When a teenage bride becomes a tattooed therapist
And a new plot twist for Messianic Jews
Gur meets girl: Phoebe Maltz Bovy reviews Sara Glass’s coming-of-age memoir ‘Kissing Girls on Shabbat’
Whenever one speaks of the strides made towards LGBTQ acceptance, there is an asterisk needed, and I don’t mean the one that sometimes accompanies the acronym as an inclusivity gesture towards additional subcategories. I mean the bit about how these days, it’s no big deal if you’re gay, unless you happen to come from a traditionalist community, in which case yeah, still a whole thing, still a possible source of ostracizing or worse.
It can be tempting, contemplating all this from the perspective of someone who isn’t religious, to say, takes all kinds, and land on a kind of relativist position where you figure, this is what works for this community, who am I to judge? That position becomes harder to sustain when you hear testimony from people who are or were in such environments, and for whom mandatory heterosexual marriage with a mandate to be fruitful and multiply really, really doesn’t work…
AI bots and Jews for Jesus: Isolated on the world stage, Israel is getting some strange bedfellows
Israel had some strange bedfellows in the news this week. The New York Times unveiled that country’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs created social media bots that posted AI-generated comments to influence American lawmakers and the general public; meanwhile, a rally against antisemitism in Manhattan drew headlines when it was revealed that the organization behind the rally was a Messianic Jewish group that aims to convert Jews to believe in Jesus.
While the stories are different, the underlying theme is the same: Israel is increasingly isolated around the world, with ever-sinking public opinion and international allies growing distant. When good PR is hard to come by, you end up with AI-created bots and Jews for Jesus as suddenly noteworthy friends.
Avi and Phoebe discuss these topics on this week’s episode of Bonjour Chai, with special guest Rabbi Michael Skobac of Jews for Judaism, an organization created in direct response to Jews for Jesus.
Eric Caplan of McGill University with a response to our early May podcast episode featuring Andrew Koss of Mosaic, who published a piece headlined “Jewish studies against the Jews”…
You asked good questions and showed some of the weaknesses in his thinking. It surprises me that Koss is more concerned about public statements that Jewish studies profs make (which is not an essential component of the job), and less about the dialogues that we foster within our teaching (a core element of our work).
All of us in the Jewish studies department at McGill have received more notes than usual this year thanking us for creating a safe space where controversial and multi-vocal material can be studied, including material dealing with Israel-Palestine. It also surprises me that the messaging from Federation CJA and B’nai Brith focuses primarily on the challenges that a pro-Israel Jewish student might face on campus, ignoring that most of these campuses continue to have dynamic departments of Jewish studies; ones that they should be encouraging students to connect with to boost their knowledge of Jewish culture and of current events.
You remarked that antisemitism is more of a talking point on the Jewish Right. The reality is a bit more complicated, I think. Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) have published a significant resource on antisemitism. Antisemitism exists on the left—as it does on the right—and Jewish leftists have often been hurt by it. Expressions of antisemitism (and antizionism) within feminist and queer spaces in the early 1970s played a significant role in the creation of separate Jewish feminist and Jewish queer organizations, and the people involved wrote and spoke publicly about this.