Livre d'Or

Freedom of speech

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:33:02 GMT

There's been a rant I have been meaning to turn into an essay for a while, but Ken White (Popehat) has done it better, so I direct you to his really well-written and referenced (though US-centric) article: The Fashionable Notion of 'Free Speech Culture' Is Justifying State Censorship, Ironically. Criticism. Is. Not. Censorship, and “Free speech culture” has a natural tendency to discount the speech rights and interests of people who criticize speech.

This is important in Europe too, not just in the US, because it's a deliberate, specific Russian infowar tactic to promote far right events at UK universities and claim censorship if anyone objects. A network based at [Cambridge] University and backed by Thiel, which it said was using the issue of free speech to “normalise white nationalism on UK campuses”. Neither Putin nor Thiel has anyone's freedom at heart, and they're all too successful at distracting people with a toddler-like notion of "freedom" where you get to say the naughty words without being told off.

There's a story that many people repeat that goes: some people on the left have abandoned the principle of freedom of speech in a misguided attempt to promote racial justice, but I, a sophisticated person, understand that freedom of speech is only meaningful if you protect the free speech of people you disagree with. It's a plausible, even seductive lie; certainly freedom of speech applies to people with horrible opinions if it is a meaningful right at all. But there's a huge gulf between making laws to protect people with racist opinions from being punished by the state merely for having opinions, and insisting that every influential organization, whether an educational institution or high-profile media, whether a private business, a charity, or connected to the state, must invite racists and transphobes to promote their message in front of broad audiences, and any suggestion to the contrary is the same as censorship. And it's always racists and transphobes; the 'whatabout disagreeable speech' folk never protect the rights of anyone except white, racist men and white TERFs. Actually, there's no conflict between real freedom of speech and racial justice; the bad consequences of saying racist things should be limited, but racists don't have an automatic right to be "free" from anyone disagreeing with them, let alone a right to be applauded and their ideas promoted.

There's a faux, "free-speech culture" approach to moderation of internet discussions, too. It is simply not true that completely unmoderated forums where users have no control over their interactions promote free speech and anything else is a bad compromise. Having to accept mass, organized groups of people threatening you with violence any time you say anything that might be uncomfortable for the worst racists is not a win for free speech. X is not a free speech haven because it allows users to post the N-word (but bans the word 'cis') and use GenAI to create CSAM images. (And that's aside from their known reputation for blocking certain views of global conflicts and promoting others.) Dreamwidth, which actually fights for free speech in the US courts, stands up to payment processors who don't want sexually explicit (but legal) material, and actively refuses to comply with Russian state censorship even at considerable person risk, is on the side of free speech. But DW also gives me the tools to ban you if you come at me or my friends with racial slurs, graphic threats of violence or just plain bullying.

I would argue that that's not only compatible with freedom of speech, it's actually an essential part of it. Though the gangs using the internet to automate attacks on individuals whose speech they don't like are not exactly the state, and what they're doing is a different vector of attack from traditional "censorship". Still, the bare minimum we need to have meaningful freedom of speech is automated tools to defend each other from automated attacks.

comments

Education privilege

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 13:47:51 GMT

I want to talk about the education privilege meme that's been doing the rounds. On the one hand I love old-school memes that encourage lots of cool people on my d-roll to talk about their experiences growing up. But at the same time, I'm kind of frowning at this particular iteration.

First up, I hesitated to fill out this meme because I hardly need a checklist to tell me I have so much "educational privilege" I'm basically a millionaire. It seems rather like showing off to write a long post about how I attended academically competitive fee-paying schools from 5 to 18, and have a First from an internationally famous university, and a PhD and I'm halfway through training to be a rabbi (another five year post-graduate academic and professional qualification). Both my parents and two of my four grandparents and two of my three siblings (3/4 if you count my foster brother) have completed professional and academic post-graduate qualifications. And I'm neurotypical and physically and mentally abled and Jewish and basically everybody in my entire life has actively supported me getting as much education as possible. The only reason this meme is anything other than disgustingly rude is that this is the social media site built around long-form writing; most of us are over-educated. Even with that I've seen some posts from people who with mixed feelings about everybody else posting about all the advantages that they didn't benefit from. In short it couldn't be more obvious that I have all the educational privilege in the world, and I would have to be very blinkered indeed to have somehow failed to notice that these advantages aren't universal.

Second, wait up, why are we rehashing the privilege knapsack from 1988? (Take a seat if you need to, but that was in fact nearly 40 years ago.) One thing about having a massive amount of education is that I have the skills to think critically and look for original sources! Rather than just smugly answer all the questions, let me respond to this like an educated person. McIntosh's work was groundbreaking at the time, and she came up with a memorable way of communicating to white women that although we experience sexism, we also have racial privilege. But is it still useful to be working with tools developed in that context? I was thinking that since the Privilege Knapsack we have discovered intersectionality, but when I looked it up I found that in fact Crenshaw was an exact contemporary of McIntosh and coined the term in 1989. This only adds to my suspicion that there's some agenda behind getting everybody to pretend we're in a women's studies intro course in the 1980s.

Third, and probably least important: why is this an education privilege meme and not purely a social class meme? This may be one of those transatlantic divides, come to think of it. Like Americans famously don't like talking about class, whereas English people are obsessed with it. To me, 'where did you you go to school?' is pretty much a socially acceptable way of asking, what class are you? OK, there exist rich parents who are abusive or neglectful or for other reasons actively obstruct their children's access to education. But basically most of the meme seems to be, did you have adequate resources and live in a neighbourhood with adequate resources? And did your family's social circle include people from the professional world? Do Americans really believe these things are unconnected to class background?

The other thought is bullying. I've seen many many posts where people ticked almost every item on the list except feeling physically and emotionally safe at school, because pretty much all of us with our heaps of education privilege were bullied, possibly by people with less education privilege (if that's actually a thing). I have mixed feelings about that too; I was bullied at school, but not in the way that the typical American high school drama trope goes. I was bullied mainly when I was under 10, not as a teenager. And it was mainly instigated by teachers and mainly about antisemitism, not by other kids who were angry with me for being academically successful. Even though I was very very much a nerd, I never experienced the jocks v nerds thing, or popular v outcast thing. That's partly a consequence of education privilege; I attended schools where getting high marks across the board was admired, not despised. I certainly wasn't popular but the girls who cared about such things ignored me rather than tormenting me.

I say girls – I think being in a single sex environment actually helped. People often claim that girls' "relational aggression" is just as bad as boys' physical violence, and I don't deny that some people are badly traumatized by bullying instigated by girls, but my experience is that it's a lot easier to ignore not being invited to certain parties than being beaten up. And there was homophobia as you'd expect in 1990s England, but people didn't clock me as not straight and I had it much easier than my (actually straight but somewhat effeminate) brother in a boys' school. What I didn't experience was sexual assault or any other forms of gender based aggression. And I didn't have any problem with people assuming that girls can't succeed academically or "shouldn't" do maths and science. That is an aspect of education privilege also not really captured by the meme. In late 20th century England, "good" schools (mostly fee paying but some state funded) were almost all single sex. On the one hand, I am politically against gratuitous segregation, and I know that the data showing that girls do better in girls-only educational settings is heavily confounded by the fact that well resourced schools were single sex when the data was collected. But in my case I think having a 10 year break when I didn't have to deal with teenage boys or significant adult sexism was an aspect of my education privilege.

Anyway, hopefully this is an adequate substitute for the meme and you don't need me to tell you in detail how absurdly precocious I was in reading and maths.

comments

Year in review 2025

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 17:39:36 GMT

My mother died in March. That feels like basically the only thing that happened this year, but of course it's not. Theoretically you stay in full mourning for a parent for a whole year (which hasn't ended yet); I haven't quite managed that, as done properly it's really quite intense, no social gatherings or live music for example, but it has definitely been the major theme in my life. And helping Dad to figure out what his life will be like as a widow.

I continued to be a student rabbi, making it through to the halfway point of my studies. I took on more and more complex rabbinic work, and got to know the incoming first year students. (We're the grownups now, there is actually only one finalist ahead of my cohort.) My much awaited and also somewhat dreaded trip to Israel got cancelled, due to the decision point coinciding with the particularly scary time when Israel was actively at war with Iran. I did some other short travel, even making it to Germany and Sweden.

Significant events:

Mum went from being officially terminally ill but mostly coping at the beginning of the year, to the drugs not working and being in a lot of pain in January-February, to actively dying. March-April was all the immediate aftermath of her death.
I had a few days with jack in Skegness, which I remember basically nothing about because it was in the middle of the final weeks of Mum's life. I think we stayed in a cute tiny house and did a bit of walking in the countryside. I have more memories of our trip to Norfolk in May.
I spent a very intense and overwhelming week in Germany at an Abrahamic faith retreat.
doseybat and verazea got married on a lightship on the Thames, and my partners had a Jewish blessing of their 20-year-old marriage, both on the same weekend.
I did a completely absurd amount of travelling for the High Holy Days, first day Rosh HaShanah in Southampton, second day in the Isle of Wight accompanied by the intrepid cjwatson, Shabbat Shuva in Stoke, Yom Kippur in Cornwall where I had to respond to the first fatal antisemitic attack in this country in my lifetime, Succot back home in Cambridge, a very flying visit to Sweden for the Shabbat during Succot with ghoti_mhic_uait, and back for Simchat Torah and returning to college.

Reading Basically the only thing I did with my unexpected free summer was to read a bunch of novels and actually get round to writing them up! Since then, because of all the aforementioned travel, I have also read:

The Incandescence by Emily Tesh. This ought to have been my favourite book ever, because I totally loved Some desperate glory and I am a complete sucker for school stories from the POV of teachers. It is very good, definitely stands out over several other Dark Academia / Harry Potter for grownups books that have come out recently. Saffy Walden is probably the character most like me I've ever seen in fiction and I do feel really quite called out by this book; it's very clear about how much damage a well-meaning person can do when they're over-invested in their own competence and a bit overly dedicated to their job. The portrayal of the school and the English class system and all the stuff that JKR fundamentally doesn't get is pitch perfect. But somehow the pacing didn't quite work for me; the plot twist where the big bad threat is not averted but actually happens should be breathtaking but Tesh pulls her punches by time skipping to the happy ending, and it all seems a bit too simple. So a lot to admire, but it's not quite the perfect book I hoped for. This Liz Bourke review will probably give you a pretty good idea whether you will enjoy the book!
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. This was recommended by my Principal during a panel discussion on books that changed our lives, and I'd been meaning to read it for a while. It's very lovely and not much like anything else; I really admired the characterization of the motherless Sophia and her grumpy but caring grandmother. It's a kind of series of vignettes which in some ways is as much about the island as the people, but absolutely one of the best portrayals I've seen of a young child who is astute but lacks world knowledge. In a way nothing happens in it, but it's still very absorbing.
Last friends by Jane Gardam. I picked this up in a charity shop because I forgot to take my Kindle to Cornwall when I had long train journeys. It's actually the third in the Old Filth trilogy and I wasn't totally convinced by the first two. It's good in the way that Gardam's books are always good, really deep character exploration particularly of people who are a bit weird in some way. The characters in LF are in the 2010s the last survivors of the generation directly affected by WW2. They are off-puttingly posh but also extremely real people as Gardam's characters always are.

So 10 books this year, of which Some Desperate Glory was definitely the stand-out.

Games Nothing really dominated this year, we've been dipping in to this and that. Still a fair amount of Innovation. When we have a bit more brain, Apiary. Very much a gamers' game and jack is much better at it than me. With the kids, bouncing between Dominion (usually the base game), which A likes, and Ascension which most of the rest of the family prefer. Continuing with party games like Apples to Apples and Bezzerwizzer (which is Trivial Pursuits with actually enjoyable gameplay) and the surprisingly challenging Chameleon. We got a bunch of games for end of year gifting season so I'll talk more about them in the new year.

Video games, mainly Wordatro, which is mostly just brain-soothing solving anagrams, with occasional forays into Roguebook when I have time to play a longer game. It's very pretty and all the cards are solid, but after a few plays it starts to suffer from the fact that it's all procedurally generated and there's no real plot. On the phone, Backpack Brawl (specifically that one and not lots of other games with similar names, the maker is Azur Interactive), where you merge items which are then used in an automated fight. It's supposedly PvP but I suspect all the 'opponents' are just scripts, you never have to wait to start a game or have someone quit on you midway or lose because the internet connection drops midgame. Fake PvP is totally fine with me! And my daily puzzles are Bracket City and recently The Daily Spell (thanks to radiantfracture for the extremely relevant rec!)

Media Um, not really? I watched I think two films in the entire year, Tron: Ares (2025) with cjwatson for his birthday, right at the end of its cinema run so we had to go all the way to Bedford, and we were just about the only people in the cinema. It is exactly what I wanted from a sequel to Tron, and I ended up asking for the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack for my birthday. Is it a good film if you're not precisely my age and from my subculture with nostalgia for the original Tron? No, no it is not, but it was perfect for me.

And yesterday Wake up, dead man (2025) with jack, because I foolishly went to a big 40^th birthday party where it was inconvenient to mask (food, dancing, loud background noise but lots of people I wanted to talk to), and have come away with a horrible cold and wasn't well enough for much else other than vegetating in front of a screen. Anyway it is perhaps not quite as awesome as the first two Benoit Blanc pieces, but twisty and full of memorably unpleasant characters. Basically no TV, I think we've managed a smattering of episodes of Owl House across the year and that's it. I listened to no music whatsoever. I've just started to get the hang of podcasts but nothing very systematic. Mostly All else is commentary from Alyth.

Culture:

Ballet Shoes in the theatre with ghoti_mhic_uait.
Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique at my first ever Prom with my family of origin.

Places:

Lincolnshire with jack in February
Norfolk with jack in May
Northamptonshire a few times to hang out with jack's Mum, and once for a retreat supporting lay service leaders
Brighton for P'tite Soeur's birthday
Educational trip to Portsmouth with ghoti_mhic_uait and the kids
Vallendar, Germany
Stockholm, Sweden with ghoti_mhic_uait. Aside from the visit to the Progressive community which was the purpose of the trip, we made it to Skogskyrkogården the famous cemetery (thanks to blue_mai for letting me know that this world heritage site was near where I used to live, years ago!) and the delightful transport museum.
Manchester to visit angelofthenorth and housemates, and for the golden anniversary of very old friends of Mum's

Plague:
Did not get Covid this year, did get a couple of very bad colds including the one that's knocked me out this week. I was vaccinated (school reimbursed me for the exorbitant cost) in spring before Pesach, but haven't managed to get an autumn / winter booster. I hoped to get a dose before travelling for the High Holy Days but availability didn't start until mid-October, too late not only for me but for the start of school and university terms. And since then I've been so busy I just haven't got round to it, I will try again in January. Most of my family also managed to avoid the plague, so I suppose that's something. My immune-compromised sister-out-law did catch it but seems to have come through ok.

Rabbinic work:
Reform services in:

Hull
Mosaic Reform (Stanmore), several times as I was covering the rabbi's sabbatical leave. Including first day Pesach.
Kehillat Kernow (Cornwall), Shabbat and Yom Kippur
South Hampshire, Rosh HaShanah
Isle of Wight, Rosh HaShanah
Oaks Lane (Essex), as part of a complex, team-lead Shavuot
Bromley (including chanting the Torah portion in public, with the special 'shalshelet' note)
Edgware and Hendon (shiva prayers, as part of placement)
Amazingly enough since they don't approve of rabbis, two services in my own home community in Cambridge, once co-leading with cjwatson who is building up service leading skills, and once as a pickup because the person on the rota dropped out at the last minute due to illness

Liberal services in:

Birmingham
ELELS (Woodford) for placement
Mosaic Liberal

Orthodox services in Stoke-on-Trent, Shabbat Shuva plus one stone setting. Non-denominational but Reform-ish Seder at Mosaic, joint across all three communities.

Teaching:

Coached one young man for bar mitzvah
Continued to teach Hebrew to adult beginners and improvers in Cambridge
One-off conversion class sessions for Mosaic
One-off conversion class sessions for Shaarei Tzedek (Whetstone)

Dreamwidth
13 posts this year, same as last year but most of them are locked posts about Mum with occasional general diary updates. Didn't really write any essays. I read everything, I'm still appreciating the people I met via the friending meme two years ago, but I'm not exactly reciprocating as well as I'd like.

End of year name and pronouns update No change from last year. Rachel or Liv if you know me in person or online, Dr B if you're being formal. She/her > Neopronouns eg zie/hir > they or he. No shortenings / nicknames for my first names, no thankyou to Mrs. I am not a rabbi yet and should not be referred to as Rabbi, but if you're curious, if everything goes to plan I will eventually be 'Rabbi Dr B' in formal contexts, or 'R Rachel' informally.

Previous versions: [2004] [2005] [2006] [2007] [2008] [2009] [2010] [2011] [2012] [2013] [2014] [2017] [2018] [2019] [2020] [2021] [2022] [2023][2024] Amazingly this is my 19th review of the year; I've been going since 2004 but there were a couple of years in the middle I missed out.

comments

Yom Kippur

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 12:45:09 GMT

Content note: mentions antisemitic murders and police violence. I personally am completely safe, I'm only talking about dealing with news.

It's around midday Yom Kippur. I'm leading the morning service with a tiny community in the southwest corner of England. There's a slight hiatus as this congregation only have two Torah scrolls, so we have to roll through from the first reading in Exodus to the second reading in Leviticus, saving the second scroll for the afternoon reading from Deuteronomy. (In this community, like most of the Progressive world, our second reading is Leviticus 19, not the verses that are sometimes used as clobber texts to support homophobia.) While there's milling about, the volunteers running the tech for Zoom approach me at the bimah and let me know that there has been an attack in a synagogue in Manchester.

First, why did we even know about this, when it's the Sabbath of Sabbaths and people aren't using their phones? Because we're running Zoom from a laptop under Windows, and Windows likes to pop up breaking news tickers. At least it was only the laptop, we didn't have the Zoom participants projected onto a big screen like many shuls do. But the Zoom techs know, and now everyone knows, that an Orthodox synagogue in North Manchester was attacked during their Yom Kippur service and two people were killed.

The next thing is that most people do in fact turn their phones back on to find out more. Not just from morbid curiosity, but to find out if people they know are safe. Almost everybody has Manchester connections, myself included. And also because we suddenly remember we've been told by the CST that for safety, at least someone in each community should be reachable by phone, even though it's the Sabbath of Sabbaths and we shouldn't be using tech. (This advice is given to, and mostly followed by, Orthodox communities as well, where they often take the prohibition very seriously.) Messages of sympathy and checking in if we're ok come pouring in. The CST remind us not to gather near the entrance of the synagogue, but to disperse immediately when we leave, and reassure us that the police are on standby. I don't know whether people get distracted and start scrolling other stuff on their phones, probably they do, but I can hardly blame them, Even if they're very disciplined about only checking their people are safe and not opening any other part of the pocket Skinner box, they're in a very different headspace from when we were fully focused on some combination of praying and daydreaming or internal reflection.

By Musaf, the additional service that follows the morning service, and is considered the deepest point of the holiest day, we know a little more. The name of the synagogue, that there was a car ramming attack and the knife-wielding attacker killed two people. The rabbi and congregation barricaded the doors, following a protocol that we all drill and rehearse regularly, and the attacker was "only" able to harm people who happened to be outside at the time, late comers, people who had gone out for a break and some fresh air, the security volunteers. That the police had arrived within minutes and shot the attacker dead.

I'm a student less than halfway through my training, but I'm the only authority this congregation have. I carry on with Musaf, (we later learn that even the synagogue directly attacked did in fact go back to their service once the immediate emergency had been dealt with) but the timbre is very different from what I had planned. I read the prayer-poem Unetaneh Tokef which contains a section about people who die by violence without completing their natural span. We've just updated to a new prayerbook; the old one presented a lot of Shoah-related material in the context of remembering Jewish martyrs, which has been included in Musaf since Mediaeval times, with descriptions of famous martyrs killed by the Romans as a stand-in for victims of Crusader and other anti-Jewish violence. The new one still has this section, but attempts to shift the focus to ways to sanctify God's name through living holy lives as well as through martyrdom. That really did not go to plan. We're right back into, everybody hates Jews and wants us dead. Act, we pray, for the sake of those killed for your holy name.

Yizkor, the memorial service, is a mess. Partly because I didn't manage to get through it without crying, the first Yizkor when I have to mention my mother. Partly because on top of everything else the community had also just heard the news of the sudden death the previous day of a beloved trans elder, they knew she was sick but didn't know she was terminal, and it was faster than even the pessimistic prognosis she'd been given. I explain that we don't usually include people in Yizkor who haven't yet been buried, but obviously we're thinking about this person, and the two killed in Manchester that morning, though we didn't yet know their names. May God remember our pioneers and community builders. May God remember our martyrs.

All this was Thursday. Since then we know somewhat more details about what actually happened. Though people didn't wait until official statements had been released to speculate about the killer's identity and his motives. Some were sure he was a far right extremist, others a pro-Palestinian activist. The claims that he was a trans antifa marxist nazi immigrant are obvious American culture war nonsense and hopefully nobody in the UK takes that sort of crap seriously. What do we actually know? That he's a British man of Syrian origin, with the first name 'Jihad', that scary religious concept that lots of Islamophobes are already paranoid about. That one of the dead and one of the seriously injured Jewish people were in fact shot by the police; the original killer didn't have a gun. We may never know his views on Palestine though lots of people are perfectly convinced they can guess.

All those people, in my community and elsewhere, who were feeling relieved and reassured that the police showed up so promptly, and grateful that armed police attended many synagogues around the country, when in fact the police are responsible for two shootings, I don't know. I was ready to concede that much as I hate the whole CST security stuff, the constant clamour for increased policing of synagogues and Jewish spaces, maybe in this case they did actually prevent a horrible attack from being even worse. And that could still be true: if the police hadn't been so quick to shoot innocent bystanders, maybe the attacker would have managed to get in to the synagogue building and stab more people. I went to my home synagogue this Shabbat, purely as a congregant, and there were armed police patrolling outside; they didn't make me feel protected and secure, but they did have that effect for other people. Several of my fellow students, like me leading Yom Kippur solo in small communities, didn't hear about the attack from a stupid Windows ticker, but because the police entered their synagogues and informed them what was going on. Some felt reassured when the police showed up, others, particularly those who have been mistreated by racist and bigoted police in the past, felt scared, for most it's probably a mixture of both.

We also now know the name of the rabbi of the congregation attacked; I've met him, he is the one Orthodox rabbi who showed up to lead the funeral of a child whose family situation wasn't completely regular according to Orthodox standards. A funeral I spent some time thinking might be my responsibility. And the partner of one of the student rabbis had kids praying in that area, not at the specific synagogue attacked but within a few streets of it, kids who are themselves observant Orthodox Jews and don't carry or use their phones on Yom Kippur, so they didn't know they were safe until nightfall. And non-Jewish friends who live in the area and have good reason to be very scared and disturbed about the sudden influx of police everywhere. We're one degree of separation away at most. It could have been any one of us. Probably, probably, violent fanatics are more likely to attack visible Orthodox synagogues in heavily Jewish areas than tiny Progressive congregations that meet in some hired hall in a remote town. That's not much to hold on to.

As for the media and political response, what can I say? I'm not at all impressed with the attack being used as an excuse to crack down even further on democratic, peaceful protests. Even Jewish organizations are joining in with the calls to ban the protests about Palestine Action, or even to charge the demonstrators with hate crimes. The Palestine Action protests are not even specifically pro-Palestine though probably most of the participants do care about the suffering of people in Gaza, but the main aim is protesting the very heavy-handed designation of Palestine Action as a "terrorist" organization, authorizing the arrests of anyone who so much as states "I support Palestine Action" or possibly even "I am against genocide in Gaza", since that could be said to be agreeing with Palestine Action's aims. This draconian policing doesn't make Jews safer, it undermines free speech. And there is absolutely no credible evidence that pro-Palestine demonstrations and campaigns had anything to do with the attack on the synagogue on Thursday.

Also some dickhead has firebombed a mosque since then, thankfully there was no loss of life but it's still very upsetting. It could be some kind of twisted "retaliation" for the attack on Thursday, or it could just be random violence. I am also angry with the pro-Palestine activists who are blaming Jews for everything. No, a bunch of English Jews did not deserve to be stabbed during Yom Kippur (or on any other day) because they might possibly be "Zionist" in the sense that they may or may not give money to Israeli charities or may have visited Israel or feel a cultural connection to the country. This is not resistance or intifada or in any way helpful to the people suffering in Gaza and elsewhere in the middle east. It is perfectly reasonable that most UK Jews are upset and scared about this attack that we are quite closely connected to, that doesn't mean we're callous about, let alone responsible for, whatabout the dozens of people killed in Gaza by the Israeli military on the same day. No, it's not the fault of some sinister Jewish conspiracy to prevent people accessing medical care that Manchester hospitals were put on lockdown on Thursday; that was the police response to a violent attack and you can blame the murderer or the police or both but it's nothing to do with "Jewish supremacist Zionists".

I am scared of continued or copycat violence against Jews. I am probably more scared of backlash against Muslims / Arabs / brown people / immigrants in general, especially knowing the attacker had an Arab name. And I am more scared of this incident being used to undermine democracy, protest, free speech and criticism of the establishment, and secondarily of Jews being blamed for that response. I am worried about how the Jewish community in general may react out of the fear engendered by this attack. Also, I am deeply grateful for the kind people who checked in with me personally when they heard the news, and for all the leaders, Muslim, Christian and civic, who sent messages of support to the Jewish community and continue to be in solidarity with us.

comments

Reading not-Wednesday 23/8

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 16:34:50 GMT

One advantage of my unexpected free month was that I started reading books again. Not a lot but 6 complete novels and a longfic in 6 weeks, which is more than I have for years. Let me catch up with some brief reviews:

Since term properly, properly finished on 6 July, I have read:

Circe by Madeline Miller 2018, Pub 2018 Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781526612519
Coconut Unlimited by Nikesh Shukla (c) Nikesh Shukla 2010, Pub 2010 Quartet, ISBN 978-0-7043-7204-7
Will Super Villains be on the final? by Naomi Novik, illustrated by Yishan Li (c) Temeraire LLC 2011, Pub 2011 Del Rey, ISBN 978-0-345-51656-5
Some desperate glory by Emily Tesh (c) Emily Tesh 2023, Pub 2023 Orbit, ISBN 978-0-356-51718-6
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (c) Ann Leckie 2015, Pub 2015 Orbit, ISBN 978-0-356-50242-7
A free man of color by Barbara Hambly (c) Barbara Hambly 1997, Pub 1998 Bantam, ISBN 0-553-57526-0
I transmigrated into Cordelia Naismith! by Lanna Michaels, 2025

I enjoyed but didn't love Miller's The Song of Achilles; I found Circe to be strong in the same ways but much more exciting. It really hits the notes remarkably well of both a myth, about gods and monsters and heroes and epic scale, and a novel about a person who seems entirely real. Circe really wrestles head-on with the situation of a woman who is powerful and privileged and certainly capable of using her power for harm, but is still subject to the cruelty of men who can physically overpower her and have the backing of the whole of male-dominated society.

As such it is often really hard to read; I don't mind feminist takes on classical mythology that make the women the viewpoint characters, but Miller's Circe is something far more raw than that, it's a kind of extended wail of anger about how all of Western society mistreats women. It's also really gripping even when you kind of know the plot (because it's in the Odyssey and other foundational texts of said Western society.) It isn't about relentless grinding violence, either; the ending, with Circe's friendship with Penelope is really sweet, and there are plenty of other moments of happiness and success. Circe comes out a winner in a way that makes sense to her, even if she doesn't overturn all the terrible power structures she (and the other characters) are caught in. Definitely recommended if you're feeling strong.

Coconut Unlimited was a present from my brother Thuggish Poet an embarrassingly long time ago – he thought I might relate to the experience of being a minority in a private school. However, CU is so firmly a book about a boy in a boys' school that there was almost no point of connection! Shukla pulls off a pretty unusual feat, which is writing from the point of view of a teenage boy who doesn't really see girls / women as people, but without either glorifying gross teenage boy attitudes or inviting the reader to feel superior to the protagonist. Part of how he does this is framing the story as reminiscence, with three established and secure adults looking back on their teenage years. Honestly it's one of the best coming-of-age stories I've come across in a while. Amit and his friends do absolutely stupid things for reasons that totally make sense within their limited, teenage worldview, and they could be incredibly cringey, but Shukla keeps them sympathetic.

Another reason why I was very unlike Amit and his friends is race. I might have been almost the only Jewish kid in school but I'm white. And overt antisemitism in the 90s was much less socially acceptable than anti-Asian racism (though it did exist, and I think my brothers in an all-male environment like the one in the book suffered more of it than I did in a girls' school). Also, my parents are not first gen immigrants, so I didn't have any of the issues around having on some level "better" language and cultural knowledge than them. I was also never tempted by or anxious about having street cred or whether people saw me as white or not, the titular "coconut" thing just wasn't an issue for me. It was always obvious that Black American youth culture was not for me, but that's not because I was more enlightened than Amit, just plainly more white.

Basically I was hugely invested in the three friends and their journey to figuring out a way to be themselves, navigating their various cultures' expectations of them.

I asked jack for recs, and he offered Will Super Villains be on the final?, and I said, no, I need more words. I decided to try this graphic novel about a superhero academy, by an author whose prose I like, and it turned out I was right, graphic novels just don't have enough words for me. Possibly if I'd read the whole series at one go rather than just the first volume, I might have felt less unsatisfied? But I just didn't like it enough to want to seek out the rest.

It's fine. It takes a fairly clichéd story of a teen girl with extra-special amazing powers who for flimsy narrative reasons isn't accepted at her new school, but then saves the day. Not a bad example of that genre, Li's drawings and Novik's writing are definitely competent, I could tell the characters apart, the story is pacey. It's manga-style both in terms of the art and the book as a physical object that is somewhere between a periodical and a book, cheap paper, line drawings only, and I haven't read a lot of manga. The story fit very comfortably into standard western school story / superhero comic grooves. For me the most interesting part was the endnotes about how Novik and Li worked together to create the characters, but that's a lot to do with the fact that it was a few pages of whole paragraphs.

Everybody loves Some desperate glory, all my friends think it's awesome and it's swept all the awards. Now I've got round to reading SDG, I entirely concur, it really is that good. I massively loved it. It has great characterization, and great world-building and it's an exciting space adventure that also cares about the ethics of ~conquering new worlds~. And it does a really interesting job of tackling the narrative problem of characters going back in time to fix bad history. My only slight criticism is that I could see the first twist coming, but not at all the second one or any of the twists after that, it kept on pulling the rug from under my feet even when I was primed to expect it to have sudden reveals. It pulls off well something which is far too often done badly: what if a fascist was sympathetic and not just a monster? And it's just impeccable writing throughout.

I think I did Ancillary Mercy a disservice by reading it absolutely years after Ancillary Sword, and immediately after Some Desperate Glory. Leckie is good in much the same way Tesh is, incredibly original space opera with great characterization and nuanced ethical questions about (space) empires. The too long since I read AS and AJ problem was mitigated by the fact that Breq tends to infodump a lot about her experience of being a human who used to be a spaceship, and the complex political situation she's dealing with, so she kind of filled in the bits that I'd forgotten.

I particularly enjoyed how AM works with Lieutenant Tisarwat as a Mary Sue character, with plot-relevant violet eyes and precocious talents, and completely subverts that trope. And generally I really cared about every character, even the small side-plot ones. The ending felt satisfying in some ways, it sort of wraps up all the problems identified in AJ (and expanded in AS), the all-powerful aliens, the use of clones, and Anaander Mianaai herself. Maybe a bit too neat? But I'm partly disappointed because I didn't want everything to be resolved, I wanted to read more of Breq and her crew desperately battling and scheming to save the galaxy from imminent doom. But I think there's two more novels in the same 'verse, even if we're not getting more of one of the best SF heroes this century.

I was very interested in this classic detective novel in the really unusual setting of 19^th century New Orleans. And in fact it really worked well for me as a detective novel and as a showcase for Hambly's in-depth period research. Sort of like the Heyer detective novels, except that a book set in the US pre-Emancipation with a Black main character is deeply about racism rather than glossing over racism. I couldn't guess whodunnit but then I never really can; aFMoC didn't feel like a puzzle novel anyway, I was very interested in getting to know the characters and their backgrounds and motivations, not really solving the murder. There is a certain amount of violence but it's not especially gory by the standards of detective novels, and thankfully it neither minimizes racism nor presents the suffering of enslaved people voyeuristically.

I was intrigued to see what sort of author would write a detective like Benjamin January, and learned to my slight suprise that Hambly is a white woman deeply embedded in SF fandom, well enough connected to have relied on Octavia Butler (!!!) as a sensitivity reader. I was interested in, and educated by, Hambly's author's note about the fine social distinctions between people with different Black ancestry in the period. What I appreciated most about aFMoC was that the stakes are genuinely high; obviously it's bad if someone gets away with murder in any context, but in this novel January is in real danger of being re-enslaved. Unlike Tesh, Hambly is of a generation who warn for historic racism, but not for rape and child abuse, and there's rather a lot of the latter, though it's off screen.

I don't know that I'll rush out to read all the rest of the Benjamin January novels, but I'm glad I did try this classic introduction of the character.

I utterly loved I transmigrated into Cordelia Naismith! It's a perfect, delightful exploration of the fantasy shared by many geeky women of a certain age of being Cordelia from Lois McMaster Bujold's Shards of Honor. lannamichaels always writes really strong Vorkosiverse fic, and very much captures both what is great about Bujold (including her voice, super impressive), and also her problems. And I just rolled around in ITiCN! It really does feel like getting a bit more of Bujold's early in the series writing, and the glimpses of the OC who gets to be Cordelia are glorious. And also it gives very justified criticism of all that's wrong with the books (slight spoilers for the remainder of the series), but in a subtle, not heavy-handed way. I stayed up til 3 am reading to the end (which I am usually pretty disciplined about avoiding) and I really wanted to spend more time with not!Cordelia.

It's rated G on AO3, which I'm sure is correct by Archive standards, but I would kind of hesitate to give it to an actual 12yo. There is some sexual detail, not very explicit but more than just fade-to-black, and it has about the same level of triggery stuff as the original: the plot depends on rape and torture and murder and and war and partner abuse, but these things are mostly in the background.

I don't know how well this would work if you don't know canon; I think you would probably get something out of a very solid 30K word isekai space opera but it does kind of assume familiarity with the source material. But if you are at all a fan of Shards of Honor you should definitely read the fic!

Up next: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson.

comments

Weddings

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 19:17:56 GMT

This weekend one of my oldest friends got married, and my partners celebrated their 20^th anniversary with a Jewish blessing and wedding canopy. So I had a lovely lovely time, and also I'm very much reminded that there's a crowd of (mostly somewhat connected) people I've been friends with for most of 30 years and I should make more active effort to actually spend time with them because they are awesome.

Sometimes lifecycle events mean learning something new about people you've known for decades. In doseybat's case, it was that they have a brother-in-law who owns a decommissioned lightship on the Thames which he lets out as a recording studio. I learned this because it was the extremely original venue for the wedding!

The lightship was covered in Pride flag bunting, and beautifully crafted origami bats, dragons and paper cabbages, made by blue_mai whom I've known since we were 10. The attendees were all visibly alternative sort of people in ways that have continuity with how we were in the 90s and 2000s. In fact I knew almost all the guests well enough to be excited to catch up with old friends; there were a few relatives of verazea's whom I don't really know, and the residents of the lightship, and one extremely lovely new person, a New Zealander whom I clicked with instantly (and I presume unlike everybody else is NODW). But mostly, the very people who kept me sane and connected through university and moving away for my science career. And whom I haven't seen nearly enough of partly because we're all in our mid-40s and busy, but mainly because of the accursed 5 year pandemic.

So I caught up over coffee with some of the early birds, and then we went onto the ship (by means of jumping over a slightly alarming gap between the jetty and the gangplank), and played middle-sized jenga (not fully giant, but also bigger than a standard set) made of pieces wombled and then painted in shiny jewel colours by squirmelia. It turns out that playing jenga with painted pieces, balanced on a not entirely flat capstan, on a ship in windy conditions is a little challenging, and it made a terrifying clatter when someone lost. Then we ate tasty tasty Chinese food (carefully labelled as 'vegetarian' or 'contains prawns' which seemed to cover most people's dietary requirements). And got trapped by a strategically laid out Millennium Falcon jigsaw. And bounced at pfy and hairyears and other old friends and exchanged life stories with the one new-to-me person.

We painted chairs with botanical and other doodles and messages of love and congratulations, and in the course of the evening doseybat and verazea sat down in them and were married by ewt. She and I were geeking out a bit about being officiants at weddings; Bat and Sarah had asked for a non-religious wedding, and I was interested to note that in some ways it's easier to do a non-religious but Christian flavoured wedding than a Jewish equivalent. Because all the wording of the Christian ceremony is so culturally embedded, like "Do you, X, take Y to be your lawful wedded spouse?" and "For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health". I haven't yet been asked to do a non-theistic Jewish wedding, but I have thought about how such a thing might work. At some point during the ceremony the tide rose and lifted the ship, which was delightful.

I'm not in a good position to judge because I'm the least introvert person ever, but it seemed like it was as introvert-friendly as a wedding party could be. There was plenty of space for quiet, one-to-one conversation and very little enforced jollity. Also most of the ship is, obviously, outdoors and most people were prepared to wear masks while below decks. Part of the reason why I haven't seen lots of these people very frequently lately is that they're generally the most Covid-cautious section of my friendship group, and when we don't have the easy default of, let's all go to the pub at [time], or let's all pile into someone's living room and chat and eat snacks, it's just that much harder to arrange anything. I miss low-key house parties and meet-ups. But I have renewed my determination to invite specific people to do specific social things; one-on-one you can of course set what level of Covid precautions you can agree on.

Sunday was a boiling hot day, less ideal than the cool, breezy weather that graced doseybat and verazea's wedding. We turned up at the synagogue in our pretty clothes and unloaded all the amazing (entirely gluten-free!) food that ghoti_mhic_uait had acquired and prepared. We realized belated we hadn't quite planned around dealing with door security (for regular services there's a volunteer rota), but we managed to let people in without anyone needing to miss out too much. It turned out that ghoti_mhic_uait had never been to a Jewish wedding before, and not even set eyes on a chuppah before standing under one, which seems like a bit of a failure on my part as a student rabbi partner, but it was all ok.

I was impressed by how many people showed up for the pre-wedding study session which was my contribution to the occasion. I taught the book of Tobit, focusing on the marriage-relevant bits. That was really an interesting exercise with a mixed audience of mostly Christians with no experience of Jewish-style text study, and Jews who have never heard of Tobit and don't know the plot, since it isn't in our Bible. Fortunately I had to write an essay last term about how I might present Tobit at a wedding or blessing ceremony, so Rab school had definitely set me up well for that one. People seemed interested and asked good questions.

There's quite an overlap between ghoti_mhic_uait and cjwatson's friendship group, and doseybat's friendship group, mostly because lots of the core people were contemporaries at Cambridge. But I avoided the temptation to go around making connections between the people who came to the Sunday wedding with the people I'd been hanging out with the day before; I think the centre of the Venn diagram is probably wildeabandon, the_alchemist and themidnightgirl. Also lots of Jewish community people as you'd expect, and some home ed people, some of whom brought children / teenagers so OSOs' weren't the only young people. Also my Dad and brother and his friend who finally made it over from France after total visa doom, which was awful but their being there at all was a silver lining because they'd otherwise have been away this week.

FK led the ceremony, which she is brilliant at. We included bits from the first, Christian, wedding which are suitable for use in synagogue, such as a hymn which is a setting of Ps 148, and the couple renewing their vows (which isn't usually part of a Jewish wedding). The three younger kids and fivemack supported the chuppah (the eldest was supposed to be there too but was delayed due to traffic and missed the ceremony). Various friends and family read the 7 blessings, changing 'bride and groom' to 'man and wife'. cjwatson stamped on the glass, FK made a sexist joke and ghoti_mhic_uait heckled her, so that was all in order.

Then we ate the extremely tasty tea and drank prosecco and chatted to the guests and I was again reminded that I should make more effort to spend time with our generally awesome friends. fivemack had managed to conjure up a ceilidh band, and themidnightgirl called the dancing with huge brilliance. There was a mix of experienced dancers and people who needed a fair amount of support, not to mention the two francophones who had never experienced British folk dancing at all before, so we all had fun trying to translate the instructions into English; they threw themselves into it with great gusto and did not have too obvious «ils sont fous, ces anglais» speech bubbles. Z even explained what on earth went on with the cultural appropriation drama over Cherkassia Kefula, which is sort of an English folkdance take on a Jewish origin dance based on the vine / mayim step, and I only just realized that the Kefula part is the Hebrew word for circle. And taught a bunch of recently created dances including one about the Dune sandworms (timely, as we'd just heard that Dune won the Long Dramatic Presentation Hugo), and one of her own.

It would have been an absolutely perfect occasion if we hadn't been very overheated. We had every window in the building fully open but it wasn't much cooler outside than inside. Not unrelatedly, takedown ended up taking ages and people were getting a bit frazzled by the end. But I think we did ok. Covid safety boiled down to pretty much relying on the open windows; it wouldn't really have been possible to eat with a mask on, and very challenging to dance, and I generally don't mask when I'm teaching. So I could have worn my mask for the ceremony but that was only like 20 minutes out of the whole afternoon so wouldn't have gained me much.

I sort of want to see if I can make it to my brother's charity's ceilidh next week. But Friday evening events in Brighton when I have a bar mitzvah in Cambridge on Saturday are a bit unworkable. And although I enjoyed the dancing, what I want more of isn't mainly dancing, it's spending time with people. And waiting for my friends to have reunions in the form of weddings isn't very efficient! I'm amazed that there were even two weddings this year, with most of my circle being in our 40s. jack has planned a bank holiday picnic next Monday; it will be fully outdoors, which is good for infection risk but possibly bad for enduring summer weather. But if you happen to be in Cambridge you're most welcome.

comments

Excursions

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 15:11:30 GMT

This week P'tite Soeur organized a family trip to London. All four siblings and Dad, which is quite a feat of logistics even if we didn't manage to also include partners.

We met up late morning at the V&A. At first I couldn't find my sister because she'd texted me that she was in the sculpture gallery on the first floor but the sculpture gallery is on the ground and second floors, but I wandered through cool things while being lost. And we perused part of the photography gallery which is currently about the history of American photojournalism, focusing more on the Civil Rights and social history part than the landscape photography part, though the one Ansel Adams piece they did have on display stood out a mile. Then we found Screwy and Dad, and were immediately pounced on by a Saudi woman Screwy had met years ago, because he is the sort of person who spontaneously meets international friends in the doorway of museums. We had a not very satisfactory sandwich lunch in the garden café, and then headed to our main destination, the Design and Disability exhibition. Which meant I got to say hi to the Chihuly that lives in the main entrance (I'd come in from the tunnel from the Tube station so hadn't yet come that way.)

The exhibition itself was, I would say, ok but not a must-see. It was very worthy, lots of explaining the social model of disability and informing us that disabled people deserve to participate equally in society and need inclusion, not impractical high-tech gadgets. Little of that was new to me, though, and what I'd come for was design, rather than things like histories of the kerb cut and Telethon protests or Camp Jened 'Crip Camp', or lectures about why ableism is bad. But all those things were interesting, and in true V&A fashion they had some outstanding textile pieces. They also had a lot of adaptations to make the exhibition itself accessible to actually disabled visitors, but it felt a bit hollow because while showcasing best practice in this particular exhibition, they didn't in fact enhance the rest of the museum to the same standards. Indeed Dad, who is pretty fit for an octogenarian, found the museum as a whole tiring and lacking in places to sit and rest, which is exactly one of the problems that the prominently displayed Finnegan Shanon piece highlighted.

We then walked along Hyde Park, past the Albert Memorial which we had great fun dissecting the colonialist themes of, in search of ice cream. I was very disappointed, they had no decent ice cream at all in the park, or even a tolerable cup of tea. But it was lovely to spend time with the family! That brought us quite nicely to our pre-show dinner venue, chosen by P'tite Soeur: the unpromisinginly named but actually awesome Tofu Vegan. Though we only booked an hour ahead, they were absolutely brilliant at accommodating Screwy's physical access needs and P'tite Soeur's dietary needs; she was geeking out with the waiter over how they made certain Chinese staples gluten free when core ingredients are wheat-based. The food was incredibly good, the service was brilliant, and we ended up paying £25 a head which is absurdly good for the middle of Kensington. Thuggish Poet joined up with us at the restaurant after a day at the cricket.

We then dispersed again because we had not quite managed to book seats together in the Albert Hall. But I waved at my siblings from all the way up in the cheap seats! Funnily enough that was my first ever prom and I loved it. We had picked Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique more or less at random (the date was convenient), and it was very good. Two short pieces before the interview, some fairly middle of the road but very well done Strauss, and a premiere of a super-weird contemporary piece rejoicing in the title of ZEBRA (or, 2-3-74: The Divine Invasion of Philip K. Dick), with an electric guitar solo. I might well have hated either of them, Strauss for being too obvious and the new thing for being too self-consciously Modern, but in fact they were just highly enjoyable. And the Symphony itself was completely delightful. Being the enormous cavern of the Albert Hall with a very large and very good orchestra and a top-of-the-range sound system definitely added to the experience, but it made me think I should go to more orchestral concerts. (Though it's not just me, it's super rude to applaud in the middle of a movement, right? Even at a dramatic ff climactic point?) Then I walked-ran to South Ken and managed to get on a train back to Cambridge exactly 40 minutes from the final baton.

Another thing I was able to do due to not being in Israel was to visit the community I'll be spending Yom Kippur with, the amazing Kehillat Kernow, a peripatetic community covering most of the Cornwall peninsula. (Yes, that's me in the news article at the top of their website, they are very prompt at reporting!) The long train journey was not as wonderful as I had hoped, because the trains were very very overcrowded in peak season, but at least I had a seat and got to enjoy the lovely views. And read a bunch of novels, which is definitely making my brain happier.

They invited me to dinner Friday evening, and had a very Liv conversation about dealing with racism in education and medicine, with the other guests having direct professional expertise, not just setting the world to rights. And put me up in a super nice hotel in a neo-gothic pile that used to be a convent, and were gracious enough to invite me to stay Saturday night as well so I even got a little bit of time in Truro, which is where they held this particular service. I walked along the river a bit, I found a teeny-tiny Pride festival in the town centre, but it was packing up by the time I had finished dinner at 7 pm, so I wasn't able to get dessert from one of the sparkly rainbow doughnut stands.

In between I lead a Shabbat service, with very enthusiastic participation from the community, and they even appreciated my somewhat political sermon about whether we can still be Zionists in this moment. Because it was the new moon of Av, I got to read from their super-exciting Historic scroll. Well, actually I chanted the verses about the creation of the sun and moon; it's still a big deal for me to do that in public. I'm pretty pleased with how all that went.

And now I'm back and I have another month of relatively uncrowded schedule. It's very nice.

comments

Not in Israel

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 14:58:55 GMT

It's been a full and emotional couple of months, friends. The main thing to report is that I was supposed to be in Israel as of a week ago, but Israel bombed Iran and Iran retaliated and the go/no-go date for my summer programme was right in the middle of the 11 days when Israel was in full lockdown due to lots of missile attacks, so they really had to cancel it. I have a whoooooole lot of emotions and thoughts about this, and I also have an unexpected summer month with almost no commitments.

We finished with the actual main part of term mid-May, but then as usual there were a couple of months of the academic year sort of weirdly trailing off. A week of extra classes because the college interpret regulations as meaning that we must have 12 taught sessions in each module come what may. Some bits of extra post term stuff that needed to happen, continuing community and placement work. End of semester assignments and exams, which were manageable because a whole bunch of academically challenging stuff got moved into the autumn term but still took up time. And just a lot of fairly intensive activities, some of them directly student-related, some of them starting to take on something more resembling rabbinic work.

I completed my three months of sabbatical cover for Mosaic Reform in North London; this meant I was actually there fairly regularly rather than just showing up, leading a service and vanishing again. Some people advised me that second year is too soon to take on that kind of ongoing work, but it was good for me, at this point I can do random Shabbat services at the drop of a hat and I'm not really learning anything from that. Mosaic exposed me to some amount of difficult community politics that I'm not going to go into on an unlocked post, and also wanted me to hold space for everybody struggling with how to react to news from Israel. So it was frustrating at times but valuable; these are very much the kinds of things I'll have to build skills in to be an effective rabbi. They also have a professional choir and I had fun working with the MD there.

In the middle there was a lovely long weekend in Norfolk with jack, we didn't bother with the seaside this time but took a delightful little cottage in a village mainly notable for its Steam museum. The steam exhibits were fun, particularly on a meta level, as there was a whole lot of information about how the owner, a businessman who made decent money (not a wild fortune or anything, just enough to fund his hobby) running a garden centre, and loved steam engines a lot but really didn't have a lot of practical knowledge about creating mini-railways or engine preservation generally. The curation is therefore rather eccentric; on the one hand they had a lot of Dad's Army memorabilia as the recent film used some of their engines and created film sets there, but on the other they had a certain number of Nazi engines which were not exactly labelled as such, the plaques just gushed about the brilliance of the mechanism of engines "made in Germany for the war effort in 1941". I think it's on the whole good that nothing has overt Nazi insignia, but it was also disturbingly coy, especially alongside the wartime nostalgic "keep calm and carry on" aesthetic. Other than the steam museum we went on a few gentle countryside walks and ate lots of very good meals in country pubs.

I took part in a Tikkun Leyl Shavuot service hosted jointly by Oaks Lane Reform and the Liberal synagogue where I was on placement last year, ELELS and a smaller Reform synagogue in the same part of East London. They put me on lots of interfaith panels; they'd invited members of the three synagogues, plus some Christian clergy as guests, it wasn't a general interfaith event. It was very interesting to experience that kind of interfaith encounter in what was definitely a Jewish space. I've been to interfaith events physically within synagogue buildings before but we're almost always outnumbered by Christians. This time it was really clear that the small handful of clergy were guests at our event. Guests, not tourists. So we had a bring and share meal, with way too much food and lots of Jews being loud, then a typical Reform-style evening service which I think was quite a novel experience for most of the priests. Lots of singing, lots of participation from everybody, and a fairly mellow feel with lots of explicit emotional shaping. I gave the sermon and talked about my experiences growing up in the grouping of Essex and East London synagogues which overlapped with the three who were running this event, namedropping multiple historic rabbis and people present, while also choosing to be somewhat personal and vulnerable. Worked well.

The two panels they put me on were: the Ten Commandments; I did a lowkey rabbinic interpretation of 'honour your father and mother', while my Christian co-panellists either were a bit confused about what exactly counts as part of the Ten ('Love your neighbour' is important, but it's really not on topic for the panel), or tried to claim that 'you shall have no other gods but me' encompasses the rest, which led to questions from the floor about how a Christian can claim to keep that if they believe that Jesus is God, and poor Christians trying to explain the Trinity to a highly sceptical audience. Somebody commented to me that they shouldn't put priests on panels with rabbis because 'it just makes them look uneducated', which wasn't entirely fair, I did try to explain that it's more about a different approach to reading the Bible than lack of knowledge, but still.

And experiences of vocation and calling as religious leaders, I was really glad to be on that one. In part because I heard some quite heart-rending stories of Christian priests who had a strong sense of vocation from early childhood but were excluded for being gay and didn't return until much later in life, or who had been female and lifelong Catholics and deeply convinced that God had chosen them to be priests. Secondly because I wanted to convey the perspective that being a rabbi is a choice of career like any other, I don't believe that God loves clergy more than people with less glamorous jobs or disabled and unemployed people. Also I talked a bit about being poly and with non-Jewish as well as Jewish partners, which wove in well with the Christians' stories of being both outsiders and leaders. Another reason it was good I was included was because I was the only woman on the Jewish side, which is mainly coincidence, the female rabbi among the organizers just happened to be on leave that day, but four men and one woman looks a lot better than all male rabbis while the Christians had a good gender balance.

College sent some of us to a residential weekend for people from the Liberal movement who are being trained as lay service leaders. It's totally possible to just turn up and lead services, but the Liberals have a really nice training programme, really supportive and well thought out. It's a few days over 18 months, not a massive time-commitment, but very good for building core skills and most importantly confidence. And it turned out this course is full of people exactly like me. Not just that they've stepped up to lead services and often run tiny communities in the middle of nowhere where there are hardly any other Jews, but so many of them turned out to be similarly geeky and with interesting non-heteronormative family structures (even some poly folk) and homeschoolers and really quite a high proportion of people who are very open about being neurodivergent. It was most excellent networking because these are often communities too small to even hire student rabbis.

And then in mid-June the whole student body plus the principal all went to Germany for the very long-established Three faiths conference. That was an extremely weird experience in lots of ways, not least because our visit out there exactly coincided with the escalation of hostilities between Israel and Iran. The conference has had links with the college for literal decades, but we stopped regularly sending people because they had a historic problem with sexual aggression and weren't really handling it properly. And without us they have always struggled to attract Jews and indeed European Muslims, so despite significant effort it often defaults to being a crowd of generally liberal Christians and a couple of token minorities. To solve this problem they had in recent years started inviting an Israeli group, Jewish Israelis who are involved in peacebuilding, and ethnically Palestinian citizens of Israel (sometimes referred to as Israeli Arabs) who are are mostly Muslim with a significant Christian minority. However, most of this group didn't make it over this year because of the war. Some of them joined us over Zoom, including a Haifa professor with a very interesting background. When I say they joined us over Zoom I mean quite often participating from bomb shelters, or having to interrupt sessions due to a missile alert. And one young woman brought a cohort of 9 young people, Muslim Israelis of Palestinian heritage aged 11 to 15, on a terrifying odyssey across multiple countries during a war, in order to find any hope of a flight to Europe when airspace was closed. She wanted them to meet Jews who don't carry guns, these kids.

I had some great conversations and some very fraught conversations. It really did feel at times that the Christians were not exactly on the same planet as the Israelis, they were talking about how shocking it was for there to be violence affecting Europe after all those decades of peace since 1945 (sic) or explaining that if people would just trust each other and sit down and have an honest conversation there wouldn't be any conflict or war or killing. Many of them seemed like genuinely sincere, committed people, and it felt really good to be supporting and mentoring the younger Christian leaders who don't have the kind of collegial support trainee rabbis do over here. And the UK Jewish contingent were sort of between the two camps. Most of us have connections in Israel, often quite close connections, and are much more aware of what's happening there than our German Christian counterparts, but equally we were having a nice holiday in a nice safe part of Europe rather than a temporary respite from missile attacks and a lot of uncertainty about when we'd be able to get home. Because the college contingent all know each other and the small handful of other Jewish attendees, whereas the Christians were from disparate backgrounds and denominations, even though our numbers were about equal it did feel as if the Jewish group were much louder and more visible.

On top of everything else we were sleeping in dorms with very thin curtains, during a heatwave and with only about 4 hours of darkness a night. Between sleep deprivation and being adjacent to the war I was a total emotional wreck. I kind of fell apart when I got the news that my summer programme was cancelled. On the one hand I didn't want to go in the first place, and I had been carrying huge amounts of anxiety about what it would be like to have barely a couple of days at home before heading off to a foreign country for a month (even before I considered how likely it was that I'd encounter military or interpersonal violence there). At the same time, the situation being bad enough for both the Jerusalem Yeshiva who completely financially depend on their summer programme, and the college, to agree to cancel, was pretty scary. Frankly, the amount it was upsetting me just being on Zoom calls with Israelis, or simply having normal adult to teen conversations with the Palestinian kids, was a clear indicator that I was in no way emotionally ready to actually spend a month in Israel.

In fact, in hindsight it now looks like I could in fact have gone. The clash with Iran lasted 11 days, and when the US got involved I assumed it was the start of WW3 and there would be huge casualties, not just among the belligerents but worldwide, but actually it ended in a ceasefire which seems to be holding. And Israel is no more dangerous now than it was before June when everybody was telling me it was perfectly fine to travel there and I should stop being a baby about it. The rest of my cohort are either out there already or still planning to go (their trips were later in the summer than mine.)

After we got back from Germany I had a few days to recuperate, a couple of minor wrapping up the year meetings at college, a couple of community Shabbats, last time at Mosaic and a visit to one of the communities I've worked with on and off, Hull. And then a week of the college's end of year community learning, known as Kol-Bo. Again, incredibly emotionally intense with preparing our colleagues for ordination and realizing there's only one more rabbi who will be ordained between them and us. And we had another heatwave, and at some point in the week a classmate confirmed they are transferring to a pluralist US school from next term. This had been on the cards for a while and it makes sense for their career, but also they got sick during the interfaith conference and weren't able to join us for the final week so we didn't manage a proper goodbye. Between being recently bereaved and still not really recovered from thinking I was going to Israel and then not going and thinking everybody was going to die I wasn't doing well with keeping emotional stability through transitions. The ordination itself was really beautiful and I'm super proud of our new rabbis and delighted that they get to be rabbis for real now, even though it means we won't have them with us in school any more.

I will fully admit that I'm glad I didn't end up getting on a flight two days later. Intellectually it goes without saying that I would far rather Israel was in fact safe enough for me to be there, and that it had been consistently obvious it would be over the past couple of months. But personally, I am absolutely delighted to be at home. And have a chance to see my family and do fun summer things like go to concerts and have picnic dates and sort out practical things that I've let slip with the intensity of everything since Mum got sick. I even managed to overlap in London with redbird and her partners this week, which was an unexpected and wonderful bonus. Among many chill, non-urgent summer plans I am hoping to be a bit more present here.

comments

DW-versary and board games

Fri, 09 May 2025 15:45:17 GMT

I missed my anniversary of moving to DW – this has been my online home since 3 May 2009, a slightly astonishing 16 years. Anyway, the 3weeks4dreamwidth annual fest is ongoing, and I am not doing any particular posting challenges or anything, but I generally think having more content here is good. Some people don't agree, they really dislike those times in early January and April-May when everybody makes resolutions to post more and the site gets busy. I'm kind of a hypocrite because I love when people commit to posting more frequently or regularly, but I never really do so myself.

But talking about random things when I happen to have time and brain is also useful! Inspired by a discussion in agonyaunt I was interested in people's thoughts about playing board games including both adults and children. When I was a kid my parents pretty much did not play games with us. They followed a parenting philosophy, which I think has some merit, that play is for children, and the less adult supervision and interference the more kids are able to explore and develop. We are four sibs close in age so we could usually find enough people to put together a game without needing parents. In the 1980s there also wasn't a great adult games market, let alone what are now called 'family' games which are specifically designed to be fun and challenging to adults while also accessible to younger children.

We did occasionally play what would now be called party games, things like charades or Pictionary, often repackaged as commercial games with physical components and some kind of scoring mechanism. Many of these were gifts from my uncle; he does have (adult) offspring now but they are a lot younger than us and when we were little he was the childfree fun uncle who preferred to have some kind of structure around spending time with children. But since our uncle was willing to play with us that set an example of playing a game being something adults could occasionally join in with. Similarly my paternal grandmother would often play cards with us, beggar-my-neighbour (which she called 'strip Jack naked') and snap when we were little, later on various forms of competitive solitaire like King's corner, and Pontoon (Blackjack), gambling for matchsticks and learning about probability.

Chess was considered improving and educational, but Mum never really learned and Dad is remarkably terrible at it (one of my earliest memories is of the first time I beat him, aged four, and not because he was letting me win but because his attention drifted and he left his queen exposed), so again, it was mostly a game we played with siblings. My mother's father was a fairly serious chess player but he didn't really know how to adjust his game to play with younger kids, so it was a completely uneven game and not really fun for either party; he died when I was 9 so we never got a chance to play on a more equal footing. The one thing we did play was bridge, weirdly; my mother thought it was socially useful to know how to play, so sent us to an elderly East End Jewish man for lessons. He was a delightful teacher and loved children. But we were really too young for bridge, I'm talking under 10, and our parents were never strong players either, but sometimes we would play a few rubbers treating it more or less as a game of luck, if you got good cards you would win. And Scrabble, from time to time, though that is another game that has the problem that it's very hard for children to give adults a decent game.

My siblings now tell me I was very annoying to play with, since I was the oldest and always wanted to play games where I could leverage my greater experience to win. Which isn't quite true, I don't doubt that I was annoying, but it was more that I wanted to play games with interesting tactics rather than games of pure luck that were mostly just reskinned snakes and ladders or ludo / sorry, especially at an age where my younger siblings were not ready for complex games. I spent a lot of time reading books of games and finding new card and word games for us to play.

As an older teen, I had a close friend who is German and introduced me to Settlers of Catan and that genre of Eurogames a few years before they hit the mass market in the UK. If you're brought up on Monopoly and Game of Life, Settlers is an absolute revelation! And it turned out to unlock entry into nerd societies at uni and as a post-grad; board gaming was my main social life during my PhD, which is unremarkable now but was quite niche in the early 2000s. Now all my partners are gamers, and I lucked into a family where adults do in fact play games with children. Not just board games, but any kind of games.

However, it's sometimes emotionally fraught. The older two are natural gamers and have always been happy to play with adults, including being comfortable with fairly complex games from an early age. But it was always much more difficult with A; he likes games in some ways, but also, especially when he was younger, found a lot of the meta stuff stressful. Games that took too long to set up, or not fully understanding the rules, or getting frustrated if there was a skill gap between him and the adults, and needing to compromise over which game to play. The parents who wrote into the agony aunt column had a similar experience, their kid 'begged' for games but would panic over losing. And I know a lot of my friends have reported disliking games because they were forced to play as children and punished for not having socially accepted emotional responses. Or because they played with horrible gatekeepery peers who didn't have the patience to teach games to relatively inexperienced players and belittled them for mistakes. I think we're doing better with G, nearly 5: she is, on a good day, cognitively able to play games aimed at much older age groups, but there's still the issue that sometimes the game takes too long, losing can be stressful, it's not fair that sometimes it's someone else's turn to choose which game we play, and so on. And I am worried that we're kind of pressuring her into playing because it's a way to get adult attention, but maybe she would enjoy other kinds of attention more. I think one thing we've all got better at, especially me, is just accepting that sometimes you can have fun for 20-30 minutes, but you don't get to finish the game because the kid just doesn't have the attention span, and that's fine.

I think a big part of it is verbal and numerical literacy. My sibs and I were all very precocious readers and had no problem reading the rules for ourselves and playing games where a lot of the information is contained in text on the cards. And we could add up the score and therefore have a clear sense of who was winning or which moves would give lots of points. But for more typical children there's a phase where they understand game tactics but are still at a disadvantage because of simply being less fluent; indeed some games can't really be played at all between people who can read and people who can't, because you need to be able to read and act on secret information, or you have to understand multiplication and probability to come out with a good score.

Some people have suggested starting with co-op games; there are some brilliant ones available nowadays, Pandemic and Flash Point and Library Labyrinth for all ages, Jim Deacove's series which scale in complexity for different ages, from pre-school to teens. I think those help in the sense that they make losing less upsetting, but I also think that the reason children (and many adults!) can find games emotionally taxing isn't only the danger that they might lose. There's still the frustration of waiting for your turn, of not quite having the skill to play the game well, or not being able to read the board position to predict the outcome. And I think adult-child co-op games have the strong risk that the adults will just 'play for you'; if you play against someone with way more experience than you you might lose, but if you play theoretically on the same team as the more experienced player, then at best your contributions are being indulged rather than really valued, and at worst you don't really get to play at all.

Some games lend themselves to offering a handicap to some players, some really don't. It probably depends a lot on the exact personality of the kid; do they feel good about winning more often, or patronized because their opponents deliberately didn't play their best game and gave them a chance, or even bent the rules a bit to give them an advantage? Is it helpful to use house rules to shorten or simplify the game or curb the use of dominating tactics? That can easily have the downside that not everybody is as fully aware of the house rules as you hope, there may be misunderstandings, and also, if the game is well designed to be balanced, changing the rules to please someone finding it stressful might actually make for a worse game.

Please tell me what you think! Did you play with your caregivers as a child, and if applicable do you play with the kids in your life now? What works to have a calm, enjoyable game when there is a big difference in skill levels?

comments

State of the Liv

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 19:34:19 GMT

As posted under lock, my mother died on 11 March. She had been seriously ill for a long time, but on a level where she was able to power through with her considerable willpower. And then she more or less speed-ran the last stages of illness and decline in just a few weeks. She had the sort of funeral that you earn by being deeply involved in all aspects of the community, and then my family sat shiva to a greater or lesser degree. Being a rab student meant that I was encouraged and supported to actually sit through the full thing, I put my life on hold and more or less stayed in my parents' home for the week.

There was a weekend in between and I went back to college, which is full of people who are professionally experienced at looking after bereaved people. My extremely wonderful partners arranged for me to join morning prayers on Zoom for every day of the 30 when I didn't have access to in-person services. I would definitely never pressure anyone to say Kaddish every day but I found it really helpful. By the last week I realized I was starting to think creatively about the little services, and how to engage the kind people who showed up to help me through the mourning ritual.

The traditional 30 days of intense mourning for a parent ended precisely on the eve of Passover. My siblings had agreed that we wanted to have as close as possible to the kind of family Pesach we have always had with Mum. I was very afraid of trying to do this, both practically and emotionally. But actually P'tite Soeur took over the project management, something she is very good at, and we shared out the cooking between us. And we compromised by not inviting anyone beyond immediate family, so we were 15 around the Seder table rather than 20 or more. Thuggish Poet lead the service, and took the radical step of reading excerpts from the actual story in Exodus, but with a recognizable rabbinic Seder structure as well. I found it really hard, probably more than the funeral in some ways, but I'm also really proud of how well we managed.

I didn't have time to be overwhelmed by that, because I had signed up to lead both the first day of Passover morning service, and the community Seder, at a community in North London. jack made this possible practically by driving me down from Cambridge in the morning so I actually got eight hours sleep between our Seder and a fairly intense professional gig. It wasn't ideal to lead a complex service as my first introduction to a new community, but on the other hand only the real keenies show up first day Pesach. I came back to the flat in the afternoon and more or less stared at walls for a few hours, with supportive hugs and cups of tea from jack, and then lead a very successful community Seder for about 80. They came from a very wide range of backgrounds with different expectations of what a Seder should be, but I think they mostly liked me.

Partly because of my recent bereavement, but mainly because of extremely awkward timing with Easter, I didn't manage to run a second Seder with family of choice this year, and I was a bit sad about that, but it was quite nice to have a relaxed week once the first intense day was past. Since then I've been getting stuck into my course again, and doing more community work and generally continuing like before but more sad.

My next big thing is that college are insisting we absolutely have to spend the summer in Israel. I don't want to, mainly because I don't think it's ethical, partly because I'm not convinced it's safe, and a small amount because I just don't want to be away from my people for several weeks, especially not far enough away that the only way to get home is several hours' flight. After much soul-searching I've come to the conclusion that I don't want to burn the amount of goodwill it would take to refuse to go. So I'm going to spend a few weeks studying at the pluralist yeshiva, Pardes. I think the actual studying will be great, even if I don't want to be there.

If you want to tell me I'm a horrible person for allowing myself to be pressured into going, well, you're probably right. If you want to be helpful, please recommend me good resources for working on my modern Hebrew over the next couple of months. I know about Duolingo and will probably put in a little bit of graft there, but ideally I want to listen to and read Hebrew media. At the moment I'm putting on Kan Bet (Hebrew language talk radio, I think more or less equivalent to Radio 4) in the background, and it is definitely helping with immersion, but I could do with something more interesting, basically. Indie radio or podcasts or a series or something. My language skills are at a rather awkward level; I am not a beginner and my strong classical Hebrew helps quite a lot, but I can't exactly follow spoken Hebrew at natural pace, I can sometimes get the gist depending on the topic and the accent of the speaker. So I think that means I'm at a level where I will get better with just lots of exposure, but any more structured recommendations would be welcome.

comments

Theatre: Ballet Shoes

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 22:00:38 GMT

My extremely awesome girlfriend managed to get us tickets for the stage production of Ballet Shoes, a book we both imprinted on. Which meant we actually managed to do the thing I'm always hoping for of a proper date-date Friday night on a weekend when I'm doing community work Saturday.

I stayed in my lovely flat after class, which is really simplifying everything compared to last year when I was staying in people's spare rooms and had to clear out Thursday morning. ghoti_mhic_uait has some slightly awkward dietary restrictions at the moment, so with the timing of getting across London we ended up grabbing a rushed supper in Leon by Waterloo.

The play itself was really worth seeing! I was nervous I'd end up disappointed with any adaptation of a childhood favourite, but it was very much in the spirit of the book. The scenery was amazing, absolutely lovely representation of a cluttered collector's home. And it was really well cast. Not unusually for the National, the cast were much more visibly ethnically diverse than the audience; they'd clearly chosen the best actors for the roles rather than the ones who look like people's expectation of Edwardian children's books, and then slightly altered the script to fit the appearances of the actors. Since the whole point of the story is that the sisters aren't biologically related, it made perfect sense for them to come from various backgrounds. Mr Simpson is played by an Asian actor, so he becomes Mr Saran, an explicitly Asian character. Theo Dane's actor is Black, so she is played as an American expat with a Southern accent. They also had the same, male, actor doubling as GUM and Madame, which was really well done and not at all laughing at him for effectively a drag role. Lots of male chorus members also played girls in the female-dominated crowd scenes.

I was really impressed with how well the three sisters acted the part of starting out as untrained actors and dancers gradually learning their craft over the course of the play! It's tricky for a good actor to pretend to be a bad actor. The three sisters are played by adults, which sort of relates to comments in the book where under 12s can't really play major professional roles, whereas nowadays it's pretty unusual for even teenagers to play 13 and 15yos. So you had to suspend disbelief a bit to think that these obvious adults were 11, 13 and 15, but it was pretty well done.

Generally they stuck pretty closely to the book, but adapted it sensibly to be a play rather than exactly following the original. They slightly changed the ending, but in a way that makes if anything more sense than how it goes in the book, and with fundamentally the same outcome. They make Dr Jakes explicitly a lesbian, inserting a dialogue with Pauline about the topic and using words like lesbian, sapphic and even Queer which felt a little anachronistic. But they do this at the expense of killing off Dr Smith, which I'm a bit sad about. I mean, nice to make the subtextual lesbian rep not so sub, but they book gives us a happy relationship, not a tragic widow. I was less sad about Mr Saran being single and available to romance Sylvie; why not? In fact Sylvie is much more of a character than in the books, with quite a bit of emphasis on the fact that she herself was an orphan adopted by GUM and not much older than the girls she ends up as the guardian for. That's partly because I relate more to the adult characters now that I'm older than most of them rather than a child reader, but I think it was also a shift in emphasis by the stage production. One change I did not like was that they ruined Winnifred's character, making her annoying and mannered rather than highly competent but not rich or pretty enough to get lead roles.

One thing I loved was that they actually show you scenes from the excessively modern Midsummer Night's Dream where the sisters play fairies, and it's gorgeous! Not at all how I imagined it, but absolutely perfect early 20th century avant garde. There were also some fairly cliched, but very nicely done, scenes from the point of view of Madame remembering her youth in imperial and then revolutionary Russia. We had to look up when the book was actually published; I had vaguely placed it as shortly after WW2, and ghoti_mhic_uait as a few years earlier than the real date of 1936. It actually does rather matter when it's set, even though its focus is really local. It's very much in the shadow of WW1 and the character of Madame as a Russian exile makes really good chronological sense.

We also had a really interesting discussion about how we related to the book when we were the target age for it, particularly in terms of how we read Petrova the tomboy. Neither of us was at all a tomboy but we weren't girly girls either. I thought that Petrova was the character you were obviously supposed to relate to, and it didn't worry me that much that her gender presentation was a bit different from mine. K felt more alienated by the implication that gender non-conforming girls have to be interested in cars and aeroplanes rather than dance and theatre.

Anyway, we managed to catch the last show of the run, but apparently there is going to be a reprise later in the year, so if this review makes you want to see it you still have a chance!

The reason it made sense to go to the theatre was that Saturday I was working at Mosaic Liberal in North London. The rabbi there is a recent graduate so I know her quite well; she warned me that things could get a bit politically fraught around news coming from Israel. This is an ongoing issue since October 7th 2023, but it was particularly acute this week as we've just learned that the baby and toddler sibling Israeli hostages were killed along with their mother. Fundamentally the issue is not that our (Progressive) communities have a lot of militant Zionists, but that many many British Jews have direct personal connections with Israelis including those murdered in the initial attack, the hostage families, and others. But we rarely have direct personal connections with any Palestinians. So there can be conflict between people who just don't want to hear anything sympathetic to the Palestinians as it seems callous when people they know directly are suffering because of Hamas' actions, and people who think it's unjust to care more about the suffering of Israelis than the much larger numbers of victims and bereaved who are Palestinian.

So I did a lot of acknowledging the emotions in the room, and gave a sermon about how it's wrong to kill the innocent even during a war situation, and reminded people of our core Progressive Jewish values of social justice. Also made sure to use a version of the prayer for Israel that explicitly asks God to protect Palestinians. I think I handled this ok; I got the impression that people with a range of different political stances felt heard and cared for, and nobody got angry with me for being insufficiently partisan or too partisan in one direction or the other. Nor for trying to avoid the issue that is on everybody's minds because it's too political and difficult to talk about.

The annoying thing is that the community somehow managed to lose (quite likely accidentally tidy up or take home) my tallit. I put it in a safe place for five minutes while we went to make Kiddush, the ritual sharing of food that happens after the service, with the other two communities who share the same building, but when I came back to fetch it it was gone. They are trying to retrieve it for me and hopefully that will work out, but it's a big nuisance!

comments

Interesting essays about gender margins

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 18:40:24 GMT

I was very interested in Jude Doyle's TERFs, Trans Mascs and Two Steve Feminism, and even more so in sbqr's thinky response.

I don't strongly care about Doyle's beef with Moira Donegan, but everything else he says about comparing the discrimination he experiences as a trans man with how he was treated as a mildly well known feminist presumed-woman is interesting. As is the 'Two Steves' model, that gender is a word for two overlapping things, a deeply felt sense of personal identity and also a social construct used to make people in the 'woman' class lesser. This problem has been an ongoing source of contention among my social group, with people I consider to be coming from well-intentioned places ending up on opposite sides.

sqbr has some great clarifications and expansions on the Doyle piece. I very much appreciated

Being raised as a woman has some huge inherent disadvantages even if you ultimately decide you're not one ... Acknowledging this disadvantage does not mean implying that being raised as a man always has equivalent advantages

And some really good examples of how cis women can be sexist and transphobic even if we're starting with good intentions.

I'm pretty sure I'm not secretly a TERF. I am not and never have been a radical feminist, I do not at all believe that sexism is the root of all oppressions or that men are inherently the Oppressor class, and I basically always prefer liberalism over radicalism (I am shading towards the more radical side on climate catastrophe, but basically I want tolerance and diversity within a functioning society, not revolution or separatism). I believe strongly in intersectionality and for many years I refused to identify as a feminist because I thought feminism required me to hate trans women and hating trans women is just bigotry as far as I'm concerned. But I think I am somewhat guilty of what Doyle calls out in his piece, of being prejudiced against trans men on the grounds that they are, well, men, and therefore assuming that they are advantaged rather than oppressed by the patriarchy.

On a related note, I very much resonated with this piece by kiya: Better Days Were On Their Way, as well as the linked Grace Petrie anthem, about the specific brain damage that comes of having been in high school in the 90s I have a very different experience of gender from kiya and in a different continent at that, but I think we must be very close to the same age. So we were for the most part alone, and we knew to be afraid. I knew zero out gay people at school, and almost none in my wider circles. A couple of friends tried to come out to me and I didn't respond well because I didn't understand their necessarily coded language, so probably they thought I was basically more or less straight and cis and likely dangerous with it.

I definitely don't want to presume, but maybe this is an avenue of solidarity with trans men: a partially shared experience of being perceived as cis girls in a world where it was not only dangerous to be anything at all other than straight and binary gendered, but almost impossible to imagine anything else. Which is not at all to say that I think trans men are actually women, that would be a really offensively wrong opinion. But maybe we have in common the same danger and the same deliberately engineered ignorance affected people from lots of different genders and sexualities and backgrounds.

comments

The internet is for uniting readers with books

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 12:57:32 GMT

I read and was very impressed by this review by lannamichaels. And I mentioned it to jack who proceeded to buy me the book for my birthday. And really, Finn and Ezra's bar mitzvah time loop is just as delightful as lannamichaels says.

Finn and Ezra's bar mitzvah time loop by Joshua S Levy. (c) 2024 Joshua S Levy; pub Katherine Tegen Books (Harper Collins). ISBN 978-0-06-324824-3.

My impression of F&EBMTL was that Levy wrote the book he wished existed when he was a kid; I'm guessing he's about my age or a little younger. It's a classic zany timeloop adventure, but everybody in it is Jewish and it's not tediously educational. It is full of allusions and in-jokes that would appeal to someone with insider knowledge of Jewish culture, but also to someone who is a secular nerd who knows the timetravel genre well. The characters are all, casually, named after major 20^th century physicists, in a way that could just plausibly be generic European Jewish names. I rolled my eyes at the retiring rabbi Alter being replaced by the new, dynamic rabbi Neumann but actually this fits perfectly into a setting where the main characters are named Rosen and Einstein and the side characters are named Pauli and London.

Finn, who is genre aware, knows full well that you can break out of a timeloop by changing your behaviour and learning the true meaning of why you're here in this life. But he also refuses to see what is right in front of him (the book does lampshade this), and assumes that it must be Ezra who has to learn a lesson and couldn't possibly be him. He's actually really well done as a not entirely likeable protagonist; he's obnoxious in a way that's absolutely plausible for a 13yo who thinks he's smarter than everybody around him, but I still cared about him. It's simplistic and age-appropriate, but I do like that the book uses the two points of view to introduce the question of whether it's necessary to behave ethically if everything resets at the end of the day and people won't remember that you were mean to them.

And I know middle-grade books are a whole different world now – there was barely even such a genre when I was a tween, and books marketed to that age-group were so lacking in diversity and so full of heavy-handed moral messages that I was happy to skip straight from children's books to adult. But I don't tend to seek out modern middle-grade books, partly because I get more satisfaction from longer and more complex books, and partly because if I don't think about it I expect them to be morally improving for middle class white boys. The dark secrets the boys must discover to escape their loops are things that would unquestionably be disruptive and upsetting for young teens, but not Terrible Tragedies where everybody and their dog dies horribly to teach them and the reader to be grateful for what they have.

The framing of a Reform and an Orthodox boy having to be timeloop buddies works really well. It does mean that the book is necessarily male-centric; Levy makes an effort to introduce female characters such as Ezra's sisters and mother, and Finn's classmate as well as the physicist who tries to help. But fundamentally, Ezra has to be a boy because Orthodox girls' bat mitzvahs / bat chayils are really low key, and Finn has to be a boy because a girl could never have inserted herself into Ezra's school and community life. That said, even knowing that books are just better than a generation ago, I found it quite moving to have the contrast be intra-community. This is very much not a book about explaining the weird exotic customs of the Jews over there to a non-Jewish audience (though it wouldn't do a bad job if you needed something like that), and it's not about religious Jewish characters discovering that there's a whole exciting secular world out there if you can just throw off the irritating restrictions of your old-fashioned religion. And it's not about the Holocaust, not even tangentially!!!

So I'm glad this book exists, and I'm glad that DW allowed me to find out that it exists, and I'm glad that we live in a future where you can pay money for the internet to send you books.

comments

Cultural experience

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 11:44:38 GMT

So my OSOs decided it was past time for me to watch Die Hard (1988). I came back from my first service leading of 2025, and headed straight to my partners' to warm up and recuperate. And we watched the film, my first time and everybody else rewatching a well-loved favourite.

There's no point writing a review of one of the most famous films of the 20^th century, but I can say that my life is improved by having seen it. I don't generally like action films, and I did definitely have nightmares about being chased through a labyrinthine building by armed pursuers, but I can also totally see why it's such a classic. I definitely appreciated the great acting by the leads and the minor characters, and the very clever scoring, and the way that all the little details were meaningful. I did not at all love the pro-gun message; it's not just a film where the entire plot is basically an extended shoot-out sequence, but specifically blazons the moral that you need a good guy with a gun to stop bad guys with guns.

I don't see how there's any debate over whether it's a Christmas movie. The only element missing is that it takes place in the HQ of a corporation in LA, and not in a small town. But apart from that it's the Christmasest movie ever to Christmas! It even includes a plot about how love is more important than career success (I liked the relationship arc, but I didn't love that rekindling love is symbolized by the protag's wife taking his name instead of using her own.) ghoti_mhic_uait argued that it could also be a Chanukah movie, on the grounds that it contains both doughnuts and a tiny band of heroes defeating a superior force in the name of freedom. I was only partially convinced, I still haven't seen anything as Chanukah suitable as Star Wars: Rogue One.

comments

Year in review 2024

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 18:58:41 GMT

What can I tell you about this year? I've been a rabbinic student for all of it, the course is going really well, but it's also eating my life.

Significant events

I travelled abroad for the first time since the pandemic began, a school trip to Paris.
I bought a flat in Hendon, and got it set up, and moved into it. And then had to deal with emergency bathroom replacement, and with one thing and another I still haven't had a housewarming.
My partner became Jewish and celebrated his bar mitzvah.
I saw The Merry Widow at Glyndebourne with my family of origin, and Hamilton on tour in Birmingham with cjwatson. I also saw Fiddler on the Roof in Regent's Park, but sadly without ghoti_mhic_uait as she was isolating with Covid when we'd booked to go.
I celebrated my third wedding anniversary (and 12 years of marriage / 16 years together) with jack with a very fine meal at Itadaki-Zen. I celebrated my 10^th anniversary of dating cjwatson and ghoti_mhic_uait with a very exciting trip to Legoland.

Reading

Ariel Kaplan: The Pomegranate Gate
Nicola Griffith: Menewood, which is good and has some amazingly memorable moments, but not as mindblowingly amazing as Hild
Michael David Lukas: The last watchman of Old Cairo, a very fun historical take on the story of discovering the Cairo Geniza, with a lovely OC contemporary viewpoint character providing the framing story.
Dara Horn: People love dead Jews. Definitely important for me to read. Taught me stuff I didn't know about antisemitism and confirmed my impression that Horn is brilliant.
Naomi Alderman: The Power .Great premise, but probably should have been a short story. Ended up leaning way too hard on lots of gratuitous and extremely graphic sexual violence and torture; I accept the point that violence isn't an inherently male thing but rather a function of some people having power over others, but I didn't need that many examples of gender-reversed horribleness.
Maggie Anton: Rashi's daughters III: Rachel. Third in a pretty middle-brow series where historical research and Jewish feminism are blended with historical romance tropes including lots of sex scenes. Like the earlier two in the series, very much catnip as Anton has read exactly the same cherry-picked rabbinic texts that could be interpreted as feminist that I have.
Imogen Hermes Gowar: The mermaid and Mrs Hancock. Very original historical, reminds me a lot of The crimson petal and the white with its somewhat realistic portrayal of historic sex work, but at least somewhat less depressing.

So, seven books, plus Gemara from Kiddushin 2a to 4a and 80b to 81b.

Games As predicted, our main tabletop gaming has been Innovation and Spirit Island. Innovation is brilliant because it has essentially no setup, the boards emerge as you play the game. And it really hits the sweet spot of offering meaningful decisions without being too mentally taxing. Spirit Island is a good, solid modern Eurogame, slightly too many moving parts but it's co-op and a good challenge for me and jack. A bit of Dog Park, an original set collecting game with absolutely gorgeous art, and Stardew Valley which works surprisingly well as a board game! And a fair amount of Wyrmspan, which in some ways is a better game than its ancestor Wingspan, but somehow imaginary dragons aren't quite as satisfying as real world birds.

There has been a good amount of gaming with my partners' children, too. A has got very much into 'party' games like Apples to Apples, Taboo, Concept and the like, and recently traditional games like chess, Scrabble, Yahtzee and Pontoon / Blackjack. G is very much levelling up to playing real strategic games, and we've been trying junior versions of loved games like Ticket to ride. There isn't a great overlap between games suitable for a precocious 4yo just building up tactical skill, and a 12yo who wants games that depend on social deduction and world knowledge but is still suspicious of modern tabletop games. Possibly we dragged him into long, complex adult games at too young an age. But lots of fun family gaming all the same. The standout is Mysterium Kids, where you have to play sounds on a tambourine to represent images.

Video games: this is the year I got sucked in to Civilization VI, which for me recaptures some of the flow-promoting nature of Civ II that I was hooked on in the late 90s, but fixes a lot of the balance issues. I never got into Civ III-V, but this one is very good meditation for me. I also highly recommend Steamworld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech. I love all the Steamworld games, really lovely art and great stories and worldbuilding and gameplay that's fun rather than pointlessly money-grubbing or pointlessly difficult. Steamworld Quest is a deck builder RPG that's just everything I want from a video game. I don't know if I'll replay it once I complete the main storyline, but it's great. (If you avoided other titles in the series because you hate pixel art, Quest is painted rather than pixel.)

My main phone distraction / fiddle has been Gems of War, which may be old enough to count as a classic by now. It's a match-3 RPG but actually good; nice graphics, not overtly sexist and racist, really lots of original characters rather than clones of all the other gacha games, completely playable without microtransactions. Also it has a slightly unusual mechanic for how the matching works to attack the enemies, it feels a bit more satisfying to play than most in this genre. Oh, and I got back into Flight Rising, a virtual pet game that feels very Old Web but is still fully active. I think quite a few of you play. Username ewerb if you want to friend me.

Media I essentially did not watch TV or films at all this year. Managed We Are Lady Parts S2, since it's 6 very short episodes and I loved S1 enough to make time to watch it. And Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl this week on Christmas Day. And that's just about it. I barely listened to music either, certainly not enough to make a list of songs.

People My husband and partners have been extremely wonderful and supportive and made tons of effort to keep our relationships strong while I'm busy and away a lot. I've been fortunate in spending lots of time with hatam_soferet now we are neighbours. angelofthenorth forgave me for dropping out of touch for several months and even came to visit. I've seen khalinche, wychwood and loreid all too briefly, squeezed around work-related travel. I continue to adore my classmates. I have very much missed doseybat and rysmiel and lots of other people.

Places

Retreat in a little village outside Oxford with some American rabbinic students
Paris, also on a school trip
London a few times to see friends and do tourism, apart from sort of kind of living there
A week in Hunstanton with jack in May, which got a bit squeezed between college commitments but was very lovely.
Brighton to see sibs, Worcester and Northamptonshire to see jack's mum.
Glasgow for Worldcon, though I didn't get out into the city much.

Plague Bad year but not the worst. Caught Covid at Worldcon, and I feel stupid for even thinking I could get away with attending a huge international con in the middle of a surge. Most of our partners' household got it two weeks after the con, which probably means it wasn't con-related, but back when we used to take Covid seriously, it used to be recommended to isolate for two weeks after a high risk activity, so who knows. And the person who skipped that round caught it travelling at the end of the summer.

J and I got boosters shortly before we were infected. We both experienced relatively short illness and no very obvious lingering effects; we've been tired and run down and prone to respiratory crap for the second half of the year, but it's minor enough that it might be random. One of my partners had a pretty miserable time with it and took quite a few weeks to recover, and I was a bit scared about one of the kids in the acute phase but they're apparently fine now, and more than one family member has some chronic symptoms but we have no idea whether it's related to the infection or not. So on the one hand nobody in my immediate circle died or needed heroic medical intervention, and nobody ended up permanently severely disabled by official Long Covid. On the other, we all had between a week and a few months of unpleasantness which I would much rather have avoided.

I suppose the positive thing is that 2 years in I have more or less convinced myself that I can get on with being a student rabbi in relative safety. I can do things like take in person classes where few people mask, and travel to visit communities and stay in hotels, and lead services and teach unmasked, without inevitably catching plague. If I avoid gathering indoors with thousands of people, it seems like the levels of precautions I'm taking (mask most of the time, but make exceptions for eating and public speaking) are mostly protecting me.

Rabbinic work I led Reform services in:

Newcastle (Shabbat and Purim)
Milton Keynes (Shabbat and Pesach Seder)
Southport (Shabbat, Rosh HaShannah, Yom Kippur)

Liberal services in:

Birmingham (Shabbat, Pesach)
Beth Klal Yisrael (the LGBTQ+ focused community)
Mosaic (Shabbat during Succot)
ELELS (observed service)

One Orthodox service at Stoke, unfortunately a funeral of someone I cared about.

I've taught and preached at Beth Shalom, my home community, and Shaarei Tzedek joint with Bromley Reform. Mostly adult teaching this year, conversion classes and Biblical Hebrew primarily.

Dreamwidth Only managed to make 13 posts in total over the course of the year, and few of them are ones I want to revisit now. You might enjoy my link roundup on eugenics if you haven't already seen it. So I haven't been nearly as present here as I'd like, but as ever I am still reading absolutely everything my circle post. Took part in a really great friending meme and I'm excited to have met lots of lovely new people, including jo, matushima, raven, bearshorty, maju, yourivy, 1empress, silviarambles and justphoenix. In no particular order, and I appreciate all of you, old and new, for writing interestingly about your lives where I get to read.

End of year name and pronouns update No change from last year. Rachel or Liv if you know me in person or online, Dr B if you're being formal. She/her > Neopronouns eg zie/hir > they or he. No shortenings / nicknames for my first names, no thankyou to Mrs. I am not a rabbi yet and should not be referred to Rabbi, but if you're curious, if everything goes to plan I will eventually be 'Rabbi Dr B' in formal contexts, or 'R Rachel' informally.

Overall I'd say that the year has been academically and career-trajectory successful. My socializing has been limited but my connections with family and friends have been wonderful when I did manage it. I haven't succeeded in building the online presence I want, though, either personally (eg posting properly here and on Mastodon), or professionally (eg setting up my website.) And I haven't made a start at all on learning to drive.

Previous versions: [2004] [2005] [2006] [2007] [2008] [2009] [2010] [2011] [2012] [2013] [2014] [2017] [2018] [2019] [2020] [2021][2022] [2023]

comments

Christmas

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 18:32:41 GMT

Christmas eve: spent a quiet day with jack. Started our Christmas dinner at around 3 pm, didn't actually take much over 2 hours to make the trimmings of roast dinner. These days we don't bother with substituting the roast part with anything vegetarian, we just have piles of roast potatoes and parsnips and Yorkshire puddings and cheese, some cooked and some just for eating.

Christmas day we wrapped a lot of presents and ate some leftovers for brunch, and then headed to OSOs' to join them for their Christmas dinner. ghoti_mhic_uait and her 16yo S made an amazing amazing roast for 10 people. And in between we unwrapped presents and played a bit with some of the new stuff and lit first candle for Chanukah. Which was really lovely, we told quite a few versions of the story and somehow got on to a discussion of Biblical unicorns, for which cjwatson's dad provided a relevant comic song. The older three children are old enough not to get overwhelmed by Christmas or make drama over gifts, and the 4yo is just incredibly mature and patient, so it felt a lot more like a comfortable, companionable adult Christmas than a magical but emotionally exhausting child one.

We also watched Dr Who: Joy to the World and Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance most fowl. I'm not particularly into Dr Who; I have absorbed it from general culture and having fans in the family, and catch up with the Christmas special or a random episode from time to time rather than actually following it. This episode was mawkish as Christmas specials always are, and the plot was thin, but it was really well acted, and Gatwa is the first Doctor I've seen who makes me react, I'd like to see more of this. The W&G is a creditable addition to the franchise but I didn't love it. Possibly because I'm just older and my memories of the earlier features are enhanced by nostalgia, but it felt a bit thin. Some great jokes, both puns and visuals, animation as excellent as usual, but there seemed to be more filler compared to the delightful moments.

I gave:

Judy Dench: Shakespeare: the man who pays the rent (partner's dad whom I don't know very well)
XKCD What if 10^th anniversary edition (metamour, who asked for it)
A collection of Yehuda Amichai poems in translation, edited by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort (bf, who often appreciates when we come across something by Amichai when we're studying together)
Magnus Magnusson: Iceland saga (gf, replacing the one she loved as a child)
Marvel Smash Up (25yo, who likes both Smash Up and superheroes.)
A reference book relevant to 16yo's interests, but that hasn't arrived yet.
The Penguin Book of Card Games (12yo, who wished that something like that existed. I picked a known classic because there's a lot of extruded if not fully AI generated rubbish out there.)
This ridiculously lovely pony playset (4yo, who introduced me to the Schleich brand of high-end plastic toys. Apparently they've been around forever but I hadn't heard of them.)
The isle of cats (husband, but we usually buy presents for both of us rather than one person giving to the other)
Tiffin made by my sister (the Christmas guests generally). As the good book says, there's always room for dessert.

I am very pleased to have sourced all of that without resorting to the Evil River, and only one of the ten was late.

And I did so extremely well for received presents this year, and we haven't even got to my birthday yet, not that I'm hinting.

The Jewish Annotated Apocrypha to match my Jewish Annotated New Testament (metamour)
Frog socks! (25yo)
Paperback (the game), recommended to me as a deck-builder word game, two of my favourite things (boyfriend)
Potted herbs for my plantless flat (girlfriend)
Ridiculously cute water bottle, lockable so I can take it into the college library (16yo)
Adult alphabet jigsaw puzzle, not the Mike Wilks set that I collect but a similar kind of idea, a crowded picture with lots of stuff beginning with the letter, in this case I and J are combined since they're both pretty rare letters (12yo)
Teeny felt hedge-hug (in a personalized cracker, so credit mainly to girlfriend)
Apiary (husband, but again it's mostly from and for both of us mutually)

This is partly because we got really organized about wishlists this year, but I do also feel really seen and loved.

Today, following our tradition for (un)boxing day, we have been playing some of the new games and generally chilling. I made French onion soup, which I love but rarely have the patience for. And tomorrow I am promised latkes and good company for my birthday.

comments

Handbag meme

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 20:47:13 GMT

I think the idea is something like, five things in your bag that say something about you:

Two sets of keys, because I live half my time with my husband in Cambridge and half my time in a flat in North London near my course. My home-home keys are on a Golem keyring which my husband bought me some years ago; I was a bit nervous about deliberately bringing a Golem into the house but it turned out not to be very cursed. Flat keys don't have a proper keyring. I keep looking for one and being spoiled for choice or being too mean to spend over £5 on a keyring.
My security pass for the campus where my rabbinical school is. I am, in fact, a student rabbi, so this one is pretty informative. The campus is very extremely gated with lots of security guards milling around; this is mainly for the protection of the multiple Jewish primary schools that share the site, but potentially we could be a target also. Most of the actual threat comes from far right 'classically' antisemitic groups, but increasingly leftwing activists seem to assume that threats against Jewish children aren't a real problem because the children might be "Zionists".
Asthma inhalers. I've had asthma since I was 4-ish, I think probably triggered by a viral infection. (Yes, viruses sometimes had long-term consequences even before Covid.) It's not very bad, it's controlled by said medication, and I've only had one scary asthma attack since I was 12.
3M Aura N95 mask. I reuse the officially disposable ones until either the thin elastic straps snap, or they get visibly grey from particles in the horrible London air. There seems to be pretty good evidence that the filters last basically forever, but the seal does get worse if you keep reusing them. I could be doing better with mask quality, but I reckon my biggest risk is that I do sometimes remove my mask to eat or for public speaking, so getting a super extra awesome mask feels like diminishing returns.
Not much else other than my phone and wallet; during the Time of Isolation I basically stopped carrying a handbag, because if I did go out it was just for my officially allowed Daily Exercise or to meet the people in my bubble. And I liked the freedom of not having a big bag on me, so when I did restart going to places, I deliberately downsized. My bag is big enough for the above essentials, but small enough that I don't carry around a bunch of crap just because I can. Sometimes it's annoying that it's too small to carry a paperback book, notebook or A4 paper folded in half, but mostly this change has improved my life

Anyway, I have somehow stumbled over the finish line at the end of term, including a 13th week of 12 for annoying bureaucratic reasons. Since we are on a semester system I am still in the semester though. I have an observed service to lead this Shabbat, and six essays due in the next few weeks, and two big scary exams mid-January. One of my classmates has banned us from talking about 'breaks' or 'rest', but it is also a month before I have to return to college and not having classes is at least a little less tiring than having them.

comments

Weathering storms

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 15:21:17 GMT

10 years (and one month) ago some friends of ours, themselves a married couple, asked me and jack out. At the time we had no clear expectations for what 'going out' was going to mean, but we fell in love very intensely and rapidly and were thinking long term thoughts probably sooner than would be standard. Though there isn't really any 'standard' for a couple dating another couple.

A few months later our OSOs went to Legoland for their 10^th wedding anniversary, and we sort of joked that maybe when the quad reached ten years we should follow the same tradition. So this year we have in fact been together for ten years, and we did in fact go to Legoland.

I suppose you expect that in a decade of relationship lots of big life changes are going to happen! I was in the process of slowly extracting myself from academia when we got together, and changed career again from alt-ac (2017-23) to retraining as a rabbi. Fairly early on ghoti_mhic_uait got together with another long-term partner, and they gradually shifted to a co-parenting relationship. Around 2020 the eldest moved out as he had completed university, and the youngest was born in the summer. We were long distance for the first three years due to my working in a university the other side of the country and weekly commuting, then really close neighbours for a bit under 5 years in the middle, then OSOs moved out to a big house in the countryside with space for three adults and three kids, so then we were 10 miles apart instead of in and out of each others' houses, and now I live in London half the time, so we're a bit long-distance ish again. So new metamour, new offspring, and some evolving dynamics of the permutations of subgroups within the original quad.

In 2015-16, around the Brexit vote, we seriously considered moving to Ireland to be able to retain our European citizenship and get out of a context where the far right were emboldened in ways I found, and continue to find, scary. We articulated being sufficiently committed to each other for an international move. But in the end we just couldn't achieve escape velocity, partly because I didn't manage to find a job, and partly because the children were of an age where they had strong educational and social ties in the Cambridge area.

And plague. Basically half of our ten year relationship has taken place during Covid times. A few months in 2020 when we stayed strictly 2m apart and only met up outdoors (including when G was a newborn and couldn't focus on people standing 2m away). Then the government made "bubbles" for households with children under 1, so we were each others' only in person contacts for a big chunk of 2020 through 21. And we had many, long, agonized discussions about balancing Covid safety with important priorities like the children's education and relationships with grandparents, and our own social needs.

Anyway. We made it to ten years and still going strong. I got massive cold feet about the Legoland trip because this year has had a lot of unexpected expenses related to the flat and I am in the middle of my long stint of not earning. And because of Covid; I massively regret attending Worldcon this summer because I got Covid, and I really don't want to make the same mistake again. But then again, a theme park is mostly outdoors, so it's probably a lower risk anniversary event than lots of things we might do. In the end, lovely ghoti_mhic_uait talked me back into it, and also used her organizing superpowers to plan the trip down to all the logistics, including getting some awesome deals so that we had a whole day including accommodation for 6 of us for not much over £300.

For lots of reasons over and above plague, we couldn't make it to Denmark again this time. And we couldn't go on our actual anniversary because of cjwatson's bar mitzvah and work commitments. So we went to Windsor at the end of the month instead, and I agree with ghoti_mhic_uait that the UK version is definitely inferior, but still a really lovely day out. We stayed in a cabin in the Woodland Village, which could fit six of us in one space, and just provides everything you want from actually staying in a Lego-themed apartment. It was so exciting to walk past all the little Lego sculptures and thoughtfully provided play spaces, and to find the Lego decorations and keeper Lego sets and bucket of misc bricks in the room! In order to have something to do when we arrived on Friday evening (the park is only open weekends off season), we played Lego-themed Minigolf, which was cute, though probably only worth it because it was included in the package deal.

jack decided he preferred a spa day on his own over a theme park trip, and 16yo S had got double-booked and had tickets for a show on Saturday. So it wasn't quite as I imagined our ten year anniversary, but it was still extremely lovely! We got to bring the teenager for the evening and stay together in the exciting themed cabin. Another thing I hadn't entirely factored in was that Storm Bert hit London sometime in the night; this led to the temperature being more than 10° warmer on Saturday than the previous few days of cold snap, but it was also very blustery and rainy. Many of the park attractions were closed from a combination of weather conditions and switching over to Christmas season. But there was still plenty to do for a day. And the Christmas stuff was mostly cute and not over-intrusive.

The stand-out ride we did manage to go on was Flight of the Sky Lion, which is a VR ride that almost completely convinced me that I was swooping through the air and plunging off cliffs and into caverns. We didn't entirely know what to expect and it turned out to be exciting in a totally different way from what I imagined. I was expecting basically a rollercoaster with some light displays, but actually most of the movement was illusory. Very convincing illusion though; the only thing that saved me from terror at some of the (fake) vertical plunges was that I could see that some of the projected images were a bit pixelly. If the technical quality improves at all I will find it almost as scary as a real coaster! (I'm a wimp about rollercoasters. I enjoy the ones aimed at children or the ones serious aficionados would scorn, but not the big famous thrill rides.)

The park being partially closed made it a bit tame for 12yo A, but I think he still enjoyed the day, maybe not as much as the superior theme park he visited aged 6, but still. And 4yo G had a totally awesome time; she's just tall enough for most of the child-friendly rides, and she has a very good sense of what she will enjoy versus what would be too fast for her, and she really enjoyed looking at all the cool Lego sculptures and playing with the Lego provided in the cabin and the restaurant. Also she's astonishingly patient; even when she was cold, wet and hungry, and had been trailing round the park on foot for hours, at a stage when I would expect kids that age to completely lose it, she barely even complained, let alone got seriously upset. She occasionally asked very politely to be carried, that was about the extent of expressing unhappiness. It's so weird to be around a very young child with that level of emotional regulation, but she's always been like this.

The food situation was not ideal. The weather was just too unpleasant to contemplate eating outdoors, which is not that surprising in late November, but obviously having to be indoors to eat greatly increased the risk of the day. Also theme parks basically always have over-priced, not great quality fast food. (Danish Legoland being the rare exception to this.) Also, the restaurant attached to the Woodland village area was the only one that was fully Lego themed and provided giant Lego fountains. That's the big downside of UK Legoland compared to Denmark: in most of the park, you can't really play with Lego while also going on Lego-themed rides or admiring Lego sculptures. They don't provide little Lego buckets to keep kids amused while queuing; they suggested downloading the park's app, but realistically if you're going to play on your phone you are probably just going to play on your phone. It's not the same. If it just had a slightly less good selection of rides I wouldn't say it was especially worse, but it's more like a generic theme park that happens to have Lego themed decor, than actually being a land of Lego.

Anyway. The short version is that I had an awesome time with my loves and I feel extremely fortunate.

comments

Eugenics

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 12:04:45 GMT

Most of the stuff that's in my head is Jewish-related, which isn't surprising because I'm a rabbinic student. But wise people have observed that it's good for community building to post links to other content, so here are a few things I've read recently that are worth reading.

Two pieces on "race science" (note the extremely scary scare quotes). If you're not aware I was a genetics researcher / educator before I was a student rabbi and I gradually came to the realization of how the field is built on absolutely rotten foundations. And the eugenics crap persists today, it's not just that back in the 19^th century people didn't know any better.

This is not why I left the field; I'm not naive enough to think the rabbinate is somehow untainted by colonialism! But it is why I am extremely aware that you have to be constantly vigilant against people trying to use sciencey-sounding language to justify racism, or even worse, using genetic technology to improve the master race instead of for the actual benefit of humans. There's a really seductive argument that goes, well, all scientific enquiry should be neutral, there should be no taboo topics. And if someone publishes some data that seems to prove a racist point, it should be countered through peer review and doing experiments to demonstrate the opposite and... Just. No. It isn't sincere, it's deliberate FUD with explicitly racist aims. Scientifically it's been debunked a million times, there is no benefit to being just a little bit racist just in case this time it really turns out that there's a genetic basis to some people being more worthy than others.

Race science really is an invidious conspiracy.

And it's in both the scientific establishment and popular culture. This piece by Millie on Fascist-coded food and consumption as identity is a bit rambly but it makes some really important points. It connects the dots between scientific racism, and some of the anti-public health cult that has become really prominent in the Covid era. Not everybody who is antivax or who campaigns vociferously for their right to breathe dirty, infected air is racist, but a lot of the underlying ideas very much are. I don't need vaccines / I'm not vulnerable to Covid because I have a "healthy lifestyle" or a "strong immune system". These are polite ways of saying, I come from a superior race. I'm thin, I'm white, I'm one of the "fittest" who is going to win at survival.

Eugenics is more than just racism. It's always, always antisemitic as well. And it's actively dangerous to other groups of people who are regarded as racially impure, particularly trans and disabled people. Regardless of whether a person's disability or trans identity is in any way genetic, once you have internalized the idea of a master race, people who strongly differ from the constructed ideal are seen as threatening. I realize this is controversial because it's dogma that racism doesn't harm white people. But it seems pretty clear to me this is all connected. Eugenic thinking, perhaps especially unconscious eugenic thinking, leads directly to discrimination and violence against white Jews, white disabled people, and white trans people, as well as intersectionally harming Jewish, disabled and trans POC.

Here is a really strong piece by May Peterson on trauma, transition, and transgender autonomy. People are upset about medical intervention in puberty for precisely eugenic reasons. There's a "normal" way that people are "supposed" to develop, and it's based on genetics as destiny. Look at all that panic about the possible, completely undocumented but hypothetically possible, effects of medically supported transition on future fertility, while at the same time many countries still legally require trans people to be sterilized before they can be legally registered as their target gender.

Alice Wong is, as always, brilliant. I can't recommend enough her piece on Disability, pleasure and ageing. It's both deeply personal (including explicit details of her sexuality as a disabled woman) and unquestionably political. It reclaims the right to pleasure for people who inhabit bodies that others find "disgusting". That disgust isn't just a random emotion, it's cultivated by a culture that is riddled with eugenic thinking.

And ok, this one is Jewish. But it's also awesome, a conversation between two amazing Jewish scholars and activists, R' Julia Watts Belser, a disabled cis woman, and Joy Ladin, a trans woman who as far as I know doesn't identify as disabled. They're talking about the connections between their work and generally being amazing together, in the same article.

General content note: some of these articles are hosted on sites that you may object to. The article about the race science conspiracy is in the Guardian. Millie on Fascist-coded food is on Substack. Peterson on Medium. And some people are boycotting Jewish cultural organizations which might be suspected of supporting Israel. Your choice whether to give them clicks or not, I'm not the boss of you.

comments

So many festivals

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 11:47:30 GMT

So I really sensibly added a lot of new people via a friending meme, and then disappeared for several weeks because I was right in the middle of my busiest season as a trainee rabbi. So far nobody has unfriended me for being inactive, but it does feel a bit unfair that I've been learning about the lives of all kinds of fascinating new people but not posting anything about my own life in return. Sorry about that.

In summary. I spent much of September stressing about, and to some extent actually preparing for, the festival season. I probably should've squeezed in a post there somewhere but it was A Lot. Infinitely better than this time last year when I had to run all the High Holy Day services at new communities within a week of starting my course. Partly because I'm now a more experienced second year and partly because it's a leap year so we had a month's grace between the start of term and the New Year.

For the first time since I started doing this professionally, I was placed at the same community for both Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur: Southport Reform. My getting to know the community service earlier in the summer was marred by happening the week of the stabbing attack and the racist riots, but because I was there at a time when they needed me I had built up some measure of trust with the community. My partner who had offered to come and be my support person (we jokingly say 'rebbitzen' from the Yiddish for a rabbi's wife) for Rosh HaShanah got Covid, so I ended up on my own. That was fine, but only increased my admiration for rabbis who always do this without spousal support.

I led an evening service, a morning service plus its complicated Musaf, additional service, and gave two sermons, and then I led a small intrepid group in Tashlich. The community enthusiastically embraced our exciting! new! prayerbook, and I can tell you I absolutely love leading from it. So well organized! Such beautiful choices of readings! I thought change might be hard for both me and my community, but the new book is just so obviously better (and I say this as someone who imprinted on the old one from a young child) that it was a wholly positive experience. But it did mean I had to put more time into preparation and not just rely on my usual habits.

I did not lead 2nd day services in Stoke, because they decided that opening up the synagogue was just too much effort and they'd rather watch streamed services hosted by other communities. That certainly made my festival season easier, though it feels a bit sad that after all these years it wasn't possible for that community to hold any services at all. So I got to spend both Friday (second day of the festival) and Shabbat Shuvah in my own home community as a congregant. I don't expect that to be the case very often in the coming decades. And my OSOs were out of quarantine in time to reschedule our planned festive meal to Saturday evening.

Mercifully we did not have class during the Ten Days between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, so in theory I had a bit of time to get things ready for Yom Kippur. In reality, my bathroom flooded just a few days before the festivals, and another rabbinic student did me the massive favour of recommending me a plumber, who came to investigate and declared that the whole room had to be stripped and rebuilt including the walls and floor. So that was extremely bad timing and excruciatingly expensive, and I spent much of the time between the festivals dealing with that.

Yom Kippur was a marathon as it always is. Spent basically all of Friday travelling in order to arrive in good time to eat and get set up before the fast. I led essentially the whole thing solo because the community doesn't have enough confident lay leaders for me to delegate the more straight forward parts of the service. Service and sermon for the evening service, Kol Nidrei. Morning service with another sermon and two Torah readings, Musaf including the reenactment of the priestly service, and the martyrs. One of the best improvements in the new book is that YK Musaf is no longer entirely taken over by Holocaust remembrance. Not that we don't care about remembering the Shoah, but it shouldn't be the main focus of the main service on the standout day of the year. They wanted a study session in the afternoon, and I prepared something fairly generic as I wasn't really expecting many people to be there, but in fact I used nothing of what I prepared, because what happened was that everybody fired questions at me about everything from Jewish medical ethics to the exact boundaries of the different denominations to the meaning of certain verses in the Torah readings. Like a super-intense, totally ad-libbed AMA after 18 hours without food and drink. At least we were sitting down rather than me standing at the pulpit.

Afternoon service (congregant read Jonah in English at least), where they'd allowed way more time than the afternoon service plausibly takes, so we had a slightly awkward gap between that and the concluding services. The synagogue filled out for Yizkor, the memorial service, as it always does, and then by the time you get to Neilah (the special closing of the gates service that ends the day), you're pretty much on rails. I was unable to dissuade the shul chair from giving announcements after the final Shofar; that both delays people who are desperate to break the fast, and breaks the mood. But it turned out some of the announcement was a fulsome thanks to me and a presentation of a souvenir mug. I still don't think that belonged at that point just as the service was finishing, but anyway, it was sweet.

The community provided a sensibly scaled break-fast, not a massive feast but some soup, bread and salad that was enough to sustain people who had to travel a long way. And I went back to the hotel to collapse. At least Southport is far enough way from SE England that nobody could possibly have assumed I was going to travel home late in the evening after the service. After being very careful in my physical preparations for the fast, tapering caffeine and increasing hydration so that actually I was only tired by the end of the day, I messed up by eating way too much breakfast the next morning. So I was a bit uncomfortable travelling home, but hey. And we had two and a half days of classes between Yom Kippur and Succot, which is not ideal but was the only way to fit in a whole semester before Christmas.

There was transport doom on Wednesday so I didn't get home in time to build my succah as I'd hoped, in fact I arrived after sunset and was late bringing in the festival. But it was soooooo good to be home with my jack! I was able to go to my own synagogue again for the first day of the festival, and sit in their succah. And jack helped me build one for us even though it was late and I didn't get to use it much. Friday cjwatson and I went to sit in hatam_soferet's extremely luxurious succah, and plan the service for C's adult bar mitzvah in a couple of weeks. I led the Shabbat service at the Liberal section of Mosaic, a very cleverly named joint Liberal, Reform and Masorti synagogue in North London. ghoti_mhic_uait came with me and we had a little mini-date after the service. I am so appreciative of my people working round my need to squeeze in time with them between all my student rabbi duties. The community turned out to contain some long-lost cousins of my mother's, and I networked fiercely so might even get some further work there.

Again, classes during the midweek part of Succot. Staying in my London flat is definitely more relaxing now I have a working bathroom again! cjwatson came to stay over Tuesday night and buy a mezuzah case Wednesday morning. I went to The Liberal Synagogue for Erev Simchat Torah, and then to East London and Essex Liberal, where I'm shadowing this year, for the daytime service. This takes us to the mythical land of "after the festivals" except that I'm also giving the sermon (in my home community! where preaching slots are really competitive!) tomorrow, and leading in Birmingham next Shabbat, and the week after that is the bar mitzvah which is not officially my responsibility but I'm also not not nervous.

This whole festive season has been massively overshadowed by the question of what do we say about Gaza? I might or might not feel brave enough to make a post about that.

comments

About me

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 20:24:29 GMT

Hello, welcome everybody from the friending meme! I realize I haven't actually created an About Me post in at least a decade, so I should give some background.

I'm a cis woman aged 45. I spent my childhood in SE England and I'm now back here, having travelled around quite a lot in my 20s. From my teens to mid 40s, I was trying to build a career as a cancer researcher, which is the reason for travelling around. In some ways I was academically successful: First from Oxford, PhD in a very prestigious lab in Scotland, post-doc in an internationally famous institution in Sweden, and tenured before I was 30, with a job that was 50% teaching medical school and 50% running a lab in the Midlands of England. But it turns out that the skills that make you good at being a student are not necessarily the same as the skills that make you successful as an academic – I am particularly bad at persuading people to give me money to do my research, and molecular biology is expensive, you can't just sit in a library and think while you're waiting for a grant.

In 2008, while living in Sweden, I got into what was supposed to be a casual, long-distance relationship with jack. By 2010 we were engaged and I searched for, and found, an academic post in England to be a bit nearer to him, though we were still long distance even if not international. We married in 2012, on Leap Day so we have only had three actual anniversaries in 12 years. In 2014 we got together with another couple, ghoti_mhic_uait and cjwatson. I was increasingly unhappy in my job, because I was stuck in a vicious circle of not having any grant money, so not being given any resources (even really basic things like research time and lab space), so not being able to get any publications or grants. The medical school would have rescued me if I'd chosen it; I could have moved into a teaching-focused job and given up on the research, and I was tempted, because I really enjoy teaching med students, but it wasn't worth being 150 miles away from my partners and spending half my weekend commuting.

So I very slowly extracted myself from traditional academia. In 2017 I moved back to Cambridge full time to live with my husband and close to our Other Significant Others (OSOs, for short). I worked as an education researcher and developer at a post-92 university for a few years. Then I got a completely ideal job as online education manager for an organization that runs professional training in genomics, which gave me my first ever decent salary and job security and really used my skills in both biology and education to do something extremely worthwhile. Then the global pandemic hit, which in a way did wonders for my career: suddenly online education in gene sequencing was the absolute hotness, and I got to work on some really significant international projects related to tackling Covid.

However. I have always been a religiously committed Reform Jew, and when my scientific career took me to places with dwindling or newly started Jewish communities, I found myself volunteering with them. Leading services, teaching children and adults, and helping said communities to be more firmly established. I was 21 the first time I was the only competent person in a tiny Orthodox (!) synagogue. And the more I did this the more I built up my skills. Lots of people wondered why I wasn't a rabbi. Well, partly because being a rabbi is an even worse career prospect than academia, but mainly because my husband isn't Jewish. Until very recently it wasn't possible to train as a rabbi with a non-Jewish spouse, and I'm in a polyamorous relationship with several non-Jews. I was made aware in 2019 that that restriction was no longer in place, but I didn't do anything about it at the time because there was a global pandemic and my partners had a baby and I had just started the cool online education job.

Exactly a year ago, I started training as a rabbi at the joint seminary (Liberal, Reform and Masorti) in London. I split my time between a very full class load here in London, and weekends either working with communities – doing what I've always done, but this time in an official, and importantly paid, capacity – or spending time with my husband and partners. My husband and I are childfree, and our OSOs have four children aged 25, 15, 12 and 4. I'm not their mother, but I'm also more than just a family friend to the younger three (the oldest was 15 when I started dating his parents and we get on pretty well, but I'm not a big part of his life in the same way.)

Oh yes, and I conducted most of my social life through LiveJournal from 2003 to 2009, and here on DW from 2009 to now. So that's more than 20 years of blogging. I don't post or comment here as regularly as I'd like but it's very much my online home.

TL;DR: Mid 40s, former scientist and education specialist, now student rabbi. Bi, polyamorous Reform Jewish woman, alloparent to 3 children.

comments

Back to school friending meme

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 21:58:40 GMT

Picture by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

Do you get that end-of-summer, back-to-school feeling as an adult? Looking forward to a fresh start, perhaps with some more DW friends? silviarambles is hosting a friending meme!

Back to School Friendzy - 2024

Please remember that friending frenzies work only if you spread the word, so, even if you're not looking for more friends, do pimp the meme in your own journal please! Thanks!

Passing this on since I'm literally going back to school tomorrow. And the meme so far seems to be full of people around my age who post about their lives more than fandom, which is exactly who I want to get to know on DW.

comments

Well, that was a bad idea

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 10:08:48 GMT

We (jack and I) got Covid at Worldcon, or possibly travelling back from it.

So yes, purplecthulhu and others, you were right, it was a bad risk. There's no point second guessing what points I could have chosen a different balance between masking and eating. Lots of people I know who are as scrupulous or more so about masking also caught plague. It's pretty clear anecdotally and from what little data we have that population levels are really high right now, and mixing over 7000 people from all over the world in a mostly enclosed space for 5 days was never going to give good odds.

On the whole it was a good con. Very well organized, I'm sure there's going to be some scandal coming out but it looked to me like they did most things right and avoided many of the pitfalls of other cons. The programming was generally really good; I didn't go to a single bad panel or talk. The worst experience I had, and this was a bit of a theme, was three really interesting and knowledgeable experts being talked over by one white male blowhard who wrote a book on a vaguely related subject. Generally the moderators were pretty good at keeping a lid on this sort of thing, but almost every good panel I went to would have been even better if that one white guy hadn't been there. (To be clear, different white guys in every case.) That is still a massive improvement on previous experiences where three random mediocre white men completely drowning out the one interesting panellist is more typical.

Events were well matched to room sizes. Not perfectly, but perfection is impossible. And the whole venue had a very very strict policy that you don't overfill rooms; I was impressed that the whole volunteer team backed up the employees in enforcing this, no 'just this once' exceptions for famous or pushy people, so they completely avoided any kind of asshole filter issues. Queues were not excessively long, and there seemed to be at least some provision for people who can't stand in queues. The con also successfully enforced bans against people who have been jerks at past cons, even the kind of jerks who booked into a nearby hotel and tried to turn up anyway. They didn't allow extremely famous authors to be divas, but insisted that everybody follow policy, which has the pleasing result that the con wasn't at all dominated by a few big names but instead there was a really good range of interesting people from all backgrounds.

The main hall and dealers' room were just great, really spacious with a whole range of interesting exhibits. There were plenty of food options even within the actual con space, and a street of very nice small local eateries half a mile away. The ceremonies were well organized and entertaining and didn't drag on. They fixed the Hugo awards (yes, technically a separate organization from the con itself but very much part of the experience) and came up with something transparent and fair. My only real complaint was that most of the dances and ceilidhs took place in rooms too small for dancing, so I ended up not really joining in any of those.

In terms of content and organization that was the best con I've been to. In terms of social, it wasn't perfect but I did get to meet or meet up with several of the people I was most excited to see, rosefox and partner, sfred and djm4, khalinche, and even briefly met kiya though we didn't get to talk much. And I hung out with lots of my Cambridge friends but not like at some cons where I've accidentally ended up travelling hundreds of miles to spend time with my local neighbours exclusively. Lobbycon kind of didn't work for me; between trying to stay masked, and the organization of programme being ironically too good (in that people spent the time between items purposefully travelling to the next thing, not stuck in queues or clustering in pinch points), I didn't get to just hang out in random spots and have chance conversations with random cool people.

And yet, I regretted going basically from the moment I arrived. I spent a lot of time fretting about how expensive it was in money, but mostly worrying about catching Covid, which in fact turned out to be founded. Even though it was good it wasn't worth the risk. I thought the Covid policy was sound (caring about ventilation, masks 'strongly recommended', everybody tests before arrival and then daily). But in fact the only part of it enforced was the 'don't hassle other people for their different approach to infection risk', and that was interpreted to mean, don't mention the plague at all. I understand that the con don't have the power to literally force people to mask and test, and some people actively can't. But they didn't communicate the policy in any way, just expected people to read the small print of the Ts&Cs, and in fact they prohibited participants from referring to the policy under the 'don't hassle other people' clause. Even ventilation was good in the main site, but terrible in the attached hotel where some of the programming took place.

Following the policy (which nobody else seemed to even know about, even people who are generally covid cautious), I tested every day and did not show positive until this morning. jack was symptomatic on Tuesday and positive yesterday. I had very mild symptoms which could be anything yesterday, (scratchy throat, a bit sniffly) and a very faint line on the test today. So given the timing it's possible that jack caught it right at the end of the con, and I caught it from him travelling home together on the sleeper train, when we didn't mask. And it's possible that even if I hadn't gone I would have caught plague from jack anyway; we tried isolating from each other when he was positive and I wasn't yet, but I think it was too late by then.

The only thing that makes this slightly less bad is that I very unusually have no commitments at all for the next two weeks, so my life isn't going to be very disrupted by needing to quarantine. (Yes, I know it's not legally required, I'm doing it because it's ethical.) So if I just get an acute case with no medium- or long-term consequences, I'll be fine to go back to college for the start of term.

So, all in all, good, but not worth risking my life and livelihood :-( I won't do that again, even if my entire family are going and I want to be with them.

comments

Bullet points

Sun, 04 Aug 2024 14:00:51 GMT

I'm not even going to apologize for how long it's been since I last posted here. In roughly reverse chronological order, this summer:

I'm going to Glasgow WorldCon in person next weekend. I am not at all sure whether this is a good Covid risk, and I dithered for ages, but I'm going. I have made no plans for the con, haven't even looked at the programme, but I'd like to meet up with people, especially those of you who are usually in a different continent from me. Or if you're in the London area on the way to or from the con I'm around - no classes at the moment.
I was visiting preacher this weekend in the normally sleepy seaside town of Southport, where this week a teenager fatally stabbed three little girls and then a bunch of thugs rioted and smashed up the mosque and kicked off a wave of race riots across the country. I think the Jewish community appreciated my support, and I appeared in some news footage of 'local faith leaders in solidarity with the Muslim community'. And I am not whining that it's hard being trainee clergy when there are families coping with the violent deaths of their children, but it wasn't a walk in the park either.
I bought a flat in NW London, so that I will have somewhere to live while I'm studying for the next four years and not have to rely on a chain of informal short term spare room borrowing. Yes, I know I'm extremely privileged. Hopefully there will be a housewarming at the end of the month, if I get the place habitable and ready for guests in the next few weeks.
Talking of studying, I got Firsts in all my subjects so have officially passed, not to say aced, first year of rab school and I will be progressing into second year.
We (the college where I'm studying) ordained five new rabbis. I have many feels about how this will be me in a few years, and also about my beloved colleagues moving on to their real jobs with no new intake of students to replace them, so we're going to be a really tiny student body next year, basically 8 people across the whole school.
I finished my first year of rab school with two weeks of interesting one-off classes, including a set of three on contemporary UK antisemitism which I'm hoping to write up.
I saw Hamilton on tour in Birmingham, thanks to cjwatson being extremely awesome at spontaneously booking us tickets for the weekend when I was visiting the community.
I saw a top-notch performance of the rather mediocre comic opera The Merry Widow at Glyndebourne. This ended up being the day I finished exams, so I felt very Oxford sitting a three hour written exam, changing into an evening gown in the toilets, and jumping on a train to go to the opera!
Talking of Oxford, we went on an end-of-term trip to the Ashmolean and ended up reporting antisemitic vandalism of the ancient near east galleries. I mean it wasn't very scary, but trying to erase "Israel" from historical maps is not exactly meaningful pro-Palestinian activism. On a more positive note we got to handle some several century old Jewish 'castle' rings, so that was cool.
My partner cjwatson became Jewish, with the whole polycule present to support him at the Beth Din (rabbinic court).

Other notable media, again, should write up at some point:

Nicola Griffith: Menewood (novel)
Michael David Lukas: The last watchman of Old Cairo (novel)
Dara Horn: People love dead Jews (non-fiction)
Naomi Alderman: The Power (novel)
We are Lady Parts S2 (TV show)

Lots of people write about their 'biggest failure' in the end of year meme. Mine has been keeping in touch with people I don't see in person. I used to have regular conversations with doseybat and rysmiel and angelofthenorth and I've just entirely lost the habit. And I've not at all contacted anyone I don't have a regular arrangement with, and I've more or less dropped off DW and Discord. It's not exactly that I've been "too busy", there is in a literal sense enough time in the week for talking to people I care about, but I just haven't quite found enough spare brain to make it happen. In theory, next year should be a bit easier, since I won't be couch surfing or house hunting and will have my own place, but a month of vacation from college hasn't fixed my bad habits so I'm not entirely optimistic.

comments

Reading Wednesday 1/05

Wed, 01 May 2024 19:40:00 GMT

Recently read: The pomegranate gate by Ariel Kaplan. (c) 2023 Ariel Kaplan; pub Solaris 2023; ISBN 978-1-78618-824-3. Someone around DW recommended it and it really sounded like my sort of book, so I put it on my wishlist and it showed up as a late December present. It is gorgeously written and original, but ultimately quite depressing.

I absolutely love the worldbuilding of The pomegranate gate! There are portals from Inquisition-era Spain to a fantasy world populated by powerful and almost immortal mazziks. Everything is described in very vivid, yet otherworldly, detail. There's loads of Jewish mythology blended with tropes of portal fantasy, and the story is impressively dramatic and original. I didn't find the characters entirely memorable, though, and had to keep referring to the cast list often enough that I got a bit bored.

Also I felt somewhat let down by the ending, which felt really rushed, and also instead of a resolution we get lots of betrayal and death and failure. I don't mind a sad ending, but it didn't feel like the book had built up to a tragedy; it was as unsatisfying as a happy ending suddenly shoehorned in when the protagonists are in an impossible situation.

That said, there is a lot to admire about tPG. I love that it's absolutely unapologetically traditional fantasy, it's not ironic or subversive, but it is modern in that it eschews gender and ethnic stereotypes, and not everybody is straight but it isn't specifically about making a big point of that. It's also unapologetically Jewish; you could absolutely read it as a completely made-up mythology with lots of invented words if you didn't recognize the terms and allusions, but it's very much rooted in what it is. TPG reads as if Kaplan probably cut her teeth on fanfic; I don't mean that as a criticism, but it has a particular style. I enjoyed that it explores in depth the idea of a human, even a special chosen human, falling in love with a supernatural being; it's not just an elaborate set-up for inhumanly sexy sex scenes, nor a soppy romance where love magically fixes everything. In fact it's mostly about pining rather than actual relationship.

I'm sorry I've forgotten whose review pointed me to this one. rachelmanija maybe?

Currently reading: Menewood by Nicola Griffith. Long-awaited sequel to Hild, which I absolutely adored. hatam_soferet lent it to me so I didn't have to wait for it to be officially released in the UK. So far I'm not loving it quite as much as the first volume, but equally I have devoured more than half the 700 page tome in about a day.

Up next: I got lots of books as Seder presents as usual. I think the one I'm most excited about is The last watchman of old Cairo by Michael David Lukas.

comments