some salted Judaism

Food: matzo toffee bark

but it comes with THIS side effect

based on this post

German American Bund. They were Nazis. Literally Nazis, they operated in the 1930s with discreet backing from Berlin, and were outlawed after the US entered the war. They held rallies, issued propaganda, ran training camps, etc. etc. There was a big rally at Madison Square Garden where their leader called the president "Frank D. Rosenfeld" and his signature legislation the "Jew Deal." I think they also harassed German American organizations that had the gall to not be Nazis. Fucking fascists, man.

German American Bund. They were Nazis. Literally Nazis, they operated in the 1930s with discreet backing from Berlin, and were outlawed after the US entered the war. They held rallies, issued propaganda, ran training camps, etc. etc. There was a big rally at Madison Square Garden where their leader called the president "Frank D. Rosenfeld" and his signature legislation the "Jew Deal." I think they also harassed German American organizations that had the gall to not be Nazis. Fucking fascists, man.

💙🕯🕯

We do not teach it as this is a social prejudice/bigotry... we teach it as a lie that people use to gain or maintain power. And the lie is always the same. The lie is: Jews are the obstacle to what you value most. And the only thing that changes in different historical settings is what you value most.

The whole conversation is recommendable, but if you only watch ~5 minutes, watch from 56:58 onward, IMO.

And then someone who read a totally different version of your moms poems that were heavily edited by a bunch of people who never even knew your mom or her relationship with her children comes along and says you're wrong about the poems. They say you're trying to avoid doing what your mom wanted you to do because one poem says to "go down the river" but you and your siblings didn't grab a raft and go floating down the nearest creek. But your version says "flow like the river," not "go down," and you and your siblings agreed she meant to be flexible in life. Then another person who read a different heavily-edited version of the poems comes along and gets mad that you don't walk around with your arms up above your head all the time since one poem says "reach for the sky." But you know your mom really loved Toy Story and was making an allusion to Woody's voice box, you and your siblings have like 10 pages in the notebook where you already talked about this, and it makes sense given the same poem says "to infinity and beyond" a few lines later (but the stranger's version took that line out). Eventually, the heavily edited versions of your mom's poems are everywhere, nearly everyone has read them, and now you and your whole family are treated like naughty, malicious children who are trying to avoid doing the chores your mom left for you.

When you, as gentiles, tell Jews we're "tricking" G-d, you're the person insisting we go down the river on a raft or literally reach our hands up towards the sky. We are not trying to trick G-d or get out of doing what we're supposed to do. We're working with the text G-d gave us, gave us as in a gift that is ours to do with as we wish now. The Torah is not in heaven, it is here on Earth and we love and cherish it enough to spend millennia pouring over it and learning all of the ins and outs and applicabilities and options and interpretations. We've turned over every phrase, every word, every letter, and continue to do so every day because that is how we connect with G-d, our history, and our people.

This is going to piss a lot of people off but sorry I don’t know what to tell you. You went the route of essentially going to a non-accredited university and now you’re mad that your useless degree can’t get you into law school. 🤷‍♀️

mikveh,

brit milah as applicable,

a sacrifice while the Temple stands (not currently) and

learning / motivation / beit din (bundling these because the beit din judges learning and motivation so they’re kind of inextricable).

Therefore, halachically, converts who undergo these steps are fully Jewish.

Non-Orthodox converts do this.

They are fully, halachically Jewish.

End of.

Per Halacha at least.

Orthodoxy has added its own reinterpretations. And I’m not opposed to new interpretation in general, I believe that each generation adds to our knowledge, we learn more and improve, etc etc, but to pretend that Orthodoxy is More Authentic or somehow Unchanged is asinine.

Examples:

the Talmud specifically accepts conversion for the purposes of marriage (Yevamot 24b:6), whereas Orthodox Jewish groups today do not

the Talmud does not say you have to send your children to Jewish as opposed to public schools in order to be a valid convert but Orthodox Jewish groups today do

Charedi clothes are not ancient Israelite clothes. They were not wearing fur hats and black coats in ancient Judea.

the Talmud also indicates that many people had pretty limited Jewish knowledge immediately post conversion, indicating that the Orthodox practice of only converting people once they are up to community standards is novel

And again, I don’t think it’s wrong that Orthodoxy has its own interpretations of Halacha, just as Reform and Conservative do. We are one people but we are not automatons who always think and feel and need the same things. Someone needed to figure out how to navigate electricity, airplanes, IVF, chemotherapy, and other things that did not exist in Talmudic times.

Just generally, I think that every person on earth would benefit from sitting awhile with the concept of “with very few exceptions, everyone always thinks they’re right.” That’s just being a person. Most people don’t wake up in the morning and go “you know what? I’m going to be a bad person.” Or “I’m going to do Judaism wrong.” Definitely people do that. But we all think we’re right. We’re all only human.

Hillel and Shammai are like a literal blatant example of this.

Take a deep breath in and out. Reform and Conservative Judaism are just as legit as Orthodoxy and there are some shit that sections of Orthodoxy does that I can promise you was not actually done 200 years ago (because it started out as a response to the Holocaust or like the rise of electricity).

Also like just because someone is Conservative or reform doesn't mean they don't keep Halacha at all. Plenty are more religious than some Orthodox Jews that I know.

Jewish law has never been unchanging. Even going back to pre-rabbinic Judaism, we can see changes in the law within the Torah. For example:

Exodus 21

2 If you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall work for six years, and in the seventh he shall go free, without payment. 3 If he came by himself, he shall go out by himself; if he had a wife, his wife shall go with him. 4 If his master gave him a wife, and she bore him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall belong to her master [i.e., the slave-owner], and he [the slave] shall go by himself. 5 And if the slave sincerely says, "I love my master and my wife and my children; I don't wish to go free," 6 then his master shall bring him before God [i.e., a temple; or perhaps, "before judges"--i.e., to a court of law], and he will bring him to the door or the doorpost. His master shall then pierce his ear with an awl; and he [the slave] will work for him [the master] forever. 7 If a man sells his daughter to be a slave, she shall not go free as a male slave goes free. [There follows a separate set of laws, according to which a female slave may not request freedom, but may be set free if her master dislikes her; she may not be sold to an outsider.]

Deuteronomy 15

12 If your brother, a Hebrew, is sold to you, whether a male or a female, he will work for you for six years. In the seventh year, you shall set him free. 13 And when you set him free, you shall not send him away empty-handed. 14 Be sure to apportion to him some of what comes from your flock and your threshing floor and your wine-vat. You shall give to him that with which God had blessed you. 15 You should remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and God rescued you. Therefore I command you this thing today. 16 But if he says to you, "I do not wish to go away from you," because he loves you and your house and enjoys being with you, 17 then you shall take the awl and put it through his ear into the door; and he will be your slave forever. You shall also do this for your female slave. 18 Do not let yourself feel severe when you set him free: for six years he worked for you twice as hard as a hired man would have. HaShem your God will bless you in all you do.

It's very clear that the passage from Deuteronomy is referencing the older law from Exodus: both passages concern treatment of a fellow Hebrew slave, and both are centered on the core idea of working for six years and freedom on the seventh, with the option to forego that freedom if desired. Perhaps most crucially, both contain the ritual of piercing the ear with an awl at the doorpost in the case that a slave wishes to remain. That's very specific; it certainly didn't evolve independently twice within Israelite culture. The Deuteronomic author was almost certainly reading a copy of the law from Exodus; at the very least, they were familiar with the ideas it contained.

And they make changes to it. The law now applies to both men and women. One can no longer release a slave directly into poverty, you have to free them with the materials to restart their life. It is no longer stated that a freed slave must leave his wife and children behind if he married during enslavement, and the fact that women must also be freed allows room for the implication that the whole family should be allowed to go together. Deuteronomy introduced the idea that there can only be one temple in one set location, so Exodus's assumption that one could easily get to a temple no longer holds. The ritual of piercing the ear with an awl is thus adapted to take place at the doorpost of one's own home, where being "before God" can now be represented through the mezuzah.

Besides the concrete changes in law, there's also a dramatic shift in perspective and tone. The Exodus law clearly favors the slaveowner. In the very first sentence, the slaveowner is the subject, who is buying the slave. The law is built in such a way as to increase the odds that a slave will "want" to stay. By being freed with nothing and returning to his farm after 6 whole years away, he will need to immediately take on debt to get the seed and possibly equipment to start farming again--and of course, debt is probably what brought him into slavery in the first place, so there's a very real risk that he'll stay in that cycle and end up enslaved again anyway. All after being separated from his family! By contrast, Deuteronomy favors the slave. In the first sentence, the slave is the subject, and he is referred to as your brother, forcing the reader to foreground his experience as important. By being freed with the materials to restart his life, and likely having his family with him, he is much less likely to choose to stay as the "less bad" option. It's much more humane.

But the Deuteronomic author faces a challenge: everyone is already following the Exodus law, and if slaveowners are acting in their own economic self-interest, they'll probably prefer the old version. So Deuteronomy attempts to persuade, not merely state the law. The author repeats that the law now also applies to women, placing emphasis and ensuring that the earlier "male or female" cannot be written off as a scribal error. They reassure the slaveowner that they still benefited from slavery, and that God will bless them for following this version of the law. They refer to the slave as "your brother" and invoke the Israelite's founding myth of having been enslaved in Egypt, providing reasoning for the change.

And this kind of thing has shown up again and again in Jewish law for millennia. The Mishnah is unusual in the way it only states the law--and it's not long until the Gemara steps in to add that reasoning. When you read a teshuvah, it doesn't just contain the ruling the rabbis settled on. It includes their reasoning and cites the precedents they're drawing on.

I think every Jewish movement could be better at respecting eachother's traditions. I know Orthodoxy gets the most flak for being exclusionary (rightly so), but I have also faced issues in Reform spaces who paint every Orthodox Jew as backwards zealots who are holding the Jewish world back. There are plenty of people (like myself) who feel called to certain traditional practices, and are also working to combat the bigotry that is present in the Orthodox community. (also, one of the most transphobic interactions I ever had was with a Reform Jew, so they're not perfect.)

The concern isnt about if a reform rabbi was transphobic one time or something. It is about overtly cutting out whole sections of the tribe. I certainly do not think that reform/reconstruction/conservative branches are acting in an equally unacceptable manner on this topic. As a whole, there is no attempt from these other branches to strip orthodox jews of their jewishness. Theres no attempt from these other branches to invalidate orthodox marriages, or conversions. Theres no attempts from these branches to segregate orthodox burials. Theres no attempt to remove orthodox access to the Kotel.

It doesn't matter what type of Jew we are. If they come for you in the morning, they will come for me by the afternoon. So we had better start behaving like we're all in this together.