Jewschool
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Jewschool is an iconic and iconoclastic progressive Jewish news and opinion weblog that has been publishing since 2002. Our mission is to connect and broadcast grassroots activists and thinkers dissatisfied with the status quo.
Jewschool
5d ago
by Sara Klugman, for All That’s Left
All That’s Left, a Jerusalem-based, anti-Occupation collective, has published For a Time Such as This: 5784 Purim Reader, a series of six essays from left-wing Torah scholars sharing their thoughts on Purim in this dark time. Jewschool is proud to partner with ATL in publishing some of these essays. You can access the full reader here.
Jerusalem is a costumed city everyday: a people of covered heads and submerged histories. The city wears multiple cloaks: names and histories of people layered on top of each other like shiva notice ..read more
Jewschool
5d ago
by an anonymous Torah student, for All That’s Left
All That’s Left, a Jerusalem-based, anti-Occupation collective, has published For a Time Such as This: 5784 Purim Reader, a series of six essays from left-wing Torah scholars sharing their thoughts on Purim in this dark time. Jewschool is proud to partner with ATL in publishing some of these essays. You can access the full reader here.
The parshiyot that surround the holiday of Purim are often filled with long and tedious descriptions of the nature of ritual service in the Mishkan. Often the descriptions feel distant ..read more
Jewschool
1w ago
by Lexie Botzum for All That’s Left
All That’s Left, a Jerusalem-based, anti-Occupation collective, has published For a Time Such as This: 5784 Purim Reader, a series of six essays from left-wing Torah scholars sharing their thoughts on Purim in this dark time. Jewschool is proud to partner with ATL in publishing some of these essays. You can access the full reader here.
“But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests.” – James Baldwin, 1979, The Nation
Haman is the one whose effigy is hung fro ..read more
Jewschool
1w ago
By Rabbi Robin Podolsky
Every day in which President Biden acts as though he is helpless in the face of Netanyahu’s intransigence adds to the suffering of the Gazan people he claims to care about—and it also perpetuates a dangerous antisemitic trope.
As Senator Bernie Sanders has reiterated over and over again with the willingness of a prophet to repeat himself relentlessly until his message is heard, President Biden doesn’t really have the dilemma he claims to have. With one phone call, he could end the bombardment and threats of invasion. He could open the door to the level of aid need to en ..read more
Jewschool
2w ago
Someday, hopefully soon, maybe not so soon, this war will be over. Even President Biden and Vice President Harris have—though wanly and unconvincingly—called for a temporary cease fire. The question that the political pundits have been worrying about is “the day after.” What will happen in Gaza the day after the war ends? Who will be in charge? Who will supply food and water and housing? Who will control the borders and internal security? Will Hamas still be a political force? These are all important questions, and it seems that the Netanyahu government is being criminally negligent in ignorin ..read more
Jewschool
2w ago
It would be easy to dismiss Franklin Foer’s recent piece in the Atlantic – “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending” – as simply another salvo in the long litany liberal Zionist hand-wringing about what really has come to a final end: the “Golden Age” of Zionist consensus, roughly the 1970s to perhaps the early 2000s. Yet every now and again, an essay commits such political and historical violations that ignoring it is impossible: it demands, in a sense, to be put on trial.
Foer begins his essay with vivid portraits of Jewish students alarmed at the rise of massive pro-Palestine ..read more
Jewschool
2w ago
by Dr. Elana Sztokman
The rabbi of the “yeshiva” in Yaffo has said that he thinks that according to Jewish halakha, all the people in Gaza should be killed. Even the babies.
He said that. Rabbi Eliyahu Mali. Rabbi of the right wing yeshiva in the Ajami neighborhood of Yaffo. Calling for Israel to murder of 2.2 million Gazans, including babies.
Take that in for a second.
A rabbi whose yeshivah is being funded by the government shamelessly calling for the murder of an entire population. Wiping them all out.
This happened. And nothing is being done to stop him or silence him or e ..read more
Jewschool
3w ago
People sometimes point to the ending of the book of Esther as a Jewish massacre—the disturbing part of the story that is supposedly suppressed in Sunday school. In Esther 9:16, now with the king on their side, the Judeans kill 75,000 enemies. That has always bugged me, for a simple reason: it’s true that there’s a moral problem in Esther 9, but it’s not that verse.
In verse 16, the 75,000 are understood to be enemy combatants, and the Judeans, who are outside of the capital, Shushan, are fighting for their lives (וְעָמֹ֣ד עַל־נַפְשָׁ֗ם). A committed pacifist might object to this violence, but ..read more
Jewschool
3w ago
image attribution: “P’kudei“, by Davi Cheng, Chinese ink and acrylic on parchment, 2013
by Gen Slosberg 夏夜
I wrote this shortly after returning from the US-Mexico border, and witnessing the trauma and incarceration faced by migrants. The way my white colleagues reacted to that trauma reminded me of ways I too had been tokenized and dehumanized in Jewish community, and how white people often focus primarily or exclusively on either my deepest trauma, or my most milquetoast, harmless, benign cultural output. My analysis, my complexities, and my nuanced interpretations of how I go through li ..read more
Jewschool
1M ago
(in honor of Adar 7, Moshe Rabbenu’s yahrzeit)
In the past few decades, Aaron Schmuel Tamares (1869-1931), a lonely, laconic, and largely unknown talmid hakham and rabbi from a small hamlet in Lithuania, became the subject of interest for scholars of modern Jewish thought in large part because he presented a novel idea of Jewish pacifism born from his reading of classical Judaism. Scholars such as Tsachi Slater, Aryeh Cohen, Hayim Rothman, and others published detailed studies of his writing from the late 19th century until his death in 1931. In 2020, progressive American rabbi and activist Ev ..read more