Happy Passover!

“We’re not going to let the terrorists take away our confidence or the ability to embrace our religion,” said Michael Masters, SCN’s national director, during the Zoom webinar.

Masters’ sentiment is also shared by congregational leaders like Rabbi Adam Roffman, of Congregation Shearith Israel in Dallas. “Sure, security is something we think a lot about, and we’ve done our best to protect ourselves,” Roffman said. “And at the same time, the life of this community goes on.”

They are trying to ban most of the Jews in the world from praying according to their own custom at the one holy site we all share. What a disgrace!

A suspect is in custody as authorities investigate a weekend fire that damaged Mississippi’s largest synagogue, which has been attacked before.

The fire broke out around 3 a.m. Saturday at Beth Israel Congregation, the only synagogue in Jackson, the state capital. Video surveillance footage shows a man splashing liquid along a wall onto a couch in the lobby.

Investigators said the blaze burned the lobby, the library, and the offices. Soot and smoke damaged the rest of the building, including the sanctuary. The building also houses the offices of the Institute of Southern Jewish Life.

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יי, אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, מַתִּיר אֲסוּרִים.

One of the beautiful paradoxes of Yom Kippur is that introspection is, by definition, individual, yet Jews recite the confessional in the plural. None of us has committed all the transgressions in the standard liturgy, yet we are each invited to find our shortcomings in the text’s long, alphabetical list. And to remember that, whether we like it or not, we are bound to one another. It is in that spirit that I offer the following Al-Chet prayer after a year marked by pain, division and rancor.

Rosh Hashanah begins tomorrow at sundown. Here's wishing everyone on Lemmy who celebrates a good and sweet New Year. May it be a year of many blessings and a year of peace. Let our actions this year bring our world closer To the world we envision in our hearts. Shannah Tovah! 🍎🍯

Happy Labor Day!

Gompers Jewish upbringing helped teach him the importance of Labor organizing, and helped him forge connections that led to him becoming a founder of the American Federation of Labor, its first, and longest serving president. He helped establish the labor movement worldwide.

He joined the Cigarmakers Local Union #15 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan at just 14, and soon went on to become its president. After WWI, he helped to found the International Labor Organization, and continued to serve workers throughout his life.

Samuel Gompers died in 1924 at the age of 74, after collapsing at a meeting of the Pan-American Federation of Labor in Mexico City.

Jacqueline Harpman is a dead Holocaust survivor who went viral on TikTok, and literary translators should be working overtime to translate all of her funny, poignant novels as soon as possible.

Harpman was born in 1929 in Belgium to Jeanne Honorez and Andries Harpman, who was Jewish. In May 1940, the same month Nazis invaded Belgium, her family moved to Casablanca, Morocco, according to an interview with the Belgian journalist Joëlle Smets. Harpman faced institutional antisemitism in Morocco, then a French protectorate, and moved back to Belgium in October 1945, after the war ended.

In Belgium, Harpman became both a celebrated author and a professional psychoanalyst. She published the slim, dystopian novel I Who Have Never Known Men in French in 1995, and it was translated soon afterward into English by Ros Schwartz. In 2022, in the wake of the first Trump administration and the popularity of dystopian fiction like The Handmaid’s Tale, the book was re-released. Book bloggers on TikTok, who usually seem more interested in romance and fantasy, did the seemingly impossible and made a nearly 30-year-old Belgian novel in translation go viral, a rare win for the crazies among us who envision a world where everyone has impeccable literary taste. It sold 100,000 copies in the U.S. last year.

"How do we take the Jews down?” one host on the self-described “Men’s podcast” Fresh and Fit asked, speaking to fellow panelists in an episode that garnered widespread social media attention in recent days. 

"We gotta kill the motherf*****s,” another guest chimed in. “My bad ya’ll,” she added.

Kentucky bans abortion except to protect the health or life of the mother, with no exceptions for rape or incest. The women who filed suit argue that the law could lead them to be criminally prosecuted for the destruction of any unviable or unused embryos, making them fearful of receiving fertility treatment.

“The fact that lawmakers who don’t understand healthcare or my religious beliefs have more rights to my body than I do is sickening,” Kalb told the local news site Kentucky Lantern.

Have a happy, safe Passover!

חג פסח שמח!

“My community is Jewish,” he said, adding that he attended school alongside Jewish students, and that his Hebrew is better than his Arabic or English. “I am around Jewish since 13 years old.”

Rashed’s six years in New York and New Jersey have influenced his palette, as well as the restaurant’s menu. In addition to traditional Druze foods, Taboonia also serves some cross-cultural treats, like everything bagel-seasoned bourekas, filled with mozzarella cheese.

Happy Purim! 🎉

Nothing to see here folks.