by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Friday, February 29th, 2008
Sports Illustrated is covering a story about a boys basketball team that might be forced to end their playoff run because they are shomer shabbat.
If Herzl/RMHA makes it to the regional championship and refuses to play a Saturday game, another school would be chosen to take its place, CHSAA commissioner Bill Reader said.
Earlier this month, the Colorado High School Activities Association, which governs sports and other high school activities, rejected the team’s request for a schedule change.
The State Senate got into the action, too:
Senate President Peter Groff, D-Denver, said the CHSAA’s decision was ironic because it has a rule barring games from being played on Sunday for religious reasons.
Full story here.
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Friday, February 15th, 2008
Props to Hannah Farber over at jspot (Jewish Funds for Justice’s blog) for her short, pithy piece entitled “I’m Going to Count to Three, and Then All Rabbis Need To Get Out Of My Uterus” on the hysteria (pun intended) about Jewish women reproducing, as the RA explains it to make up for the Holocaust.
Since I began working in the Jewish community, I’ve heard this advice again and again, and it never fails to get my ovaries in a twist, not least because of the implied (or explicit) criticism of professional women (never of professional men) who postpone childrearing to accommodate their career goals. I say: if the rabbis are so committed to making this a communal issue, the rabbis should raise the children. In fact, given their comfortable salaries and high communal status, they have no excuse: they should be adopting and converting children by the dozen.
Also contains links to good refutations.
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Monday, February 4th, 2008
Just a public service announcement for those in states with primaries tomorrow — Alabama, Alaska, American Samoa, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, and Democrats abroad — don’t forget to vote!!
You can locate your polling station here.
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Thursday, January 31st, 2008
For anyone looking for some good tunes to snuggle up with during these winter days (even snowing in Israel this week!), soul songster Shir Yaakov has released five albums compiling most of his work to date, including his Musical Midrash project (see Beresheit5764, Vayikra5764, and Bamidbar5764) and newest tracks (see Is he free?) as well as some older work.
Shir Yaakov giving a recent house concert in Italy.
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Monday, January 28th, 2008
Samantha Shapiro of the NYTimes Magazine takes the Hartman decision to ordain women as Orthodox rabbis to the pages of The Slate. (If you’ve never seen the words “achudus ha’am” and “ahavas yisrael” in a mainstream pub, here’s a chance. Also a particularly amusing cartoon of a lady rabbi.) Basically, she, like Rabbi Haviva Ner-David, questions whether this will really make a difference for Orthodox women seeking to be rabbis.
On women becoming non-rabbi spiritual leaders and law-decisors:
These strides are significant, but there’s a question of the trajectory of these quasi-rabbinic roles. A man in any of these women’s positions could expect after a few years of service to be promoted to main rabbi. It’s fairly unlikely, however, that these women’s careers will advance much further. Without an accepted orthodox rabbinic ordination, there is nowhere to be promoted to.
And, on these women’s ability to even remain within the Orthodox movement:
Women who believe so passionately in the divinity of the Torah and its laws that they want to remain in the Orthodox community have to do a difficult dance. If they get rabbinic ordination through Hartman or other institutions, they are likely to move themselves outside of the norms of their communities and not really be able to influence them as a rabbi would—and if they don’t, well, they’re still not rabbis.
Full article here.
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Monday, January 28th, 2008
On New Year’s Day, I was driving back from celebrating with friends at a little cabin in the woods. It was already into the evening when I and my driving buddy hit Connecticut. Temperatures were dropping rapidly, especially from New York state heading north. While driving over a bridge, my car hit a patch of black ice, wobbled, and then headed into a terrifying skid that took us 360 degrees around, over two highway lanes, headlights of the car behind us in our eyes, highway rails glimmering in the peripheral, screaming, until we stopped abruptly facing forward in the righthand lane. Thank God no one was hurt, and no car damage, mostly due to the fact that there were miraculously no cars driving right near us excepting the truck behind us.
We pulled gingerly off the highway and stopped at the next side street. I put my head down on the wheel and said, “Baruch Hashem, baruch Hashem, baruch Hashem,” over and over, like an incantation. As sure as I knew the feel of the seat below me I knew I had been given a miracle.
The following Shabbat, I wanted to bentch gomel, the blessing one who has survived a life-threatening experience (such as illness, pregnancy, or traveling long distances) makes after an aliyah during Torah service following their recovery. The catch was that I was visiting my sister. She and I were both raised in a Reform congregation and both have since come far from it — I to my neo-Chassidic, renewal, traditional, feminist enclave and rabbinic path, and she with an Orthodox husband and part of the Orthodox community of Pittsburgh. Usually, when I visit her, I make an exception to my acting principle that mechitzot = trayfe for my davenning so we can all be together. However, this Shabbat, I would not have been able to have an aliyah to bentch gomel at her shul, and so she and I went to the Conservative shul near her.
Now, I honestly don’t spend a lot of time in synagogues, but especially not in smaller cities since I’ve always lived in big cities. In the winter, when presumably the cold keeps people from trudging out to services on Shabbat, this shul combines their library minyan with their regular congregation and has one combined service–albeit still only around 40 people by Torah reading.
The gabbai came up to us when we got there to welcome us and wish us Shabbat shalom, at which point I mentioned that I would like to bentch gomel. He was really sweet about it, asked if I was all right, and set about getting me an aliyah. Someone would come and let me know which it was, he said. My sister and I found siddurim, chumashim, and took our seats. A few minutes later, the other gabbai came over and told me that I would have the fifth aliyah.
He also handed me one of those lacey doilies old ladies wear in shul and a bobby pin. More »
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
Leonard Nimoy, who
brought Star Trek the priestly blessing before becoming an art photographer (including
“The Shekhina Project”) has just released a
new photography book using large women models to replicate famous fashion and art photographs.
I began to become conscious of this question of body size and body image in our culture. I became more aware of what we’re bombarded with in magazines, newspapers and television commercials — “Lose 10 pounds in three weeks! Eat and be thin!” It’s incredible if you stop and think about it. I found this burlesque group in San Francisco called the Fat-Bottom Review. I made arrangements to photograph them in San Francisco and then again in Los Angeles.
Catch his interview here.
(And do look at that link for the priestly blessing; I didn’t know there was a whole ring of “TrekJews”, and the link is to an excerpt from the upcoming Jewish Themes in Star Trek… just not my world…)
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Sunday, December 16th, 2007
Shir-Yaakov (center) making some music with the fine folks last year at Isabella Freedman.
Giving some props to everyone’s favorite wandering Jewsician Rabbi Shir-Yaakov Feinstein-Feit for his new recordings, done this month out west (not yet mixed but on their way). Let me tell you folks, they sound even better when performed live in a cabin in the woods with some magical Chanukah lights in the background and a whole bunch of back to the earth Jews with guitars and djembes. Stay tuned to Jewschool for more info on the new album, coming soon.
Adam Olam Katan (My personal favorite)
I’m Here
Or Zarua
Waterfall/Firefly
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
The Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the largest award of its kind ($100,000) announced yesterday its five finalists for 2008 year.
They are:
• Ilana M. Blumberg for Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books
• Eric L. Goldstein for The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity
• Lucette Lagnado for The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit:
My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World
• Michael Makovsky for Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft
• Haim Watzman for A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel’s Rift Valley
“The five finalists have been selected by an anonymous panel of distinguished judges drawn from the literary and academic community. The names of the judges will be released upon the announcement of the Winner. An awards ceremony will be held this spring. Authors were selected based on their demonstration of a fresh vision and evidence of future potential to further contribute to the Jewish literary community.
The inaugural Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature was awarded last year to fiction writer Tamar Yellin for The Genizah at the House of Shepher (Toby Press). The prize considers fiction and non-fiction in alternating years. The prize honors an emerging author in the field of Jewish literature who has written a book of exceptional literary merit that stimulates an interest in themes of Jewish concern,” according to a press release sent to Jewschool.
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Sunday, December 9th, 2007
Christian Newswire tells us the real meaning of Chanukah, while quoting a rabbi speaking for the charedi Igud HaRabonim/Rabbinical Alliance of America:
Rabbi Yehuda Levin issued the following statement:
Chanukah is not a winter solstice holiday, nor a present exchanging Kwanza lite. The Macabees revolted against the Syrian-Greeks only when they tried to squelch Jewish rituals dealing with modesty, holiness and the service of G-d. It was when the allies of the Syrian-Greeks, upper class socially liberal Jews, known as Hellenists, embraced the attempted abolition of ritual circumcision, Sabbath, and the Holidays and encouraged young Jews to cavort nude in the gymnasiums they built (Gymnos, the Greek word for nude) that the loyal religious Jews defied their “enlightened”, “progressive”, “socially liberal” (read libertine) reprobate brethren and sacrificed their lives to prevent the “Hell”enization of Jewish Holiness. Anyone who is familiar with ancient Greek culture knows about the centrality of homosexuality in their daily lives. It is obvious that what followed the nudity in the gymnasium and the emphasis on the body, was rampant institutionalized homosexuality, which religious Jews have associated with Amalek’s attack on the ancient Jews during their desert sojourn (as stated in the Torah/Bible).
The faithful Jews, willingly martyred themselves to defeat the debauchery of that time both heterosexual and homosexual. Thus Chanukah represents the first ever defeat of a world power’s homosexual agenda!
More »
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Saturday, December 8th, 2007
Photo by Miriam Rubin, posted on Jew and the Carrot
Greetings from the Hazon Food Conference. Your live blog team is furiously typing away between the Latke Vs. Hamentaschen debate and the contra dance.
I came here to the conference not sure what to expect. I had sponsored some friends in Hazon bike rides over the years, had read the Jew in the Carrot occasionally when it linked to Jewschool, but didn’t know exactly what Hazon did. I came because someone donated conference fees for several rabbinical students, because I love hanging out at Izzy F, and because I love food.
What I’ve realized is that I am part of a new movement: the New Jewish Food Movement. I already belong to an organic vegetable coop in Boston, avoid processed foods, buy at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, buy organic as much as I can. I try to buy food and products with good labor records, and I spend hours cooking food in my kitchen in a given week. I grew up picking apples in the fall and hearing stories from my mother about how she would go with her grandfather in a truck out to Western Mass to get vegetables from the farmers for his fruit and vegetable store in Dorchester. Connecting to food just makes sense to me.
Here this weekend are Jewish farmers, chefs, organic entrepreneurs, ritual slaughterers, CSA champions, homesteaders, bobo Whole Foods shoppers, amateur foodies, and everything in between. What we all have in common is that we are concerned with what has happened to our food in the past 50 years: the agribusiness meat producers that now cage animals and pump them full of hormones to prevent them from dying from their living conditions; the destruction of indigenous communities by factory farms’ clear cutting rain forests for monoculture and paying workers slave labor wages; the huge environmental cost of shipping exotic products from around the world; the basic disconnect between people and their food. There’s a palpable excitement here. People can taste the future, and it tastes organic, it tastes local, it tastes healthy and just.
I had wondered, honestly, about whether this food movement could really take hold. Having done work in the labor movement and having studied poverty in America, I couldn’t help but think how Whole Foods and the like are way out of many people’s price range. Chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns restaurant addressed the question of sustaining the organic food market this way: one person asked during his talk, in a rather roundabout way, how could people afford to eat organic and local on a daily basis.
“You’re really asking am I an elitist snob, aren’t you?” The woman answered “no…”
“The answer is yes, I am an elitist snob. I realize that many people cannot afford to buy this food. But I’m not trying to reach them. I’m trying to reach the people who think that they can’t afford to buy it, but who really can. More »
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Friday, December 7th, 2007
The snow is falling here in Falls Village, CT over a gorgeous frozen lake. The food, of course, is fabulous, as would befit the Hazon Food Conference. Highlights have included feta stuffed salmon, fresh made goat cheese, and vegetables all grown at the Adamah farm up the road.
In case you were worried you’d miss all the fun, or in case you were one of the dozens on the waitlist for the conference, your live blog team YehuditBrachah, Kol Ra’ash Gadol, and Kung Fu Jew are on the job.
Over the course of this weekend, we will keep you updated on the various goings-on that we think would interest the Jewschool community. Some of these have already included the Rubashkin scandal and kashrut ethics, environmentalism, food sustainability, and new developments in the eco-kashrut movement. We wanted to make sure to get in a dispatch before Shabbat.
First of all, the goats are dead. More on that later.
The sun is beginning to set behind the four foot tall recycled vegetation menorah set up outside. (KRG: This sounds kind of goofy, but it’s actually really beautiful…) We have to run off to get ready for Shabbat — to be in time for candle-lighting with Rabbi Steve Greenberg — but we promise to return motzei shabbat with reflections on the various speakers, organizations, and this growing food justice community.
Also, the goats.
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
Seen at a New York City grocery store:
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Sunday, November 25th, 2007
Starting to think about your summer plans? Here are two suggestions:
National Havurah Committee Summer Institute
If you were thinking about submitting a course proposal to teach during this summer’s Institute, they are due tomorrow (11/26). You get to attend the Institute for free as a teacher, minus your NHC membership dues ($40). If you are an artist, applications to be one of two Poretsky Artists in Residence are due December 4. Stay tuned for Everett Fellowship information once it becomes available later in the winter, allowing 20s and 30s Jewish leaders to attend for majorly discounted cost. August 11-17, 2008 at Franklin Pierce College, Rindge NH.
Yeshivat Hadar
If you want to spend some time in serious text and spiritual study this summer, there’s no place better in my opinion than Yeshivat Hadar. They’ve just opened application for this coming summer. Now entering its second year, the program is from June 1 – July 26, 2008 and boasts some of the greatest young minds of the traditional egalitarian world — Shoshana Cohen, Rabbi Shai Held, Rabbi Amy Kalmanofsky, Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, Sara Labaton, and Rabbi Ethan Tucker. Courses ranges from Talmud to Rashi to Halachah to Midrash, liturgy skills to Chassidut. Participants are subsidized, so you could actually afford to do it. This is the perfect program if you’re looking to finally make some headway in your text skills, to skip a preparatory year of rabbinical school or prepare for PhD work that involves Jewish texts, or simply to spend eight weeks for their own sake immersed in study. They are having an intro evening of learning in New York City on January 16, 7-9 pm, at West End Synagogue, 190 Amsterdam Ave, which will be the site of the program.
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Friday, November 23rd, 2007
Apropos of Kol Ra’ash Gadol’s recent post, here’s a little update on Rabbi Morris Allen and the exciting Heksher Tzedek initiative, which was prompted by Allen’s investigation of the Rubashkin’s plants. (Again, see Jewschool coverage of Heksher Tzedek here.)
The Nathan Cummings Foundation has just awarded Heksher Tzedek a major one-year grant, which means that the dream of having food justice in the Jewish community (and far beyond it) is that much closer to becoming a reality.
The horrible conditions in the Rubashkin plants in 2006 prompted Allen to try to do something about the seeming contradiction between kosher food and justice — a contradiction that shouldn’t exist, according to Allen. He writes on his blog,
We need to be in a world where we can say that keeping kosher is the way in which I demonstrate not only a concern for my relationship to God and Torah but the Jewish concern for our relationship to the world in which we live. That’s what I really want to get across to people.
Heksher Tzedek aims to award hekshers to companies that follow a (in-development) set of justice requirements about worker rights, safety, animal treatment, etc for food products. I had the pleasure of hearing from Rabbi Allen a few weeks ago at Hebrew College, and he is probably one of the most inspiring and brave rabbis working today, for taking on the massively powerful kashrut industry that really does have the power to ruin a person if they want to. He said,
Kosher food should be the kind of food that elevates a sense of kedushah, and when you discover that things are the very opposite of that, you have to respond. …Something is wrong when the smoothness of an animal’s lung is more important that the condition of the workers.
When Rabbi Allen was investigating, he spoke with a number of workers at the Rubashkin plants. One story was particularly moving. He sat down with a man who worked the line and asked him, “What is it like to work in a plant that produces our food?” The man was visibly startled at the question, and then touched.
“You know,” he said, “I have sat next to a rabbi [monitoring the line] for over ten years, and this is the first time any rabbi has asked me what it’s like for me to work here.”
These are the kind of efforts in the Jewish community that I want to be part of. From strength to strength, Heksher Tzedek.
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Sunday, November 18th, 2007
Okay, so this new magazine just came out. It’s called Jewish Living.
Over here at Jewschool we had a little debate about the magazine, because we got a press release about its launch from the publisher. And frankly, the release makes most of us cringe. Noteable quotables from it:
For the first time ever, a smart, stylish and thoroughly modern magazine will celebrate Jewish home, family and cultural life. *Jewish Living* takes the focus off of religion and places it squarely on the cultural. And in doing so, it seeks to acknowledge and enrich the changing lives of modern Jewish women and their families.
Er… wait, modern Jewish women don’t want to get all bogged down in stuff like religion and politics, so let’s give them recipes?
The concept came to Zimerman, a former senior creative advertising executive at Foote Cone Belding, one wintry Toronto afternoon while making what would prove to be a life-changing stop by a newsstand. “There was an abundance of red and green magazine covers touting the joys of Christmas. I thought ‘Where are all the dreidels? Where are the latkes?’” said Zimerman. “It wasn’t the first time I felt like the only boy without a Christmas tree, but it was certainly the first time I decided to do something about it.”
Wait, the magazine is in response to being jealous that there isn’t a bunch of Chanukah crap all over North American consumer outlets to the same degree there is Christmas crap?
Relocating to New York with his family, including wife and *Jewish Living* Creative Director Carol Moskot, Zimerman designed the magazine to offer inspirational style ideas and practical, how-to information on a wide range of topics. *Jewish Living* aims to make each day more meaningful, functional and beautiful for its targeted demographic of affluent and influential readers…. Headquartered in New York City, *Jewish Living* targets a well-educated urban professional woman between the ages of 25-54 with a median household income of over $125,000.
Ohhhhh, it’s about living a beautiful rich mildly Jewish life without being bogged down with religion or politics. I get it. How narrow-minded and ridiculous!
Or at least, that was the general take on the press release.
BUT. More »
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Wednesday, October 17th, 2007
An interesting piece in the Jerusalem Post this month about the development of the Hebrew alphabet: as opposed to the Phoenician system of lettering, the Hebrews developed vowels, which allowed people to read out loud their texts, contributed to the spreading of the Bible, and the lasting impact of Judaism. Also, we loved it so much we named our god after the achievement.
In short, the patriarch, matriarch, and deity of the Hebrews all get their names by adding a heh to convert otherwise common words into special ones. The Hebrews used their vowel-letters not just to make writing possible, but to create their most important names.
In addition to ?LHYM, we find a second, four-letter name for God, the tetragrammaton (which means “four-letters” in Greek). The four letters are yud, heh, vav, heh. Common pronunciations such as “Yahweh” or “Jehovah” miss the point. What really matters here is the remarkable fact that this name consists entirely of the Hebrews’ newly invented vowel letters, each included once, with the particularly special heh repeated.
The tetragrammaton is unique in ancient Hebrew, in that its pronunciation seems divorced from its spelling. It also seems to lack any plausible etymology, and is unattested in similar ancient languages. Now we know why. The Hebrews paid homage to the vowel letters that made it possible to spread the Word of God by using those letters to refer to God.
Full article.
by YehuditBrachah [➚] · Sunday, October 14th, 2007
Over at Nextbook, one woman’s musings about the role of The Jewish Catalog (the first, need you ask?) in her life and on her parents’ shelf.
I like the way she describes the ubiquitous nature of The Jewish Catalog.
““On the ‘hip’ level,†she told me recently, “we were probably down in the negative range.â€
But some things were, perhaps, unavoidable then, like inane news about Lindsay Lohan is today. By the time I was born in 1975, our house was punctuated with little emblems of the era; these shone for me like beacons. Despite my parents’ heavy Neil Diamond predilection, for instance, some Joan Baez and Simon and Garfunkel albums seemed to have fallen from a planet of fairies into our living room. My parents had chunky macramé plant hangers and trippy Marimekko hangings on the wall. And on their bookshelf was an oversized red volume called The Jewish Catalog.
The Jewish Catalog, a 320-page tome first published in 1973, was not necessarily a hippie artifact. But it had a profound effect on me growing up that I associated with hippie culture, subtly signaling that Judaism, like life, was a sort of groovy pursuit to be embarked upon however you wished.”
I had a similarly surprising experience while searching through my bubbie’s shelves a few years ago for a siddur; I found two copies of Gates of Repentance with High Holiday tickets from 1973 and, you guessed it, an original copy of The Jewish Catalog. My bubbie was even farther from the world of happy hippies and their handmade kippot; she was the one yelling at my mother to be in by 11pm when she was in college and at my father to cut his hair and get a job.
About integrating past experience with Judaism with a do-it-yourself spirit:
“Most of their friends had copies of The Jewish Catalog, and for my mother, it was a user-friendly guide to a Jewish life she had never actually lived. Suddenly making Shabbat dinners, she mined it for recipes and information on the order of blessings. Celebrating holidays other than Passover and Rosh Hashanah, she consulted it for instructions on how to, say, decorate a sukkah. For my yeshiva-educated father, who was well acquainted with much of the information contained in the Catalog, it was meaningful in a different way. Like many kids who grew up Orthodox in the generation following the Holocaust, he’d grown up thinking Judaism was a strict, dour affair, but the catalog was evidence to him that in fact it could be fun. Together, my parents used it to help craft an earnest, positive Jewish household. And when I discovered it on their bookshelf, The Jewish Catalog let me believe that somewhere out there beyond the cut lawns and latticework sidewalks of suburban Chicago was an even greater Jewish fantasy world where everyone really did sit around crocheting yarmulkes and sewing needlepoint challah covers, and they looked really happy doing it. Jews looking happy being Jewish. Amazing.”
What will our generation of thinkers and innovators’ contribution to this spirit be? Will it be a book? Will it be havurot that last? Will it be our blogs? And can this maybe move from fantasy to reality (or has it already done so)?
Full article here.
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