This Sunday, Jewish Currents, The Workmen’s Circle and The Shalom Center are cosponsoring “Jews Uniting to End the War and Heal America,” a day-long conference featuring a remarkable list of speakers and representation from a broad, liberal Jewish spectrum.
Central Synagogue, 123 East 55th Street (between Park and Lexington Avenues), NYC, 9:30-5:15 (registration pens at 8:30)
Room is limited; preregistration is recommended! A full list of speakers, including Jewschool Founder Daniel Sieradsky, can be found at www.circle.org/jewsuniting/.
If we think of each human life as an entire world, as the Jewish tradition urges us to do, then the war in Iraq is a black hole swallowing galaxies. Yes, the war has moved to the backburner of public consciousness because of all the other ways in which our country is suffering from the radically ideological, and radically incompetent, Bush government. Nevertheless, ending the Iraq war and reckoning with the damages it has caused is a critical foundationstone of the “change” that Barack Obama urged throughout his campaign. Few public voices are saying so, however, and few voices are challenging the “preemptive war” doctrine or other military policies that have held sway since 9/11.
Seventy-eight percent of American Jews voted for Obama, despite all the predictions of Jewish liberal “slippage” and all of the lies and rumor-mongering that tried to provoke that slippage. Now is the time for the Jewish community to follow up its vote by breaking its silence about this war. One key purpose of the conference is to explore the complex reasons for that silence and finally release our community from its grip. We have weighed and largely withheld our words for more than five years; it’s time, now, to lift our voices and direct our resources towards the healing of America.
by Kung Fu Jew [➚] · Wednesday, November 19th, 2008
Christ on a cracker, I have never seen so many Jewish social justice organizations in one place. These orgs are the answer to the staid and hobbled mainstream, at least in our eyes, and their presence in the Jewish world is all that prevents me from saying “Screw it,” and starting over. A ridiculously just AJWS-Avodah-led partnership including cosponsors NIF-JFREJ-JUFJ-HIAS-JFSJ-6th&I-Zeek-UriL’Tzedek-Jewschool-etcetera excitedly announces these events in DC and NY:
Jewschool’s very own Mobius joins distinguished panels of local, everyday Jewish changemakers in NY and those who attend will benefit from activism skillshare workshops, networking, an earload of local social justice opportunities, and mishegaas.
Sunday, November 23, 2008 Washington, DC
Sixth & I Synagogue
4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Sunday, December 7, 2008 New York, NY
NY Society for Ethical Culture
4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Judaism was meant to be revolutionary. Check the info below the fold. More »
The yeshiva created by the Hadar empire is going full-time/year-round, with stipend and everything. Applications are due February 1st. Deets are here:
Mechon Hadar is excited to announce that it is now accepting applications for the both the summer 2009 session and the first-ever year-round session (2009-2010) of Yeshivat Hadar. More »
Perhaps one or two of you have noticed that Jewschool has been having a few problems lately. We admit that we haven’t been ourselves of late. Somehow all those late nights, too much caffeine, and jaunting around the world in search of the cutting edge, the complex, the groovy and also the outre, startling and eccentric of the Jewish world, has taken its toll on our beloved website.
Well, actually I have no idea what the problem was, as I’m not really much of a techie.
We have taken several steps to try and fix the problems, and hope that we have the problem under control. We apologize for the sporadic outages, and welcome everyone back to the joyous world of Jewschool. Thanks for your patience.
In the wake of the 70th anniversary of Kristalnacht, one might ask oneself, is there anything left to learn about the Shoah? Is there anything left to learn from the Shoah?
Well, thanks to information gleaned from postings on a couple of different internet message boards, I can assure you the answer is yes.
According to the highly reputable British tabloid The Sun, the long-believed rumor that Hitler was monorchic has been confirmed by his doctor’s priest’s diary. The Brits are particularly overjoyed at this revelation as it lends credence to their charming folksong “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball.” (The link above includes a fascinating sidebar detailing variations in the lyrics to the ditty.)
In related news, a Los Angeles area figure skating troupe has out Mel Brooks’ed Mel himself by putting The Producers on ice. See below. If you want to skip straight to the skating Nazis, that part starts around 4:30.
My conscience requires me to cap this with Brooks’s quote about his original intent with The Producers: “Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance. “
There’s a whole post on how much I love Elisa Albert, the featured reader at the 92Y Tribeca Open Mic tonight — alongside with the wondrous Sway Machinery — but here, let me just rant a bit about how excited I am that it’s happening in the first place. Yes, the name is a bit of a mystery — I mean, it’s nowhere near 92nd Street — but that’s New York for you.
But here’s what it is: A fast-paced (3 minutes, or 1 sheet of paper), exciting open stage where people can come to do poetry, stories, songs, or anything they want that inspires them. I spent most of my life trying to get to this city, and now that I’m here — and I’m surrounded by a hundred of my favorite writers and artists — I kind of want to get everyone together, not just to do their hit single, but to drop any piece that they’re in the mood to read. Last week, I got to talk to Dara Horn, one of my favorite novelists, and she told me this idea she had for a new book — and it was half an hour of me sitting in a cafe with my jaw steadily progressing lower and lower toward the ground.
It was that kind of moment — the kind where she’s pumped with creative energy and I’m pumped with oh-WOW-wtf energy and we both recognize that a bona fide creative moment happened. So, if you have anything to share — or just want to hear a bunch of really cool people do really cool things — stop by tonight. It’s free. Oh, and there’s a bar attached, so things will just get interestinger and interestinger.
First of all, I grew up among the Xtians all my life. There are more Jews who blog on Jewschool than I ever knew until the age of 22. Nebraska, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, small town California, Oregon and Washington State. I’m not afraid of Christians.
But I do have to be honest, they have some funny ideas about us Hebrews. One asked my family, “Oh, you’re Jewish? So where do you do your sacrifices?” And not because he was an anti-Semite, but because a good read of the Old Testament would lead you to believe that.
And many folks like him happen to believe, in a pretty benign way, that the Jews have been replaced. By them. It’s as easy as saying, “Hey-didn’t-God-tell-the-Israelites-to-kill-the-Canaanites-even-though-they-never-did-anything-wrong?” Yes, indeedy, that easy to believe. Ever met a Canaanite? They’re not around so much, but any Palestinian will do. You see, the ideas of “replacing” a people are quite common here at home among us Jews. They’re not so different, they’re really good people, trust me.
But that doesn’t mean I want them making foreign policy decisions about Israel. Their love of Israel is as uneducated as you can get — and not a tap we want to open without the ability to shut it. American policy vis a vis Israel under greater influence of the Evangelicals is going to become the Jews’ Proposition 8: all the Christians will out-fund and out-influence the Jews on our own issue. Don’t believe me? Look up the 990 tax forms of the biggest churches. Above and beyond any Federation.
I love Eli’s comics because of their double-punch. Not only do we get to lampoon the Evangelicals’ blood thirst for the End of Days, but we harpoon our own people for our unfortunate Crusades-related baggage. Sometimes it’s even hard to tell who’s the main target of the cartoon: us or them.
Commentary asks how this cartoon got past the “liberal, tolerant” editors at The Forward. I’ll explain why: Eli proves time and again that the best comedy material — stupidity, fanaticism, embarassment — is in the mirror.
Click on the Russian-language version of the campaign Web site of Benjamin Netanyahu, the conservative Likud leader running for prime minister of Israel, and up pops a picture of him with Barack Obama. On the Hebrew version, Mr. Obama is not pictured. But he is, in fact, everywhere.
The colors, the fonts, the icons for donating and volunteering, the use of videos, and the social networking Facebook-type options — including Twitter, which hardly exists in Israel — all reflect a conscious effort by the Netanyahu campaign to learn from the Obama success….
Those who created the Obama Web site, including Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital, say the Netanyahu site is closer to Mr. Obama’s than any others they have seen.
“Nothing has been so direct as the Netanyahu Web site, though we have seen others with shades of it,” he said.
Web sites aside, for liberals in both countries, the idea of Mr. Netanyahu as the Obama candidate of Israel seems mystifying. Of the three main contenders for prime minister in February’s election, including Tzipi Livni of Kadima and Ehud Barak of Labor, Mr. Netanyahu is the most hawkish and the least interested in the focus on dialogue with adversaries that Mr. Obama made a centerpiece of his foreign policy platform. Mr. Netanyahu has said he would shut down the current negotiations with the Palestinian leadership….
The phrase “Together we can succeed” is the campaign slogan on the Netanyahu site, and it echoes, to some extent, Mr. Obama’s “Yes we can.”
On Wednesday, 20 campuses involved with the Union of Progressive Zionists will sign 10,000 of the above postcards (see the back) and deliver them to the White House. Harvard Progressive Jewish Alliance president Paul Katz on Haaretz:
President-elect Obama has the power to transform the Arab-Israeli peace process, but if he is to succeed he will need to begin immediately. We – America, Israel, and the entire Jewish people – don’t have another four years to spare.
Rutu Modan’s serialized comic, The Murder of the Terminal Patient, wrapped up in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, which means the entire 17-chapter work is now available online. The format is a little annoying — each chapter, which was original a page in the Times Magazine, is a separate PDF. But the aggravation is worth it to read the story, particularly for free.
If you’re not familiar with Modan’s work, drop whatever you’re doing and find yourself a copy of her Eisner Award winning novel Exit Wounds. Exit Woundsfollows a frustrating day in the life of an Israeli guy trying to figure out whether or not his estranged father might have been the victim of that day’s terror attack. (And, in a particularly Israeli twist, this takes place on a day when there were two attacks, and no one seems to know or care about this particular one in the shadow of a larger attack in Haifa.) Modan’s sparse, evocative line work makes it easy to get lost in the story, and her focus on the realities of the situation rather than the politics leave the reader with a lot to chew on long after the book is closed.
The Muder of the Terminal Patient gives us a very different (but still very Israeli) story in the form of a murder mystery. Instead of a detective, our protagonist is a doctor, but naturally, because he is an immigrant from Russia, he’s working as a nurse. Because the story was written to be serialized, the pacing features lots of cliffhangers and minimal character development. However, with a victim named Lev (“heart”) and a grieving widow named Tikvah (“hope”), I’m not sure we’re supposed to see these figures as “characters” in the traditional sense anyway. But if we do read this as a parable, what might it mean for the heart of Israel to expire… particularly in the way revealed at the end of the story… and what might hope look like after grieving is done?
Reps from eighty countries met this past Wednesday at the UN to discuss religious tolerance at a conference sponsored by Saudi Arabia. I’m sure many will invariably claim there is no small measure of hypocrisy when a Wahabi Islamic regime that outlaws all other forms of religion convenes a conference on religious tolerance. For their part, however, many of the speakers from Islamic countries decried the hypocrisy of Western nations preaching individual freedom of religion while promoting social and economic policies that bias against non-Western faiths.
I often wonder if our respective cries of hypocrisy really only mask our inability to break free of our own inbred biases. It’s just so complicated. As a Westerner, I make no apologies in my advocacy for individual civil and human rights – but I will also admit that I will too often stand in judgment of other cultures before trying to understand their cultural viewpoints and their profound frustrations with the prejudices of the West.
That’s why, though I’m sure many in the will be cynical about such a conference, I am heartened that it happened at all and I truly hope it will lead to yet more dialogue. And I am particularly heartened that Israeli President Shimon Peres, a participant in the conference, commented afterward Israeli President Shimon Peres that the event was “unprecedented,” adding that it would have been impossible just a decade ago:
“What we are witnessing today is a new beginning,” Peres said at a press conference. “What was today demonstrated was the will. We now have to work for the way.”
If you’re interested in further reading, check out these articles in Yahoo News and The Daily Star
A new book by Maria Balinska, an editor at BBC Radio, takes a look at cream cheese’s favorite bread product. The Bagel: A Cultural History (Yale Univ. Press) evidently traces the bagel from the nether reaches of history to present day, with–maybe not surprisingly–a whole bunch of time spent on 19th century American Jewish life.
Though it has several possible ancestors, Balinska suggests that the bagel-as-we-know-it may have been born in 17th c. Poland, as attested in a speculative (and possibly fictional) legend about the 1683 Battle of Vienna. Slate summarizes:
As the story goes, 17th-century Poland was the breadbasket of Europe, and King Jan Sobieski was the first king not to confirm the decree of 1496 limiting the production of white bread and obwarzanek (bagellike rolls whose name derives from a word meaning “to parboil”) to the Krakow bakers guild. This meant that Jews could finally bake bread within the confines of the city walls. Furthermore, when Sobieski saved Austria from the Turkish invaders, a baker made a roll in the shape of the king’s stirrup and called it a beugel (the Austrian word for stirrup). As Balinska says, “Whatever its origin, the story of the bagel being created in honor of Jan Sobieski and his victory in Vienna has endured.”
….Once bagels became popular in Krakow, the Jewish bakers began making them in their own bakeries due to the strictness of Jewish dietary laws.
All very interesting. But what I want to know is whether Balinska weighs in on the H&H vs. Ess-a-Bagel debate. Not like the answer isn’t totally obvious, but still.
Last night, the Jewish Young Adult Writer’s Forum kicked-off in the greater Boston area with an open house designed to introduce the concept to creative types in the 20s/30s crowd. The idea is fairly simple: a dozen or so folks (chosen through a simple application process) will meet monthly over four or five months to workshop some writing and learn from visiting professionals. The goal is to be flexible enough that theme of each meeting (and the pro who comes to lead it) can be tailored to the specific group that forms the first cohort. If it’s successful, organizer Chloe Safier hopes to engage future cohorts as well. Oh, and did I mention that participation is free? And includes dinner?
This is possible because the program is helped along by the support of ROI, PresenTense Group, and Gesher City Boston. But what I found most notable is that I found myself at a gathering of Jewish people in my age cohort, in a section of the city I lived in for seven years (before hopping to the other side of the river about a year ago), and the only person I had ever met before was the organizer. (This doesn’t happen often to me. I grew up in the Greater Boston Jewish community, I have worked in the community for years, I volunteer in the community, etc…) In the inevitable name-game section of the evening, a few people introduced themselves with particular Jewish affiliations (mostly professional), but most didn’t. And while I don’t want to make assumptions that anyone else in the room belonged to that elusive “unengaged” Jewish population that everyone’s so anxious to snag, this group certainly at least has the potential to serve folks both within and outside of the Jewish institutional mainstream.
JYAWF is accepting applications for the workshop until November 25th.
by Kung Fu Jew [➚] · Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
Bawdy Barracks is the title of the article in The Jerusalem Report this month featuring Miriam Libicki’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel Jobnik! announcing that her previous six issues are due to be released as one volume in December by the biggest North American comics distributor — mazel tov, Miriam!
Having sat with Miriam at a couple comic conventions, it’s always amusing to see the play of emotions across people’s faces as they carefully examine this “Israeli” comic. Is it pro-Palestinian? Pro-Israel? Self-hating? Apolitical? It’s always fun to watch their skeptical faces searching for the pro/anti agenda. The only exception is their smirks as they reach for Towards a Hot Jew, of course. (Link takes you to Zeek’s great review of her work circa last year.)
This was written on Monday, November 10 from the Independent Minyan Conference. Due to our server problems, it was never published.
Walking home from Kol Zimrah on Friday, one of my roommates asked me how minyanim were viable in the long term, and how they contributed to the larger community. And here I am, sitting in a panel that answers her question.
Our independent organizations do not strive to be everything for everyone’s Jewish journey. Most do one thing, and strive to do that one thing well. Be that great davening at an indie minyan, or comfortable and inclusive mikvah experiences. By working with other singularly, or narrowly, focused organizations, we can find our needs met across a variety of venues, each doing what it does best.
From the prospective of a Hillel director on the panel, he sees Hillels as indie minyan stepping stones (my words, not his). Students arrive at college and, on a campus with a large Jewish population, have the opportunity to explore different davening styles than they had at home, be that stylistic changes (musical, meditative, etc.) or different denominations. They can explore and expand their knowledge of Jewish services and Judaism as a whole. Then, during that elusive stage of post-college/pre-married-with-kids, they can participate in our minyanim instead of falling off the map entirely. This is, after all, the demographic that synagogues have little success with. So why not give them the tools to form their own communities, fit in with already established indie communities?
… And taking advantage of this post not having been published as originally planned:
The JTA reported on the conference.
Most minyanim cluster around a point on the ideological spectrum between Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, finding a number of innovative ways to balance an egalitarian impulse with an otherwise traditional prayer service.
One of the things I found problematic with the conference is related to this excerpt: Despite inviting minyanim such as Kol Zimrah and Tikkun Leil Shabbat, the conference seemed to focus only on traditional egalitarian, Conservative, and Orthodox (and anywhere in between and amongst) minyanim that were started around 2001 and later. Yes, there was a panel discussion on the history of the movement (which was great, by the way, and I really wish it had been a plenary session that everyone attended first thing in the morning so that it could have influenced the day’s sessions), but the sessions seemed to narrowly define the movement – er, scene – in terms of age and/or discontinuity from previous generations’ minyanim and havuros along with the style of davening. Very little was mentioned of havuros; the first reference I heard was in the afternoon’s history of workshop. And does anyone know why the NHC wasn’t involved in this?
There’s a 
Rutu Modan’s serialized comic, The Murder of the Terminal Patient, wrapped up in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, which means the entire 17-chapter work is now available 
If you’re not familiar with Modan’s work, drop whatever you’re doing and find yourself a copy of her 
Bawdy Barracks
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