Tag: Jewish

On My Invitation as a Jew to Participate in Advent and Christmas by Ivy Helman.

imageI attend Czech classes twice a week.  This time of year the courses focus on Christmas.  I’ve attended three different schools over the last five years, and all handle Christmas similarly.  Even though the Czech Republic is only marginally Christian, for many Czechs being Czech and observing Christmas seem to go hand-in-hand.  In fact, Czech customs around Christmas even figure into the citizenship exam.

In last Tuesday’s class, my teacher asked me how I celebrate Christmas here.  She knows I’m Jewish.  When I said that I don’t observe Christmas traditions in my home, she responded, “you don’t have to be a believer to do Advent-related and Christmasy things.  Only 20% of Czechs are, and yet we all participate in Advent and Christmas.” It was part invitation, part assimilation request.  However, the excited in-class discussion felt more like an attempt at conversion. Don’t you want to be a part of this amazingly joyful time?   Continue reading “On My Invitation as a Jew to Participate in Advent and Christmas by Ivy Helman.”

On Belief and Action by Ivy Helman

29662350_10155723099993089_8391051315166448776_oMy birthday was last Wednesday.  Perhaps more than any other time of the year (yes, even more than Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur), the days and weeks leading up to my birthday are filled with personal reflection.  Not that religious and secular new years don’t give me pause to reflect, but I think the lack of buzz around this personal event seems to offer me more space and time to think.

This year more than past years, I’ve been thinking about beliefs: what I believe in; how ideas and concepts that were important to me last year are less so this year and vice versa; how beliefs motivate me to act or not; what role belief plays in my life; why some beliefs demand solid resolve and others not so much; and so on.  I wanted to share with you some of my personal reflection. Continue reading “On Belief and Action by Ivy Helman”

Mazel Tov Tzidkaniyot of the Wall by Ivy Helman

20151004_161012I have never understood the logic behind sexism. Why is half (or so) of the human race better than the other half? Of course, patriarchy and patriarchal religious traditions offer various seemingly logical reasons, sometimes even divine explanations for the inequality between the sexes. Still, the –isms of patriarchy, whatever their “reasons” or perhaps better excuses, puzzle me.

Even more puzzling are the steps patriarchy-orientated men and women take to preserve these distorted systems. Violence usually goes hand-in-hand attempting to control others in order to preserve the status quo. Obviously if you need to resort to violence to keep people in their place, there is something horribly wrong with society. That being said – one could say that almost no society, nation or culture in our modern times doesn’t have some form of patriarchal violence within it. One would be correct to attribute some measure of the increase of violence to globalization, capitalism, fear, past colonialism and/or neocolonialism. Nonetheless one is hard pressed to find a culture without sexism, without patriarchy and without the need to keep the system in place through violence. Continue reading “Mazel Tov Tzidkaniyot of the Wall by Ivy Helman”

Thoughts on Race and Being Jewish by Ivy Helman

20151004_161012When studying the Shoah, it is extremely important for teachers to introduce students to the 1800s concept of race “science,” which is what I have been doing in my classes over the past few weeks.  An American and European development, this “science” was deeply connected to the development of racism.  Through a “scientific” method, humans were classified based on certain characteristics (i.e. head size, posture, gait, etc.) and traits (i.e. aggression, passivity, even temperament, etc.). Physicality was linked to personalities that were “typical” as well as desirable or undesirable.

Race “science” supported the slave trade, colonialism and the exhibition and exotification of non-European peoples. In the case of the Shoah, race “science” was heavily relied upon by the Nazi Regime in their propaganda, law and ideology. For the Nazis and all nations under their purview, “Jewish” was a racial identity, “scientifically-proven” through measurements and observations and set out by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, previous and subsequent anti-Semitic decrees and the systematically-planned extermination of 6 million of us.

Continue reading “Thoughts on Race and Being Jewish by Ivy Helman”

I Love Love Tel Aviv By Laurie-Ann Cota

Laurie-annAs a self-identified Jewish musician, pop culture nerd/aficionado, getting in touch with my cultural heritage in creative ways is extremely important to me.  This past year I traveled to Israel for the first time and it was life changing.

I traveled with close friends from my undergraduate days at UCLA.  We had bonded and formed a friendship through the blood, sweat, and tears shed in a Hebrew class.

As a Jew in the United States I realized that I was conforming to social standards without even knowing it.  Coming home to Israel, this became very clear.  For instance, many of my friends have very curly hair – we call it the “Jewfro” – and they remedy this problem with the ever so popular Brazilian Blowout, which definitely makes one look less “ethnic.”  I have BIG hair, which I maintain by getting it razored or thinned out; if I don’t, I end up looking like Einstein.  In Tel Aviv there were big heads of curly hair that were flowing with pride.  My friends and I commented that we didn’t even realize how much of our Jewish identity we hid with simple hair products.  Something as innocuous as our hairstyles made me step back from the manner in which we alter ourselves to fit into society here in the United States. Continue reading “I Love Love Tel Aviv By Laurie-Ann Cota”

(Non-Human) Animals on the Agenda by Grace Yia-Hei Kao

“[E]thical interest in nonhuman animals is flourishing.”

To my delight, the New York Times recently chronicled the growing scholarly interest in human/non-human animal interactions in a story entitled “Animal Studies Cross Campus to Lecture Hall.” There are now more than 100 courses in colleges and universities in the burgeoning field of animal studies. At least 40 U.S. law schools now routinely offer courses in animal law. A growing number of formal academic programs, book series, journals, conferences, institutes, and fellowships are also dedicated to (re)examining human-animal relations from a variety of disciplinary perspectives—“art, literature, sociology, anthropology, film, theater, philosophy, [and] religion,” to name a few.

Continue reading “(Non-Human) Animals on the Agenda by Grace Yia-Hei Kao”