by Susan Fried
On Sunday, March 17, about 300 people gathered in the SIFF Cinema Egyptian for a screening of the documentary Israelism. The film examines the relationship of American Jews to Israel and how it started changing even before Oct. 7.
Continue reading OPINION | Filling In Some Missing Pieces: On Watching ‘Israelism,’ a Documentary About Growing Up Jewish in Americaby Danielle Marie Holland
As Jews enter the first of the high holidays of Judaism, Rosh Hashanah, many prepare for the 10 Days of Repentance, or, Asseret Yemei HaTeshuvah. During these 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Jews reflect, atone, and practice teshuvah.
Continue reading OPINION | Reflections for a New Yearby Guy Oron
(This article was originally published on Real Change and has been reprinted under an agreement.)
Progressive Jews, Palestinians, and other community members mobilized opposition to the proposed adoption of a controversial definition of antisemitism that would stigmatize criticism of Israel ahead of a Jan. 24 King County Council meeting.
Continue reading Antisemitism Definition Sparks Response From Progressive Jewsby Amanda Ong
In March, local Seattle author Alvin Horn released his first young adult novel — Places to Be. The story is set in Seattle and follows a young Black teen and star basketball player, Marley. Though he is a good student, Marley falls in with a group of friends who get him into trouble, and when he flunks history, his mother puts him on house arrest for the summer. But what starts as punishment becomes a summer of maturity.
Continue reading YA Novel ‘Places to Be’ Takes Youth to the Columbia City Library and Beyondby Mordecai Ben Isaac, translated by Solomon Solis-Cohen
Purim begins this evening, March 16, 2022.
Mighty, praised beyond compare,
Rock of my salvation,
Build again my house of prayer,
For Thy habitation!
Offering and libation, shall a ransomed nation
Joyful bring
There, and sing
Psalms of Dedication!
by Susan Davis
We live in a pluralistic community here in southeast Seattle. Even how we celebrate time varies.
According to the Gregorian (standard) calendar, the new year started on January 1, 2021. But the Ethiopian New Year starts Sept. 11 and the year will be 2013. Islam just celebrated New Year the second week of August and it’s now 1443. Chinese Lunar New Year was in February and it’s 4719. The Hindi New Year of 2078 happened in April.
Some calendars are solar, or solar-lunar, while others are lunar based. You get the idea: Time is measured, explained, and observed differently around the world and, therefore, here in the South End, too.
Continue reading Rosh Hashanah Reflection: Measuring and Celebrating Timeby Joy Resmovits
One of the biggest privileges of being Jewish in moments like these, when the world feels like it’s caving in on itself, is that we get to ring in a new year in the middle of the fall. Yes, it marks a time of serious spiritual self-questioning and atonement, with hours-long services and liturgy replete with some stone-cold allusions to who will die and who gets to live another year. New Year’s Eve it is not.
But ultimately, we dress up our tables with fish heads (for a new start), pomegranates (filled with seeds that supposedly equal the number of mitzvoth, or good deeds, but don’t try to count them …), and apples dipped in honey (to bless our year with sweetness) and get to wave a fond farewell to 5,781, the current year of the Jewish lunar calendar.
Since it’s a time of reflection, I’m looking at the past to illuminate the future. And what I’m realizing on the eve of this time-bound holiday — which, quite strangely, falls on Labor Day this year — is that our clocks are broken. No, not our Fitbits, our internal clocks. Since 2019, our lives have been compressed into an unnatural pattern of bursts of change and excruciating stasis. We are, simply put, out of sync with the passage of time. On top of the grief and inequalities that compound on a daily basis, the compressed way in which we are forced to take in life’s IRL splendors — for those of us who are lucky to not be immunocompromised — is grinding us down. Numbing us. This is the season of quitting, haven’t you heard?
Continue reading Rosh Hashanah Reflection: Recapturing Hopeby Susan Davis
For more than a century, philosopher George Santayana’s warning has been often repeated: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, the day when we stop to remember the Holocaust, in which as many as 17.5 million people were systematically tortured and murdered by the Nazi regime between 1939–1945 throughout Europe. The largest groups that Hitler targeted were Jews, Slavs, and Romani people. LGBTQIA+ people, the mentally or physically disabled, Soviet prisoners of war, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, People of Color, leftists, and dissidents made up the majority of the non-Jews who were also murdered. There were others, such as trade unionists, members of the Baha’i Faith, Catholics, Protestants, Socialists and others whom Hitler considered “unpure.”
What does “unpure” mean? It was the main driver of Aryan race propaganda, which is a legacy of American slave-owning racist ideology. Hitler harnessed the concept and convinced ethnic Germans that they were the superior race. The sophisticated propaganda campaign had a profound effect on the German people and proved to be the gateway to the horrific genocide of historic proportions that occurred during World War II.
Continue reading Honoring Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Remembrance Dayby Jennifer Karami
The Seattle Globalist was a daily online publication that covered the connections between local and global issues in Seattle. The Emerald is keeping alive its legacy of highlighting our city’s diverse voices by regularly publishing and re-publishing stories aligned with the Globalist’s mission.
(A version of this article originally appeared in the Seattle Globalist.)
“I know your grandmother’s real name.”
Those were the words of Denise Grollmus’ mother on her 28th birthday — the day she found out she was Jewish.
The Holocaust destroyed most of the Jewish population in Poland before 1945. Jews that survived did so by physically going into hiding or by renouncing their Jewish identity.
That’s what Grollmus’ grandmother did. In Nazi-controlled Poland, the family begun masquerading as Catholic to avoid persecution … and kept the charade going for generations.
Continue reading The Endurance of Jewish Lifeby Bobbe Bridge (former Washington Supreme Court Justice)
As I write, millions — maybe billions — of words have been dedicated in print and orally to the life and legacy of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: the law professor; the lawyer for the ACLU winning landmark rulings at the United States Supreme Court; the federal District Court Judge; the Supreme Court Justice; the Notorious RBG. She became an iconic figure in her later years, an idol in a black robe and lace collars — collars that were carefully selected (like her own words) to signal her meaning.
Continue reading I Became a Judge Because of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
