Independent researcher Jennifer Stark-Blumenthal will present Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction, an expansive and engaging investigation into centuries of changing Polish-Jewish relations. With forthright honesty the author calls on Poles and Jews to recognize and challenge the “myths” each tells about the other and themselves.
Rokhl Auerbach, the Yiddish Shmoozers, and Jewish Cultural Resistance to Regime Change in America
Among a welcome cascade of Yiddish books newly translated into English, Warsaw Testament calls out to be read now. Writer Rokhl Auerbach compiled and structured the bulk of the book’s narrative in Tel Aviv in 1973, drawing on her earlier eyewitness notes on Jewish suffering and resistance under Nazi occupation two decades earlier. In Tel Aviv, she wrote:
“Driven by an uncontrollable impulse, I wrote in secrecy and solitude. . . . In the autumn of 1943 and during the winter of 1943-44, working between midnight and 5 a.m., I wrote two works: They Called it Resettlement, on the Great Deportation of 1942, and what became, as I kept adding more material, an early draft of this book. In the daytime I would hide my notebooks at the bottom of a drawer and cover them with the apples, pears, dark flour, and barley cereal bought with the ration cards. (p. xlii).”
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Restraint vs Overconfidence
Thoughts on Parashat Shemini 5785
Our parasha for this week contains the tragic tale of Aaron’s two sons, Nadav and Avihu, who “offered a strange fire that had not been commanded.” (Lev 10:1) It all starts with what should have been a day of joy – the Israelites had completed the Mishkan, Moses had made preparations for its consecration for 7 days. But it all ends in this terrible tragedy. Our sages offer several readings of this story: some say that Nadav and Avihu had been drinking alcohol. Others maintain that they were arrogant, holding themselves up above the community; this was also the reason they had never married. Others claim they were insecure and envious in the presence of Moses and Aaron – they were saying to each other: when will these two old men die so we can lead the congregation? But there is yet another opinion that boils down to the argument that it all wouldn’t have happened if Aaron and Moses weren’t that shy in their leadership, that they should have been more decisive and firm.
The Jealous God and Our Wide Choice
Thoughts on Shabbat Pesach Day 7, 5785
A jealous boyfriend catches his girlfriend whispering quietly into her cell phone very late one night. “Are you cheating?” her angry boyfriend asks. “Is there somebody else?” The girlfriend laughs and replies, “Do you really think I’d still be dating you if there was someone else?”
Frankly, had this indeed happened in real life, these young people must have lived in a pretty lonely place – in some very distant and desolate province, village or small island community, for example. Another place that comes to my mind at this moment is… the Garden of Eden??
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