As you can imagine - the article is depressing. I was most struck by the response of his mother when the reporter called her. Instead of just talking about her son - she read a prepared statement.

When I called Brick's mother, she said she did not remember specifics about the coming-out conversation, and did not want to discuss the impact it has had on the family. Instead, she shared a prepared statement: "I have always been proud of my son, I will continue to be proud of my son, and I love him very much." She said Brick's father had suggested she add the last part.

More...

Rabbi Brick has his dream job — actually, dream jobs. He is director of family learning at an Orthodox synagogue in Oakland, California, and teaches Talmud and Jewish ethics at the pluralist Jewish Community High School of the Bay. At the 200-household synagogue, Beth Jacob Congregation, Brick runs the youth program, leads Torah study for adults, and fills in when the senior rabbi is out of town.

[...]

There are a few compromises he has had to make — Brick does not officiate at weddings or witness conversions, for fear their validity could be challenged in other Orthodox spaces. He said he has made those sacrifices to keep the peace. He is also single, and declined to say whether he plans to date — or whether he thinks people can pursue same-sex relationships within the bounds of halacha. That silence may be helping him win — for now — tolerance among his colleagues.

[...]

Today, leading modern Orthodox thinkers broadly agree that a marriage between a gay person and someone of the opposite sex is untenable. At the same time, marrying a man is incompatible with halacha — and celibacy, beyond being a tough sell, runs contrary to what the Torah prescribes: monogamy, procreation, family, continuity.

"There's a stalemate," Brick said. "Because everyone's follow up is, if you love them you're going to do their wedding, and if you won't do their wedding, you don't love them. To engage in the conversation publicly, there's no way to succeed."

[...]

As rabbinical school approached, he decided to share his secret with five people — a YU administrator with a degree in social work, who he knew was an ally; a rabbi he had known since childhood; a gay friend who had grown up Orthodox; and a young couple he was close friends with. He told them he was attracted to men, but still would probably marry a woman.

[...]

Back in Israel for his first year of rabbinical school, Brick began seeing a therapist for the first time, referred by a gay Orthodox Jew he'd met through Wexner. He paid out of pocket rather than use his YU health insurance, lest some administrator find out. "I sat down, like: 'Hi, I'm a gay rabbinical student. That's what we're here for,'" he recalled of the first therapy session. It was the first time he had used the word "gay" out loud to describe himself to someone else. He was 23.

[...]

In general, he said, the reaction has been surprisingly positive, though he acknowledged that he mostly avoided telling people he expected to react poorly.

[...]

Perhaps surprisingly, Brick does not think sexual prohibitions are the primary source of pain for gay Orthodox Jews. "It's how people think of you on a day-to-day basis, with the words that they say, the way that they act — that's the thing that hurts," he said. "If you got rid of that, everything else would be so manageable."

He added: "The main reason why I'm doing this is because there are people out there who think that there are no options for them. There are people who are literally killing themselves over this. People who are incredibly depressed, in horrible situations, because they don't have access to the full picture of what Judaism has to say about them. I want to get my word out to them."

Image has labelled “Sukkos,” peering into a sukkah.

The first of many Episodes on Temple OS from a queer, Jewish perspective

Happy Rosh Hashana 5784 to all my Hexbears who celebrate!

The Jewish calendar is pretty wacky! It incorporates both Solar and Lunar cycles and the new year actually takes place in month #7. Though the Canaanite Gezer Calendar begins the year in the early Autumn, but does not include the names of the months. The months are of Babylonian origin, named:

1. Nissan
2. Iyar
3. Sivan
4. Tammuz
5. Av
6. Elul
7. Tishrei
8. Heshvan
9. Kislev
10. Tevet
11. Shvat
12. Adar
13. Adar 2 (sometimes)

You'll notice an occasional month #13. Since the months are lunar, they don't perfectly sync up to a full revolution of the the earth around the sun. The extra month is necessary to keep Passover in the spring (month of Nissan) After much discussion included consultation of Pagan astronomers (this was allowed due to their accuracy) during the 300s C.E., a regular system was developed where 235 lunar months match up to 19 solar years. If the year, when divided by 19 has a remainder of 0,3,6,8,11,14, or 17 it will have a "leap month" added, or else it will have 12 lunar months.

For anti-genital mutilation posting in the megathread earlier I remain very much not sorry. But also! I wish to extend shanah tovah to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, the September 11th of peaceful universal non-existence.

Jewish identity can be a bit of a fuck, especially when it's ambiguous (half on the wrong side but still an important part of who you are) and you are living in a country (the Deutsch land) where there was a genocide and can be a bit difficult to talk about a complicated relationship with Judaism to most people. I don't expect them to be antisemitic or racist. Just having a lot of weird uncomfortable feelings. Telling people they shouldn't feel awkward, none of their ancestors killed mine, and the only people here who might have ancestors who did came here recently from what is now hero nation Ukraine seems not to help much for some reason. But also a real Jewish bakery opened near me and that's neat and now I've got round challah and honey cake.

Took off early from my usual PhD nightmare times and now making some nice traditional food and about to drink too much wine pointedly sourced from a post-apartheid country while my body is threatening to come down with a cold. The boss of the universe certainly will not punish me for this

The Eleanor mentioned is Eleanor Marx

In the 17th century, the simplicity and elegance with which Isaac Newton had succeeded in explaining the laws governing the motion of bodies and the stars, unifying terrestrial and celestial physics, dazzled his contemporaries to such an extent that mechanics came to be considered complete. By the end of the 19th century, however, the relevance of certain phenomena that classical physics could not explain was already unavoidable. It fell to Albert Einstein to overcome these shortcomings with the creation of a new paradigm: the theory of relativity, the starting point of modern physics.

As an explanatory model completely removed from common sense, relativity is among those advances that, at the dawn of the 20th century, would lead to a divorce between ordinary people and an increasingly specialized and unintelligible science. Nevertheless, either during the physicist's lifetime or posthumously, even the most surprising and incomprehensible aspects of relativity would eventually be confirmed. It should come as no surprise, then, that Albert Einstein is one of the most celebrated and admired figures in the history of science: knowing that so many barely conceivable ideas are true (for example, that the mass of a body increases with velocity) leaves no choice but to surrender to his genius.

Origins

Albert Einstein was born in the German city of Ulm on March 14, 1879. He was the first-born son of Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch, both Jews, whose families came from Swabia. The following year they moved to Munich, where his father established himself, together with his brother Jakob, as a dealer in the electro-technical novelties of the time.

Little Albert was a quiet, self-absorbed child, and his intellectual development was slow. Einstein himself attributed to this slowness the fact that he was the only person to develop a theory such as relativity: "A normal adult does not worry about the problems posed by space and time, because he considers that he knows everything there is to know about them from early childhood. I, on the other hand, have had such a slow development that I did not begin to ask myself questions about space and time until I was older".

In 1894, financial difficulties caused the family to move to Milan; Einstein remained in Munich to finish his secondary studies, joining his parents the following year. In the fall of 1896 he began his higher studies at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, where he was a student of the mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who later generalized the four-dimensional formalism introduced by the theories of his former student.

On June 23, 1902, Albert Einstein joined the Confederal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, where he worked until 1909. In 1903 he married Mileva Maric, a former fellow student in Zurich, with whom he had two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard, born in 1904 and 1910 respectively. In 1919 they divorced, and Einstein remarried his cousin Elsa.

Relativity

During 1905, he published five papers in the Annalen der Physik: the first of these earned him a doctoral degree from the University of Zurich, and the remaining four would eventually impose a radical change in science's picture of the universe. Of these four, the first provided a theoretical explanation in statistical terms of Brownian motion, and the second gave an interpretation of the photoelectric effect based on the hypothesis that light is composed of individual quanta, later called photons. The remaining two papers laid the foundations of the special theory of relativity, establishing the equivalence between the energy E of a certain amount of matter and its mass m in terms of the famous equation E = mc², where c is the speed of light, which is assumed to be constant.

Einstein's efforts immediately placed him among the most eminent of European physicists, but public recognition of the true scope of his theories was slow in coming; the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he received in 1921, was awarded to him exclusively "for his work on Brownian motion and his interpretation of the photoelectric effect". In 1909 he began his university teaching career in Zurich, then moved to Prague and returned to Zurich in 1912 to become a professor at the Polytechnic, where he had studied.

In 1914 he moved to Berlin as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The outbreak of World War I forced him to separate from his family, who never joined him again. Against the general feeling of the Berlin academic community, Einstein was then openly anti-war, influenced in his attitudes by the pacifist doctrines of Romain Rolland.

On the scientific level, between 1914 and 1916, his activity was focused on perfecting the general theory of relativity, based on the postulate that gravity is not a force but a field created by the presence of a mass in the space-time continuum. The confirmation of his predictions came in 1919, when the solar eclipse of May 29 was photographed; The Times presented him as the new Newton and his international fame grew, forcing him to multiply his lectures around the world and popularizing his image as a traveler of the third class railroad, with a violin case under his arm.

Towards a unifying theory

During the following decade, Einstein concentrated his efforts on finding a mathematical relationship between electromagnetism and gravitational attraction, determined to advance towards what, for him, should be the ultimate goal of physics: to discover the common laws that were supposed to govern the behavior of all objects in the universe, from subatomic particles to stellar bodies, and to group them into a single "unified field" theory. This research, which occupied the rest of his life, was unsuccessful and ended up by making him a stranger to the rest of the scientific community. After 1933, with Hitler's accession to power, his loneliness was aggravated by the need to renounce German citizenship and move to the United States; Einstein spent the last twenty-five years of his life at the Graduate Institute of Princeton (New Jersey), where he died on April 18, 1955.

Einstein once said that politics had a fleeting value, while an equation had value for eternity. In the last years of his life, his bitterness at not finding the formula that would reveal the secret of the unity of the world was accentuated by the need he felt to intervene dramatically in the political sphere. In 1939, at the urging of the physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Paul Wigner, and convinced of the possibility that the Germans were in a position to manufacture an atomic bomb, he addressed President Roosevelt urging him to undertake a research program on atomic energy.

After the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions in World War II, Einstein joined scientists seeking ways to prevent future use of the bomb and proposed the formation of a world government from the embryonic United Nations. But his proposals for humanity to avert threats of individual and collective destruction, formulated in the name of a unique amalgam of science, religion and socialism, received from politicians a rejection comparable to the respectful criticism among scientists of his successive versions of the idea of a unified field.

Albert Einstein continues to be a mythical figure of our time; even more so than he became during his lifetime, if we take into account that the photograph of him showing an unusual mocking gesture (sticking out his tongue in a comical and irreverent expression) has been elevated to the dignity of a domestic icon after being turned into a poster as common as those of song idols and Hollywood stars. However, it is not his scientific genius or his human stature that best explain him as a myth, but, perhaps, the accumulation of paradoxes contained in his own biography, accentuated by the historical perspective. Einstein, the champion of pacifism, is still remembered as the "father of the bomb"; and it is still common to attribute the demonstration of the principle that "everything is relative" precisely to him, who fought fiercely against the possibility that knowing reality meant playing blind man's buffalo with it.

Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

• ❤️ Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
• 💖 Come talk in the New Monthly queer thread
• 💛 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
• ⭐️ October Movie Nominations ⭐️

reminders:

• 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
• 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes struggle sessions over upbears
• 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
• 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can go here nerd
• 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 💙‎Comprehensive list of resources for those in need of an abortion -- reddit link
• 💙Resources for Palestine

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays
• ❤️Mega upload with theory for many tendencies

Mainstream Jewish orgs finally break with “Combat Antisemitism” organization over “woke-ism” video

Enjoy your passover dinners, internet communist friends. Drink wine and curse Tsar Nicholas for me. I'm delaying my personal passover until Sunday. Hopefully the Angel of Death understands.

Rosenberg, who’s sold more than 25,000 copies of his Haggadah, says there are endless parallels between Harry Potter and the Haggadah, like the four sons of the Passover Seder and the four Hogwarts houses, or the trio of Harry, Ron, and Hermione and that of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.

Photo: Exiles in Siberia, 1904

Link to article: YIVO will digitize a trove of Jewish Leftist HIstory.

I'm getting real tired of rabbis dismissing me because my Judaism comes from my father and not my mother, and I'm willing to go to extremes to correct this.

The strength of the Swedish army, according to Matt and Chris, was a direct result of a weak nobility and a comparatively strong peasantry. An interesting counterpoint is Poland, which had a strong nobility, a weak monarchy, and was late to abandon both paganism and feudalism.

Following the black death in the 14th century, Poland and Lithuania came to be centers of Jewish life due to the weakness of Church control (comparatively) in recently Christianized lands. Migration of Yiddish/German speaking Jews happened due to widespread persecutions in central Europe, and the population growth was higher in a region spared the horrors of the 30 years war. Poland was a participant to be sure, but during the 1600s Polish nobles looked to the East, what was to become Ukraine, to do rent-seeking and procure necessary crops. It's arguable whether or not the taxes imposed by Polish landlords amount to "Colonialism" in the modern sense, but the farming peasants (Ukrainian, Orthodox) did not take well to the domination by Absentee Landlords (Polish, Catholic). Jews fit into the tinderbox because throughout Christian europe, they had been forced into a profession known as "Tax Farming," being the collectors for Nobles of taxes from impoverished peasants.

Bogdan Chmielnicki was a Cossack Noble who led an uprising against rival Polish Nobility. He hoped to ally an independent Ukraine with European powers against Poland. In practice, Jewish communities, regardless of if they were involved in tax-collecting or not were destroyed, as Cossack armies considered them tools of the Polish landlord class against the peasantry. Despite the material and political conditions, religious hatred against Jewish people cannot be ignored .On the eve of the uprising and genocide in 1648, Estimates of the death toll vary, but were likely in the 10s of thousands. 100 Jewish communities were destroyed, and there are reports of 6000 Jews murdered in one of the larger towns. Thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity or sold into slavery. Chmielnicki is hailed as a hero by Ukrainian nationalists, appears on Ukrainian currency, and has several towns named after him.

Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza lived from 1632-1677 in Holland. He studied religous works under Menasheh ben Israel, last week's figure. I've found his actual writings rather dense. But he's a figure who lived his life in the fairly prosperous Dutch shadow of the 30 years war. He exemplifies the radically new kind of religious thinking that was happening at the time.

In James Carrol's sketch in "Constantine's Sword" he writes "Like Marx two centuries later, Spinoza was born a Jew, but by the time he died he was branded an atheist, a materialist, an anarchist, and a revolutionary."

Spinoza, though considered a "rationalist" incorporated mystical ideas about the divine presence in Nature and the value of the individual self into his writings. Carrol wrote America's Jewish Founding Father a piece on Spinoza that I consider well-written, but a fairly lukewarm lib analysis.

While his teacher ben Israel attempted to reconcile contradictory statements in the Hebrew Bible, Spinoza arguably invented modern Biblical criticism, publishing works atributing the Torah to human authors that was considered blasphemous. Previously, some commentators, notably the Andalusian world-traveler Abraham ibn Ezra had cautiously hinted that specific verses in the Torah were human additions.

Spinoza was excommunicated and the writis kind of a banger.

One person in Jewish history personally encapsulates the 17th century trend towards Biblical criticism, and the shift of population, wealth, and power from the Iberian kingdoms to Britain and the Netherlands.

In this post, we shift from the history of Ashkenazi Jewry (those descended from German-speaking lands) to Sephardic (Spanish and Portuguese) speaking communities. There is a tendency to associate "Ashkenazi" with communities that developed under Christian rulers, and "Sephardi" which those under Islamic rule, but as you'll see below, that it an oversimplification that isn't useful for cultural or historical analysis.

Menasheh Ben Israel was born on the Portuguese Island of Madeira in 1604 and emigrated as a child with his family, fleeing the Inquisition, to Holland.

In his 20s, he brought and managed the first Hebrew Printing Press to Amsterdam. Although Hebrew printing had begun earlier in Northern Italy, Amsterdam was to be a major center of Hebrew books throughout the early modern age. He wrote and published books in Hebrew, Spanish, and Latin. Ben Israel was influential in creating a Sephardic Jewish community of Iberian refugees who had previously been outwardly practicing Catholicism. He visited the New World Colony of Recife, but returned back to Amsterdam.

As the reformation progressed, Calvinists in particular became interested in studying the Hebrew Bible in the original language, so Hebrew printing became influential to both Jews and Christians in the region. Similarly, Menasheh maintained contacts with the Royal courts of Europe, offering to provide them with Hebrew books.

Toward the end of his life, Ben Israel requested from Cromwell to allow Jewish settlement in England. The Jews had been expelled from England in 1290. Ben Israel and a small delegation visited London in 1656-7, and secured the right to settle and pray privately for a community of Dutch Jews. Cromwell was, well, a Millenarian psycho and Ben Israel spoke to his fantasies, self righteousness, and fervor. One could draw a pretty straight line from Cromwell's conditional philosemitism to the Balfour declaration and the Christian Zionism of today.

Between 1348 and 1351 The black death caused unspeakable death and destruction to the Jewish communities of Europe. Early, a rumor spread that the plague was spread by Jews poisoning the wells of Christian towns. There are eery parallels to antisemitic canards that arose early in the spread of COVID-19.

Violent pogroms erupted across central Europe, particularly in the Rhineland. Writers of the era composed Kinot_ or songs of mourning, some explicitly about the contemporary violence, and some retelling the destruction of Jerusalem (by Babylonians and Romans), or using literary motifs from the Lamentations of Jeremiah but obviously drawing on contemporary experiences. Typically, a minor noble or Burgher (often deeply in debt to a Jewish lender) would stir up area peasants based on the rumors of well-poisoning, ritual murder, or host (communion wafer) desecration. While the Pope issued a toothless protective bull against murdering Jews, and Emperor Charles IV also attempted to protect Jews from violence, the perpetrators were absolved of any murders fairly swiftly. This has echos in the complicity of the Vatican in organizing the "rat lines" sending Nazi War criminals to South America in the years immediately following WWII.

Some historians believe that in the period of the plague the Mourner's Kaddish became a central part of Ashkenazi practice. Though some scholars trace it earlier, to the time of the crusades. It is an example of a major prayer switching significance (from glorifying Torah study to communal mourning) based on the emotional needs of the population.

We have incredible archaeological finds from the years of the black death. Jewish lenders, sensing doom, buried or walled-off valuables that they held. The Erfurt Treasure was discovered in 1998 hidden within a wall. The Colmar Treasure was found in 1863. It is important to note that during medieval times, though a few Jews in each town would have worked as money-lenders and pawnbrokers, most had more mundane occupations, and did not hold such wealth. Jewish communities were neither noble or serf, they would have worked in various crafts depending on their skills and region including wagon-building, carpentry, dyeing, food production, fabric work, etc.

By way of introduction, I think the period of the thirty years war is a particularly interesting time when we can see the beginnings of modern Jewish thought and practice in Europe. The key preliminary events here were the Spanish Expulsion of 1492, where the Jews of Andalusia/Iberia were martyred, forced to convert to Catholicism or Emigrated (Mostly to Ottoman and Muslim lands, but also the Low countries and the New World). These Jews were the ancestors of the Sepharadim, while the Jews who originated in the Rhineland and migrated generally Eastward to the Slavic and Baltic areas would become the Ashkenazim.

The second major innovation was of course the printing press. Hebrew printing began in the late 1400s in Italy and radically changed the dynamics of studying sacred text.

The 1600s will bring us such fascinating characters in the Jewish world as Baruch Spinoza, Moshe Isserles, Shabbtai Tzvi, and Menashe ben Israel. And Jewish cultural centers will begin in the former backwaters of Lithuania and Poland.

My notes on Martin Luther (Ep 1.)

At about 80 minutes in, Matt makes reference to Luther's recalcitrance on what initially was a sort of philosemitism. Indeed in "That Christ was born a Jew" Luther appears to welcome Jewish converts into his new purified Christianity.

Towards the end of his life though, and the publication of "The Jews and Their Lies." Its clear than any semblance of openness and decency that Luther had towards Jews as a people was simply based on the assumption that they would quickly convert to Christianity in large number.

Some Historians (I have an essay by Hayim Greenberg to this effect) lay the cultural responsibility for Naziism squarely on Luther, with his synthesis of Religious and Political power combined with a more modern strain of antisemitism.

A real banger from Blowback's Noah Kulwin.

"Do not use participation in the slave trade as an excuse for whitewashing Jews, unless you are willing to do the same to Arabs and Native Americans. Otherwise, it is nothing more than discrimination. And discrimination against Jews has a name: antisemitism."

Good slop this week. Lots of talk about Representations of Jewish masculinity