Shelach
Hello friends! This week in jewsletter we have: tzitzit and gender; bodily autonomy and judaism; gefilte fish hot dogs; and my very own cat Jam as Jewish Pet of the Week.
An administrative note: I will be skipping next week and returning the following week. I've got nice personal life stuff coming up--a beloved partner is visiting, and I'd like to devote the time I normally spend putting this together as quality time with them instead.
CNs: transphobia, abortion rights (and our sudden lack thereof), murder of shireen abu akleh, genocide (shoah)
Jewish Calendar
This week's torah portion, Shelach L'cha, includes the mitzvah of tzitzit. It's one of my favorite mitzvot that I nonetheless only intermittently follow.
Who needs to wear tzitzit? Ada gets into questions of obligation and permission in their latest Etz Hi newsletter, as well as touching on gender near the end.
Ben Yehuda Press's parsha thread digs a little more on the gender front, including a fascinating excerpt from Haviva Ner-David's memoir about her decision to have her young daughter wear tzitzit, as she would for a son. Relatedly, did you know about the tzitzit project, a group of artists making tzitzit and talit katan for people other than cis men? now you do!
Israel being horrible to Palestinians
The UN is now among the many groups agreeing that Israel shot American Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. IDF still says they didn't do it and don't need to investigate further.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs of T'ruah writes about the destruction of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and calls for Jews who say they support Palestinian lives (including those pushing a two state solution) to speak up.
Bodily autonomy
Rabbi Becky Silverstein, who I am immensely pleased to be learning from in SVARA class, wrote a wonderful article about bodily autonomy as a jewish value through application of "lev yodea marat nafsho", the same teaching that lets us decide for ourselves if we are able to fast on yom kippur.
trans rights
In Alabama, there's one clinic that offers gender-affirming healthcare to trans youths, and it's run by a Muslim doctor and a Jewish doctor together, and I think that's great. CW at the link for frank talk about suicide and about anti-trans laws, as well as some weirdness around religion and binary gender and queerness. But I think it's great that the Forward published this, and I hope it will sway some of their readers without more direct connections to the issue away from transphobia, and away from supporting transphobic laws.
Abortion and Judaism
What do Jews say about abortion? There's a variety of opinions, but pretty much all of them allow for at least some abortions in at least some cases.
Lilith Mag has a timeline of their articles on Judaism and repro rights from the early 1980s to 2020.
The Forward recently published an interview with a 90 year old rabbi from earlier in June about his experiences helping people access abortion pre-Roe as part of a clergy collective network.
Rabbi Max Ticktin, who ran the Hillel at the University of Chicago, was arrested for setting up an abortion in Michigan. The woman who had come to Ticktin for help turned out to be an undercover cop.
The Chicago police, working in coordination with Michigan law enforcement, executed a search warrant on Ticktin’s home, where they found a trove of files they hoped would lead them to other clergy in the network. But Ticktin, who died in 2016, was apparently prepared for such a raid.
“He did all his files in Hebrew,” recalled Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, another member of the Chicago network. “He joked about that. His files were all written in Hebrew. That made them useless unless the cops could read Hebrew cursive.”
Great job, Rabbi.
Earlier this month, a Reform synagogue in Florida filed a lawsuit arguing that abortion access is necessary for our religious freedom. There are good arguments against using a religious freedom defense, namely that this argument places authority into the hands of rabbis rather than in the hands of pregnant people who want abortions.
But of course there's also terrible arguments against it: regarding that same lawsuit, a libertarian law scholar blog argued that non-orthodox jewish views aren't really religious. It's not worth your time to read the original but here's an article about it. The original author is wrong, or maybe he's not even wrong, or maybe he's accurate within the letter of the law in a way that reveals incredibly immoral flaws in the surrounding system. Civil rights lawyer Sheryl Ring has a deeply upsetting yet accurate thread about it.
In the present and near future, Jews for Abortion Access / 73 Forward has some resources and gatherings that may be helpful for you.
Books and Language
https://twitter.com/SeeTheTreasures/status/1540329978247643139
SVARA's daily mishna collective is starting up again soon. On July 6th they'll begin learning masechet berachot, but it's all drop-in, so you can go when you're free and not miss much.
Happy pride month from the Yiddish Book Center, who have a nice little roundup page of some of their LGBTQ content. Also their Yidstock store has some extremely cute merch.
NYT ran an article about preserving Morrocan Sephardic women's songs. I love the accompanying photos of artifacts and (of course) of the women themselves.
The recording of the Rae Dalven: Life of a Greek-Jewish American book launch event is available on youtube!
https://twitter.com/hchesner/status/1539626864955867137
The vatican is releasing a large collection of jewish files online, including many jewish pleas for help during the holocaust. I will not be exploring this for hte sake of my own mental health, and also because my not understanding italian makes it difficult to navigate the website. But if you're curious here's a link to a link to the archive.
The digital yiddish theater project is looking for submissions to their timeline of yiddish drag! If you want your yiddish culture updates a little more academic, In Geveb has a comprehensive update on recent english-language yiddish studies work.
Let's use old midwifery records to learn about jews and castles!
Miscellaneous
I normally avoid embedding two tweets in a row, but this twofer is just too good.
https://twitter.com/depthsofwiki/status/1539640354768658436
https://twitter.com/dzkalman/status/1539700938851631112
Actor Beanie Feldstein got engaged to her girlfriend and it's extremely cute.
Gefilte fish dogs: probably not real! but probably also not actually gross. I would eat one.
Tasha Kaminsky put together a pretty great twitter thread version of the "what are the major streams of judaism" spiel, which was a little reductive about orthodoxy maybe, but honestly really solid overall.
https://twitter.com/jorosenfeld/status/1539970597655937026
Back in the 1970s Yeshiva University (a modern orthodox college) wanted to celebrate its oldest alumnus, and looked it up, and found out it was Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, a movement with a very different approach to jewish law and modern jewish life, and promptly decided to not advertise that after all. It did show up in the YU purim shpil that year though. Probably this is petty, but I mostly find it hilarious. Thank you to Fred MacDowell for posting this!
Events!
New event additions to the list are bolded.
6/26 Matir Asurim prison pen pal training! More info at instagram
6/26 Gangsters vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in Wartime America book talk
6/27 Resistance as Liberation: Judaism and Abortion Care, from Ratzon: Center for Healing and Resistance and the Jewish Anarchist Salon
6/28 Trans Chidusz – a Long Table: "we wish to examine ways in which the state determines the parameters of our bodies, focussing on the example of trans and gender variant bodies from the perspectives of Polish law and of Jewish law."
6/30 Antisemitism and the Impact of Philanthropy on Public Discourse (part of a series)
6/30 Queer Ladino with Nesi Altaras
7/7 T'fillat Trans 101: An Introduction to Crafting Trans Ritual with the Trans Halakha Project (trans and/or nonbinary people only)
7/7, 7/14: Shmita immersive: rest as resistance with Rabbi Elliot Kukla at SVARA
7/10 Queer Yiddish Politics and Poetry: A Pride Celebration with Irena Klepfisz and Zohar Weiman-Kelman
7/29 Queer Disability Shabbat (queer and disabled jews only, please, but with expansive definitions on all three of those identity labels)
Jewish Pet of the Week
The jewish pet of the week this week is a repeat, because it's my very own cat Jambalaya (Jam for short) who insisted on helping me cut fabric to sew a new kippah earlier this week.
https://twitter.com/Tekgo/status/1538959587239350272
Shabbat shalom, and see you in two weeks!
<3
Meli