The transporation committee found that while the segregation on select bus lines is supposed to be voluntary (women at the back, men at the front), the haredi population “treats them as lines ‘belonging’ to the haredi population.” Haredi groups expect a publicly-funded separate arrangement that contravenes the Basic Laws of freedom of movement and religion, it reported. “This, in turn, led to attempts on their part to force these arrangements on passengers who did not agree to them.” The reports of assaulted women are not pretty.
Women’s rights activists within the haredi and orthodox communities are campaigning Katz to accept the committee’s conclusions. Israeli author Naomi Ragen told JPost that Katz should accept it ”so that we know that we are living in a democratic state and not in Iran and Afghanistan.” In a NIF portrait of orthodox women’s activists, Kolech-Religious Women’s Forum activist Zahava Fisher said, “Whether it is Blacks like Rosa Parks being asked to sit at the back of the bus in the US, or women being asked to sit at the back of the bus in Israel, we cannot accept segregation.”
Apparently there is nothing in halakha mandating segregation of men and women in public places. A ruling by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein even permits mixed seating on public transportation and says that any man who experienced erotic contact in such contexts has problems. (Two points to the first reader who can find it online.)
I’m more than a little uncomfortable with the Iran-Afghanistan-Israel parallel, and I have no problem supporting my like-minded bretheren from out here in the Diaspora. So do our sisters in Israel a favor and let Katz know that the mehadrin buses should end. That kind of religion is below Israel’s dignity.
Katz’s email, office phone and fax below the fold. More »
Rabbi Steven Wernick, the new head of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, has made it clear that one of his priorities for the organization is outreach to Jews in their 20s and early 30s. As Conservative Jews gather for the USCJ’s biennial in Cherry Hill, N.J., December 6 — the first of Wernick’s tenure — and begin to chart a new course for the movement, it’s worth considering how best to go about pursuing this important goal.
Obviously, there are a lot of exciting possibilities when it comes to enfranchising and exciting 20- and 30-something Jews. But there are also some pitfalls that are common in efforts to reach this particular demographic. More »
At the end of parashat va’yeitzei, the Torah gives us some closure on the epic drama between Ya’akov and Lavan. We are told of a peace treaty of sorts, an establishment of borders and an agreement of terms of future engagement. This scene, which appears at the end of Genesis chapter 31, includes a couple of interesting elements that are worth mentioning. First, this is the one instance, that I can think of, in Torah that a non-Israelite is quoted in their own tongue. We read to the end of the chapter from verse 44:
“And now, let us cut a covenant, I (Lavan) and you, and it will have been as a witness between me and between you.” And Ya’akov took a stone and he erected a pillar. And Ya’akov said to his kinsmen, “Glean stones.” So they took stones and they made a mound, and they ate there on the mound. And Lavan called it “yegar sahaduta,” (witness mound, Aramaic) and Ya’akov called it “Gal’eid” (witness mound, Hebrew). And Lavan said, “This mound (gal) is a witness (eid) between me and between you, today.” Because of this, he called its name ‘Gal’eid.’”
So to catch us up to speed a bit, Yaakov had fallen in love with Rahel, his uncle Lavan’s daughter, while fleeing from his brother Esav. Ya’akov was promised Rahel as his wife on the condition he stay and work with Lavan for seven years, but when that time was up Ya’akov was given a veiled Leah, Rahel’s older sister, as a bride. We find ourselves, at this point, twenty years later, Ya’akov fleeing not only his brother, but now his uncle and father-in-law. This family drama is intense, intriguing and relevant, but I want to step away from it.
While the family drama is fascinating, right now I am more fascinated by the construction of the Torah in this passage. It should come as a striking effect that Lavan’s Aramaic tongue is preserved in the text. There is plenty of Aramaic in the Hebrew Scriptures; however, it tends to be found (but not exclusively) in books such as Daniel and Yeremiyahu (Tanakh) which are partially written in Aramaic. To my knowledge, this is the one occurrence of Aramaic in the Torah. And what is fascinating to me is not that there is Aramaic in the Torah, but that the tongue of a non-Israelite is retained. How many non-Israelites appear in the Torah? Are we to believe that the Egyptian Pharaohs spoke Hebrew? That the kings of Moab conducted their own conversations with other Moabites in Yehudean? It seems reasonable, and traditional commentators agree, that the Torah translates the words of non-Israelites into “lashon ha’kodesh, the holy tongue”. So why here? And why Lavan? Why is the name he called this place retained in his own language, but the statement he makes after it in Hebrew? More »
by Aryeh Cohen [➚] · Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
Shlomo Sand‘s book The Invention of the Jewish People has come out in English translation. It is intentionally provocative and explicitly political, and it has hit a cultural nerve. The New York Times, the largest circulation Jewish daily in the world, has taken it up, as have others.
Here is a sampling:
The Electronic Intifada‘s glowing embrace (except for the slight demurral that it is not anti-Zionist enough).
Haaretz‘s interview with Sand when the Hebrew original came out.
I was a little bit late to the game myself, only catching up with the book in September. If you haven’t read it yet, let me tell you – don’t wait. It’s a great window into how one person grappled with the big questions of life, and as you know from reading Danya here, she writes with panache. She also writes with extensive footnoting, which makes for a memoir that has the feel of a great (and very accessible) academic work. We’re Jews, we tend to interpret our lives through text (and interpret our texts through life), and the way Danya weaves in the voices of those who have written before her reflects this ethos in a thrilling way.
Apparently, some other people got nominated too. I have neither read their books nor shared webspace with them, so I offer their names and titles without further comment:
Lila Corwin Berman – Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (University of California Press)
Ari Y. Kelman – Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States (University of California Press)
Kenneth B. Moss – Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard University Press)
Sarah Abrevaya Stein – Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (Yale University Press)
Mazel tov to them too, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I’m rooting against them. (Look, I don’t watch sports, so ever since America’s Next Top Model stopped being good, this is about as invested as I get in any kind of competition.)
For a somewhat less biased and more informative take, read the press release from the Jewish Book Council.
Arurtz Sheva, the news service of the West Bank’s settlers says:
In a powerful echo of the Biblical story of the patriarch Abraham, a Mumbai doctor smashed his father’s idols and eventually decided to become a Jew in the Land of Israel.
Abraham was born Vagirds Frads to a Hindu cleric who worshipped idols, and a mother who prepared food for them. As did the Biblical Abraham, young Vagirds could not understand how his father could honor a man-made statue, nor why his mother would cook for them. “Sometimes I eat it in secret,” he confided…
What’s wrong with this? Special Thanksgiving Turkey points to the first person who gets it right.
Guest post, cross-posted, by Didi Remez, an Israeli media consultant and human rights activist. He recently attended the J Street conference and met many of the Jewschool crowd. He was electrified by their concept of Cultural Judaism and hopes he can contribute to a constructive relationship between them and progressive Israelis.
Disclosure on post: Remez lives in Ajami. During the evictions of 2007-2008, he was active in the neighborhood’s Popular Committee. The Shaya house is a hundred yards from his, as the crow flies. Coincidentally, he and Mary Koussa, one of Salim Khoury Shaya’s grandchildren, have worked closely together since 2003.
You can read the entire saga of the Shaya family in this Haaretz article, but the gist is fairly simple. In the 1920’s, Salim Khoury Shaya, head of Jaffa’s once prosperous Greek Orthodox Palestinian community, built a house for his family. He had seven children. In 1948, a census was taken of the remnants of Jaffa’s Palestinian community. Empty houses were taken over by the State of Israel, according to the Absentee Property Law (more about that at the bottom of this post). The Shaya house was a unique case. Three of the siblings were absent (in Lebanon), but four were present. So the State proclaimed itself “partner” and legally took over 40% of the house.
Decades passed and, except for a number of failed attempts in the 50’s and 60’s, to sue for full property rights, the Shaya family didn’t hear much from the government. Their area of Jaffa (near Ajami) was a slum no one was really interested in. That all changed about four years ago. The Jaffa coast went through accelerated gentrification and property prices skyrocketed. Amidar, the government owned housing company that administrates most Absentee Properties, saw an opportunity for a windfall. Contrary to popular perception, most of the Palestinians living in the area are not descendants of the pre-1948 residents, but descendants of refugees displaced during the war from other parts of the country, and are now tenants of Amidar. Therefore, their eviction, on a variety of pretexts, was relatively simple. In 2007-2008 alone, Amidar issued at least 400 eviction notices in the Ajami neighborhood.
The few Palestinian owners were more of a problem. But in 2007, some bureaucrat looking through old case files discovered the Shaya family’s vulnerability and hatched a plan — slap them with an exorbitant demand for years of back rent for the 40% of the house “owned” by the government and then demand that the “partnership” be dissolved through sale of the house to a third party. The Shayas don’t want to leave their ancestral home, but their attempts to buy out the State were rebuffed, and now Amidar and the Israel Lands Administration (ILA) have taken them to court. They want them out. More »
The latest Sh’ma has hit the newsstands and is also available in a wonderful new digital formal. All ’bout Jews and Guns. David Myers has a piece about what happened to tohar haneshek (purity of arms); Mindy Finkelstein has a piece about the aftermath of the North Valley JCC shooting in 1999; Yossi Melman writes about Israel’s arms trade; and I penned a piece about Israel, guns, the American Jewish community, and masculinity. And that’s not all!
Leading members of the Jewish community – many identified as Liberals – have sent a letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper asking him to withdraw a taxpayer-funded Conservative flyer that they say portrays the Liberal Party as anti-Semitic.
…. “We find it highly disturbing that any party or parliamentarian would attempt to use Israel as a wedge to divide the Jewish community and, indeed, Canadians, for partisan gain,” the letter says.
“Support for Israel should not be portrayed as exclusive to one party. The Liberal Party has a history of support for Israel, working co-operatively and effectively with the Canadian-Jewish community and speaking and acting against terrorism.” [Globe and Mail.]
The letter can be viewed in full at The Globe and Mail. Note that the article picks up on the ridiculousness of the Tories trying to claim that one party is more pro-Israel than another, but does not pick up on the fact that Jews can have multiples opinions on Israel. Note that the letter also ignores the latter, and urges all political parties to “stand behind [Israel].”
Still, I just don’t understand why they didn’t ask me to sign… Aren’t I prominent enough?
As a coda to the discussion about the woman arrested for wearing a tallit at the Western Wall, this little Torah nugget came through my Facebook from my friend Simon. This, he writes, “opinion [was] expressed almost 300 years ago in R. Yom Tov Ben Yisrael Algazi’s Yom Tov deRabbanan, quoting his father, Yaakov Algazi, Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem in the first half of the eighteenth century.”
“The meaning of the expression ‘Strength and dignity are her clothing’ is that she used to put on tefillin and tallit, which are called ‘strength and dignity’ [based on Midrash Tehillim on Psalm 90], and the verse states that ‘she laugheth at the time to come’: that she has a reward in the time to come, in the next world. For even though she is performing a commandment that she is not obliged to perform, she still earns a reward … Her wisdom also supports her, because she doesn’t go and ask the rabbis whether to put them on or not — ‘She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and the law of kindness is on her tongue.’ — she performs time-dependent commandments that she is not obliged in on her own initiative and relies on her own opinion.”
Blogging from the Bolt Bus on the way, appropriately, to the National Havurah Committee board meeting:
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight wrote this insightful post last fortnight following the elections:
Why did Democrats lose in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday? Because independent voters moved against them, say the pundits.
This is true [... b]ut it doesn’t really tell us very much. It’s a lot like saying: the Yankees won the Game 6 last night because they scored more runs than the Phillies. Or: the unemployment rate went up because there were fewer jobs.
It’s worth a read in its own right, but I want to focus on one section and draw an analogy to the Jewish community:
Part of the problem is that ‘independents’ are not a particularly coherent group. At a minimum, the category of ‘independents’ includes:
1) People who are mainline Democrats or Republicans for all intents and purposes, but who reject the formality of being labeled as such;
2) People who have a mix of conservative and liberal views that don’t fit neatly onto the one-dimensional political spectrum, such as libertarians;
3) People to the extreme left or the extreme right of the political spectrum, who consider the Democratic and Republican parties to be equally contemptible;
4) People who are extremely disengaged from politics and who may not have fully-formed political views;
5) True-blue moderates;
6) Members of organized third parties.
These voters have almost nothing to do with each other and yet they all get grouped under the same umbrella as ‘independents’.
Similarly, many overlapping terms are used for Jewish individuals and communities who are not affiliated with any of the major denominations: independent, unaffiliated, nondenominational, postdenominational, Just Jewish, etc. More »
It’s time once again for my not-quite-weekly song of the week.
This week, klezmer superstars (the only in existence) The Klezmatics sing “Holy Ground” from their 2006 Grammy Award-winning album, “Wonder Wheel.” All of the lyrics on the album are previously unrecorded lyrics written by Woodie Guthrie inspired by his experiences with Jews and Jewish culture. In this video, they’re singing with a Yiddish choir from Boston. It’s pretty bangin’.
The switchover is complete. A slight change in expected behavior: the old feed automatically redirects to the new one. So if you’re subscribed to the old feed, you’re going to keep getting updates for the next 30 days, rather than what we had originally written about a placeholder article. Please change your RSS subscription to point to: jewschool.com/feed, because after 30 days, the old one won’t redirect anymore, it’ll just stop working.
This is an announcement for you readers who follow Jewschool through our RSS feed. Tomorrow afternoon, we’re going to be changing a few settings on how the feed is published, with the result that its location will change. There are a bunch of reasons for making these changes, like that we’ll now be able to offer per-author and per-category feeds, but what it means for you is this: once we update those settings, the next time you try to access the feed, you’ll see that it’s empty except for a single article, which will give you the new location. This bears repeating: if you don’t switch your subscription over to that new location, you will not get Jewschool posts through RSS. The placeholder item will remain in place for 30 days, at which point the old feed address will cease to function altogether.
Let us know in the comments if you have any questions. It should be a pretty painless switch.
by Kung Fu Jew [➚] · Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Jewschool has 999 followers on Twitter. Quick, somebody put us over the top! And if you’d like to follow the tweets of some of Jewschool’s contributors, then you can follow 14 of us at once right here.
Canada might have a federal election soon. How soon remains to be seen, though that hasn’t stopped the Conservatives, who are currently running their second consecutive minority government, under leadership of Stephen Harper, to start planning for a win. And they want to form a majority government this next time around.
It seems their early tactics include targeting five long-time Liberalridings plus a bonus NDP riding. “Coincidentally,” these six ridings have large Jewish populations. Three are in Quebec (all in greater Montreal: Outremont, Mount-Royal, and Westmount-Ville-Marie), two are in Toronto (St Paul’s and Eglington-Lawrence), and the other is in Winnipeg (South Centre). With the exception of Outremont, which voted in the NDP these past two elections but had been Liberal from 1935 until then, the ridings have all been Liberal for at least 20 years (and Mount Royal sine 1940). Mount Royal’s MP is Irwin Cotler, who, in addition to being Jewish, served as both Minister of Justice and Attorney General earlier this decade. He won his first election with 91% of the vote. Winnipeg South Centre MP Anita Neville is also Jewish, and currently serves as the Liberal Critic for Indian Affairs. Now, the religious affiliations of the MPs isn’t enough reason for Jews to vote for them. But in light of the Tory accusations, are they being labeled “self-hating Jews“? [Bad midi auto-load music on that linked-to site, and it's also rather hateful all around. You've been warned.]
The Tories think they can sway these Jewish voters by mailing pamphlets to their neighbourhoods, spreading “facts” about how the Whigs (or Grits, depending on your political view or your nickname preference) don’t support Israel. And by “don’t support Israel” they of course mean “don’t support the Jews.” Because, as we all know, there’s only one accepted Jewish stance when it comes to Israel. What do the flyers say?
Conservatives are using the leaflets to tell Jewish voters that their party has fought anti-Semitism abroad and supported Israel, but the Liberals have not.
The missives say the Liberals were against listing Hezbollah and Hamas as terrorist organizations and “willingly participated in the overtly anti-Semitic Durban I” conference on racism… [Globe and Mail.]
And to counter that,
They point out, for instance, that Harper’s Conservatives “led the world” in boycotting the second UN-sponsored conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, dubbed a “hate fest against Israel.” [CBC].
There’s no mention that the then-Liberal government attended the first Durban conference at the request of Israel. Or that, after the anti-racism conference “derailed into attacks against Israel,” and Israel and the USA walked out, Israel asked Canada to stay to “defend Israel against anti-Semitic attacks”.
It also highlighted comments made by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, who accused Israel of a war crime for actions taken during a 2006 conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon. [Canada.com.]
While, of course, the Tories under Harper,
“strongly backed Israel’s right to self-defence against Hezbollah” during the bombardment of Lebanon in 2006… [CBC.]
But the Liberals aren’t the only ones upset by these tactics. All three major opposition parties in Parliament, Liberal, NDP, and BlocQuébécois, have spoken out, calling this a new low for the Conservative Party. (And not only because these mailings cost an estimated $6.3million out of the federal budget.)
The only Jewish group that has spoken out about this is Bnai Brith Canada. Unsurprisingly, their CEO Frank Dimant lacks a nuanced, pluralistic view of Canadian Jews. He said that the flyers were accurate, and that the Tories are “more in tune with the Jewish community” than the Whigs/Grits because, again, there’s only one acceptable stance for Jews to take on Israel, and all Jews accept that.
This annoys me to no end. And not just because I’ve had to defend the Liberals (a party I don’t vote for) this morning.
Women arrested at the Kotel is not the only battle over basic women’s rights and religious freedoms in Israel this season:
Arurtz Sheva, the news service of the West Bank’s settlers says:
The latest 
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