They are trying to ban most of the Jews in the world from praying according to their own custom at the one holy site we all share. What a disgrace!

A suspect is in custody as authorities investigate a weekend fire that damaged Mississippi’s largest synagogue, which has been attacked before.

The fire broke out around 3 a.m. Saturday at Beth Israel Congregation, the only synagogue in Jackson, the state capital. Video surveillance footage shows a man splashing liquid along a wall onto a couch in the lobby.

Investigators said the blaze burned the lobby, the library, and the offices. Soot and smoke damaged the rest of the building, including the sanctuary. The building also houses the offices of the Institute of Southern Jewish Life.

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יי, אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, מַתִּיר אֲסוּרִים.

One of the beautiful paradoxes of Yom Kippur is that introspection is, by definition, individual, yet Jews recite the confessional in the plural. None of us has committed all the transgressions in the standard liturgy, yet we are each invited to find our shortcomings in the text’s long, alphabetical list. And to remember that, whether we like it or not, we are bound to one another. It is in that spirit that I offer the following Al-Chet prayer after a year marked by pain, division and rancor.

Rosh Hashanah begins tomorrow at sundown. Here's wishing everyone on Lemmy who celebrates a good and sweet New Year. May it be a year of many blessings and a year of peace. Let our actions this year bring our world closer To the world we envision in our hearts. Shannah Tovah! 🍎🍯

Happy Labor Day!

Gompers Jewish upbringing helped teach him the importance of Labor organizing, and helped him forge connections that led to him becoming a founder of the American Federation of Labor, its first, and longest serving president. He helped establish the labor movement worldwide.

He joined the Cigarmakers Local Union #15 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan at just 14, and soon went on to become its president. After WWI, he helped to found the International Labor Organization, and continued to serve workers throughout his life.

Samuel Gompers died in 1924 at the age of 74, after collapsing at a meeting of the Pan-American Federation of Labor in Mexico City.

Jacqueline Harpman is a dead Holocaust survivor who went viral on TikTok, and literary translators should be working overtime to translate all of her funny, poignant novels as soon as possible.

Harpman was born in 1929 in Belgium to Jeanne Honorez and Andries Harpman, who was Jewish. In May 1940, the same month Nazis invaded Belgium, her family moved to Casablanca, Morocco, according to an interview with the Belgian journalist Joëlle Smets. Harpman faced institutional antisemitism in Morocco, then a French protectorate, and moved back to Belgium in October 1945, after the war ended.

In Belgium, Harpman became both a celebrated author and a professional psychoanalyst. She published the slim, dystopian novel I Who Have Never Known Men in French in 1995, and it was translated soon afterward into English by Ros Schwartz. In 2022, in the wake of the first Trump administration and the popularity of dystopian fiction like The Handmaid’s Tale, the book was re-released. Book bloggers on TikTok, who usually seem more interested in romance and fantasy, did the seemingly impossible and made a nearly 30-year-old Belgian novel in translation go viral, a rare win for the crazies among us who envision a world where everyone has impeccable literary taste. It sold 100,000 copies in the U.S. last year.

"How do we take the Jews down?” one host on the self-described “Men’s podcast” Fresh and Fit asked, speaking to fellow panelists in an episode that garnered widespread social media attention in recent days. 

"We gotta kill the motherf*****s,” another guest chimed in. “My bad ya’ll,” she added. 

Kentucky bans abortion except to protect the health or life of the mother, with no exceptions for rape or incest. The women who filed suit argue that the law could lead them to be criminally prosecuted for the destruction of any unviable or unused embryos, making them fearful of receiving fertility treatment.

“The fact that lawmakers who don’t understand healthcare or my religious beliefs have more rights to my body than I do is sickening,” Kalb told the local news site Kentucky Lantern.

Have a happy, safe Passover!

חג פסח שמח!

“My community is Jewish,” he said, adding that he attended school alongside Jewish students, and that his Hebrew is better than his Arabic or English. “I am around Jewish since 13 years old.”

Rashed’s six years in New York and New Jersey have influenced his palette, as well as the restaurant’s menu. In addition to traditional Druze foods, Taboonia also serves some cross-cultural treats, like everything bagel-seasoned bourekas, filled with mozzarella cheese.

Happy Purim! 🎉

Nothing to see here folks.

reposted in whole from : Leftist antisemitism is a symptom - American Jews and the Illiberal Left

TLDR: I think we would be wise to stop regarding leftist antisemitism only in its own context and habitually recognize it is a part of a larger issue, the rise of the illiberal left.

Why are Jews are the most reliable supporters of Liberal policies and politicians in modern American history?

Haviv Rettig Gur seems to suggest that Jews in the US, recognizing that Liberal values resulted in their (imperfect but historic) emancipation in the US, became perhaps the most Liberal people ever. They understood that US Liberal values were what made Jews relatively safe in the US, and offered them opportunities which had been denied to them everywhere else.

When previously did a head of state speak to Jews the way George Washington did?

Gur suggests that this is why American Jews have historically been so invested in the struggle of black folks in the US. When I say invested, I'm talking about facts like these:

• Henry Moscowitz was one of the founders of the NAACP.

• Kivie Kaplan, a vice-chairman of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now called the Union for Reform Judaism), served as the national president of the NAACP from 1966 to 1975.

• From 1910 to 1940, more than 2,000 primary and secondary schools and 20 Black colleges (including Howard, Dillard and Fisk universities) were established in whole or in part by contributions from Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. At the height of the so-called "Rosenwald schools," nearly 40 percent of Black people in the south were educated at one of these institutions.

• Jews made up half of the young people who participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.

• Leaders of the Reform Movement were arrested with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964 after a challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations.

• Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched arm-in-arm with Dr. King in his 1965 March on Selma.

• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were drafted in the conference room of Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, under the aegis of the Leadership Conference, which for decades was located in the RAC's building.

When I was a child and asked my mother why Jews seemed overwhelmingly to be Democrats, I was told "because of FDR and the Civil Rights movement." That's not wrong, in Gur's framing, but perhaps a more shallow response than the question deserves.

In Gur's framing, US Jews realized that the promises of Liberalism, over and over, no matter how much they delivered for other peoples, did not deliver for black Americans.

Gur suggests that US Jews worked to see that change for their black co-citizens because if American Liberalism didn't deliver for black Americans what it appeared to promise to all Americans, the sense of safety, security, and belonging which Jews felt in the US was an illusion.

US Jews believed that we had common cause with non-Jewish American Liberals. We thought non-Jewish liberals believed what we believed about universal civil rights, pluralism, enlightenment values and enlightenment reason. When Jews saw the "In this House We Believe" signs on our neighbors' lawns, We felt comforted because those beliefs are also our beliefs.

We thought, for instance, that our non-Jewish friends agreed that Liberal democracies were better for human rights than any form of government in the history of human societies. We thought they agreed that religious, racial, and ethnic intolerance were social ills which needed to be fought with information. We thought they valued data, reason, and reliable sources.

Since 10/7/23, we've been learning that we were mistaken. We've seen gentiles who we thought shared our values seem to discard those values.

We saw college educated friends share antisemitic (and alarmingly familiar) conspiracy theories about Israeli puppetry of US politics and the return of Nazi and Soviet antisemitic slogans/images.

We've seen highly educated "Liberals" preach ahistoric nonsense denying that the Jewish people are from the Levant and willfully ignoring the huge swaths of historical fact which don't support their favored narrative.

We've seen friends rage against "globalists" and "Zionists," when what they mean is 'Jews'.

We've seen people who we thought were allies against all forms of racism justify their racism towards Jews as righteous through specious reasoning like 'I don't hate Jews, just the 97% of Jews who believe that Jews should have self-determination in their homeland.'

We've been told that we cannot ask them to temper their use of antisemitic tropes, because doing so "weaponizes" concerns about antisemitism to obstruct them from their righteous crusade against the most evil nation on earth...which happens to be the only Jewish nation.

Despite this, about 80% of Jewish voters voted for Harris over Trump.

I think US Jews will continue to be Liberals, because Liberal values are dear to us and aligned with our values as Jews, as a historically oppressed minority, and as Americans who see more clearly than some others the gap between the promise of American liberalism and its long-delayed universal delivery.

The problem, I think, is in how many of our former friends simply aren't Liberals any longer.

I think Jews in the US need to spend a good deal more time scrutinizing the illiberal left.

Nine days after the attacks of 10/7/23, Jonathan Chait wrote:

Writers like Michelle Goldberg, Julia Ioffe, and my colleague Eric Levitz, all of whom rank among the writers I most admire, have written anguished columns about the alienation of Jewish progressives from the far left. I think all their points are totally correct. But I find the frame of their response too narrow. They are treating apologias for Hamas as a factually or logically flawed application of left-wing ideals. I believe, to the contrary, that Hamas defenders are applying their own principles correctly. The problem is the principles themselves.

...

Liberals believe political rights are universal. Basic principles like democracy, free speech, and human rights apply equally to all people, without regard to the content of their political values. (This of course very much includes Palestinians, who deserve the same rights as Jews or any other people, and whose humanity is habitually ignored by Israeli conservatives and their American allies.) A liberal would abhor the use of political violence or repression, however evil the targets.

...

The illiberal left believes treating everybody equally, when the power is so unequal, merely serves to maintain existing structures of power. It follows from their critique that the legitimacy of a tactic can only be assessed with reference to whether it is being used by the oppressor or the oppressed. Is it okay for, say, a mob of protesters to shout down a lecture? Liberals would say no. Illiberal leftists would need to know who was the speaker and who was the mob before they could answer.

...

One observation I’ve shared with many analysts well to my left is that the debate over this illiberalism and the social norms it has spawned — demands for deference in the name of allyship, describing opposing ideas as a form of harm, and so on — has tracked an older debate within the left over communism. Communism provided real-world evidence of how an ideology that denies political rights to anybody deemed to be the oppressor laid the theoretical groundwork for repression and murder.

There have been conscious echoes of this old divide in the current dispute over Hamas. The left-wing historian Gabriel Winant has a column in Dissent urging progressives not to mourn dead Israeli civilians because that sentiment will be used to advance the Zionist project. Winant sounds eerily like an old communist fellow traveler explaining that the murders of the kulaks or the Hungarian nationalists are the necessary price of defending the revolution. “The impulse, repeatedly called ‘humane’ over the past week, to find peace by acknowledging equally the losses on all sides rests on a fantasy that mourning can be depoliticized,” he argues, calling such soft-minded sentiment “a new Red Scare.” Making the perfect omelette always requires some broken eggs in the form of innocent people who made the historical error of belonging to, or perhaps being born into, an enemy class.

But more than three decades have passed since the Soviet Union existed or China’s government was recognizably Marxist. And so the liberal warning about the threat of left-wing illiberalism seemed abstract and bloodless.

On October 7, it suddenly became bloody and concrete. It didn’t happen here, of course. The shock of it was that many leftists revealed just how far they would be willing to follow their principles. “People have repeated over and over again over the last few days that you ‘cannot tell Palestinians how to resist,’” notes (without contradicting the sentiment) Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of the left-wing Jewish Currents.

Concepts like this, treating the self-appointed representative of any oppressed group as beyond criticism, are banal on the left. Yet for some progressive Jews, it is shocking to see it extended to the slaughter of babies, even though that is its logical endpoint. The radical rhetoric of decolonization, with its glaring absence of any limiting principles, was not just a rhetorical cover to bully some hapless school administrator into changing the curriculum. Phrases like “by any means necessary” were not just figures of speech. Any means included any means, very much including murder.

Both Julia Ioffe and Eric Levitz have pointed out that decolonization logic ignores the fact that half of Israel’s Jewish population does not have European origins and came to Israel after suffering the same ethnic cleansing as the Palestinians. This is correct. But what if it weren’t? If every Israeli Jew descended from Ashkenazi stock, would it be okay to shoot their babies?

It is often the case that a movement’s treatment of Jews serves as a broader indicator of its health. It’s not an accident that the Republican Party has become more attractive to antisemites as it has grown more paranoid and authoritarian. What the far left revealed about its disposition toward Jews is not just a warning for the Jews but a warning for all progressives who care about democracy and humanity.

The pro-Hamas left is not merely indicating an indifference toward Jews. It is revealing the illiberal left’s inherent cruelty, repression, and inhumanity.

I think Chait is right. I think Gur is right.

The problem is much greater than leftist antisemitism. The illiberal left has become nearly as great a threat to Liberalism as the far right.

I'm annoyed that it is has taken me so long to catch on and alarmed by the implications.

I am, however, very proud of my 14yo, who sums up her experience trying to respectfully disagree with leftists this way:

"They're allergic to nuance."

It’s true that Jewish communities have invested a lot in buildings, sanctuaries, halls and campuses, but none of those actually are the community. Perhaps our Jewish past, or at least the stories we tell about it, accustom us to wander — which is to say, to move on in order to survive.

And there’s no better symbol of that for the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center than the Nehdar Torah, which Mendel said will be in the holy ark when it’s opened during Sabbath services.

In 1934, Samuel Nehdar, a leading importer in the Iranian port city of Khorramshahr, commissioned the Torah to mark the death of his first wife, the daughter of a famous rabbi in the region.

Nehdar remarried and moved to Tehran, before emigrating to the U.S. in 1967.

“He knew they’d go and destroy the synagogues,” Raymond said in a temple history of the Torah in 2018. “He argued that since Khomeini was ordained he must have learned Hebrew and knew that the Torah was a holy book, so his Revolutionary Guards might have kept it.”

About six months later, the FBI notified Nehdar that a crate had arrived at the port of San Pedro from the Islamic Republic of Iran, addressed to him. Who mailed the crate remains another mystery.

An argument (machloket) from the Talmud:

Beit Shammai says: On the first day one kindles eight lights and, from there on, gradually decreases the number of lights until, on the last day of Hanukkah, they kindle one light.

And Beit Hillel says: On the first day one kindles one light, and from there on, gradually increases the number of lights until, on the last day, they kindle eight lights.

The reason for Beit Hillel’s opinion is that the number of lights is based on the principle:

One elevates to a higher level in matters of sanctity and one does not downgrade. Therefore, if the objective is to have the number of lights correspond to the number of days, there is no alternative to increasing their number with the passing of each day.

Increase your light every day of Chanukah and all year long!

Although a fairly recent tradition, dating only back to the 5300s, it is an important celebration to many of our co-religionists.

You pull the string and it says, "again with the string?"