Tishrei 5786
Hello friends! The coming month is Tishrei, which means we are almost at Rosh Hashana.
I have been doing some writing for the high holy days in the form of a couple little sermon-ish-es. Dvars torah. Drashes. Whatevers. Do you want to read them? If so I might publish them and link the text in my next newsletter.
Jewish Calendar
This month is ALL HOLIDAYS ALL THE TIME. I hope you have your Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur plans set. If not, browse your way through https://opencommunities.info/, or email me and I can try to hook you up with a spot for streamed services that fit your needs. Don’t forget your calendar (or this printable one) or planner for the new year too.
One of Reboot’s projects that’s been going on for a number of years now is 10q, which asks an introspective question a day for the 10 days of awe, and (if you answer year after year) allows people to look back at their previous years’ answers to the same questions.
Here’s some bonus resources for this time of year:
Gashmius volume 5: Teshuvah
Jews of Color Initative’s High Holy Days Resource List 2025
Rebooting Jewish Life’s High Holidays Resource Guide
Disability Torah Project’s holiday dvars, including Simchat Torah and Sukkot
SVARA’s High Holidays Reader 5786
A scant few days after Yom Kippur we have the outdoorsy holiday of Sukkot, which is also one of my favorites. I tend to celebrate it at other people’s places because I live in an apartment, but I do try to eat in a sukkah at least once per year and shake the lulav if available.
Sukkot leads right into Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah too! I am so glad I’m not a congregation-based jewish professional, or generally more religious than i already am because WHEW. What a season. I’m tired just thinking about it.
Israel/Palestine, Antisemitism, and/or Antifascism
This Forward article about trad egal minyans wrangling keffiyeh policies and other israel/palestine-related issues was interesting. Personally I don’t think banning the keffiyeh is a particularly big-tent action, but I do have empathy for the between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place situation of trying to run a community that deals with these touchy topics.
Go Birds, fuck ICE, free Palestine (and kol hakavod to Hannah Einbinder). Buy a sticker with the design (or check it out off instagram) here.
UC Berkeley shares 160 names [that are being investigated for antisemitism] with Trump administration in ‘McCarthy era’ move, including pro-Palestine Jewish professor Judith Butler (no paywall). In other federal government data sharing news, A Federal Security Grant Program Popular with Jewish Organizations May Now Require Beneficiaries to Cooperate with ICE—if that’s relevant to you, your org can sign on to a group letter Reject[ing] Repressive Conditions of the Nonprofit Security Grants Program here.
“A record $10M federal grant to Tikvah” ugh. Tikvah is a right-wing project and i don’t like them, nor do i like the smell of a “jews and western civilization” project being the only type of jewish project to get funding.
“The largest professional organization of scholars studying genocide said […] that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”, as does the UN, as do Vermont politicians Bernie Sanders and Becca Balint. Meanwhile, the Israeli supreme ruled that Israel’s been derelict in their duty to provide enough food to their Palestinian prisoners.
Never again to us, or never again to anyone? Anti-Palestine trolls made the LA Holocaust Museum take down a social media post that implied Never Again could be applied to Palestinians. Ugh.
Books and Language (and poetry and music)
Ben Yehuda Press has some cool looking new titles out and a back to shul sale on, with 20% or more off!
Bene Appetit: The Cuisine of Indian Jews by Esther David, a member of the Bene Israel community.
I loved Samuel Hayim Brody’s triple-book review In Search of Arab Jews, covering The Jewelers of the Ummah by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew by Avi Shlaim, and When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History by Massoud Hayoun. Is it, as Memmi wrote, “far too late to become Jewish Arabs again” or is this another trap of colonialism?
Rena Branson’s new album In Doing and In Dreaming releases 9/22, which is quite soon!
Fat Torah: Every Body Beloved, a Life is a Sacred Text guest post/book excerpt from Rabbi Dr. Minna Bromberg.
Miscellaneous
An Expanded View of Jewish Art and Stories: Rebecca Salzhauer interviews Liba Vaynberg and Anna Ziegler for Reboot’s blog, about Jewish theater and more.
Rafe Neis and Gilah Kletenik have a new podcast called aderaba with episodes so far about trans people and, separately, being created in the image of hashem. In other podcast news, AJHS’s The Wreckage Season 3 is coming out, about USSR Jews’ struggle to emigrate.
A petitionary prayer [techina] for [trans] Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT)
Sheydgarden (Ezra Rose) is running a raffle of some excellent diaspora-produced Jewish art on their instagram to benefit the sameer project. Don’t have an instagram? it’s mirrored on Bluesky here.
In Chicago, anti-Zionist artists are forming their own Jewish cultural center.
Organized Labor, Politics and Klezmer Musicians in New York Until the First World War from Daniel Carkner in Der Spekter
A bit of history: a 1952 Hillel-sponsored publication of some interviews, a survey, and a roundtable of Jewish Harvard students, via Annette Yoshiko Reed.
Classes and Events
past events
“Spells of seeming”: Magic, Attempted Genocide, and Horror in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn by Samantha Landau apparently includes talk of its jewish themes as well!
Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell interviewing Emily Tamkin was amazing. Here’s part 1; part 2 is not yet up upon making this post. Listen to his music, read her books, maybe throw the Worker’s Circle some cash for putting the events together.
Events
Friend of the Jewsletter Shel Maala has some high holy day events, including two online services (shabbat shuva and sukkot day 3).
If you need to learn your alef bet, check out Embodying the Alef Bet with Beis Lakish! Mondays, October 6th - November 10th. Register: bit.ly/alefbet25
9/21, 9/28 How Kabbalah Reimagines Torah with Daniel Matt
9/23 Rosh Hashanah
9/25 Letters from the Afterlife: The Post-Holocaust Correspondence of Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson with Goldie Morgentaler
9/29 Book Talk: Antisemitism: an American Tradition
9/30 Jewish Currents Text Study—Responsibility & Repentance in the Face of Genocide
10/2 Yom Kippur
10/7-13 Sukkot
10/9 Mikołaj Grynberg: Jewish Poland Today on Page and Screen
10/14 Shmini Atzeret
10/15 Simchat Torah
10/23 “Aleppian Wedding”—Songs from Shared Traditions: A Concert with the Aleppo Ensemble and Mohamed Alsiadi
10/23 Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941, with author Sarah Zarrow
10/27 Ilana Pardes on Ruth: A Migrant’s Tale (lecture)
10/27 Adventures of Max Spitzkopf: The Yiddish Sherlock Holmes book launch, with Mikhl Yashinsky
Pet of the Month
The pet of the month this month belongs to a friend of the jewsletter (okay, a friend of mine!). Her cat loves boxes and attention and, apparently, radical jewish calendars.
With love,
Meli