josephfinlay.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Just rereading Ester, and it’s great once you see that Achashverosh is the villain of it. He’s the paradigmatic tyrannical, sexist, insecure King, and all who comes within his orbit behave terribly: Haman, Ester, Mordechai. It satirises them all. And it ends with the King instituting a new tax.

submitted 10 hours ago • 0 comments

Won’t somebody think of the golf courses

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Not all heroes wear capes, some wear keffiyehs www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

josephfinlay.com/erasing-gaza/ In the world of pro-Israel discourse Gaza barely exists. Popular engagement with Gaza, and with Palestine more generally, is so skin-deep as to be practically irrelevant. Controversies over No Other Land and Gaza: How to Escape a Warzone epitomise this phenomenon.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

This seems very positive and worth engaging with www.regthink.org/en/the-prese...

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

I wrote a piece on recent controversies over the films Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone and No Other Land, and the wider tendency in pro-Israel discourse of erasing Gaza, and Palestine in general. josephfinlay.com/erasing-gaza/

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

This PACBI statement about No Other Land is ridiculous www.bdsmovement.net/no-other-land

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

There have been complaints that Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone shows Gazans talking about Jews while the subtitles say Israelis. No Other Land does exactly the same: Yuval Abraham describes himself as Jewish but the subtitles say Israeli. This interchangeability is very normal in Israel/Palestine.

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

My view is that No Other Land winning the Oscar is a really good thing, and we should celebrate it. Let's take the win for once.

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

This is serious double speak. The first stage has ended, they were supposed to be entering stage 2 now. Hamas wanting to move to stage 2 is a sign of commitment to the process whereas Netanyahu wants to stay in stage 1 for longer so Israel never has to formally end the war or fully withdraw.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

In the absence of a devolved English parliament, the term English has no real legal meaning, as opposed to British which is the nationality. There's a high chance that someone identifying as 'English' is simply a racist.

submitted 12 days ago • 2 comments

People who know about this: why hasn’t Germany tried to ban the AFD? Are there significant legal barriers?

submitted 16 days ago • 2 comments

What Judeo element would he like to preserve? Talmud? Kabbalah? Isaac Balshevis Singer stories? The charedi community are doing well on the having children front, Nige will be happy about that

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

Anyone got book / article recommendations on the history of conspiracy theories / conspiratorial thinking? Preferably academic

submitted 23 days ago • 2 comments

The first episode of @cockneyyiddish.bsky.social dropped today, and predictably it is an absolute mechaye / delight cockneyyiddish.org

submitted 23 days ago • 1 comment

Born a Hungarian Jew in 1937, Sherwood was part of a small but significant group of Jewish scholars and activists in Britain who studied Black experience and history and advocated for anti-racism.

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

I wrote about why our intense emotional connection with the Israeli hostages needs to be expanded outwards josephfinlay.com/on-emotion/

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

I’ve seen people saying this is stupid but, in the police’s defence, this would vastly increase the incidence of unauthorised tritone substitutions within a radius of up to 200m. www.standard.co.uk/news/london/...

submitted 27 days ago • 5 comments

Don't think the quiet part has ever been louder than in the "Palestinian refugees accidentally allowed into Ukrainian refugee program" story

submitted 27 days ago • 6 comments

It would be possible to make a deal for the release of the remaining hostages in one go, but alongside the release of Palestinian prisoners the quid pro quo would be a total end to the war and a full IDF withdrawal from Gaza. Such a deal has been available for almost the entire length of the war

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

Outrageous

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

The person most responsible for the (hopefully temporary) breakdown of the ceasefire / hostage release process is surely Donald Trump

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments

I'm afraid what risks 'hollowing out' London is property prices, foreign consortia owning countless empty buildings, rental costs, the decimation of nightlife, gentrification and Pretification and the demise of in person shopping. It should be somewhere we want to go not have to.

submitted 30 days ago • 22 comments

I agree with the concern at the condition of the Israeli hostages released yesterday, but this must be coupled with concern over the condition of Palestinians. Their fates are literally intertwined: when Gazans starve so do the hostages. Not to mention the treatment of prisoners in Israeli jails.

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

Simultaneously racist and politically inept www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

submitted 34 days ago • 2 comments

The failure to speak clearly against Trump's Madagascar Plan is inexcusable and horrifying.

submitted 34 days ago • 2 comments

Jake Wallis Simons claims to have a friend in Gaza who supports Trumps proposal. I feel that this may be an imaginary friend.

submitted 35 days ago • 0 comments

My 6 year old’s last remaining language quirk is to call jacket potatoes ‘Jack ‘n potatoes’. When challenged she has argued that potatoes clearly don’t have jackets and the name must be connected to Jack and the Beanstalk.

submitted 35 days ago • 1 comment

I can’t see Trump’s insane plan for Gaza happening, just as I don’t see the US taking over Greenland or Canada. But it’s totally plausible that the Israeli ultra-right will use this as cover to ethnically cleanse Gaza, and perhaps the West Bank too.

submitted 35 days ago • 0 comments

This review of Peter Beinart's new book is unfair and misses the point. The book is not aimed at Palestinians or their supporters; it is directed at diaspora Jews, and seeks to use Jewish stories to convince them to support Palestinian liberation proteanmag.com/2025/01/31/b...

submitted 36 days ago • 1 comment

An excellent and damning indictment of Starmer and the Labour right www.owenjones.news/p/keir-starm...

submitted 36 days ago • 0 comments

What on earth?

submitted 37 days ago • 1 comment

“We are strongly committed to self-inflicted wounds”

submitted 38 days ago • 0 comments

I’d love to be wrong but it seems very likely that the other Bibas family hostages are dead, and Hamas has told Israel that they are dead. Netanyahu is withholding this information from Israelis because he wants the eventual revelation of their deaths to create anti-ceasefire public sentiment.

submitted 39 days ago • 2 comments