We’re facing a humanitarian and moral crisis right now because of our country’s immigration policies. Don’t be fooled by the executive order that the president
After the Exodus, Torah was revealed at Sinai, and our ancestors had to figure out how their lives would be different after their liberation from
Instead of retreating from the needy among us in fear, Purim mandates that we instead stretch out our hands and create connection.
This year, we must think carefully about Tu BiShvat’s call. We must think about all of those in our sightlines who are being prevented from planting their roots, the ones who are being denied the most essential human experience of building something permanent, of building something that is forever.
Willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice is, indeed, a Jewish sensibility. However, it is a sensibility that is carefully limited.
Welcome to the Queer Mikveh Project, a documentary film and project asking why mikveh, a Jewish ritual of water immersion, is not more accessible to queer and trans people. The project aims to reframe who gets to do mikveh and how, document queer mikveh projects that currently exist and create more opportunities for engaging in this powerful ritual.
These two texts challenge us to pay close attention to the power dynamics involved in a hegemonic body adopting cultural products of a subordinate group. Sometimes erasure comes through restricting the minority practice of its own culture, as in Antiochus’s later persecution, which we marked on Chanukah. But sometimes erasure comes through cultural appropriation, depending on a subordinate group to create culture, and then taking it and turning it from culture to artifact, from lifeline to epitaph.
This Hanukkah, I pray to also learn from those who remind us that the impossible is possible bazman hazeh, in this, our time.
How can we broading the Channukah story and learn about other ways to respond to oppression besides the violent resistance of the Maccabees?
As we light the Channukah candles this year, may we celebrate our own liberation and reflect on how we wield our power as Jews.