September 16, 2017

Stop eating that gross honey cake and try this apple cake!

I hate honey cake and refuse to suffer it on Rosh Hashana. Instead I make an apple cake recipe that's been in my family for as long as I can remember. You probably have one too but I'll share mine.

It's parve so you can serve with milchig or fleishig.

Apple Cake (for Yom tov or anytime)

Ingredients:
3 c. All Purpose flour
2 c. white sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp fine salt
4 eggs
1 c. canola oil
½ c. orange juice
2 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp cinnamon
4-5 apples, peeled, cored, and chopped (A rough chop bigger than bite size is fine)

What to do:


1. Set aside chopped apples in bowl 1, and toss with the cinnamon.
2. In bowl 2, combine the flour, salt, and baking powder
3. In bowl 3, beat eggs, sugar, oil, juice and vanilla.
Add bowl 3 to bowl 2, and mix until just combined (Don’t overmix!)
4. Pour half of the batter into a greased cake pan, baking dish, or bundt pan (make sure it’s deep enough because this cake rises a lot)
5. Add a layer of your chopped apples (about ½ of the amount of apples)
6. Pour the rest of the batter on top of your apple layer
7. Top with remaining apples
Bake at 350 degrees for about 60-80mins (Until a toothpick comes out clean)

September 6, 2017

The massacre at the Munich Olympic Games was 45 years ago Sep 5th-6th.

May their memory be a blessing and Hashem Yikom Damam.

While it seems so long ago, we must never forget.

August 20, 2017

Ivanka Trump's rabbi deeply troubled by president's response to Charlottesville

A head rabbi at Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s New York City synagogue denounced President Trump’s response to the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, joining a chorus of political and religious leaders who say the president was wrong to blame “both sides” for the violence.

In a letter Wednesday to his congregation, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein wrote that his community had been “consumed” by the “frightening message and fallout” from the hate-fueled mayhem that left one woman dead and others injured last weekend.

“We are appalled by this resurgence of bigotry and antisemitism, and the renewed vigor of the neo-Nazis, KKK and alt-right,” read the letter, which was signed by Lookstein and two other rabbis. “While we always avoid politics, we are deeply troubled by the moral equivalency and equivocation President Trump has offered in his response to this act of violence.”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/17/ivanka-trumps-rabbi-deeply-troubled-by-presidents-response-to-charlottesville/?utm_term=.9a4e1c86afe3

August 18, 2017

Barcelona Chief Rabbi Urges Jews to Leave Spain: 'This Place Is Lost

http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/1.807706?v=4AC74ED5C9670B361DAD0B6343570B5E


Barcelona Chief Rabbi Urges Jews to Leave Spain: 'This Place Is Lost'
Rabbi Meir Bar-Hen says Spain is Europe's 'hub of Islamist terror' and that he's been encouraging congregants to buy property in Israel

JTA
16:56
Commenting on deadly attacks in Catalonia, the chief rabbi of that region in Spain said that his community is doomed, partly because of radical Islam and authorities’ alleged reluctance to confront it.

More at the link above. Jews are already leaving France. Now Spain?

August 15, 2017

Teen tackled by bystanders after vandalizing Boston Holocaust memorial

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/15/teen-tackled-by-bystanders-after-vandalizing-boston-holocaust-memorial/?utm_term=.7074f2785bc4

The New England Holocaust Memorial in downtown Boston was vandalized Monday night by a 17-year-old who was immediately tackled by bystanders and held until police arrived, police said.

The teen hurled a rock through a glass panel etched with numbers, representing those tattooed on the arms of the Jews and others in the concentration camps operated by Nazi Germany, police said. The panels are affixed to six glass towers, each 54 feet high.

It was the second act of vandalism in less than three months at the site, located in Carmen Park near historic Faneuil Hall. The suspect in Monday’s incident was charged with willful destruction of property.

July 21, 2017

NOTHING TO CONNECT THEM EXCEPT HATRED: THE TORCY-CANNES GANG AND THE PROBLEM OF ANTI-SEMITIC ISLAMIS

Sept. 19, 2012, was the morning after Rosh Hashanah and the fridge was empty. Joël Benguigui, 57, and his wife, Joëlle, were heading home after a stop at the kosher hypermarket in the city of Sarcelles, near Paris, when Joëlle realized she’d forgotten to buy chicken. The couple did a U-turn, but instead of driving all the way back to the kosher hypermarket they decided to stop at its rival, the Naouri store, into which two fragmentation grenades were about to be thrown.

Joël remembers that as his wife walked into the store, he waited for her near the smoked-glass doors in front of the checkout where his phone worked better so they could exchange text messages. “All of a sudden I heard a great ‘boom!’ I saw some smoke. I thought of a firecracker,” he remembered. “Then the glass door just caved in. It simply fell on itself.”

The smoked-glass windows meant that the outside of the store wasn’t visible from where Joël stood. Yet between the explosion and the collapse of the doors he’d had the time to discern two silhouettes running. When the door fell, he jumped outside by reflex, in search, he would later rationalize, of what he thought to be two foolish kids. “I think I thought of running after them. But they had already vanished,” he remembered.

On the sidewalk, a small crowd attracted by the commotion had started to gather. Some people approached Joël and told him he was hurt. “No, I’m not,” he replied. “It’s a firecracker. But as I said that,” he continued, “I felt my arm was beginning to tickle and I looked and saw some blood. The back of my leg right behind the knee was bleeding as well. I said it probably was some piece of glass. Then I went back in to look for my wife and she was safe. But then that’s when I realized what had actually happened.” One of the two M75 fragmentation grenades had in fact landed right at Joëlle’s feet as she was approaching the checkout. Although the spoon had detached itself from the weapon, the grenade had miraculously misfired.

The second grenade had worked fine. M75 grenades are antipersonnel weapons of Yugoslavian fabrication. Their core contains some 3,000 steel balls with a 3-mm diameter and an effective killing radius of 30 to 50 meters. Yet miraculously, Joëlle received only two of those balls and no—one else was hurt—though Joëlle was later diagnosed as having permanently lost 20 percent of her hearing capacity because of the noise.

Joël and Joëlle Benguigui are Sephardic Jews from the Maghreb who define themselves as “a little bit more than just traditional Jews.” They attribute their good fortune in avoiding more serious injuries to “a miracle, a divine will.” One can also assume that the assailants threw the grenades blindly and that one landed near the door, which served as a shield. These details emerged progressively after Joël called 911 and a skeptical police arrived on the scene.

In 2011, 67.4 percent of the under-18 population of Sarcelles was of immigrant descent, compared with 19.7 percent for the French population at large. One third of the town’s population was Jewish, which is how Sarcelles acquired the nickname in France of the “small Jerusalem.” The town’s mayor from 1995 on had been Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who had conquered the town with the help of his wife, the journalist star Anne Sinclair, and the then all-powerful Socialist Party. His politics of harmonious cohabitation between the city’s various communities had been less charitably labeled vote-catching by some of his critics. In any case, in 2012, when the attack occurred, DSK’s political career—smashed by the accusations of sexual assaults against hotel maid Nafisatou Diallo in New York and the journalist Tristane Banon in Paris—was already in shambles, and so was the Socialist Party. In Sarcelles, there were concerns that, deprived of its leader, the town’s harmonious multiculturalism would go south. (Anti-Jewish riots would, in fact, explode two years later, during the summer of 2014.)

Does this local context partly account for the police reluctance to label the Naouri attack an anti-Semitic act? “When I said to the police officer who was interviewing me that I was the victim of an anti-Semitic aggression,” recalled Joël Benguigui, “he simply refused to write the word down. He said that at this point, no evidence could point out in that direction. Which I found especially amazing since he was recording my own statement, not discussing the result of an investigation.

More: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/240727/torcy-cannes-gang-anti-semitic-islamist-france

June 25, 2017

New Yiddish Film and the Transvernacular

After a silence of over half a century, a body of Yiddish-language films (broadly defined to include movies, television, and web series) have appeared in Yiddish since 2005. Translated from an English or Hebrew script into Yiddish dialogue, these films showcase fluently spoken dialogue delivered by and for non- or non-fluent Yiddish speakers. While the Yiddish in these films can be described as “postvernacular”—a mode where the language’s primary mode is symbolic—they also point to a novel use of Yiddish as a communicative language derived via translation. This study identifies two distinct streams: (1) films that employ Yiddish to match a given historical context, including the television series Shtisel (Ori Elon and Yehonatan Indursky, 2013-) and the multilingual feature film, Félix et Meira (Maxime Giroux, 2014); the prologues to A Serious Man (Coen Brothers, 2009), and The Cobbler (Tom McCarthy, 2015); the Yiddish-language feature films Homeland (Dani Rosenberg, 2009) and The Pin (Naomi Jaye, 2014); (2) films that employ Yiddish as a new expression of Jewish culture, including the comedy web series YidLife Crisis (Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, 2014-present). The analysis proposes a new concept: “Transvernacular Yiddish,” or communicative Yiddish derived through translation from another language. This study suggests that transvernaculity offers a new stage in the development of Yiddish.

https://ingeveb.org/articles/new-yiddish-film-and-the-transvernacular


**************** ****************

Long read but fascinating!

June 23, 2017

Otto Warmbiers family kept his Jewishness under wraps while North Korea held him hostage

WASHINGTON — The family of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who died on Monday, days after his release from 17 months of captivity in North Korea, was advised to keep his Jewish background and identity concealed while officials tried to negotiate his release.

That was because the North Korean justification for his imprisonment centered on a dubious claim that Warmbier had stolen a propaganda poster in a Pyongyang hotel lobby on orders from the Friendship United Methodist Church in Wyoming, Ohio, to bring it back “as a trophy” in exchange for a used car worth $10,000.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/otto-warmbiers-family-kept-his-jewishness-under-wraps-while-north-korea-held-him-hostage/

June 19, 2017

BDE Otto Warmbier

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/06/19/otto-warmbier-dies-days-after-release-from-north-korean-detainment/?tid=sm_fb&utm_term=.6bd0a4d317f3

😞

June 6, 2017

LGBT CONTINGENT INFILTRATED BY PROTESTERS AT CELEBRATE ISRAEL PARADE

On Sunday, the LGBT contingent of the Celebrate Israel Parade—made up of five Jewish LGBTQ organizations and the only openly gay group present on this day—marched proudly in one of New York City’s largest annual Jewish gatherings. At one point, the soundtrack accompanying their contingent was a popular Jewish techno song by Israeli pop artist Hashem Melech, which was blared from the parade’s sound system. The group of about 90 participants waved Israeli flags overhead. Most of them wore pride shirts; some of them were just teenagers for whom this was their first time marching in such an event.

Then, at around 1:45 in the afternoon, the music went silent.

According to Mordechai Levovitz, one of the organizers of the LGBT contingent as well as three others present, a female protester interrupted the sound system, causing it to go silent. Then, as seen in footage below, an estimated five protesters from Jewish Voice for Peace, a fringe group that advocates the total boycott of the state of Israel, disrupted the LGBT group. What many people described to me as a “whirlwind” ensued. Four of the five people that had been marching with the LGBT group took off the pride shirts that were given out to the marchers, revealing red shirts that said “Celebrate the end of apartheid all together.” They formed a barricade around the group, held up signs that read “Queer Jews for a free Palestine” and “No pride in apartheid,” which they also began chanting. The five were arrested.

Rebecca Vilkomerson, the Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace, said the LGBT marching contingent was “a carefully chosen target.” She explained that the protest was organized by “a group of queer Jews who feel strongly about gay rights not being used to pinkwash the occupation

Rest of article at link: http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/236292/lgbt-contingent-infiltrated-by-protesters-at-celebrate-israel-parade?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=post&utm_term=LGBT+Contingent+%E2%80%98Infiltrated%E2%80%99+by+Protesters+at+Celebrate+Israel+Parade&utm_content=june2017


This really angers me. They didn't need to infiltrate a group. Bunch of weak asses can hold a protest and need to infiltrate a group? Really?