R. P. Schwartz
@Doc_RPS
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Lapsed historian of science. Educator, amateur sociologist of Orthodoxy, tweeter in the early morning. US history/politics, race, feminism, SAR HS Color War, 🏒
Joined January 2012
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This is not an accident, or an oversight, or a failure of a system.
It is very successful vote suppression.
This drone footage shows a long line of voters waiting to cast ballots in Atlanta on Tuesday. Georgia election officials, poll workers and voters have reported major trouble with voting in Atlanta and elsewhere.
Read the latest.
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@IIHFHockey
You know how to make clear there is no place for this in hockey? Condemnatory tweets aren't it. One lifetime ban, and we'll never see this again.
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@Historianus
@SumanSeth42
@ryanaboyd
Spiciest take: treating romance as a genre as beneath contempt is rank misogyny, nothing more.
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There have been many difficult things for me about living through American politics since 2015. One is watching what's being done to American democracy. Another is watching what's happening in and to my community. (1/n)
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Pesach is hard. Not the cleaning, which I manage, or the cooking, which I enjoy. Not because of the food restrictions.
Pesach is hard because it's so much about children, and the seder experience, and for so many of us, that isn't going to look exactly how we would have hoped.
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@nycsouthpaw
I live on a small island that has as many people as North and South Dakota combined. We share two senators with seven million other people in New York City, and millions more in NYS.
Not really interested in South Dakota's thoughts about this, tbqh.
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I left my house on Shemini Atzeres to walk to shul, and saw a police car pull up at YU and officers--not regular patrolmen--get out of it.
Then I walked the few blocks to my shul and saw another police car parked in front, with more officers outside. And that's how I knew.
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Folks, it happened. Something led to mixed dancing.
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Our universities should not be reputation laundries for child-orphaners and their enablers.
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I read this over Shabbos. Of course, I already had a fairly good idea what was in it. But in the interests of not bloviating emptily, I printed all 283 pages of syllabus, opinion, concurrences, dissent, appendices (double-sided, if you speak for the trees), and brought them home.
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Received an invitation to be a scholar in residence for an Orthodox organization. Addresses me as "Mrs." Refers to the man who recommended me to them as "Rabbi Dr."
We're still doing this? Really?
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Two days ago, I was teaching my AP Gov class about the Fourth Amendment, their rights as Americans, and that they should never allow a police officer into their homes without a warrant.
I told them the story of Ramarley Graham.
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R' Feivel Cohen was niftar today. Most of the frum world's mourning is for the author of the Badei HaShulchan, an indispensable work for those studying halakha.
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I have lived in New York City my entire life. I was here on 9/11. At the Rangers parade in 1994. Here through the worst of COVID.
Nothing makes me feel like more of a New Yorker than wedging my car into a parking space an inch bigger than said car.
(Silver Odyssey is me.)
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It didn't take last night to see that Chaya Raitchik, Chris Rufo, and their ilk are trying to get my child killed, with the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability.
When you keep repeating that all LGBTQ people are sexual abusers of children, you are inviting this.
When I say that there are people out there trying their hardest to get my child killed, please understand that I mean, with no hyperbole or overstatement or exaggeration, that there are people out there
trying
their
hardest
to
get
my
child
killed.
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I know a fair amount about New York State law for hiring and firing clergy. I know a fair amount about shul politics. This is not a thread about those. So about the rebbetzin-ate, and what it is to inhabit and lose that role, and my heart goes out to
@avitalrachel
, a thread:
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I wore a black skirt, ivory silk blouse with a tie, cropped black cardigan, large-brimmed black hat, and square-toed black loafers. I thought I looked fetching. My students thought I looked like "the chewy bar guy." Can't remember the last time I laughed so hard.
@Avi_Pretzel
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And I do not know how a community that I am committed to and love and see enormous value in has allowed itself to become this. How it has mainstreamed and mainlined this worldview. And that, too, is a source of real pain. (21/21, fin.)
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I'm talking about, since 2015, the increasing MAGA-ization of the Orthodox world. This is to a significant extent true in the Modern Orthodox world I live and work in, and far more true in the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world in which my siblings live. (3/n)
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Lo hayu yamim tovim l'Yisrael like the day the principal announces,
"Boys, take your tefillin home."
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This, this, this.
If this election result holds up, no reprise of 2009--spending a year chasing a GOP vote, any GOP vote for ACA that will never come and runs out the clock.
There's a lot to be done. The Biden Administration has a mandate to do it. Get on it.
If Democrats win both Senate seats in GA, it’s going to be hard to explain why they should promptly re-empower McConnell by seeking small-ball deals with him instead of getting rid of the filibuster and passing Biden’s big, bold agenda. Biden has a mandate. Time to use it.
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In case someone gaslights you about how no one saw this coming, or could have predicted, or whatnot.
@zeynep
from December 7th. She was far from the only one who saw this for what it was. And yes, people who had more to lose (women, minorities, Muslims) were more likely to see.
There's time to be alarmed. It's such a time. The president's blatant, if incompetent, attempts to steal the election are happening in a period of entrenched of minority rule, and are met mostly with silence or approval by Republican leaders. New piece:
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I will keep retweeting this as long as it keeps being true.
I remember the revelation of learning Amartya Sen on famine: Famine is a political, not a natural, disaster. Weather or crop failures alone don't result in famines that kill millions. That takes failure of government.
The reason you're not able to pay your rent or buy food (or are worried about not being able to) is not because there's a pandemic. It's because elected officials have failed to respond. They have created a false choice between health and the economy.
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The ever-relevant James Baldwin: “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
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That transformative moment in one's Jewish life when candelighting hits 5 PM.
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For
@18_forty
and
@DBashIdeas
, I wrote about the truths I have gleaned from experience of parenting kids who find their own path, when it's different than yours.
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Again, *I do not mean having conservative politics*. Do I need to say that again? The Torah is neither conservative nor liberal--it has elements of both--and people are free to decide how their convictions map onto American politics. It's the round-the-bend MAGA stuff. (5/n)
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Rebbetzin Bruria Hutner David was nifteres today.
She was the founder and dean of Beth Jacob of Jerusalem (BJJ, as it was known to everyone else but her; or the Machon, as it was known to her), a frankly elitist institution that educated literal generations of charedi women.
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A gutten moed,
@themishpacha
. I'm one of those Orthodox feminist nudniks who doesn't buy your publication because of no pictures of women. Bought your Pesach issue because of
@safier
's article about Jenny Miller Faggen--and because I saw you included pictures of her.
Incredible.
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Aside from everything else about the numpty quoted tweet: whose definition of modest?
Let's play a game: count how many different parts of this woman's outfit would get her kicked out of a Brooklyn Bais Yaakov!
(And that's before her teachers spoke to her about her sashay.)
Modest clothing yet every guy looks. Is there something attractive to being classy that society has lost?
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Bob Dylan told us to put our fingers up and see which way the wind is blowing.
Maya Angelou told us that if someone tells you who they are, believe them. (35/35, fin.)
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We could, as a community, choose to talk that way. Instead, many members of our community have imbibed and replicated a way of thinking and speaking that has little to do with Torah values and everything to do with Tucker Carlson and QAnon. (19/n)
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I have nothing smart to say about the rasha Walder, nothing smart to say about Shifra Horvitz, Doresh Damim otah yizkor.
I want to ask us to think about the context we create, however unwittingly, in which victims come forward, or don't, are listened to, or aren't. (1/n)
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Without the Senate, a Democratic president's administration will be strangled in the cradle. Think McConnell won't block every cabinet nominee? Associate Justice Merrick Garland would like a word.
Whoever's in charge of recruiting Senate candidates needs to do a better job.
Beto is polling at 2%. He could beat Cornyn in TX.
Hickenlooper is polling at 1%. He could beat Gardner in CO.
Bullock is polling at 0%. He could beat Daines in MT.
Stacey Abrams isn’t even running. She could beat Perdue in GA.
We *need* the Senate in 2020.
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Because I am an Orthodox Jew, and we are truly, truly a funny people, I bought kosher lePesach ground up bugs to feed my (son's) gecko, to replace the chametz-containing ground up bugs we feed him (the gecko, not the son) all year.
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@GilStudent
@jacklanger
A colleague told me today, "I'm trying to eat healthier and I don't want to eat chocolate, so I always have meat for lunch."
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"You don't understand, Rivka. It's complicated."
I understand that you are asking me to hold the "flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy" to a lower ethical standard than I hold Hockey Canada. I would prefer not to.
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If you are a frum person who runs all of your most serious life decisions past a posek, and you don't know a frum couple who has terminated a pregnancy on the advice of their posek, that means only one thing: they didn't feel safe telling you.
Your periodic reminder that antichoice laws prevent Jewish women from following the teachings of their religion during a difficult time and are therefore anti-religious and antisemitic.
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If every male Orthodox rabbi focused on "how can I make women feel like full members of the community in every possible way" instead of on "how can I patrol the boundaries of the permissible and prevent slippery slopes," how different could our religious community look? Thread.
I just remembered how after shabbos, when we would all go to the parking lot after maariv to say kiddush levana, my rabbi always made a point to say his sholom aleichems to me and my best friend. He made a point of making clear that we were just as much a part of it as the men.
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He was killed because he was poor, and Black, and almost no one cared, and almost no one remembered.
He was summarily executed by a police officer who was not held accountable.
He died ten years ago yesterday.
Ramarley Graham. Say his name.
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"I think what they are doing is wrong, and at the same time, I know that they are trying to be members of our community, and ovdei Hashem, they are in pain, and it is an incumbent obligation upon me not to increase their pain. Not to target them for humiliation or harm." (18/n)
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I'm not even sure what I'm saying here. I hurt, deeply, for my child. I am afraid for them. I am certain that our community is driving out and hurting other people like my child (and, although we are not the main story here, their families are collateral damage.) (20/n)
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This is deeply painful for me, because this is a community that I chose and continue to choose every day. A community that professes to believe in eternal values, and lives much of its life that way--impressively, movingly, with commitment and sacrifice. And then this. (4/n)
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The rhetoric is not "halakha prohibits this." That is fairly clear, and Orthodox Jews are allowed to espouse traditional Orthodoxy. The rhetoric is frankly eliminationist. I am worried about my child's emotional wellbeing. I am worried about my child's physical safety. (15/n)
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If the only time you tell your LGBTQ undergraduates that you love them--the only time--is as you're pushing them away,
you don't have to answer the question. We already heard your answer.
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This man gave a briefing to say happy things about corporations just before the markets closed so that the stock market's week, and he, would look less bad.
While a pandemic rages, cases mount, and Americans will die.
That's what he cares about. That's all he cares about.
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@chick_in_kiev
It's almost like when we legally mandate lying about Black American history, it doesn't stop there. Huh. Who'd'a thunk.
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They said it was impossible. They said it could never be done.
But I have achieved the impossible.
I have done the un-do-able.
I bought too many potatoes for Pesach.
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One could, conceivably, say: every human being is created b'tzelem Elokim. I don't know why some people experience themselves this way. I don't know what Hashem wants of them. (Or: I think I know what Hashem wants of them, and it's very hard.) (17/n)
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In my blood and tears I wrote this. I share it in case it helps dispel anyone's loneliness or ease anyone's pain. If nothing else, you are not alone. Lots of us not doing the picture-perfect Pesach, again, this year.
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I am watching significant chunks of the community of which I am a part make my child the apotheosis of evil. (That I and other parents like me are collateral damage in the process is hardly the main point.) (14/n)
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I'm just an Orthodox Jewish girl, standing in front of an Orthodox Jewish boy, asking you to remember that I exist.
(That's the entire extent of my pop culture armamentarium, so don't expect any more movie references from me.)
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Here's why I wouldn't do this.
(I mean, besides the fact that it's tired, and that's an old picture, and don't we have anything more important to get exercised about.)
On packaged, peeled, sectioned oranges; and saltwater; and my grandmother's hands, a thread:
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Or do we want everyone, all of us, in all of our complexities and imperfections and humanity, with all of the complications and challenges and re-thinkings and adjustments that demands?
That's the only question. All the rest is commentary.
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There are so, so many of us. An army of parents, each struggling to make our own ways, hoping we don't get it wrong, trying to do best by our kids and their siblings.
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And then losing it.
Not on the basis of choices you made, or actions you took.
Because the role may have demanding, and time-consuming--but it was never yours to begin with.
The loss, though. The loss is yours. And in the noise, the loss is what I'm thinking about. (15/15.)
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But for those who don't have all of the children at the table whom you would want to have--because they're in the house but not at the table, or not in the house; because they can't sit at the seder or don't want to; for reasons religious, developmental, medical, emotional--
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Liquor store clerk: I’m gonna need to see some age verification
Me: When I was a kid, American charedi magazines ran pictures of women.
Liquor store clerk (stands up): "Mipnei seivah takum, v'hadarta pnei zakein."
Liquor store clerk: “I’m gonna need to see some age verification.”
Me: “When a problem comes along, you must whip it.”
Liquor store clerk: “Before the cream sits out too long, you must whip it.”
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Here's a thought experiment: would anyone get up and say, "The reason Orthodox Jews go to the mikvah after their menstrual periods is...." or "Haircovering is a very important mitzvah for married Jewish people...."?
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The far bigger problem, in terms of numbers, is that in the (not even) 10 minutes that I listened to, guest and host consistently talked about, as markers of full participation in or exclusion from the congregation, things that Orthodox women are excluded from every day.
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For a variety of reasons, Orthodox Jewish politics has been converging with Republican politics for some time. I'm not talking about that. Orthodox Jews, like everyone else, are entitled to vote their convictions or self-interest, and to decide that aligns with the GOP. (2/n)
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As much as
@Adderabbi
hates "As an Orthodox rabbi," that's how much I hate "As the parent of a queer kid." Your child's identity is not your credibility. So to be clear: I offer that not to burnish my credentials, but to establish my pain. (13/n)
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Following up on
@DBashIdeas
, the Jewish Action issue, and
@themishpacha
supplement that I haven't read yet, I want to say one thing about cost-of-frum-life discussions: enormously underrated in this conversation is the choice of where to live--*not* in the cost-of-living sense.
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"Rivka, how could you say something like that?!"
I am trained as an an historian, so I know how to mine the archives and come up with obscure historical documents like
the Republican Party Platform from every presidential year. (25/n)
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I have heard from my nephews what their rebbeim say in class. I read (occasionally) the charedi newspapers, and see what they're laundering into the communal discourse. (Yonason Rosenblum writes columns that are only intelligible if you're up on the latest outrage cycle.) (7/n)
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You know a frum couple that has terminated a pregnancy. You just don't know that you know a frum couple that has terminated a pregnancy.
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@DBashIdeas
, my brother, there's a very big "yes, AND" here. (Maybe so big that it becomes a "yes, BUT"):
The demand-side problem is not only--not even primarily--that not enough women at Stern want to study Gemara.
As Chaim Saiman once wrote regarding gedolim, I think the same is true re: higher Talmud learning for women: There has been too much focus in changing the “supply” and not enough efforts in changing the “demand.”
Prob a lot more at play as well.
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My nephew: "And cheat." Me: "And cheat?" Nephew" "Yes. In the last election. And the one before that. And probably the one before that and the one before that." Where did he get this? (Not my sister's home.) MAGA election lines mainstreamed into frum culture. (10/n)
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I'm not sure I've ever agreed with anything more than I agree with this.
The most American thing about me might be how I react to the coronation.
(And yes, the separation of religion and state is of inestimable benefit to religion.)
If we won the Revolutionary War only so our rabbis don’t have to be subjected to a Shabbos afternoon coronation clergy conga line in a church, Dayenu. 🇺🇸 🕺
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It will never not be funny to me that most American households make a meal like this once a year, and they need three weeks, a special edition of every food magazine, and a spreadsheet to get ready.
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Living this way is a choice that we make. No other country makes this choice; no other country lives this way.
Can't rent a car. Can't buy a cigarette. Can buy a weapon of war.
So many Trump supporters argued that California’s ban on assault rifles was absolutely useless because the Gilroy shooter used an assault rifle anyway. Well the 19-year-old had to go all the way to Nevada to legally purchase an AK-47. The hardest part for him was renting the car.
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Inspired by a dear friend in the charedi-ish world who in middle age worked her way through Shas mishnayos because "it's our Torah, too", and by
@Adderabbi
's bat mitzvah daughter, I have started mishna yomi-ish. (Skip days and catch up is more my mode.)
I'll check in in 6 years.
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My teacher and mentor, Rebbetzin Chaya Ausband zt"l, passed away today at the age of 96. Some not-terribly-organized thoughts, memories, reflections, lessons that I learned: (1/n)
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@DBashIdeas
has written movingly about having a seder alone when he desperately didn't want to be alone at that point in his life. Others have written about the pain of Pesach while experiencing infertility. Those are not my experiences.
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I thought that the single most New York City thing I had ever done was to parallel park perfectly in a space half an inch larger than my car. It is not. The most New York City thing I have ever done is to wait for a truck to finish towing a car so I could take its parking space.
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The issues here are not binary (Huh.) It's not as though your choice is to support contemporary gender ideology in all of its forms, or to sign on for the ugliness of the groomer slanders and the claims of pedophilia. (16/n)
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and for crying out loud, I want us to stop using as shorthand for "full communal participation" something we don't let half the community do, ever.**
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Just finished reading the charging documents for someone I taught as a Yeshiva College undergrad now charged with crimes committed at the Capitol on January 6th.
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And, second-least anonymous anonymous item ever:
If you uncomplicatedly celebrate an athletic team that numbers an accused rapist among its ranks, but are very circumspect about what women in what leadership roles you acknowledge/invite;
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The only way to save our democracy is expand and protect voting rights. Otherwise, Republicans will get and keep power, without majority support, by disenfranchising people, mainly PoC.
The only way to do that is to nuke the filibuster. I don't know if Dems have what it takes.
165 new voting restrictions already introduced in 33 states this year according to
@BrennanCenter
. That number is rising every day.
This underscores why Dems need to pass John Lewis Voting Rights Act & For the People Act to stop GOP voter suppression
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(The heated was in large measure my fault--I got angry at him, and the engagement was unproductive.) But the arguments that he adduced could have come--I am sure did come, in some form--from the intellectual universe of Ben Shapiro, of whom he is an avid listener. (12/n)
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@chick_in_kiev
Naomi Wolf, in The Beauty Myth, argues that keeping that energy bottled-up is essentially the point of all unreasonable feminine beauty standards.
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Before we discuss halakha, before we craft policy, certainly before we plumb the intricacies of US law, we have to answer a basic question: Who do we want to be? Whom do we want our community to include? Who is in?
It is, indeed, Pharaoh's question: מִ֥י וָמִ֖י הַהֹֽלְכִֽים?
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Hoo boy, yes, we have a demand problem. But the demand problem is not "not enough women want to learn Gemara at a high level." The demand problem is that our community has not created the demand, socioculturally, economically, and infrastructurally, for Gemara-learned women.
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I said, I know you are wrong, *because the extremists have already prevailed.* States in the United States *already have laws on the books that ban abortion. That ban abortion in cases that halakha would allow it. That have no exception for the health of the mother.* (18/n)
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Another nephew got into a very heated argument with me last year about his right to use the word "retarded" to insult his sister *as we stood in a room with my niece/his first cousin who has Down Syndrome.* (11/n)
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I am utterly blown away by this appearing in Cross Currents. (You can read it and tell me all the ways it falls short, or you can read it and realize what an enormous sea change is reflected in this discussion, of these issues, this way, for this audience. I prefer the latter.)
“On my drive home from the cemetery, I wondered: What if Chani had married a man? What if instead of telling her parents she was lesbian, she had informed them that she had decided to stop keeping Shabbos – would they have ostracized her?”
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This, precisely. I never understood the moral panic around trigger warnings. Literally do not understand the critics' argument. A trigger warning is not an avoidance of difficult topics. It is an announcement that you are about to discuss a difficult topic, to give a heads up.
Unpopular opinion: if I show very gruesome images of war death & injury in my talks, I warn people. At least once, it was clear that was appreciated - by an adult man. We don't know who has experienced trauma/what triggers PTSD. Sometimes a warning is simply polite to do.
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Do we want a community limited to those who fit perfectly, or can pass as fitting perfectly? The straight, cis, married, with children, who all turned out right, neurotypical, physically and cognitively abled, frum (and Jewish) from birth, not too many questions, white (enough),
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To be clear:
A man was murdered in public in broad daylight on a subway.
Governor Hochul says he had it coming to him for being mentally ill in a public place.
This is disqualifying from public office anywhere, but especially on the Democratic Party line in New York State.
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Anyone who says that the state of affairs until last week was abortion on demand until viability is wildly misinformed or lying to you. Either way, you can decide how seriously to take anything else they say.) (14/n)
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It is the stated position of the national Republican Party to seek a national ban on abortion. Possibly with an exception to save the life of the mother. With no exception for maternal health, or rape or incest, or fetal abnormalities incompatible with life. (24/n)
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if that is the pain and sadness you hold around Pesach, while you imagine picture-perfect families behind everyone else's doors--
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