HEY JEWS

Drunk.

Today I learned, just now, from wikipedia:

Music historian James Fuld notes that "the word jingle in the title and opening phrase is apparently an imperative verb." In the winter in New England in pre-automobile days, it was common to adorn horses' harnesses with straps bearing bells as a way to avoid collisions at blind intersections, since a horse-drawn sleigh in snow makes almost no noise.

So it was more like, Jingle, bells, jingle! Jingle all the way!!"

Got take out dim sum last night (where the restaurant wished me a merry Christmas), the kids built these gingerbread house kits we bought from a local bakery (they've never built them before; one got so frustrated at her broken house that she literally resorted to a hot glue gun, the other's was so top heavy it collapsed on itself), prepared breakfast for 30 for a homeless shelter, watched Wonder Woman stink it up, listened to a half-assed lecture about Jews on Christmas (which offered so many reasons for the Chinese restaurant tradition but somehow missed *because they're open*), picked through cookies and other stuff gifted from all the neighbors. A fine not-Christmas was had by all.

The night before we went to a friend's backyard for a modified Feast of the Seven Fishes thing. It was 17 degrees The oysters and shrimp cocktails literally froze, but I got to put to good use one of my hanukah presents, a heated vest with a light that pulses and glows like a tiny little Iron Man generator.

I didn't realize that the member of the New York Dolls band who just died from cancer, Syl Sylvain (not his full birth name) was an Egyptian Jew who ended up in the US with his family. I think they left Egypt when it started to be a little uncomfortable there for Jews shortly after the formation of the country of Israel in 1948

Hey Jews who observe the not-quite-minor-but-still-not-totally-mainstream-holidays. Happy Purim!

Topical elements of our synagogue's Purim Shpiel last night (all on Zoom):

- Vashti refused to show up in-person and maskless for the king's party, choosing instead to participate remotely via Zoom, prompting him to find a new queen
- Vashti + Fauci = Faucti, played by congregant & chief infectious disease specialist at local hospital
- Q Haman

Forced and awkward puns and lots of corniness, as is the tradition, but got a few chuckles out of me

Our temple did a cool cross cultural exchange:

"Beyond the Hamantaschen - The Scroll of Esther begins with an account of Ahasuerus’s kingdom and tells us his kingdom stretched mei Hodu ad Kush, from India to Ethiopia. So… for Purim this year we are offering take-out food delivered to the parking lot from Mantra by Indian Garden and Addis Café."

wow, nice! 2 of my favorite cuisines. and this is definitely one of the holidays that could use some gastronomic updating. will push for similar here next year (though i live in a total, um, food desert for Ethiopian)

AITA: My husband (35m) made a huge party with his friends and got super drunk and asked me (32f) to come by wearing just a crown and I said I don’t want to go. His evil advisor (49m) is suggesting he kill me but like idk his party seemed stupid. AITA?

— Dr. Hannah Lebovits (@HannahLebovits) February 21, 2021

Q Haman is great

My housemates and I finally got around to making hamantaschen yesterday. We really upped our game this year; one housemate made the poppyseed filling herself instead of buying it in a can, we had some savory ones with caramelized onions, and I wanted a really sour filling for some of them so I cooked down sour cherries with sugar and thickened them with flour, so that basically they were little sour cherry hand pies.

nice! sour cherry sound fantastic. in my house we're making them with an 8-year-old and a 6-year-old so it's strawberry and apricot jelly right out of the jar at the moment lol. I look forward to branching into more refined tastes in coming years!

They were really good, I was very happy with them. We did some apricot jelly out of the jar as well, for tradition's sake. And some fig jam and goat cheese, which I haven't tried yet but have high hopes for.

all those hamentaschen sound incredible lily

My sister (in England) really wanted to make them with prune and poppy seed fillings, but says she has never seen either for sale there. I guess it never occurred to her to ... make it.

L'shana Tovah! Zoomed a service today; and then had dinner with Mom , my son and his gf. Was a little different without my Dad who passed away last November. My wife and I did the cooking.

Services were nice today, a nice return. I did have a chilling thought, though, when I looked around the maybe half-full sanctuary (many were at home, streaming, no doubt wary of return) and thought, imagine if all those missing people had been taken by the pandemic? I feel very fortunate that so many were absent by choice.

Virtual services for us. Kids service in the morning with our 6 & 11 year daughters. Grown folks service was a little later and we made the older kid sit through it. At times she was twitchy and desperately looking for a distraction but occasionally I could see the words were hitting her hard. She was teary-eyed when the rabbi spoke of the hardships of the past year. It meant a lot that something said during a service registered with her.

Our synagogue is, uh, blessed to have a lot of outdoor space and set up a huge tent on a grassy field and did in-person outdoors. Masks required, vax and reservation required for first day of the holiday but honor system the second day b/c no reservations. It was really nice. Humorously, the COVID Task Force implemented a "no shmoozing" rule to avoid close contact - you could socialize once you were out of the physical vicinity of the service but they didn't want people congregating. There was absolutely beautiful weather here in western Mass, which really made the experience.

fwiw, ours had masks required, and while I assume most if not all were vaxxed, there was not a vaccine requirement. The sanctuary was divided in half, more or less, with the front half marked as not/less socially distanced and the back half spread out and more explicitly socially distanced, but because it was nowhere near capacity those is the front could spread out and/or pod up with friends if they wanted. The kids and their services were all outside. The rabbis acknowledged that everyone has their own degree of comfort, and that no one should put themselves in a position that made them feel unsafe, but I think everyone was OK with how things went.

Outdoor under a tent, masked, really nice to do it not on the screen and I'm not even that religious

Great service today, felt weirdly special. We had temple member Tavi Gevinson's mom (who is a Norwegian convert who moonlights as a Hebrew tutor) chant the Haftorah, we had temple member blues singer Joanna Connor perform (contextualized by a great sermon about how it's sometimes OK to feel bad), we got the great news that since the pandemic broke out there has not been a single outbreak among the kids in the preschool, and that after planning for the financial worst the temple not only didn't have to cut its budget but actually received *more* donations. And then to top it all off we had the junior rabbi forget to turn his wireless mic off when he went to lead the kids service outside so, just like in "The Naked Gun," we heard his disembodied upbeat voice reverberating through the hall. The main rabbi even joked we were lucky he didn't use the bathroom.

From a Smithsonian Folklife article “The modern potato latke was not inevitable “

While the incorporation of the potato in European diets introduced Jewish home cooks to a new potential ingredient for their latkes, the invention of Crisco in 1911 spurred further cooking options. In Eastern Europe, latkes were historically fried in schmaltz, rendered poultry fat. Observant Jews following the laws of kashrut do not eat meat and dairy products in the same meal, so latkes cooked in schmaltz could only be eaten alongside meat or non-dairy dishes. Crisco is made from vegetable oils and seeds, and thus is parve (neither meat nor dairy). Thanks to this technological change, Jewish cooks had the option of frying and eating latkes in a new way

https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/foodways-holidays-hanukkah-latkes?fbclid=IwAR0qg6QMc25A1tJEBcMmaWMsH7lqwuNVWYNYjFqSnkouV2mwlH7Zf2YDdI0

I am now thinking about how delicious a schmaltz-fried latke must be

Yesterday my daughter told me a teacher of hers wished her and another Jewish student a "Happy Seventh Night!" My daughter told the teacher it wasn't the seventh night, it was the third. The teacher furrowed her brow, said oh, then asked, well, doesn't Hanukkah last seven nights? And my daughter said ... no.

Another Jewish student in a different class was asked by a classmate if she was from Israel. The girl said no. The other kid then followed up with "but aren't you Jewish?" And the first said yeah. And the other kid asked "but how could you be Jewish if you're not from Israel?" (This is 9th grade, btw, not 1st grade). The first girl said you don't have to be from Israel to be Jewish, her family was mostly from Poland, and the second kid, shocked, said "Poland? But Poland isn't a Jewish country!"

Then there was an online discussion my kid saw, so buyer beware, but the gist was someone was convinced Hanukkah had something to do with Hitler, and a person righteously corrected them and explained that, no, Hanukkah had nothing to do with Hitler. Hanukkah was about something that happened thousands of years ago, whereas Hitler had to do with the Holocaust ... "in the '90s."

Last was my same daughter's objection to people that say "Happy Hanukkah, to all that celebrate." And she was super annoyed, because no one ever says "Merry Christmas, to all that celebrate." It's always for non-Christian holidays, and it comes off sooooo patronizing.

Anyway. Happy Hanukkah.

no one ever says "Merry Christmas, to all that celebrate.

I do!

happy samhain, to all who slaughter livestock

hag sameach to all, even the losers and the haters

more latke history:

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/12/the-great-latke-lie/420018/

I always assumed it was different in other parts of North America but after growing up in BC I am never shocked by gentile ignorance of even the most basic facts about Judaism

gotta whole latke love

Huh:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/dec/25/bambi-cute-lovable-vulnerable-or-a-dark-parable-of-antisemitic-terror?fbclid=IwAR3rte1amicW2qK0nkL54vbMpPxmoRuP9Z3s8c9Ap2PPlSImEiPxrCzA6Kc

It’s a saccharine sweet story about a young deer who finds love and friendship in a forest. But the original tale of Bambi, adapted by Disney in 1942, has much darker beginnings as an existential novel about persecution and antisemitism in 1920s Austria.

Now, a new translation seeks to reassert the rightful place of Felix Salten’s 1923 masterpiece in adult literature and shine a light on how Salten was trying to warn the world that Jews would be terrorised, dehumanised and murdered in the years to come. Far from being a children’s story, Bambi was actually a parable about the inhumane treatment and dangerous precariousness of Jews and other minorities in what was then an increasingly fascist world, the new translation will show.

In 1935, the book was banned by the Nazis, who saw it as a political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Europe and burned it as Jewish propaganda. “The darker side of Bambi has always been there,” said Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota and translator of the forthcoming book.

Shana Tova.

Zooming Romemu Brooklyn service as I like the Rabbi who used to be near me at 6th & I in Washington DC

Rabbinical lol this morning: "Today we are celebrating the creation of the world 5783 years ago. Of course, some of those years were much longer than others. Like the last two."

Ha.

The rabbi in the service I viewed addressed that joke's concept in a more serious way and noted that someone said he was very negative. He asserted that is just how things are, and that despite all the painful negativity around us, we have to work on changing ourselves for the better and that the atmosphere around us would eventually change but we need to be patient. He quoted a Fugees lyric as part of this sermon (while acknowledging that might date him)

which lyric?

there's a latke cart near my house so i thought i'd go out there to celebrate the high holy days. i asked them to give me the most popular thing on their menu. they gave me a bacon latke.

not really a big jewish population around these parts, i don't think.

"The latkes here are treyf... and the portions, oy, so small!"

whoopsie

KFC’s German branch has apologized for seeming to encourage its customers to mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht — the notorious Nazi pogrom against Jews — by eating chicken, saying that a promotional message was sent in error as a result of an automated push notification.

The pogrom that began on Nov. 9, 1938, is known as the night of broken glass, and is widely commemorated as the start of the Holocaust. It was a coordinated assault on German Jews and their homes, businesses and synagogues. On Wednesday, KFC Germany sent a message to users of its app with the title “Anniversary of the Reich’s pogrom night,” according to reports in the German news media and screen shots of the promotion that circulated widely on Twitter. The message invited customers to enjoy “tender cheese with crispy chicken.”

Someone just plugged holidays.xml in there without checking and fired some marketing interns

Hey Jews. How y'all doin'? I most assuredly am not looking to turn this into yet another political thread discussing you-know-what, but thought it might be a good space to share a bit about where I'm holding these days.

I think I'm on the very extreme end of Jewishly-engaged ilxors - my kids go to a Jewish school, the vast majority of people we see socially are Jewish, and my partner is, uh, the director of our synagogue. We live in about as progressive a community as you can find outside of the most urban of areas (we're not urban) and shit has been pretty crazy here. Our rabbi stepped down about 4 months ago to take a different job, and the search for a new one is nascent, so there is a decidedly inconvenient vacuum of leadership at the synagogue. A sizeable portion of our community not only proudly identifies as anti-Zionist, but would probably say that this is a central pillar of their Jewish identity, driven by values like human rights and moral courage. This faction -- which, while it skews quite a bit younger than I, includes a number of our friends -- has been protesting for a ceasefire, getting arrested doing so, and drafting language about the occupation for our community leaders to consider incorporating into their own statements. Simultaneously, like probably any synagogue, we have plenty of folks demanding public declarations of unconditional support for Israel, questioning where our Israeli flag is (it, alongside our US flag, came down during some minor renovation a few years ago and sneakily hasn't gone back up), and generally finding bogeymen in any criticism of Israel. Oh yes and also there are quite a few Israeli expats in the congregation, including a guy who grew up in Kfar Aza and had several cousins and close childhood family friends murdered and other cousins currently being held hostage. Along with a few other people at the synagogue, my wife has been thrust into the position of making statements, trying to hold the community together, and being consulted by any number of local civic leaders. Let's just say she's been working a lot of late nights, and absorbing a lot of abuse.

I haven't been engaging in the political discussion here on ilx, and have been trying my damnedest to stay out of it in other forums as well, both online and irl. I've just had way too many experiences where both parties come into an interaction looking for and taking for granted that they will find support and solidarity, and instead come out feeling more alone and alienated after someone says the ever so slightly wrong thing that makes it clear you don't see 100% eye-to-eye. Instead, I've been working really hard to (a) stay humble, (b) put the value of human life above all else when compelled to figure out how I feel, and (c) recognize that whatever self-righteous, vitriolic, cocksure arguments people make are actually driven by the roiling emotions this situation is dredging up. Pain, sadness, confusion, anger, trauma. I am a therapist so it is pretty on brand for me to "focus on the feelings" rather than the content of what people say, but I do believe that that's where solidarity is to be found, and it doesn't seem like division and bitterness are doing us any favors getting towards any positive outcomes.

Not sure if I'm even looking for anything by posting this, other than getting it out of my head and articulated. But it has felt impossible to find spaces that aren't going to politicize whatever someone says and try to shift you left or right to fill a role. If others are finding it as daunting to hold and articulate a nuanced perspective that doesn't fit into the prescribed boxes, in social spaces, I welcome your solidarity! Bonus if said experience is informed by being a Jew. ilx has very slowly over the past few years turned me from an exclusive internet lurker into an occasional poster, and I have a lot of respect for the level of discourse here, self-deprecating "new board description"-type comments notwithstanding. So I have a little spark of hope that I can say this stuff here and get responses without it degenerating. But if this goes unnoticed, that's ok too, feels good just to get it out.

tl;dr: it's hard out here for a Jew in October 2023.

Thank you for posting. Sincere and heartfelt, I wish the best things for you and your community

lovely post.

I also really appreciate the quality of discussion on this board at times like this. And I'm glad I'm not responsible for crafting any sort of public-facing statement - leading a synagogue in Oct 2023 must be a thankless task.

Thank you both <3

Wonderful, sustaining post Laurel. I would say “thank you” but only if it were multiplied a thousand times

I've just had way too many experiences where both parties come into an interaction looking for and taking for granted that they will find support and solidarity, and instead come out feeling more alone and alienated after someone says the ever so slightly wrong thing that makes it clear you don't see 100% eye-to-eye.

I feel this very, very hard. You are not alone.

Bonus if said experience is informed by being a Jew.

Omg, I feel this so hard. You have no idea.

I will just add that I think people may underrate how difficult it is to be receptive to information that conflicts with your previously held notions when emotions are high. Also, having a lot of people yelling at you because you did not word things in exactly the right way or you did not pick up on someone's sarcastic quip just multiplies the difficulty.

I'm not Jewish but I am constantly mistaken for being Jewish, which is close enough right? jk

What you say about your synagogue reminds me of family, in that you're sort of stuck with each other, and love each other, and political events can expose faultlines that seem unbridgeable, yet you have to find a way of living with them.. Perhaps this is a model for the world??

What a lovely and thoughtful post, I would love for you say more down the line, if you feel like it.

I think defensiveness, unprocessed anger and getting things wrong are a natural part human relating, and we shouldn't be ashamed of messing things up, but it takes a lot of practice (or a lucky good temperament) to get past those things -- and "having time to get past things" can feel like a luxury or an impossibility when you're stressed or it feels like you're under siege.

I love that therapist phrase "rupture and repair" (I'm a Jewish trainee therapist, it turns out) and I wish it was a bigger part of the current therapy-speak-vogue (as opposed to overvaluing narcissistic self-belief).

Yes, very good post. Sometimes Judaism and being Jewish is complicated. I'm not even sure all four of us in my immediate family are on the same page about a lot of things. This past Yom Kippur (for non-Jews, or anyone, this was back at the end of September), our Rabbi's sermon was almost entirely focused on the dangerous rightward swing of Israel, and those at the other end of the political spectrum (including many of his fellow activist friends in Israel) pushing back. And yet, he has many friends there now, many in danger, some of whom may be dead. How do you process that conflict, that duality? It's hard. Many of us are, in his words, "fine but not really OK."

I'm bringing all this up not to be political, but just to affirm, yeah, sometimes, even often, Judaism and being Jewish is complicated, and when I encounter debates (on ILX, in real life, anywhere) that start from a position of absolute certainty and conviction, I sometimes find it alienating, at best. And yeah, said experience is informed by being a Jew.

Per Tracer, my synagogue honestly does feel like a second family to me, with my membership/association predicated almost entirely on those feelings rather than the pull of religion, specifically. When we hear certain jokes or references, we understand. When they have to remind everyone at services where the emergency exits are, or where the children in babysitting will be lead to safety, or which doors to the building to use because of heightened security concerns, we all understand. When a Temple member tells the story of why she swims every day - because her mother escaped from the Nazis in Hungary by diving into a river in the dead of winter and somehow making it to freedom with a bullet in her back - we understand that, too.

When my older daughter was applying to colleges, a significant Jewish population was important to her, because of the comfort that community provides. She may not agree with everyone, she may not like everyone, but she knows they (we) share many similar experiences and stories, and given the anxieties of life (let alone anxiety in times of acute crisis) that provides her a sense of security she does not always find elsewhere.  

I admittedly feel a bit alone lately, although at least my wife sees things similarly to me. I got briefly roped into this chat group of local Jews, which I was hoping was going to be positive because my town tends to be very liberal to left and I figured there would be more complexity to the discussion, but it's just a lot of "Look at what this professor said!" Eventually it devolved into a kind of campaign against our village's mayor for not making a statement in support of the 10/7 victims. I suspect her sympathies are more pro-Palestinian and I honestly do not care. This is a village of 8,000 people with a commuter train station and a small downtown. I do not need our mayor to take any overt stance on Israel-Palestine and I kind of am glad she doesn't. Several people in the group kept asking that anyone seeking to campaign against the mayor (who, fwiw, I don't even like that much for more localized reasons) keep it in a separate group that they had created since not everyone was interested in joining that fight. They kept doing it over and over again and they were dominating the conversation and I finally just left.

I am sympathetic to but can't really align myself with the Free Palestine movement for reasons I don't want to get into in order to avoid a political debate in this thread. I feel a lot of pain watching what is happening in Gaza but also feel that pain over what happened in Israel is being denied under various academic-sounding justifications. I suppose Palestinians would say the same has always been done to them.

My personality has always been allergic to being a joiner and going along with any party line, which leaves me as sort of an island. I grew up conservative Jewish and I'm the son of a cantor. Jewishness and synagoguge were a huge part of my life growing up, and I don't actually have any ill feeling toward that, in fact I have felt the urge to reconnect with it in recent years. The prominence of zionism in synagogues has complicated that for me, as has my allergy to stuff that feels "clubby" like youth groups when I was younger, Hillel in college, and today any sort of Jewish group putting on officious vigils and rallies. I find Jewish Voice for Peace simplistic and weird tbh. I saw them wearing talit and blowing shofars in the capital, like a cartoon of Judaism with no context.