Hello friends. If this post is inappropriate, please tell me how to fix it or feel free to remove it. I am here because sometimes The Algorithm presents me new information, but especially when it's about Judaism in the current global climate, I want to make sure I'm not being told something inaccurate or harmful.

• When I was a kid, I thought Judaism was a religion
• As I got older, I learnt people also treated it as an ethnicity, it was both
• Now I am seeing some people (I am unsure of their intentions) say Judaism is not an ethnicity, it is a religion

For example, this guy: https://www.tiktok.com/@yuvalmann.s/video/7317661422694026529

Who is a Jew, from Israel, who is now an anti-Zionist. He says "a Jewish person from Morocco, a Jewish person from Ethiopia and a Jewish person from Germany or Hungary have absolutely nothing to do with each other but one thing, religion". And later explains that the idea of Judaism as an ethnicity itself was an idea of Zionists.

I'd be curious to hear what people here think about that take, whether it's accurate, if it's harmful/inaccurate, etc. Thanks very much!

Has anybody had any luck? Most of the spiritual Jewish musicians I have found have been committed Zionists which is gross.

My friends and I are working on an arrangement of Eli Eli by the martryed poet-soldier Hannah Senesh. The song is a simple, reverent prayer of gratitude for nature. The author, a Hungarian Jewish refugee in then-Palestine was a zionist. The song is an 'unofficial anthem of Israel' and plays a prominent role in non-Haredi Shoah Rememberence.

Senesh wrote it when she was overcome while walking to the beach in Palestine before she became a paratrooper in an attempt to liberate more Jewish people from Hungary.

The last line of the song is 'Tefilat ha'adam' or 'The Prayer of Man(kind)'. The hebrew can change nicely to 'Tefilat sh'falasteen' which means the 'Prayer of Palestine'.

The song transforms into a prayer for the endurance of Palestine. Lyrics below in English. We could also change 'water' for river as a reference to 'From the River to the Sea' but the words for 'sky/heavens' and 'water' rhyme in Hebrew.

My God, My God

May these things never end:
The sand and the sea

The rustle of the water
The lightning in the sky

The prayer of Palestine.

One of my jewish friends sent me this on discord and i thought it might interest yall

I promised last night to post a photo. My goodness, this was hectic. I got 3 hours of sleep the night before and was really running on empty. Yet I also promised to throw together a dinner for 2-3 of my friends (and partner). Well, all three showed up! With the power of friendship we managed to juggle cooking scuffed teriyaki tofu (they still liked it), roasted butternut squash, matzah ball soup from a box, and latkes from a box all at the same time in a small apartment kitchen. We didn't even have enough chairs for the five of us lmao. How the hell do people put together actual big dinners? The Manischewitz matzo ball soup is unironically extremely good. Also my friends brought donuts but not sufganiyot. Then after dinner some of us saw the new Ghibli film and honestly? I didn't love it. Well, now I need to get ready for overmorrow's Christian-side-of-the-family Christmas-get-together-slash-funeral-for-my-grandpa-that-died-recently crossover event. Wish me luck!

Norman Finkelstein was born on December 8, Brooklyn, New York City in 1953 to Holocaust survivors Mary and Zacharias Finkelstein. Finkelstein's parents were Jewish Holocaust survivors. His mother grew up in Warsaw and survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp. His father was a survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz. After the war they met in a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria, and then emigrated to the United States, where his father became a factory worker and his mother a homemaker and later a bookkeeper. Finkelstein's mother was an ardent pacifist.

Finkelstein has said of his parents that "they saw the world through the prism of the Nazi Holocaust. They were eternally indebted to the Soviet Union (to whom they attributed the defeat of the Nazis), and so anyone who was anti-Soviet they were extremely harsh on".

Finkelstein grew up in Borough Park, then Mill Basin, both in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended James Madison High School. In his memoir he recalls strongly identifying with the outrage that his mother, who witnessed the genocidal atrocities of World War II, felt at the carnage the United States wrought in the Vietnam War.

He attended James Madison High School followed by Binghamton College, where he graduated in 1974 with a degree in History. Finkelstein enrolled at Princeton University where he earned a Master's degree in political science and a PhD in political studies in 1988. He also studied at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris.

As a young man, Finkelstein identified as a Maoist and worked for The Guardian, a Maoist newsweekly. After the 1981 trial of the Gang of Four, Finkelstein had a falling out with Maoist politics.

Following this experience, Finkelstein decided to develop his worldview with meticulous scholarship. Finkelstein recounts spending an entire summer in the New York Public Library comparing historical population records of Palestine to the claims made in the Joan Peters Zionist text "From Time Immemorial".

Finkelstein's work largely debunked the text, which was well-regarded at the time, winning the National Jewish Book Award in 1985. Finkelstein's skepticism of scholarship regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict would continue to characterize his academic career.

In 2003, Alan Dershowitz published "The Case for Israel", which Finkelstein called "a collection of fraud, falsification, plagiarism, and nonsense". Dershowitz began campaigning to block Finkelstein's tenure bid at DePaul University. In 2007, Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University. In response, Finkelstein resigned, and students staged a sit-in and hunger strike in protest.

In 2008, Finkelstein was denied entry to Israel. In 2009, a documentary film about Finkelstein's life and career was published, titled "American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein".

"My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies."

• Norman Finkelstein

Norman Finkelstein - Israel and Palestine

An Unpopular Man - Norman Finkelstein, TNR

FINKELSTEIN: Misadventures in the Class Struggle -

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
• 💚 Resources for Palestine
• 🐌☕ Zapatista Coffee

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

Ḥanukkah's probably not going to be much fun this year, but it's mostly just me and a bunch of cousins so I don't really care if they yell at me. We never really talk politics so maybe they'll actually turn out to be cool, who knows.

A younger cousin's Bat Mitzvah is upcoming, and with the recent heroic efforts of the Palestinian Freedom Fighters I have felt called to deepen my relationship to Judaism beyond my family's rout holidays and the shame and revulsion that Zionist Fascism has inspired in me.

A local friend pointed me to a progressive synagogue in my area and they accepted me at the last-minute into their adult B'Mitzvah classes!

As you can imagine - the article is depressing. I was most struck by the response of his mother when the reporter called her. Instead of just talking about her son - she read a prepared statement.

When I called Brick's mother, she said she did not remember specifics about the coming-out conversation, and did not want to discuss the impact it has had on the family. Instead, she shared a prepared statement: "I have always been proud of my son, I will continue to be proud of my son, and I love him very much." She said Brick's father had suggested she add the last part.

More...

Rabbi Brick has his dream job — actually, dream jobs. He is director of family learning at an Orthodox synagogue in Oakland, California, and teaches Talmud and Jewish ethics at the pluralist Jewish Community High School of the Bay. At the 200-household synagogue, Beth Jacob Congregation, Brick runs the youth program, leads Torah study for adults, and fills in when the senior rabbi is out of town.

[...]

There are a few compromises he has had to make — Brick does not officiate at weddings or witness conversions, for fear their validity could be challenged in other Orthodox spaces. He said he has made those sacrifices to keep the peace. He is also single, and declined to say whether he plans to date — or whether he thinks people can pursue same-sex relationships within the bounds of halacha. That silence may be helping him win — for now — tolerance among his colleagues.

[...]

Today, leading modern Orthodox thinkers broadly agree that a marriage between a gay person and someone of the opposite sex is untenable. At the same time, marrying a man is incompatible with halacha — and celibacy, beyond being a tough sell, runs contrary to what the Torah prescribes: monogamy, procreation, family, continuity.

"There's a stalemate," Brick said. "Because everyone's follow up is, if you love them you're going to do their wedding, and if you won't do their wedding, you don't love them. To engage in the conversation publicly, there's no way to succeed."

[...]

As rabbinical school approached, he decided to share his secret with five people — a YU administrator with a degree in social work, who he knew was an ally; a rabbi he had known since childhood; a gay friend who had grown up Orthodox; and a young couple he was close friends with. He told them he was attracted to men, but still would probably marry a woman.

[...]

Back in Israel for his first year of rabbinical school, Brick began seeing a therapist for the first time, referred by a gay Orthodox Jew he'd met through Wexner. He paid out of pocket rather than use his YU health insurance, lest some administrator find out. "I sat down, like: 'Hi, I'm a gay rabbinical student. That's what we're here for,'" he recalled of the first therapy session. It was the first time he had used the word "gay" out loud to describe himself to someone else. He was 23.

[...]

In general, he said, the reaction has been surprisingly positive, though he acknowledged that he mostly avoided telling people he expected to react poorly.

[...]

Perhaps surprisingly, Brick does not think sexual prohibitions are the primary source of pain for gay Orthodox Jews. "It's how people think of you on a day-to-day basis, with the words that they say, the way that they act — that's the thing that hurts," he said. "If you got rid of that, everything else would be so manageable."

He added: "The main reason why I'm doing this is because there are people out there who think that there are no options for them. There are people who are literally killing themselves over this. People who are incredibly depressed, in horrible situations, because they don't have access to the full picture of what Judaism has to say about them. I want to get my word out to them."

Image has labelled “Sukkos,” peering into a sukkah.

The first of many Episodes on Temple OS from a queer, Jewish perspective

Happy Rosh Hashana 5784 to all my Hexbears who celebrate!

The Jewish calendar is pretty wacky! It incorporates both Solar and Lunar cycles and the new year actually takes place in month #7. Though the Canaanite Gezer Calendar begins the year in the early Autumn, but does not include the names of the months. The months are of Babylonian origin, named:

1. Nissan
2. Iyar
3. Sivan
4. Tammuz
5. Av
6. Elul
7. Tishrei
8. Heshvan
9. Kislev
10. Tevet
11. Shvat
12. Adar
13. Adar 2 (sometimes)

You'll notice an occasional month #13. Since the months are lunar, they don't perfectly sync up to a full revolution of the the earth around the sun. The extra month is necessary to keep Passover in the spring (month of Nissan) After much discussion included consultation of Pagan astronomers (this was allowed due to their accuracy) during the 300s C.E., a regular system was developed where 235 lunar months match up to 19 solar years. If the year, when divided by 19 has a remainder of 0,3,6,8,11,14, or 17 it will have a "leap month" added, or else it will have 12 lunar months.

For anti-genital mutilation posting in the megathread earlier I remain very much not sorry. But also! I wish to extend shanah tovah to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, the September 11th of peaceful universal non-existence.

Jewish identity can be a bit of a fuck, especially when it's ambiguous (half on the wrong side but still an important part of who you are) and you are living in a country (the Deutsch land) where there was a genocide and can be a bit difficult to talk about a complicated relationship with Judaism to most people. I don't expect them to be antisemitic or racist. Just having a lot of weird uncomfortable feelings. Telling people they shouldn't feel awkward, none of their ancestors killed mine, and the only people here who might have ancestors who did came here recently from what is now hero nation Ukraine seems not to help much for some reason. But also a real Jewish bakery opened near me and that's neat and now I've got round challah and honey cake.

Took off early from my usual PhD nightmare times and now making some nice traditional food and about to drink too much wine pointedly sourced from a post-apartheid country while my body is threatening to come down with a cold. The boss of the universe certainly will not punish me for this

The Eleanor mentioned is Eleanor Marx

In the 17th century, the simplicity and elegance with which Isaac Newton had succeeded in explaining the laws governing the motion of bodies and the stars, unifying terrestrial and celestial physics, dazzled his contemporaries to such an extent that mechanics came to be considered complete. By the end of the 19th century, however, the relevance of certain phenomena that classical physics could not explain was already unavoidable. It fell to Albert Einstein to overcome these shortcomings with the creation of a new paradigm: the theory of relativity, the starting point of modern physics.

As an explanatory model completely removed from common sense, relativity is among those advances that, at the dawn of the 20th century, would lead to a divorce between ordinary people and an increasingly specialized and unintelligible science. Nevertheless, either during the physicist's lifetime or posthumously, even the most surprising and incomprehensible aspects of relativity would eventually be confirmed. It should come as no surprise, then, that Albert Einstein is one of the most celebrated and admired figures in the history of science: knowing that so many barely conceivable ideas are true (for example, that the mass of a body increases with velocity) leaves no choice but to surrender to his genius.

Origins

Albert Einstein was born in the German city of Ulm on March 14, 1879. He was the first-born son of Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch, both Jews, whose families came from Swabia. The following year they moved to Munich, where his father established himself, together with his brother Jakob, as a dealer in the electro-technical novelties of the time.

Little Albert was a quiet, self-absorbed child, and his intellectual development was slow. Einstein himself attributed to this slowness the fact that he was the only person to develop a theory such as relativity: "A normal adult does not worry about the problems posed by space and time, because he considers that he knows everything there is to know about them from early childhood. I, on the other hand, have had such a slow development that I did not begin to ask myself questions about space and time until I was older".

In 1894, financial difficulties caused the family to move to Milan; Einstein remained in Munich to finish his secondary studies, joining his parents the following year. In the fall of 1896 he began his higher studies at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, where he was a student of the mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who later generalized the four-dimensional formalism introduced by the theories of his former student.

On June 23, 1902, Albert Einstein joined the Confederal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, where he worked until 1909. In 1903 he married Mileva Maric, a former fellow student in Zurich, with whom he had two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard, born in 1904 and 1910 respectively. In 1919 they divorced, and Einstein remarried his cousin Elsa.

Relativity

During 1905, he published five papers in the Annalen der Physik: the first of these earned him a doctoral degree from the University of Zurich, and the remaining four would eventually impose a radical change in science's picture of the universe. Of these four, the first provided a theoretical explanation in statistical terms of Brownian motion, and the second gave an interpretation of the photoelectric effect based on the hypothesis that light is composed of individual quanta, later called photons. The remaining two papers laid the foundations of the special theory of relativity, establishing the equivalence between the energy E of a certain amount of matter and its mass m in terms of the famous equation E = mc², where c is the speed of light, which is assumed to be constant.

Einstein's efforts immediately placed him among the most eminent of European physicists, but public recognition of the true scope of his theories was slow in coming; the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he received in 1921, was awarded to him exclusively "for his work on Brownian motion and his interpretation of the photoelectric effect". In 1909 he began his university teaching career in Zurich, then moved to Prague and returned to Zurich in 1912 to become a professor at the Polytechnic, where he had studied.

In 1914 he moved to Berlin as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The outbreak of World War I forced him to separate from his family, who never joined him again. Against the general feeling of the Berlin academic community, Einstein was then openly anti-war, influenced in his attitudes by the pacifist doctrines of Romain Rolland.

On the scientific level, between 1914 and 1916, his activity was focused on perfecting the general theory of relativity, based on the postulate that gravity is not a force but a field created by the presence of a mass in the space-time continuum. The confirmation of his predictions came in 1919, when the solar eclipse of May 29 was photographed; The Times presented him as the new Newton and his international fame grew, forcing him to multiply his lectures around the world and popularizing his image as a traveler of the third class railroad, with a violin case under his arm.

Towards a unifying theory

During the following decade, Einstein concentrated his efforts on finding a mathematical relationship between electromagnetism and gravitational attraction, determined to advance towards what, for him, should be the ultimate goal of physics: to discover the common laws that were supposed to govern the behavior of all objects in the universe, from subatomic particles to stellar bodies, and to group them into a single "unified field" theory. This research, which occupied the rest of his life, was unsuccessful and ended up by making him a stranger to the rest of the scientific community. After 1933, with Hitler's accession to power, his loneliness was aggravated by the need to renounce German citizenship and move to the United States; Einstein spent the last twenty-five years of his life at the Graduate Institute of Princeton (New Jersey), where he died on April 18, 1955.

Einstein once said that politics had a fleeting value, while an equation had value for eternity. In the last years of his life, his bitterness at not finding the formula that would reveal the secret of the unity of the world was accentuated by the need he felt to intervene dramatically in the political sphere. In 1939, at the urging of the physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Paul Wigner, and convinced of the possibility that the Germans were in a position to manufacture an atomic bomb, he addressed President Roosevelt urging him to undertake a research program on atomic energy.

After the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions in World War II, Einstein joined scientists seeking ways to prevent future use of the bomb and proposed the formation of a world government from the embryonic United Nations. But his proposals for humanity to avert threats of individual and collective destruction, formulated in the name of a unique amalgam of science, religion and socialism, received from politicians a rejection comparable to the respectful criticism among scientists of his successive versions of the idea of a unified field.

Albert Einstein continues to be a mythical figure of our time; even more so than he became during his lifetime, if we take into account that the photograph of him showing an unusual mocking gesture (sticking out his tongue in a comical and irreverent expression) has been elevated to the dignity of a domestic icon after being turned into a poster as common as those of song idols and Hollywood stars. However, it is not his scientific genius or his human stature that best explain him as a myth, but, perhaps, the accumulation of paradoxes contained in his own biography, accentuated by the historical perspective. Einstein, the champion of pacifism, is still remembered as the "father of the bomb"; and it is still common to attribute the demonstration of the principle that "everything is relative" precisely to him, who fought fiercely against the possibility that knowing reality meant playing blind man's buffalo with it.

Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

• ❤️ Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
• 💖 Come talk in the New Monthly queer thread
• 💛 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
• ⭐️ October Movie Nominations ⭐️

reminders:

• 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
• 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes struggle sessions over upbears
• 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
• 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can go here nerd
• 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 💙‎Comprehensive list of resources for those in need of an abortion -- reddit link
• 💙Resources for Palestine

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays
• ❤️Mega upload with theory for many tendencies

Mainstream Jewish orgs finally break with “Combat Antisemitism” organization over “woke-ism” video

Enjoy your passover dinners, internet communist friends. Drink wine and curse Tsar Nicholas for me. I'm delaying my personal passover until Sunday. Hopefully the Angel of Death understands.

Rosenberg, who’s sold more than 25,000 copies of his Haggadah, says there are endless parallels between Harry Potter and the Haggadah, like the four sons of the Passover Seder and the four Hogwarts houses, or the trio of Harry, Ron, and Hermione and that of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.