Vayetzei
This week’s torah portion has jacob’s ladder in it! if you fall asleep in the wilderness with a stone for a pillow maybe you will also have wild-ass dreams about angels.
I had no idea superlinear vocalization like this was a thing and it’s blowing my mind. Learn more about the different niqqud systems at wikipedia or the jewish encyclopedia but honestly i’m just gonna go “ooh pretty” for a while.
This essay on Young Frankenstein and masculinity by trans man Aegor Ray doesn’t mention judaism but things about Mel Brooks and masculinity are also about Jewish masculinity, that’s the rules.
It is black friday, so everything is on sale today but please do not shop at amazon, as workers there are doing a one-day strike for (among other things) better working conditions. If you want to buy books, I like to buy directly from publishers when I can, and a bunch of them are having sales too.
A non-exhaustive list sourced from this facebook post in a Sefarim swap group. I have not tested most of these codes.
Oxford University Press 30% off (code: ADISTA5), whose website i find overwhelming but does include Becoming Ottomans, on how Ottoman empire Sephardim navigated citizenship.
Wayne State University Press 45% off through 1/10 (code: HOL1). I’m thinking about buying this book on the California Gold Rush, or this one about disability and leprosy in medieval jewish communities, or this one about pre-Kabbalah Jewish magic, or this one about American Jewish agricultural utopias, or this one about chavurahs of the 1970s, or this history of the golem, or—you get the picture.
Yale Jewish Lives series is 40% off (code: BFPREVIEW), which i did not browse as biographies are often not my thing.
Harvard University Press is 30% off thru 12/31 (code: HOLIDAY20). You can learn about the myth of judeo-bolshevism, the author of The Dybbuk, Persian jewry through the writings of Sorour S Soroudi, yiddish socialists in New York, Italian Jews 1924-1974, or read the correspondence between Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, or maybe a book about those two and also Kafka.
University of Nebraska press 50% off thru 12/31 (code: 6HLW20), including everything JPS (incl the 3 volume folktales of the jews series), at least two books about jewish basketball, global jewish foodways, a book about american antizionist rabbi Elmer Berger, the great kosher meat war of 1902, and way way way more
University of Illinois press 50% off thru 12/31 (code: HOLIDAY50), on topics including yiddish and italian anarchism, midwest jewish foodways, jewish chicago (aka the communities my maternal family is from), appalachian jewry, ritual medical lore of sephardic women, and more.
Of course you can also buy from individual creators like Ezra here who just published two new zines!
I have a deep love and appreciation for small Jewish communities and also the Midwest, so i was saddened to learn that the UP (Michigan’s upper peninsula) closed one of its three remaining synagogues, even though I understand why. if there’s less than a minyan in the town and there’s others in reasonable driving distance, eh. Apparently a Joliet, IL congregation now has some of the ritual objects, including one of the Torahs.
[O]n a sunny but cold day in early January of this year, Zacks loaded two large, ornate bimah chairs, two floor menorah lamps, the congregation’s eternal light, and various other synagogue relics into his minivan and made the five-plus-hour drive to Joliet.
Also they found proof of cannabis in an old Jewish shrine from 760 BCE. #blazeit4hashem
None of the events I linked in last week’s newsletter have happened yet so here they are again, with one new addition in bold (the Cornell webinars):
On 11/29, Xava de Cordova and Binya Kóatz are leading a Talmud lesson about empire and reparations. To register to receive the Zoom link and class material, fill out this Google form: https://forms.gle/2QGm4xtGrtMPF3tz9
On 11/30 there will be a Rad Yiddish event about poet Avrom Sutzkever. "In this meeting, we will provide context for his work, enjoy reading some excerpts, and discuss how we as young (and young at heart) Yiddishists can criticize, claim, and foster Yiddish cultural transmission, aka the golden chain or di goldene keyt."
On Dec 2, check out this online event titled Art and Artists on Being Black and Jewish. It’ll be live-streamed and live-captioned.
UW’s annual ladino day is 12/6 this year, and focuses on how technologies (“from the printing press to the smartphone”) affect the language. Apparently there’s a uTalk ladino/judezmo module, among other resources for learning.
12/6-12/14 Cornell’s Jewish Studies program has a series of webinars on Di Linke: the Yiddish Immigrant Left from Popular Front to Cold War https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_fjj_fmQHS_i52cGrsonEfA
Queer Jewish cabaret show Homos and Houmous is happening on December 12th over zoom. Not sure it’s my thing (I don’t usually go for drag stuff) but it might be yours!
On 12/13 there is A Miracle of Fat: A Fat Torah Hanukkah Workshop. I never thought of the beautiful opportunity Chanukah is, as an oil-/fat-centered holiday, for us to learn about and move towards fat liberation. I hadn’t heard of Fat Torah before but I extremely love their post about how healthism and diet culture are expressions of idolatry.
YIVO has a free lecture on 12/22 about ashkenazi jews and Chinese food: yivo.org/Chinese-Food
The jewish pet of the week this week is Rey! She’s a tiny rescue pup whose owner I originally met through jewish youth group almost 20 years ago.
