November 19, 2021

Vayishlach

Hello!

Content notes for this week's newsletter are (trans)gender problems, police and military violence, christian nationalism, disrespect of dead bodies, nuclear weapons, genocide denial. Cheerful, huh?

Jewish Calendar

This week's torah portion is Vayishlach. In it, Jacob wrestles with a "man", quotation marks intended--and that is how many summaries put it, because the hebrew word is eesh, meaning man, but he is strongly implied to actually be a messenger or angel from G-d.

I have been in queer and trans social circles for long enough to see a gender in quotation marks and wince as my first reaction. Angels canonically have no sex and no gender; perhaps he was wearing manhood as a disguise, or in human drag. Perhaps it's a trans angel choosing manhood for himself, at which point we should not be using quotation marks, implying his real gender is elsewhere. Dude's even got name anxiety, which is trans as fuck. Just sayin'.

Anyway, a transmasc (not assigned female at birth, but assigned unsexed at creation) angel wrestles with Jacob, wrenches his thigh, and that's why kosher filet mignon (if you can find it at all) is even more expensive than you'd expect based on the prices of regular kosher beef and regular unkosher filet mignon.

This is not part of my drash. This is a yiddish platypus.

Israel problems and antisemitism problems

I recently found out about the long-standing Israeli policy of not returning the bodies of deceased prisoners to their families and i am pissed. There is cultural context that worsens this: both Jews and Muslims have burial customs that involve ritual washing, shrouding, and burial as soon as possible after death. Israeli Jews are making the decision to prevent Palestinian Muslims from observing these burial rites. As someone trained in tahara, the Jewish post-death-pre-burial purification ritual, this is morally abhorrent and is emblematic of intentional unnecessary israeli cruelty to Palestinians.

The deadly exchange is chemical weapons and extrajudicial murder and vigilante violence comic book iconography, but it is also Yoram fucking Hazony and other ideological interplay between American and Israeli right-wing politics. It's not only Hazony either; the article linked in that tweet includes a number of other jews participating in this project alongside barely-coded antisemitic screeds in quoted speeches, two parallel trends I found more than a little worrying, even as I eyerolled through the David Brooks' fond reminiscence of conservativisms past and how all the attendees were very nice to him personally. Tangentially related to all of this is ohio shonde Josh Mandel's christian nationalism.

Miriam Libicki has a comic about Israel's not-so-secret nukes on The Nib.

Koren is proud to be publishing Nakba denialism. Do not support Koren.

Miscellaneous

Sarah Aroeste's new all-Ladino Chanuka album, Hanuká, is out now! Yes, Ocho Kandelikas is on it, but so is a Ladino version of Maoz Tzur and a whole bunch of other songs you probably haven't heard a million times. There's a release party on Sunday linked below, you can buy it on her website, or you can listen on spotify to get in the holiday spirit a little early.

New Yiddish Dylan cover just dropped, along with the rest of a new Daniel Kahn album called Word Beggar.

University of Nebraska Press, which distributes JPS titles, has a 50% off sale on all their books, including a book of tkhines, some works on neohasidism, and plenty more.

I have not yet watched The Club, a Turkish series available on Netflix about a Sephardic family in 1950s Istanbul, but it is very high up on my to-watch list.

There's a really cool literary salon and/or fundraiser for indigenous water protectors on November 27th called YidLitWith...StopLine3. So many wonderful yiddishist performers, artists, and organizers I admire are participating in this (rosza daniel lang/levitsky! Brivele! LEV!), AND you get to support a good cause? amazing. You should go. I got a ticket even though I'll probably be deep in vaccine booster side effects then.

Related: Are you a yiddish-speaking feminist? Vaybertaysh is looking for guest hosts!

Matir Asurim: Jewish Care Network for Incarcerated People is looking for volunteers, including for people who want to be pen pals with incarcerated jewish people.

Events!

11/21 Greek Family Zoom by SHIN-DC, featuring Athens Jewish Community leaders

11/21 Hanuká album release party from Sarah Aroeste and Museum of American Jewish History

11/21 The Few Overcoming the Many: Hanukkah Wisdom in a Shmitah Year (sliding scale $18+)

11/23 A Bukharian Jew in Uzbekistan ($10)

11/23 The Jewish Metropolis: New York from the 17th to the 21st Century

11/23 “When I Grow Up”: A Graphic Novel Exploring Interwar Teenage Jewish Life

11/23 [In a way]: Zine Launch and Transgenerational Talk

11/27 YidLitWith...StopLine3 yiddish culture salon

11/28 Chanukah begins

11/30 Reclaiming Identity: Jews of Arab Lands and Iran share stories of identity, struggle and redemption

11/30 In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust book event

12/2 The Rich History of Jewish Papercuts, with Deborah Ugoretz. The art, not the injury.

12/5 Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Documentation and Revitalization Efforts: Language, Music, and Folklore

12/12 Ladino Day at UW

12/15 Conversation: Yiddish and Social Justice

Jewish Pet of the Week

The Jewish Pet of the Week is Shlomo, owned by ancient Judaism scholar Annette Yoshiko Reed!

<3

Meli