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I'm Jewish. I invite you all to celebrate any Jewish holiday. But they're all stupid religious bullshit other than the food part, so I wouldn't bother.
The food is the best part of any holiday, to be fair.
I agree. Unfortunately, with Jewish holidays, you have to sit through what feels like about 10 hours of prayers in Hebrew before you get to the food.
Which especially sucks when you're a hungry kid who doesn't understand Hebrew.
I have the best Jewish friends. They're not strict Jewish, they adapt a lot of the traditions to suit themselves. For example any of the food heavy holiday's they invite their non-Jewish friends over but do most of the religious stuff before we show up. So for me, I get to visit with friends, eat pretty good food (I've learned what to avoid like the unleavened bread), and help them celebrate something that's important to them. They make no expectation for us to actually participate, just respect that they are. It's a good time.
I feel for their kids though, they have to do the 10 hour thing.
Damn, lucky you not having to sit through the boring shit. Because yeah, the food is great!
Yep. Half my family is Jewish, half is Catholic. My dad (Jewish atheist) made me sit through a really long seder once and afterward said he forgot how boring they are. And also didn't warn me about the bitter herbs lol. Next time we went to a seder it was wayyy more streamlined.
You can use parsley as 'bitter herbs,' which is what we did. Not the most pleasant thing to eat, but not exactly unpalatable. I've heard of some people using celery. That feels like cheating.
If fish isn't meat to the Catholics then why shouldn't celery be a bitter herb
Beaver, armadillo, alligator and capybara are all also fish according to the Catholic church.
So yeah, Jews definitely don't have the monopoly on this stuff.
Celery leaves specifically would probably be what they meant. You can actually use them as a substitute for parsley in cooking!
I think that may be what the idea was, but they definitely meant just regular celery because the conversation, which had happened a couple of times with guests when I was a kid, was along the lines of "why are you using parsley? Celery is so much nicer!"
I dated a girl who is Jewish many years ago. Her parents would just throw dishes at each other while arguing in Hebrew. To hear you say that it can’t be entertaining slightly offends me.
Hebrew or Yiddish? If she wasn't Israeli, it was probably Yiddish. Yiddish is also better for yelling people in. My grandmother was very good at it. It's like if German had a bastard child with Polish.
Oh maybe that’s what it was. On a related note the girl I dated has a sister that was a substitute teacher at our high school at the time. She was 21 and would buy us booze and she also played strip poker with my friends and me. Took my buddy’s virginity. Fun times!
where does ladino fit into this?
Not very much. There are very few Ladino speakers alive today. Like exponentially fewer than Yiddish, which already doesn't have very many speakers left.
Ladino is very close to Medieval Spanish, but written using Hebrew letters.
Yeah, but... the food part.
Eh, you can have charoset any day of the year if you feel like it.
Food holidays are my favorite holidays, and also because of Jon Stewart, I irrationally appreciate the abundance of Jewish holidays.
Which Jewish holidays should I celebrate?
Well the problem is that Passover has the best food, but it's also celebrating a genocide, so I don't really have a good recommendation.
Purim maybe? It's mildly less stupid than the others since it's actually based on something that really happened? But it's still based on an arranged marriage, so even that's kind of fucked up. I don't know. The Bible is ridiculous.
Dang, yea, the Bible is a terrible mess.
Hamantaschen are amazing and I'll make them year round, no one can stop me!
I also make the donuts for Hanukkah for my mother
At least we're out of the years where we were making like a gross of them. That was exhausting.
Every year my mother buys jelly donuts for us when we come to visit for Hanukkah and every year, we all tell her that we don't like jelly donuts.
At least she doesn't try to cook them. She's an awful cook. And she doesn't understand food. She makes latkes in the oven (not fried) the day before we come, freezes them, then defrosts them when we come over. And we eat two and pretend we like them and cover them with enough sour cream so that we can't taste them.
We used to go home and make our own another day, but they're also kind of a pain in the ass to make, so we just deal with shitty latkes once a year now.
Her matzoh ball soup is fine, but it's very hard to fuck that up.
That's fucking adorable though. Getting old is weird.
Oh, the homemade donuts, all 122 of them were well received! As well as the hamantaschen. But when you're making a gross of them, it just takes a long time.
I like latkes, but it was one of them few holiday cooking things that I did not get pushed into doing as a kid (and now several decades later still do for the family)
Challah, hamantaschen, donuts...mostly all the dessert things, I guess. And the charoset! There's more, but I forget until I get the call and start baking for her.
I'm good with most Jewish food, but I draw the line at gefilte fish. I don't know who decided ground up fish balls in soup was a good idea, but it wasn't.
Our white versions don't involve the food :(
There's plenty of Jewish food cookbooks out there! I'm personally a big fan of kugel.
My (fairly religious) aunt introduced me to latkes when I was a kid and it became a lifelong love affair.
I love a good latke, but a bad latke is a very sad thing indeed.
She was (is) a great cook, they were always light and fluffy. Usually we'd have them with applesauce but sometimes she'd make them with a lot of onion and we'd eat them with ketchup.
Ew. I don't know about ketchup. We always have sour cream.
I love my aunt and have very fond memories of oniony, ketchupy latkes but I don't eat ketchup with my potatos anymore lol.
In my defense, I was a child. I'm not even sure where she came across them, we're not Jewish (we were Baptists, from the midwest).
She also makes an onion pie that's pretty great.
Christ that looks good.
It's also so easy to make that even my mother can't fuck it up. Which, if you ever had my mother's attempts at cooking, is very impressive.
Lmao. Does her cooking make you nostalgic?
My mom regrets that she didn't learn all of her mother's cajun recipes. I regret it, too.
It does not. She's a much better cook than when I was a kid while still being a terrible cook. But at least her idea of offering me dinner is no longer a defrosted turkey burger every night.
There were also the dreaded dinnertime words of my childhood: "This was an experiment."
Because the "experiment" was usually something like, "the recipe called for two cups of sugar and that's too much sugar, so I substituted cottage cheese."
That sounds horrendous. Kind of adorable, though.
hi fellow Jew pls celebrate the holidays with me
I'll celebrate with you, but can we make up a new holiday with the same food but none of the boring prayer parts?
Judaism is a closed religion, lighting candles for Hanukkah is one thing and that's cool if you want to partake in some fun. Saying prayers over those candles is markedly different and definitely appropriation.
I wouldn't call it appropriation. Appropriation would be claiming those weren't Jewish prayers or a menorah, they were Christian (or whatever).
A non-Jew saying Hebrew prayers doesn't offend me. My non-Jewish wife has done it before because she got a masters in folklore and wanted to take part. She didn't claim it as her own, she just took part in the ceremony. And plenty of non-Jewish spouses of Jews have done the same thing.
Honestly, if you're curious and you want to take part in Jewish ceremonies, go for it. Judaism is not as closed as you think. If it was, you wouldn't have famous converts like Sammy Davis, Jr. and Isla Fisher (and Ivanka Trump, unfortunately). It's not a simple process like turning around three times and saying "I'm a Jew!" but it's not exactly a ridiculous challenge either.
A non Jew saying Jewish prayers is absolutely appropriation. There's a rather clear line of thinking surrounding this in the greater Jewish community especially amongst the rabbinical crowd, and the Messianics are a rather large part of it.
Rabbis aren't popes. They don't get to decide what is or is not offensive to Jews in general. Sure, very religious Jews might have a problem with it. And I could not care less what they think. Especially when they're the minority in the U.S.
62% of self-described American Jews say being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry and culture, while just 15% say it is mainly a matter of religion. Even among Jews by religion, 55% say being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry and culture, while 66% say it is not necessary to believe in God to be Jewish.[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_atheism
Do you honestly think most Jews would have a big problem with my wife saying a blessing over the menorah when most of them don't even think you have to believe in a god? I guarantee you more Jews were offended by Bradley Cooper playing Leonard Bernstein with a prosthetic nose than they would be over a non-Jew saying a Hebrew prayer.
Rabbi's aren't Pope's and they're born to argue so when the vast majority of them clearly state that a non Jew saying Jewish prayers is contrary to the principles of the religion then I'm going to accept that as a religious decree.
So yea your non jewish wife saying the bracha is a problem. You're welcome to practice as you see fit, no one's going to pull your Jew card over it but that doesn't make it halacha/Kosher/ cool or any other version of acceptable.
Why do Rabbis get to declare what is cultural appropriation when only 15% of American Jews say Judaism is about religion?
It sounds like you are offended by it. I would love some evidence that the general Jewish population agrees with you.
Why do the people who devote their lives to studying the scriptures of the religion get to be the ones who decide what's acceptable within the religion and what's not?
Because they're literally the subject matter experts. It's also pretty damn clear in the tanach too. In order to perform the mitzvah you need to be Jewish.
I'm not offended by how you choose to practice your religion, I'm pointing out that what you're doing is absolutely cultural appropriation and off sides with the understood practice of the religion as a whole. You're the one who seems to be offended by being called out on this, and that's for you to come to grips with not me.
I like how you keep ignoring the fact that the vast majority of Jews clearly don't give a shit about what Rabbis think.
Basically you're saying that Rabbis get to decide what Jews consider to be cultural appropriation and Jews as a whole do not.
Which is nonsense.
There's like 3 dozen angles to why your shiksa wife and kids shouldn't be saying brachot. It's more of a fact based gish gallop than moving the goal posts.
And yes Rabbi's as the stewards of Judaism get to make the call what's authentically Jewish and what's not. That you're unaware of these basic tenets of your culture and heritage is pretty fucking weird.
As I said above, you're welcome to keep larp'ing as a Jewish family but you're just lying to yourself and others. You seem to be really offended by this fact, maybe seeking counsel from a rabbi would help you with your conflicted emotions.