The Other 60th
while the jewish establishment goes wild at 60, they omit 1/2 the story
Jewish Boys
jewdas investigates the new trend of shagging jewish boys
Desperate to wed?
what could be more perfect than that big white wedding? singledom?
New Diaspora
can you imagine a jewish diaspora without a centre? jewdas explains why you must
The Animals that we are Noone was carniverous until noah, right? well, no not really - so who messed up?
Value the Jew
a commendation from David Cameron? His values are jewish. Excellent.
Passing Jews
So where did the Jews go? actually, they're the new crusaders...Another future for zion?
do jews really need a state of their own to exercise power? what can we learn from history?
good (radical) shabbes
its time to reclaim the radical nature of shabbat observance. here's how.
the shema - god's callcentre
struggling with the first line of the shema? of course you are...
Judas rose up. Hail Jewdas!
Our dear counterpart from biblical time, Judas Iscariot, was a beloved man of Christ and supposedly of G-od. He loved Yeshoua to bits and, from what I heard, Christ loved him too. Nice starting taste. But everything got cocked up...
Challenging the violence of orthodoxy
Historiography is always political. The right to write the history books, to set the narrative, to fix the canonical account is always claimed by the victors and bitterly contested by their opponents. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of Jewish history. The mainstream account, emanating form the Zionist movement has achieved almost total hegemony.Sodomising the Torah
Here in the UK , the first legal Same-Sex commitment ceremonies are beginning to take place. Although the move has been widely accepted across the country, a few (rather sad) protesters dutifully stand outside the ceremonies with ‘No to Sodomy’ posters. Apart from wanting to ridicule their pathetic protest, I was intrigued by their use of the term Sodomy.Joseph, Pharaoh and Anticapitalism
The Joseph narrative, like so much of the Torah, is frequently viewed from a one dimensional perspective. At the beginning of the story, the Israelites, the clan of Jacob, are poor farmers in Canaan ; by the end they are privileged residents of Egypt , given the best land under the patronage of Pharaoh and one of their group is at the heart of the government. The fate of the Egyptian people, however, is less frequently commented on.In radical tradition
We learn a great deal from the possibilities of language. Certain notions can be espoused, certain phrases are based on key assumptions, certain concepts can be almost impossible to express. In this case, let’s combine the words radical and traditional. Let’s explore the possibilities:Without a floor to stand on
If one was to ask a non Jewish lay-man to name things Jews were particularly good at, talking would be high on the list. We are a people of words, we are novelists, poets, intellectuals, comics. We cut our teeth writing and studying Talmud, where words took the place of land, where divine commands are overruled by the arguments of the majority, where the meaning(s) of words is deabted to a hairsplitting degree.xtreme mitzvot
tie flicking: everyone knows that Maimonides says that charity is better when anonymous, but few know his top tip for making it that way. He points out that some sages would keep a coin in their tie and flick it over their shoulder as they walked down the street. Best not do this with £2 coins-could get treacherous...Radical Rav
The observance of tish ba'av brings us back, on a yearly basis, to a deep sense of loss. We mourn the destruction of the temple and have correspondingly gloomy thoughts about the beginning of the diaspora. Some of us even fast, although to be honest, most feel that yom kippur affords more than enough opportunity for that.Finding Chouchani
Emmanuel Levinas’ Talmudic readings are the quintessential metting of Judaism and modernity. Through his free-wheeling, playful, philosophical, political and above all European commentaries, Levinas achieves his aim of translating the Talmud ‘into Greek’ i.e. into the language of the modern West. He draws on the central text of Judaism to discuss ideas as wide as land, destruction, revolution (in the wake of 1968) moral obligation, feminism and forgiveness, often drawing on the most obscure and inpenetrable texts to work his magic. His readings make the modern reader (Jew or otherwise) feel that in Judaism ‘everythimg has already been thought’, that its classical texts deal, in profound and non-simplistic ways, with all the issues that we wrestle with today. That rather than a text to be ignored by secularists or neutered by orthodox sacralization the Talmud is the site of Jewish and human repair, the meeting place where we can learn to think and live with each other.Opening the gates of toyrah
The Talmud records a set of ‘Yavne legends’ - a group of stories about the founding of the academy in Yavne that marks the beginning of what we now call ‘rabbinic Judaism’. Whether or not these stories are historically true is irrelevant – they’ve been recorded as paradigms - ideals which shape Jewish thought.
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