Blogging Anti-Semitism

by Ilana Newman in Toronto for Global Jewish Voice

Yesterday my friend’s boyfriend said that Jews run the world.

Well, not quite in so many words. But the sentiment was there.

I made a brief (and perhaps ill-advised, in a non-Jewish context) joke about the mythical Zionist Occupation Government, but this guy didn’t seem to understand that it was a joke. He nodded, saying, “It’s true, there are so many Jews in positions of power- just look at Hollywood, and the banks!” An uneasy silence ensued, in which I, the only Jew in the small group gathered (ironically, at Aroma, the Israeli coffeeshop franchise), realized that I didn’t know how to call this guy out on his casual and awkward anti-Semitism.

So I didn’t say anything.

I’ve become more and more aware, in the last several months, of a burgeoning anti-Jewish sentiment in the world— there are, of course, obviously antisemitic events like hate crimes (which have, incidentally, been on the rise in the last few years), or the rise of Hungary’s über-nationalist Jobbik party (which is, tellingly, featured positively on the website of white supremacist organization Stormfront).

I am privileged to live in a country like Canada, where my rights as a member of an ethno-religious minority group are protected under the law. I remind myself every day that not everyone is so lucky, and that even my country, which can be very loud about its “salad-bowl” or “mosaic” culture (as opposed to the United States’ “melting pot” ideal) is nonetheless home to a distressing amount of Islamophobia and racism/colorism. And because of the internet and social media, we live in a world that has simultaneously become, paradoxically, ever-larger and ever-smaller. Everything is only a few keystrokes away, and that includes the darker parts of the world, the things people think they say in secret.

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Challah for Hunger through the Eyes of a Transitioning Founder

by Eli Winkelman for ejewishphilanthropy.com

As the founding executive of Challah for Hunger transitioning my primary affiliation to a Board role, I wanted to bring you into the world as I see it at this point.
Back in 2004, during my first year at Scripps College, I began baking challah with friends, just for fun. Others joined in, and week after week people came back, complaining that “their friends ate all their challah.” Something clicked: people liked learning to bake challah; others wanted to buy the loaves. And so the first chapter of Challah for Hunger was born.

Since then, we’ve grown, purely by word of mouth, to more than 60 chapters in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia. Our volunteers bake creatively flavored challah, sell it, and donate the profits to social justice organizations. Chapters give half their proceeds to one shared cause, and each chapter’s volunteers act as a giving circle to allocate the other half. Over the past nine years, we’ve raised nearly half a million dollars for organizations including American Jewish World Service, the Blue Mountain Humane Society, Sharsheret, and Projecto Jardin.

For the last nine years, I’ve had the privilege to serve as Challah Enthusiasm Officer. Many nonprofits declare a vision to put themselves “out of business.” Challah for Hunger is not one of them. Our volunteers practice teamwork, hone skills (from kitchen navigation to tzedakah allocation), build bridges within the Jewish community and beyond, and most importantly to me at this time, make meaningful connections. Why would we ever want to go “out of business”?

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Jesus 'Used to Be Jewish'? That's Not What the Gospels Say

by Bernard Starr for The Huffington Post

When I interviewed Christians and Jews for my book "Jesus Uncensored: Restoring the Authentic Jew," I heard over and over "everyone knows Jesus was Jewish." But when I dug a little deeper I discovered that "everyone knows he was Jewish" really means "he used to be Jewish." Then I found that many still believe that Jesus was born Christian and that he launched a new religion.

For example, Jane, educated in Catholic grade schools, agreed that Jesus was Jewish. But when I followed up with, "Did he remain Jewish throughout his life?" she said, "Oh, no. He became a Christian and started Christianity." "When did that happen?" I asked. "When he was baptized by John the Baptist," she answered confidently. "It says so right in the Bible."

Noah, a young Jewish college student, who attends a small New England college, asked his Christian fraternity brothers, "What was Jesus' religion?" They stared at him as if he were an idiot. He pressed for an answer. Unanimously they declared, "Christian, of course."

The fact is, Jesus was born into a family of practicing Jews dedicated to Judaism. As prescribed in the Torah, he was circumcised on the eighth day after his birth. Throughout his life he was thoroughly committed to Judaism, the Torah and Jewish practices. He prayed in synagogues and taught Torah to "multitudes" of fellow Jews. And John the Baptist only baptized Jews to purify them for the expected arrival of the Jewish Messiah. All this is stated clearly in the Gospels; Jane's quote is not.

Christians are astonished when I inform them that the word "Jew" appears 202 times in the New Testament and 82 times in the Gospels, while "Christian" does not show up at all in the Gospels and is mentioned only three times in later parts of the New Testament -- the first mention is when Paul is preaching in Antioch years after the crucifixion (Acts 11:26). Why is "Christian" absent from the Gospels, which span Jesus' life and ministry? Because there was no Christianity during Jesus' life.

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Graduation! And it Feels So…

THE CONSPIRACY BY H. B. RUBIN for newvoices.org

I went to my graduation. It was about as anti-climactic as I expected it to be: my gown was the same obscene shade of red as everyone else’s, I didn’t have enough time to shower before the ceremony, and the rain forced me to wear shoes.

I know, these are all material concerns. But in twenty years, they are the ones I’ll remember, right?

But in all honesty, graduation wasn’t so bad. It was actually kind of funny. All 800 of us graduates shivering slightly in the May rain, bound together by our shared… varieties of hangovers and sleep-deprivation. Some, I am pretty sure, were still drunk. The surrounding jittery faces made it clear that my friends and I weren’t the only ones that had attempted to stay up all night. I guess we had all thought that by not going to sleep, somehow, the night would never end, and in that way, our lives as we knew them would never end as well.

As we waited to begin the walking procession, I breathed in slowly, in the effort to clear my head and take it in, all of it. Restless, scared, excited, tired, loud. There was a lot of laughing, and a lot of silence. We began to walk. Today I Am Graduating. I said to myself, over and over, trying to imbue the words with some sense of meaning or finality. Today Is The Day I Am Graduating. But they just felt like words. I didn’t feel any different; there was no magical Disney woosh going through my insides. It was overcast and cold and I discreetly ate handfuls of Peanut Butter Puffins to stay the growling of my insides. Today. Graduating. As we walked in rows of two through the center of campus, with hordes of cameras and families grinning at us, I felt small pinpricks flutter at the edges of my eyes, but then they were gone.

What was my biggest take-away from graduation (other than the firm handshake I received along with my blank diploma holder)? The assurance that it is okay to have no idea what I am going to do with my life. This was corroborated enthusiastically by all of our graduation speakers, even the ones who seemed to have a semblance of what they were doing with their lives. One of my favorite professors, Elvin Lim, put it a bit more eloquently than I can. He spoke about uncertainty, contingency, and unpredictability.

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Sarah Silverman’s Better Half

The comedian’s sister’s protest of gender inequality at the Western Wall makes a case for holiness, not against 

By Rachel Shukert 

After more than a decade of rape jokes, d*** jokes, and sly inversion of all forms of racism, we’re all pretty used to Sarah Silverman and her comedy, which in this era of Girls, “hipster racism,” and hundreds of YouTube videos of the aspiring stars of tomorrow strumming folksy songs about their various bodily functions can seem both oddly prescient and oddly quaint in its resolve to shock.

So, it’s only fitting that another Silverman has emerged on the scene, intent on breaking down a set of very different boundaries: Susan, the comedian’s rabbi sister, who along with her teenage daughter Hallel Abramowitz was among the latest group of women to be detained by Israeli authorities to appease the unbending ire of a bunch of absurdly powerful men dressed as John Galliano. Their transgressions, committed as part of the social action group Women of the Wall, seem to be the usual ones of wearing tallit, reading Torah, and other acts of “gender-bending” that the ultra-Orthodox seem to think will turn the entire Temple Mount into something resembling an extra-fierce episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race (we should be so lucky). The comedian herself was quick to Tweet her support: “So proud of my amazing sister @rabbisusan & niece @purplelettuce95 for their ballsout civil disobedience. Ur the t*&s! #womenofthewall.”

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