CW: antisemitism, pale of settlement, pogroms, genocide, cultural erasure
I don’t think goyim can really conceive of how much Jews actually hold back in our criticism of antisemitism in media, and when you hear us it is often because we see a dangerous message that you don’t… Yet.
I have a complicated relationship with Tim Burton’s rendition of The Corpse Bride. I love it as a beautiful piece of stop motion art, but it isn’t what it should have been, he took a Jewish story from the Pale and with intention stripped it of its Jewish origins. This alone is incredibly antisemitic. The criticism you will hear has probably been “this is a Jewish story, it should have retained its Jewish elements” but have you heard why we feel strongly about this story?
The story of the corpse bride is incredibly important to me and was born from Jewish trauma and Christian violence. Mobs would routinely attack Jewish weddings, they would murder brides and they would bury them in unmarked graves by the roadside still in their wedding clothes, they reasoned that without Jewish wives there are no Jewish mother’s. Jews are intrinsic to the story.
It is antisemitism to take our story, about our pain, at the hands of non-jews and strip it for “useful” parts, in fact it is heartbreaking every time.
We are often forced to pick our battles and fighting a battle over a movie that has already been released by a director with a cult following is not worth it, you only hear us speak up in numbers when the antisemitism may lead to another century of violence, because raising our voice means picking a fight, because so many of you already see our pain as inconvenient and it is exhausting to never be heard.
