Gay, frum Jews

"From my perspective the notion of "a life built on cognitive dissonance" is neither religiously viable nor traditionally Jewish. It seems to me that Orthodoxy (modern to ultra) simply doesn't have the tools to provide the kind of open minded, halakhically observant, passionately Jewish communities that LGBTQ Jews need. Good thing there is something called "Conservative Judaism" which provides all of those things and luckily (at least for those Jews living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan) it is right down the block."

Me: Let's see: can't get married, can't be a rabbi. Sounds as great as being a gay republican. Obviously no one's identity is an oxymoron, but what's the point of joining a club that doesn't want you? You can join another branch and retain your frumness. And why would God forbid us to do something that harms no one? Continuing to take the Torah as the divine word is a whole other can of worms. Grow up, my fellow queers. You guys are late to the party anyways; legitimate critiques were lodged against orthodoxy over 100 years ago.

The sheer irrationality that people come up with just to stay part of a group (a hateful one, at that) is infuriating.

Read more: http://www.forward.com/articles/135255/#ixzz1DfmO92rI

Washington is kinda like Hitler, right?

‎Person A: "I was thinking about how we celebrate George Washington...But we got to start telling the truth. He owned other people. If they were good slaves, somebody made them good by beating them half to death...It's kind of like the Jews being made to celebrate Hitler. That's the way black people have to celebrate slaveowners of our past." Joseph Lattimore, quoted in Studs Terkel's Race.

Person B: If we so discriminated our historical figures, then we should never celebrate history. That Martin Luther King cheated on his wife many a times. We should not have a day for people who do not keep their vows. Gandhi beat his wife, we should not celebrate domestic violence. Yet since history is a constant series of oversimplifications, we simply try to remember what is admirable and move on from there.

Me: Yeah, shit. The more I think about this, it's actually kind of ignorant and offensive. We don't worship Thomas Jefferson qua slaveholder--we readily admit his faults and those of our other "founding fathers"; and we (should) recognize the term as sexist, too. Seeing Jefferson as nothing other than a slaveholder is just as bad as seeing him as nothing other than a "founding father". So, this statement is ignorant AND hypocritical: it is overly reductive.

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I have read parts of Race, love Studs Terkel, and think ethnographic research carries a lot of value; however, we need to recognize the lack of credibility the "on-the-street" style interview also has. Peoples' feelings are valid, but sometimes their opinions aren't. Obviously we should try to tell the whole truth about figures as significant as Washington and Hitler. This, everyone can agree on.

Jakov Lind

"What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make use feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide."--Kafka

A book has done that. It is Jakov Lind's Soul of Wood.

Perhaps it was Lind's extraordinary past that produced such extraordinary work: the boy was separated from his parents who emigrated to Palestine after the Nazis annexed Austria, and he went into hiding in Holland. He took on many identities throughout his life, and even worked for the SS. He moved to London, befriended Canetti, and then wrote in English, lamenting his loss of German and European culture. Stefan Zweig's suicide, which forever separated him from his homeland, comes to mind.

I cannot put into words, at least not ones that rival Kafka's above, about how Lind's stories have touched me. They do, to be sure, affect me in a similar way as those of Kafka's absurdist works; I see Lind as a post-war Kafka, someone fully familiar with the chaos of the world and the ability to render it into almost perfect representational art. Lind's symbols, even ones as insane as a paralytic Jewish boy hidden from the Nazis at the top of an Austrian mountain with the help of a crippled WWI veteran (this is the background of the title story), will hopefully remain as prevalent as Kafka's human-turned-creature Gregor Samsa.