mushroom

fun trivia question to annoy your friends: who was the first actor to portray Homer Simpson?

it's a bit unclear from how i excerpted it, but Wolff isn't even a convert. He's a gentile German who pretended to be Jewish so he could have a career Writing Articles. Lol

edit: like Warren, according to him he was told by his mother that they had Jewish roots and he never really looked into it himself and he just went with it

One German Jewish historian, Barbara Steiner, has written a book about the phenomenon and history of Germans converting to Judaism. She finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the primary motivations for most converts are manifestations of guilt in one guise or another. Steiner elsewhere characterized Fabian Wolff as an antisemite who assumed his identity with the express purpose of criticizing Israel. She, too, is a convert.

converting out of guilt is so wild to me. some kind of strange pascal's wager going on in their head

i have to imagine that if you already have grown out a payot and have learned hymns circumcision would be the only thing keeping you from just fully converting. the article also talks about how converts are a pretty substantial proportion of the countrys jewish population and have an outsized say in the community

Very funny article ( archive link ) about a growing bizarre trend in germany: faking Jewishness.

Some years ago, a friend of mine was invited to a Shabbat dinner. The attendees all gave the appearance of being religiously observant. They knew the hymns, the men wore kippot, one even had payot. The hosts insisted that my friend recite the various blessings. Through a chance comment during dinner, he discovered he was the only Jew in attendance. They were Germans who enjoyed enacting Jewish rituals, and wanted a Jew to unwittingly give his blessing.

Reminds me of americans () insisting they are 1/24th cherokee.

‘My vote snatched’: How to win India’s election without a single vote

Two weeks [before the election], the Election Commission of India (ECI) had already called the seat in favour of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after cancelling the nominations of the opposition Congress party’s candidate and five others. The eight remaining candidates all withdrew.

Yet, Surat is only the most extreme example of a peculiar phenomenon that is playing out in multiple constituencies across India: opposition candidates dropping out, joining the ruling BJP or alleging threats to their lives. Even as the BJP has denied any foul play, opposition candidates claim these instances are evidence of an uneven political playing field.

i really like dynamite on a conceptual level. it's a red stick with a string and a cool name and it blows up. it's like it was made for looney toons. delightful

hard to imagine a future for ukraine right now that isn't fucked for the next 15+ years at least. depressing to think that even after the war started they could've ended it a few months in, from a position of relative strength, if it weren't for fucking boris johnson and the western MIC

many such cases

does anyone have any info or good reading on AKEL, the ML communist party that was in charge of cyprus from 2008-13? i was unaware that any explicitly leninist parties had been in power anywhere in europe since '91.

"order must prevail" and "dissent must not lead to disorder" are the kind of comically fascist lines you would expect to find coming from the over the top bad guy in a YA novel