@theartofmadeline
bliss lane
titsay
Not today Justin
The Stonewall Inn
roma★
noise dept.
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Interview Vampire Daily
YOU ARE THE REASON
occasionally subtle
RMH
TMBGareOK. The Official They Might Be Giants tumblr
Cosmic Funnies
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
$LAYYYTER
almost home
Noah Kahan
tannertan36
Product Placement
seen from Malaysia
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@mabfan
By mabfan
My superhero for this class: Worldbender. She has the power to warp reality, but having destroyed her original universe, she’s very reluctant to do so. Instead, she uses her ability to steal other powers to be a hero in the universe that she thinks she effectively created when she destroyed her old one.
Uh oh.
The Story Behind the Story, Part I: The Genesis of Dani and Avi
In May or so of 2003, a dear friend e-mailed me and said, “I’m going to write a novel in the month of November, and you’re going to do it with me.”
I e-mailed back and said, “No.”
But it was the spring of 2003, and there was a lot of change coming to Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) heard arguments in March in the case Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which was the case that ultimately brought marriage equality to Massachusetts in May 2004. While many SJC trials get little notice by the general public until the rulings come down, Goodridge sparked a lot of conversation about what it would mean for Massachusetts if the justices were to rule that the state laws as written violated the Massachusetts constitution. There was a lot of discussion about what a ruling for Goodridge might mean and how marriage equality might be implemented.
Before this, I had never really considered myself a writer. Well, I have been a technical writer since 2000, and I had written a bit of fanfiction, but I had never really thought of writing original fiction. My original dalliance with fanfiction came about because after some time as a technical writer I was becoming afraid that I had forgotten how to write anything that wasn’t in technical-document-speak (short, declarative, action-verb sentences, numbered steps, and bulleted lists). But the longer the discussions in the spring and summer of 2003 went on about the potential impact of marriage equality on Massachusetts, the more I started thinking.
My husband, who is an award-winning writer of science fiction and a journalist, says that the interesting story to tell about new technology is not “whom does this help” but “whom does this hurt?” And as an Orthodox Jew, I began to wonder how gay Orthodox Jews might be affected by the ruling. When people started joking that now Orthodox gay couples would now start being asked, “So, nu? When are you getting married?” like Orthodox straight couples are, it started a tickle in my brain. How would (presumably mostly closeted) Orthodox men react to the new exposure? How would Orthodox communities react to having gay couples as members of their synagogues? And a few days later, I had in my brain a talkative gay Israeli boy who was out and proud – and not at all observant of halacha, Jewish law. With him came this quiet boy who was Orthodox. I didn’t know what they wanted, and I didn’t know why they had chosen to move into my brain, but there they were.
And very soon, thirteen years after they first appeared in my mind, they will be out in front of the world.
In the twelve years since marriage equality came to Massachusetts, not all of the Orthodox Jewish community’s questions have been answered. But there do exist Orthodox synagogues that have found ways to make the gay couples among their memberships feel welcome as full members of the community. In 2010, a number of prominent Orthodox rabbis signed a Statement of Principles that set out a Modern Orthodox approach to having same-sex couples in the community. For the first time, respected rabbis were taking a stand on the treatment of LGBTQ+ members of their communities. For example, point 5 of the Statement says:
Whatever the origin or cause of homosexual orientation, many individuals believe that for most people this orientation cannot be changed. Others believe that for most people it is a matter of free will. Similarly, while some mental health professionals and rabbis in the community strongly believe in the efficacy of “change therapies”, most of the mental health community, many rabbis, and most people with a homosexual orientation feel that some of these therapies are either ineffective or potentially damaging psychologically for many patients.
We affirm the religious right of those with a homosexual orientation to reject
therapeutic approaches they reasonably see as useless or dangerous.
While to many it might not seem like the document takes a huge step forward by any means, to the Modern Orthodox community it represented a major sea change.
While there are remain groups within the Orthodox Jewish community who treat the members of the couple as nothing more than roommates rather than acknowledging that there is any other relationship possible between two people of the same sex, the Modern Orthodox community has made significant strides toward integrating same-sex couples fully into the community. I have seen this change happen over the thirteen years that Dani and Avi have lived in my brain, and I hope that the positive changes continue to happen.
(As for the friend who tried to get me to participate in NaNoWriMo in 2003? She relented on the novel writing and instead in September 2003 convinced me to pick up the knitting I hadn’t touched since I was nine. And she has become one of my best first readers and most ardent supporters.)
In Which I Wax Rhapsodic About the Cover of Flying Without a Net
I can’t even remember when I first encountered CB Messer’s artwork, but I know that I have loved it for a very long time. Her work is gorgeous, and the intricacy of the detail that she puts in blows me away.
I was therefore very excited when I found out that she was the art director for Interlude Press, and I was even more excited when I was told that she would be designing my book’s cover. We had a brief telephone meeting in which she tried to get me to give her some information about visuals in the book and I flailed and yammered about the characters and the world they inhabit. I’m a word nerd, and words comprise my palette. But the visual arts are not my strength; I paint images in text and leave it to others to provide the visual media.
I was concerned, after our meeting, that I had failed utterly to provide any information that would be of any use to CB. So I was absolutely thrilled when, not long after, CB sent me a draft of the cover. It was almost but not quite identical to the cover that will be released with the book. In one image, she managed to capture the essence of this story.
There are three main elements to the cover image, all of which have relevance to Dani and Avi. The chamsa, the hand, is a symbol that has become associated with Judaism and with Israel. To me, it captured Dani’s Israeli roots and Avi’s dedication to his religious beliefs. The rainbow chamsa unites their Jewish identities with their identification as gay men. And in the base of the chamsa sit some iconic buildings of the Boston skyline, helping anchor the action in and around the city of Boston.
(The one major change between the first draft of the cover that I saw and the final version is that CB had originally put an image of the Boston skyline in the location where the individual buildings are now. While I loved having the Boston skyline on the cover, I was afraid that Jews who were familiar with the chamsa iconography would automatically see the skyline as that of the old city of Jerusalem and not Boston, so CB chose the iconic Boston buildings that now appear.)
The most subtle element of the cover, and the one that truly blew me away, is the background behind the chamsa. It’s designed to look like the brown leather covers that are typical of the bound versions of many of the Jewish religious texts that one would find in most Orthodox Jewish households. This connection of the traditional to the modern echoes the balance that Avi must strike in his Modern Orthodox Jewish life.
I can’t wait to see how the cover looks in hard copy.
Want to see the cover up close and catch all the fine detail that CB put in? Flying Without a Net will be released on 17 November 2016 and is available for preorder from Interlude Press.
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In which an author waxes rhapsodic about the cover art for her first novel.
About Names, and the Pronunciation Thereof
Dani’s name does not have the same weighty significance as Avi’s. However, his name poses a challenge. A writer can make their reader do many things: laugh, cry, think. One thing, however, that a writer cannot make their reader do (without a lot of clunky textual machinations) is pronounce things a specific way.
Many names with biblical origins are now considered mainstream names. Michael, for example, is still one of the most popular boy’s names in the United States. It is not, however, pronounced the way that you’d pronounce the Hebrew name. For one thing, the ch in the middle is pronounced in Hebrew in the same way as the ch in “Loch Ness,” not the ch in “chocolate.” And Daniel as Dani pronounces it is pronounced Dah-nee-el, with the “a” pronounced the same as the “a” in “father” and the emphasis on the final syllable.
The pronunciation of Dani’s name is hampered further by “Dani” being a common nickname for “Danielle,” with the “a” pronounced as the same vowel as in “cat.”
So when Dani showed up in my brain and announced that his name was Daniel Moshe, I had to decide what I wanted to do. Should I have a character pronounce Dani’s name incorrectly in the story and have Dani correct him or her? Or should I just leave the pronunciation up to the reader and just not worry about it?
(“Moshe” poses its own issues, since it’s pronounced “Moe-sheh,” with an emphasis on the first syllable. It’s the Hebrew form of “Moses.”)
I did consider other ways, short of an expository lump, that I could guide readers toward the proper pronunciation. I thought about having another character (likely Dudu, Dani’s brother) say something like, “But Daaaani!”), but I still couldn’t figure out how to indicate that it was supposed to be pronounced Dah-ni. So, ultimately, I decided that there was nothing I could truly do to make a reader pronounce the name the way I intended.
Might I have made the whole thing easier by just calling him Dan or Danny and having the pronunciation be more natural for my readers? Perhaps, but it wouldn’t have been as true to the character I was looking to create. Dani has a Hebrew name with an Israeli pronunciation and Israeli nickname. (Dani’s brother, David, pronounces his name as Daveed Diggs does, but he doesn’t mind people calling him Dave. And he has a family nickname that is a standard nickname for David in Israel but that can cause hilarity among Americans. His nickname is Dudu.)
Want to find out more about Dani, Avi, Dudu, and all the others? Flying Without a Net will be released on 17 November 2016 and is available for preorder from Interlude Press.
Now Available for Pre-Order: “Flying Without a Net” by E.M. Ben Shaul
I understand Shir HaShirim, the Song of Songs, much more now. I can relate to the lover who is basking in the beauty of their beloved, who is so struck by the appearance of the one who is in their heart that they wax poetic, that they write the most epic of love songs.
“My beloved is mine, and I am his, that feeds among the roses.”
One of Publishers Weekly’s top ten most anticipated romance titles for Fall 2016
Summary
Dani Perez, a secular Israeli working as a software engineer in Boston, has never had trouble balancing his faith and his sexuality—until he meets Avi Levine, a gay Orthodox Jew and sign language interpreter. As they fall in love, Dani finds himself wanting Avi in his life, but he can’t understand how Avi reconciles what his religion demands with what his body desires. And although he wants to deny it, neither can Avi.
Despite the risk of losing Avi forever to a religious life that objects to their love, Dani supports him through the struggle to find an answer. Will they be able to start a life together despite religious ideology that conflicts with the relationship they are trying to build?
Price: $17.99 print / $6.99 multi-format ebook Release Date: November 17, 2016 Details: Trade paperback, 6"x9" ISBN: 978-1-941530-11-5 print // 978-1-941530-12-2 ebook US/Canada: If you place both the print and ebook versions in your cart and order before November 20, 2016, you will receive the multi-format eBook for free with the discount code FLYING. International: Order the print edition by January 17, 2016 from your favorite book retailer and receive free multi-format eBook by submitting a copy of your receipt to [email protected].
About the Author
E.M. Ben Shaul lives in many communities. An Orthodox Jew and writer of gay fiction, E.M. lives in the simultaneously gay-friendly and Jewish-friendly Boston area with her husband and twin daughters. A technical writer by day and freelance editor by nights and weekends, E.M. likes to knit, cook and coin neologisms. E.M. seeks to explore the seeming conflict between religious teachings and the heart’s desires. Get to know E.M. on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook.
Cover art and design by C.B. Messer
When Dani and Avi, the main characters in Flying Without a Net, first showed up in my brain, I wasn’t sure what to do with them. They were the first original characters I had considered writing since I was in high school, and I tried to ignore them. Dani showed up first, outgoing and talkative. He basically informed me that his name was Daniel Perez but that he used “Dani” as a nickname.
He brought along with him a friend. This friend was much quieter. He didn’t say anything for days; trying to draft even the barest of character sketches was a real challenge. But then he told me that his name was Abraham Joshua Levine, and that his family called him Avi. This immediately told me something about Avi’s family, if not about Avi himself.
You see, “Abraham Joshua” immediately called to my mind Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a great 20th century Jewish philosopher and scholar who had one foot firmly in the religious world and one foot firmly in the secular world. Rabbi Heschel marched in Selma, AL, with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He represented American Jewry at the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1938 while living in Frankfurt but subsequently was released, after which he escaped to London and then to the United States. He was an Orthodox Jew who became one of the great thinkers of the Conservative movement, and he also taught at Hebrew Union College, the Reform Jewish rabbinical school. He found a way to balance his religious life and his secular life and did not turn his back on those whose beliefs or backgrounds were different from him.
The fictional Avi strives to find a similar balance between his secular and religious lives. He hopes that his community can embrace those who are different from mainstream Orthodoxy and find the similarities between them rather than focusing on the differences.
Flying Without a Net will be available for preorder from Interlude Press next week and will be available for purchase on 17 November 2016.
“j.k. rowling clearly has no idea how the american educational system works” so true can you imagine if the american educational system held that the pinnacle of scholastic achievement was getting into one single tiny elite school in massachusetts that’s so crazy who ever heard of such a thing
It’s father’s day, and I have no real time to finish this, but I wanted all my Trekkie friends and family all around the world to have this. ANTON YELCHIN 1989-2016 mrscratch0753.tumblr.com
COMING THIS FALL: Flying Without a Net, by E.M. Ben Shaul
Dani Perez, a secular Israeli working as a software engineer in Boston, has never had trouble balancing his faith and his sexuality—until he meets Avi Levine, a gay Orthodox Jew and sign language interpreter. As they fall in love, Dani finds himself wanting Avi in his life but confused by Avi’s observance. Dani can’t understand how Avi reconciles what his religion demands with what his body desires. And although he wants to deny it, neither can Avi.
Despite the risk of losing Avi forever to a religious life that objects to their love, Dani supports him through the struggle to find an answer. Will they be able to start a life together despite religious ideology that conflicts with the relationship they are trying to build?
About the author
E.M. Ben Shaul lives in many communities. An Orthodox Jew and writer of gay fiction, E.M. lives in the simultaneously gay-friendly and Jewish-friendly Boston area with her husband and twin daughters.
A technical writer by day and freelance editor by nights and weekends, E.M. likes to knit, cook, and coin neologisms. E.M. seeks to explore the seeming conflict between religious teachings and the heart’s desires.
Get to know E.M. on Facebook at facebook.com/em.benshaul, on Tumblr at embenshaul.tumblr.com and on Twitter at @embenshaul.
Cover art and design by C.B. Messer.
When Superman: Man of Steel came out people were saying that the film was too gritty and cynical and it was that cynicism that destroyed the Superman we have always know and loved.
That it was that very cynicism that had Superman break his cardinal rule of do not kill and had him that very thing, kill.
As the reviews come out about Batman vs Superman and the bleakness and cynicism of that film I posit that the reason Superman has killed and the reason he is so unrecognizable as the hero we grew up with and the hero we loved and looked up to is because every essence of his Jewishness has been meticulously and calculatingly been scrubbed out.
Superman was written by two Jewish teens in the early 30′s and they imprinted onto Superman a Jewish identity.
Superman is in Diaspora. His homeland gone, his language, his culture, and his heritage both alien and foreign to were he lives. Living day to day with a part of himself hidden so as to be live a somewhat unmolested life.
He must struggle with what it means to be a member of his people while not having his people or culture around him and while having the outside culture imposed upon him and expected to assimilate to this outside force.
A great example of this can be seen oddly enough in Man of Steel when Lois Lane asks Superman what the S on his chest stands for. He tells it means hope in his people’s language and Lois responds by saying that here it is a S.
Superman is expected to accept this new reality and to let go of his culture and understand that he must rather assimilate instead. That he must let go of what it means in his language and culture and understand that it is now a S.
It is the internal struggle of the Jew. To survive in Diaspora. To endure and still maintain a sense of self and one’s roots. To keep your people’s language, customs, and culture alive especially surrounded by a world where you are the alien. You are the foreign being and you must assimilate and then be grateful that you were allowed to be forced to assimilate in the first place.
Superman has two masks. The mask of Superman and the mask of Clark Kent. Kal-el, is the face of Superman and not the mask. Kal-el is the struggle to survive when you are the alien.
Superman in the films and especially Man of Steel and even more so in Batman vs Superman is meant to be a jesus figure. A Messiah.
But that is not what he really is. He is rather the personification of Tikkun Olam.
Tikkun Olam is that each and every person is obligated to fix the world. To leave it a better place that when it was when you got there. To work towards justice, peace, and truth, the three pillars of Judaism.
Superman is meant to reflect what each of us can be. What we should be and should do. That when given the opportunity to good we should take it with both hands. That is whatever way we can with whatever our own abilities and powers are we should help others when given the chance. That is Tikkun Olam and that is Superman.
The new Superman does not fail because it is cynical. The new Superman fails because he is not Jewish.
Yes. This.
“villain attempts to go back in time to kill superman as a small child, gets shot in the face by ma kent, who buries him behind the barn with the others” would probably have niche appeal as a comic but i don’t care, i want it
The first time a man from the future showed up at Martha Kent’s house, Clark Kent was two years old.
According to his birth certificate, anyway. She just kind of accepted that the details were a little fudged. Relativity, and all.
Maybe the stranger would have succeeded in whatever it was he wanted to do, except that he really did just show up. Appeared, like a ghost made flesh, right in the backyard. Clark, thank goodness, was out in the fields with Jonathan. He couldn’t bear to be alone, that boy, and they could never bear to leave him.
Which left Martha free to shoot the ghostly intruder in the face.
Martha had not always considered herself a shoot first, ask questions later sort of a person. But that was before she found a baby in a spaceship where her corn was supposed to be.
They’d switch off, Jonathan and her, who got Clark and who got the shotgun. Martha got the shotgun more often than not. Guns made her husband uncomfortable. She was hardly a fan, but she’d always been a terrible pacifist. Too determined to defend herself.
The sight of all that blood and brain and bone was still nauseating. She compartmentalized, told herself it was no different from slaughtering a cow; didn’t think about riot gear or tear gas or the friends she’d lost or all the things she’d moved away from when her heart couldn’t take it any longer. This was different. This was her son.
She prodded the corpse with her foot. It remained a corpse. A real nasty looking corpse, all big and burly and holding a gun much too large. She didn’t like making assumptions based on appearances, but she didn’t imagine he’d been coming for anything nice. She bent down to search his pockets, found a metal wallet and flipped it open.
Born 2018.
Well, hell. Wasn’t that just a kick in the pants?
Probably she ought to have been a bit more unsettled than she was. But she’d been waiting two years for someone to show up on her doorstep, men in black or UFOs or something. Hell, she’d half expected her sweet little boy to hatch into something worse.
Just because she brought home space babies didn’t mean she was a damn fool.
Jonathan had rejoined her in long strides, was holding Clark in such a way that he couldn’t see the corpse on the ground. “Well, shit,” he said.
“Eyup,” Martha agreed.
“Don’t look government.”
“Nope.”
“We burying him?”
“I’ll bury him,” Martha said, standing up. “You get Clark inside and read him a book or something. I don’t want him seeing any of this, getting him messed up in the head.”
“You sure? Looks heavy.”
“That’s why we have a wheelbarrow. I’ll stick him out behind the barn, might as well keep all our secrets in one place.”
Martha had a long time to think as she dug a time traveler’s grave. There were a lot of reasons someone might travel back in time trying to kill her kid. The first was her instinct as a mother, which was: he was a fucking asshole. Who killed a kid? Fucking assholes, that was who.
Now, it was also possible that her sweet little boy grew up to be some kind of space Hitler. She didn’t think she’d raise that kind of a kid, but she didn’t suppose there was any parent who set out to raise a Hitler.
Still didn’t sit right with her. She didn’t much like the idea of killing baby Hitler, either.
Keep reading
This is really, really good.
Oh, the weather outside is yucky But I’m shipping Steve and Bucky So as long as I’ve got warm feet Let it sleet, let it sleet, let it sleet.
Oh, challah tree, oh, challah tree
I baked you in my oven.
My kids ate you before shabbat.
They showed you lots of lovin’.
Some other loaves I also baked
The Cohen’s portion I did take.
Oh, challah tree, oh, challah tree
I baked you in my oven.
Sci’s spoiler free reaction to SW: TFA
To preface this, I have an older brother. He is four years older than me. As a child, I idolized him, I wanted all of his attention, ALL OF THE TIME. My brother was an exceptionally kind boy, and allowed the constant annoyance of a small, rather odd girl who wanted to play with him and his friends.
My brother was a big, tall kid with a mass of curly brown hair, and he loved Star Wars. His nickname, right through college, was Chewbacca, or simply Chewie. He was so famous for this in grade school that several teachers, having taught him first, called me Skywalker Two (or too) when I hit their classes.
I wanted to play with him, and that meant Transformers and He-Man and Star Wars. Always, forever, Star Wars. He had the Degobah playset with the foam ‘quicksand.’ He had the Cantina set, with the full band, including the weird blue guy and his giant piano. He had the Millenium Falcon, a massive hunk of plastic that took up too much floor space. His figures were neatly arrayed in a carrying case shaped like Darth Vader’s head, each one in it’s neatly labeled slot.
I had Leia. I has four different Leias, if memory serves. I brought them everywhere, and still regret the “Return of the Jedi” Leia who was left behind on the shores of a lake when it started to rain. But Leia was all I had, so I stole the Cantina singer, who was alien but her clothing and her red lips on the end of her mouth stalk coded her as a girl, and therefore mine.
I had a figure in the same size, a blonde, smiling nurse from some medical playset. She wasn’t a Star Wars figure, but she was the same size as Leia, and when my brother pulled out his dozens of figures, I made up stories about this little blonde nurse, who was Leia’s best friend, who was a pilot, who fought for the resistance.
My brother, in a rare act of unintended cruelty, pointed out that no. All the Resistance pilots were boys. My nurse was a nurse. She would take care of Luke and Han and Lando when they were hurt. It was an important job. And I agreed. It was.
Last night, I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens. And there was a moment when the X-Wings were flying, and the call signs were being announced. And one of the voices was unmistakably female.
Before I saw her, before I knew her, based only on the sound of that voice, I started to cry. Like, not a little watery eyes. I cried. For a voice I needed to hear for so many years, and never had.
Things have changed, in a lot of ways, since I was a little girl. Last night, I saw a woman fly an X-Wing, and it wasn’t even a major thing. She was just there. But more than that, so were we. I stood outside with the 501st, the remarkable, enthusiastic, brilliant, personable representatives of the New England Garrison. And I saw women in costume, women in store bought shirts, women with jewelry and leggings and chewbacca onesies.
I saw women just as excited by the guys dressed as stormtroopers as any of the guys. Who wanted their pictures taken with the troopers, who were full of the same childlike joy that had sustained their love of the series. Mothers and grandmothers and little girls, all just there.
As if we had always been there. Because we have.
She was a pilot. I knew it all along.
This is wonderful. Thank you for writing it.
At the moment, I'm in the middle of reading Chimera by Mira Grant. It's near-future science fiction, and it's set in the San Francisco Bay Area. Don't worry. I won't be posting any spoilers here. J...
Good post about representation.
