The following statement was released by the Society for Jewish Ethics on January 13, 2020 By seeking to subvert the results of a free and fair election, by repeatedly lying to his supporters concerning that election, and by inciting an insurrection, Donald Trump has betrayed his oath of office and is clearly...
[This is the second of a series of posts on nonviolence in Exodus. The first one, by Aron Wander, is here.] This article is an adaptation of a drash given to the Shtibl community over Zoom on January 9, 2021. With the book of Exodus, a new hero bursts onto the narrative...
guestpost by Aron Wander Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines. – James Scott, Weapons of the Weak This past August, an exhibit titled “Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust” opened at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London. The Senior Curator, Barbara Warnock, explained: Sometimes the view that people have is that the...
What to do with Hanukah? (Spoiler alert—its actually about Diaspora.) Hanukah lives in the sweet spot where there is one story which claims that it is “historically true” and yet there is very little contemporary evidence to back this up—the earliest account being written generations after the events—and there is another story,...
Scroll through the hundreds of cartoons that Jason Adam Katzenstein has drawn and posted on his popular Instagram account and you’ll quickly notice a theme. There’s an executioner lying in bed, trying to remember if he locked his dungeon. A happy-looking chess piece on Zoloft. A fire hydrant worrying that everyone hates...
The author, the National Jewish Educator for Avodah, originally wrote this for the Avodah Service Corps. The Festival of Sukkot is about closure. It arrives dramatically as the culmination of not one but two holiday cycles, the Three Pilgrimage Festivals, and the High Holidays. Every time the Torah lists the pilgrimage festivals,...
Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature, Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, and Director of the Graduate Certificate program in Translation Studies at the University of Southern California Thought I saw an eagle But it might have been a vulture, I never could decide. Leonard Cohen, “Story of...
Yesterday I was floored by the callous disregard for justice – no, I’m used to that. What I was floored by was its blatentness. To have the only charges be for the walls of the neighbors’ apartments, and none for the senseless and terrible death of Breonna Taylor. At this time of...
The Torah gives just one unique commandment for Rosh HaShanah, to hear the sound of the Shofar, producing that raw, emotionally complex, array of sounds that evoke: the summoning of courage for dangerous battle (such as before Jericho’s walls came a-tumbling down), the awe accompanying realization of the implications of freedom and...
Worried about where the Kyle Rittenhouses and white militias/vigilantes will take us? Or maybe worse, are you not worried about it, thinking (hoping) it’s just a small group of people who will always be on the margins? No matter where you come down, it is worth all of us focusing for a...