Ancestry.com. 23andMe. MyHeritage. Genealogical research is all the rage right now. I love genealogy because I value knowing where I come from. It’s also fascinating. The stories of our ancestors are full of fortune, misfortune, dreams, tragedy, strokes of luck, strength, and pure grit. Spiritually and biologically, I am my ancestors. I carry the soils of their homelands in my bones, their kinship in my blood, their courage in my chest. I…
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When people ask how I came to engage in Indigenous solidarity work or why rematriation of Indigenous life and land is important to me, my historical answer has been: It’s just the thing I’ve always paid attention to. Some people can’t ignore anti-Black racism, some people can’t ignore climate change, I can’t ignore Indigenous sovereignty issues. This still begs the question though: Why? Why does this arena of solidarity hold my heart…
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Cyclical conceptions of time are thoroughly embedded in me through my Jewish heritage and culture. I was born on Rosh Chodesh Av – the new moon of the Hebrew month that is now ending. The Hebrew calendar is a lunisolar calendar, which means that while my Hebrew birthday rarely matches up with my Gregorian birthday, it is always on the same date relative to the cycle of Jewish festivals and religious observances.…
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Dear Jewish Community, I hope everyone is healthy and well, staying strong and resilient, and finding new sources of communication and connection. Check out this beautiful Tkhine When an Epidemic Breaks Out (1916) – a non-canonized, Yiddish Ashkenaz prayer translated by Noam Lerman and others. I have been attending SVARA’s daily Mishnah studies and wanted to share something that is sticking with me from a recent beit midrash (study session). We have been breaking down Masechet Avot, Chapter…
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Each morning at the 2020 Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute, Ched Meyers led a Bible study that framed our analytical discourse around settler colonialism. On Tuesday, he offered “Naboth’s nahala: Tale of Two Queens (An Archetypal Parable of Settler Colonialism).” The story of Naboth’s vineyard (I Kings 21:1-24), in short, is this: King Ahab really wants Naboth’s nahala (property or inheritance) – a vineyard. He desires this “property” so much that when Naboth is…
Leave a Comment“For too long the depth of racism in American life has been underestimated. The surgery necessary to extract it is necessarily complex and detailed. As a beginning, it is necessary to X-ray our history and reveal the full extent of the disease… Our nation was born in genocide, when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on…
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