Intro post?
I keep meaning to make a good pinned post for this blog that includes links to find your way around my stuff, and I keep putting it off, so here's a slightly messy index for now.
Jewish holiday colors post. This began as a guide for fan artists wanting to draw Jewish characters with more depth or accuracy than just popping a blue santa hat on their head in a Christmas scene, but it also includes some basic info on how each holiday is celebrated, which ones are considered "major" or "minor" holidays, and whether it would be okay to schedule a workplace conflict on that day.
Advice for visiting a synagogue for the first time. This is nominally a guide for non-Jews wishing to show support to their local Jewish community but people have talked about using it as a guide for folks exploring the idea of becoming Jewish. In it I tried to address the things a visitor or newcomer might be most nervous about.
Jewish representation in fiction. This turned out to be a whole genre of posts because once I answered the one a couple of people had follow-up questions. I mostly stopped getting these when I joined the mod team on Writing With Color because that's exactly the type of question we address over there. I'll include posts from WWC that I contributed to, both before and after joining the team, that speak to this topic.
The WWC post I responded to that kicked off this series was about a Jewish family in an urban fantasy setting adopting a non-Jewish teenager with a similar type of magic. This post led directly to me actually remembering to submit our adoption ritual on RitualWell, a site that collects contemporary Jewish rituals.
Since I mentioned being a Jewish educator in that post, I had the opportunity to give some thoughts about how to name a Jewish-coded culture in second-world fantasy, and in the notes we also got into how Jewish representation functions differently in second-world fantasy versus portal or urban fantasy settings.
The same setting also prompted questions about Jewish head coverings, which led both to some notes on what constitutes a synagogue building and the history and complex development of Jewish contemporary gender expectations.
This anon had follow-up questions, this time prompting a discussion about what it would actually look like, in a practical sense, to code a community in a second-world fantasy setting as unequivocally Jewish.
WWC ask regarding queer Jewish characters - this talked about assumptions people make about what "Orthodox" and "secular" mean in Judaism if they haven't experienced it themselves, with respect to queerness but also general Jewish practice.
WWC ask regarding Jewish characters at a certain well-known magical boarding school - includes a disclaimer strongly opposing the extreme bigoted beliefs of the creator, focuses instead on how to think about the details in creating a young Jewish character.
WWC ask regarding a Jewish character in an underground organization - in which we explored how one can write a plot incorporating a trope often played in antisemitic ways without upholding the antisemitic connections.
WWC ask regarding a Jewish character reconnecting with his heritage while struggling with other parts of his life - this one resonated with readers in a way I didn't expect, since the steps I suggested the character could be shown taking to reconnect with his Jewish identity were also steps people could take in their real lives. We jokingly referred to it as the "color of the post" because it has a bunch of different sections.
WWC ask regarding a character losing his humanity in a Jewish neighborhood - in an unusual move, we advised the writer that the simplest solution was to not make the character Jewish.
WWC ask regarding Jewish naming conventions for superheroes - that which we call a Rosen by any other name...yeah, okay.
WWC asks regarding fantasy worlds with confirmed, active gods - this post includes the religion-in-fantasy-worldbuilding alignment chart.
Another WWC ask following up on that one, in which Shira and I reflect a little more on what it means to have a world with magic and religion.
WWC ask on an overlapping topic, this time from a Jewish writer looking to center cultural authenticity for a Jewish, Afrolatine character in a portal fantasy setting. While with non-Jewish writers the conversation centers around ways inserting Jewishness as an antidote to whitewashed fantasy norms can backfire if the world is set up to support a conflicting theology as "true," this ask opened a conversation about how to center Jewishness in a fantasy setting, either through real-world Jewish practice or fantastical Jewish flavor. I wish we had more input to speak to the Afrolatine angle on this one but on the whole it was a great extension of this topic.
WWC ask exploring whether anthropomorphic dragons fall into the "lizard-people" trope - this led to a deeper exploration of character design elements linked with negative Jewish coding in male characters, and what makes a character, especially a villain, ring as Jewish-coded.
WWC ask about nonhuman Jews: can a tree-person be Jewish, and what is up with non-Jews using the word "Goyim" for themselves (and if you've got to use it, at least use it right).
While we're on the topic of nonhumans, WWC ask about angels (short answer, it's complicated? But not spiritually meaningful. 2J3O.)
What if the Jews lived?
To Pearl, from Gladys is an exploration of a Jewish cookbook my aunt gave me from my grandmother's things. An inscription indicates that a friend of my grandmother's gave her the book in 1945 as an apology for losing her umbrella. I don't know who Gladys was or how much use my grandmother actually got out of the book, but it charms me. The tag #to Pearl from Gladys has a few other posts about this book.
Poem about the same grandmother. This is a rather heavy poem with themes around Yom Kippur, memory, and death of a loved one, so please note content warnings for death/decline of a family member, Alzheimer's disease, and a self-accusing tone that might not be right for those who need to be gentler with their own souls.
The Jewish Book Recommendation project seeks to provide information for librarians looking to bulk up their Jewish fiction collection. There are lots of lists of Jewish fiction that don't give a sense of whether you're about to plunge into lightweight Bat Mitzvah angst, a Holocaust narrative, or something in between, so this project collects as much information as possible for librarians to make sure their collections are varied and robust.
This exchange where I tangented off on some events from a recent Zoom class while worrying that I was inappropriately derailing someone's post, and ended up helping create something that comforted OP, many readers, and even myself.
The Four Children of Passover, rewritten by the same Zoom class from the Moses lesson. Contains a similar poignant warmth.
This response to someone feeling badly about not being able to fast on Yom Kippur. This was an ask not directed at me, but I felt I had some words of comfort I could offer to this anon or others in a similar situation.
Response to a question to the jumblr community about language I prefer for talking about God.
That time an Instacart shopper did not buy milk. That was a thing that happened.
Squash Blossom Taco Friday, now with recipe.
Anything I'm OP on or contributed significantly to should be tagged #Meir makes stuff.
Posts about my wife are now tagged #congrats on your buff wife
The cats are tagged as follows:
Margo (black cat, died spring 2022): #Margo the cat
Cooper (Orange and white cat, huge): #Cosmodoop
Daisy (Chonky brown tabby): #Daisy would like to know
Penina (New addition, gray and white kitten): #Penina the cat
If there's something I forgot that you think deserves to be in here let me know!
