Tetzaveh
Hello all! Today is PURIM! PURIM ALEGRE! This week we read Parshat Tetzaveh.
The past couple weeks I've been changing up how i collect links and events for this newsletter, so apologies in advance if there's duplicate links! I tried my best to weed them out but one or two may have slipped through the cracks. For instance, I was sure I'd included Devin Naar's translation and discussion of a cross-neighborhood manifesto by salonican jews organizing together, but I can't seem to find it now.
Also in Jewish Currents, you can read an extremely cool interview with prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba in advance of her new book coming out.
Andy Izenson gave a lovely dvar torah the other week about welcoming (and being) the stranger.
Boomer and older friends, I just found out about Alte, a project some former Jewish Currents staffers are building about aging.
I also just found out about Ayin Press, "an artist-run publishing platform, production studio, and research collective rooted in Jewish culture and emanating outward." Their journal has some big names and big topics in issue one, with a lot of sephardi participation, and essays on dreams and judeopessimism. Nice to see. Also of note: Ayin's store sells Tom Haviv's crescent hamsa flag, "a flag for envisioning the future of israel and palestine."
Many Romanian records of Jewish burials were placed on auction then given instead to the jewish community they were from, as is right and proper.
People have been being racist towards jews of color again on twitter. Don't do that.
Two years ago, I and many others seeking community convened together at Trans Jews Are Here. It's happening again, online this time, and free to attend. I've linked it in the events list as well.
Lotta trans jewish farmers out there and all of them are rad. Any of y'all willing to let me crash on your couch post-pandemic and look adoringly at some chickens, lemme know.
Melbourne, Australia-based glom press is crowdfunding their 2021 collection right now, which includes a lesbian cowgirl novella comic from queer jewish artist Mira Schlosberg called Kugel Western.
In other jewish lesbian news, TREYF podcast had Irena Klepfisz on their most recent episode, which I have not yet listened to but am excited to experience. Transcript available at the link.
“On this episode, we spoke with Irena Klepfisz. Irena is a writer, a poet, an activist, a lesbian feminist, a teacher, a researcher, and a movement elder. We spoke about her experience being born to Bundist parents in the Warsaw Ghetto, her role in founding the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation, her years of work in the lesbian feminist movement in NYC, and her thoughts on the ways Jewish history is being taught today."
Sarah Biskowitz wrote for In Geveb about learning yiddish online In These Times.
Yasha Levine wrote a fascinating essay about Soviet Jews who fled to Israel, but then went back and made the first half of it available for free. It makes me want to subscribe to their regular work just to read the rest! The topic's a fascinating one, and hard to dig into the truth of due to the amount of state propaganda both sides of it are likely to produce; but it does not surprise me that people got to a promised land, realized it was not good enough, and went "fuck this, i'm going back"--my own grandparents moved back to Europe after raising their children in America, land of promise, and this does not seem all that different!
Events! We're over the purim hump, which means there's all of 40 days left until passover [screams internally].
2/27 Purim: weekend edition
Crying Nazi Dinner: An Antifascist Purimspiel, a dramatic reading of a really bad quality lawsuit a nazi tried to bring against antifascist Emily Gorcenski.
2/28 ASU Jewish Studies' Judaism, Science, and Medicine group's Judaism and Climate Change one-day conference
2/28 @ 11am ET: SMQN Chai & Chat with writer and educator Isaac Adjei Ofori-Solomon
3/1 Feeling Jewish: A Book Conversation with Professor Rachel B. Gross (facebook, zoom), a book talk for Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice.
3/4 Jewish Bookbinding Workshop from MyJewishLearning. Plan ahead enough time to buy a materials kit!
3/7-3/9 KlezNorth, a UK-based klezmer festival
3/11 UW's Jewish Studies department brings us Israel Through a Colored Lens: African American Perspectives on Mizrahi Israelis
3/11 The Hadassah Brandeis Institute's event America and the Crypto Jewish Presence: Reclaiming the Legacy of Sepharad (more info at HBI link)
3/11 Seder Leading 101 event
3/24 https://www.theatredybbuk.org/exagoge
3/31 Trans Jews Are Here
4/9 Beyond Productivity: How Shabbat Values Underscore Disability Justice Principles, a special friday night service from Kol Tzedek
The Jewish Pet of the Week this week is extremely cute snoozer Babka! Hello! Such a sheyne punim.
See you next week!
<3
Meli