📣 IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT 📣
One month into 2025, and I already know that woo simply won’t cut it for my annual retreat. This year, I will be bathing in the radioactive waters of a sanitarium located in the mountains of Tajikistan that was recently brought to my attention by The New York Times. Let me know if you’re interested in joining. I think this could be my version of when a yoga teacher takes 12 people to Costa Rica.
Hi friends!
It has rained in Los Angeles! I guess the lizard people responsible for burning the Diddy evidence finished their dirty work and told Steven Spielberg he could flip the lever under the Shoah Foundation to ON. A miracle we desperately needed here in the fire pit, because many of us who were very fortunate to not lose our homes or material possessions were on the verge of losing our minds. Experiencing a natural disaster IRL while every flavor of sociopath took to their phones to comment on it will be discussed at a later date when my last remaining brain cell regains 80% function.
For now, I am thrilled to share that gategate has officially ended. A few days after I last wrote to you, a high wind warning still in effect, fires still burning, with no plan in place should the power go out again, my upstairs neighbor saw a man collecting cans from our recycling bin and sent a text to my landlord demanding that the reopened gate be closed immediately. Love how this man was more concerned with keeping a can collector off of “his” property that he doesn’t even own than our sense of safety. Did he bother to ask our landlord to fix the actual problem? You already know the answer to that.
I didn’t have the energy to deal with any of these clowns, so I just parked my car on the street until I did. Then, I emailed my landlord and offered up the solution of putting the key to the gate’s emergency release in a lockbox somewhere on the property. He thought that was a great idea. Three days later, he took care of it and sent all of his tenants an email with the news as if he had thought of it himself.
It wasn’t the first time a man has taken credit for an idea I have pitched, and I assume it shan’t be the last.
The one-two 2025 welcome punch of those fucking fires followed by being alive since Inauguration Day has done me in. I need to be put in a medically induced coma for a bit. I am hoping that a restorative, medical slumber will give me the energy to actively resist fascism and the strength to find a middle ground between freaking out and being numb. When my reaction to watching Trump take office was to buy a heated blanket with pockets for my feet (highly recommend), I knew I didn’t have much fight left. And who can blame me? These vibes have fangs and are taking a bite.
On that Inauguration Monday, while I was trying to enjoy a late lunch of tuna salad, so kindly brought over by my dear friend Sheela, we got an alert from the demented Watch Duty app about a brush fire in Griffith Park. She told me to put my bubie’s ring on in case we needed to evacuate in a hurry. I told her that if I continued to live in a state of hyper vigilance, I wouldn’t make it through the week. “Maybe just put the ring on?” she suggested. I put the ring on.
Later, lying on my couch under a cruelly unheated blanket, wearing the ring, I plugged my mind tether into TikTok (I miss the ban) and watched Herr Musk do a Nazi salute, twice. So, in light of the fact that we’re currently watching the world’s richest man promote Nazism in a techno-fascist plot for world domination and that this week marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we need to talk about the Holocaust.1

The Holocaust may be something that exists for you in the pages of history books or Anne Frank’s diary or maybe it’s just a sad thing referenced in viral posts denying its existence on X. But for me, the Holocaust is part of my family’s story. It was a very real event that killed six million Jews and millions of others and both my paternal grandparents survived it. They met after liberation, in a displaced person’s camp in Germany, so it’s fair to say that if the Holocaust hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t even exist. Do with that what you will, time travelers.
My bubie’s name was Helen. She was a talented seamstress and she survived Auschwitz by sewing military uniforms in a factory. Of seven siblings, it was just her and her sister who lived. She wore dentures because the years of starvation she endured destroyed her teeth. My Zaide Louis was a staunch leftist, a resistance fighter who risked his life every night to bring food to hungry people in the Lodz ghetto where he managed to stay until it was liquidated and he was sent to a forced labor camp.
After the war, my grandparents tried to return to Poland, where both their families had lived for generations. That didn’t go so well. Anti-Semitism was rampant, and the local Poles were worried that Jews would try to reclaim their property. My dad actually has pre-war family photos returned to Bubie by the Poles living in what was once her father’s home. There were pogroms and so much anti-Jewish violence that my grandfather and other survivors formed armed resistance in an attempt to reclaim their safety.
My grandparents eventually had to flee the Communists with my baby uncle in the middle of the night. Because of McCarthyism, they couldn’t go to New York, where my bubie’s sister and her husband had moved. But Canada came through, and so they went to Toronto and built a whole new life as refugees.
My zaide devoted his life to human rights work and union organizing. He died when I was young so I didn’t get to know him, but I have a feeling that we would have loved yelling about politics together.
Bubie lived to be 99 and I knew her well. After Zaide passed, she had a second great love, a boyfriend named Bernard who was obsessed with her. She refused to move in with him because she was a very strong woman and liked being independent in her later years. Nothing brought Bubie more joy than knowing and TELLING US ALL that she was the only one of her friends in the condo building who had a boyfriend. To be fair, the rest of the men were dead.
About ten years ago, when she was still with us in every way, Bubie and I had tea in her condo and she gave me the beautiful, simple ruby and gold ring that I mentioned earlier. She received it as a wedding gift from my zaide’s brother-in-law, a doctor, who they visited shortly after getting married. The story, as Bubie told it, was that he opened a drawer in his office and told her to pick something from a small collection of gold jewelry that he had accepted as payment from post-war prostitutes with syphilis.
I think because survivor testimonies are the main way that people without a family history like mine hear firsthand accounts of the Holocaust, there is a misconception that survivors are forthcoming with their experiences, but Bubie only revealed bits and pieces of what happened to her at Auschwitz. When she did, she always gave her sister, who was eight years older, credit for keeping them both alive. She was traumatized but she was a wildly resilient woman. She cultivated community and family. She had a zest for life that was infectious and a sense of humor to rival a professional insult comic. Before she died, I promised her that we would never, ever forget what she lived through.
For me, “never forget” includes never forgetting the joyful life she lived after surviving the worst, and the glint in her eye as she told me that ring’s incredible origin story.
So, YES, the Holocaust happened. And, YES, that was a Nazi salute from Elon Musk that he then doubled down on by telling Germany's far-right party to move "past guilt" two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day. And, YES, the ADL, an organization that, according to their website, was formed with “a mission of securing justice not only for Jews but for all people,” at a time when the cruelty and horrors in Gaza have heightened anti-Semitism globally, changed social media mores to make anti-Jewish rhetoric the norm in comments sections, and played directly into the hands of far-right movements and parties, is aligning themselves politically with people whose unconditional support for Israel is rooted in pandering to a fundamentalist Christian Zionist base that hopes every Jew will return to our biblical homeland so we can find Jesus, die, and bring on the rapture. That’s where we’re at. And that’s why we’re having Holocaust education week.
Do I think we’re living in Germany in the 1930s? No. I feel compelled to say that because I have seen multiple blonde, American shiksas with nose rings spinning out on my FYP about being the new Anne Frank. Some very dramatic Americans on TikTok are seeing protests against extremism in Europe and assuming that the protests are in support of them. I also saw this screenshot set to some insane music that has almost 80k likes and thousands of people thinking that Canada is setting up an office for American citizens seeking asylum. I got under my heated blanket and took an edible the night I saw that post, so I completely forgot that I tried to be a voice of reason (pray for brain cell) until someone liked my comment the next day. But as you can see, my contribution didn’t make much impact.
What’s happening in America has been so swift, intense, and dark that it feels almost impossible not to cave into fear and paralysis. I asked my crystal ball to show me the future and it self-immolated in protest. But still, I refuse to let my own fear and sense of instability turn into hopelessness or hysteria when too many are suffering already and I know that there are enough of us who want to make things right.
The only way to foil a liar is to keep telling the truth: That immigrants and refugees are human beings, not scapegoats. That being a racist piece of shit is not the norm. That we’ve seen this before and won’t let it happen again. That women are not your property and anyone with a uterus deserves to have control over their own body. That trans and non-binary people exist and always have. That climate change is real. That there are too many channels for anyone to actually control the message, so even though every major social platform and attention-seeking billionaire seems to be in bed with Trump, we will find a way to gather elsewhere. That evil literally never prevails, but too many will pay the price as it tries.
Take care of yourselves, my beautiful readers. One day at a time. Lots more to come when I’m released from the coma clinic.
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™️
Liz
Shoutout Andrew Greenwald.