Anti-Semitism and my quilt’s 15 minutes of fame

thanks to my longtime friend EZDZ for introducing me to the podcast mentioned below, and consulting on this scholarly article which you are about to enjoy

Anti-Semitism: what it is and isn’t

Not anti-Semitism: critique of Israel, a country that is doing war crimes, i.e. the campus protests demanding that universities divest from Israel and its war crimes

Actual anti-Semitism: the season 2 Veronica Mars episode “Green-Eyed Monster”. (Spoiler alert: I’m going hard.)

So, the premise is that Julie Bloch is a client at the private eye office of Veronica Mars and her dad. Julie, a Jewish character, is played by Laura Bell Bundy who plays particularly gentilic characters in Hart of Dixie, How I Met Your Mother, and elsewhere and I have found no clues that this actress is a Jew. She hires Mars Investigations to look into her boyfriend and find out if he’s fooling around, and then breaks up with him based on the confusing assumption that he’s not actually wealthy as he pretended to be(though it turns out he is) because of some particularly bad Veronica deductions. Because he’s housesitting for his friend Nicholas Cage.

To sum up: Julie’s entire plot is about her lying, being super focused on protecting her wealth, being suspicious about money, and bleaching her mustache. And being a Jew.

My favorite Veronica Mars rewatch podcast, VMI pod, is pretty great at catching many parts of the show that “don’t age well” or were terrible to begin with. Like all of season 3. But they missed two crucial things in this episode — one being the anti-Semitic basis of the entire plot, and the second being Cress frikkin Williams. He showed up briefly in the prior episode, but now he’s here being positioned implausibly as a villain. Who could ever believe him as a villain? Maybe someone who’s never seen him in Living Single? Or as the Mayor in Hart of Dixie? Or as the tech/AV staffer working with Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed which was bizarrely mentioned a couple episodes prior in Veronica Mars?

My quilt’s 15 minutes of fame

If you’re a reader of the New York Times, which I am not, you may have glimpsed my quilt in an article on Tuesday about campus protests. (I woke up Tuesday to texts from my mom — “You’re famous!”) The quilt was captured in the video attached to the article, and described in the text as well. I haven’t seen this quilt in person in months; I lent it to Jewish Voice for Peace for protests and they’ve been using it generously which is exactly what it’s for. Unfortunately the need for the quilt’s presence at town hall meetings, campus protests, and in the streets has not waned at all as Israel continues its war on Gaza in the name of Jewish safety.

The quilt appeared in the New Haven Independent as well – thanks to M for spotting it there!

photo of my quilt at a Yale protest demanding divestment from Israel’s genocide of Palestinians; photo credit to the New Haven Independent

The particular events that were covered included a seder for Pesach (Passover), which is the Jewish holiday currently happening and which usually involves a pretty intense kind of feasting. Many of us this year are declining to feast, as the other banner in the photo above says, “our seder plates are empty – stop starving Gaza”.

Dwelling in the opportunity and responsibility of mutual aid. And here’s a cat.