April 30, 2021

Emor

Hello chaverim! This week’s parsha is Emor. We learn about a bunch of festivals and also how disabled priests can’t offer sacrifices. While reviewing this parsha I ended up on a whole adventure skimming through talmud bavli bekhorot 43-45: why does the torah list these disqualifications like this, for priests and for animals for sacrifice and for firstborn animals? What counts as a disqualifying blemish vs just a way people (or animals) are? There is even discussion of appearance of disqualifying blemish vs presence of it (which makes me want to bring in the Americans with Disabilities Act as a complementary text). What is a disability? We just don’t know, but it’s certainly bound to what role a given person is expected to play in their social context.

There is a lot of potentially upsetting material in the newsletter this week, and I outright skipped a few additional ones I could have included. Content warnings: antisemitism, genocide (shoah/holocaust), antiqueer and antitrans bigotry, racism (including mention of lynching, concentration camps), Israeli apartheid, global pandemic. LOVE TO LIVE IN 2021. IT SURE IS A GREAT TIME.

I’m going to try and include content notes like this weekly from here on out. Let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d like included besides what I think of as “heavy hitters”, and I’ll do my best.

The International Ladies Garment Workers Union used to publish a Yiddish magazine called Justice (Gerechtigkeit), which can now be accessed online thanks to the Yiddish Book Center.

Even though the event ostensibly ended yesterday, you might still be able to watch a selection of films from Miami Jewish Film Festival online. That link is to the nationally available options; readers in florida probably have access to additional content. At time of writing I was able to unlock content to watch over the next couple days.

Sarah Biskowitz interviewed a Sephardic Moroccan Jew living in Paris about her upbringing and her experiences in France.

Unfortunately, COVID19 is hitting Sarajevo hard, including ladino speaking community elders. The Saved By Language documentary on youtube includes info from those ill from the pandemic or recently deceased.

Do you want to learn about the Jews of Bulgaria? Joseph Benatov will teach you over zoom three Wednesdays in May.

Sarah Day has a whole bunch of new and restocked jewelry, including BDS-compliant magen david and hamsa pieces! I am strongly considering a cobalt or moss green mini hand necklace.

Hadar’s Project Zug has their spring class schedule up, including How Do We Increase Peace in the World?: Learning With Sephardi Sages, A Food Tour of the Talmud, and How to Question Authority.

Last week Larry Yudelson wrote about Toratah, the regendered torah project, which is neat if not entirely my gender jam.

Jewitches.com is selling a beautiful tarot inspired card deck featuring art from Ephraim Moses Lilien! The cards are available for purchase and the accompanying booklet is free to download.

dear antivaxxers: please stop with your bad shoah analogies.

Many of the American soldiers who liberated Dachau 76 years ago yesterday were Japanese-Americans who enlisted directly from the American internment camps, and that’s only one of the fraught connections between historical and present anti-Asian racism and antisemitism.

Relatedly, this short piece about intergenerational trauma from the perspective of Schroedinger’s Cat wrecked me. It is not technically itself jewish but it is relevant to judaism. Thank you, Jonny Sun, my feelings will never recover.

Who wants to read a f/f rabbi mystery novel?

There’s a whole bunch of responses to the controversial Jewish Currents opinion article on antisemitism, including Rachel Ida Buff at Jewschool’s piece on the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB) which fought against deportations and McCarthyism, Ben Lorber’s excellent response, and Jewish Currents’ own Letters to the Editor roundup.

Yeshiva University is being sued over whether they have to support a lgbtq+ student club. If you register as secular for funding purposes you gotta not discriminate against us gays just like a secular school.

Trans scholar Jules Gill-Peterson wrote in Jewish Currents about the roots of this contemporary anti-trans bigotry through the frame of one bill in particular, North Dakota House Bill 1476, touching on christian hegemony, Marx’s The Jewish Question, the politics of protecting innocent white children, and more.

The same week, two names I recognize, one for excellent work elucidating anti-lgbtq bigotry (Heron Greenesmith) and one for excellent writing on contemporary antisemitism (Ben Lorber), wrote this deeply informative article about antisemitism and transphobia’s relationship. Together they explain the ways white supremacist conspiracy theories involve trans people and jews and the massive crossover there.

I wish these articles weren’t relevant to our times. Sometimes when I read these things I despair about it, and other times I am tempted in the direction of slur reclamation: “fine. my rootless cosmopolitan transgender ass DOES have horns. i AM a lizard person. look at me controlling the media with my secret cabal.” I do not think think this is quite what Mariame Kaba meant when she said “let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair”, but I’m going with it anyway.

https://twitter.com/rabbisandra/status/1388099884704804870

Human Rights Watch put out a report explaining how Israel is committing apartheid against Palestinians. “The fictional claims that HRW concocted are both preposterous and false,” said the Israeli Foreign Ministry, saying nothing about the nonfictional claims, which I imagine comprise most of the report. On a less glib note, the report could be a good educational resource for both people (like me) who aren’t super current in their knowledge or people learning about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians for the first time, and Jewish Currents’ newsletter about it points out that Israeli human rights organizations B’Tzelem and Yesh Din recently admitted the same.

Noah Tamarkin’s book Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa is 1) included in the Duke University Press 50% off sale, 2) having a book launch event next Tuesday 5/4

The rest of that Rashbi story, if you’re curious.

JewishLIVE / Judaism Unbound has an all-day Shavuot experience again with a fantastic lineup. If you know of another tikun leil shavuot or other online event, let me know and I’ll link to it along with the ones i already have in my list below!

Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) has a great webpage teaching women to leyn megillat ruth, as it’s traditionally read on shavuot. They are also organizing a online reading of it on May 13th.

Shabbat is an idea whose time has come back around, particularly for leftists. I have not yet watched this talk about class conscious shabbat but based on the summary twitter thread from the speaker I am very excited to. There is also this essay on shabbat as anticapitalist, which was posted yesterday on the New Voices blog, exploring the relationship between capitalism, timekeeping, and productivity, including a look at how jewish workers over time have reckoned with shabbat.

EVENTS!

5/1 Yiddish May Day Shabes from Boston Workers Circle. Program is in yiddish with translation into english.

5/2 Yakov Rabkin teaching Jewish Messianism in the Face of Crises in the 1930s Hishbati info, register here

5/2 Queer Jews: A 20th Anniversary Symposium in Memory of David Shneer, a 20 years later event about an anthology

5/2-5/3 Jewish Psychedelic Summit

5/3 Jewish Currents in Conversation with Time To Say Goodbye! White leftist jews and leftist asian americans “discuss the possibilities of diasporic internationalism against the backdrop of US imperial decline.”

5/3 Queer Yiddishkeit symposium. Register here.

5/4 From Interfaith Family to the Rabbinate: Three Communal Leaders’ Jewish Journeys

5/4 Book launch event for Noah Tamarkin’s Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa

5/5 The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: Dina Danon in Conversation with Devin E. Naar

5/6 Nostalgia & Reality: Black & Jewish Relationships in the 1960s and Beyond

5/6 Musical Conversation About Shared Melodies of Greece, Iraq and Sephardic Traditions

5/6 Reflections of a Muslim Scholar Studying Halakha, a talk from Rabea Benhalim, Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Law School

5/9 A Virtual Coffeehouse in Twentieth-Century Cairo with Dr. Alon Tam, $32

5/12 UW Sephardic Experiences of Modernity Colloquium, including The Ladino Press: Using Machine Learning to Excavate Visual Content in Historic Ladino Newspapers, The Modernization of Education and Its Impact on Midwives: The Case of Jewish “Bloody Midwives”, and Mapping Early Migration from ‘Turkey’ to Seattle: A Social History of Seattle’s First Ottomans

5/13 Virtual Women-Led Megillat Ruth Reading from JOFA

5/14 The Jewish People of Color National (Virtual) Shabbaton

5/15 3pm through 5/16 9pm PDT Shavuot LIVE

5/16 Queer women’s torah workshop part 1

5/16 3pm-9pm PDT Miles Nadal JCC (Toronto, ON) Tikun Leil Shavuot, fb link

5/16 5:30pm through 5/17 2am PDT The Paul Feig z”l Tikkun Leil Shavuot from Marlene Meyerson JCC

5/20: Gabriel Abensour (Hebrew University of Jerusalem): Rabbi Yosef Knafo’s Struggle for Democratization of Knowledge in Fin de Siècle Essaouira

5/23 From Northwestern University’s Arab-Jewish Culture, Identity, and Language: Past and Present series: Performance and Conversation With Tair Haim, Acclaimed Soloist of the Band A-Wa

5/25, 5/27 Reading Jewish Texts in an Age of Climate Change lectures from Julia Watts Belser

The Jewish Pet of the Week this week is Leelee, who even has a hebrew name ליבי!

Thank you for sticking with me through this lengthy edition of Weird Jewish Digest (colloquially known in my household as “the jewsletter”), and I’ll see you next week!

<3

Meli