women have "poor sense of direction".
Those cunts and homos shouldn't be driving, eh.
As though having a a good sense of direction enabled you to be a better participant in society's larger scheme.

The research is part of a larger effort to identify differences between the male and female brain, in the hope they will shed light on why some mental disorders affect men and women differently.

Perhaps it is because we are taught to behave differently to ailments?
While no doubt that the biochemistry of males bodies and female bodies are different, ignoring social ordering and societal structuralism is like trying to put together a puzzle in which you have none of the frame pieces and you don't have a picture of the puzzle to compare with.

For example, major depressive disorders are far more common and persistent in women, while autism is around four times more common in boys than girls.

Because women, in general and not all, have less avenues for independence and are constantly bombarded with mixed messages on what they must do in order to be a Good Woman - Western society, obviously, seeing as this article doesn't mention any queers or hetero's of colour, it is safe to assume that of the 90 volunteers they were all white and of a certain class (though perhaps not, as this research is trying to be "objectively scientific" while taking a bio-sociological stance. Hypocrites).
As for autism being more common in boys... perhaps, maybe, I dunno, it presents itself differently in girls!
Isn't that exactly what the research is trying to show?!

Oh and by the way? Where do the bi men and women stand in this little experiment. Any Transgenders (or are they in the same categories as gays and lesbians). Anything at all about intersexed or genderqueers.

Yeah, no so much.

Gah, these things piss me off so much.
Scientific research my peachy ass.