April 9, 2021

Shemini

Good morning friends! This week’s parsha is Shemini, which translates to eighth. It may contain the midpoint of the whole torah depending on how you count. In the parsha some priests set stuff on fire weird so hashem set them on fire right back and they died. There’s also a bunch of rules, including kashrut (food stuff) and tahara (commonly translated as purity) and tumah (commonly translated as unclean or impure).

The Partisan Haggadah is part of a long sephardi history of political parodies.

Where does JNF USA’s money go? Find out in this twitter thread from Rabbi Jill Jacobs about the transparency her organzation Truah obtained a few years back.

Xai, How Are You? and Judaism Unbound crossing over is very relevant to my interests and probably yours!

Check out this Tablet article about ladino satirist Elie R Karmona. He put out serialized fictions based on his mother’s folktales, raised money to buy a printing press, and eventually worked with others to print things like shakespeare translated into ladino. Fascinating. The new book of sephardic artifacts and stories from U Chicago press linked therein looks very cool, and I’m also intrigued by Lo Ke Meldavan Babalarimizin / From Our Fathers’ Newspapers (apologies for the Amazon link–had difficulty finding this elsewhere).

A book of Ashkenazi Herbalism was recently published. I love records of how “everyday judaism” was and is practiced around the world, not just the pieces by rabbis in synagogues.

Somehow I missed the release of Veronica Schanoes’ Burning Girls and Other Stories last month but I desperately want to read it now, between the tagline of “When we came to America, we brought anger and socialism and hunger. We also brought our demons” and a story about Emma Goldman having tea with Baba Yaga.

Judith Batalion’s book The Light Of Days, about women resistance fighters and their histories, was also released this week. What stories do we not tell? why? If you would like to do more reading about WWII and the holocaust, there are some recommendations for you in this twitter thread.

There are so many books I want to read. Instead of buying them, or reading some of the ones I already own, I ordered some gluten free bagels and wrote this newsletter.

Yiddish Book Center put out this food related compilation of interview videos from the Wexler oral history project.

Yiddish duolingo is now available, to much hubbub and fun and dialect-based drama all around. I’m not doing it because I don’t have brainspace for another language right now but I appreciate that so many people are into it. If you’d like to beef up your queer yiddish vocabulary, Sasha Bernstein’s list of trans yiddish terms is a great start.

All of Hamaqom, a bay area-based jewish education group focused on inclusivity, is currently online. View their current courses here, varying from hebrew and judaism 101 courses to a one-day conversation on sephardi/mizrachi jews and race and a June class on Jews of the American South. It does look like they have a zionist bent, though, as there is an event for Israeli independence day listed.

Non- and Anti-zionist beit midrash (house of learning) Hishbati was written up on Jewschool’s blog. I’ve added their first round of lessons to the events list below.

Calls for stuff:

• Jewish Currents is soliciting pitches for their soviet issue
• Awkward naming for something that isn’t about gender, but The Leo Baeck Foundation’s arts and culture programme DAGESH. is inviting Jewish artists from across Europe and the Americas to participate in a multimedia arts exhibition »TRANSITIONS« that will premier in Berlin on June 30th, 2021.

And now, some EVENTS!

4/11 Raphael Magarik teaching “What House Would You Build Me?: Skepticism Toward the temple in Biblical Thought. Hishbati info, register here

4/13 TransHallel Rosh Chodesh Iyar (my hebrew birthday!) (but also 5 AM PDT)

4/13 Queering the Omer with Rabbi Jane Litman. (register here)

4/15 Mending the World As Jewish Anarchists, a book event for There Is Nothing So Whole As a Broken Heart. You can buy a book from the hosting indie bookstore with your free ticket.

4/15 Dr. Annette Yoshiko Reed is giving a talk titled Demonology and Popular Piety in Second Temple Judaism and Beyond

4/15 4:30 PDT A staged reading of These and Those, a play i know nothing about but the promotional image features quotes from both dril and Kohelet

4/18 JOCSM? On the Racial Identity of Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews, a converstion between Hadar Cohen and Tamar Zaken

4/18 Lara Haft teaching Right Relationship with the Land: Torah Alternatives to Conquest Hishbati info, register here

4/19 Rad Yiddish Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Poetry

4/22 Leonard Cohen’s Mystical Midrash

4/25 Chana Rein teaching Make Here Israel: The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Approach to Zionism and Diasporism Hishbati info, register here

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

5/2-5/3 Jewish Psychedelic Summit

The Jewish Pet of the Week this week is Marshmallow, whose hair is freakin’ beautiful, I cannot even.

<3

Meli