October 21, 2022

Cheshvan

Hello all! Welcome to the first real monthly issue of weird jewish digest! This is all in trial mode still. Let me know what you think!

Content notes include: genocide, antisemitism, anti-Palestinian violence, and probably some other rough topics in the links themselves.

Jewish Calendar

Before the next time I send out an email on November 18th, we'll go through the following parts of the weekly torah reading cycle:

• 10/22 Bereshit / בְּרֵאשִׁית from last year and from two years ago

• 10/29 Noach / נֹחַ from two years ago (last year I took the week off). See also: tower of babel thread from Ari Lamm this past August

• 11/5 Lech-Lecha / לֶךְ־לְךָ from last year and from two years ago

• 11/12 Vayera / וַיֵּרָא from last year and from two years ago

I also appreciated this piece about tzimtzum from Akiva Weisinger's email list. Still very relevant even though we are now past the parsha Vezot Habracha. A key theme in Judaism is aiming for the unachievable, because while you might not get what you are hoping to accomplish, perhaps your successor will.

Cheshvan

There's no holidays in cheshvan. Honestly after the month we've all had this feels like a relief. Whether you were observing the holidays, or isolated from them for reasons outside your control, or both (like me!), it's been quite a time!

Weird Jews: it's always been difficult outside the norm

I still haven't read Emily Tamkin's book Bad Jews (sorry, Emily! I'll get there!), but I continue to enjoy its blog-based book tour, including the history of our in-community divides and jews pointing fingers at each other, and the conversations bubbling up in its wake. The main thing I want to discuss today about this is the role of institutional Judaism in codifying jewish culture and norms. Tamkin says in her JTA interview:

American Jewish institutions tend to be more conservative than American Jews at large. Which is fine, except to the extent that these same organizations, the same donors, purport to speak for all American Jews — which they don’t and in fact can’t because it’s such a pluralistic set of communities.

This week also saw the posting of Allen Lipson's history of Jewish Theological Seminary, The Sanitizing of Conservative Judaism, about how big-C-Conservative judaism plays centrist to try and keep little-c-conservative jewish organizations happy. Like many big-name philanthropists, Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall wanted Jews to be more civilized (read: american, assimilated, unaccented speakers of english), and wanted American rabbis to model this. Thus, their funding of JTS was conditional (explicitly or implicitly) on moving it to a richer neighborhood, requiring a bachelors' degree for entry, and denying smicha (ordination) to students that still spoke in accented english two years in, for instance.

I grew up going to a Conservative synagogue and it's still the mainstream Jewish institutional culture I'm most familiar with--the compulsory zionism, the space for halachic observance without making it obligatory, the debates over playing instruments during services, the whole shabang. What I was less familiar with was the role of these hyper-rich individuals in the early days of the movement, steering it to intentionally be more assimilatory, "to smooth out the rough edges of a Jewish community teeming with recent immigrants."

Now, the story we are told about the founding of the main American streams of Judaism is that first, the old yiddish speakers came, and practiced what we now call Orthodox judaism. Then, people went "no! we should assimilate and be American, not just Jewish!" and declared themselves Reform. Then, some rabbis were invited to a Reform event that had shellfish and pork on the menu, went "what is this goyishe bullshit", and went on to found the Conservative movement. There are facts, lies, and oversimplifications in this story. One of the oversimplifications is that this was just a natural easy cause-and effect, that these three movements arranged themselves on a neat continuum of all-assimilation to all-traditional and that these are naturally the only ways to be jewish. Sometimes, if your teacher is particularly dedicated, reconstructionist judaism might get a place to the left of reform judaism, without really being defined or explained.

I know by now from my reading and conversations that worlds of judaism have existed outside these boundaries, outside these synagogues, in living rooms, in union halls, in delicatessens, and more. But we even have synagogues outside synagogues, and always have.

Yesterday, a tweet about mushroom synagogues floated by my feed and paralyzed me in thought for a few minutes. It turns out mushroom synagogue is a pejorative term used in the early 1900s for a shul that pops up solely for providing high holy days services. All kinds of mainstream synagogues railed against these, going so far as seeing them as a threat to jewish existence. While most arguments against them I've seen were from orthodox groups, United Synagogue of America, now known as the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, did as well not too long after the two named philanthropists were steering the political direction of JTS.

I am aware that the mushroom trend included actual scammers who lied about being rabbis, but some pieces remain unclear--was it only scammers? Because without any lie, these are not the "sham services" mainstream synagogues claim. These are lay-led community services for those who can't afford the costs of a standard synagogue (proof that once again we are having the same arguments about jewish community endlessly).

In 1934, a New York state law was signed outlawing counterfeit religious congregations on the basis of lies--and that same year the Jewish Daily Bulletin had an article about how there was a "loophole" to the law: if they cannot prove it's a moneymaking exercise by design or that people are lying about their credentials, they cannot shut the place down.

At what point does starting a synagogue outside the mainstream's borders count as a mushroom or a fake synagogue and when is it just another type of congregation?

When is a Jew you disagree with a "bad jew" or a "fake jew", and who gets to decide this?

Which brings me to the uncomfortable last part of this essay. As a friend of mine pointed out, classic mushroom shitpost you cannot kill me in any way that matters is also, during rough times, a very jewish sentiment. Our discussions about assimilation are all shaded in trauma and survival. The Jewish Question is not just about the extermination stage of genocide. It's about how do we exist as citizens of a place? How much should people be obligated to fit in, how much distinctiveness assimilated away? How much of our difference, how many of the uncomfortable outside-the-norm pieces, need to be sanded off, discarded, ignored rather than maintaining spaces for them?

The article about JTS mentions both Schiff and Marshall referred to assimilation as their solution to the Jewish Question--though this was obviously before the shoah and its conflation with the JQ concept--with the aim of removing both the socialist leftist tendencies and the more old-country observances of the then-recent wave of immigrants. The aims of many institutions today have barely changed. As long as a few hyperrich philanthropists are making the decisions about community direction, us weird jews will suffer--until and unless we are able to fully exist and participate on our own terms.

Israel and Palestine

Israelis continue to commit horrific violence, politically, economically, and interpersonally, against Palestinians and their allies. I am no expert regarding any of this, but feel it is important as jews to know this is happening and stand against it, particularly as our own american jewish organizations hold silent when it comes to criticizing the right-wing israeli politicians up for election.

On that note, twitter user @Chaiya_Redacted is assembling an antizionist jewish history reading list. Do you have things to add? Reach out to her!

Books and Language

Sacha Lamb's delightful When the Angels Left the Old Country is out! It's got a bunch of starred reviews and a Jewish pet fan. There's also a lovely conversation between Lamb and fellow queer jewish author Aden Polydoros on the Jewish Book Council site.

Another recent release that looks great: Lech by Sara Lippman, the best thing to combine abortion and the borscht belt since Dirty Dancing. Check out the cover design story.

It is, apparently, time to once again anti-recommend the boy in the striped pajamas. I assume everyone subscribing knows why, but if you need a good resource to share or want to learn more, the linked thread goes into the reasons and some better options.

Mordechai Martin's short story Kometz Aleph O, about learning your ancestral tongue through duolingo, gave me so many feelings.

Miscellaneous

This Jews of Arab Lands lecture series has some fascinating-looking talks coming up, as does this JTS series about Judaism and censorship.

Josh Millard's ongoing twitter thread of finishing his grandfather's half-finished stained glass menorah is wonderful. It's fun having a peek into the stained glass creative process, and the way he's figuring out what his grandfather was going for and working out the design schema accordingly is a joy to see.

The next Shel Maala class is It Is In The Heavens: Jewish Astrology in the Talmud and Beyond, learning about jewish astrology from teacher Lexi Kohanski. I have it on good authority that you don't have to know much of anything about astrology or about talmud to sign up--the class provides what you need to know, as long as you know your alef bet!

Let's learn about the Jewish Middle World, the land of shapeshifting supernatural creepy crawlies of legend! Click through for bonus werewolves.

Events!

10/26 Defending Diaspora: How Have Jews Thought About Their Wanderings?

10/26 Mapping the Rabbinic World: Rabbis, Demons, and the Babylonian Talmud from Sara Ronis, author of Demons in the Details

10/30 Music of the Red Scare: A Virtual Concert Featuring Ryan Harvey & Brivele

10/31 Demons in the Talmud: another talk by Sara Ronis

10/31 How To Do Research at YIVO: Accessing Digitized Materials

11/9 Jewish and Indigenous American Interactions Part 2 (recording of part 1) with David S. Koffman

12/4 UW Ladino Day 2022: Past, Present, Future

12/7 Irena Klepfisz: Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021 book talk

And one in person event in Massachusetts because it looks so cool and I wish I could go and it has good covid protection policies:

Jewish Pet of the Week

The Jewish Pet of the Week this week is from a very special therapy cat visit to a nursing home! Ruth loves cats and so, for her 103rd birthday, a friend of the jewsletter pulled some strings to bring her a feline visitor named Lady. Happy birthday Ruth!!

<3

Meli