YAO!
Remember Kesharim? How about the previous USCJ RFP for Indie Minyanim that want money? Well, maybe third time’s the charm.
(Does anyone know, even anecdotally, anyone who’s actually asked for or received this money?)
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Quick: List the offensive things in this article!
Jewneric: Jewish Guys & Asian Girls, Oy Gevult!
Trust me, I’m a Jew. So what’s the deal with this attraction anyway?
After galavanting around Manhattan this past Saturday night with Jewish girls of course, I found myself sharing a cab with a Filipino girl back to Brooklyn. Relax mom I was just making sure she got home..uh..safely.
Mind you, officially Filipinos are Asians and the Philippines is part of Southeast Asia. The Philippines used to be called the Philippine Islands of the Pacific, so describing Filipinos as Pacific Islanders is still not wrong.
Our lively conversation ensued, and because this attraction has been plaguing me for so long I had to get her thoughts on the matter at hand. After clearly offending her when I told her the Jewish guys that I know think Asian girls are more submissive- bad idea- she started a defense on behalf of the whole female Asian community. I don’t think she saw my point, that sometimes the attraction is rooted in low self-esteem men who can’t handle the tough Jewish woman, and are attracted to the general passivity of asian women.
That’s just a sample.
Personally, I’m not sure if I should be more offended by the terrible writing, lack of editing, antifeminist approach to dating, conflation of race and religion…. oh, shit, if I list everything then you won’t get to play.
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Lehmann to Gordis: Don’t Turn Against Future Rabbis
Rabbi Daniel Lehmann, president of Hebrew College, has issued a lengthy response to Rabbi Daniel Gordis’s Commentary column that accused young rabbis of turning on Israel.
Here’s a taste:
Most disappointing are Gordis’ recommendations for responding to the challenges that beset liberal rabbinical schools with regard to Israel education. While he admits that it will not be easy, he offers little upon which we can build a compelling educational plan. For Gordis, the selection of students, the curriculum and assigned readings and the year of study in Israel hold out the most hope for confronting the challenges that so concern him. The level of vagueness and generality in his list of suggestions is surprising, especially for a founding Dean of a North American rabbinical school. More baffling is his insistence that “raising the flag of particularity and distinctive loyalties high and unabashedly” holds out the most hope for developing rabbis who will be lovers of Zion. The adults that we teach in our Rabbinical School are not so shallow and anti-intellectual that they would be swayed by flag waving. Commitment to Jewish particularity will not be engendered by flowery rhetoric or demagogic charisma. The pledge of allegiance has long been discarded as the method to generate deep loyalty. Thin processes of socialization will not work to nurture the souls and stimulate the minds of adults who seek thick, authentic experiences of Judaism.
Read the entire response at JewishBoston.com.
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Complicated Emotions on Yom Yerushalayim
Cross-posted from JewishBoston.com.
Today, June 1st, is Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, marking the reunification of Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967. This is both an Israeli state holiday and a rabbinically mandated minor religious holiday, which means it’s celebrated both with parades and liturgy.
I’ll admit that this mixing of politics and religion makes me deeply uncomfortable. Attributing military and political victories to God is a step further down the slippery slope of political demagoguery than I’d like to take. It makes it easy for politicians, generals, and their supporters to confuse luck, skill, and power for divine right. It’s not surprising that the term demagoguery originates in Ancient Greece — that’s also where the habit of proclaiming religious holidays for military victories started. Perhaps you’ve heard of Chanukah?
I’m not alone in my discomfort with this conflation. The sages of the Talmud were so uncomfortable with Chanukah as a military holiday, they wrote a new backstory for it… you know, the bit about the oil? The rabbis thought we’d be better off with a fairy tale invented 600 years after the events of the holiday instead of celebrating the military victory. One might wonder whether the hindsight knowledge that the victory came at the price of quite a bit of Jew-on-Jew violence and resulted in a corrupt Hasmoean dynasty that further consolodated the roles of high priest, king, and general into one person and eventually lost Israel to Rome.
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Memoir with a Message: An American Radical
I read a lot of nonfiction, and more than a few memoirs. But my pleasure-reading tends towards showbiz tell-alls (next up: Tina Fey and Betty White) and pop-history (think Sarah Vowell). So when I was asked to review Susan Rosenberg’s An American Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own Country, I knew I’d be wandering out of my comfort zone.
Jewschool readers may know Rosenberg from her work as director of communications at American Jewish World Service. Those with longer memories may recall the 1990 documentary Through the Wire, which detailed a fight that Rosenberg and her fellow prisoners at the Female High Security prison in Lexington, Kentucky fought and won against the government protesting the cruel and unusual treatment they received. Rosenberg’s book connects the dots, detailing her transformation from radical activist on the FBI’s most-wanted list to non-profit Jewish professional.
In some ways, this book is hard to read. First, we are asked to sympathize with Rosenberg, a leftist radical advocating violent resistance to the US Government. She came of age in the 1970, when, she tells us, so much of the world was engaged in violent upheaval, it felt like the only way to stop the government’s racist, colonialist, misogynistic and anti-gay policies was through violence. She got involved with the Black Liberation Army and landed on the most-wanted list by being implicated in the Brink’s Robbery of 1981. While I can understand the enormity of the abuses she and her compatriots struggled against, it was hard for me to feel much sympathy for someone advocating for violent means to a political end.
But that changed the moment of Rosenberg’s capture, when she received a 58-year sentence for stockpiling weapons — the longest sentence ever given for a possession offence. Labeled a terrorist in the courts, Rosenberg was plunged into a prison nightmare so hellish, it challenges everything we want to believe about our land of the free, home of the brave. This too, makes the book hard to read, because the ugly underbelly of our justice system and the struggles of the women inside it are overwhelming.
At times, particularly in the first half of the book, I found myself wondering what Rosenberg was leaving out. Surely she must have provoked her captors to elicit some of the cruelty she encountered. But there is no justification for the torture she documents — and make no mistake, it is torture. Even more horrifying is Rosenberg’s admission that her status as a political prisoner, and a member of the white middle class, brought privileges even within the prison system that she credits with her survival.
As the book progresses, and Rosenberg herself matures and begins to not only examine the system but also her own beliefs, it becomes easier to root for her. Woven throughout her experience is a growing connection to her Jewish heritage. Although not religious, she finds strength in connection to her people and her heritage, and ultimately finds allies including a Chabad rabbi who makes prison rounds and Rabbi Matalon of B’nai Jeshurun in New York City. She writes of sharing a Passover seder in prison, one of her first moments of contact with the “general population” after months of segregation, and of teaching about the Holocaust in prison education classes to young women of color who had never encountered the subject. Even as she chafes at the rise of a more fundamentalist streak in prisoners of other faiths, Rosenberg manages to find grounding in a secular attachment to Judaism.
This book isn’t for everyone. I can’t imagine a reader who isn’t at least somewhat predisposed to liberal politics having any sympathy Rosenberg, especially because such readers are unlikely to make it far enough into the book to confront the abuses of the prison system. Those who are triggered by depictions of abuse and misogyny are also likely to have a difficult time with the book.
But it’s worth pushing through the discomfort, for there is real wisdom in these pages. And the network of individuals who coalesce around Rosenberg, and her own eventual emergence into nonviolent social activism and human rights work add a glimmer of hope to the otherwise bleak picture presented.
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Steve & Eydie and the Sounds of Zionism
Sometimes I come across videos on YouTube that I simply can’t resist sharing with you all here.
Today, I present Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gorme singing the hits of Israel:
I wish I had grown up in a time when this is what Zionism sounded like. I wonder if we’ll achieve a time when Zionism can once again sound like this. May it come speedily and in our time.
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Debbie Friedman and the Tragedy of the Closet
When I heard that Debbie Friedman had passed away, I was sitting in a conference room at the San Francisco Federation, participating in a board meeting for Keshet, a nonprofit organization working for the full inclusion of GLBT Jews in Jewish Life. I learned of Debbie’s passing via a message posted on Twitter by a lesbian Jewish educator with whom I used to work. The news hit our meeting hard. We stopped for a moment of silence. After all, she was one of us.
Sadly, Debbie Friedman was not a member of the Keshet board of directors. She was, however, a lesbian Jew. But reading the press asking for healing prayers during her recent illness, or the overwhelming displays of grief and affection in both the Jewish and mainstream press since her passing, you’d never know it.
I didn’t know Debbie personally. But like most liberal Jews my age who have been even the slightest bit involved with organized Judaism, I’ve been touched by her melodies. Most of those songs came to me second- or third-hand, learned at summer camp and USY events from song-leaders and enthusiastic youth leaders who taught their friends to sing “Not By Might” or her havdalah niggun as though they were as old and as central to Judaism as the Torah itself. Although I eventually became familiar with Debbie Friedman’s name, I still prefer to hear her songs shouted by enthusiastic teenagers over her considerably more polished renditions. And it wasn’t until I reached graduate school that I learned that the havdalah melody I had been singing since the fifth grade came from her wellspring of melody.
I didn’t know Debbie personally. But as someone who’s been a leader in the Jewish GLBT world for a number of years, I’ve heard persistent stories about her life as a lesbian. It seems that Debbie’s sexuality was an open secret; everybody knew about it, but no one spoke of it. This made me angry. Was she ashamed? Did she fear for her career? From all accounts, Debbie was incredibly humble – is it possible that she didn’t realize how central and beloved she was to not only her Reform Movement, but to contemporary American Judaism as a whole? I can’t imagine a single synagogue refusing to sing her prayer for healing because the love of her life was a woman, but maybe Debbie could.
I don’t bear any ill-will towards Debbie for staying in the closet. But her life in the closet was double-barreled tragedy: how sad that Debbie could not live her life with wholeness, and how sad that so many queer kids were deprived such an important role model. How ironic that the tyranny of the closet overpowered the woman whose songs let us let go for a moment of what the world might think of us, just long enough to shout “Nutter butter peanut butter” or sway with our arms around our friends and not worry if we looked gay.
My friends who knew Debbie tell me that she had a life-partner. I don’t know her partner’s name, because all the press around Debbie’s illness and passing only asked for prayers and comfort on behalf of Debbie’s sister, family and friends. I hope this did not add to the unbearable pain and loss her partner must be experiencing now, but how could it not?
My friends who knew Debbie tell me that she struggled against the closet, that as recently as this year she expressed a desire to come out and a loss as to how to do so. It saddens me to think of her life ending, prematurely, with this business left unfinished. I hope whoever becomes the guardian of her legacy will follow through on this wish of Debbie’s, so that her life can be a blessing to future generations of GLBT Jews, and to all Jews.
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Exactly as much as you will want to read about a single comic book and then feel compelled to click “Like” so all your Facebook friends will want to read it as well.
Friend-of-Jewschool David Wolkin has a massive interview with Sarah Glidden, creator of How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, up at Comics Alliance. The comic comes out tomorrow, which is about the time you should be finished reading the interview. Totally worth it, though.
Note: Post title edited following conversation with Wolkin.
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Hold them to a Higher Standard
This morning, I saw a post on my friend Darya’s Facebook page:
ugh. Not that I expect a whole lot from local Jewish newspapers, but seriously? www.jstandard.com/content/item/a_statement_from_the_jewish_standard/
I’ll save you the click. The link is to a statement signed by the paper’s editor, Rebecca Kaplan Boroson, saying the following:
We set off a firestorm last week by publishing a same-sex couple’s announcement of their intent to marry. Given the tenor of the times, we did not expect the volume of comments we have received, many of them against our decision to run the announcement, but many supportive as well.
A group of rabbis has reached out to us and conveyed the deep sensitivities within the traditional/Orthodox community to this issue. Our subsequent discussions with representatives from that community have made us aware that publication of the announcement caused pain and consternation, and we apologize for any pain we may have caused.
The Jewish Standard has always striven to draw the community together, rather than drive its many segments apart. We have decided, therefore, since this is such a divisive issue, not to run such announcements in the future.
Disclaimer
The views in opinion pieces and letters do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jewish Standard. The comments posted on this Website are solely the opinions of the posters. Libelous or obscene comments will be removed.
This is outrageous on many levels, and I’m sure I don’t need to go into them in detail here. But seriously? The decision is bad enough, but to apologize to “members of the traditional/Orthodox community” for “any pain we may have caused”? (And to implicate the entire “traditional/Orthodox community” in this decision is unfair and damaging to many people in that community as well.)
Did they miss the memo about all the gay kids committing suicide because of the way society shits on them? Including one right in their backyard? These things don’t happen in a vacuum.
But if there is a happy ending (or, hopefully, a happy middle) to this story, it’s the inspiring way GLBT Jews and allies sprang into action across the internet today. My Facebook feed was overwhelmed with people posting outraged comments and committing to write to the paper. I posted a message about my outrage on the paper’s Facebook page, and dozens of others followed suit. Disappointed messages have been tweeted at the paper’s Twitter account all day. And although you wouldn’t know it, because no one has been approving comments on the original article’s webpage all day, I know dozens of people have been leaving messages there.
If you share my outrage, I encourage you to let the paper know. You can find all their contact information online, or leave a message for them on Facebook or Twitter. If you need a sample letter, check out this short and to-the-point example by Rabbi Menachem Creditor.
And if you need a little more motivation, here’s Sarah Silverman’s addition to the It Gets Better campaign:
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Dear Queer Kids, Please Stop Killing Yourselves
This week our country has finally woken up to the epidemic of gay teen suicide. Don’t be fooled by the media into thinking there’s been a sudden uptick in queer kids killing themselves — this has been going on for far too long. But for whatever reason, now people are starting to notice.
Dan Savage and his husband Terry have launched a YouTube project collecting videos from adult queer people to reassure kids out there that It Gets Better. There are aspects of the project that don’t entirely sit right with me, but I think it’s a good starting response. It’s worth pointing out that while this project is called “It Gets Better,” there is a different, youth-led project itself is called “Make It Better,” which should really be our goal. Because it only gets better if we all work hard to make it better.
Here’s my video, Jewschool. If you’re making one, please share a link in the comments. And if you’re a queer kid out there who feels alone, maybe Jewschool can be the start of a new community for you. Start making it so by leaving a message in the comments to this post.
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The Conservative Movement Wants Your Feedback
We’ve written many times about the struggles of the Conservative Movement to find its place in 21st Century Jewish North America. Sometimes, they’ve even listened to us. (After I wrote this post, I got a phone call from one of the higher-ups to further discuss my criticisms and solicit my feedback.) So, I am actually sort of optimistic about the usefulness of a new endeavor the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (the movement’s synagogue organization) is embarking on: soliciting feedback via email.
Do you have ideas about what the movement should do next? Want to make sure the programs that positively influenced your life don’t get short shifted? Feel strongly that something is dead weight and should be cut? The movement wants to know, positives and negatives. E-mail your thoughts to 4tomorrow@uscj.org. I don’t know who’s on the other side of that inbox, but my sources on the inside seem pretty convinced that the feedback received through this initiative will actually be thought about as the movement plans next steps.
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Y-Love takes on Shidduchim for Tu B’Av
cross-posted from JewishBoston.com
Just in time for our Tu B’Av reflection on Jewish love songs comes a brand-new entry into the field. Y-Love (aka Yitz Jordan) is known as the world’s first African-American Orthodox Jewish hiphop artist, but he’s good enough that you don’t need all those adjectives to sell his music.
He’s also a stand-up guy. We first met at a Jewish conference a few years ago, and I was immediately impressed with his commitment to speaking truth in his music, online right here at Jewschool, and his life, even when his opinions contradict the establishment.
His Tu B’Av song continues in that vein, taking aim at the shidduch (matchmaking) practices of some Orthodox communities. He describes the song, “Second Chance,” as his first foray into ballad territory, but it’s as much a rant and a lament as it is a ballad.
Speaking about the origins of the track, he says, “It’s basically taking my life from 2005-2006, and blowing it up to illustrate a point — people have to be allowed to take more control of their own shidduchim process in the Orthodox communities, and when a person ‘listens to the rabbi,’ well, all decisions have consequences. (Yes I am referring to someone specific in the song. And that’s all the info I’m giving on that subject 
)”
You don’t have to be Orthodox or have participated in matchmaking to relate to the song or its message. Click here to download the MP3.
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Israeli Crazy Chef occupies YouTube
Just when you thought Zionist propaganda couldn’t get any more distasteful than comparing Israel to a small penis, here comes Israeli Crazy Chef to push you even further away from the Jewish state.
I can only imagine the pitch meeting: “What if the Swedish Chef was a Zionist?” “But the Swedish Chef is kind of a psycho, totally unaware of the havoc he’s wreaking on everyone around him while he’s trying to make his meal.” “Exactly! It’s perfect!”
I’ll admit, after watching the first one I stumbled across (“Jew Bread“), I turned to my office-mate and asked if she tell whether this was anti-Semitic or Zionist. After watching a few more, I think the answer is clearly “both.”
It’s like a train wreck… Each clip I watch repulses me in new and different ways, but I can’t look away…
So the the question is… who’s funding/making/distributing these?
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Festival of Freedom
Jeeze, a guy gets busy for a few weeks and you turn this site into all Israel, all the time! (Okay, all Israel plus Kyrgyzstan and a touch of Talmud.)
Anyway, while I’ve been gone, I’ve been busy. I mentioned that I graduated from Hebrew College. I was incredibly honored to be asked to speak at graduation, so I naturally took the opportunity to get on my soap box and told the older folks in the room “Don’t Tell Me I’m Next.” Ironically, despite giving a speech against always asking “what’s next,” I was getting ready to embark on my own next adventure: becoming editor of JewishBoston.com. Having been liberated from eight years of (part-time) academia and (full-time) employment as a Jewish educator, I started my new job the following day. And now, here I am, blogging at you from the former chapel of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies in downtown Boston. (Seriously, they ripped out the aron kodesh to make me an office. I’ll leave it to the rest of you to interpret that how you will.)
So now that I’m something of a professional blogger, I will probably be spending less time around these here parts except for the occasional cross-post or when the mood takes me to write something that doesn’t fit at my primary residence on the web.
But today I did want to share one of those cross-posts, because this weekend we have a big holiday coming up, and I don’t mean Father’s Day.
June 19th is celebrated across the United States and around the world as Juneteenth, the anniversary of African-American emancipation in this country. Although the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in September and went into effect in January, many slaveholders in the south simply ignored it. The date of Juneteenth commemorates the June 18th and 19th taking of the state of Texas by the Union army under General Gordon Granger, who publicly announced the end of slavery, inspiring public celebrations among the newly freed slaves. Three years ago, Massachusetts became the 25th state to recognize Juneteenth as a holiday; 11 more have since followed suit.
I had never really contemplated Juneteenth from a Jewish perspective before this year. A few months ago, my friend Ingrid phoned me excitedly from her home in LA. “Juneteenth falls on Shabbat this year,” she told me, “so I’m going to host a Jewnteenth seder!” As someone who is both Jewish and African-American, Ingrid was thrilled to carve some space into the calendar that spoke to both elements of her identity. Modeling her Shabbat dinner after the Passover seder seemed natural, since both Passover and Juneteenth celebrate freedom from slavery.
As she spread the word among her friends, she found that many had never heard of Juneteenth before, never mind Jewnteenth. Ingrid insisted to me that was because Juneteenth celebrations are more common on the east coast, although the Juneteenth World Wide Celebration web site lists a dozen events in California and only two in Massachusetts. My searches on Google and Twitter today have not uncovered any Boston-area Jewnteenth events at all.
So whether you’re part of an organized celebration or not, this weekend is a great opportunity to reflect on the freedoms we share as well as the work still left to do to ensure equal rights for all. And if you’re not already familiar with the racial diversity within the Jewish community, you can check out the work done by such organizations as The Jewish Multiracial Network and Be’chol Lashon (In Every Tongue).
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#JEd21
Jewish educators on Twitter who want to be part of a bigger conversation know the hashtag of choice is #JEd21. This hashtag was created by Phil Brodsky (yes, hashtags do have creators!) when he was the Hornstein Intern at Darim Online. Much of the conversation tagged with #JEd21 involves the application of technology to Jewish education, because after all, what is the 21st century if not the Information Age?
Longtime Jewschool readers (or dlevy groupies) might remember that I’ve been working part-time (for eight years!) on my masters degree at Hebrew College. I’m pleased to let you all know that this coming Sunday, I will be graduating with two degrees — an MA in Jewish studies and a Masters of Jewish Education. Since so much of my life has straddled the worlds of Jewish education and the internet, I set out to take a hard look at what Jewish education really does look like in the 21st century, and what it could look like if we all put our heads together.
Once my research started, I quickly realized I’d need to limit my inquiry a bit — this isn’t a doctoral dissertation, after all. So, I decided to stick with what I know best (and is dearest to my heart), supplementary Jewish education for teens. Below is the fruit of my labor. I don’t know how interesting it will be to any of you, but here you go.
Eagle-eyed readers will note that two other Jewschoolers make it into my citations.
(If you’d prefer reading a Google Doc to Scribd, I’ve got you covered.)
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Be a fly on the wall at the RA Convention
The Rabbinical Assembly is having their annual convention RIGHT NOW at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City. And you can watch the action online as a selection of events are live-streamed (and then archived for future viewing). I am too busy to actually check in on the proceedings, so I can’t guarantee that anything interesting will be happening, but I believe in about an hour they’ll be dedicating the new Conservative Machzor, so maybe some of our liturgy geeks will want to check that out.
Here’s a sample from Sunday’s discussion with Rabbi David Wolpe and Rabbi Harold Kushner:
I know they’re not streaming the entire conference, and I’m having a hard time locating a conference schedule, so maybe one of our readers can jump in with suggestions of when to tune in in our comments section.
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Geeking Out with the Cambridge Companion
Every once in a while, I read something that feels so resonant, so right on, that I have to share it. (After all, that was what the original blogs were all about – literally web logs of cool stuff we came across and wanted to share, or at least keep in a public record.) I’m in the final throes of writing my masters thesis, shoulder-deep in academic (and frustratingly not-quite-academic) writings about Jewish identity, Jewish education, technology, and what-have-you.
I just finished reading Debra Renee Kaufman’s chapter in The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism
It’s worth pointing out that this book is specifically about Judaism, the religion, which it distinguishes from Jewishness, the ethnic/cultural piece of the Jewish endeavor. Of course, part of what struck me about Kaufman’s piece, coming 169 pages into this collection, is her cogent argument against making such a separation.
Thanks to the magic that is Google Books, I can stop trying to describe the paper to you and simply have you read it:
(How cool is that nifty little internet geegaw, right?)
For those of you out there in Jewschool-land who have been reading us for a while, I don’t think you’ll find much surprising in here. But it’s nice to see some research and data to back up a lot of the instinct we’ve been acting on (and writing about).
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I saw the best garden gnomes of my generation…
I followed links from The Beat to Fantagraphics back to PLOG (The Presspop Blog) just so I can share with you this image of the vinyl sample of the forthcoming Presspop statuette of Jewish beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg.
I desperately want one for my new office.
(I was a totally good kid in high school, but the one time I ever skipped school was to attend one of Ginsberg’s final poetry readings.)
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