Etta Federn was bornon April 28th 1883 in Vienna, the youngest daughter of an assimilated Jewish family. She was the daughter of the suffragette Ernestine Federn and the doctor Salomon Federn and the sister of Paul, who became an analyst, Karl, who became a lawyer and writer, and Walter who became a journalist.

She had an education on an equal footing with her brothers. She studied literary history, German and Greek literature. After graduation she began to study German and philosophy. In addition, she received a broad education in foreign languages.

She broke with her family and moved to Berlin, where she completed her studies with a thesis on Faust. She earned her living there first as a teacher and then as a translator from English, French, Danish, Russian and Yiddish. She translated Alexandra Kollontai, Hans Christian Anderson and Shakespeare.

She worked as a literary critic for the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt. She published many biographies including those of Dante and Goethe. At the same time she began to write essays, biographies, autobiographical, stories, a play and poems. She married twice, both marriages ending in separation.

She made contact with the anarchist movement in Berlin and began to participate in the activities of the German anarcho-syndicalist union the FAUD (Free Workers' Union of Germany - Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands), contributing articles to its press on a regular basis. She began to make many friends within this movement.

The anarchist movement in Berlin attracted in Etta’s own words many “self-motivated Jewish women who offered their intellectual, emotional and political support to the ideas of social revolution, free education, the importance of cultural work, women’s emancipation and the importance of solidarity and responsible behaviour”.

She met Emma Goldman, Mollie Steimer, and Sonia Flechin, among others. In particular, she maintained a close friendship with Rudolf Rocker and Milly Witkop for life. She took an active part in the women’s organisation founded by the FAUD, the Syndikalistischen Frauenbund -Syndicalist Women’s Organisation (SFB).

She received death threats from the Nazis as a result of her biography of the liberal politician Walter Rathenau, murdered by right wing officers, which was published in 1927. In addition the forces of reaction put pressure on the newspapers and publishing houses she usually wrote for, so that her sources of income began to dry up.

She left Germany for Barcelona in 1932, at the age of 49 with her two sons. In 1933 her books were amongst those destroyed during the Nazi public book burnings and she was placed on the Nazi blacklist.

In Barcelona she received continuing support from the anarchist circles still in Berlin, and in turn she was able to welcome those fleeing to Berlin later. She was able to adapt quickly to Barcelona, writing articles for the Spanish press within weeks and starting to learn Catalan. However, she remained financially straitened, and had to rely on small but regular transfers of money from her close relatives in the USA.

During the Spanish revolution she joined Mujeres Libres (Free Women), the anarchist women’s movement, in July 1936. She taught literature, language and education at the cultural centre set up by Mujeres Libres, the House of the Woman Worker, was based on the teachings of the Spanish libertarian educationalist, Francisco Ferrer.

Later , in 1937, she founded, in collaboration with Mujeres Libres, four libertarian schools in the Catalan city of Blanes. These schools, of which she was the director, trained teachers as well as teaching children. They were co-educational, with an orientation towards atheism and antimilitarism, and designed to have an anxiety free, stimulating and caring atmosphere for children.

In May 1937 she returned to Barcelona and had her book Mujeres de las Revoluciones , which included biographical sketches of twelve famous women, published by Mujeres Libres.

In 1938, because of the massive bombing raids on Barcelona she left for Paris with her two sons.

Between 1940-1945 she moved to Lyons. She was by now completely exhausted physically and sometimes seriously ill. Despite this, she engaged in resistance work through translations, propaganda work and organisation.

Her oldest son Hans died in 1944 in the fighting at Vercors. Paradoxically it was because of this that she became entitled to French nationality and a small monthly pension, although she remained in poverty until her death in Paris ion May 9th, 1951.

She features as a literary personality in a novel of the Swedish anarchist writer Stig Dagerman (who had married the German anarchist Annemarie Goetze) Skuggen av Mart (Stockholm 1947) and in Utan Vaiaktig stad (Stockholm 1948) the novel of another Swedish writer, Arne Fosberg.

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Quoting Gilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab–Israeli War of Narratives, pages 37–8:

Boasting a circulation that rose, late in the decade, to 40,000 copies, a third of which were sold in Arab capitals beyond Egypt’s borders, Al‐Risāla provided a forum for some of the most prestigious Egyptian and non‐Egyptian Arab intellectuals of the period: its contributors included ʻAli ʻAbdul‐Rāziq, Ahmad Amīn, ʻAbbās Mahmūd al‐ʻAqqād, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Tāha Hussein, Tawfīq al‐Hakīm,¹⁰ Mahmūd Taymūr, and Sātiʻ al‐Husri.¹¹

[…]

Avoiding the trap into which ultranationalists and religious conservatives fell, it struggled against all forms of the illusion that [the Third Reich] was pro‐Arab because it was anti‐Jewish: Al‐Risāla denounced [German Fascism] “as a ‘white imperialist attack’ on the Semitic peoples, first and foremost against the Arabs and Muslims,”¹³ while assailing the specific form of anti‐Judaism peculiar to [Fascist] anti‐Semitism. Yet all this went hand in hand with fierce denunciation of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine.¹⁴

Gershoni insists that Al‐Risāla was in no sense marginal or exceptional: “It was actually the pro‐fascist […] intellectual voices that were peripheral.”¹⁵ He offered further proof a few years later in a study of another […] publication, the Egyptian monthly Al‐Hilāl (The Crescent), which played a key rôle in shaping culture in the Middle East.¹⁶

Like Al‐Risāla, Al‐Hilāl methodically denounced the […] imperialistic and racist nature of [Germanic] and Italian fascism. Gershoni dwells in particular on two essays that appeared in July and August 1933, one about the great mass slaughters of history, the other about anti‐Semitism; Al‐Hilāl warned that the Jews might fall victim to a massacre on a scale with the one that had decimated the Armenians, which it cited as the most terrible in modern history.¹⁷

(Emphasis added.)

…wow.

תרבחו ותסעדו ! Hope all of you are having a good and great Mimouna , stay safe and much love .

He was the one who wrote “The Scroll of the Steamed Portions of Ham.”

(Mirror.)

Neither the gesture nor the rebuke fazed Israel365, whose founder calls it “Israel’s voice in the MAGA movement,” and which caters to an evangelical Christian audience. On Saturday night, the group is hosting an event in Dallas where, it confirmed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, it will proudly fete Bannon as the guest of honor.

Bannon — whose podcast, “War Room,” commands considerable influence among pro-Trump diehards — will also deliver a speech and answer questions. The event is hosted by Israel365 Action, the group’s advocacy arm, which is running a slate in the upcoming elections for the World Zionist Congress.

“We are grateful to Steve Bannon for using his voice and his War Room platform to help the Jewish State achieve Total Victory and are proud to honor him this Saturday night as a Warrior for Israel,” Rabbi Tuly Weisz, Israel365’s founder, wrote in an email to JTA.

In a subsequent message, he wrote, “Anyone who listens to Bannon, knows that he is a Warrior for Israel, and is frequently even criticized for being the most pro-Israel voice in the movement.”

Even as Israel365 is rebuffing those who call Bannon an antisemite, the event has sparked some local controversy. It was originally set to take place at a local Orthodox Jewish day school, Akiba Yavneh Academy, but at least one parent complained and the school canceled.

“Appalled and embarrassed that my children’s school is the location this event is taking place,” the parent, who asked to remain anonymous, wrote on Torah Trumps Hate, a Facebook group largely of Orthodox Jews who oppose Trump. “How any Jewish group is comfortable aligning with antisemite Steve Bannon is crazy to me.”

The parent praised the school for cancelling. Akiba Yavneh did not respond to JTA requests for comment on Friday, but Weisz confirmed that the school canceled the event booking shortly after Bannon was announced as a speaker.

The school is not the only institution to distance itself from Bannon. His gesture at the conservative confab CPAC last week drew criticism from Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, which called out his “long and disturbing history of stoking antisemitism and hate, threatening violence, and empowering extremists.”

The blowback extended beyond the Jewish community and into Bannon’s own political camp. Far-right French leader Jordan Bardella canceled his own CPAC appearance because of Bannon’s gesture, which Bardella called “a gesture alluding to Nazi ideology.” Bannon denied it was a Nazi salute and said Bardella “wets himself like a little child.”

The gesture was the latest one by a pro-Trump figure after Elon Musk, the billionaire Trump adviser, made a similar salute at an inauguration event in January, drawing widespread criticism.

Another wave of criticism came in response to Bannon’s subsequent statement that “the number-one enemy to the people in Israel are American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support MAGA.”

I’m kind of drekposting here since this is barely Judaism-related, but I felt like sharing some positivity and I hope that the moderators don’t mind.

Performance proper starts at 10:50

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6610351

Nineteen years after this Citizenship Law of 1952 was enacted, my parents moved from the U.S. to Jerusalem and were granted citizenship and full rights under the “Law of Return.” Out of a youthful naivete that would deepen into willful ignorance, they managed to become both American liberals who opposed the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, while also acting as armed settlers of another people’s land.

They moved into a Jerusalem neighborhood that had been ethnically cleansed only a few years earlier. They occupied a home built and recently inhabited by a Palestinian family whose community was expelled to Jordan and then violently barred from returning at the barrel of a gun — and by the citizenship papers my family held in their hands.

This 1-to-1 replacement was not a secret. People like my family lived in these quarters precisely because it was an “Arab house,” proudly advertised as such for its elegant, high-ceilinged design in opposition to the drably utilitarian, haphazardly constructed apartment blocks of the settler Zionists. I was born in the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of Ayn Karim, much prized for possessing all the native Arab charm with none of the actual native Arabs to unsettle the pretty picture. My father was in the Israeli military, from which he and many of his friends emerged, after the monstrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, liberal proponents of “peace.”

But to them, that word still meant living in a Jewish-majority country; it was a “peace” in which the original sin of the state, the ongoing process of ethnic cleansing, would remain firmly in place, legitimated and thereby more secure than ever. They sought peace, in other words, for Jews with Israeli citizenship, but for Palestinians, “peace” meant full surrender, a permanent occupation and exile.

All of this is to say: I don’t regard my decision to renounce this citizenship as an effort to reverse a legal status as much as it is an acknowledgement that this status never held any legitimacy to begin with. Israeli citizenship law is predicated on the worst kinds of violent crimes we know of, and on a deepening litany of lies intended to whitewash those crimes.

The look of officialdom, the trappings of lawful governance, with their seals of the Ministry of the Interior, testify to nothing other than this state’s slippery effort to conceal its fundamental unlawfulness. These are forged documents. They are, more importantly, a blunt instrument used to continually displace actual living people, families, entire populations of the land’s Indigenous inhabitants.

In its genocidal campaign to erase Palestine’s Indigenous people, the state has weaponized my very existence, my birth and identity — and those of so many others. The wall that keeps Palestinians from returning home is constituted as much by identity papers as by concrete slabs. Our job must be to remove those concrete slabs, to rip up the phony papers, and to disrupt the narratives that make these structures of oppression and injustice appear legitimate or, god forbid, inevitable.

To those who will breathlessly invoke the talking point that Jews “have a right to self-determination,” I will only say that if such a right does exist, it cannot possibly involve the invasion, occupation and ethnic cleansing of another people. Nobody has that right. Moreover, one can think of a few European countries that owe land and reparations to their persecuted Jews. The Palestinian people, however, never owed Jews anything for the crimes committed by European antisemitism, nor do they today.

My personal belief, like many of my 20th century ancestors, is that Jewish liberation is inseparable from broad social movements. That is why so many Jews were socialists in pre-war Europe, and why many of us connect to that tradition today.

As an observant Jew, I believe the Torah is radical in its contention that Jewish people, or any people, have no right at all to any land, but rather are bound by rigorous ethical responsibilities. Indeed, if the Torah has one single message, it’s that if you oppress the widow and the orphan, if you deal corruptly in government-sanctioned greed and violence, and if you acquire land and wealth at the expense of regular people, you will be cast out by the God of righteousness. The Torah is routinely waved around by land-worshipping nationalists as though it were a deed of ownership, but, if actually read, it is a record of prophetic rebuke against the abuse of state power.

The only entity with sovereign rights, according to the Torah, is the God of justice, the God who despises the usurper and the occupier. Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism or Jewish history other than that its leaders have long seen in these deep sources a series of powerfully mobilizing narratives with which to push their colonial agenda — and it is that colonial agenda alone that we must address. The constant efforts to evoke the history of Jewish victimhood in order to justify or to simply distract from the actions of an economic and military powerhouse would be positively laughable if they weren’t so cynically weaponized and deadly.

Zionist colonization cannot be reformed or liberalized: Its existential identity, as expressed in its citizenship laws and repeated openly by those citizens, amounts to a commitment to genocide. Calls for arms embargoes, as well as for boycotts, divestment and sanctions, are commonsense demands. But they are not a political vision. Decolonization is. It is both the path and the destination. We all must orient our organizing accordingly.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2913041

Chanukkah is a Jewish holiday (or more accurately 1.1 holiweeks, since it lasts eight days) that starts on the 25th of the Hebrew month of Kislev and celebrates the military victory by the Hasmoneans over the Syrian Greeks in 164 BCE, and the Jerusalem Temple’s rededication under the Hasmoneans. Quoting Prof. Eyal Regev:

One important reason for promoting its celebration years after the purification of the altar was to celebrate and commemorate the Maccabees’ achievement and to support their successors, the Hasmoneans. The fact that the Maccabees, their followers and successors, encouraged Chanukah’s celebration in the two epistles, shows that Chanukah also had political significance.

[…]

Chanukah, which celebrates the rededication of the Temple under the Hasmoneans, would have been an effective political tool to reinforce Hasmonean government, since it was celebrated in the Temple and probably also in many Jewish houses.^[9]^ It strengthened Hasmonean authority and was a kind of Hasmonean Independence Day also representing their collective identity.^[10]^

Chanukah was also helpful in constructing the Jewish social memory about the Maccabees’ achievements.^[11]^ It was one of several festivals that the Maccabees instituted in order to commemorate their military victories for the coming generations. Additional festivals that served this role are the Day of Nicanor (13 in Adar; 1 Macc 7:48–49; 2 Macc 15:36),^[12]^ and Hakra Day, a day of the removal of the citadel (hakra) in Jerusalem, the last remnant of gentile oppression (1 Macc 13:49–52). These three festivals stressed Hasmonean authority and rule.^[13]^ Indeed, Chanukah became a holiday due to the intersection of its religious, Temple focus, with the political needs of the Hasmonean leaders who established it.

My memories aren’t as clear now that I’m an adult, but Chanukkah might well have been either my introduction to Judaism, or what interested me in it. I vaguely remember the feeling of fascination when I saw those bizarre and mysterious symbols on the dreidel. What strange looking symbols! It was my first exposure to the alephbet and was what eventually lead me to (briefly) studying Hebrew.

Being a gentile and lacking Jewish friends in my locale, I am disappointed to say that I cannot take part in the celebration, but the tale of resistance against overwhelming odds can easily resonate with many gentiles today, especially Palestinian ones. Just as the Maccabees could not give up their independence so easily, neither can the lower classes of the world.

Have a great Chanukah!

Though the text in the book of Maccabees does not detail what the rededication of the altar looked like, we can postulate that it resembled the dedication ceremonies described in the bible, particularly the dedication of the Tabernacle in Numbers 7. In this chapter, we learn that the chieftains of Israel brought various presents to the Tabernacle. Among the presents were items used in facilitating sacrifice, including silver basins, bowls, and ladles (Numbers 7:1-8:3). A Hanukkah gift is, therefore, a gift that enables us to worship God; this is precisely how the Jews celebrated the festival of Hanukkah in the years following their victory over the Greeks.

Everything changed after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.

Sacrifice was no longer possible and the understanding of how to worship God shifted from sacrifice to study and prayer. For this reason, the festival of Hanukkah could have transformed into a gift-giving holiday. Instead of giving gifts to facilitate sacrifice, one would give gifts to facilitate acts of study or prayer. Instead of giving a silver basin, one might give a tallit or a chumash. As we know, however, the rabbis took the celebration of Hanukkah in a different direction. They introduced the miracle of the oil and focused on the laws surrounding the lighting of the menorah.

The second way we can understand gift giving as a Jewish custom is with the introduction of Hanukkah gelt in Europe during the 18th century.

Many believe this custom developed because of the etymological connection between Hanukkah and education. Chinuch (education) shares the same Hebrew root (Chet/nun/chaf) as Chanukah (dedication). For this reason, education (specifically Torah study) became a central focus of Hanukkah. Historian Eliezer Segal suggests that families began to use these Torah study sessions during Hanukkah as an opportunity to give small amounts of money to teachers who were otherwise prohibited from accepting money for teaching Torah. Parents would give children money to give to their teachers. Eventually, Segal suggests, the children began to expect it themselves. This, he says, might be the origin of the practice of giving gelt during Hanukkah.

There are some, however, who date the practice much earlier. In "The Original Chanukah Gelt," Marvin Tameanko argues that this custom dates back to the very first Hanukkah festival celebrated by the Maccabees. He points to the then-common practice of taking war booty: when the Jews destroyed the Greek armies, they took weapons, armor, horses, and coins (I Maccabees 3:41). These coins were distributed to victorious soldiers, widows, and orphans of the dead as well as the general population, including children. Tameanko suggests that this could be the origin of Hanukkah gelt.

The third way to understand gift giving as a Jewish custom is by reinterpreting Hanukkah as a holiday that has always celebrated the interplay between Judaism and the dominant culture of the time. In his book, "The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays," Irvin Greenberg says, “Hanukkah is the paradigm of the relationship between acculturation and assimilation where each generation has interpreted Hanukkah in its own image, speaking to its own needs.” He discusses how the story of Hanukkah began because of the blending of Greek and Eastern cultures. Hellenism attracted the Jewish elite. In fact, there were some Jews who favored aggressive assimilation. Gift giving is the prime example of a custom that was, and still is, borrowed from the dominant culture.

In addition to Jews using foreign coins as Hanukkah gelt, gift giving was generally practiced in Greek culture during the time of the book of Maccabees. There are three examples in the books of Maccabees that describe Greeks engaging in the practice of gift giving.

In the first example, King Anthiochus’s officers tell Mattathias they will give him gold, silver, and gifts if he makes a pagan sacrifice (I Maccabees 2:15-28). In the second, King Antiochus realizes that his wealth diminished during the war, and he laments that he will no longer be able to give gifts the way he used to (I Maccabees 3:30). In the third example, the King of Persia turns a holy site into a shrine and uses the money he makes from it to give gifts to his friends (II Maccabees 1:34-35).

Each of these examples speaks to the fact that gift giving was a prevalent practice in Greek culture during the time of the story of Hanukkah. It sets the stage for a discussion about how Jews borrow from and engage with the dominant culture of their time. If Hanukkah is a time for thinking about what it means to be a free people who also live and participate in greater society, it is a perfect opportunity to think about what it means to share practices with others and whether a borrowed ritual can still be considered Jewish.

A few weeks ago I asked a Sephardi friend if I could try having an Orthodox style tech break. He generally feels uneasy about us trying to copy rules that aren't for us, but he basically said 'If you want to, sure.' (Later I did try to have this tech break, but I screwed it up after 22 hours.) I wasn't trying to hold my own Shabbat celebration, but some of you might feel a little uneasy anyway because in another respect I'm still being a copycat. What do you think?

I have my own impression for phenomena that are probably okay to borrow and which ones are over the line, but I hesitate to call it reliable. I would appreciate any feedback on the outline.

These are okay:

• Learning Jewish languages and dialects
• Following and sharing Jewish recipes
• Participating in Jews' celebrations, festivals, and other events with their permission
• Wearing a kippah when a Jewish person requests it
• Singing Jewish songs
• Regularly thanking the Almighty for food (and when we relieve ourselves)

These are off-limits:

• Trying to reuse (biblical) Hebrew for conversational purposes
• Adding trayf ingredients to Jewish recipes (I actually don't know if you'd care about this, but it still sounds cringe)
• Holding Jewish celebrations as if they were your own
• Wearing a kippah whenever you want, and appropriating other ceremonial fashion like streimels and prayer shawls
• Blowing a shofar whenever you want
• Giving yourself a secret Hebrew name

Is this about right? Am I missing anything?

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cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6408688

“Our politicians cannot be complacent in these marble hallways while Israel continues to burn Palestinians alive in their tents,” said Niall Ricardo, an organizer with the Independent Jewish Voices Canada group, in a statement.

Protesters accused the Canadian government of “arming” Israel by exporting weapons and military parts to the United States, which are then supplied to Israel.

They also demanded an end to the import of military goods and technology from Israel.

The extent of racist offenses and discrimination against Ethiopian Jews manifests in various aspects, including reluctance by factories to employ them, landlords refusing housing, and specific schools rejecting their children. In a troubling incident unveiled by the [...] NGO Tebeka in September 2011, 281 children of Ethiopian descent were unlawfully denied registration at a school in the Central District of Israel. This not only constituted a clear violation of children’s right to education but also reflected a broader pattern of exclusion within the country (Refworld, 2012).

In a separate incident, an Ethiopian mother and resident of Israel reported that on her daughter’s first day of kindergarten, the child was placed in a classroom exclusively composed of Ethiopian [...] youngsters. Despite the school justifying the placement based on the geographic area of the children, parents publicly perceive it as a result of the color of their skin, expressing concerns about potential discrimination (Sokol, 2019).

In addition, in 2019, a group of Ethiopian-Israeli parents took legal action against four ultra-Orthodox schools in Jerusalem that refused to enroll their children for the upcoming school year, further highlighting the persistent barriers in the education system (Surkes, 2019). These incidents underscore the urgent need to address discriminatory practices and promote inclusivity within the educational framework.

Yemini led a contingent of Zionist aggressors over to Jewish man and left-wing activist James Crafti, protesting in a keffiyeh, to accost him while filming his usual "Rebel" material.

While I expect accurate coverage of the conduct of this angry, violent mob in mainstream, legacy media spaces to be largely non-existent, some outlets saw the violence in person and saw fit to include it. During the exchange, one of Yemini’s Zionist mob hurled Crafti to the ground, as witnessed by an Age journalist.

Charming of the Herzlians to offer anticolonial Jews a (very small) fraction of their Palestinian siblings' horrific suffering.

(Spotted here.)