Shabbat 31a:6

love elisheva

listen to every word.

“In Jewish thought, a sin is not an offense against God, an act of disobedience. A sin is a missed opportunity to act humanly. The verb to sin in Hebrew is also used in the sense of ‘missing the target.’ When God created us free to choose between good and bad, He also gave us the capacity to know when we had chosen wrongly”

— Harold Kushner, To Life!: A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking

To be honest, this interpretation still reminds me of Christian arguments for free will, or at least there are similar possible issues. For what it’s worth, modern Christians actually make the same point about sin, and you can sense that it’s meant as a nicer alternative to the usual Christian rhetoric about sin.

*sigh*

“This thing in Judaism reminds me of something Christians say!”

Yeah. Because they literally stole the 25% of their belief system that isn’t completely about salvation vs damnation from us.

Kinda crazy when people get obsessed with the idea that the word goy existing and the idea of being the chosen people means Jews must think they’re better than everyone else when there’s literally so many flavors of Christianity that pride themselves on being the best Christianity that’s the only one that will definitely get you into heaven.

this is the way I like to explain what seeing incorrect chanukkah decorations to christians and culturally christian secular people:

imagine that every single christmas item you saw had something wrong with it. theres images of bunnies with spring colored eggs even though that's for easter. it says "merry new year and happy christmas" instead of "merry christmas and happy new year". its about the birth of santa now, not jesus. apparently it's happening on December 27 for some reason. everyone is telling you that this holiday is about resistance even though you know that its about peace, love, and light. you see a picture of rudolph the red nosed reindeer with a glowing blue nose but everything else is right and you think "huh, that one isn't too bad. might as well get it"

I think a lot of Americans have a hard time grasping the idea of Jewish indigeneity because they dont know where their own ancestors came from. Maybe they'll have vague ideas like German, Italian, or Irish, but what they know has very little bearing on their day-to-day lives. They don't dress any different, they don't speak the language their great grandparents spoke, they don't hold regular ceremonies and rituals that harken back to the old days.

The idea of an ethnic group maintaining a constant identity over thousands of years is patently absurd to them. "You're telling me you're still mourning something the ancient Romans did? That's ridiculous! Clearly you've fallen for modern Israeli propaganda, otherwise you're deliberately arguing in bad faith in order to justify land theft and genocide!"

It's very frustrating, because when I say these things I do not say them in bad faith. My friend once said "it's a very American thing not to understand large timescales", and I think she was right on the money. The process of American assimilation has cut peoples ties to their ancestors to such a degree that they can no longer comprehend a continuous identity spanning millennia.

So I'm going to say this in the clearest language I can:

There is a genuine, historically provable, continuous connection from ancient Israelites to modern Jews. By the laws and customs of those ancient Israelites I am one of them. Let me reiterate. I am an Israelite, a Hebrew, like from the Bible, and the fact that my identity has been so mythologized and talked about as if it's a thing of the past will never change that.

In today's episode of antizionist goyim plz stop infantilizing non-ashkenazi jews, allow me to remind everybody that

Emma Lazarus, literally "the mother of Zionism" who used her poetry and prose to encourage jewish pride and solidarity and who used her money to help settle Jewish refugees in Eretz Israel (Ottoman Syria) and the US, was a Sephardic Jew.

rating different ways that characters are generally revealed to be jewish in tv and movies made by (mostly) goyim:

B'nei mitzvah mention: 3/10, points taken off for laziness. kept some because it's an important event so I get why it's used

B'nei mitzvah scene: 8/10, can either be really good or really bad depending how accurate. honestly ranges from a 5/10-11/10

Chanukkah mention: 0/10, im so tired of this one its so overdone and it's always in the christmas specials. it can be done right but like that's only if jews are writing the scene

Pesach mention: 4/10, definitely a better holiday to use than chanukah because it's not done to death and it isn't automatically paired with christmas. points removed for the inevitable inaccuracies

Rosh Hashanah mention: 7.5/10 just for using a holiday that most people wouldn't think of or may not even know of

Literally any other jewish holiday: 9/10 how do you know about this who told you

Any jewish holiday scene: 7.5/10, which actually means it can range from 5-10 depending on how ridiculous and wrong the scene is making my rating perfectly average.

shabbat mention: 8/10, kinda love it. it's also really good for casual conversations because its a weekly occurrence so there's plenty of ways for it to feel natural when bringing it up in a script

shabbat dinner scene: 15/10 absolutely love it especially bc it shows character dynamics in a casual setting. if there's anything incorrect it doesn't bother me much because the ways people observe shabbat vary a lot

"im jewish": 10/10 straight to the point no notes love it

literally any mention of money/greed/power: -10/10 shut up shut up shut up why is your only jewish character rich and greedy and why is that their defining trait

antisemitic comments: -15/10 why can't you think of anything nice to say.

nose comments: -100/10 needs to be in a separate category because I hate it so much. somehow even worse when its a goyische actor wearing a prosthesis and caked on "jewish" makeup bc like how are you being fake racist rn

not even saying anything and just making it painfully obvious: 8/10, yeah that character's last name is goldberg so it's pretty clear and I like that. I do wish it was mentioned upfront though

brit milah mention: 5/10, its usually played for laughs which feels a bit weird but not weird enough for me to care. this is a true neutral

having them wear a kippah/magen david/anything visibly jewish from the second theyre introduced: 100/10 my favorite by far because it's made clear from the start and there's no question about it

"Painfully obvious" should be a lower score, especially when you're using a last name as an example. Like I'm Ashkenaz, I don't think I'd automatically know a Sephardi/Mizrahi etc last name. (Not that people are representing them a lot in media, but...)

Also, there was a person on a show I watch whose last name is Levine. (Actual person, not a character,) and I thought she was Jewish. Turns out there's like, A Thing in Britain where there's goyische Levines.

But also I want them to be explicit about it. Don't have them say oy twice and expect that to be good rep. Show don't tell doesn't count for representation!

But good post. Adding something I've seen from Hallmark these past few years:

Jewish, but learning to celebrate "the joy of Xmas" anyway: -18/10 please sit on a pinecone

I feel like the reason there aren’t any ‘Jewish hero fights the Fair Folk’ stories is because we’d easily get out of that situation.

Like, put Hershel of Ostropol in any situation involving the Fair Folk and bro would talk his way out.

This is why I’m not really scared of paranormal beasties. But yes, I’d enjoy reading this happen.

Names have power? Give them your secular name and not your Hebrew one.

If you eat their food you’re trapped? It’s not kosher anyways.

They speak in riddles? What, and you didn’t grow up answering a question with a question?

Confuse the Fair Folk with impossible halachic questions: if a man falls off a roof and onto a woman and as a result she becomes pregnant, is he obligated to marry her and is the child a mamzer? If meat is grown in a laboratory from a mix of various animal cells is it kosher, and is it even meat, and what bracha would you even say on it? Is a unicorn permitted to cleanse a poisoned stream on Shabbat using the innate purifying powers of its horn or does it count as work? Can it be justified as pikuach nefesh? Can necromancy be justified as pikuach nefesh, if one approaches necromancy with the understanding that it is just delayed medical assistance?

And if all else fails, you can always get out a fleischig pan, kick ass and take names, and don’t forget to say the blessing for fucking someone’s day up:

BARUCH ATA ADO-NOT TODAY ASSHOLE

can’t get over when famous gangster lucky luciano was like “hey lansky seems like quite a hassle getting all those nazis offa your terf you want us to help ya out” and meyer “Left Russia Because of Pogroms and Became A Gangster In The US” lansky was like “no. no getting to beat the shit out of nazis is reward enough for us. sorry lucky this one’s personal don’t worry about it”

here’s a quote from a New York Times article abt it

also bonus quote from that article

“quick question about the punching, judge perlman: how about murder instead”

everybody says that “the government” enlisted these mobsters to beat up nazis, but like. no. no that didn’t happen? judge nathan perlman illegally called up a man who could have him shot dead at a minute to say “hey. i’ve scoured the fucking law books tryna find a way to get these fucking nazis out of here, but my legal means have unfortunately run out. so-” and meyer fucking lansky was like “ah say no more boss lemme call a buncha friends and we’ll get this sorted out real quick don’t even bother paying me.“

can you imagine that phone call. like genuinely. how am i supposed to continue living my normal life knowing this happened. people who loooove talking about punching nazis, taKE FUCKING NOTES

this is my favorite Meyer Lansky story.

my second favorite Meyer Lansky story is about the time, many years later, that he was at a meeting of mafia heads and one of them started bragging about how his son was following him into the family business.

Meyer Lansky said “That’s nice. My son works for NASA.”

we should use ladino casually the same way people use yiddish casually. ladino is a beautiful language and it should be used more often! the more people who even just know two words, the less likely this wonderful language and important piece of history is to fully die out. the more jewish languages that are used regularly the better!

as a Jew I find the antisemitic trope of the Wandering Jew endlessly fascinating and there’s a version of it that lives rent free in my head that I can’t get out

because yes, we have been cursed—not by G-d, but by man; not for anything we’ve done, but for libel against us—and the curse antisemites have forced on us is that we must wander forever. we don’t get a home, here or there. we aren’t allowed to put down roots in diaspora, but we aren’t allowed to return either; regardless of which we do, the nations try to drive us out and impose their sentence on us: you must wander some more

there is a deconstructed version of the Wandering Jew that I want to reclaim, not as a testament to our sin but as a witness to the nations’, how they’ve treated the wanderer in their midst. on some level, a witness to how the nations treat all wanderers: Jew, Roma, bedouin. but ultimately, a testament to the libel & persecution we as Jews have endured & persevere through

this Wandering Jew is a weary old immortal forced to wander by hatred that goes before him through the nations, who has seen those nations come and go, empires rise and fall, and bears witness to our plight through every one, waiting for injustice to be righted so he can finally rest

Today is the 81st anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising!!

I still remember that day in grad school when I learned about this lady named Vladka Meed, who smuggled explosives into the Ghetto in preparation for the Uprising.

That is my origin story. Learning the deep involvement of women at every level of the Uprising, from armaments to command (enter: Queen Zivia) changed my life, as a Jewish woman, and as a historian, forever. And I'm so SO honored that I get to play a role in ensuring that they take their rightful place in our collective memory.*

Remember, US readers, whenever anyone tells you that the Jews "should have resisted," that "if the Jews had guns more could have been saved," remember, that the Jews DID resist. They DID have guns. And most of the Jews who rose up and fought?--expected to die. The Warsaw Ghetto fighters didn't start the Uprising out of some silly dream that they could "beat" the Nazis, they rose up to make a statement about the dignity of the Jewish people.

As a sidenote, many of the best scholarly treatments of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust have been out of print since the 1970s.

*My first book, The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto, is set to be released in Fall 2025.