Starlings over the Jewish Ghetto Synagogue, Rome

Links

Cool Jewish postcards.

Reasons to go to Tucson.

Things we should have known about.

A free fancy mikveh in Newton, MA!

Vote Jewish!!!

hallo @ nyc jews reading haaretz.com

What are the stakes? IDK, but certainly at the very least Jerusalem and New York will run out of Jews and we will never get to rebuild the Second Temple and when Moshiach Schneerson tries to come back he won’t be able to get into Williamsburg or Israel and when we try to roll our bones to Yerushalayim all the rich people who’ve jumped off bridges into the East River because of the Financial Crisis (which will surely increase in severity) will encumber us.

:’(

Shabbat this Week

wrong date.

“Yiddishyiddishyiddishyiddish Yid?”

Today, after dropping off my cousin’s car with Hassan in Sunset Park, and after a series of greener pastures-related poor train decisions, I got off the J/M/Z at Marcy rather than Myrtle because I wanted to walk through South Williamsburg to see what it’s like there on this holiest of Jewish days. I wondered if the holiness would be visible, if I would behold the power of traditions and religious fervor, manifest in raiment, physiognomy, population density, architecture.

Here are some of my observations:

- There seem to be fewer men on the street, but not fewer women, and possibly more groups of unattended children

- Everyone dresses up, but there is either a limited array of dresses available at the store or members of sects tend to dress up in the same fashion – several young girls from different families wore the same dresses, and pairs of women would match each other but not necessarily the pair across the street

- The women seemed unaffected by fasting and continued to walk briskly and engage in animated conversation

Tish, Purim, 5766

- Children are permitted to play on Yom Kippur — a group of boys sat around a table inside a sukkah like members of the Sanhedrin, or perhaps like their fathers attending a tish

- People do not seem especially somber and in fact seem relaxed and happy (other than the  somewhat crazy-looking Hasidic man smoking a cigarette while pacing at the Marcy stop)

As I was leaving the neighborhood and heading for the Bushwick Public Library, I turned toward a particularly active corner, onto which a stream of men was emptying from what must have been a basement synagogue. When I reached the corner, a girl (with dry skin on her cheek right where I get it), pulling a smaller girl along with her, approached me and said what I thought was, “It is a holiday; we need someone to shadow the light.” Assuming my own ignorance of a Yom Kippur tradition, I asked of her to where she needed me to cast a shadow, and she pointed down the street. As I nodded in agreement, struggling to find my shadow in the midday sun, her grandmother approached and said to her something in Yiddish that culminated in “Yid?” Grandma then turned to me, smiled, asked if I’m Jewish and then explained, after I answered, that though they needed someone to “shut off” the light, a Jew couldn’t be asked to do it.

On my way down the street I passed what I assume to be the house in question, in whose window hung a brightly lit golden chandelier.

Lake Tahoe vs. The Kinneret (Sea of Galilee, Lake Gennesaret)

“The celebrated Sea of Galilee is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe by a good deal—it is just about two-thirds as large. And when we come to speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a  rainbow. The dim waters of this pool cannot suggest the limpid brilliancy of Tahoe; these low, shaven, yellow hillocks of rocks and sand, so devoid of perspective, cannot suggest the grand peaks that compass Tahoe like a wall, and whose ribbed and chasmed fronts are clad with stately pines that seem to grow small and smaller as they climb, till one might fancy them reduced to weeds and shrubs far upward, where they join the everlasting snows*. Silence and solitude brood over Tahoe; and silence and solitude brood also over this lake of Gennesaret. But the solitude of the one is as cheerful and fascinating as the solitude of the other is dismal and repellent.” – Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

*alternately, “where the express quad chairlifts roam”

Who buys and sells Nazi war memorabilia?

(other than HRW senior military analyst Marc Garlasco, I mean)

While I refuse to assume that an interest in Nazi memorabilia explains/means anything about Garlasco’s politics, I am curious to know what might be the ideological breakdown of sellers on these sites. It sounds like at least some of those commenting are Nazi sympathizers, and if the ratio is higher than on other sites (like eBay, which doesn’t seem to allow the sale even of boardgames about WWII that feature the swastika as the symbol of the player’s Nazi enemies), buying a nice SS jacket or one of Hitler’s bones might be likened to buying blood diamonds, or, like, cocaine, and would therefore not be very responsible.

Just like your grandaddy's?

Some of us had a Bat Mitzvah 10 years ago

I did and it made attending my oldest sister’s first son’s even more memorable. I got to see my hometown, all my siblings, my Uncle, my first friend, and Kindergarten Sunday School teacher, Irene. Judaism is full of life-cycle events, like going to the B’nei Mitzvah of relatives.

Bushwick Jews

I’m sitting at Boulevard Cafe in Bushwick and the other two people at this table also went on Birthright, one as far back as 2000. I learned this because they’re friends and were discussing it. I inserted myself into their conversation briefly, offering an encouraging comment about how Hebrew isn’t so hard to learn, which seemed to disturb them.

Anyway, I’m seeing $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ (18 of them). This blog is Eminently Brandable.

Boulevard Cafe

Also, if you google “Bushwick Jew” or “Bushwick Jews” we are the top hit. For “Bushwick Jewish” we are superseded by a book by Rabbi Bushwick on the Jewish calendar.

My tablemates’ conversation is now about “In Treatment.”

In Defense of Slouching Towards Bushwick, the Blog Name

Admittedly, the only person thus far to openly malign our blog’s name is the person featured in its favicon, Sam, but I nonetheless feel obligated to offer a rebuttal to her criticism, in the name of the A- I got in fifth grade Social Studies for my refusal to mind the rules of debating. I am told that two-word blog/website names are ideal (e.g. www.fatapple.com – buy it cheapish while you can!), but I am an overly-long-and-hyphenated last name kind of person, and anyway these days one needs type a full URL but once for it to be a click away forever.

In an effort to present our blog’s name in a favorable light, I will attempt a close-reading of it, as a text, that completely ignores any faults and makes note solely of its merits. First I will look at each word in its historical and perhaps literary context, and I will then examine the name holistically.

Word #1)

Slouching

As Sam mentioned in a previous post, the word “slouching” was initially deemed germane to the nebulous possible future content of this blog because of its association with the reclining done during the holiday of Passover. She worries that now that Passover has Passed and nightly we sup in straight-backed Puritan chairs rather than while lounging on hand-made pillows, “slouching” has become irrelevant, as obsolete as your barracks when you discover gunpowder or combustion (or mobile warfare in Civ II ).

But “slouching” carries more significance than its nod to a reclined posture. As the girls over at http://sororitysecrets.wordpress.com know, “when you are having the best conversation of your life are you slouched back in your chair? no! You are upright, excited, and animated.”

I hereby posit that there are four kinds of people:

Those who will slouch .א

Those who will slouch but who will not slouch towards Bushwick .ב

Those who do not know how to slouch .ג

Ballerinas .ד

As girls at top sororities know, a slouch at best betrays a lack of confidence, and at worst becomes an outward manifestation of internal shame, but somewhere between those things lies slouching that “successfully demonstrates inner turmoil,” and there, in the times and spaces when “the best lack all conviction,” slouch we. And we do not merely slouch in a chair, nor do we slouch on our way to work (!); no, we are currently-always slouching towards a particular destination, for a particular reason determined largely by history, and here is where it gets Jewish.

I hereby abandon my word-by-word exegesis. Words # 2 & 3) Towards Bushwick

My dad, like many Jews, grew up in New York. Like a certain brand of Jew, he escaped New York as soon as possible, moved to San Francisco, lost his accent, and married a woman who, while willing to convert herself, would certainly never ask it of her children’s prospective spouses. At family reunions on the East Coast we were the ones who got away, the sheep in black fleece who marveled at the many unfamiliar faces for a mere instant before smugly returning home. So Sam and I, I think, form part of a microtrend — we are the Second Coming (to New York), but we feel a little ambivalent about it.

Our* great-grandparents came to New York on dirty dirty boats; my grandfather drove supply trucks, went AWOL, and gambled away a wristwatch in WWII before becoming a dress salesman and moving from Crown Heights to Nassau County; my dad cleaned other students’ toilets to put himself through college (as part of an abominable and ongoing program), then got himself the fuck out of there, and here I am, not attending grad school, back in the dirty borough his relatives left for Long Island in the late 50s.

Why are we here? To be born? We are part of the generation of what we like to call the “wechooseniks“: we have everything / so we dig our own graves.

So while many youth from San Francisco move to New York after college, I think there’s something distinctive about those of us who have chosen to return to a place our parents thought they had finally left forever, a place of demanding families, of anachronistic traditions – we are the ones who slouch on our way here, feeling perhaps ambivalent about our choices, perhaps ungrateful, but forever in our gerund, waiting for our hour to come.

The family at a cousin's Bar-Mitzvah "back east"

* I have no idea if Sam’s family history is even remotely similar to mine