too-jew-to-be-true

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ya being kafkaesque isn’t about turning into a bug it’s about how if you turned into a bug your boss would still be like “ok but we’re short staffed can u still come in”

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"In our shtetl prevailed mystical belief in dreams, remedies, signs, stiny, astrology and magic. The grandfathers recounted that in the olden days there was no pump in the town to put out fires, but it was extinguished by means of a special remedy. When a person had a toothache he was 'talked out of it,' the evil eye was driven away. To keep the evil eye away, mothers would attach an onion with salt to the child, or tie a red cotton string around its wrist. The most radical method to fend off the evil eye was to hang an amulet in the form of a mezuzah around the child's neck."

- Moshe Berkowitz

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Jewish brides in Antananarivo, Madagascar hold up challah covers given to them by Ghana’s Jewish community as wedding gifts. 2016

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Boris Shapiro's surreal Shtetl

After experimenting with different media and styles the Ukrainian-Israeli painter Boris Shapiro developed his own naive-like style based on the 16-17th century Dutch school, like that of the great Dutch masters Peter Bruegel or Hieronymus Bosch. With his beautiful paintings he expresses his own humor, dreams and simplicity. Depicted are mostly magical scenes from the Jewish Shtetl. His paintings are whimsical and surreal, with the the colors being usual Earth tones, symbolizing the down to earthiness of everyday life.

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Dura Europos synagogue, C. 244 AD, 

(in contemporary syria), Tempera over plaster.

In order:

-The Torah Niche on the west wall of Dura Europos Synagogue,

-Pharaoh ordering the Midwives to kill all male Hebrew babies and Moses is found by Pharaoh’s Daughter.   *Detail of Pharaoh’s Daughter and Moses

-Exodus: The Israelites leaving Egypt, Moses dividing the waters  *Detail of the left side 

Happy Passover!

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the zodiac in ancient synagogue art → (i) hammat tiberias, (ii) beit alpha, (iii) sepphoris

the zodiac, along with helios (the sun god) and personifications of the four seasons, are motifs found in several ancient synagogues. the format remains consistent, with two concentric circles encased by a square; helios is represented in the central circle, the zodiac in the outer circle - meant to be read in a counterclockwise direction - and the four seasons at the outer corners. hammat tiberias and sepphoris are unique in their borrowing of roman iconography in the personification of the seasons, as the season of tammuz (or summer) is shown bearing a sickle and sheaf, found in roman art to represent the harvesting of crops in summer months. the reoccurring zodiac “functioned in ancient synagogues not as mere ornamentation but as vivid representations of the hellenized jews’ perception of the cosmic order”; similarly, the centralized greek god, helios, became instead a representation of god in hellenized judaism, divorced from its original context and reinterpreted through a jewish lens.

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the zodiac in chodorow synagogue → chodorow was a wooden synagogue originally constructed in galicia, poland (now the ukraine) in 1652. artist israel ben mordechai lissnicki painted both the ceiling and interior of the synagogue, modeling his work on galician jewish folk art, illuminated jewish manuscripts, motifs carved on tombstones in jewish cemeteries and earlier synagogues. the ceiling is richly decorated with flora and fauna, both grounded in reality and fantastical in nature; each motif holds significance in ashkenazi art, and more specifically the folk art of eastern european ashkenazi synagogues. (more on chodorow synagogue)

(i) taurus, (ii) virgo, (iii) sagittarius, (iv) aquarius, (v) libra, (vi) gemini

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Currently working on an artistic project dedicated to abandoned jewish cemeteries (in Hungary) and their amazing symbols, such as these lions! Please check the Art of Abandoned Jewish Cemeteries site to follow for more details of the project.

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Antique Jewish wedding rings. 

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when i started writing this comic, there were courses on duolingo for klingon and dothraki, fictional languages that are only spoken by characters on television shows who don’t exist, but the course for yiddish, a language spoken by jews – real, living, breathing people – for generations, didn’t exist until april 2021.

in 2017 a jewish employee at the anne frank museum was asked to put a baseball cap over his yarmulke. yeah, you read that right – an employee who worked in the house anne frank and her family hid for two years was asked to hide his judaism when he came into work. 

what i’m saying is goyim are trying very hard to pretend jewish people don’t exist anymore, and it’s safer for a man to tattoo a swastika on his face than it is for me to wear a necklace with a symbol of my culture on it.

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Solomon Yudovin, the artist of the shtetl

Solomon Yudovin (1892–1954) is rightly seen as one of the principal artists of the old shetls, as an artist who had depicted their synagogues, old people, artisans, and, most important, the lush decorations on carved tombstones in their cemeteries.

Unlike several other Russian Jewish artists of that period, notably Marc Chagall and El Lissitzky, Yudovin did not embrace modernism but remained a figurative, realistic artist throughout his life. With his skill in producing moribund, balanced compositions, and his powers of concentration he was at odds with the empirical commotion of impressionism.

A nephew of writer and ethnographer S. Ansky, Yudovin was known as a “graphic Yiddishist.” His drawings and historic artistic photographs serve as a wonderful complement to Yiddish works of literature, both poetry and prose.

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Alfred Molina as Doctor Otto Octavius aka Doc Ock (Spider-man 2, 2004)

"Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seat belts."

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today (27 Jan) is International Holocaust Memorial Day, so I've compiled a list of charities you can donate to which help to preserve European Jewish culture as well as supporting living Jewish communities, especially in Eastern Europe, as a way to honour victims of the Holocaust both by preserving their memory and by supporting the European Jewish communities that the Nazis aimed to destroy.

- YIVO; founded in Vilne, Lithuania in 1925 and now based in New York, is one of the largest organisations for the preservation and education of Yiddish, as well as hosting the largest archive of Eastern European Jewish materials (23 million items) - including many which were rescued from Nazi book-burning by Jewish resistance. It is the ONLY prewar Jewish library and archive to have survived the Holocaust.

- World Jewish Relief, formed during the Holocaust by the UK Jewish community to aid the evacuation of German Jews. The majority of their modern day work focuses on aiding vulnerable Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. They also provide aid to refugees, disabled and elderly people, and respond to international disasters across the world.

- The Yiddish Book Centre hosts an online archive of hundreds of digitised Yiddish books (many with translations), as well as a video oral history archive with 1000+ Jewish people of all ages and backgrounds telling their own stories, many in Yiddish (with subtitles). They also train new Yiddish translators and run lectures, education programs, film screenings, music festivals, and the world's first Yiddish museum.

- The Together Plan supports post-Soviet Jewish communities, especially in Belarus due to the current instability there. As well as supporting Jewish communities with aid, education, and community building; they also record and translate Holocaust testimonies, preserve Jewish graveyards, and run education on Jewish Belarus.

- The European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative works to preserve and restore Jewish cemeteries, particularly in countries whose Jewish populations were decimated by the Holocaust, which left cemeteries to be vandalised and fall into decay. This is an important act in honouring the dignity of the dead, as well as witnessing and preserving the presence of lost European Jewish life.

If you have no money to spare, consider spending some time browsing the testimony and history hosted on YIVO and the Yiddish Book Centre as an act of memorial.

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i’ve been thinking about the midrash today that says before all babies are born, they are told of all of the pain and hardship in life, but also the beauty and love. once they are told of this, every single soul chooses life and to be born.

it’s interesting to me because i know that many depressed and suicidal people aggravate over this idea of “why do i have to be alive, i never asked for all of this!!!!” i definitely had that mindset for years. maybe the work for ppl like us is to travel backwards and re-learn life, ourselves, and the world until we are once again in agreement with our unborn selves that accepted the conditions of living, that there will be suffering and ugliness, but the reward of life is inherently worth the agonies that come alongside. and maybe we could not fully appreciate and understand the sublime moments in life if it werent for the moments of pain

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“Do not believe your thoughts, neither when they tell you that you are terrible, nor when they tell you that you are a saint.”

St. Paisios of Mount Athos

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I just love how I post about anti-semitism and Jewish people pick up on it and immediately have a term for the thing I posted.

Just to be clear, this isn’t just a Jewish thing because I am sure everyone does this and has their own intracommunity terms. But as a black man who doesn’t know the context, it’s just funny because of how lost I am to it. I was confused and had to google what shoah (another term for the Holocaust) and ayahuasca(google says it’s like a psychedelic or some shit and not a Jewish thing) means. It’s just weird to experience that as a black man.

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This is Shuli Elisheva's prayer from October that she wrote in Yiddish and English, based on some of the sources that she learned about Biblical figures' bodies and souls not matching. I thought it might be useful to any other Jewish transgender women who are struggling with their gender vs. their religion.