by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Sunday, May 11th, 2008
I’m afraid I’m not up for much tonight, but it is Week four, day one,
Chesed of Netzach.
IN the meantime, here is a review on Salon of what looks to be an interesting book: “A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World,” by journalist Tony Horwitz
Start with this. Ponce de Léon went to Florida to find not a fountain of youth but the same things that drew every Spanish invader: gold and slaves. (He found neither.) The first Protestant refuge in North America wasn’t Plymouth but La Caroline, a fort built on the Florida coast in 1564 by the above-mentioned Huguenots. A year later, their slaughterer Menéndez held what was possibly America’s first Thanksgiving dinner, well attended by local Indians.
On and on it goes: a hemorrhaging of certainty. The first European child born in North America? Not Virginia Dare but, more likely, a Viking boy named Snorri, born circa 1000 A.D. in what the Norse liked to call Vinland. The true founding father of New England? Not Bradford, not Standish, but John Smith, who gave the region its name and actively promoted its colonization.
And what about those flat-earthers who thought Columbus would tumble off the world’s edge? You can blame that little fiction on Washington Irving. The Greeks had long ago figured out the world was round, and for more than 700 years, even the Catholic Church had accepted it. The only thing Spaniards were still debating in 1492 was the distance to Asia. In this, as in so many other matters, Columbus was mistaken.
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Saturday, May 10th, 2008
Week Three, Day seven
Malchut of Tiferet
Week Three, Day six
Yesod of Tiferet
This past weekend, Be’chol Lashon (In Every Tongue), a project of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research sponsored a conference in San Francisco of Jews and Jewish identified ethnic groups from around the world. Many of these groups are not formally Jewish, the descendants of anusim and xuetas. Some are Jews officially, although not always accepted with open arms by the so-called “mainstream,” such as the Ethiopian Jews, or the Abayudaya. And then there are the Jewish communites whose faces and color don’t fall within the stereotypes of what a Jew looks like - as if there was any such thing: the Jews of India, Jews who are of color who converted, or whose parents did.
“The Jewish community keeps talking about the crisis of intermarriage and the crisis of declining numbers, but meanwhile you’ve got people with Jewish heritage, spiritual seekers, Jewish communities of historical significance, and the Jewish community is doing nothing to help them,” says Gary Tobin, the institute’s president and a longtime advocate of greater openness to those outside the Ashkenazi mainstream.
According to institute research, at least 20 percent of American Jews are racially and ethnically diverse. But old stereotypes about what “real Jews” look like persist, Tobin says.
“Instead of worrying about people being ‘lost’ to intermarriage,” he wonders, “why aren’t we extending our ideological borders to include all these people who are so interested in joining us?”
Personally, I think it would be completely fabulous if the descendants of the anusim made a formal return, and the Ibo and Lemba formally converted. Welcome! Join the party!
And of course, for those that are us, we should move mountains to bring them close and help them.
On a humorous note:
Safed’s Chief Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu wrote in an article … “it turns out that Olmert is more corrupt than we thought.”
“So what shall we do? Elect another prime minister without faith? Another one without credibility? Another one without values?…when will we wake up and realize that we need a prime minister with a kippa?”
“We need a prime minister who acts based on genuine faith and values.
Um. Hey, I’m a rabbi myself, and I even occasionally wear a kippah (rather than a hat), but I’m just not quite sure this would solve the problem. Especially since I’m pretty sure that Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu wasn’t promoting say, Rabbi Andy Sacks, or R. David Golinkin, as a solution to the problem.
I dunno. I could be wrong. PM Sacks, has a kind of a nice ring to it….
Yeah, okay. A PM with a kippah. That would definitely solve all our problems. No more corruption. (Anyone want to do a quick google on rabbi, Israel, corruption charges?)
by Danya · Friday, May 9th, 2008
Just to mix things up a little: A call for subs for an anthology that has nothing to do with either the election race or Israel! Rather, Orthodykes. I don’t know any more than what’s below, so please follow submission guidelines or pass along to potentially interested parties…..
Call for Submissions:
KEEP YOUR WIVES AWAY FROM THEM:
AN ANTHOLOGY OF WRITINGS BY AND ABOUT ORTHODYKES
Deadline: July 31, 2008
Jewish women who are bisexual, transgender, lesbian or queer-identified live lives that can often be fraught with discord. But they have also mined the complexities and contradictions that come with these identities as sources for spiritual change, ritual innovation and community building. Keep Your Wives Away From Them is an anthology of professional scholarly essays and personal journalistic pieces that will document the stories of those who have lived in the meeting-ground of Judaism and queer desire. This anthology, in calling attention to an otherwise hidden or silent population of women, will unravel the puzzle of a seemingly impossible identity. It will also document the rich innovations in Jewish and queer life in the communities of Jewish LBTQ women and female born genderqueer individuals that have developed in around the world over the past 25 years.
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by chillul Who? · Friday, May 9th, 2008
Remember when Yom Ha-atzma’ut used to be easy?
Nowadays it seems like you’ve got three choices..
You can follow our co-blogger Chorus of Apes and go all Nakba on us. You can go all “neo-Zionist” instead and lose yourself in congratulatory paroxysms of pride and militaristic extremism. See here for example. Or finally, you can waffle and prevaricate between the other two alternatives, watching any tribal joy you once felt drain out through myriad cuts of national guilt and historical revision.
The last option seems most popular in progressive Jewish circles these days. My roommates objected to my proposal for a Yom Ha-Atzma’ut House Party by saying they wanted to avoid propaganda or the appearance of it. “Maybe we should have something about the nakba too.” “We don’t want to look right wing.” “How about we go to a Brit Tzedek talk instead.” Something about Independence Day made us uncomfortable.
Yom Ha-atzma’ut looks a little funny these days. Between the alliance of Electronic Intifada and Kahane Chai to forever tarnish the word “Zionism,” and the casual abuse of patriotism by fear-mongering Republicans in the US, the idea of “national pride” has become suspect. Every 60th Birthday congratulation needs a “but..”, and every praise of the Jewish State re-born in the Jewish Homeland comes with a “however..” We’re cynical and jaded, and don’t want to buy into anything that smacks of conservative forces or creeping 21st century totalitarianism.
So we want to kill the myth of the Third Comonwealth, scuff the shine on the Zionist dream, give us nothing-but-the-facts-ma’am and add another social justice cause to the bottom of the list.
But I’m thinking that Yom Ha-atzma’ut is not something to do half-assed. Righteous foundation myths and tribal pride aren’t just kids’ stories: they’re the moral stories that give us our ideals.
Remember (if you’re American) when you first learned what really happened when the Pilgrims hit Plymouth rock. When that cartoon fantasy of harmony and shared wealth dissolved into the broken treaties of the colonists, and the cold hard earth they dug into to rob Native graves. I think that a large part of that sting, that rage, (that righteous indignation, if you will) was the disappointment that the reality did not live up to the myth.
People we’d been taught to honor had let us down. The founding parents of institutions we’d be taught to respect and identify with had behaved in despicable ways. Which is sort of ironic, I guess. Or at least depressing.
But the real, glorious irony is that the myths never did let us down. These lies are the tales that taught us what to believe in. The myths are the prosecutor’s finger. When we hear about Israeli crimes and mistakes, whether during the War of Indepedence or today, it’s the myths that shout loudest “this was wrong. This must be remedied.” It’s the Declaration of Indepedence which was never fulfilled which kicks us in the gut and demands more effort on our part.
Our myths are our moral foundation, and I believe, something to celebrate whole-heartedly. So this is a (slightly belated) Yom Ha-Atzma’ut Same’ach from me to you, with no ifs, ands, or buts. Happy Independence Day. Make the dream a reality.
by backbeat · Friday, May 9th, 2008
What is a “third rail” anyway? Do subways and trains even have dangerous “third rails” anymore?
Regardless of its modern day relevance, the “third rail” is an often-heard political term for the undiscussable, unapproachable topics - the ones that are too “charged” to deal with.
In the U.S. Congress, engaging Hamas is one of those “third rails.” Nobody wants to talk about it, think about it, or deal with it - unless it’s just to bash Hamas and condemn rocket attacks (which deserve to be condemned).
So, it shouldn’t go unnoticed when a serious Congressional sign-on letter begins circulating Capitol Hill that argues for a number of solutions to the ongoing crisis in southern Israel and Gaza — including a Hamas-Israel ceasefire.
Led by Representatives David Price (D-NC) and Ray LaHood (R-IL), the Price-LaHood letter to President Bush urges him to reinvigorate Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking and pursue efforts to end the crisis in southern Israel and Gaza, in light of the President’s upcoming visit to the region, where he will be celebrating Israel’s 60th. It urges solutions including: exploring a ceasefire, ending the Gaza blockade, addressing the smuggling of weapons, and, of course, condemning rockets.
The Price-LaHood letter is the first Congressional initiative to seriously and comprehensively deal with the crisis in Gaza and southern Israel. Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, Americans for Peace Now, and the new J Street all support the letter.
The Price-LaHood letter closes for signatures this Monday, May 12th. Please call YOUR Rep Today!
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Thursday, May 8th, 2008
Week Three, day five,
Hod of Tiferet
JTA reports on Rabbis for Human Rights, North America’s new initiative, the In Pursuit of Justice campaign, launched today, Israel’s 60th birthday, in Central Park.
The campaign includes the replanting of olive trees in the West Bank and poor Jewish neighborhoods; a human rights trip to Israel and the West Bank planned for November; and a human rights curriculum based on a Talmud-style commentary on Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
A number of initiatives are included in the campaign. More information as to how you can get involved is available at the website. Also, those who loved the fabulous Human Rights Conference of two years ago, keep your eyes peeled.
by Chorus of Apes · Thursday, May 8th, 2008
NYTimes posts a video that needs to be seen by everyone this nakba/independence day. As the video makes clear, today marks independence for some, and the beginning of a long nightmare for others. I fear the contradictions of zionism mean we will never solve this problem.
by BZ · Thursday, May 8th, 2008
60 years ago this week, the State of Israel declared independence. Here is the full text of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. It contains many ideals that Israel can work towards as it enters its next 60 years. Some of those ideals are going to get Jewschool labeled as anti-Israel for publishing them. So be it.
ERETZ-ISRAEL was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.
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by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
Week Three, Day Four
Netzach of Tiferet
A new Gallup poll shows that Barack Obama would do nearly as well as Hillary Clinton among Jewish voters in November.
According to the poll, Clinton would win 66 percent of the Jewish vote versus 27 percent for John McCain in a general-election matchup. Obama would do nearly as well, winning 61 percent to McCain’s 32 percent.
But, still, I just can’t get all the way on the bandwagon. It’s not that I don’t like Obama, but I’m still not convinced that he’s all so much greater than Hil. but that’s not all of it, really. Rebecca Traister said it very well ( and was referenced in this week’s Nation in an article about how Clinton’s using race really is troubling) some time ago in noting how there’s more than just a whiff of real misogyny in the gleeful bandwagoning of Obama.
I’m not inclined to vote for Clinton just because she’s a woman (nor, I must admit, for Obama because he’s African American; I still mourn for Edwards), but I can’t just quite move on from the underlying weirdness of the way so many of my progressive friends -the male ones mostly- talk about Clinton. Usually it’s not in such stark terms as the crazy righties do, they aren’t buying the Hilary toilet plungers or anything, but there is that underlying discomfort which itself is something that they are uncomfortable with, but instead of addressing that problem, it can be disguised by some genuine problems with her policies and campaign style.
Traister nails a lot of it head on:
O’Brien said, “With straight white male progressive friends, I feel something that makes me viscerally angry and afraid — the viciousness of the rebuttals to the suggestion that [Obama's and Clinton's] policies are roughly equal or that Clinton’s have some benefits to them, the outright dismissal of any support of her, the impossibility of having a nuanced conversation … The whole ‘Hillary Clinton is a monster’ theme is so virulent.”
Alex Seggerman, a 24-year-old art history Ph.D. student at Yale and an Obama voter, said, “I don’t think anyone in my peer group, including my parents and my friends, would be comfortable saying, ‘I’m not ready for a woman president.’ They would be ostracized. Saying, ‘She’s had plastic surgery’ or ‘Her attitude is off-putting’ are fine. But these are really expressions of some deeper issues with the fact that she’s a woman.”
…Valenti continued, “Because their friends were not being specifically sexist, or saying something that was tangibly misogynistic, they were having a hard time talking about the sexism of it.” Valenti confirmed that this “Feminine Mystique”-y problem that has no name was familiar to her. “I spoke to a guy friend who said, ‘You’re being ridiculous. I’m not not voting for her because she’s a woman; I’m not voting for her because she’s a bitch!’ He could not see the connection between the two things at all.” Valenti said he explained away his comment by declaring, “I mean ‘a bitch’ in the sense that she’s not good on this or that issue.”
I don’t like the whole oppression olympics. I don’t like it when Jews do it, and I don’t like it among any other groups, either, but I’m definitely not alone in wondering why there’s no real answers -other than the sort of nutty first wave “you must vote with your ovaries”- to how we can end the divide and conquer between the race and gender camps, without having one side or the other have to continue to suffer along with the same old crap.
IN the meantime, since we still live in a world where things like this are firsts, let’s be proud of them.JTA reports on Alysa Stanton-Ogulnick, who reportedly will become the the first black female Reform rabbi next May, when she is ordained at the Cincinnati campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
Glad ta meetcha.
Enjoy.
by BZ · Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
As Israel prepares to celebrate 60 years of ambiguity in this department, it’s been a big week for issues of religion and state. And here’s the latest news:
Israel’s Reform Jews dedicated the first non-Orthodox synagogue to receive state funding on Monday, after a long court battle that accented the rift among streams of Judaism in Israel.
The Reform Yozma congregation fought for the better part of a decade for state funding equivalent to what Orthodox congregations receive. After arguing their case twice before the Supreme Court, they got what they wanted: a prefabricated, two-room building on a plot of land in the center of Modiin, a new town between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
“This is a substantial step in recognizing different streams of Judaism in the state of Israel,” said Rabbi Kinneret Shiryon, who leads the 240-family congregation. The government has long funded Orthodox synagogues, even paying rabbi’s salaries.
The Reform movement is trumpeting this as a huge victory. And I can see why it would feel good to finally get a piece of the pie. But I’m not feeling so great about it. I want to see a thriving liberal Jewish culture in Israel, but I fear that this development, insofar as it sets a precedent, is dangerous for liberal Judaism in the long run. (And if it doesn’t set a precedent, then it’s an insignificant anomaly.)
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by LastTrumpet · Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
In a course at the U of North Texas, R’ Geoffrey Dennis asked his students to offer a kabbalistic commentary on U2’s mysterious ways. He’s posted some of the choicest bits over at his blog.
Johnny take a dive with your sister in the rain
K.Gr. - Water = Divine experience.
A.D. - Go to the waterside and pray. The Shekhinah will reveal the hidden to you and your soul will awaken.
W. Got - [Into] the feminine side of the Sefirot power.
K.F. - Let [God's] glory fall on you; dive as deep as you can.
Let her talk about the things you can’t explain
J.P.H. - The esoteric.
V.I. - Donkey drivers and women can reveal things that are profound, even thought they don’t seem important.
C.D. - A tzadik or rebbe is required to talk about the things you [the hasid] can’t explain yourself.
K.F. - Find the meaning, keep asking questions.
Anybody got any other pop songs with obvious kabbalistic imagery? YehuditBrachah once told me that “Ain’t No Sunshine” by Bil Withers is about the departure of the Shekhina.
Full story.
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
Week Three, Day three:
Tiferet of Tiferet
I originally was going to blog this as a “wow, some good news for a change” post, but as I realized exactly where this all was taking place, that pretty quickly slid away. Ynet reports about a new green(er) energy production site for Jerusalem. Using methane produced by a local garbage dump, electricity will be produced for Jerusalem municipality. And this is good news, of course; it’s a far greener process than coal produced electricity.
But I can’t help but sigh over the whole thing anyway. The Abu Dis dump is actually one of the first places where i was involved with Israeli activism because of the Jahalin Bedouin living there.
Why, you may ask are the Jahalin living in a garbage dump?
As one can read at the Bustan website, “The Jahalin were settled by the Israeli government on lands of Abu Dis, after their dispossession from the Negev in the 1950s. This land was later declared ‘state land,’ and in 1975, the Ma’ale Adumim settlement in the West Bank was founded on the expropriated Palestinian lands of Abu Dis, Azzariya, Issawiya, A-tur and Anata.”
Although it was due to government forcible relocation that the Bedouin were living in Abu Dis to begin with, it took many years of a court case to get the government to even being to live up to its responsibilities. Well, all right, at least to recognize them, even if not to follow through. YOu know, little things, like providing water and electricity.
In the meantime, Maale Adumim continues to expand so that the Bedouin can see just over the hill beautiful houses with great city services, clean streets, and the other accoutrements of Jewish life in Israel.
I can’t begin to say how sad it was for me to see people living in shipping containers and struggling to maintain their way of life and their dignity under some very trying circumstances.
Due to the encroachment of Ma’ale Adumim, the Jahalin were forcefully evicted from their homes a second time. In addition to losing their homes, they lost their land, their animals, and their ability to farm or graze the lands. Subsequently the Jahalin were uprooted from their traditional sustenance and forced to find work without benefits as day laborers in low-income fields, often in one of the neighboring Jewish settlements. They are living in corrugated tin shacks without basic amenities, without health care, without electricity.
Ma’ale Adumim begins on the neighboring hill, replete with beautiful villas to house 35,000 settlers that receive tax breaks and other government subsidies to live there. There are new educational and cultural institutions; widely paved, fine-landscaped roads and traffic lights in and around the settlement; public gardens; swimming pools, restaurants; shops; and even a Meretz chapter. Juxtaposed with this suburban expanse, the Jahalin have been transplanted into a cramped corner of Azzariya, sandwiched between settlements and living next to Jerusalem’s municipal waste dump.
Well, I’m just so glad the residents of Jerusalem can be greener in their use of electricity. Maybe they can share some of it with the Bedouin now.
by sarah · Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
Ben Brown and Ari Y Kelman are up to something fun over at their new (RE)VELATION project:
There are 613 mitzvot (commandments from God) that all Jews are supposed to follow. Some of them are easy to understand and apply to modern day life, while others seem antiquated and irrelevant. We invite you to ponder the 613 rules and to submit your own (re)interpretation of what they mean to us today.
Just as a sampling, here are a few of the site’s most recent submissions:
Don’t shit in your own backyard.
a remix of Mitzvah 609 by Reamworks SKG
Do not commit incest with one’s wife’s sister, unless you want to end up as a character in a Star Wars movie
a remix of Mitzvah 100 by Anonymous
Do not repeat the mistakes of history.
a remix of Mitzvah 356 by Anonymous
Pick a day to hang out and do nothing but play Grand Theft Auto and get stoned.
a remix of Mitzvah 111 by Nathan “The HIGHrophant”
All this stuff is going to get rolled into an art project to debut at the annual DAWN project in San Francisco on June 7.
Get in on it.
by Kung Fu Jew · Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
- Action alert by Brit Tzedek v’Shalom calls on Bush to get off his ass. BTVS takes it to Congress’ doorstep on June 21-24, register here.
- Yediot Achronot covers Israeli Fred Schlomka’s alternative tours through Israel, Jerusalem and the West Bank in “Alternative Tourism Comes of Age in Israel.” Tours are even designed to be legal for Israelis who otherwise are restricted to Area C of the territories.
- Day schools grapple with teaching Israel — how much do we decide to brainwash our kids? To be fair, both right and left-leaning communities get their way on how to teach about Palestinians, the Israeli national myths, and the balance of blame in the peace process. Which means that the politics of the next generation of Jews will be even more divided between Jews taught to think critically and openly, and those openly brainwashed…
- Listen to J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami at their press conference, courtesy of JTA.
- In this ten minutes on TV, Obama says Hillary sounds like McCain on Iran. And head of Joint Cheifs says third-front war on Iran a bad idea.
- Right-wing smear-machine CAMERA launches Wikipedia-editing campaign — gaaaaa. I am infuriated of course, but when I thought about it, sure, let ‘em waste their time on Wikipedia. I’m working on prying their like out of Congress.
- Did you know the majority of American Jews aren’t Zionist? It shouldn’t be surprising, but if 35% of American Jews don’t identify as “Zionist” but 90% identify as “pro-Israel,” I think we’ve got to rethink our labels. The same labels for young Jews drop to 24% and 70% respectively. Check the facts.
- Yad LeAhim, an Israeli anti-Christian group (though they call themselves anti-missionary), despite losing in court for persecution rights (denial of citizenship) against Messianic Jews making aliyah, are now picking on a 13-year-old world Bible quiz contestant. Warned Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a leader of the national religious movement, “Once they used to wage crusades in order to bring us closer to Christianity. Now they work by other means.” At first I was going to appeal for perspective until I realized, yes, I might consider a Crusade over embarassing reality TV any day.
- …Which transitions perfectly into the reason some Jews won’t boycott China. I couldn’t help but notice who is and isn’t supporting the boycotts: Do boycott: JCPA, Reform movement, American Jewish Congress, a dozen leaders of the Conservative movement and liberal Orthodoxy, American Jewish World Service. Don’t boycott: Agudath Israel of America, Orthodox Union, National Council of Young Israel, ADL, American Jewish Committee. This list has a few surprises, but I think it says a lot.
Israel events in NYC: Shabbat dinner with Sayed Kashua, Bernard Avishai and Bennie Morris at CBE, Pints for Peace, and Israel lobby expert Dr. David Albert.
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Monday, May 5th, 2008
Week Three, Day two:
Gevurah of Tiferet
According to ynet, a Petach Tikvah rabbinical court, after hiring a woman as secretary, sent her away in tears after humiliating her and threatening to curse her (seriously!) because … well, because she was female.
Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann heard about it and decided to intervene, ordering,
that the worker should be returned to work on Monday, and instructed the director-general of the rabbinical courts, Rabbi Eliyahu Ben-Dahan, to escort the woman during her first day at work in order to make sure she was being greeted appropriately.
Friedmann also sent a harsh letter to the Petah Tikva court’s presiding judge, Rabbi Baruch Shimon Salomon, stressing that the rabbinical court was obligated to follow the laws of the State of Israel, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Law that prohibits discrimination based on gender.
The minister warned that should the court fail to accept the worker, sanctions would be taken against it.
What I want to know is how they hired her without figuring to that she was a woman? Or did they hire her and then decided that women were sin-bearing D6 monsters? What?
Well, but OTOH, the rest of the Hareidi world is working on other important measures. Like banning snacks with pictures of the Israeli flag on them. And boycotting Independence day celebrations because they might lead to mixed dancing. Who wrote this punchline?
Finally, more on the Drukman case: “National Religious Party Chairman MK Zevulun Orlev announced Sunday he plans to propose a bill calling for stripping the rabbinical courts of all authority pertaining to conversions.”
by shamirpower · Monday, May 5th, 2008
Jewschool would like to congratulate our colleagues at Jewcy and Zeek on their new partnership:
Zeek, an online journal that has helped shape modern Jewish-American culture, today announced that it is joining forces with Jewcy.com, one of the web’s most innovative and rapidly-growing online communities. Beginning today [May 1], Zeek’s online content will be published at www.jewcy.com/zeek.
Zeek joins Jewcy as the first content partner in Jewcy’s initiative to create a publishing network of editorial sites serving the YoCo psychographic – young, culturally omnivorous Americans looking for meaning and community.
“We are joining strength with strength,” said Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, chief editor of Zeek and formerly the managing editor of Tikkun magazine. “We’re a leader in Jewish intellectual, cultural, artistic, and spiritual life, and Jewcy is the largest and most dynamic Jewish community on the internet.”
“Zeek is the first of many partnerships to come in our effort to assemble an all-star team of the nation’s most original, creative voices,” said Tahl Raz, CEO and founding editor with Joey Kurtzman. Kurtzman added: “Zeek consistently publishes daring, groundbreaking work. This had to happen.”
Zeek will retain its editorial independence and continue to publish its print journal. Its most recent issue, published last month, is a 120-page anthology of Russian-Jewish art, fiction, and poetry.
The venture is the first such merger among the publications and organizations collectively known as the ‘new Jewish culture,’ and represents a joining of two of the leading forces in independent Jewish media. Said Kaiser, “This is a natural evolution of the work all of us have been doing, and we’re thrilled to be joining forces.”
We applaud the proliferation of indy-Jew-media. Mazal tov!
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Monday, May 5th, 2008
Haaretz offers an interesting response by Asher Maoz to the ridiculous attempt by the High Rabbinical Court to invalidate, retroactively, all of the conversions performed by (Orthodox) Rabbi Chaim Druckman, posted here by Josh Frankel a few days ago.
Will this finally be the straw that breaks the camel’s back?
Well, I doubt it. Although as Maoz -correctly- points out, such retroactive annulments are contrary to halakha, this is by no means the first ruling contrary to (or at the very least, irrelevant to) halakha made by those leading the charge to make (Ultra-) Orthodox Judaism more stringent, more separate, and more isolated. As a matter of fact, aside from a number of “halakhic” rulings which are simply stringent for their own sake, or the retroactive post-mortem re-ruling of those gedolei hador who ruled more leniently to make their actual rulings seem like they weren’t practices that the gedolim themselves actually followed or to at least try to hide the fact that they made such rulings at all, or out and out questionable practices (many of these have been covered in the Jewschool archives, but I won’t list them here) in general this tendency is in itself problematic as a matter of “al tifrosh” -do not separate yourselves - which is, in fact, the entire point, not simply a side effect, of many of the rulings of these types.
Just for one example of many, several of the halakhic solutions established by the Conservative/ Masorti movement in order to free agunot had actually been under consideration -or being used- by the Orthodox mainstream - until the Conservativim started using them, which them made them treif by association, with the current preferred mode to be to say that all weddings not performed by an Ultra-Orthodox rabbi are not valid, completely in contradiction to Jewish law, and running a real and actual risk of make mamzerut more common, because people are then “free” to remarry when in fact their first marriages are halakhically legitimate (all it takes are a Jewish man, an unmarried Jewish woman and two Jewish witnesses, rabbi not required), making their remarriages halakhically invalid. Oy, what a mess. The only humor to be had being that if it became common for women to get unchained by going to the Ultra-Orthodox and having their first marriage declared void, Masorti rabbis would almost certainly have to start insisting that anyone who had been remarried by the ultra-orthodox get a get retroactively… the entanglements could be legion…okay, not really that funny.
So what’s going to change now? Well, almost certainly nothing. At least not until the Orthodox who aren’t complete loons (most of them, but unfortunately, not speaking up) start saying that it’s not okay to trash moderation, that halakhah isn’t a means to make yourself politically powerful or to control your community’s every move, to oppress certain segments of your population, or to drive your neighbors nuts; when the normal majority start telling their leaders that they won’t follow them when they make stringencies for stringency’s sake, well, then, maybe then something will change.
