There are currently several bone marrow drives going around in the Chicagoland for GIFT OF LIFE, a bone marrow registry that focuses on Jewish registers.

Donating DNA to go in a bone marrow registry is easy and painless. It is a swab on the inside of your cheek.

It is very important - because they are currently looking for a match for a 26-year-old woman who will not make it many more weeks without a match. You can read more about her story here:

http://www.juf.org/news/local.aspx?id=51320&source=home

On that website is also a list of drives that are going on this week and this weekend.

Please consider doing this if you would be comfortable donating if you are a match. If you would not be comfortable with that. . . . don't put yourself in the registry. (70% of donations are just done with an I.V. blood donation - they do something with the blood to get plasma. These days they don't have to actually get the marrow that often.)

You also do NOT have to be Jewish, or Jewish-by-Birth to be in registry. I am a convert, and am in the registry. However, it is more statistically likely that someone with a similar background to the person in question will be a match - which is why they do these "background-targeted" drives. (However, they sometimes also do cross-check them with other banks.)

Remember what the Talmud says about saving one life! Thanks, guys.

From BBC News, The Man who Smuggled Himself into Auschwitz

I'm supposed to spend Shabbat somewhere with no eruv, but where we're going to have to go back and forth between several different buildings within a three or four block radius all day. For those of us who don't want to carry, our lives would be made much easier if we had an eruv. We only need it for the day, so it doesn't have to be very durable (the weather should be pretty nice), and the area has telephone lines that we can probably use to some extent, but I'm having trouble finding a how-to guide, as it were. I can find a half-dozen comprehensive guides about how to kasher my kitchen, lay tefillin, and goodness knows what else just by going to Google, but this eludes me. Surely someone has written this. Anybody want to point me in the right direction?

Current Location: the OU chair

What is this, I don't even know.

( Students Punished for 'Kick a Jew' Day )

I'm pretty sure nobody has posted this here yet.



A warning, from one musician to any others reading: you may want to be in another room when the falsetto parts kick in.

Has anyone heard about this film? Thoughts?

I assume this list is way longer, but it's got some interesting programs. I don't have an Iphone, but it would be nice to have some of these.

My favorite?
The Parve-o-meter ;)

http://www.vccafe.com/2008/10/27/made-in-israel-kosher-iphone-apps

So I announced my wedding on LiveJournal, and a friend (angryskul) accused me of trolling and made a rape joke.

Is this normal in the Jewish community? I thought a friend would offer congratulations and offer to help me in my journey to married life.

Is it because I'm a Catholic marrying a Jewish woman?

Any advice on how to deal with this would be much appreciated. Is this a breach of friendship? Does it matter if he's Orthodox or not?

My cousin is on a pilot trip right now to decide where he wants to move his family next year. He is a nice mix of Breslov-frum and backwoods/guitar-playing/Xfiles-watching/baseballcap-wearing secular. Basically, during the week he's Tshirts, jeans and cap, and on Shabbos it's strictly black hat and gartle... he's strict to halacha but incorporates the good of the secular world into his worldview. They're checking out Tzfat, Nahariya, and Ramat Beit Shemesh.

I'm going to see him for Shabbos and he mentioned going to RBS next week for Shabbos to see how it is. No clue what neighborhood, but when I mentioned it to my fiance, he looked at me like this strange cousin may have just lost his mind, and shook his head. There was an article, which I cannot find, about a girl who was stoned (not "to death" but beaten badly) in RBS (Bet I'm guessing) by the Modesty Police.

I found several articles, this being the most recent so far:
http://jta.org/news/article/2009/07/12/1006432/residents-struggle-to-counter-violent-religious-coercion-in-beit-shemesh

Anyone know what the status is in the community as a whole, and if this is something a person making aliyah would consider when looking for a safe, modern-leaning but frum area to live?

Current Mood: contemplative

Just was told about this terrific compilation of Jewish online resources

Sotheby's is auctioning off a 700 year old Sefer Torah.
Info and a link to further information here
http://onthemainline.blogspot.com/2009/11/13th-century-spanish-torah-for-sale.html

All in Hebrew with English subs... click "view clip" link at bottom of page.

"melancholic morbid sketch show"

[Ending has Holocaust imagery]

http://www.matarproductions.tv/content_in.asp?id=171&title=The%20Saddest%20Sketch%20show%20In%20The%20World&cat=comedy#

Are there any popular, general interest Jewish forums in English online? There must be, but I can't for the life of me find any. I'm looking for something like www.lds.net/forums or forums.catholic.com, with Jews of varying levels of observation and interested outsiders discussing doctrine, social issues, politics, etc., but all I can find are forums for Jewish singles in greater Indianapolis or forums that get one post every two weeks. Although the Mormon and Catholic forums are, what I'm looking for needn't be sponsored or hosted by any particular branch of Judaism, of course. Thanks!

Hello everyone! I go to Lehigh University where we just started our first Jewish Cultural Association.  We already have a Hillel and a Chabad, but the problem is many Jewish students don't attend these institutions.  A lot of it is because my campus is really secular.  Our goal is to plan fun and interesting events that all Jews would want to attend.  These do not need to be religious in nature.

Our ideas include discussing Jews in the news, movie nights, etc.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Oh, and we don't have any funds for 15 weeks :(

I know that it is several years old now, but the Documentary Channel in Canada is showing Jenin: Massacring Truth this evening.

One of the best lines in the Doc is while interviewing a judge from the panel that chose the Sharon/Saturn Devouring His Young as the cartoon of the year states that Jews don't issue Fatwas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/world/europe/08britain.html

A case involving the admissions policy of a Jewish high school in London has potential repercussions for thousands of other parochial schools across Britain.

I heard Shlomo Sands on the radio talking about his book The Invention of the Jewish People. I'm actually a bit perplexed about what the point of the book is other than to be misquoted by anti-Zionists and antisemites and get a lot of publicity for Sands in the process.

I haven't read the book, but going from what he said on the radio, none of the "shocking new revelations about the history of the Jews" is in any way new. I guess if your Jewish education stopped at 13, you might be surprised by some aspects of the book, but I'm not a historian, just an interested Jew, and I didn't find them particularly new.

One of the things he says is that during the second exile, most of the Jews weren't actually exiled. Who thought they all were? The Babylonian exile only actually involved the upper classes and left most of the peasants behind. There have been Jews living in Israel at every point since the exile. Who did he think wrote the Palestinian Talmud? Hadn't he heard of Jews being killed in the crusades?

His next 'revelation' is that Judaism was a proselytising religion and a lot of Jews are descended from converts. Again, no shit Sherlock. As if the references to conversion in rabbinic literature, the accounts of converts in Roman sources, the legend of the Khazars and the references to proselytising Pharisees in the Gospels, weren't enough to tip you off, I would have thought that anyone with an inquiring mind might have noticed that Russian Jews look an awful lot like Russians and Ethiopian Jews look an awful lot like Ethiopians and not attributed it to very fast evolution.

He also points out that our current understanding of nation states and race and ethnicity are quite modern inventions. Again, not telling me anything I didn't already know.

I think things get a bit odd when he goes from all of that to "So Jews aren't really a people/nation/ethnicity (as long as you use a definition of people/nation/ethnicity by which no group of people we currently think of as a nation would count as a nation, a definition of ethnicity which no one apart from Nick "my ancestors were here during the ice age" Griffin actually uses)".

I'm just getting this from an interview I heard. Anyone actually read the book and found something which is both true and not already common knowledge?

One of my friends likes to find alternate tunes to psalms and prayers, and she pointed out that L'Cha Dodi can be sung to the Dr. Mario tune.  (If you don't know the tune, you can listen to it here.)    Singing it was so awesome-- and so weird-- so I thought it appropriate to let all the weirdjews out there know that it can be done :-)

Stumbleupon took me to this website. I think its horrible. What is your interpretation?

[crossposted to my journal]

Now I know part of The Family Guy's schtick is complete tastelessness, but it didn't take reading the recent ADL letter* to prime me to speechless disgust with the second half of The Family Goy. [Edit: synopsis]

I haven't seen much of the show, so I'd thought that maybe there was some attempt to highlight the stupidity of all the stereotypes by making it Peter using them, but then they're perpetuated by other characters, too. Along with some hateful actual lines and visuals. Jesus coming by at the end to say 'I'm Jewish and you're being stupid' was amusing, but seemed quite insufficient to undo the leadup to his arrival.

Bad enough that. But then when I was about to post about it I read about something Real Life. Washington Post reports about a little anti-health reform gathering on The Hill** in the past couple days. Congressfolk who were happy to address a crowd who held signs like "Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds"[sic], and worse:

But the best of Bachmann's recruits were a few rows into the crowd, holding aloft a pair of 5-by-8-foot banners proclaiming "National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945." Both banners showed close-up photographs of Holocaust victims, many of them children. (Photo)

Immediately in front of this colorful scenery, various House Republicans signed autographs and shook hands with the demonstrators. Rep. Virginia Foxx (N.C.), who recently said the health-care bill is more dangerous than terrorists, gave out stickers saying "Govt Run Healthcare Makes Me Sick!"

"Who knew a casual comment on TV could generate this?" Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) exulted as he stood in front of the Dachau banner.

I find this quite sad. And a little scary.



* the one finding Doonesbury to be insensitive for a character's comment about moneylenders -- I don't find that strip particularly funny, but don't see it as anti-Jewish, either. (The rest of the letter had far more disturbing bits, but Doonesbury's what I remember)

** the person linking to the article was commenting on the irony that several people in the crowd were tended to by "Medical personnel from the Capitol physician's office -- an entity that could, quite accurately, be labeled government-run health care."

Tags: anti-semitism
Current Mood: distressed