Jewschool

24/07/2024

Sam Brody with an insightful and appropriately depressing take on the 17th of Tammuz and this moment.

Netanyahu, who is not only a mass murderer of Palestinians but who has also shown repeatedly that he places Israeli life and safety absolutely last in his calculus of concerns, behind his own political career, should speak to an empty Congress. But he won't. Because This Is Who We Are.

23/07/2024

Guest post from Dr. Sam Brody for 17 Tammuz and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu's arrival in DC to speak to the Congress which is bankrolling his government's massacre of Gazans.
"Netanyahu, who is not only a mass murderer of Palestinians but who has also shown repeatedly that he places Israeli life and safety absolutely last in his calculus of concerns, behind his own political career, should speak to an empty Congress.
But he won’t. Because This Is Who We Are."
Link to full post in the first comment.

22/07/2024

Check out Arielle Tonkin's review essay of Dr. Devora Steinmetz's new book:
"Ask What the Text Wonders: A Review of Why Rain Comes from Above: Essays in Religious Imagination, by Devora Steinmetz"
Link in the first comment.

06/06/2024

As we approach the festival of Shavu'ot, commemorating the Jewish people's reception of Torah at Mt. Sinai, Max Buchdahl explores two related questions through the teachings of classical Rabbinic texts:
1. What was special about Mt. Sinai?
2. Why was Torah not given in the Land of Israel?
Check it out in the first comment.

21/05/2024

"Thus, what Israel and its supporters accuse Palestinians of inciting, Israeli officials and public figures are explicitly and openly declaring, and the Israeli army is prosecuting. And while Palestinians and their supporters chant for liberation “from the river to the sea,” Israel is enforcing Jewish supremacy “from the river to the sea” in the form of occupation, annexation, and apartheid."

What Israel and its supporters accuse Palestinians of inciting, Israeli officials are openly declaring, and the Israeli army is prosecuting.

10/05/2024

Check out Joshua Shanes's response to the open letter by pro-Israel Columbia University students. Link to the post is in the first comment.
'On Pluralism and the Difference Between Religious Identity and a State: A Response to Columbia’s Hillel Students"

06/05/2024

The Chicago Tribune published a good article, written by food reporter Ahmed Ali Akbar, on the Jewish presence and prayer and Shabbat observance at the United for Palestine encampment on the University of Chicago quadrangle. Jewschool Senior Editor Aryeh Bernstein is quoted briefly in the article, in support of the students and their Jewish observance. Here is Aryeh's full statement of enthusiastic support for the Jewish students observing commandments in the encampments. Link to the post is in the first comment.

19/04/2024

"The Shabbat before Passover is called 'Shabbat HaGadol,' which is usually translated as 'The Great Sabbath.' But according to Rabbi Joseph di Trani (1568-1639, Greece), perhaps it should be translated as 'The General Strike.' He teaches us something deep about the relationship between Shabbat observance and revolution, between our weekly, regular interruption of the labor cycle and the possibility of radically transforming the social order.."

For the second installment of our partnership with the HaShata Hakha reader of justice-oriented essays on Pesach, published yesterday, we share, in time for Shabbat HaGadol ("The Great Shabbat") Jewschool veteran Raphael Magarik's poignant, "Rest for Radicals: Shabbat HaGadol as General Strike". The full post, which includes a link to the full reader, is in the first comment.

19/04/2024

My haggadah suplement.

Oh that I could write like langston
with the words like broken glass
slashing my tongue bleeding
as they float into the world smooth
as jazz hip as miles’ trumpet

to tell the truth with the anger that
it deserves about the lives that
are being sacrificed, destroyed
tell the truth before you explode
let the rage create the rhythm

18/04/2024

Rabbi Lara Haft Yom Tov, "Let All Who Are Hungry Come and Eat":
"At this year’s seder, the same war criminals who have forced Palestinian families to flee their homes will lift up their matzah and wax poetic about the Israelites’ rush to escape Egypt. The same politicians who have manufactured a famine in Gaza, leading millions to the brink of starvation, will proudly declare: 'Let all who are hungry come and eat.' What was once the simplest line of the Haggadah has become gibberish."

This is the first of a series of posts Jewschool will share for Passover in partnership with Hashata Hakha, a soon-to-be-published, justice-oriented Haggadah reader with contributions from members of Halachic Left, All That’s Left, and Smol Emuni. Stay tuned for more. Click on the link in the first comment for the full post.

17/04/2024

What is liberation for the Jewish community this year?

This is what liberation could look like for us, the Jewish community, this year. Taking a lesson from the story of Rav Nahman that we too have the potential of Pharaonic heard-heartedness; and unlearning the idea that the Palestinians deserve the killing and the famine and the disease, that it is th...

16/04/2024

Breaking the Silence Advocacy Coordinator Joel Carmel breaks down the culture of repression advanced in the past six months in Israel through use of omnipresent phrase "Yachad Nenatzeah/Together We Will Win", which has served to ostracize and endanger dissenters to this immoral war on Gaza. In response, Carmel describes the powerful counterforce of testimonies by IDF soldiers through the organization Breaking the Silence, undermining Israeli propaganda and demonstrating the horrors committed by the IDF and resistance to them. Full article in the first comment.

31/03/2024

Hey folks, I will be giving a lecture in Kalamazoo next week Monday. If you're in the neighborhood come on by.

22/03/2024

Jewschool is proud to partner with All That's Left, a Jerusalem-based collective unequivocally opposed to the Israeli Occupation and committed to building the Diaspora angle of resistance in publishing and distributing their brand new Purim reader: "For a Time Such as This".
We now share Sara Klugman's essay "Purim: On Excess":

"This year, we have to also ask: what does a generous Ramadan look like in a besieged land? How can we make sense of, respond to, and work with this ruin – and turn it towards generosity?
Perhaps Purim has an answer: excess. Purim, on unsteady feet, commands us: transform ruin through excess: of joy and of sustenance. In this year’s somewhat cosmic collision of Purim and Ramadan, in the face of staggering tragedy in this land, of state-pushed starvation, these holy texts beg of us: be generous, remember the hungry, and turn towards collective joy."

Links to the devar torah and to the reader in the comments.

22/03/2024

Jewschool is proud to partner with All That's Left, a Jerusalem-based collective unequivocally opposed to the Israeli Occupation and committed to building the Diaspora angle of resistance in publishing and distributing their brand new Purim reader: "For a Time Such as This".
We now share a poignant piece by an anonymous Torah student considering the Rabbinic tradition that King Ahasuerus wore and degraded stolen Jewish priestly garments at his bacchanalia, and interpreting, in this light, rampant mocking use by IDF soldiers of displaced Gazans' clothing and property.
"Ahasuerus wearing the priestly garments reminds me that sometimes even more trivial acts, devoid of immediate violence, have weight. They can be representative of exploitative power structures, warning signs of destruction and degradation. As in the case of Ahasuerus, these acts can warn of more explosive violence to come; or as today, they can explain the dehumanization that has enabled massive ongoing violence to occur."

Links to the post and to the full ATL reader in the comments.

21/03/2024

Jewschool is proud to partner with All That's Left, a Jerusalem-based collective unequivocally opposed to the Israeli Occupation and committed to building the Diaspora angle of resistance in publishing and distributing their brand new Purim reader: "For a Time Such as This". We begin with Jerusalem-based Torah scholar and organizer Lexie Botzum's "Discarding Haman’s Garb: Refusing the Roles of Empire".
Link to the full piece and to the reader in the comments.

"From its inception, Zionism made the same bargain as Mordecai and Esther – to seek strength and protection through collaboration with empire – though its choice was made before the emergence of genocidal threat, and its violence directed not against the perpetrators. Zionism’s goal was to find a home in the family of colonizing Western nations, to make Israel a tool of empire – first of the British, then the US – so they could then reap its benefits. The choice was to pursue 'security' through fear; to rely on the benevolent support of nations who are at best agnostic towards the Jews so long as they align with Zionism’s current material interests. To put on Haman’s garb, and take their place beside Ahasuerus’s throne."

21/03/2024

Harvard Divinity student Zev Mishell criticizes liberal Zionists' apologetics for Israel's indefensible war on Gaza and thinks through ways forward through the lens of Purim.
"For...progressive Jews, engaging with Purim in 2024...means refuting the use of our Jewishness to enact even more violence, especially as Israel prepares for an invasion of Rafah, the last refuge for civilians in Gaza. Though it’s impossible to know what will come from this moment, we can embrace Purim’s call for a v’nahafoch hu, an overturning of what’s grown immoral and stale, and work to build a new vision for contemporary Jewish life."

Read the full post in the link in the first comment.

20/03/2024

"By pretending that he is forced to rely on persuasion with Netanyahu, Biden is reinscribing a key antisemitic trope; he is suggesting that Israel tells the US what to do rather than the other way around."
Read more in the link in the first comment, for Rabbi Robin Podolsky's op-ed, "President Biden Is Letting Gaza Bleed While Perpetuating an Antisemitic Trope. And, Yes, I Will Vote For Him To Stop Trump".

13/03/2024

Aryeh Cohen asks what the mainstream American Jewish community will do on the day after the war, after doing nothing to stop the killing in Gaza.

On the day after, the leaders of these organizations, the rabbis of these synagogues, will have to look at themselves in the mirror and see the tens of thousands of dead Palestinians and ask themselves—did I do anything to try to stop this? And the sad truth will be that no, they didn’t.

12/03/2024

The April, 2024, issue of The Atlantic features a bizarre cover story by Franklin Foer lamenting the end of a supposed "Golden Age of American Judaism". In this Jewschool exclusive, Prof. Benjamin Balthaser unveils the nostalgic fiction that Foer and other centrists invented in order to avoid the inevitable confrontation with liberalism's quietly sanctioned violence:
"Zionism's Jewish Nostalgia Trap: A Rebuttal of Franklin Foer"

"Foer’s evocation of Yiddish is precisely this form of saccharine nostalgic haze: an incoherent mashup of Jewish leftists, anti-Zionists, cosmopolitanists and then also, nationalists, racists, and colonialists, as if these have any more common than exemplary Russians Tsar Nicholas the Second and Vladimir Lenin."

Link to the article in the first comment.

08/03/2024

Israeli-American Jewish feminist leader and scholar Dr. Elana Sztokman with pointed words of communal self-reflection for Israel in light of a prominent, government-funded rabbi's recent call in the name of Jewish law for total annihilation of all Gazans.

"If this racist, blood-thirsty so-called rabbi, part of a movement that got 15 mandates, a segment representing over a million Israelis, if they have such a powerful presence in our society, and the rest of us have NOT succeeded in rooting it out...if we believe this idea that people who fail to root out the violent creeds spreading in their societies deserve what is coming — that in the case of Gaza, they deserve to be bombed and starved and displaced — then what does that say about US? What do WE ISRAELIS deserve based on the fact that guys like this...have a following and large budgets and a powerful head of security with his own private militia supporting him? What do WE deserve?"

Read the full post at the link in the first comment.

07/03/2024

Raphael Magarik clarifies what is and is not the moral challenge of chapter 9 of the Book of Esther and holds the chapter up as a mirror to us today, in the face of this war:
"The text of Esther, however, does distinguish. Whatever its sympathies or moral judgments, in distinguishing, the text places itself on the side of distinction—of recognizing and registering differences between killing in self-defense and massacring."
Link to the post in the first comment.

06/03/2024

The Jewish studies scholar-turned-filmmaker Tova Hopemark discusses her award-winning first film, ALRIGHT ROBOT, what writing for film has in common with academic writing, and why she made a comedy about depression, in this interview with writer-director Hannah Rothblatt (Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Broad City, The Daily Show, South Park).
Link to the article and to the 11-minute film in the comments.

05/03/2024

It's been too long since we've published poetry on Jewschool. We're delighted to share this powerful piece by Oakland-based organizer and writer Gen Xia Ye Slosberg, a mixed-race, q***r, disabled Asian American Jewish woman: "I See You".
"I see you.
I see you for your olive skin
I see you for your curly hair
I see you for the exotic tongue you speak
The way your hips gyrate with sensuality
The way you know about faraway lands
The way you shouldn’t be but are – ..."

Read more inside!

I see you for how you Placate my guilt/Tug at my heartstrings/Satisfy my curiosity/Satiate my voyeurism/Don’t you see?/I see you.

21/02/2024

In honor of Moses's yahrzeit the other day, Prof. Shaul Magid shares a probing analysis of pacifist Rabbi Aharon Schmuel Tamares's creative reading of Moses's act of violence, killing the Egyptian taskmaster, contrasting Tamares's reading with that of 20th century Jewish reactionary Meir Kahane's reading:

"For Kahane, non-violence is diasporic and a sign of Jewish weakness. For Tamares, it is a sign of Jewish strength. Moreover, Jewish violence for Tamares is an exercise in assimilation; it is an act of becoming “like the gentiles.” Kahane admits as much when he says that Jews have to become “more like the goyim.” For Kahane, Moshe’s killing the Egyptian was the signpost to a new Jewish space, the inauguration of a new Jewish project: collective strength, power, and conquest. Tamares sees it otherwise. Moshe’s violence was for him an exception that proves the rule. First, it did not work, and second, for Jews to model it is, in effect, is to mimic Pharaoh, to become Pharaoh."

For Kahane, non-violence is diasporic and a sign of Jewish weakness. For Tamares, it is a sign of Jewish strength. Moreover, Jewish violence for Tamares is an exercise in assimilation; it is an act of becoming “like the gentiles.”...For Kahane, Moshe’s killing the Egyptian was the signpost to ...

19/02/2024

San Francisco poet Leslie Simon reflects on ancestral legacies and spiritual meaning in two recent actions of Bay Area Jews interrupting civic business to demand American action for a ceasefire in Gaza.

It started out as a secret, a big secret. A former student messaged me to see if I wanted to be involved in an historic sit in calling for an Israel-Gaza ceasefire. I did.

08/02/2024

"A 'Moral War' in Gaza Has Always Been a Fantasy"
Jewschool contributor Aron Wander responds to those American Jewish leaders supporting the Israeli bombardment of Gaza who call out for a "moral war":
"Ultimately, calls to support a theoretical “moral war” without acknowledging the immorality with which that war is actually being fought – by a far-right government, with the willful disregard of tremendous civilian casualties, with growing calls for ethnic cleansing, and while settlers freely rampage through the West Bank – simply serve to whitewash war crimes."
Read more in the link in the first comment.

Photo description: Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023.

Photo attribution: Photo by Naaman Omar, Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

06/02/2024

Prof. Shaul Magid:
"I feel jolted from the world of liturgy where humility is the center to a world of arrogance, a world of excuses, a world of blame. And if you try to suggest complicity you are mistaken, you lack love of the Jews, you may even be evil. It is as if the world has become the inverse of the prophetic imagination. And often this is said in the name of Judaism."
Read on in the link for more on the challenges in adopting Jewish liturgy's posture of humility and acknowledgement of responsibility when the surrounding Zionist culture digs in on defiant self-justification and vilification of the other, often in the name of Judaism.

I feel jolted from the world of liturgy where humility is the center to a world of arrogance, a world of excuses, a world of blame. And if you try to suggest complicity you are mistaken, you lack love of the Jews, you may even be evil. It is as if the world has become the inverse of the prophetic im...

01/02/2024

Why do we as a society continue to kill to demonstrate our disdain for murder?

01/02/2024

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