Rachel Arieff's Website

On "Politics"

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 01:31:02 -0800

I have come to the conclusion that the word "politics" in reference to policies of the left or right has no meaning anymore.

It is a genteel dinosaur of a word. A quaint luxury of a past age that, like a lace doily, that has been shredded by the impulsivity and savagery of modern culture.

The mask has been ripped off the power structure; more people than ever before can see who benefits from this system and who doesn't.

Instead of "politics", there seems to be only human decency and the lack thereof.

In this day and age, when I hear people say, "I disagree with his/her POLITICS," that word reeks of gaslighting.

For example, in reference to the late, great Rob Reiner, I'm hearing some people say, "I disagreed with his politics, but..."

Specifically, what were Rob (and Michele) Reiner's "politics"?

Supporting LGBTQ rights? Defending the rights of American citizens to vote? Keeping fascism at bay and protecting the U.S.'s...Read More

Medusas

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 13:02:47 -0700

As I scan the shore for the next medusa to impale on my stick, I hear a voice behind me.

"Don't do that."

It's a gorgeous morning at my favorite beach. No wind at all, not even a breeze. As I initially approached at the beach, the water was a continuous, still stretch of velvety turquoise blue, smooth as a fresh bedsheet. I could see straight down through the water to the sand bottom and the small, dark brown rocks dotting the sea floor.

In the 20 years I've been coming to this beach, I can't remember the water ever looking so crystal clear and calm. I can't wait to get in.

I grab my snorkeling mask and trot through the burning-hot sand to the edge of the water.

From a distance, they had looked like rocks. Now I see what they really are: perfectly round, red-brown medusas floating lazily on the surface of the water, the color of bloody stools marring the endless stretch of blue.

First my eye spotted one. Then, just a meter or two away, another. And another. And another.

They are everywhere.

Fucking disgusting.

Whenever I see these things I'm freaked out and repulsed and won't get near the water. I'd driven an hour in record heat; now I'm reconciling myself with the possibility of spending the whole day sitting in the hot sand.

Frustration wells up in my gut.

I put away my snorkeling mask and look for a sturdy stick. If I'm not able to swim all day, I'll spend some time extracting medusas from the water. A stupid and futile exercise, I know. But somehow, the idea of making the medusas pay for my disappointment makes me feel better.

I spot a big medusa rolling helplessly on the shoreline. Its sand-coated tentacles look like filthy, matted hair. It actually resembles a severed human head. I spear...Read More

Empathy for the Devil

Sun, 18 May 2025 03:11:29 -0700

Header photo: Polish children murdered at Auschwitz.

Last summer, my partner and I visited Auschwitz.

Because there so many visitors (2 million every year), we were divided into groups, assigned guides, and taken through the various parts of the immense camp.

One of the most harrowing parts of the visit was the tour of the victims' personal objects.

The thousands of suitcases (many with names or initials on them), eyeglasses, shoes, prosthetic limbs, toys, and other personal effects -- each category of particular item displayed behind glass in its own warehouse-sized room -- at first tore at the heart, then eventually numbed the mind. Knowing that all these items had belonged to real people just like you and me, who had jobs, people who loved them, hopes and dreams, daily routines, and physical challenges, transformed each item into a world of its own. And behind that glass, piled like mere junk -- as they were treated like junk by the Nazi mass-murderers who had stolen them from their owners -- were countless worlds, brutally destroyed. A universe of senseless, stupid, bottomless cruelty and death.

As horrible as these giant dioramas were, for me, one item in particular stood out from the rest: the "Hair Room".

Because of its deeply personal as well as religiously sacred nature, the Hair Room is one of the few areas in the camp where visitors are not allowed to take photos, though you can see photos of this room on...Read More

To Jews... again

Sat, 17 May 2025 08:26:23 -0700

Israel is bombing and starving Gaza in the name of Judaism and our family members murdered in the Holocaust. Exterminating them in the name of our great-grandparents who were exterminated. Avenging their deaths by the Nazis by becoming Nazis themselves.

I was taught that being Jewish meant not just honoring our history, but also being fierce defenders against injustice and genocide inflicted on ANYONE ELSE.

I was taught to be proud of Jews like Michael Schwerner, the young man who left New York City in the 1960s to join Black Americans in the deep south protesting for their civil rights, and who ended up getting murdered alongside them.

I was taught to admire the Jews who defended the poor, who worked to build bridges with Muslims and Christians, who helped Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and who worked to protect the human rights of Latin Americans made refugees by our country's funding of death squads in their homelands that killed their family members.

I was inspired by Jews who were curious and respectful of the larger world around them and...Read More

What healthcare is like outside the U.S.

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 08:09:41 -0800

A few years before I moved to Spain — we’re talking around 2002 — I did my yearly medical checkups in the Planned Parenthood down the street. I think it was on Vermont Boulevard in Koreatown. Though I am eternally grateful for Planned Parenthood for providing me and millions of other women and girls with virtually free healthcare (I think it cost $40 for an annual checkup), the first sign that this wasn’t an ideal situation was the filthy, graffiti-covered interior of the elevator. The second was the dingy, crowded waiting room and the very long wait to see the physician.
The third was the consent form all clients had to sign upon entering. It looked like this:

I remember reading that last question and thinking: Yeah, my mom would be mad. She should be. She should be mad that I’m 34 years old and still going to a pregnant teenage girls’ clinic for my primary health care. I mean, what does that say about me?

Since I had never lived outside the U.S. and therefore never experienced anything different, it never occurred to me to ask, What does that say about my country?

I was fortunate enough to never have had any kind of serious illness or medical emergency. But I knew a lot of people who had. Starting with my roommate, who got drunk one night and tried to kill herself by slitting her own throat. She appeared in the living room, where my then-boyfriend and I were watching TV, wearing a tank top and her chest smeared with blood from the wound in her neck, smirking defiantly at us, her eyes sparkling with rage and whisky as she said, I think y’all better call an ambulance.

The ambulance came and whisked her off to the hospital, where they...Read More

We don't have to blindly believe our thoughts

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 06:20:55 -0700

We don’t have to believe our thoughts.

This is not a new idea. It’s at least 3,000 years old. But I will try to illustrate it with what happened to me over the weekend.

On Saturday, I attended a wonderful event: a sardinada (sardine party) in a fishing village on the Catalan coast. Hundreds of freshly-caught sardines are barbecued over sand pits right on the beach, served with pan con tomate (bread smeared with garlic and tomato), and followed up with a dessert of hot ron cremat, or burnt rum. All this accompanied by a live band playing habaneras, songs from 19th-century Cuba, the era of Spanish colonization of the Caribbean: a lovely remnant of a largely ugly past. Afterwards, I went back to the cheap but charming mom-and-pop hotel I had booked for the occasion.

The night receptionist, a young Black man who looked to be in his late 20s or early 30s, let me in.

He was very friendly, even seemed strangely happy to see me. I was tired and had drunk some alcohol, and wanted to go right to my room. But he engaged me in conversation.

I willingly obliged. I felt a bit sorry for him. It seems like a lonely job, being the night receptionist at a mostly-empty hotel. I had first spoken to him in Spanish but he switched immediately to English.

“Do you speak English?” he said, in an accent that sounded African to me.

“Yes,” I said.

His face broke into a smile. “Are you from England?”

“No, I’m from the United States. You?”

“I am from the colonizer country. My father is from Jamaica and my mother is from Nigeria, but I was born in the colonizer country.”

I took that to mean that yes, he was from...Read More

A Message to Jews

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:42:18 -0700

It seems the majority of the world's Jews still remain either silent on Israel's extermination of the Palestinian people, or support it. The reason for that isn't because Jews are intrinsically evil, but rather because of the Zionist conditioning many of us have experienced.

In this conditioning, we received a traumatic, unfiltered education about the Holocaust from an early age. We were also commonly taught that another Holocaust could happen to us again if we weren't eternally on the defensive. This warped our minds to be paranoid and suspicious of the world around us and to have an "us vs. them" mentality.

We were also taught

-that our survival as a people depends on Israel's existence and well-being,

-that Israel is a sacred land, chosen for us by God(!!) that we must fiercely defend no matter what the circumstances (and of course avoid criticizing it),

-that Israel is the same as Judaism, and -more than any belief in God, moral code, knowledge of Jewish scriptures or adherence to Jewish laws or customs, that unconditionally loving and defending Israel is our core duty as Jews.

In short: the basis of our "religious" education was less spirituality than Holocaust trauma and Israeli nationalism.

Over my lifetime, Israel has clearly become more and more of a brazenly aggressive and immoral country, though it has provoked wars and regularly committed human rights abuses against the Palestinians since its inception. Growing up in Israel's patron state, the U.S.A., I and my young Jewish peers were...Read More

Voting in Europe vs. the U.S.A.

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 05:21:05 -0700

It's 11 in the morning on Sunday, and I just got back from voting. I never wrote about what it's like to vote in Europe, but I think it's important that people in my native country, the U.S.A., are aware of how differently (sorry: better) things are done in other places.

I live in a village outside of Barcelona in Spain. Though today's election was for the in the European Parliament, the voting conditions are the same as I will describe, no matter what the election.

1. Elections are held on Sundays, when almost everyone is off work. Obviously this guarantees maximum voter participation. The voting stations are open from 8 am to 8 pm.

When are elections in the U.S. held? For example, the presidential election? November 4th, no matter what day of the week it is. Usually it falls on a work day, and since the U.S. has not designated voting days as holidays, many people need to finagle with their employers to get off work to vote. In addition, since there are no legal protections for workers if they miss work to vote, many people lose pay when they vote. I believe this in itself is a breach of basic citizen rights. Voting is a vital part of the political process. Citizens should not be penalized for participating in the political process. Obviously.

2. There is no such thing as "voter registration" in Spain. (Nor, I believe, in Europe.) If you are a citizen, you are automatically registered. Thanks to digitized databases, this convenience was available long ago, and it should have been in the U.S. as well. But since the U.S. system is set up with numerous hurdles to voter participation, it has not been done.

Another hurdle in U.S. voting is having to having to register with a political party ahead of time and, in some elections, being able to vote only for that party. In Spain, these complications are non-existent. You...Read More

This Happened Today in Class

Sun, 26 May 2024 10:04:25 -0700

I’m teaching a 6-year-old Bahraini girl named Maryam with very limited English skills. It’s our first class together. She wants to tell me about the leader of her country, so I Google him and screen-share the images with her.

Suddenly she sees, among the images, a Palestinian flag.

The conversation, verbatim:

"Palestine! Palestine!" she cries, pronouncing it the original Arabic way, which is Fah-leh-STEEN.

"Falestine is die!"

Quickly searching for a response that won’t traumatize her, invalidate her or get me in trouble with the teaching platform, I say:

"Palestine is sad, right?"

Maryam repeats:

"Falestine is die."

I say, "Inshallah, they won’t die."

She says, "But Israel is doing for Falestine is die."

She means: Israel is killing Palestine. Of course she's right.

I say, "Yes. It’s very bad, right?"

"Yeah. We like Palestine, not Israel," she declares.

"Yeah, I know. Israel is doing bad things, right?"

"Yeah."

"I think they’re going to stop doing bad things soon," I offer weakly. "They have to stop."

Maryam counters: "Yeah, but they are not stop."

"No," I admit. "Now they don’t stop. Now they’re very bad."

"Israel, they very very very very very very very very very very bad!"

--------------------------------------

Maryam is only 6 years old but knows exactly what's going on: Israel is killing the Palestinian population. Israel was ordered to stop killing them. Israel refuses to stop.

Israel is very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very bad. Maryam has absorbed this lesson about "The Jewish State" into her little 6-year-old being.

The world’s children who know what’s...Read More

Why Israel Abuses the Word "Nazi"

Fri, 24 May 2024 02:19:59 -0700

Since October 7th, Israeli leaders have continually abused the word "Nazi" to describe Hamas. Since they belong to the group of people who were actual victims of the Nazis, you would think they would be careful not to trivialize and disempower this term by labeling people who are clearly not Nazis, "Nazis".

But this misuse of the word "Nazi" is by design.

By making the word "Nazi" synonymous with Hamas, Israel's intention is to make world believe that Hamas has the same goals and has committed the same crimes as the Nazis. If the world believes that, then it may be less sympathetic to the Palestinians governed by Hamas. If the world believes Hamas are the same as Nazis, it may not care so much when Israel attacks "Nazi-run" Gaza with 2-ton bombs with a civilian casualty rate of 90%, and starves the survivors on top of it. By making Hamas equal to Nazis, Israel hopes not to be held accountable for its actions in Gaza, which are in violation of international law.

But the word "Nazi" is a double-edged sword. Needing to resort to the word "Nazi" suggests that Israel's moral standing is so weak that it has to call its enemy by the name of a completely different, unrelated group that occupies a completely different space and time in history: the real Nazis, who rose to power in the 1930s and were defeated in 1945. It suggests that if Israel calls things by their real names, it's not enough.

The real Nazis were German Europeans. They were Christians. They were imperialists. They acted on beliefs of white supremacy and the inferiority of...Read More