pls share the yiddish folk music? ❤️

link to a playlist from an account i highly recommend

Gentiles read Anne Frank’s Diary and think “wow what an inspiring tale of staying positive during adversity, how moving.” Jews read it and think “this is who they took away from us. This is who they wanted to destroy. This is who we lost.”

I want Appalachian klezmer ... Wheres my redneck klezmer bands

https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/this-rabbi-and-rapper-want-to-create-a-jcc-for-jews-of-color/

“Tentative plans call for locating the JCC in what Jordan, a traditional Jew, jokingly calls a ‘shtetl-adjacent neighborhood,’ such as Bedford-Stuyvesant. Although led by Jews of color, it would be open to Jews of all backgrounds, Jordan said – no different from, say, a Sephardic synagogue or center aimed at meeting the needs of Sephardic Jews but open to the entire Jewish community.

In fact, Jordan said he and Rabbi Rishon are hoping the JCC will serve as a venue for bridge-building, both between Jews of color and other Jews, and between Jews and non-Jewish minority groups. Bridge-building activities might include kosher potluck dinners (‘because everybody loves to come together over food,’ Jordan said), hip-hop concerts and block parties.”

Here’s the donation link, though you can also donate on venmo @tribeherald!

https://tribeherald.org/

the erasure of bernie’s jewish identity (for crying out loud-bernie’s dad’s family was wiped out in the holocaust)  in order to dismiss him as “another old white guy” seems like idk SOME FUCKING BULLSHIT.

Starring Rachel Sennott as Hannah Rosen, a boy crazy senior in high school, and Madeline Grey DeFreece as her best friend, Carrie Lowstein, the film takes place at the funeral for the friends’ former Hebrew school classmate Samantha Goldstein, who died by suicide. After being pressured to practice kissing in the synagogue bathroom before their Hebrew school lesson on processing grief through faith, Carrie realizes she might be in love with Hannah. A queer coming of age story, Tahara explores teenage lust, friendship, and death, all through a Jewish lens.

Growing up, my brothers and I often teased my mom for having what we thought was an irrational fear of being a Jew.

She said she painted over the Star of David on a duffle bag because when we were traveling, she didn’t want people “to know.” She warned my dad not to drive fast to my aunt’s house on Yom Kippur because she thought more speed traps were set during the Jewish holidays.

If we said a word like “Shabbat” in a department store, she seemed to hear it from aisles away. We were not to say Jewish things too loudly in public, she taught us. Better to be safe.

These things did not make sense to us, three brothers extraordinarily lucky to have grown up in a New York suburb where safety was hardly a worry at all, where any kind of violent crime — let alone violence against Jews — was so rare it was almost unfathomable. But my mother had her own reasons, and they were valid, for she grew up not in the United States but in Baghdad, Iraq — watching, through the wide and curious eyes of a 6-year-old in the early 1970s, as 2,000 years of peaceful Jewish life there came crashing down around her.

She doesn’t like to talk about Iraq much, but my grandmother Fortunée and my aunt Cynthia do. Some of the most memorable moments of my childhood were spent in Long Island living rooms, sitting beside them as they told me, in a spellbinding mix of English and Arabic, stories of life in a country that ultimately rejected them after such a long and rich history of coexistence.

They shared tales of my great-great-great-grandfather, a trader who famously owned a caravan of more than 1,000 camels and traveled the Silk Road from Baghdad to Aleppo and Isfahan and beyond; of my great-grandfather, who built Iraq’s first cinema and movie studio; of the family house, with courtyard gardens so luscious they attracted wedding parties from all over the city.

In the summertime the children flew kites and slept peacefully on the cool roof. Jews were jurists, government officials, one was even the first minister of finance. They lived side-by-side with Christians and Muslims; they were business partners, neighbors, close friends who supported one another.

But these stories were always set up as the beginning of the end. Sprinkled throughout paradise were the warning signs, each worse than the next, until there was no choice but to leave. In the 1930s it was mainly political rhetoric; then in June 1941 it was the “Farhud,” a pogrom that killed nearly 200 Jews and injured hundreds more. By the 1950s more than three-quarters of Iraq’s Jews had fled the country; just over a decade later, around the time my mother was born, the few remaining Jews saw their assets frozen and their passports revoked.

My mother remembers when they imprisoned her father along with other Jews, remembers her mother going every day to the jail where he was being held, remembers the emptiness the family felt the morning after her cousins escaped over the border to Iran. When she was 3 years old, in January 1969, nine Jews were hanged in the main city square. By 1972, my mother’s family was among some of the last to leave, bound for the United States. As recently as November, the number of Jews remaining in Iraq was reportedly in the single digits.

This is the story my mother remembers, the story she has always feared would repeat itself. That no matter how comfortable we as Jews may feel today, it only takes a small group of people (and a large group of people to sit idly by) to turn everything on its head. I remember watching with her in our living room as Donald Trump assumed the presidency in 2017. It was on her mind. As he approached the podium for his oath she asked me, with tears welling in her eyes, “Are we going to have to leave?”

At that point I didn’t think the answer was yes; I’m not sure I do now, either. But with each incident that has followed, family conversations have become more frequently wrapped up in those kinds of questions. First there was “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville. Then the attack in Pittsburgh, on a synagogue that looked an awful lot like ours. Then San Diego, Jersey City and other smaller but significant incidents in between.

Jewish students’ experiences on college campuses are becoming increasingly uncomfortable. This fall, swastikas were drawn in a school in our district, and in another one nearby. And in December, there were several anti-Semitic attacks in a little over a week in New York — arguably the Jewish capital of this country — ending with the Hanukkah stabbings in Monsey.

Now is the first time that I have truly felt, in my (admittedly few) 23 years of life, such an overwhelming fear of impending doom. It seems to be all anyone talks about anymore, perpetually swirling around us, and for good reason. If war won’t destroy the world, climate change will. And now to add to it, the wave of anti-Semitic attacks over the past year are instilling the seeds of fear into many millennial Jewish-Americans for perhaps the first time. Not even, perhaps, because we fear for ourselves — but because we fear for the future of our children and our grandchildren. I can’t help but think this is unnatural: We are so young! Many of us have yet to figure things out for ourselves, have yet to hold our own in the world.

And yet we wonder and worry for those who will follow us because we are so palpably and devastatingly confronted with hints of what they will face if we do not act.

My mother, I now understand, has carried that very same fear with her all along. Well before any of the warning signs of the past few years, before anyone else seemed to be concerned, she was, because she had lived it. She was part of a community that had once felt exceptionally durable and perfectly coexistent, but instead fell apart before her eyes.

The answer, of course, is to act. (We are all guilty of not acting.) To push back on our suffocating culture of complacency — that if we’re not directly in harm’s way, right now, we do nothing — and be the ones to go against the grain until the grain goes in the right direction. Make people uncomfortable when they say or do something they shouldn’t, no matter how innocuous it may seem, so that we may look back upon these decades not as the moment when more could have been done, but as a mere malignant spike in a generally positive direction.

Our children will thank us for looking out for them. For understanding all that is at risk. I now thank my mom every chance I get.

Jordan Salama is a writer and journalist. He is a recent graduate of Princeton University.

I deleted the automatically attached photo. It is disturbing to see a crudely drawn swastika on a living elderly, infirm man’s head. Content warnings apply if you click through to read the article.

I had a conversation with a friend the other day during which, after it came up that I only eat at kosher restaurants, she said that she hopes I don’t think less of her for being “a bad Jew”. And I just hate that whole idea so much. 

So, if anyone out there needs to hear this today: you are not a bad Jew. 

You don’t keep kosher or Shabbat? You’re not a bad Jew.

You can’t read Hebrew and don’t know what to do during the Amidah? You’re not a bad Jew.

You only celebrate Hanukkah and haven’t been inside a synagogue in years? You’re not a bad Jew.

You don’t know any brachot and can’t even remember the last time you prayed? You’re not a bad Jew.

You can still learn and take on mitzvot, if that’s something you want in your life. And if you don’t want any of that? That’s okay, too. You’re still not a bad Jew.

We’re a self-deprecating people. I know. I’m right there with you. But this one kills me. Wipe those words out of your mouth and stop tearing yourself down for all the things you never learned or don’t do. No matter what the reason is. It doesn’t matter.

You are not a bad Jew.

New York City saw three anti-Semitic attacks within 24 hours between Monday [December 23, 2019] and Tuesday [December 24, 2019], according to the Anti-Defamation League, which has offered a $10,000 reward for information on one incident.

The first incident occurred in the Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood on Monday, when police said a man wearing a kippah was violently assaulted, as reported by CBS New York. The victim said he had been looking at his phone when someone started yelling anti-Semitic comments, and that when he looked up, he was punched in the face and kicked repeatedly after he fell to the ground. Dov Hikind, founder of the Americans against Antisemitism organization, said the victim was going to need MRIs and that “his life is changed forever.” Police arrested and charged a 48-year-old man from Miami.

Then, in the early hours of Tuesday, a group of youths shouted expletives and anti-Semitic slurs at a Jewish man walking down the street in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, the Shomrim neighborhood watch group told Yeshiva World News. When the man took out his phone to film the incident, one of the suspects threw a beverage and continued shouting anti-Semitic remarks, according to the Yeshiva World News.

The third incident was an apparent assault of a Jewish man, also in Crown Heights, on Tuesday afternoon. The ADL has offered $10,000 for information on those responsible. A suspect punched a Jewish man in the back of the head while another filmed the attack, according to the Yeshiva World News.

“We are appalled at the sheer frequency and aggressive nature of these incidents,” Regional Director for ADL New York and New Jersey Evan Bernstein. “They’re made particularly heinous by the fact they are occurring during a time when society is supposed to come together in peace for the holidays, and as the Jewish community is particularly on edge as it’s reeling from the deadly attack in Jersey City on December 10th. Enough is enough; now is the time for society to come together in rejection of this hate and for public officials and community leaders to speak up, lead by example, and demand meaningful change to protect the Jewish community.”

I haven’t been able to discuss every single attack that happened this week, in comparison to this multiple stabbing many of them have been “”minor”” but the fact almost every single night of Hanukkah there has been an attack.... the fact they were stabbed right when they were lighting candles at their rabbis house at the end of Shabbos :(.

ok im gonna say it. people on this site are so quick to call jewish men ugly its ridiculous. and then you get called on it and you’re all like oh but i didnt know he was jewish like that makes it any better.. maybe examine WHY you think jewish features are ugly and then talk to me

Nittel Nacht: The Holiday You Know Nothing About

December 24th has a different connotation to Jewish populations in the West. While it is known to Gentiles as Christmas Eve. To us, it is known as Nittel Nacht. Nittel Nacht started out in the 1600s when Jewish population during Christmas Eve were subjected to attacks by their fellow Christian Neighbors. Tensions between Jewish and Christian communities surrounding Christmas time had already been incredibly high before the attacks. A widespread Ashkenazi work dating back to the 11th century, called Toledo Yoshu, a collection of work that expressed Jesus as having an illegitimate birth and took part in deviant behavior showing that tensions had been incredibly high surrounding the holiday for hundreds of years. Like said previously, in the 1600s it all came to head as Jews were viciously attacked by Christians. The attacks were most likely caused by sermons given out by priests claiming Jews as the killer of Jesus. And as this was Jesus’ acclaimed “birthday” many Christians saw fit to avenge their savior. This caused many Rabbis to declare a holiday, Nittel Nacht. A holiday where no Jew was allowed to study Torah, a holiday where Jews stayed up very late and instead plays games like cards or did mundane things like chores. Or they would read the famous Toledo Yoshu instead of studying Torah or tell famous stories about Jewish identity and pride. During Nittel Nacht you often did not leave your house and stayed inside. Some rabbis believed the apostates were conceived on this day and prohibited married couples from having sexual intercourse.

This Holiday Served Two Purposes:

1. It prevented Jews from being attack. I think this is the most obvious and the main reason for its creation. If the Jews do not go out of their house or do anything Jewish like studying Torah then no one can know of their Jewishness and thus they are safe from Christians who wish to avenge their messiah

2. It prevented Jews from ever seeming to celebrate or honor the Holiday. Though this kind of relates to prevention of being attacked, it also doesn’t. Jews deeply rejected Jesus as any prophet, messiah, or important religious figure. Some had the idea that even if we studied Torah, a holy action, it could be used to contribute to the “unholiness” of the day. So to not only prevent attacks, was Torah studying banned, but also to make sure and positive that no Jews could ever been misconstrued into contributing to the non-Jewish holiday.

“Instead, Wolf pointed to the kabbalistic spiritual aspects of Nittel Nacht as a reason for honoring it. He said that the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Sholom DovBer Schneersohn, stated, “Whenever we study Torah, we generate spiritual flow and positive energy. On this night, the powers of impurity are extremely strong. Being that they are extremely strong, if we generate extra holy energy, instead of it being a positive influence on the world, unholy forces can grab it. Then, it’ll be used to strengthen the unholy.”” (Jewish Journal)

Jewish people due to extreme tension/attacks, and rejection of Jesus, actively sought out to avoid embracing any pleasure from Christmas. And thus Nittel Nacht continued to be a holiday observed in secret. Today, in modern time, tensions are no way near as they were, as so many have stopped celebrating Nittel Nacht as to some it no longer has a use. However many communities still observe Nittel Nacht through out the west.

Nittel Nacht takes place from noon or nightfall until midnight, either on Christmas Eve or on Jan. 6, the Feast of the Epiphany — when Eastern Orthodox Christians celebrate.

Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish followers. May the next several days bring you light and blessings.

Jewish People Problem #20

When you can’t find a single book with a Jewish protagonist that isn’t about the holocaust