thedreideldiaries

[thedreideldiaries]

Since July is Disability Pride Month

(as opposed to every other month when we're all demure about disability rights /gentle sarcasm)

I wanted to highlight one of my favorite artists: Liberal Jane.

[thedreideldiaries]

Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher during their wedding ceremony at Temple Beth Sholom in Las Vegas on May 12, 1959.

[thedreideldiaries]

UBI needs to happen. via antiwork

[thedreideldiaries]

Praying Jew — Aleksander Grodzicki (?-1893), Polish.

oil on canvas, 1893

height: 76 cm; width: 54.7 cm

[thedreideldiaries]

x

[thedreideldiaries]

shabbos yontif beis machloykes tallis tzitzis shavuos sukkos esrog bris kashrus brochos mitzvos shachris shkoyach medinas yisroel

reblog to scare an israeli

[thedreideldiaries]

“The History of the Bene-Israel of India,” depicting a group of shipwrecked Jews (the progenitors of the Bene Israel) reciting the Shema. 1897. (Published in 1937 in Tel Aviv).

[thedreideldiaries]

May is Jewish American Heritage Month and Mermay Jewish mermen upon ye

[thedreideldiaries]

Everytime a Jew breathes and laughs and smiles and sings and dances and votes and buys a house and gets married and studies in school and makes plans for a fun night out and enjoys fresh bread and curls tightly into a warm bed and remembers everyone who came before is a time our ancestors rejoice.

[thedreideldiaries]

A pair of silver tefillin covers decorated with fig and pomegranate trees and grape vines, from Bezalel, Jerusalem, around 1925. The inscriptions ראש and יד indicate tefillin shel rosh and tefillin shel yad. The other inscriptions read "Bezalel" and "Yerushalaim". x

[thedreideldiaries]

I’m sorry, one minute I was daydreaming about cavewoman!Rivka and dinosaur!Isaac and the next thing I knew, I was knee-deep in TIIINY AAAARMS jokes ;-) Art by yeaka 

For non-Jews: he’s trying to touch the mezuzah on the way in to their cave and it’s juuuuust not gonna work out.

These characters are usually a warrior woman and a dragon shifter and you can read their adventures in the Mangoverse books–check out The Olive Conspiracy and the short story collection Tales from Perach: Jewish fantasy books for only $2-4! (Also on Amazon; those links are to a PDF indie site.)

[thedreideldiaries]

Well, in light of all the dumb decisions duolingo is making right now, here's a few free/accessible resources for learning Yiddish:

Ultimate Yiddish Resources Masterpost

Yiddish/Ladino Queer Vocab Glossary

And some free PDFs:

Basic Yiddish: A Grammar and Workbook, by Rebecca Margolis

A Manual and Grammar of the Yiddish Language, by J. Mazin

Colloquial Yiddish: The Complete Course for Beginners, by Lily Kahn

Idisch y Latinoamerica, by Eliahu Toker

English-Yiddish Dictionary, by Alexander Harkevy

Cursive Alef Beys Writing Practice, YIVO standard, from YBC

Digital Yiddish Library, over 12k titles for free, from YBC

[thedreideldiaries]

[thedreideldiaries]

I cannot take "fraud" talk about benefit programs seriously because I know what can get labeled as fraud. Taking a tupperware of leftovers home from a friend's birthday can be argued to be food stamp fraud. Exchanging SNAP for cash is fraud, that makes sense, except in many cases, people will let someone else use their leftover SNAP at the end of the month (it doesn't roll over) in exchange for cash they need for shampoo, toilet paper, Tylenol, or other essentials not covered by SNAP. Paying the nurse or attendant for the full shift even though you asked them to leave early because you wanted to go to bed is fraud, even though the alternative is either they get less pay for no fault of their own, or they have to hang around while you sleep. Meanwhile, paying someone for the full shift when the jobsite has to shut down early is policy in many workplaces. Giving your attendant or nurse cash to go pick up your medicine and letting them keep the change is fraud. In some states packing your kid lunch if you are on free lunch is fraud. Because of how strictly benefits programs are defined and regulated, for the recipients, basic human acts and impulses are defined as fraud.

If people want to talk about benefits fraud, they should be talking about third party administrators, nursing homes, and farms. That's where big ticket fraud that is malicious, deliberate, and with the aim of ripping off the government happens. It's the province of large scale service providers and contractors, not people who use benefits or the workers directly assisting them. So unless you're explicitly talking about that, shut the fuck up about "oh I'm sure there *is* fraud."

[thedreideldiaries]

this joke is similarly eternal

[thedreideldiaries]

Sefer Abudarham (Commentary on Jewish prayer), Rabbi David Abudarham, Lisbon; Eliezer ben Judah Toladano, 1489

170 leaves (269 x 195 mm) on paper. A rare pre-Expulsion imprint from Lisbon.

Peirush ha-berakhot ve-ha-tefillot (or, as it has come to be known more popularly, Sefer abudarham) was completed in Seville in 1340 by Rabbi David Abudarham, scion of a prominent Sephardic family. In the preface, the author states that it is his desire to afford his readers with the means of understanding both the text and ritual procedure of Jewish prayer. To this end, and in order to trace the variations in custom between different Jewish communities (Spanish, Provencal, French, and German), Abudarham had recourse to a wide range of materials, including the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, the literature of the ge’onim, and several earlier custom collections. Modern scholarship has suggested that Abudarham based his text in large part on the work of Rabbis Judah ben Yakar (d. ca. 1201-1218) and Jacob ben Asher (ca. 1270-1340), from whose compositions he quotes liberally and often without attribution. Nevertheless, it was Abudarham who succeeded, as no one else had before him, in compiling what was to become a virtually indispensable exposition of Jewish prayer.

Three introductory chapters, on the reading of the Shema, the Amidah, and the various benedictions recited prior to the performance of certain mitsvot, precede the commentary, which begins with the daily prayers and goes on to treat the liturgy for Sabbaths, New Moons, Hanukkah, Purim, Passover (including the Haggadah), Shavuot, fast days, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot. Abudarham also appended special discourses on the weekly readings from the Torah and Prophets, the Hebrew calendar, and rules governing blessings (e.g., those recited over food, perfumes, etc.). [x]

[thedreideldiaries]

Jewish women's bath in the Sar Chal neighborhood of Tehran, Iran, 1970s.