דאיקייט

— Alana Newhouse, NYT Book Review of Stranger in a Strange Land by George Prochnik (via spikenards)

Interior of the Holleschau Synagogue — Isidor Kaufmann (1853-1921), Hungarian.

by Bill Aron from his Soviet Jewish Life series; featured in From the Corners of the Earth

Tallit from Tafilalet, Morocco. Early 20th century, cotton and silk.

Wacław Koniuszko (1854-1900) - "Old Jew repairing a carpet", ca. 1890

“hold on, this question is so ridiculous I need props to deal with it”

From “The Holocaust and Memory Theft” in Café Europa Revisited by Slavenka Drakulić

1988

Various kitchen implements for the preparation of matzah, 19th/20th century

Like I want you to seriously imagine a world where people who think of themselves as both progressive and educated were regularly posting takes that said things like, eg. "uh... you can't be Episcopalian if you're Black lol. Episcopalians are from England??" Ok? Are you imagining that? Yeah, pretty batshit, huh? I need you to know and understand that treating the Ashkenazi/Sephardi distinction as though it is a racial one is about a million times more ridiculous than that. It's like imagining a clean racial division between "Episcopalian churches that have an organ" and "Episcopalian churches that don't have an organ". It's like if you tried to invent a new sort of congregational phrenology based entirely around the percentage of teetotaler church attendees, or how often people liked to sing "Come Thou Font."

Jewish students at the State Gymnasium in Chelm, Poland, 1934. (Portrait of four Jewish girls posing with a Polish friend, on the far left. Left to right:  Ewa Baliat, Henia Pojazd, Marysia Wilenka, and Kasia Harczuk), 

Jewish ceremonial textile, Iranian Kurdistan, 19th century

Iranian Jewish woman praying during Hanukkah, the festival of lights, at Abrishami synagogue in downtown Tehran.  

[image description: an illustration of a woman facing left and holding a hanukkiah. she wears a veil and a collar and traditional style clothing and is in a gold arched frame and surrounded by blackness with stars. flames flow out of the hanukkiah behind her and in the flames reads לא בחיל ולא בכח כּי אם-בּרוחי meaning “not by might, nor by power, but by spirit.”]