[kvetchings]

also wanted to share now that i'm posting here again that my judaism is and always will be transgender and antizionist! i'm happy to talk to anyone who finds judaism and antizionism to be contradictory or other antizionist jews who haven't been able to find antizionist jewish community <3

[kvetchings]

Do you have any recommendations on contemporary Jewish music or resources on contemporary Jewish music? I've wanted to try and find some for years, but every time I find a resource it just ends up giving the same handful of klezmer standards, show tunes by the same half-dozen or so Jewish composers, or regular pop music that's only Jewish insofar as the singer or composer is Jewish.

i do! here are some of my favorite contemporary jewish musicians:

Melita and Isaac -> folksy, some kids music (i mostly play for preschoolers) but not exclusively

Elana Arian -> huge leader in reform songleading, writes really gorgeous liturgical settings

Aly Halpert -> I think if you are a progressive Jew in the US you've probably heard Aly's ashrei or her song Loosen, but I'm also sort of living in a nexus of her music so it's hard for me to judge. she's an incredible jewish musician and you should check her out.

Levyosn -> smaller yiddish band based in northampton (produced by borscht beat records who produce a lot of contemporary klezmer and klezmer-adjacent groups)

i'm happy to give more recommendations or point you in more directions with the caveat that a lot of the jewish music i listen to is either liturgical, klezmer, or for children. borscht beat's website has more yiddish musicians and aly and elana both collaborate with a number of other very cool and talented jewish musicians. Chava Mirel, Batya Levine, Noah Aronson, Eliana Light, Shira Kline -- eliana and shira both mostly make kids music but i still recommend checking them out.

here is my biggest contemporary liturgy hack: there are two huge songbooks called Shireinu volume I and II. volume II just came out and has an audio component that is available on spotify. it doesn't have all the songs in the book but it does have 49 of them recorded by a bunch of contemporary jewish songleaders. volume I is also available on the Internet Archive.

[kvetchings]

there are only six people following this blog and I mostly used it as a journal, but I hope someone sees this. I started this account in high school when I was very insecure in my Jewishness. I wanted so badly to live a Jewish life and I felt not Jewish enough to try. it’s 10 years later now and I’m a Hebrew school teacher, I light shabbat candles almost every week, I speak Yiddish, I play Jewish music on the violin and guitar (personally and professionally), I have a degree in Jewish studies, people I know text me to ask me questions about halakha, and I’m waiting to hear back about my rabbinical school application. I get so much joy from my Jewish life. I’m so glad I started learning. I’m so glad I chose to be Jewish.

[palamate-deactivated20220813]

Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz

[kvetchings]

this is going to be a year of me growing so much as a Jew, I can already tell. I love celebrating shabbat every week with my weird community of Jewish young adults. I love doing readings for my religion class and disagreeing with them because I care so deeply about the text. I love going to a reconstructionist shul and missing how deliberate humanists are about when and how they talk about g-d and use hebrew. I am a religious person and I’m figuring out what that means to me! shanah tovah!

[realsadjewishhours]

HOW TO LIGHT SHABBOS CANDLES

Shabbos candles are lit 18 minutes before sunset. After sunset has already passed, Shabbos automatically begins, and one can no longer light the Shabbos candles.

STEP 1:

Light 2 candles that are large enough to burn for 2-3 hours, or until the Friday night meal has concluded. (Some have the custom to light 1 candle or many candles. Ask your Rabbi which custom to follow.)

STEP 2:

Extend your hands over the candles, then draw them inwards in a circular motion, as if to bring the light toward you. This symbolizes that you’re drawing the spirituality and holiness of Shabbos into your home and into your life. Do this motion 3 times. Then cover your eyes.

STEP 3:

Say the blessing while your eyes are closed:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה’ אֱלֹקֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם

אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְצִוָּנוּ

לְהַדְלִיק נֵר שֶׁל שַׁבָּת

Ba-RUCH / ah-TAH / ado-NOY / eh-lo-HEY-nu / MEH-lech / ha-o-LAM

a-SHER / kee-d’-SHA-nu / bi-mitz-vo-SAV / vi-tzee-VA-nu

l’-had-LEEK / neir / shel / Shabbos.

Blessed are You, Hashem, our God, King of the universe,

Who has sanctified us with His commandments,

and commanded us to kindle the light of Shabbos.

By saying this blessing, you are accepting Shabbos upon yourself. As soon the blessing is finished, prohibited activities (such as using electronics) cannot be done. The candlesticks should not be moved because they are “muktzeh.”

STEP 4:

Talk to God when you’re done saying the blessing. Take a moment to thank God for everything He has given you, and ask for all that you desire for the future. God loves to hear your prayers! Jewish women traditionally use this special time to pray for their families and ask to raise upright and God-fearing children and descendants who will follow in the ways of Torah and Judaism. You can also use this time to pray for others who need good health, relief from pain, or any other need. Open your heart and speak to God.

(Source)

[progressivejudaism]

New to Jewish Prayer? Nine Tips for Beginners

Perhaps you’ve been to Shabbat services, and found them mystifying, or you've been invited to a bar mitzvah service and have no idea what to do. Here are some ways to get something out of the experience as a beginner.

[kvetchings]

my friend gave me this BIG ol magen david for my birthday which was really sweet of him but like do i have to self assurance to wear it? no. i’d feel like a fake jew.

[yidquotes]

The only Jew in Star Wars was Han Solo. He was a flawed hero like in the Jewish Bible. Luke Skywalker was a perfect hero. That’s goyish.

Rabbi Yitzhak Greenberg

[nerdyqueerandjewish]

@jewish-american-princet thoughts???

[chochmah-binah-daas]

Luke is the ultimate assimilated Jew suddenly trying to (or maybe even being forced to) jump too deep too fast into being Jewish. He comes from a relatively charmed life. Loving aunt and uncle, romantic stories growing up about his war hero father who died when Luke was a baby, humble but comfortable living situation. It’s as if this Jewish boy was adopted by his goyische aunt and uncle living in middle America. 

Then suddenly he faces the ultimate Jewish experience: coming home to devastation and fleeing the country (planet, in this case). He has to learn on the fly and even though we, as the outside viewers, know this is his “destiny” (assuming one buys into the very messianic prophecy of the restoration of the Jedi), Luke clearly has issues getting acclimated. 

It’s as if he’s being led down the good observant Jew path by Yoda and Obi Wan but his friends are hellbent on their revolutionary mission. He argues with his 900-year-old teacher that he just can’t keep doing handstands on Planet Shrek while his friends are dying fighting a tyrant and his army of Space N*zis. I daresay this is extraordinarily Jewish, viewed through the lens of late 1800s and early 1900s Jewry in central/eastern Europe. 

This post also overlooks one extremely important Jew in this franchise: Princess Leia, played by self-proclaimed half-Jewish Princess Carrie Fisher (may her memory be for a blessing). She was absolutely that child who argued against her community’s rabbi about whether or not women should be allowed in the Talmud study group, and at 7 years old, successfully led to the founding of the Women’s Chavrusa. This is a woman who was taught an unwavering foundation of morals and proceeded to implement those morals to fight injustice. She’s a class traitor and she’s damn good at it. 

Even with a small army surrounding her, guns out, Darth Vader demanding information, this 5′1″ woman looms over her captors by virtue of that strength of character. There’s a reason Jewish women have the unfortunate stereotype of being “bitchy” or “princesses”. It’s just the outside culture misinterpreting their unwillingness to back down, their persistence in arguing for the causes that the Torah teaches us are worth fighting for. This essentially flows through Leia’s veins. 

Saying any of the original trio isn’t Jewish is missing the complexity of Jewish experiences. They’ve all come from their own upbringings but they’re all joining their local Jewish Socialist groups and finding their ways into the same revolution.

[kvetchings]

also while I’m posting my grandma is visiting and she saw the permission slip for a jewish summer camp I’m going to on our kitchen table and was like “are you getting bat mitzvahed?” no thats… a permission slip with the word yiddish on it. she’s lived in New York City for most of her life and has been married to my jewish grandfather for 50+ years. idg how she remains so in the dark about judaism. 

[kvetchings]

yeah apparently when my dad was a kid every year around christmas my grandma would send my grandpa out to get a tree and would tell him “go get the hanukah bush” and he’d be like no its fine I’ll get a christmas tree and at the high holidays she’d make him go get gefilte fish and eat it, since he was insisting on being a jew, so honestly I think this was just a microaggression. thanks goyische bubbe. 

[kvetchings]

the #firstantisemiticexperience hashtag is horrifying. so many people were targeted so early in their lives. i’ve been thinking about how my grandma’s elementary school class was especially small because it had more jewish girls than average, and a lot of mothers held their daughters back. i’ve been thinking about how kids in my mom’s school told her she was going to hell. i’ve been thinking about how my goyische grandma made comments deriding her husband’s judaism, and how my grandad did the same to my jewish grandmother, and what it must have meant for both my parents to hear that from the people raising them. i’ve been thinking about my first antisemitic experience, when a boy in my ninth grade history class turned to the kid sitting next to me and told him a holocaust joke, the day we began studying the holocaust. earlier that morning my dad told me in the car on the way to school that his grandfather left poland to escape violent antisemitism. i’ve been thinking about my jewish friends who have had pennies thrown at them, and whose synagogues have been vandalized, and who attend jewish day schools with bulletproof glass in the windows. i’ve been thinking of the gentiles who believe that antisemitism doesn’t matter anymore, or just exists in europe, or ended in world war II. just because we can join country clubs doesn’t mean we aren’t still othered and oppressed. antisemitism will always be more complicated than that. 

[kvetchings]

I had a really interesting conversation with my mom and our closest family friends over the weekend about black/jewish relations. they’re black, and the mom works in an organization of primarily black and/or jewish people because they do education relating to the holocaust and the slave trade. she said she hasn’t experienced any division in her workplace as of yet, but I was remembering a conversation we had over the summer about how they’ve so far avoided publicly naming a stance on israel and I wonder the affect that could have. her son is in his late 20s and lives in brooklyn, and he said that he’d already witnessed a lot of hostility and had a lot to say about racial politics in israel, which was interesting because it’s really not something I know a lot about, and I’d never heard a gentile talking about the treatment of sephardic jews before. he also said that jews control 25% of the wealth in either the world or the united states (I missed which). that’s untrue. he’s really smart and I really like and respect him, he’s basically a brother to me, but that left a bad taste in my mouth. obviously I’m not going to dismiss anything else he was saying.

[jewish-tutter]

“Jewishness is not a belief, a feeling, a conviction or a lifestyle. It is a state of being. We can either celebrate it or fight against it. But it will always be there. So why not celebrate it?”

[kvetchings]

good writing comparisons I got: Seinfeld twice, David sedaris, Joni Mitchell, Etgar Keret, whoever wrote the god of small things

[kvetchings]

SEINFELD TWICE?? SEINFELD TWICE? two different people compared my writing to seinfeld!

[kvetchings]

i feel like there’s something i lost through not having a female relative to teach me how to cook traditional foods. my mom doesn’t cook, her mom doesn’t cook, and my other grandma isn’t jewish. she doesn’t cook either but that’s beside the point. i can cook latkes or matzah balls or challah but im figuring it out for myself. i know better than my mom does what im doing. and i know im gendering all of these things but they are gendered. it feels wrong that im the one to show my mother how to braid challah or sing the chanukah prayers. where was her mother to teach her that? where was she to teach me?

[kvetchings]

my friend didn’t know that my family is half christian and I told him and he was like “yeah but your name is still [REDACTED ASHKENAZI NAME], you can’t get away from that.” and like... oof yeah. of course this particular friend is goyische and has been making jokes about how jewish my name is since we’ve known each other. I know I can’t get away from it. 

[kvetchings]

i’ve made almost this exact post before but lets have 5779 be the year of not casting italian gentiles in jewish roles. cast jews! need someone who “looks jewish” for a jewish role? super easy! any jew looks jewish automatically! you don’t need need jason biggs.