Jew in a Blog

moomaldthings asked: Hey did you say you were watching Hatufim? I don't know if you're the right person to ask, but I read recently that 60% of Israel is Misrachi/Sephardi, and I was wondering do you think that 60% of the cast of Hatufim is Misrachi/Sephardi? Or is it whitewashed? Like Nimrode has darker skin and maybe Iris too? But I also don't really know how to read the ethnic features?!

maaaan Hatufim is SO INTENSE and nerve-wracking that i only watched three episodes. then when i finally went back to it, Hulu had taken it down D:

i bet every society whitewashes their shit. additionally, sephardim aren’t really identifiable by skin tone. lior ashkenazi is sephardi, for example (as are, strangely enough, most jews with the surname “ashkenazi”). my sephardi friends are pretty white. jerry seinfeld’s mother is a syrian jew. paula abdul’s mother is ashkenazi. the only dark skin yids i know are persian or black. my bukharian friend isn’t that dark. alternatively, my dad is ~swarthy~ but obvs white passing (and i don’t know any jews from arab countries).

also there is a DOPE ladino folk song about “el rey nimrod” so maybe it’s a traditional sephardi name?? i have no idea. it might just be modern israeli because they mined the Tanach for every goofy name they could find. EDIT: of course, the actor’s name is not Nimrod, it’s Yoram. also a goofy name taken from the Tanach.

it’s just hard to read jews along ethnic lines. that’s why i get so annoyed with gentiles who try and pit us against each other and put us into the black/white paradigm by substituting it with ashkenazi/sephardi.

Orchestra of Exiles is the thrilling story of how one man helped save Europe’s premier Jewish musicians from obliteration by the Nazis. In the 1930s Hitler began firing Jewish musicians, but a very successful soloist fought back. Overcoming extraordinary obstacles, the world famous violinist Bronislaw Huberman moved Europe’s great musicians to Palestine and formed a symphony that became the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

"On a lighter note there is the description of Moses’s hearing aids, which, when inserted, ‘emit a brief tune — as if to say, At your service — and immediately amplify the hubbub of the surrounding world.’ The batteries, when they begin to wear out, give off an ‘insistent continuous ring that can’t be ignored,’ and that seems, oh, so very Israeli."

AB Yehoshua Looks Back at his Country and Work

Recently, Amichai Lau-Lavie, founding director of Storahtelling and a second-year Jewish Theological Seminary rabbinical student, published a blog post about illegally smuggling tallitot (prayer shawls) into the Western Wall for use by Women of the Wall on February 11, Rosh Hodesh Adar.

“I broke the law by smuggling prayer shawls into the site of the former Jewish Temple, right under the nose of the Israeli police,” he wrote. “I don’t feel badly about breaking a law, which is not even an actual law to begin with — but I feel terrible about the situation in which a place for prayer has become a circus of terror and an abuse of all that’s sacred.”

Dang. I know this guy. 

I can’t decide, though, whether he’s truly doing a good deed, or being the Male Savior here to help out the poor women.  He also was a part of Keshet, the LGBTQ group, but is straight. I also don’t understand why he essentially bragged about it on the internet:

“And I wanted to stand on a chair and call out: People of Jerusalem, Ladies and Gentlemen, esteemed leaders, rabbis, members of knesset: I smuggled prayer shawls into the Western Wall today!”

"In the Haredi-run party United Torah Judaism, the sense that change is afoot has overshadowed its election success, which saw it increase its seats to seven from five. “We are worried about everything: Reform buses on Shabbat. We’re in Israel not in New York,” Yerach Tucker, spokesman for UTJ lawmaker Moshe Gafni, commented to the Forward."

(Source: forward.com)

Until the foundation of the state of Israel, Palestine was under British mandate. From 1939, Britain granted fewer immigrants entry, so persecuted Jews came illegally. Ships of refugees continued to arrive in Nahariya, even after the war. One such was the “United Nations” which arrived on 1.1.1948. Of those on boar, 537 were successfully hidden, but 131 were arrested.

Yekkes in Israel. From the source:

Many in Nahariya initially lived in containers. Among them was Andreas Meyer, the youngest of the three brothers from Rheda. He was 17 when he and his family arrived in Nahariya. As a trained locksmith, his skills were in demand among the growing population. He and his brother Justus set up a workshop. But he lived in his container (to the left of the picture) for a further four years.

ביבי הביתה

Collection of essays, including one by Martin Goodman, author of the excellentRome and Jerusalem

On a hot August day in the Galilee, a group of schoolchildren in the Arab Christian village of Jish counted diligently, from one to 10, after their instructor. But the words, though similar to Arabic and Hebrew, were neither.

”Chada, tarteyn, telat, arba, khamesh,” they recited, ”shet, shva, tamney, teysha, asar.”

At this unique summer camp, some 85 children were being immersed in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke and in which the Gemara — one of the Talmud’s two major books — was written. Once the Middle East’s lingua franca, Aramaic is an almost vanished language today. But the camp organizers and the families of these children hope to resurrect it. Moreover, they aim to carve out a new national identity based on that resurrection.

Read more