I want to very briefly say something about Jewish identity and a cognitive dissonance I think I’ve observed these last few days.
Jews conceive of ourselves as all belonging to the same family, being descended from the same lineage. If you convert in, that lineage becomes yours.

Converts’ Hebrew names are given as b’nai Abraham v’ Sarah (children of, and) - the first patriarch and matriarch become their ritual parents.
But this extended family has spread and it has many branches, and we all have different experiences and practices.

Your aunt and uncle do things differently at their house than your parents do at yours. Ashkenazim (E. Europe) have different traditions from Maghrebim (N. Africa) have different traditions from Beta Israel (Ethiopia) and so on. We have different histories and experiences.

So these two statements are true:
1) The Jewish people are a large extended family.
2) Jews from one background cannot claim the experiences and life stories of Jews from another.

These past few days, I have been very uncomfortable watching another European-descended Jew like myself wield the existence, history, and struggles of the Jewish community in Kaifeng as a cudgel against other users in this fandom.

This community has a unique history, unique traditions, and faces unique struggles in the modern day due to government sanctions on religion and ethnic minorities. These issues have been discussed in other threads this week by people more qualified than me to speak for them.

I am disturbed by what I see as the citing of this community’s existence as a way to speak over Chinese diaspora voices about experience, representation, and interpreting contemporary Chinese literature and media.

I have seen straw man debates over the Kaifeng community’s existence used to level baseless or easily disproven accusations of antisemitism at Chinese diaspora fans.

This is concern trolling. It is not in keeping with the principles of the Jewish faith to use one of the most marginalized branches of our family as an excuse to start drama and infighting. It does not aid them in any way.

Furthermore, I have seen discussions about appropriating this community as the basis for spite fic. I cannot express enough how deeply inappropriate this is. The Kaifeng Jewish community’s traditions and practice split from mainline Rabbinic Judaism over 1100 years ago.

As white, Western Jews working with extremely limited documentation, we cannot begin to accurately approach them in a historical or modern setting. We do not know their practice, their traditions, or their experience, even though they are part of our extended family.

It would be difficult verging on impossible to write even well-intentioned fic and write it accurately.
Some stories are not ours to tell.

Over the past few days, I have seen many Chinese diaspora fans reach out and assure no antisemitism was meant. I’ve seen fewer Jewish voices state that this was wrong, that this was inappropriate, and this should not have happened.

Our experiences are not a monolith. This person was behaving badly and doing it in the name of people who should have been left out of it, and they were doing it because someone had the gall to block them. The reasons for that blocking are irrelevant.

As always, it is your right to curate your online experience as you see fit and establish safe and healthy boundaries. Self-care is an integral Jewish value.
Thank you and good night.