my conversion blog

No?

Then you would've sold Anne Frank to the NAZIs. Because at the time, NAZI propaganda was doing exactly what anti-Jew propagandists are doing today: telling everyone Jews were evil. Not ALL Jews of course! Just the globalists! And they secretly controlled the governments and economies of the world! They were the reason you didn't have a job, why your life sucked, why society was sliding backwards into degeneracy.

So you would be told today, "Oh yeah, the Franks? Zionists, all of them." And you would have believed it. And you would have been angry at them. And you would have gladly watched them be hauled off.

The Germans who hid Jews during the Holocaust did it despite everyone around them telling them Jews were evil blood-drinking baby-killers. They did it despite the fact that doing so put them in real danger.

Born Jews, Jews by choice, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Ashkenazic, Sephardic, Mizrahi, Israeli, diaspora…they are an integral part of all of our communities and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.

We still have work to do as a community to uplift Jewish POC, particularly Black Jews, but to my Black Jewish friends out there know that I see you and I will keep trying to do the work.

thank you

The four-episode docuseries explores the historical rifts and alliances between Jewish and Black Americans and is hosted by Harvard University historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. It comes at the start of this year’s Black History Month — and as questions have simmered about whether the last several years have irreparably harmed the historic kinship between Jewish and Black Americans.

It argues that the relationship between Black and Jewish Americans wasn’t set in stone during the civil rights movement when Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched in Selma with Martin Luther King Jr., but was shaped by centuries of history, and continues to be shaped by oppression and white supremacy.

Among those at the table with Looney are Angela Buchdahl, senior rabbi of New York’s Central Synagogue; cookbook author and culinary historian Michael Twitty; writer Jamaica Kincaid; editor of The New Yorker David Remnick; and Rabbi Shais Rishon, also known as MaNishtana.

The series explores key moments in the histories of Black and Jewish Americans, and how those moments ran parallel and crossed paths over the past five centuries. It covers the transatlantic slave trade, the overlaps between the Great Migration and Jewish immigration from Europe, the lynching of Leo Frank, the civil rights movement, the Crown Heights riots, the 2017 Unite the Right rally, and post-Oct. 7 activism.

“A lot of previous conversations about [Black and Jewish relations] really just look at that golden era or just look at the divisions that have come in the last decades, but we’re trying to take a holistic view about how race and caste [were] established in America,” Sara Wolitzky, co-executive producer and director of the docuseries told eJewishPhilanthropy.

“Black and Jewish America” features a variety of academics, activists, writers, and celebrities, including Rev. Al Sharpton, Jewish studies professor Susannah Heschel (the rabbi’s daughter), actor Billy Crystal, activist and professor Cornel West, and playwright Tony Kushner.

By Naftali Silberberg

The 15th of Shevat is the New Year for Trees, known as Tu b'Shevat.

According to Biblical law, there is a seven year agricultural cycle, concluding with the Sabbatical year. When the Holy Temple stood in Jerusalem, on years one, two, four and five of this cycle, farmers were required to separate a tenth of their produce and eat it in Jerusalem. This tithe is called Maaser Sheni, the Second Tithe, because it is in addition to the (two percent which must be given to the Kohain, and the) ten percent which is given to the Levite. On the third and sixth years of the cycle, instead of the owners eating the Maaser Sheni in Jerusalem, they gave this second tithe to the poor, who were permitted to consume it wherever they wished.

[On the Sabbatical year, no tithes are separated. All produce which grows during this year is ownerless and free for anyone to take.]

It was therefore of vital importance to ascertain when the new year started for produce. Our Rabbis established that a fruit which blossomed before the 15th of Shevat is produce of the previous year. If it blossomed afterwards, it is produce of the "new year." [By comparison, grains, vegetables, and legumes have the same New Year as humans, the 1st of Tishrei.] Why is this so? In the Mediterranean region, the rainy season begins with the festival of Sukkot. It takes approximately four months (from Sukkot, the 15th of Tishrei, until the 15th of Shevat) for the rains of the new year to saturate the soil and trees, and produce fruit. All fruit which blossom beforehand are a product of the rains of the previous year, and are tithed together with the crops of the previous year.

Although this day is Rosh Hashanah for trees, we attach special significance to this holiday because "Man is [compared to] the tree of the field" (Deuteronomy 20:19). Through cultivating strong roots – faith and commitment to G‑d – we produce many fruits—Torah and Mitzvot.

Observances and Customs

On this day it is customary to partake of the fruit with which the Holy Land is praised (Deuteronomy 8:8): olives, dates, grapes, figs and pomegranates. If tasting any of these fruit for the first time this season, remember to recite the Shehecheyanu blessing. (A blessing recited on joyous occasions, thanking G‑d for "sustaining us and enabling us to reach this occasion." This blessing is recited before the standard "Ha'etz" blessing recited on fruit.)

Due to the festive nature of the day, we omit the Tachanun sections (petitions for forgiveness and confession) from the prayers.

Like, whatever is the first thing that comes to mind for you, I hope it is resolved, gets better, improves.

The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.

For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.

German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.

The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.

I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.

So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).

There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.

Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf  when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.

(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage. 

The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have.