Re'eh
It is the 24th of Av 5780, and this week we have Parshat Re’eh. I have SO MANY LINKS this week.
I davened twice this week using the Siddur Masorti, an egalitarian sephardi weekday siddur with beautiful typesetting and layouts and full transliteration. It is available in PDF form free on OpenSiddur and for purchase in hardcover form from Izzun Books.
I continue to have complicated identity feelings around the labels: sephardi; mizrachi; sephardi/mizrachi; jew of color/sephardi/mizrachi (JOCSM); (anti?)assimilationist. I do not have the brain space to break them down right now, but Zaman Collective’s Summer 2020 issue includes some amazing work from people on the mizrachi side of things, including this piece Houndstooth by Tzor Edery.
If you remember me mentioning an anti-fascist klezmer event in a previous newsletter but missed it, the video is available on youtube. Couldn’t hurt to throw a few dollars at the organizers if you like it. There’s a lot of talking between song performances but if that’s not your jam, it is a recording and nobody’s keeping you from fast-forwarding. Geoff Berner’s Condos song in particular never ceases to crack me up, and the version in yesterday’s concert was particularly good.
If you want some more badass yiddishe music but on the more rock side of things: Forshpil’s put out a 2nd album, which has fueled the writing of (this week’s edition of) this very newsletter.
Letterform Archive put out an amazing blogpost showcasing yiddish utopian work. I’m a little entertained by the “I show them here not to glorify the Soviet Union” hedging in the beginning, though I know it’s necessary. Trust me, us Jews are aware that the promise of utopian freedom did not pan out there as we hoped. (Don’t @ me). Many of the examples in the post are from El Lissitzky’s Chad Gadya, an illustrated version of the Passover song. The one for Hakadosh Baruch Hu (G-d, blessed be He—rightmost art of the three below) particularly blew my fuckin’ mind, and i love seeing other people work through the whole “revolution and/or moshiach” idea I toy with sometimes.
There’s also a whole bunch of information on his views on typography, which—how many of my special interests you gonna find at once in here, huh? There’s even a manifesto! I love manifestos! I want to find the person who wrote this blogpost, buy them coffee, and go “tell me more. tell me EVERYTHING”.
a quick talmud joke
and a quick explainer of the talmud joke, because whoever said explaining a joke ruins it is incorrect
I’ve got two additions from friends of the newsletter (ok, friends, just…regular friends):
Jaz passed along Lilith Magazine’s Summer 2020 launch event, over zoom on Aug 19, 2020 at 8:00 PM EST. “The evening will include an intergenerational discussion among three Lilith writers, Makeda Zabot-Hall, Imani Chapman & Esther Amini, about this unprecedented season, and what may await us.” Sounds neat! The 2020 issue’s cover feature is Now. Next, which seems particularly relevant In These Times, and there’s also an Unetanah Tokef for Black Lives which gave me chills.
Josh recommends the Streits Matza documentary, which is available to stream on Kanopy (a service hooked into many public library systems, including Seattle’s). “Lots of great archival footage and photos, and if you are the sort of person who likes factory tours, it has got some amazing footage of machinery, interviews with the workers, kashrut discussions and so much more.” Thanks Josh! I’ll give it a watch.
Also there’s a sale on all of Jewish Twitter Shitposter in Chief Maimonides Nutz’s teespring stuff through Monday.
The Jewish Pet of the Week is Brynna’s Gandalf, a sleepy old man cat.
Shabbat shalom, friends! See you next week. May your shabbos be as peaceful as napping Gandalf.