Due to a protest at my college, Hillel had to move tonight’s Seder to a secret location and have barred last-minute registrations.

I signed up in time to go, but I’m disappointed that some people who want to go may not be able to. I really wish this was an event that could be more open to students who may have been on the fence about going.

The fact that Hillel has to hide the location of a Passover Seder is horrifying to me.

jewish culture is your cat noticing you kiss the door frames and star of david above your bed so she starts tapping her paw to your face and then the door/pendant/whatever she seems to think is important that dad look at

that's so cute omg

in light of Columbia University including ashkenormativity -- albeit defined poorly -- in their dictionary or DEI words, here are some things that people (jews and non-jews) say that are ashkenormative.

"All Jews are white european colonizers!" - While this doesn't even apply to Ashkenazim (who are not white and are not colonizers), it especially doesn't apply to Mizrahim, most of whom's families never stepped foot in Europe.

"Falafel, shawarma, hummus etc aren't Jewish/Israeli foods!" - This erases this culinary traditions of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews by claiming that the only Jewish foods are Ashkenazi ones. Hummus is just as much of a Jewish food as Babka is.

"Jews should just go back where they came from." - While an Ashkenazi Jew might (but not definitely - ie Ukraine) be able to go back to where our recent ancestors lived, most Mizrahim and Sephardim definitely could not.

Let my people know.

Memes of Judaism

Pesach is, to me, the most difficult holiday to celebrate right now. Since Oct 7th we've had a few holidays, but Pesach is the one that pains me most so far.

Hanukkah made sense. We are fighting to keep our homeland, as the Maccabees did. We have Israel now, and we will still have Israel. The holiday celebrating our resistance against those who wished to destroy us in our home made sense.

Purim made sense. Yes, it was painful to celebrate the holiday of joy, but we have resisted a force that wishes to eliminate each and every one of us. Just as we did in Persia against Haman, we are defending ourselves because never again will we be put in the position of being at our oppressor's mercy.

Pesach does not make sense. How are we to celebrate being taken out of captivity when over a hundred of our brothers and sisters are still being held captive? How are we to cheer about our freedom when our own people are not free? How can we celebrate G-d's hand coming down to free us when members of our Jewish family have not been free for over half a year?

It is painful. It physically hurts my chest to think about all of this. I wish for G-d to carry our people again, this time from the tunnels under Gaza. From the violent antisemitism we have been seeing happening all around. May we yet again experience freedom from those who wish us harm.

I in no way am saying that we should not celebrate Pesach. If anything, it is more important now than ever to celebrate and pray for freedom. I am just sharing my own feelings on the matter.

As was said then, we say now: LET OUR PEOPLE GO!

Passover is the Jewish festival of freedom.

Israel has 133 hostages, alive and dead, still held in captivity. I'm grateful for each one released, but as long as some of our people, Jews and non-Jews alike, are hostages, we all are. Also, yesterday alone, Israel saw no less than 6 terrorist attacks (attempted or thwarted) with zero casualties, and I'm grateful no one got hurt, but what kind of freedom do we have, when this is our daily reality, and it's not even recognized?

At the end of every Passover Seder, for 2,000 years now, Jews have concluded the holiday feast with, "Le'shana ha'baa bi'Yerushalayim (לשנה הבאה בירושלים)," next year in Jerusalem.

(here's a Passover Hagaddah from Casablanca, in Morroco, with this phrase and a drawing of the Hebrew Temple in Jerusalem -)

Passover is the festival of freedom, the story of a nation breaking its bonds of enslavement, it's a story of emancipation, and as such, it is a beacon of hope and a reminder that freedom is possible for all those who yearn for it. That's why slaves in the US south adopted this language, and expressed their hopes for freedom through the story of the Jewish exodus from Egypt.

But the story doesn't end as soon as the Israelites have left Egypt, it doesn't end in the desert. Achieving freedom is a process. That ancient story demonstrates that, but we have other, more recent examples. Jews liberated from the Nazi camps were still re-living the horrors of the Holocaust every night, if not more often than that. The hostages who have been released from their captivity at the hands of murderous, rapist Hamas terrorists are still working to recover. Freedom is a process. And in the story of the exodus from Egypt, which Jews have been re-telling annually for thousands of years, guiding our thoughts and understanding of what our freedom is, the story doesn't end when our ancestors left Egypt. The final note of the story defines our freedom as only being fully achieved after going through the journey in the desert, the process, when we are once more living freely in our ancestral, promised land, when we return to our holy city. And no matter where we live, we express this idea in Hebrew, our native, ancestral language.

(here's another Passover Hagaddah, this one from 1940's Cairo, in Egypt of all places, with this same phrase -)

Poet Amnon Ribak (whose career was originally in hi-tech before he started delving into what his Judaism means to him) once wrote, "Every man needs some sort of an Egypt, to deliver himself from its house of slaves, to leave in the middle of the night into a desert of fears, to walk straight into the waters and see it parting in front of him." He takes the Jewish exodus and turns it into a metaphor for personal challenge and growth. And how does he finish this poem? (my emphasis) "Everyone needs an Egypt, and a Jerusalem, and one long journey to remember forever through the feet."

Here's the poem composed as a song (composing poems is an Israeli tradition. And while we're at it, this is a reminder that the biggest center of original Jewish culture and art in the world today is Israel):

This Passover, we will be remembering and re-telling the story of our ancestors' exit from Egypt, we will collectively yearn for Jerusalem again, we will do our best to learn from this ancient story as if each of us has been personally delivered from Egypt, we will cherish the freedoms that we have, and keep in mind the ones we still have to fight for, first and foremost the literal freedom of our hostages. Please, if you celebrate Passover, consider leaving an empty chair at your Seder table for all the people who are not yet free.

And may we all have a happy and meaningful Pesach! <3

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

It’s genuinely annoying how many people want Jews to think about Palestinians during our Saders.

Well, my family, and I will not.

It’s terribly sad what’s happening in Gaza, but don’t expect Jews on a holiday where we celebrate our liberation and remember our suffering to turn it into another group’s tragedy.

No, that’s not how it works.

Sorry, not sorry.

Zionists spread propaganda that all Islamists from countries dress like this:

Say you're Islamophobic without saying you're Islamophobic

Look what propaganda I saw from Zionists

They seriously believe it, I live in fucking Poland and I see that this shit has nothing to do with reality, yes, there are people who dress like this, but spreading the word that every Islamic country dresses like this is like saying that every Jew looks like this:

I don't think I need to tell you how stupid this line of thinking is

Antisemitism on college campuses

You know what's not going to free Palestine?

-Barricading Jewish students from entering certain buildings, ordering them to stay indoors during one of our biggest holidays. -chanting antisemitic slogans and slurs. -Harassing and physically attacking Jews. It's literally Nazi behaviour.

The last few days have been terrifying for Jews across the world, and these instances shouldn't be ignored.Imagine any other minority group being treated like this.

Chag Pesach Sameach / חג פסח שמח to all, but especially to the Jewish mosquito whose seder consisted of me tonight…

Tombstone from the Jewish cemetery in Yeghegis, southeastern Armenia, 13th century

In the gorges of the Yeghegis Mountains there is a unique medieval Jewish cemetery filled with funerary poetry and expressions from the Bible and Talmud. Although there are many historical records of Jews in Armenia in ancient times, to date – except for a reference in an obscure Russian academic journal in 1912 – there is no information about the community during the Middle Ages. The names found on the tombstones were popular among Persian Jews, indicating that the Jewish population of Yeghegis may have had an Iranian background. However, the exact history of the emergence of this Jewish community and the circumstances of its disappearance after only 80 years, remains a mystery.

you would punch a nazi, but would you take ten minutes to learn about jewish history?

Chag Pesach Kasher Vesameach. 

I would like to wish everyone a Chag Kasher V’sameach. May we all merit to celebrate in rebuilt Jerusalem as we say in the Seder.

As we sit down with family and friends this Pesach, our thoughts turn to those who are unable to do so, please remember them and leave an empty chair.

חג פסח כשר ושמח לכל בית ישראל באשר הם.

Finished my art book project for a class! Not the usual thing I knit, I’ll admit, but I’m so proud of how it turned out.

First, the charting was fine but the actual duplicate stitching was a NIGHTMARE to get right. I had to rip out ל so many times 😭

Making the scroll poles was a Learning Experience involving wood stain and super glue. Sewing on the canvas back was somehow the easiest part! Anyway, I’m super pleased with the result and I’m excited to present it to my class.

Skip the read more if you’re not interested in hearing about my artistic decisions :)

Part of this final assignment was to create something based on items in the library collection at my workplace. There’s a beautiful, giant 19th century Torah that I’ve viewed several times and haven’t been able to forget the sheer comfort and awe of being able to sit down for an hour or two and just read the Torah.

But there are rules to interacting with a Torah (both Jewish and archival rules): do not touch the text. Do not touch the parchment. Do not unroll without assistance. No, we can’t repair the holes and whatnot in this manuscript because 1) she’s super old and 2) we have no idea how to do it (which makes me sad!! She needs a good cleaning)

I also got to view a teeny miniature Torah from the library’s EXTENSIVE miniature collection.

So I decided I wanted to make a representation of the Torah that encouraged touch, and interacting with a text through another sense. This one only has the Shema stitched in it (funny, because no one is going to be reading this aloud to a congregation so no one is technically going to hear it). I made the first word blue in the Jewish manuscript illumination tradition, which wouldn’t illuminate just one letter, but rather the whole word, so as not to place one letter above another in importance. The blue is also reminiscent of tekhelet, a probably-blue dye mentioned in the Torah.

I also did not write out G-d’s name because Obviously Not. I’m not an official scribe and I also don’t want smartass or ignorant goyim viewing my art book and going “tehe I know how to pronounce that” when they see the tetragrammaton and just. Saying the Name.

All this to say, I’m so happy with my final project and I hope I get an A.

I sincerely don't know how these all still shock me, but they do. The first one is from an anti-Israel protest in the UK, where apparently everyone was allowed to cross the road, other than Jews. "But the police are just trying to protect these random Jewish passerby!" If everyone can pass peacefully by anti-Israel demonstrations, other than Jews, what does that say about these protesters?

The next vid is from Colombia University, in the US. There's an interview from October 2023, where a Hamas senior explicitly says that they will be carrying out Oct 7, the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, again and again and again. I'm gonna be honest, I can't understand how that interview alone hasn't shocked the world, and wasn't talked about by everyone. I guess this footage is the answer. Because some people are actually on board with that.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

Just a reminder that there is an antisemitic history of comparing Jews to pigs. I don't think it should be too hard to criticize Israel without using historically antisemitic rhetoric.