One thing for which I’m thankful this year: יהוה vindicates in His own time, and I don’t have to defend the people whom were giving me drek when they need someone to defend them. They might get to acutely feel the effects of having driven away people whom would have otherwise spoken up for them when other people were given them drek.
A few specific incidents come to mind, with one incident being that someone who frequently wrote k’tav hara against me—a public figure within the genealogy realm—has gotten her Sefardi Jewish heritage questioned (and in quite the passive-aggressive way, too). I don’t know whether she knows about it, and I don’t care to bring it to her attention either way. I thought about speaking up for her, even though she treated me and others similarly, though I just let it go—if she can write k’tav hara, she can read it.
In any case, I hope that if she ever reads the allegations against her, she feels at least similarly to how I and others felt when she would mistreat us—especially when she encouraged others to gang up on us.
PS In case anyone is curious to know who she is, Google “Sephardic Jews in Poland?”
The allegations are unfair, wild, and not unlike what she has written about others and me.
Update: screenshot and quote in case the k’tav hara against the genealogist gets deleted after all (My problem can be that I’m too nice even regarding people whom treat me like drek, and I ended up rebuking the person in question about his allegation once he recently used a different forum to try to gaslight me into thinking he did not know what Jewish DNA is):
“Generally, the simplest explanation is best. An Ashkenazi genealogist with a large platform claims that their TALALAY ancestors from Mogilev, Belarus, adopted the surname in the 19th Century not from local Slavs called TALALAY but from a similarly named family in 14th Century Catalonia. Allegedly the family crossed Europe from one end to the other, secretly remembering (or misremembering) the surname for 500 years. There is no evidence to support the claim. There is no evidence of equivalent family histories. Anyone is free to mythologise their ancestors like this, but it is not genealogy. Is it more likely a surname was adopted locally or from someone generations and a continent away?
“I think such fantasies contain a belief that Sephardic ancestry is somehow superior to Ashkenazi. It seems to me that the story of how a family reached eastern Europe from the Rhineland, survived the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the horrendous history thereafter, is in every way equally deserving of serious study.”
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