#all jewish cultures are beautiful

[hanukkitty]

yiddish and yiddishkayt and ashkenazi culture feel so cozy in my soul. i'm feeling embarrassingly mushy about it

[hindahoney]

i've been getting more into judaism after being raised jewish. i was never bat mitzva'ed, so im wondering if i should do that? also wondering what other steps to take.

Well, I have great news! You don't need to have a bat mitzvah, you are a bat mitzvah! If you would like the celebration, you certainly can have one, but it isn't necessary.

I didn't grow up with really any Jewish observance, so I was essentially a complete beginner when I decided to connect. So, my suggestions come from personal experience and the experiences of some others I know who are baal teshuva.

Some more steps you could take to foster a stronger relationship with your Judaism is first to reach out to your local rabbi, and see what events or classes their shul has going on. Showing up to these opportunities can open doors to figuring out what feels right for you, and I've found that making friends who are at a level of observance that you strive to be at can inspire you to keep learning. If you get in touch with a rabbi beforehand, they could probably arrange to have you meet with someone who can show you around and introduce you to people. While this can be really intimidating at first, believe me when I say that many Jews will be happy to help you and won't pass judgement. Many Jews have been in your shoes, you're not alone.

Or, you can pick a few different shuls and just go to each one until you find one that feels right for you. Don't feel pressured to commit to one over the other. Don't get bogged down by the labels of movements. If you have a personal goal in mind or a certain aspect of observance you want to do, just start doing it, even if it feels awkward at first. Over time, it'll be easier. Find some local study groups, or join one online! During quarantine I joined a Torah study group from a shul hundreds of miles away from me. They didn't care that I'd never step foot in their shul before, they were just happy to have a fresh face who wanted to learn. You could also try Partners In Torah, which is a website that can connect you with a chavruta.

Chabad is always a great option for those who are looking to deepen their relationship with Judaism because they always have resources specifically for people looking to reconnect.

If you live in a place with a significant Jewish population, you could find a Young Jewish Professional's group that can introduce you to more people.

I would recommend getting a siddur with Hebrew and English, if your Hebrew is shaky. I would also recommend starting to read the parsha every week, or starting the Tanach from scratch and reading it like any other book. I suggest The Living Torah and The Living Nach by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan because the translations are in modern terms and easier to read, and they have commentary by Rashi. I also can't recommend enough Joseph Telushkin's books Biblical Literacy and Jewish Literacy, they're incredibly comprehensive guides to living a Jewish life by forming a strong Jewish educational foundation. Seriously, I've mentioned these books a million times on my blog because I love them that much.

Also, you could just start small! Saying modei ani in the morning when you wake up, saying hamotzi or the birkat, or even just saying Shema before bed can be a great way to start the process of opening up.

This last recommendation might be a little out there, but I think that doing some traditional Jewish cooking or baking can help motivate you to keep learning. This is how I started. I bought a few kosher cookbooks and just started making anything I had the ingredients for. It's not necessarily a "standard" way to connect, but my soul felt like it was reaching through time and space and connecting with all the Jews before me who had prepared and eaten the same thing.

As always, if anyone else has suggestions for anon, the more the merrier! I want to express my sincere excitement for you. Enjoy the journey you're on, don't be so caught up on "but I wish I was more observant this way" or "I'm not Jewish enough in this way" because it's all nonsense. Reconnecting is an amazing and life-changing experience, so enjoy the path that you're on, not necessarily the destination. When I first started, I was so insecure about how much I didn't know and worried others would judge me, but I found most people genuinely just want to help. Learning was exciting, and in some ways I'm envious of all the new experiences you're going to have. I would have enjoyed it a lot more had I just relaxed and accepted that it's okay not to know things yet.

Good luck!!

[dankovskaya]

this shit is so depressing

[gorillawithautism]

i'm a white jew and i tend to get more gender envy from nonhuman sources (such as my favorite monkey cercopithecus kandti) but one thing i don't really see represented even in gender envy posts that aren't human-focused is cultural items.

here's some ketubot, some jewish folk art, and a kiddush cup that make me feel something

As a brown trans boy it sucked so badly to watch those “gender envy” slides on tik tok and see only white boys with fluffy hair. It was a little thing but it made me feel invisible even in my own community. So these are men that look like me and give me gender envy. If you’re POC disabled/ don’t see your self in common trans discussions feel free to add on.

[iwieldthesword]

I need to talk about this because it's making me feel insane.

Last week, my white leftist goyisch friends sat me, a wholeass antizionist Jew, down for a "talk" because they "needed to check in about Palestine" and make sure "our values aligned before we hung out again". They apparently needed to "suss out" where I stood on Palestinian rights, despite having had several conversations about Palestine and them being some of my closest friends. They needed to check, to search for and uncover my true values, because I had said some "disturbing things" that had made them "suspicious".

Disturbing things included:

Supporting IfNotNow which is a "liberal zionist organization" because it normalizes Jewish heritage in the Levant

Not bringing Palestine up enough, despite them also not bringing it up (this was apparently a test)

Mentioning that the Houthi's flag talks about cursing all Jews

Saying Stalin was antisemitic because of the "all the paw-grihms"

...and apparently other things they wouldn't specify, but had been tracking for months.

To clarify, I am an antizionist Jew from three generations of antizionist Jews. I have been vocal in my support of Palestinian liberation and in my condemnation both of Israel's actions and its violent founding as a state, and of zionism in many of its forms. I am a regular donor to Palestinian and Jewish NGOs and advocate for Jewish antizionism in person, at temple, and online. I have been talking about Palestinian liberation before they could point to Gaza on a map. But they needed to make sure, they needed to "suss out", they needed to check. And it's notable that the majority of moments that made them suspicious of me were times where I talked about antisemitism: not about Palestinian liberation, not about Israeli decolonization, not about anything actually relevant to Palestine. It was talking about antisemitism that made them check to see if I was a cryptozionist.

One of the most pervasive and insidious forms of antisemitism is the idea that Jews are inherently untrustworthy and suspicious. You have to constantly be on guard, track what they say and do, "suss out" the real truth. You have to keep them in line and and watch them carefully because they're liars and sneaks, and if you're not looking closely they'll return to their real values (and drag you down with them). This is where the idea of "cryptozionist" comes from and what it's directly building off of: the inherent untrustworthiness of Jews and the need to check. Because no matter how close you become you can't actually trust them, and any upstanding gentile should make sure to avoid associating with Jews before "sussing out" their real allegiances and intentions. You have to make them turn out their pockets, just in case.

I'm the first and only Jew they actually were friends with; I know because they've told me (strangely proud of it in the way white Americans are proud of that kind of thing). They've asked me questions about Judaism and fawned over how beautiful and unique it was for me to be connected to my community and culture. Pre-October 7th, one of them had even mentioned being interested in coming to services at my temple. She still has my copy of our siddur. But now she needed to "check" before she could be seen with me in public. Which is what it was: it wasn't a "you're my friend and I need to give you some feedback because you're fucking up" kind of intervention (which is normal and important to have), it was a trial. It was a last chance for me to prove to them that I'm clean-enough that they could afford to risk being seen with me in public, just in case someone noticed them fraternizing with a hypothetical Enemy and their leftism was compromised. It was a test to make sure that I behave properly when required to, that I'd play along and do what I'm told and turn out my pockets if asked (because any refusal would validate the notion of having something to hide). And above all it was an opportunity for them to reaffirm their own cleanliness by putting my imagined immorality in its place.

I did what I needed to do: I smiled. I apologized. I "didn't know that". I "appreciated the feedback". I turned out my pockets because what else could I do? They'd decided who I was and what I believed, regardless of what I said or did, so there was no point in explaining that they were wrong about me. If I had told them they were being antisemitic, it would just have been proof that they were right. Caring about antisemitism is a dogwhistle in the spaces they've chosen: it's not a real form of oppression, it's a tactic for sneaky, lying Jews to weasel out of admitting their true alliances. There was nothing I could say.

Nothing's really changed for me. I'm going to continue my activism for Palestinian liberation rooted in my culture and my faith. Antizionism is still not antisemitism. But I got a reminder that many white goyisch leftists fundamentally just don't trust Jews, and that the activist spaces they're in not only exacerbate their antisemitism in an increasingly insular echo chamber, but also allow them to finally vent their internalized bigotry in a socially-acceptable way. In my former friends' eyes, what they did was activism—disavowing a Jew (and making me feel humiliated, scared, and unclean in the process) as a cathartic stand-in for doing fucking anything for actual Palestinian liberation—but for me it was a grief that I'll be feeling for a long time: not only over losing friends I loved and trusted, but also over my sense of belonging and security in leftist spaces.

[slyandthefamilybook]

it's so annoying seeing posts about Jewish culture—cutesy posts about fighting with g-d that appeal to Christian atheists' religious trauma, posts with Jewish music, posts with pictures of beautiful Jews—getting tens or even hundreds of thousands of notes, but the moment someone makes a post about antisemitism—about how it's built in to Western society, about how it's insidious and creeping, about how you've probably internalized it, about the difficulties we face and the grief we feel—they fail to break jumblr containment. Don't get me wrong, I love that goyim are celebrating Jewish culture as something beautiful and wonderful, but that can't be all we are to you. We're real people with real problems that you can't just ignore in favor of reblogging posts about bagels or whatever

[nonbinary-vents]

A lot of non Jews just do not understand ashkenormativity and what non Ashkie Jews mean when we try to discuss it, and it’s really getting infuriating to me. Non Jews think ashkenormativity equals Ashkenazim being like, the privileged oppressors of all Jews, when that is just… completely not the case, and sometimes actually the invert— the early 20th century, for example, was not a good time to be Ashkenazi among other Jews, Samech Tet supremacy was a pretty big thing. Ashkenazim do not have a ‘one up’ on other Jews when it comes to how Jew haters see us, in fact, there’s actually some specifically Ashkenazi specific bigotries and conspiracy theories, things like Khazar conspiracy or chunks of leftists Jew hatred.

Some examples of actual ashkenormativity is the neglect to try to preserve and document Jewish diasporic languages that aren’t Yiddish, or the heavy focus on Ashkenazi history and oppression while downplaying everything else— I can not sit through another Jew trying to say that Jews had it good as Dhimmis or that Mizrachim were living it up with the Islamic countries until we got expelled, please I will explode—, or acting like the epitome of Jewish food is Kugel and Latkes, or the generalisation of non-Ashkie Jews as one cultural group, or the way Mizrachi culture has been looked down upon and seen as ‘primitive’, and are you seeing the pattern yet? Ashkenormativity is an intracommunity issue, and it works fundamentally differently to how most non-Jews think they understand it. It’s mostly based on the idea of neglect and the centralising of Ashkie experiences, not whatever weird idea you have of ‘Jewish racism’. If you’re trying to define it as that, then you’ve fallen for some intense disinformation and propaganda, or you yourself are knowingly spreading that to demonise Ashkenazim. Frankly, I really don’t want any non-Jews to be involved in these things at all, because it’s a self contained Jewish issue, meaning that outside communities can’t really change or work on the problem. It has to come internally.

There are a lot of things I want the Jewish community to improve on when it comes to non-Ashkenazi subcultures. I want things like my family’s customs, diasporic languages, cultural tales, foods, all of that to be preserved, cared for, and revitalised in the same way that many Ashkenazi counterparts are. I want the neglect of our Jewish subcultures to improve. I want to not feel like crying when I hear about how my mother grew up being looked down upon and being embarrassed to be spoken to in her mother’s native language in public, I want to be able to know that’s a complete thing of the past and there’s nothing that resembles it at all now. I want to be recognised properly.

I do not want, in any way shape or form, to make Ashkenazim less safe, or have Ashkenazi culture be less cared for.

Trying to tear down Ashkenazim, who are just as vulnerable to the non-Jewish world as the rest of us are, who need just as much help and respect from the people on the outside, and whose cultures are just as valuable, just as beautiful and integral to the Jewish people as anything else, that is evil. It’s just evil.

[troybarnesbucky]

also let me clarify that sephardi culture and pride is beautiful and i love being sephardic ok thank youuuuu

you ever see someone romanticize ladino and sephardic women’s traditional dresses and pomegranates so much and they overuse 🪬🧿 to the point that it’s suspicious? yeah they’re probably pro-diaspora, most definitely ahistorical when it comes to jewish history, and probably violently against jewish self-determination.

[jewreallythinkthat]

I know that the jumblr tag has very much been more negativity than positivity the past 10 months and we all know why, but I also wanted to make sure they everyone knows how amazing it is that we have curated this space, that we work together and disagree and debate and argue and at the end of the day are still a community.

Yes it can feel like doomscrolling sometimes but it's proof we are not alone and we have people like Geordie and other non-Jews who are fighting for us, allying so fucking hard and showing that there are people out there who will listen and want to learn and engage.

I think it's amazing that we have self policed effectively, pushing back against extremist beliefs from both outside but also within the community. We have people keeping track of things that don't seem right so that when shit hits the fan we have receipts and a paper trail to fall back on. We have people sharing knowledge or Torah; we have people sharing recipes and food; we have a range of ages and backgrounds and diversity missing from many places; We have a guinea pig.

We're a community of people around the world who have for the most part never met, we don't share too much personal info because anyone can look in and it's not safe so we have adapted like we have for thousands of years to retain and keep our traditions and culture while also staying safe. We are connected by our shared history and culture and love of being Jewish.

I know it can be rough and the posts are regularly more sad than happy, but we have found eachother and that is so so beautiful and important. We have built a community together and we aren't going anywhere soon

[ofshivelight]

something i've noticed while studying jewish history is how immediate it feels. it isn't history, not really—it dwells a half step behind us, an echo that redoubles and visits us again and again, as though it happened mere hours ago and not a thousand years. the collective memory of the jewish people is long, vibrant, and alive, a creature all its own with a deep, abiding loyalty to its people that has been cultivated through thousands of years of dedicated cultural transmission. red ochre handprints on the cave walls that we gently touch up every day with the materials we have nearby, keeping the imprints of our people alive. and i think that's beautiful.

[matan4il]

I love you, Jews whose Jewishness comes from conversion.

I love you, Jews whose Jewishness comes from their dads.

I love you, Jews whose Jewishness comes from being adopted by a Jewish family.

I love you, Jews whose Jewishness comes from choosing it, from embracing it even when halacha doesn't make it easy or automatic, comes from connecting to its teachings and meaning whether religiously or culturally, from exploring it even when you were born into it through your mom so you seemingly don't have to, from holding it up as something beautiful and worthy whether as a secular or religious Jew, from being proud of your Jewish ness even when the world tries to make you feel ashamed of it, from looking at the world being hateful to Jews and deciding their hate is only going to fuel your love for your Jewishness and your fellow Jews that much more.

Despite all the persecution, hatred and violence turned against us, we've survived for thousands of years because somehow, we never let them convince us there was anything wrong with what we are, even when what we are was The Ultimate Other, and therefore had to be rejected. You all are this generation's reincarnation of this Jewish certainty, that there is nothing wrong with us, no matter what they say about us. That we are not lesser just because we're different and misunderstood. That we are worthy of the same rights, even when they vilify the term we use for that.

I love you all, I'm so glad you exist.

[challahfairy]

a sad story about a beautiful jewish culture; i recommend we all fall down this rabbit hole.

i think this is something we should spread awareness about as jews, because they aren’t the only ones who’s rich and unique traditions may be lost.

**EDIT: THIS ARTICLE IS FROM 2014

more recent wikipedia article

[fem-lit]

In the current epidemic of rich Western women who cannot “choose” to eat, we see the continuation of an older, poorer tradition of women’s relation to food. Modern Western female dieting descends from a long history. Women have always had to eat differently from men: less and worse. In Hellenistic Rome, reports classicist Sarah B. Pomeroy, boys were rationed sixteen measures of meal to twelve measures allotted to girls. In medieval France, according to historian John Boswell, women received two thirds of the grain allocated to men. Throughout history, when there is only so much to eat, women get little, or none: A common explanation among anthropologists for female infanticide is that food shortage provokes it. According to UN publications, where hunger goes, women meet it first: In Bangladesh and Botswana, female infants die more frequently than male, and girls are more often malnourished, because they are given smaller portions. In Turkey, India, Pakistan, North Africa, and the Middle East, men get the lion’s share of what food there is, regardless of women’s caloric needs. “It is not the caloric value of work which is represented in the patterns of food consumption” of men in relation to women in North Africa, “nor is it a question of physiological needs…. Rather these patterns tend to guarantee priority rights to the ‘important’ members of society, that is, adult men.” In Morocco, if women are guests, “they will swear they have eaten already” or that they are not hungry. “Small girls soon learn to offer their share to visitors, to refuse meat and deny hunger.” A North African woman described by anthropologist Vanessa Mahler assured her fellow diners that “she preferred bones to meat.” Men, however, Mahler reports, “are supposed to be exempt from facing scarcity which is shared out among women and children.”

“Third World countries provide examples of undernourished female and well-nourished male children, where what food there is goes to the boys of the family,” a UN report testifies. Two thirds of women in Asia, half of all women in Africa, and a sixth of Latin American women are anemic—through lack of food. Fifty percent more Nepali women than men go blind from lack of food. Cross-culturally, men receive hot meals, more protein, and the first helpings of a dish, while women eat the cooling leftovers, often having to use deceit and cunning to get enough to eat. “Moreover, what food they do receive is consistently less nutritious.”

This pattern is not restricted to the Third World: Most Western women alive today can recall versions of it at their mothers’ or grandmothers’ table: British miners’ wives eating the grease-soaked bread left over after their husbands had eaten the meat; Italian and Jewish wives taking the part of the bird no one else would want.

These patterns of behavior are standard in the affluent West today, perpetuated by the culture of female caloric self-deprivation. A generation ago, the justification for this traditional apportioning shifted: Women still went without, ate leftovers, hoarded food, used deceit to get it—but blamed themselves. Our mothers still exiled themselves from the family circle that was eating cake with silver cutlery off Wedgwood china, and we would come upon them in the kitchen, furtively devouring the remains. The traditional pattern was cloaked in modern shame, but otherwise changed little. Weight control became its rationale once natural inferiority went out of fashion.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[baileyartblog]

I have so many versions of the Scarecrow but I wanted to try and do a more original take on him! Big ol info dump about him under the cut :3c

Born Josephine Keeny, Yonatan Crane uses his knowledge of chemistry and biology to keep his lycanthropy at bay, lest he go hog wild and start eating people.

When completely in control he is a court-ordered psychiatrist, truly believing that even the most vile criminal can be rehabilitated. Unfortunately for those who refuse change, he resorts to various ways of training them to fear their own crimes. Failed experimentation gives him the ingredients needed to stay human, so he gets over failure quickly. He's highly intelligent, softly spoken, and can be extremely passive-aggressive. He WILL hold a grudge. Despite having studied psychology and knowing it well, he has very poor social skills.

If he fails to prevent a transformation he turns into the Scarebeast, a wild and powerful animal capable of self-awareness but not of speech. The Scarebeast is akin to that of a wild animal and so is harmless if it doesn't feel threatened. You could even pat, brush, and ride the Scarebeast if it sees you as a friend. Transforming back into a human puts great strain on Yonatan's body and mind, meaning that he can be left in an altered state for days to weeks afterwards- This state is the Scarecrow, who is between animal and human. The Scarecrow will run at you on all fours unprovoked and is in fact more dangerous than the Scarebeast in terms of rage and vindictiveness.

The scars covering Yonatan's body are from medical experimentation and strain from transformation, but a majority of them are from the abuse inflicted by his great-grandmother growing up. He was born out of wedlock and was noticeably not white, so the woman treated him as less than human. His condition became obvious and so he was seen as being from the devil, suffering failed exorcisms and various abuse. Growing into a socially stunted but physically beautiful young girl, his guardian felt that he would use his looks for evil and so poisoned his mind into believing he was hideous - Something that he never stopped believing. Ironically she never injured his face as that would then make the abuse too obvious.

His first-ever transformation caused his guardian to suffer a fatal heart attack, and he lived off her corpse for several days before fleeing. He never knew his parents, but he knew about them from photos and journals kept hidden in the house he grew up in; Choosing to change his first name to reflect his half-Jewish mother and taking his surname from his Native American father. He feels entirely disconnected from those cultures and has only recently been studying to learn more.

[drdemonprince]

I am a trans man and I have lots in common with cis men.

I am a Jewish man, and my “ethnic” white features are the ones that trans men meet with fear and revulsion: hairiness, balding, shortness, and carrying weight in my hips and ass. I look like my father, my grandfather, and my brother. I will not apologize for that.

I am a queer man, and I love and defend my queerness. I get de-gendered and they/themmed because I am expressive, I am dynamic, and I am loud. I love drag, I love to queen out, I love gay mens’ history and culture. I love leather, I love kink, and I love seeing other people like me in those spaces. I love to feel, see, hear, touch and connect with other men— cis and trans.

I am a disabled man. I have that in common with cis men too. Men who are afraid they are not manly enough because they are not physically strong, because they cannot endure hard labor, or work out or play sports. Men who are “weak” for being mentally ill, or autistic, or expressing their emotions at inappropriate times. Autistic men who have “childish” interests and are terrified of being mocked for them, or who can only enjoy what they love “ironically”.

I am on HRT. I have that in common with hundreds of men who have naturally lower testosterone, and older men. I wear a binder, which is something I have in common with men with gynecomastia.

The longer I transition, the more the constellation of traits that make me “clockable” or “non passing” as trans shifts, and takes on new meaning. Yes, I have wide hips, a big ass, I am short, I am queer, I am mentally ill. No, I am not like “the average” man. But I see myself reflected in new places all the time.

I am a person who wields the privileges of whiteness and male gender. I am constantly learning how to be humble, how to let others speak, and how to be in mutuality and support instead of “protective”. I see this same struggle in other men in activism, who have been assumed to be leaders, but now need to learn to follow, and learn to listen.

I am a man, straightforwardly. Other men are my brothers, and I love them. Women are my sisters, and I care for them and want them to walk freely in the world. No person is not my kin, and I want them to be liberated. All our fights are entwined.

Thanks for making the space to share this.

An absolutely beautiful message, thank you.

[jewish-vents]

I'm so tired of goyim assuming I'm a goy because I'm black and assuming they can talk shit about Jewish people in front of me or with me. My ancestors converted because in New Orleans, in the old days, the only people who didn't treat them like shit were Jewish people. Nobody else paid them fairly or talked to them with basic respect. And because they were respected, their minds were open and they realized the beauty of Judaism. They found a spiritual home and converted. I feel like I continually go through the reverse realization, where I see the ugliness of the world en masse. Goyim will stand there and go, "well, there are some people who are Jewish and racist" as if that'll make me leave Judaism when they're blanketly, uniformly ethnocentrist and hateful themselves. The worst any racist Jew has done is ignore me. Hateful goyim want to straight-up murder me. They want to murder all of us. The fact that I have a little bit of visual camouflage is just making me more aware of it, not less.

The way people act when they think you're one of them and not one of (((those people))) is incredibly telling. I don't think anything has made me want to be more observant as much as seeing how goyim in the South are acting right now. The right is trying to "save" all of us by converting us to Christianity, the left wants to murder us, and the centrists are smugly parroting their same old lines about how if we were all secular (culturally Christian) atheists (who didn't observe any Jewish holidays or practices) then the world would know peace.

No. All of those ideas are wrong. And I am not here to shit talk my own community with you, even if it'd be safer to do so. I would rather be unsafe with people who care about me than safe with people who want me to either radically alter huge parts of myself or outright die. I don't want to hang with people who have looked at Hamas' atrocities and said "it's fine, it's resistance". I don't want to hang with people who think they have to "save" me.

People get mad because I won't talk to them or I leave the room but honestly it's taking all my self-control not to yell at them when they start saying hideous, unfounded garbage about Jewish people. Trust me, you want me to walk away. You don't want to know the things I might say otherwise.

I know Hashem said not to fire back at people talking shit but it's hard. It's so hard. I don't want to become a hateful person. I don't want to lash out at other people. But month after month of this is wearing me down. I just want people to go back to pretending to respect us. Just go back to talking shit in private and not to my face. Please, goyim, that's all I'm asking.

.