Author: thebedtimeactivist

What I find generally very difficult to explain – and also what people find hard to hear – is that there are antisemitic tropes that are used by both white supremacists (no surprise there) but also by leftist intersectional anti-racists. One stubborn trope is the issue of double loyalty, loosely defined by ‘you say you… Continue reading Beyond double loyalties

In conversations on identity politics and the position of Jews within it, I have often thrown in some form of ‘let’s not compare too much with the US’. Since the European context is socially and historically quite different, we should not import uncritically the American discourse into our conversations here. Still, when previewing documentaries for… Continue reading Shared Legacies

A mere few days after the Dutch elections, the first Racism Quiz and Knowledge Test aired on public television. Two enthused quiz masters, joined by a panel of six celebrities in the studio, answering and commenting on the questions at hand. This is not a test to check just how racist you are, we were… Continue reading The Racism Quiz

The misconception that lies at the base of Jewish exclusion in anti-racism movements is the persistent presumption that Jews are white, part of the establishment and thus not marginalized in any profound way. This is an incredibly dense argument, leading to unfortunate situations in which Jewish organisations rarely show solidarity with anti-racism movements, while anti-racism… Continue reading A perfect writing challenge

Like every time with elections upcoming, the Dutch Jewish scene is considering its options. Its main focal point: which political party is good for the Jews? This has come to mean: how do political parties rank when it comes to Israel, antisemitism and specific religious issues (in that order). Today, voting advice has become a… Continue reading Election advice

It is the week of Jewish Purim celebration and of hamantaschen baking. My condensed version of the Jewish holiday is: they tried to get rid of us, we overcame, we baked cookies, now let’s eat. Cookies as the ultimate Jewish agency. This week stirred also another Jewish cookie tale. The Davelaar bakery announced to the… Continue reading An ode to Jewish cookies

This week I was struck by a new reading of a text I have read a gazillion times: the book of Esther, about the Jewish holiday of Purim. The one with the dressing up and over-eating of the triangular Hamantaschen – or, what I like to refer to as the vagina-cookies. It is all about… Continue reading Esther’s intersectionality

The newspaper headline cuts straight to the core of the message: ‘This Government will not apologize for the slave trade’. Again? I am having flashbacks. After last year’s BLM protests the question of an official apology for the Dutch role in the transatlantic slave trade came up in Dutch parliament. It was debated and declined.… Continue reading Apologies?

I never thought of myself as an activist. I am a mother, a lover, film scholar, birthworker. I am many things packed into one human being. As I think we all are, multifaceted creatures. Did I mention I am jewish? Well, here is where things recently started getting murky. I spent the first half of… Continue reading why I write