Ushpizin (pronounced oosh-pee-ZIN) is the Aramaic word for “guests” and refers to a short prayer recited on each night of Sukkot inviting one of seven Jewish forbearers to join us in the sukkah.

Sukkot begins tonight at sundown.

A queer Torah study group in Portland, Oregon, wants LGBTQ+ people to know that they have always been a part of Jewish history.

It’s all in how you look at things, explains Rabbi Emerita Ariel Stone, who helped start the study group at Congregation Shir Tikvah. “If you look back at Jewish teachings about the Torah, it says that there are 70 different ways to understand any piece of Torah, any word, any command, any story,” Stone told Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB).

In 1889, she left her husband and moved to New York City to join the lively culture of political meetings, labor demonstrations, and intellectual debate. Her eloquence and dedication quickly made her a popular speaker and a prominent member of New York’s immigrant anarchist community. She lectured in German and Yiddish to immigrants anxious to improve the miserable working conditions and long hours that choked their lives. She also began to lecture in English to diverse audiences including middle-class men and women, intellectuals, and even farmers attracted by her unconventional opinions and her charisma.

During this period, Goldman was linked to a general fear of anarchists as provokers of violence. This fear was based primarily on the 1892 assassination attempt on steel magnate Henry Clay Frick by Goldman’s closest comrade and lover, Alexander Berkman, and on the subsequent death of President William McKinley in 1901, shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, who claimed to have been inspired by Goldman. Contrary to public perception, Goldman’s primary form of political action was education, not violence. She preferred to use the spoken word to challenge the current political order.

Throughout her career, Goldman spoke out boldly about the particular problems faced by women and demanded their economic, social, and sexual emancipation. She became a prominent figure in the struggle for free access to birth control. Goldman was also a strong advocate of free love for women and men, heterosexuals and homosexuals. She believed individuals should enter into and leave personal relationships with no constraints, and that love and sexuality were crucial to personal and professional fulfillment.

Goldman’s determination to speak out on her controversial views led to frequent arrests. The ultimate gag order on Goldman’s ideas came when the United States entered World War I, and her anti-conscription lectures and organizing were considered a threat to national security. She spent 18 months in federal prison, after which she, Berkman, and a boatload of other foreign-born radicals were deported to the Soviet Union.

In Russia, Goldman was shocked by the ruthless authoritarianism of the Bolshevik regime, its repression of anarchists, and its disregard for individual freedom. After less than two years, she and Berkman left Russia in despair.

Emma Goldman died on May 14, 1940, in Toronto. After her death, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service allowed her body to be re-admitted to the United States, where she was buried in Chicago near the Haymarket anarchists who had so inspired her.

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.