Above, the Chilean Federation of Jewish Students protests discrimination.
Over at New Voices Magazine (my day job), we launched a new blog this week that Jewschoolers might be interested in. It’s called the Global Jewish Voiceand it’s a way to jump-start a wider conversation that we normally have at New Voices. While New Voices is normally American or Israeli (and occasionally Canadian) in scope, the Global Jewish Voice is a fully international conversation about the lives of Jewish students and young adults.
The blog is staffed by 10 writers reporting on their lives on campus, in the workplace and at home. They are writing in from every corner of the globe, including Israel, the US, Chile, Spain, China, Canada, the UK and–no joke–Serbia. The blog’s student editor is based in Portland, Ore. There’s also an open submission policy.
A few highlights so far:
Reporting from the West Bank, Liran Shamriz describes the constant dilemma of being an army soldier and same-time sociology student:
This could quickly turn to riots – we need to get the hell out of here. We don’t even have bulletproof vests – any jerk in the street can knife me and disappear. I started to walk toward the trucks and my phone blinks again, this time from a Facebook message: “Shlomo gave us grades! I got a 91! I think he is good after all, he probably didn’t even check that well… how much did you get?”
Meanwhile in Chile, sometimes the struggle is more symbolic of living Jewishly in a non-Jewish world. University student Maxamilliano Grass is on the vanguard of Jewish student activism and pro-Israel work in a country with 75,000 Jews—and over 400,000 Palestinians: More »
My first post at Jewschool was about being a Jew from Texas. Finally–now that I’ve lived in New Jersey for nearly four years and I’m getting ready to graduate and move somewhere other than my hometown of Austin–it seems that Jewish life in Austin is beginning to diversify.
I started thinking about this when I got an email from Mike Wachs, founder of Austin’s very own, brand-spanking-new local jewblog, Git Nu. It’s got a pretty daring design. Each post has an image. Mouse-over and of the images and the text of the post displays, and click on the image and you go through to the post.
So far, there aren’t so many posts. With the help of a grant from the Jewish Federation of Greater Austin, Mike is just getting Git Nu off the ground. Here’s part of what he said in his email:
I’ve started a small, alternative outlet for Jewish Culture in Austin and just wanted to say hi. The site is called Git Nu and while there have only been a few outside contributions so far, the initial response seems to be one of excitement.
If you have any advice on soliciting content, building community, leading the discussion–in a general sense–or any other topics, any help would be much appreciated.
According to my mom’s boyfriend–he’s on the board of the Austin fed–Austin is the fastest-growing city in American for 20- and 30-somethings. He says that’s not a percentage, but in sheer numbers. So more people means more Jews. And more young Jews means more diverse offerings in the Jewish community in Austin.
At least, in theory. I haven’t seen a whole of evidence of it yet, but Git Nu looks like an indicator.
That’s right, folks. You heard it here first. (Well, actually, you heard it at JTA first.)
Birthright Israel said it has received a record-breaking number of North American applicants for its free, 10-day trips to Israel.
The organization, which provides all-expense-paid trips to Israel for Diaspora Jews aged 18 to 26, received 40,108 applicants during the seven-day registration period ending Tuesday
Israel’s Minister For Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, Yuli Edelstein, called it “the most successful project in the Jewish world.”
[Emphasis mine, obviously.] JTA’s full story is here.
That’s quite a claim. I dunno how the actual founding of the state doesn’t take top honors there, but I’ll leave it to the bloviation specialists at Birthright and in the Israeli government to duke it out over that.
To explain the “big-deal-ness” of this to non-Jews: just mention that Vice President Biden spoke, and they raise their eyebrows, as if they are impressed, and then squint, saying, “Is he Jewish?”
To stay awake during a session: count the number of times you hear the word “Delegitimization”–you won’t fall asleep, ever.
To be hypocritical: pretend you are an “older” delegate and don’t directly answer any of the questions that students ask during the sessions or workshop.
[...]
To sound like everyone else: use the following catchphrases–”delegitimization,” “conflict,” “framing,” “giving,” “development,” “social media,” “nolaga,” “Israel advocacy,” “Jewish identity,” “generation,” “future.”
All of this had me re-reading all of HP. Re-reading it, combined with my slightly unsatisfactoryrecent experiences in a couple of different New York City prayer communities had me giving serious consideration to a big new project. I’ve also been thinking about less than a year from now when my NJ chavurah is not going to be an option for me every week.
HP paints such a perfect picture for me. The only place I’ve ever been (not that I don’t know of others) that lives up to BZ’s vision of Stage 3 pluralism is Kol Zimrah. KZ meets once a month and only on Friday nights. But I want what is on offer at KZ every Friday night. And then I want it again in the morning. And I want it in a daily minyan. And I want it on holidays. This is a tall order.
So this week, I began starting to think toward creating one more element of this.
For some, like me, what draws them to KZ is the pluralism. I like the singing, but I like the ideas more. However, most of the people who come are probably more drawn in by the singing and spirited atmosphere. The spirited singing is thanks to two liturgical developments. First, we can thank some Medieval Kabbalists for giving us Kabbalat Shabbat. And second, we can thank Shlomo Carelbach for giving us some great tunes to make Kabbalat Shabbat a fun, engaging prayer experience. In essence, KZ without a Carelbach Kabbalat Shabbat would be a shell of itself.
So maybe what we need to create is the same kind of big singing, big fun prayer experience on Shabbat morning.
Luckily, much like Kabbalat Shabbat, we have hefty section of psalms to sing in the morning too! P’sukei D’zimrah usually gets shafted in shul. Most people don’t even show up until its over. It’s also long, so if we actually sang all of it, we wouldn’t be done with services until it’s time for Minchah.
We’ve got tunes for all of these psalms, but some may not work for the kind of spirited experience I’m talking about here. Especially if Carlebach (or Carlebach-esque) music is what is needed, we’re in trouble. For Psalm 150 and for 92 and a few others, we’ve got no problem.
But for some pslams, this will take some work. I chatted with Russ, our chazan (OK, our JTS student chazan, but he’s our chazan) at Chavurat Lamdeinu here in Jersey, about it this morning. I’m a bit melodically-challenged sometimes, so the obvious hadn’t occurred to me. Russ pointed out that Carlebach (and others) have a gazillion nigunim out there that could be laid on top of some of these psalms. This will take some work, but it’s doable.
Of course, as others have pointed out to me as I’ve rambled about this idea off and on this week, there are also some significant practical challenges here. Getting a minyan together on a Shabbat morning is harder than on a Shabbat evening because you need a Torah. You also need people to read Torah. This stuff is infinitely surmountable, but it’s there nonetheless.
The biggest challenge would be time. At its fullest, by my count, P’sukei D’zimrah includes 16 full psalms, the entire Song of the Sea, two prayers and a whole host of ancillary biblical passages. This is a more than twice as much material as Kabbalat Shabbat, which only has 8 psalms and a few extra piyutim/songs (usually between one and three songs, though it depends on who you talk to).
So there would probably need to be cuts. Personally, I’d probably start with the ancillary biblical passages, but I wouldn’t want to make these decisions alone anyway.
There would also have to be some discussion of how to do the rest of the service, with very careful attention paid to the requirements of Stage 3. Issues like the number of aliyot and the triennial cycle would certainly be up for discussion. Other parts of the service would need discussion too, such as the Amidah, where a Heiche Kedushah (leader does Amidah aloud through the Kedushah, everyone continues silently on their own, no leader’s repetition after) would probably merit discussion. And Birkot Hashacar etc, despite being a favorite of mine, would probably be right out because that can all be done at home before arriving or individually by people who arrive early.
That’s about as far as my thinking on this has taken me so far. Thoughts, anyone? Who’s with me?
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).
“There are many ways to have intelligent interfaith conversation, and they don’t always have to take place in a boardroom or office. Sometimes they’re with people you run into on the sidewalk and interact with for five minutes.” — Lilit Marcus
I don’t remember exactly when I actually met Lilit for the first time, though it could possibly have been at that very meetup nearly four (gah!) years ago, at a Kol Zimrah, or other random Jew-y stuff here in NYC. Always was impressed with her wit, her knowledge, her openness, and her writing. Always fun to snarkily break down a stupid argument or to get her clear-eyed insights, especially on faith, religion, spirituality, and a Jewish world she could see with fresh eyes, having not been drowned in NYC Jewyness her whole life. A blast to have a bourbon with as well.
In any case, the J-blogs just got a little less smart last week as Lilit, friend of the blog and former contributor here at Jewschool, parted ways with Jewcy. After helming it through its near-death experience and keeping it alive until it could join forces with our friends at JDub, she was recruited to start something new on the internets. Whatever it is, I’m sure it will be smart and snappy. We wish her all the best!
Her last post as big cheese of Jewcy is here. Good luck finding a replacement, Jewcy, you have some awesome shoes to fill.
Vaguely interested in Jewish innovation but not committed enough to read an entire blog post each day? Have no fear, Jewschoolers, we’re reading Dan Sieradski’s 31 Days, 31 Ideas blog so you don’t have to! Missed our first two summaries? Start here and continue here. Today, I bring you our final round-up. More »
Can’t get enough of the new Jewish ideas flowing forth from our buddy Dan over at 31 Days, 31 Ideas?
Have no fear, the sequel is here: 28 Days, 28 Ideas. I promise you the ideas will be more clever than the naming scheme for these websites.
Same basic premise, only this time the ideas come from Dan’s colleagues (including a few of us here at Jewschool).
I’ve been a little quiet here lately (although not in the comments section!). I’ve been busy with work and school and life and jet-setting (if a day trip to Cherry Hill to teach attendees of the USCJ Biennial Convention how to be nicer to gay people counts as jet-setting). But I’ve also found some time to do a bit of reading. My secret? Google reader and the Barnes & Noble e-reader on my phone make multi-tasking while I poop loads of fun, no pun intended. And audiobooks enliven even my minuscule 15-minute commute.
Anyway, dear Jewschool readers, I figure if you’re here, reading this very blog, then you might also enjoy reading (or listening) to the self-same things I am reading (and listening to). So here’s dlevy’s list of recommended reading (and listening) for the moment.
First, let’s talk about Philip Roth. Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny that his window into the behavior of American Jews in the twentieth century is unique and provocative. I fall into the love him category, although I admit I haven’t read a ton of his work. However, I recently reacquainted myself with the shorts collected in Goodbye, Columbus and Other Stories. I took the audiobook out of the library and have been listening in the car all week. The stories are fantastic, but we know that. The performances here are all equally phenomenal. John “Pippin” Rubinstein, Jerry “I Made Nathan Lane a Star” Zaks, Elliot “I Shtupped Barbra Streisand” Gould, and Theodore “Topol Who?” Bikel each bring their own particular charm to some of Roth’s best. But Harlan Ellison’s rendition of “Defenders of the Faith” elevates the story to new heights. I was totally blown away by his performance, and the way this story of soldiers during WWII came alive through it. I won’t say much more in case some of our readers aren’t familiar with the story, but despite its setting, the issues it raises are still relevant in Jewish communities today. Fantastic.
Outside the world of literature, I’ve found myself visiting and revisiting a bunch of blogs that are worth plugging here.
Eat Me Daily is not a Jewish blog. It is, as you might guess, a food blog. It’s relatively new on the scene – I believe it’s been around for just over a year – but it’s reliably entertaining, with a mixture of original content and links to fun food stories out there in the interwebs. This week two posts in particular caught my Jewy attention: the Cupcake Menorah and Finagle-a-Bagel Webisodes. !בתאבון
Jew Point 0, the blog of Darim Online, features some interesting insights into how Jewish organizations are using internet technology to achieve their goals. The posts can be a little inside baseball, but as I’ve mentioned before, that’s my thing.
jew on this might be best described as the Jewschool of Australia, although that doesn’t really do them justice. Like Jewschool, it’s a group-authored blog from a progressive viewpoint. In their own words, they are “jews who ponder, not just wander. we’re writing about stuff. thinking critically. eating jewishly (because we all know how important food is to jewishness, and we all love that that is so).” Chances are, if you like Jewschool, you’ll like jew on this as well.
Modern Tribe’s Jewish Life and Style has become the blog home of Punk Torah. The blog is a mix of how-to videos (way more entertaining — and accurate — than eHow) and d’vrei Torah on the weekly parsha, with a smattering of other features and the occasional plug for Modern Tribe’s products. Patrick Arthur and friends break down Judaism to make it accessible with a punk rock attitude mixed with southern hospitality. (You can also follow him on Twitter.)
Finally, a blog that I’ve subscribed to with my trusty RSS reader but haven’t had the time to fully explore is The Jewish Writing Project. Envisioned as a place where anyone can share stories about what being Jewish means to them (regardless of how or whether they self-identify as Jewish), the site also has a commitment to quality (that includes an editing process! on the internet! Praise the Lord!) that makes me hopeful.
I’m also gearing up to write my master’s thesis, which looks like it’s going to involve quite a bit of reading about informal Jewish education, technology, modern American-Jewish history, and more, starting real soon. So get ready for some super nerdly over-sharing from me in the coming months.
“IDF: My Job is So Secret, I Don’t Even Know What I’m Doing!”
“Don’t Worry, America, Israel is Behind You”
“Super-Jew”
And of course, rock bands which reached their peak twenty years ago.
Lovitt has a bold plan to combat this sartorial foolishness. Today, he unveiled at his blog, What War Zone?, a new line of tacky Israel shirts.
Today, he posted a video about Sukkot by Globe photographer Joanne Rathe. I don’t think the video will shock anyone here in terms of the information presented, but it was fascinating to me because of the absence of men, despite focusing on an Orthodox family. (I’m making an assumption here based in part on the way the women are dressed.) And I’m pleased that it was presented simply as “a look at the traditions associated with the Jewish holiday of Sukkot as seen through the eyes of a family in Boston” and not “a female perspective on Sukkot.”
Boston’s Federation, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, recently completed a year-long strategic planning process. One of the most palpable new programs to arise in the wake of the strategic plan is an ambitious new website-to-be, JewishBoston.com. The website aims to be a major hub for Jewish communal life in the Greater Boston area, centralizing information from over 500 Jewish organizations and making that information usable to the casual consumer. God bless the folks attempting that project, I sure wouldn’t want that kind of pressure!
The people behind the website have put a lot of effort into community outreach, holding focus groups and open feedback sessions as the plans coalesced. Today, thanks to Twitter, I learned that the Jewish Boston website is live — sort of. While it doesn’t yet feature any of the bells and whistles planned for its proper launch, the folks putting it all together are using the domain for a blog about the process of creating such a gigantic undertaking. So right now, JewishBoston.com is the address for “Building JewishBoston.com – a blog about the development of JewishBoston.com.”
This probably won’t be of interest to many, but for those of us who deal with how Jewish communities communicate and organize information, it’s a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain.
Last night, my Motzei Shabbos plans took me to the cinema, where I saw Julie & Julia. For those of you living outside the world of popular culture, this is a film based on a book based on a blog. The blog was started in late 2002 – just around the time I stopped blogging my first time around – right around the moment when blogging jumped from being a niche phenomenon to a zeitgeist. (Coincidentally, Jewschool launched in December 2002, just a few months later.)
There’s a moment in the film in which Julie’s husband, despairing at the state of their marriage (crumbling under the weight of her cooking/blogging project), asks Julie why she blogs, why this has become so important to her. Julie’s answer had a lot to do with a search for individual identity and voice at a moment in her life when she risked dissolving into her bland, repetitive workaday existence. Last night, listening to this conversation on the big screen, I found myself reflecting on the same question relative to this here blog that you’re reading.
It just so happens that it was the second time in two days that the question had come up for me. On Friday, I had coffee with Ally Berenson, program director of Gesher City Boston. There were two purposes to this meeting. Ally and I were in USY together, so it’s always a pleasure to see each other and catch up. Since we both work in the Jewish community, we inevitably have a lot to talk about, but since I work primarily with teenagers and she works primarily with the 21-35 crowd, our professional lives don’t intersect as often as I might like. However, at the last Jewschool powwow (about a dozen of the editors & contributors got together for a real-life in-person meeting last month), Team Jewschool talked about exploring potential connections Jewschool could and should be making with other organizations out there in the Jewish world. I immediately thought of GesherCity. Now before all you bleeding edge anti-establishment hipsters vomit all over your netbooks, let me explain… More »
Remember when Jay Michaelson declared the death of “Jewish Hipster Cool” in Sh’ma almost two years ago? (The article is old enough that it’s fallen off the bottom of Sh’ma’s own online archives.) Well, apparently nobody told D. G. Myers of Texas A&M (that bastion of Jewish thought), who writes in the latest Commentary a rant against “The Judaism Rebooters” that inspires among us, the accused, nostalgia more than anything else.
The article came to our attention — and here I use “our” to really mean the Jewschool contributors collectively — about a week and a half ago when David A. M. Wilensky forwarded around a brief blurb from Tablet about the article. He titled his e-mail to us “Someone has to have something to say about this.”
It turns out, many of us had something to say, but none of us had much to say… but I’m getting ahead of myself. Read on. More »
At work, I’ve gotten the reputation of being one of the more technology-minded folks in the building. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m an early adopter, or a digital native, or simply younger than the rest of the folks around, but I tend to get called into meetings to help brainstorm how the interwebs might help or hinder any given project. Lately, I’ve been part of an ad hoc team convened by our marketing department to consider how we could better use social networking tools to publicize community programs and generate leads for our academic programs. (Being part of this team has lead to my late adoption of twitter… if anyone wants to watch me take my fumbling first steps, you can follow me here.)
Thinking more critically about how the college can engage with the community online has heightened my awareness of how others are using technology in interesting ways. Today, my attention was grabbed by Rhonda Moskowitz, a filmmaker working on a documentary about Jews in prison. She describes her film thus:
Modern-day Jewish prisoners are a hidden and ostracized segment of our nation’s Jews. Many people in our society aren’t even aware of their existence. It’s a startling concept and one that’s difficult for people to face, especially Jews.
TESHUVA (RETURN) brings the subject of Jewish prisoners into public awareness and humanizes Jews who have gone astray. We can learn a lot about ourselves by studying the lives of others. Viewers may be surprised to discover that the film’s subjects, Dana and Phil, despite having committed crimes, are more like themselves than they realize.
As one might imagine, financing an independent documentary about anything these days is difficult. Financing an independent documentary about a subgroup within a minority community — and a subgroup that community is unlikely to want on display — is an uphill struggle. So, like many other independent artists, Rhonda has taken to the internet to raise money for her film.
However, Rhonda hasn’t simply set up a virtual pushke and hoped for the best. Rather, Rhonda has set up a blog which offers fascinating insights into her process and the stories she’s hoping to tell.
This week, Rhonda shared two captivating film clips of Passover seders taking place inside prisons. How does one celebrate freedom behind bars? Follow the link to find out. And then read on for thoughts on Hanukkah on Death Row, what the families of prisoners go through, and more.
So I grew up in an atmosphere in which working to make the world a better place (in Hebrew, tikkun olam—”the healing of the world”) wasn’t just a virtue; it was an imperative.
I am therefore somewhat ambivalent about having gone into the theater; in a way, the fact that I’m not in a third-world country working to create food distribution systems makes me feel like a moral failure. (When I’m at my most self-loathing, I say, “My parents secured black people the franchise, and I write pretty music that makes upper-middle-class white people feel nice.”)
But my self-loathing aside, the fact is that theater does have the power to inspire its audience to tikkun olam; actually, we seem to be getting closer to measurable evidence that it does. more
I’m a big proponent of the need for art, even (or perhaps especially) in times of crisis when art feels like the farthest thing from a priority. But can it be tikkun olam? Read the entire post and see if you’re convinced.
Here’s an excerpt from 
June 19th is celebrated across the United States and around the world as 
Jew Point 0
jew on this
Modern Tribe’s Jewish Life and Style
Finally, a blog that I’ve subscribed to with my trusty RSS reader but haven’t had the time to fully explore is 
Last night, my 
As one might imagine, financing an independent documentary about anything these days is difficult. Financing an independent documentary about a subgroup within a minority community — and a subgroup that community is unlikely to want on display — is an uphill struggle. So, like many other independent artists, Rhonda has taken to the internet to raise money for her film.
Joel Derfner, author of 
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