The Jewish Literary Salon in Krakow, Poland - one of the many complex Jewish projects in contemporary Poland
In Dan Sieradski’s recent web project 31 Days, 31 Ideas, cartoonist and rootsman thinker EliValley suggests that the American Jewish community create “Birthright Diaspora.” Awkwardly conceived as a 10-day immersion in a Jewish diasporic site, the manifesto suggests that by creating a program in which Israeli and American Jews visit “global” Jewish communities located far from their own, their Jewish identities will transform into something better. Valley writes:
It’s time to expand our notions of positive Jewish identity and at long last move beyond an ideology that fretfully masquerades self-hatred as Jewish empowerment. By digging through centuries of global Jewish life, Birthright Diaspora will help transform Jewish self-awareness and break the dichotomy of “hero” and “victim” that has handicapped internal Jewish intellectual inquiry for decades. The goal is not merely widespread immersion experiences in global Jewish communities but a renewed understanding of Diaspora as a Birthright that forms the roots of Jewish consciousness. If implemented effectively, Birthright Diaspora can lead to an existential transformation in the way Jews and Israelis view themselves and the world.
It is a heartfelt manifesto, and what it lacks in theoretical precision it regains in passion. For many years now, there has been an emphasis on the next big “program” that will contribute to the strengthening of what we have come to call Jewish Identity and Community. Various ideological camps, including Jewschool, have claimed that by funding the notion of “global Jewish Peoplehood,” Jewish identity and community will bz’h undergo the type of “existential transformation” that Valley describes.
I am confident that longing for this type of existential transformation is a red herring, or even more troubling, a fantasy of our own power. By denying the reality that the Jewish Diaspora has geographically contracted and remained intact, our cultural activists continue to accept a model of a “shackled” community that pivots off a vague notion that, as Valley writes, “in the Jewish world, the interconnectivity often manifests itself through ripples emanating from the perceived center of Jewish life in Jerusalem.” More »
Some of us know Avi Fox-Rosen for his klezmerish work. Some of us may appreciate his whimsy. Some of us just like bikes and others (of either sex) may like hot girls. And then there are furries. But I digress.
Here is something yummy and fun for all of us. Because it’s ADAR!
Avi Fox-Rosen’s CD Release Party is Wednesday June 3rd @ Union Pool, Williamsburg, BROOK-LYN.
So you’re the next emergent upstart wizbang genius. You’ve got a great idea. You can save the Jewish people and in the process, repair the whole world… if only you had the funds to get things started.
Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard it all before. But we’re hearing it more frequently these days, which is a good sign. So check out some of these fellowships, many of which have upcoming deadlines.
The Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin & Sonoma Counties has clarified its stance on pluralism in the Jewish community. We, apparently don’t need it. I mean that the JCF has “to manage such situations without diminishing the rich exchange and expression that defines our community.” The policy implications of this “clear statement” are that “the JCF will not fund” organizations that:
advocate for, or endorse, undermining the legitimacy of Israel as a secure independent, democratic Jewish state, including through participation in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, in whole or in part.
I would imagine that this means first, that, in the above statement “advocate for” has as its object “undermining” and not “the legitimacy of Israel…”. Second, apparently, participation in the BDS movement could not have as its object strengthening Israel as an independent and democratic state.
As the perfect coda to this policy announcement, the acting CEO of the JCF clarifies: “It is our intention that this policy establishes helpful guideposts that will not squelch creativity, diversity of expression, or critical debate in our community.”
[I have Personal Jesus stuck in my head now. Why did I think that was a good subject line?]
From Failed Messiah comes today’s favourite “those crazy hareidim” story:
Haredi airline passengers are being advised to hang a new type of mehitza – a halachic barrier to separate the sexes – around the top of their airplane seats, to shield their eyes from immodest neighbors and in-flight movies.
The Rabbinical Council for Public Transportation, which is also representing the haredi community on the issue of gender-segregated “mehadrin” buses, is now placing advertisements in haredi newspapers encouraging the community to purchase the traveler mehitzas.
The new mehitzas, made of white nylon, stick onto the fabric of the airplane chair using Velcro and can be arranged to make a protective “shield.” The mehitza goes around the head and is mostly in front of the passenger’s face, protruding only a little to the sides. Its designer, who asked that his name not be published, declined to share pictures and his design details, but said the mehitzas were “airy” and did not bother anybody.
This is ridiculous. I’ve been on El Al flights where flight attendants have asked women to change seats so that haredi men don’t have to, gasp!, sit next to them. Are they really going to sit with their heads in boxes for a full flight? No, they’re going to continue insisting that the women be moved away from them.
On the other hand, I’ve definitely been on flights where I’ve wished I could just block out everyone around me… Hmm… Maybe there is a market for such an item!
I picked up this little clay Hasid paperweight in a tourist market in Krakow. He has a diamond in his hand. Reactions to him vary, from astonishment to rage.
Some interesting Jewish things floating around the culture:
Rabbi Duvid Bergman of the Radziner Shul in Boro Park gives spectacular shiurim in a concise and eloquent Poylish Yiddish. For all of our Yiddishists out there – s’iz nisht keyn treyf-posl.
Juan Goytisolo, arguably Spain’s great living novelist, released a radical revision of his text Juan the Landless. In this new revision-translation, we meet a Spaniard tortured by a vicarious guilt for the crimes of his country – the persecution of Muslims, Jews, and homosexuals. A man with no land, no history… ain’t nothing like a little Occidental guilt.
A recent digital exhibition of Nomi Talisman’s project META/DATA is up on the website of The Judah L. Magnes Museum. Quirky.
BBYO launched their Build a Prayer website yesterday. It purports to be a website where Jews of all ages and backgrounds can connect to prayer and Shabbat by building a service. What follows are my reactions as I try to create a service.
Step 1: Choose a service
I have four choices to start off with. I can either make a “Friday Evening Service,” “Saturday Evening Service,” “Saturday Morning Service,” or “Blessings After Meals.” No weekday services?
Now I have three more choices. I can either make a “Traditional,” “Pluralistic,” or “Custom” service. What?
I can include any combination of Hebrew, English, and transliteration, and I can choose from two different layout styles, both of which include space for commentary, which is great. But now I’m wondering what kind of choices I’m gonna get for commentary. More »
Our parasha this week, Terumah, contains instructions to Moses, Bezalel the holy handyman, and the Jewish people on how to build the mishkan, the portable Tabernacle in which God’s presence dwells in this world aka God’s mobile-home. The hundreds of instructions are detailed and precise, and in our tradition they are packed with meaning. Precisely what that meaning is is up for debate: Some commentators point to parallels between the building of the mishkan and creation; others draw philosophical, mystical, and cosmological ideas from the instructions. There are thousands of things to say here, but here are two neat, short ideas from the midrash on the importance of sustainable development and crowdsourcing in the building of the mishkan. I can’t help myself – I love finding very 21st Century ideas in 1,500 year old texts. Sustainability: The midrash (Midrash Rabba, Chapter 35, 36:2) wonders why God chose trunks from עצי שיטים – shittim trees, to be the mishkan‘s structural frame. The midrash‘s answer? God wanted to teach future generations a lesson – shittim trees are not fruit bearing. If God, owner of everything and in need of nothing, chose to avoid using materials that don’t deprive future generations of fruit (aka he used sustainable materials in building his house), then so should we.
Crowdsourcing: The building of the different pieces of the mishkan (Chapter 35, 35:2) – the table, the walls, the menorah, etc. – is commanded in the singular v’asita (you shall build). However, one item is commanded in the plural v’asu (y’all are going to build this one). And which is it? It’s the ark – the most important piece of the whole project. It’s at the center of the mishkan, it’s from where God speaks, and it contains the Torah. When we create any institution, there are always negotiations in who gets to design, who gets to contribute, who gets to build. However, the message from the midrash is that when it comes to the central thing, the raison d’être of the whole thing, what really matters is that everyone gets to be involved.
Do these midrashic ideas resonate with you? How would you build a house for God?
In a terse note, Rabbi Weissmandl of Supreme Kosher removed his supervision from Agri-Star. OU supervision remains intact, for now, but this is a worrying sign. Indications are that this might be about Kashrut Politics, but perhaps there’s more to it? Let’s watch and see what unfolds.
The other form of computer checking involves much more sophisticated software, and further reduces the chance of human error. In the process we’ve just been talking about, the letters were fed to me automatically, but I still had to use my brain to identify them and see that they were kosher. In this process, there’s barely any brain involved at all.
In this process, the operator uses a hand-held scanner to get the columns of text into the computer. Then it is run through OCR software – very clever software, which not only recognises letter glyphs but can also be taught to handle variations in glyphs caused by its being hand-written. Because it is a computer, it can also be taught some of the laws of whether a letter is kosher or not, so it can apply those mechanically to each glyph and flag up any doubtful cases.
Finally, the OCR output is compared to a Torah text, and any discrepancies are flagged up along with the doubtfully-kosher ones. A report with all problems is generated and given back with the scroll to the sofer, who then goes through the list and fixes everything on it.
Scan report
Like this. Column 003, says the first entry on this report, which starts “Vayomer Adonai Elohim” – one comment. Line 21 (Bereshit 3:5), problem, thus: extra letter vav in the word “mimenu,” where it should say “…yodea Elohim ki b’yom akhalkhem mimenu v’nifkedu eineikhem…” and then in the picture you can see it’s got “v’mimenu,” for some reason or other.
This “Referendum” features chefs, owners, customers and the omnipotent food thinker Michael Pollan addressing how to deal with bringing these issues together.
Take a watch and let’s see if there is a way to have a “Referendum” on how we eat our other Jewish meals. We can make our Shabbat dinners and Passover Seders in a sustainable capacity, but at what cost to our pocket books and our traditions?
This article was originally published on InterfaithFamily.com. Interfaith Family is “the online resource for interfaith families exploring Jewish life and the grass-roots advocate for a welcoming Jewish community.” I don’t think I’ve written about my family on Jewschool before, but I thought I’d give it a try by cross-posting.
My brother and I were raised by two Jewish parents. Ours was a liberal Jewish home: mezuzahs on the doorways, Shabbat dinner every Friday, holidays observed and celebrated. I grew up believing that my parents were both equally committed to our family’s level of observance. In recent years, long after my parents’ divorce, and as my father has formed a new family, I’ve learned that my outlook was perhaps naive.
My father believed that raising the kids with Judaism was the right thing to do. He went along with it. But while our family observed Passover, eschewed bread and other leavened products for the eight days, he would go to the deli by his office for lunch and privately enjoy a sandwich. Once I was old enough to go to synagogue on my own, he no longer went to Shabbat services. And when I wanted to start laying tefillin, he was more than happy to give me his set, which had been stashed in the back of his closet since before I was born.
As an observant Jew, I was taken aback by his deception. In hindsight, I understand, and appreciate, the decisions he made for our family. I was left wondering what type of religious life he would have, especially as he ages and talks about his will and funeral plans. But while I was wondering what his funeral might look like, balancing my future mourning needs with his probable want for a not overtly religious burial, another life-cycle event brought his religious views to the forefront.
My father started dating, moved in with, and became engaged to the woman who is now my stepmother. This raised a whole other round of questions for me. As far as I knew, he had only ever dated Jewish women. My stepmother is not Jewish. I didn’t have much opportunity to spend time with her before they were married; we lived on opposite coasts. My questions went mostly unanswered, and mostly unasked. More »
The picture to the right is of Polish-Jewish Socialist Sigismund Danielewicz, an early 20th century organizer and founder of the California Sailor’s Union. He was the lone opposer of the exclusion of Chinese from Pacific labor unions. He was opposed virulently by the San Francisco Jewish establishment and was last seen in 1910 heading back, on foot, to the East.
The San Francisco Jewish scene has long been at the corroded fault-line of established Jewish communal politics and a fresh, rebellious underground cadre of Jewish culture workers. We’ve got Jews on the far left, and some of them keep Shabbos. We’ve got exceedingly experimental forms of non-traditional Jewish practice – and sometimes I hear Israelis speaking Yiddish in my neighborhood. Today, the Bay Area, which encompasses SF, Berkeley, Oakland, and Palo Alto, and everywhere in between, is a very distinctive and fresh corner of the exile. Here’s a sample of current offerings:
1. The Contemporary Jewish Museum in SF is a non-collecting institution that offers up exhibitions of current Jewish art, performance, and sound. The museum’s current offerings include the Soferes Julie Seltzer writing a sefer Torah in an tweaked performance of our male-dominated scribal art. Upcoming exhibitions will feature the life and work of Oakland Jew Gertrude Stein and a display of work by designer and illustrator Maira Kalman.
2. The Mission Minyan Purim Party, a fresh traditional reading of Megilas Esther followed by a costume party that showcases some of the craziest-looking Jews I have ever seen.
3. The Jewish Farm School‘s Oz Farm in Mendecino County is offering, in partnership with Hillel, Jewish youth the opportunity to participate in a week-long farm immersion experience. During the six programs, they will be working on sustainable farms located on the East and West coasts.
That is right, Jews workin in the verdant, fertile land. I feel all like A.D. Gordon just thinking about it. Blessings from the Bay.
Women are largely prohibited from serving in combat units in the IDF, though they are ubiquitous as medics, scouts, officers, education officers, social workers, and more. Even still, women soldiers have increasingly been combatants over the past few years (see picture).
Yet most day-to-day work related to policing and securing the occupation is not ostensibly combat-related — so why are female soldier voices so few? Even among voices of conscience, female voices are rarely heard. Sometimes women soldiers are privy to the worst of human rights abuses by men — and yet remain silent still. Why?
Breaking the Silence is changing that with a new booklet of women’s testimonies and a cross-country mission to the American Jewish community this month. Dana Golan is bringing their first-ever women-only testimonies to America as the organization strives to educate the American Jewish public on what “occupation” entails.
Their first woman CEO, former Border Police officer Dana Golan, explains:
“Israeli society does not want to think about our girlfriends, daughters and sisters taking an active role in carrying out the ‘occupation,’ just like the male soldiers. We want to believe that the female soldiers stationed in the territories are not as aggressive and that they do not get their hands dirty.”
She explains women feel it is not their place to out their peers, and the pressure to be “one of the guys” often begs them to be more harsh than their male counterparts.
Breaking the Silence is one of Israel’s most important — and hard to hear — contributors to the debate around the conflict. Neither heroes nor villains, they say, Israeli soldiers are young people put in impossible situations. I highly encourage you to attend these humanizing (de-hero-izing and de-villifying in turn) voices, this time from women of conscience.
Full tour list below the fold. Read more on Ynet and CommonDreams.
Friday, February 19, 2010
12:30PM – NYU, Richard Ettinghausen Library, 50 Washington Square South.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
7:00PM – Columbia-Barnard Hillel: the Kraft Center for Jewish Life, 606 West 115th Street (between Broadway and Riverside Drive). Sponsored by New Israel Fund’s New Generations, RSVP here.
It sucks when Jews commit a hillul hashem and the news picks up on it. We all suffer, especially if they’re observant and it smacks of hypocrisy.
But what about when it’s a poseur?
Amidst the feel-goods about IsraAID and JDC helping out on the ground in Haiti comes a story of a shady character named Jorge Puello. He’s a “legal advisor” to the 10 missionaries accused (and now cleared) of smuggling children into Dominican Republic. He’s also wanted in connection with a human trafficking scandal that spans Central America. He reportedly ran a brothel out of his home in Miami, luring Caribbean women with promises of modeling work only to traffic them into the sex-trades. It gets stranger. Puello apparently served a stint in jail for narcotics, served in US Army Intel, and worked for Homeland Security. Is nobody doing background checks anymore?
Oh yeah, and there’s this: he sports a beard, velvet kippah an claims to be ”president of the Jewish Communities of Dominican Republic.”
About four years ago, he emerged in Santo Domingo saying he wanted to establish a Sephardic Jewish community. Cerminara and Ana Puello said everyone in their family is Catholic and that Jorge Puello’s converted on his own. “He is Jewish by conviction,” she said. “He practices the religion and believes it in his heart.”
The Dominican Republic is home to about 50 Jewish families, a tightly knit and low-key community that includes Sephardim and Ashkenazim, and some had doubts about the new arrival, said Isaac Lalo, secretary of the Centro Israelita de Republica Dominicana, the main synagogue.
“This guy has nothing to do with our community,” Lalo said. “Sephardic Jews don’t just set up a community out of the blue.”
WTF?! Like we don’t have enough Madoffs in our midst, people gotta pose as us and do their evil deeds?
Last weekend, the first Limmud Chicago took place on the wooded campus of Oakton Community College in suburban Des Plaines. I’m on the ‘Steering Wheel’ (there are no committees in Limmud) so I’m biased, but thought I’d provide a report.
From 8am to 11pm, nearly 400 participants gorged on 80 sessions ranging from Hasidut to Queer Torah and from Text to Crafts. Check out the program here.
My most memorable sessions were led by Arthur Waskow’s Can Jewish Festivals Save the World, Shai Held’s sessions, Menachem Cohen’s How Not to Study Torah, Aaron Frankel’s Songs of Yehuda Halevi, Marc Belgrad’s Getting to God, and Mark Rothschild’s fascinating Prophets and Profits. I would have had more were I not ‘on duty’ in the prime mid-day hours. I heard raves about Asher Lopatin’s session on the Quran’s portrayal of the Akedah, the obligatory drum circle, Ruthie Gelfarb’s Introduction to Mussar, and many more.
The conference drew participants from Metro Chicago, Toronto, Colorado, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin and someplace called New York. There was a good mix of age ranges and backgrounds. Upon entry, everyone, whether presenter or participant, was assigned a volunteer role. And a considerable amount of leftover food was donated to the Night Ministry, serving homeless youth.
By now we’re all familiar with the Limmud concept, and this was, if I may say so, a very ‘limmud-y’ first Limmud in the Midwest. And if it can happen Chicago… it can happen anywhere.
It was a fantastic day and a smashing success. If you want to participate next year, check out the website.
The idea: A site to host the development of “open source” curriculum for learning how to learn Talmud and other texts in Hebrew/Aramaic.
The need: There are few if any curriculae which are targeted at the student who wants to start a serious learning practice, or for use by teachers who want to initiate students into a serious learning practice. There are many, many sites for introducing the unaffiliated and the uninterested. However, the interested and affiliated who want to take their study practice one step up are in a bind. This is especially so for those who don’t live in a major urban center. Moreover, teachers in day schools and the growing number of community high schools who want to up their game and teach on a higher level are also in bind.
The project: The web site would be a collaboration between Jewish educators and web designers. Tools would be developed that would allow educators to collaborate with each other across geographical boundaries on curriculae and methodologies.
Obstacles: Years ago when I was the chair of the Rabbinics Department at the Ziegler School, I wanted to start a conversation about teaching Talmud in the original languages to adults on a graduate level. I discovered that there was almost nothing published on the subject. There was one article by Dr. Marjorie Lehman of JTS in the Journal of Jewish Education. The situation has improved somewhat. A conference was convened two years ago at Brandeis University to address the issue. Some more articles have since been published. However, when a teacher, pressed by time and not compensated for creating curriculae on her own, wants to teach Talmud to her tenth grade class, she is back with her Talmud and nothing else. (The level of compensation for most Jewish educators at all levels is a stain on the Jewish community and an insult to Torah—but that is a rant for another day.)
What I suggest is that the ability to collaborate—either to have a great idea and put it up to allow someone else to develop; to step into the middle of the process and add a twist which will make it better—will spread the work out and also keep the means of production in the hands of the workers. Credit for the work will be assigned to those who do the work and not to the institutions who benefit from it.
Process: While the curriculum will be “open source,” in that permission will be given to modify, add, etc. to the educational products in process, there will have to be a screening process for collaborators to avoid the wikipedia fallacy, otherwise known as the blind leading the blind. Those who collaborate will have to have been trained and perhaps credentialed in recognized ways so that there is a serious element of quality control.
As an example of the type of curriculum I am referring to, I am appending here for download, a pdf textbook that I created several years ago for Kiddushin 29aƒƒ—the discussions dealing with the obligations of parents and children. This curriculum has been used successfully in various different high-school and graduate school settings by several different teachers, and, not to sound like the bitter old man that I am, I should have been well-compensated for developing this—but I harbor no illusions that that will ever be the case. So I present it here in its uncompleted form as an example of the type of curriculum that could benefit from further development by qualified collaborators. (If you are interested in exploring the curriculum, you must download it to your computer and open it with Adobe Reader or the full Acrobat, otherwise most of the functionality won’t be available.)
The picture to the right is of Polish-Jewish Socialist Sigismund Danielewicz, an early 20th century organizer and founder of the California Sailor’s Union. He was the lone opposer of the exclusion of Chinese from Pacific labor unions. He was opposed virulently by the San Francisco Jewish establishment and was last seen in 1910 heading back, on foot, to the East. 
Women are largely prohibited from serving in combat units in the IDF, though they are ubiquitous as medics, scouts, officers, education officers, social workers, and more. Even still, women soldiers have increasingly been combatants over the past few years (see picture).
It sucks when Jews commit a hillul hashem and the news picks up on it. We all suffer, especially if they’re observant and it smacks of hypocrisy.
My most memorable sessions were led by Arthur Waskow’s Can Jewish Festivals Save the World, Shai Held’s sessions, Menachem Cohen’s How Not to Study Torah, Aaron Frankel’s Songs of Yehuda Halevi, Marc Belgrad’s Getting to God, and Mark Rothschild’s fascinating Prophets and Profits. I would have had more were I not ‘on duty’ in the prime mid-day hours. I heard raves about Asher Lopatin’s session on the Quran’s portrayal of the Akedah, the obligatory drum circle, Ruthie Gelfarb’s Introduction to Mussar, and many more.
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