HEY JEWS

i strongly remember a time when a haredi guy was selling his paintings on the street in NYC and my mom and i approached him with interest. when she spoke to him, he looked right past her and didn't respond in the slightest. when i said something he smiled and started talking to me. i don't know how common that sort of thing is -- how many haredi forbid even the slightest social contact between a man and a woman who is not a relation?

btw ms. rabinowitz sounds like a really awesome person.

i don't know exact numbers but there's a spectrum. the charedi communities i participated in skewed much more to the permissive side (though unmarried singles were still actively discouraged from fraternizing outside of shidduch dating). but there are more fundamentalist communities in the united states - satmar seems like the most obvious one. from what i understand there's a spectrum in israel too but that extends much more to the right than the one in the US (like the haredi burqa sect is exclusively found in israel).

eg the litvish (ie non-chassidic) yeshiva i went to for high school was moshe feinstein's (mentioned in the article u posted) yeshiva. so even though boys and girls were educationally and socially segregated, and pretty much men only fraternize with men and women with women and the gender roles are very formal, he still was lenient on issues of like professional and formal association between genders. iirc though touching someone of the opposite gender at all (that's not a marriage or a family member) is disallowed but he ruled that you could shake a woman's hand in a business setting (especially if she would be offended if you begged off), or that sitting next to a woman on public transportation is not an issue. i mean obviously this is still hardcore gender segregation.

i watched this and found it very moving

http://www.timesofisrael.com/dustin-hoffman-finally-meets-his-jewish-roots/

hey jews anyone seen a play called bad jews?

Yes, and I hated it. Over-rated, clichéd, ugh

I can kind of tell from the title what it will be like and why I won't like it.

Irreverent Jew humor gets tiresome after a while because the stakes of irreverence are so low in all but the most Orthodox Jewish circles.

Harmon’s portrait of Daphna, the lone Jewish woman on stage, and by extension all Jewish women, relies on retrogade anti–Jewish woman tropes — nagging voice, excessive hairiness. That “Bad Jews” was written by a young Jewish playwright makes this feel like even more of a betrayal. Jewish leaders ruing the Pew study might want more Jews to be like Daphna, who decries intermarriage, values her Jewishness and doesn’t want it to be watered down in future generations. But Harmon has made her so unlikable — rigid, self-righteous, whiny. Even her womanliness is questioned: She is depicted as so undesirable that Jonah agrees that her Israel boyfriend must be a figment of her imagination.

sounds gross

Yeah actually sounds worse than I imagined, although that's definitely a common cliché to the kind of bad Jewish comedy I'm thinking of.

I've always liked Jewish women though, to the extent you can generalizingly "like" any entire group of women, and a lot of the negative stereotypes read as positive traits to me - strength, concern, lack of pretense, etc.

Sadly this got good reviews in Washington DC papers last year, so the run got extended, and then they brought it back again this year.

The airhead Christian blonde girlfriend of another character in the play is formulaic as well

it sounds like the playwright ends up shipping Daphna out to Israel in the end. if that's his hope for getting rid of all the annoying hung-up on being jewish jews, i think he's setting himself up for disappointment

I've always liked Jewish women though, to the extent you can generalizingly "like" any entire group of wome

i'd say that this extent is... no extent.

i have a lot of awful overentitled jewish girls in my classes, and lots of smart, sharp jewish girls too. there are definitely "types" within the overall group, but to characterize it beyond that, i dunno. weird.

saw it earlier this week I thought it was a very very bad play like an average episode of a bad sitcom actually left about a little after halfway through which I don't think I've ever done before

disappointed there have not been any '"Bad Jews", Bad!' headlines about this tbh

I kinda enjoyed Bad Jews but more as a light Saturday matinee entertainment and not some tour de force of theater

Somehow it only dawned on me for the first time this year that Achashverosh was a real fucking imbecile of a king.

Just a complete putz basically.

Drunken, fickle, easy to manipulate, no discernible policies or values other than partying, and misogynist too

Hamentashen are tasty

in addition to executing his wife for refusing to appear naked in front of his friends there's a midrash that the entire party the opens the megillah was really just an excuse to use the temple vessels that had been looted from jerusalem

Wow.

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Some grocery stores around here have been displaying Passover food now, because they just assume that since Easter is Sunday, Passover must be right now too. Wonder if they will realize they have to leave it up through the end of April? Or will they remove it Monday?

I find that grocery stores that bother carrying any Passover stuff around here carry it year-round, as if someone is going to buy matzo in July.

The thing is, there are totally non-Jews out there who eat matzo when they don't have to. IDGI but go explain the goyim

Matzah available year round is nice for when I find myself with the urge to make matzah brei

Sometimes I have seen "Not Kosher for Passover Matzah" year-round and yes I guess there are Goyim who go for that

Some grocery stores around here have been displaying Passover food now, because they just assume that since Easter is Sunday, Passover must be right now too. Wonder if they will realize they have to leave it up through the end of April? Or will they remove it Monday?

― curmudgeon, Thursday, March 24, 2016 10:15 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was wondering about that, too. local grocer put the passover food out two weeks ago! I did a double take and thought perhaps i had forgotten the date. (didn't stop me from bringing some macaroons home, though.)

guys i find the ivanka phenomenon so confusing + i have so many conflicting thoughts on it and what it means about america and about the jews (and what it means that trump is using classical fascist imagery about birth + fertility when speaking about jewish grandchildren) but atm i just want to say that she has some v cute kids:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BDUW0QhikCD/?taken-by=ivankatrump&hl=en

tell us more about the classic fascist imagery, think I missed this

well, just in his speech to aipac he made some comment about how ivanka is going to have her jewish baby very soon and this kind of political elision between the personal birth/fertility as a stand-in for political national health has a tradition. this is in addition to the many times that trump has used his own health + fertility as a stand-in for a kind of nationalist power (i saw a lot of speculation that this was the dog whistle behind him talking about the size of his genitalia). maybe i'm reading too much into it but talking about babies + birth in political speech reminds me a lot of hitlerian propaganda such as

http://www.crestock.com/uploads/blog/2008/propagandaposters_de/20.jpg

this is a big genre btw i'm not just picking + choosing one poster

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/b7/83/f7/b783f79bd5b14685510ed21cdb4092d4.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/13/a0/17/13a017609f1de94c6d4d2845da397d21.jpg

http://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/womensmagazine.jpg

I doubt Trump's even aware of that but his AIPAC audience probably was and it was definitely a gross moment

i don't think trump needs to be aware of it to basically embody much the same ideology

in fact being aware of it would be a hindrance

I like the idea of Trump independently stumbling upon Nazi imagery and theories and conspiracies. Allows him plausible denial while at the same time allowing him to take advantage of it. Kind of like when Billy Joel was claiming to have composed something that turned out to be identical to some Mozart piece. " I don't know anything about Mozart, and I have never heard that piece, but how about that, aren't I good?"

isn't that standard operating procedure for Trump (cf David Duke etc.)?

Pretty much. What I'm saying is that maybe he really has no idea! Maybe all authoritarian neo fascists eventually find their way to the same (er) solutions.

i was surprised to learn this:

"Consider this question: how does the relationship between Israel and the Australian, Canadian, or British Jewish community differ from that of Israel and the American Jewish community? If one seeks an answer that can be quantified, note that, even taking into account the effect of the Birthright program—which to date has sent 400,000 young American Jews on trips to Israel—it is still the case that only about 40 percent of American Jews have bothered to visit the country at all. Without Birthright, that proportion would shrink to a third. By contrast, approximately 70 percent of Canadian Jews have made the trip at least once, as have 80 percent of Australian Jews and an estimated 95 percent of British Jews. Beyond the Anglosphere, 70 percent of French Jews have visited Israel, as have 70 percent of Mexican Jews and more than half of Argentinian Jews."

could this be perhaps partly due to americans just not being big foreign travelers in general? i.e. the average American has only been to three countries outside the u.s. and almost a third have never left the states?

maybe there's something to that - it's very surprising to see mexico + canada at 70% and the US at 30% less.

big lolz @ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/kasich-meets-talmudic-scholars-explains-bible.html

i liked this lil riff on it

https://twitter.com/dwdavison9318/status/720271473198428160

oh hey that reminds me - anyone got a decent recipe for matzo ball soup? I've tried a couple but each time the matzo balls turned out way heavier/harder than they should be. (My familial elders is no help in this regard, as they are all terrible at cooking)

ygm i sent u a recipe

Seltzer is an essential ingredient if you want to avoid golf balls.

aha!

this probably belongs on a few different threads but why not here?:

http://patijinich.com/recipe/post_1/

good stuff IMO

This is probably a question best for Mordy, but has anyone written a good theological defense/explanation etc. of strict observance of all of the mitzvoth without belief in God? And conversely, what are the best defenses of Reform-type Judaism from a theological perspective (i.e. not merely justifying it using secular terms).

What you probably want is an argument from historical revelation (that as our understanding of morality develops so should our practice). This is a better answer for justifying Reform-type Judaism (which makes most sense in a sociohistorical context imo) but not for strict observance without belief in G-d. Essentially though if you accept this historical based revelation than you can believe in the Torah even while believing that it was a changing document. Can also be a nice way to square parts of the Torah you don't like with the divinity of the Torah as a whole -- that our current level of revelation demonstrates that we can't understand, say, Leviticus, the same way it was understood in 1000BC. That it wouldn't even be an appropriate way of practicing the Torah. You can also fold in development of the oral Torah into this. Every since taking Brill's Revelation course at YU (looks like the syllabus is here: http://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/713482/rabbi-alan-brill/revelation-materials-unit-i-five-models-of-dulles-and-some-21st-century-questions-/) I can't help but think of these models in terms of their use - what questions they're coming to answer, or problems they're coming to address. That's why I think ultimately Reform is best understood as a response to acculturation into German Protestant culture and less as a stable theological theory. nb that Heschel's Torah from Heaven revelation model answers a lot of these same questions but keeps more of the divine revelation at Mount Sinai (which historical revelation only just barely preserves).

Re the other question I don't have a good answer (tho possibly you could make one from cultural preservation, or communal fidelity) but I did hear stories about Yeshiva students who were leaving their schools en masse during the high point of the Haskalah movement and there's a story I've heard that in Slabotke Yeshiva bochurim would smoke on Shabbos while learning gemara bc learning gemara was just too geshmak. This isn't really the same thing but it kinda gets to the same idea that maybe there are reasons to participate in these traditions despite not signing on to much of the theological underpinning it.