I wrote this poem last November, after Leonard Cohen had passed away (his yahrtzeit is later this month), and I was constantly listening to his music. I was also heartbroken, because the person I call here the Kabbalist’s son had finally walked out of my life on Sukkot just a few weeks earlier. I’ve never felt as unsheltered as I did then. Sukkot wasn’t primarily on my mind when I wrote the poem, but its underlying motives of giving and losing shelter, fleeting joy, and the convergence of transience and permanence echo some of the holiday’s themes. 

I loved the Kabbalist’s son, who came to me in starry nights

immersed in the secret wisdom of his ancestors.

In the shadow of the candle light

I heard them singing in the Temple,

I saw them swaying by the river,

their silhouettes transposed from ancient lands

onto my crimson painted bedroom walls.

His beauty smiled in the deepest crevice of my loneliness.

I drank his words. His pale skin was my firmament,

his name in every blessing.

For just one moment out of time

his touch repaired forever and again my world.

He came to me past the tents of his brothers and sisters

who had forsaken him.

He came without allotment or inheritance

but with his share of splendor and eternity.

I fed him tea and peanut butter, I mended his suit

while he washed and scrubbed his body,

water dripping down the tiles and from his clothes.

I shared his dreams when he slept near me,

for one moment out of time.

I saw him dancing with joyous black-clad men,

I heard him crying on the doorstep of a foreclosed home.

His sweetness was broken, his kindness impure.  

There was nothing I could do. He told me:

I have no love to give you.

The stars turned into snowflakes,

the snow turned into rain.

Last year’s man is gone and with him,

the Kabbalist’s son.

Julia Knobloch’s poetry has appeared in Moment Magazine, Rascal, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere. She works for the Union for Reform Judaism and lives in Brooklyn.

Image via PxHere

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(Jewcy even once threw our hat into the feminist Sukkot ring with the Ushpizienne, a list of female Jewish comedians who would obviously make any holiday party amazing. It’s not the most intellectual of responses, but who wouldn’t want Ilana Glazer in their sukkah?)

Anyway, since it’s traditional to decorate your sukkah with representations of your metaphorical guests, there have been some gorgeous designs of these ushpizot, some of which you can purchase for your own weird Jewish booth thing. Let’s look at just a few gorgeous choices, each in a very different visual style:

1. 1. Dov Abramson’s Ushpizot: “Make Room in Your Sukkah”Abramson is an Israeli artist who sells his designs on Etsy. His ushpizot series comes as posters or party banners (cute!), and he covers his bases, using both Biblical and historical figures. His illustrative portraits of the women are fun, but still definitely respectful. Plus, why stop at 7 female figures when you can have over two dozen? Eve! Miriam! The daughters of Zelophehad! Nechama Leibowitz! Ofra Haza! The hits just keep on coming!

1. 1. Ma’yan’s Prophets
      Ma’yan is a Jewish feminist organization that went with seven women regarded  as prophets: Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Avigail, Huldah, and Esther. It uses collages with evocative imagery to share the stories of these prophetesses. You can order a poster (designed by Ellen Alt) here.

1. JOFA’s educators
   The Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance actually ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund their poster, back in 2014. They chose no Biblical figures, and actually went with women a bit more obscure to the layperson— prominent female Jewish scholars and educators (each portrayed by a different artist). So if you want to learn about Flora Sassoon, this might be the poster for you, and if you already know her life’s work, this is definitely the poster for you.

Or, you could get all three of these! Listen, it may be too late to get these in time for the holiday (especially if you’re not in Israel and interested in Abramson’s work), but you may be able to make it work, or at least use these pieces of art as inspiration for your own feminist sukkah.

And of course, tweet us with pictures of your own feminist sukkah art. Especially if you went the ushpizienne route.

The post Welcome the Ushpizot appeared first on Jewcy.

Sukkot is probably my favorite Jewish holiday because we get to build a temporary structure, a sukkah, to live in—and decorate!—for a week. (More about why we do that here.) Traditionally, Jews adorn their Sukkot with posters of the ushpizin, the seven biblical “guests” who we invite to join us on each night of the festival. Not surprisingly, the ushpizin are all men: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph and David; the most revered dudes in the Torah. No ladies—until now.

Rather than invite seven biblical men to my sukkah, I decided I’d invite the Jewish female comedians and characters I’ve been most into this year, and throw together some posters to honor them.

I think the temporary/pop-up nature of Sukkot lends itself to a pop-culture influence, where the guests you welcome one year might not be the same ones you welcome the next. Last year I honored the cast of Girls. This year I’ve been pretty obsessed with Broad City, and continued to cultivate my enduring love for Lena Dunham, Sarah Silverman and others.

So without further ado, here are my ‘Ushpizienne: Class of 5775’: Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer, Abbi Jacobson, Jenny Slate, Ilana Glazer, Sarah Silverman, and Yael Stone.

Don’t forget to ‘hack into booth city’:

And—why not—the cast of Girls, from last Sukkot:

Download large versions of all images for your sukkah (or permanent four-walled residence) here.

Ari Perlow is an antipodean Jewess who is obsessed with vegan analogues and digital media. She co-hosts the podcast Yeah Nah But and tweets at @ari_perlow.

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If you’re traveling for the High Holidays this year, be prepared to have your Sukkot paraphernalia searched at security. Be prepared to see countless Jews waving lulavs as they remove their belts and watches. Be prepared to unwrap your etrog and let the TSA agent examine it, and perhaps smell it for good measure. JTA reports:

“TSA’s screening procedures do not prohibit the carrying of the four plants used during Sukkot – a palm branch, myrtle twigs, willow twigs, and a citron – in airports, through or security checkpoints, or on airplanes,” the Transportation Security Administration said in a statement, noting the dates of this year’s Sukkot holiday, from Sept. 18-25.

Cooperate fully and we’re sure your etrog, lulav, hadas, and aravah will make it on the plane unscathed.

The post Your Lulav and Etrog Will Be Searched At Airport Security appeared first on Jewcy.

Paper chains, pipe cleaners, and hanging gourds decorate the sukkah that we build in the exact same fashion each and every Sukkot. But nowhere in the Torah does it say that a sukkah’s design must be as architecturally limited as we’ve been making them—there are essential parameters, but there’s room for variation. In that vein, author Joshua Foer, Roger Bennett, and Reboot started a competition in which architects designed and built twelve seriously inventive sukkahs, which were eventually displayed in a two-day exhibit in Manhattan’s Union Square. Directed by Jason Hutt, Sukkah City documents the project that questioned the status quo of sukkah construction.

Chag sameach and here’s the trailer. The film is screening in Union Square on Sept. 22, and at the JCC in Manhattan on Sept. 23 and 24, with a Q&A with the competition’s jury members and winning architects.

SUKKAH CITY – Trailer from Oxbow Lake Films on Vimeo.

(Photo from sukkahcity.com)

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A confession: I have a crush on Ruxin. There, I said it. Yes, Rodney Ruxin (Nick Kroll), the Jewish products-liability attorney on The League, is an insufferable jerk. Yes, he seems willing to go to great lengths to humiliate and sabotage his friends. Yes, his morals seem, well, flexible. (In one episode, Ruxin defends a paint company whose cans explode by arguing that anyone buying such a cheap item should have “a reasonable expectation that that product will explode in your face.” “And, morally, you’re good with this?” asks his friend, Pete. “There was just one word in there that I am not familiar with,” Ruxin responds.)

So, yes, I know that I should be embarrassed about my crush. “I can’t even unpack that,” one friend responded when I told her about my attraction. Well, I can. Maybe what’s attractive about Ruxin is that he’s part of a rebranding of the Jewish man: not the nerdy, nervous nebbish of yesteryear but a cocky, self-assured asshole.

Ruxin’s loutishness sometimes plays off his Jewishness. In one memorable episode, he hosts a Sukkot party in an attempt to butter up the Jewish preschool teacher to improve his son’s chances of being accepted. “Wonderful news to fill your pathetic social calendars,” Ruxin warmly says by way of announcing the party to his friends. “Since when does Sofia allow you to celebrate Judaism in your house?” one buddy asks, referring to Ruxin’s decidedly non-Jewish wife. “Forget Sofia, since when do you allow Judaism in your own house?” asks another. Well, ever since baby Geoffrey needed to get into a good preschool, of course. Ruxin warns his friends not to park in his driveway, which has a pothole; when he hears that the city will expedite cleanup on racially insensitive graffiti, he spray-paints a swastika on his own driveway. In poor taste, sure, but the man knows how to get things done, even if it means, you know, appropriating a Nazi symbol.

That’s what’s liberating—and appealing—about Ruxin: his brazen boorishness isn’t bound up with his Jewishness. Unlike Jewish putzes of the past—slimy lawyers like The Wire’s Maurice Levy or cripplingly analytical men in the Alvy Singer mold—Ruxin’s bad behavior exists independently of his Jewishness. He knows it, too: “If I did look inward, which I won’t,” he says, “I think we would find that my Judaism would be the least objectionable thing about me.” You have to like a guy who doesn’t engage in the kind of endless introspection typically characteristic of Jews in popular culture, or one who doesn’t view his Jewishness as a burden or a mark of Cain, forever setting him apart. See what assimilation has wrought—a man can just be a jerk like everyone else.

But Ruxin isn’t without some ancestral anxiety. He is, in some ways, a product of his people. In a fit of cold feet before he marries the Catholic, Hispanic Sofia, Ruxin blurts out, “I’m worried that her family full of conquistadors is going to round up my whole family and stick us in a basement and put yellow stars on us.” Even here, it’s clear that Ruxin’s Jewishness is nominal at best; mixing a touch of Inquisition-era worries with a healthy dollop of Holocaust neurosis, Ruxin’s sense of Jewish history is a jumble of victimization across time and geography. Being Jewish, for Ruxin, is merely being subject to the occasional moment of deep-rooted paranoia—but not so deeply rooted that it can’t be soothed, in this case, by the reassurance of knowing that he is marrying a very attractive woman. Sexy, right? A man who coasts through life on his assimilated rudeness but maintains some iota of his people’s historical dread is, after all, every girl’s dream.

Jewish jerks aren’t new. And they’re generally not attractive—no one swoons over Shylock. But Ruxin’s different; his Jewishness is refreshingly tangential to his coarseness, one of many facts about Ruxin instead of his defining fact. Also, when he thinks he’s home alone, he sings about eating crackers and jelly in the goofiest voice imaginable. It’s kind of adorable.

Previously on Network Jews:

Tommy Pickles, the heroic cartoon baby on Rugrats.

Willow Rosenberg, the lesbian witch on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Andrea Zuckerman, the brainy girl on Beverly Hills, 90210

The post Network Jews: Ruxin, The Fantasy Football-Obsessed Jerk on ‘The League’ appeared first on Jewcy.

So here’s where one would normally point out a serious flaw in a classic Jewish recipe. The thing is I can’t; stuffed cabbage is magical. And like most modern day magic, there’s a precise science behind it: Everything is improved when stuffed with meat.

Want the proof behind my hypothesis?

Picture yourself after a long bad day where everything is just horrible. Now picture yourself eating a gigantic steak at the end of it. And just like that, your day has improved.

The same logic works with a cabbage. By itself, a cabbage is kind of meh, stuff it with meat and it makes your day.

There’s a reason this dish has been favorite since it was called holishkes. Stuffed cabbage has been happily devoured by Jews since the 14th century. According to Sharon Lebewohl and Rena Bulkin, authors of The Second Avenue Deli Cookbook, the dish was first introduced to the Jewish and gentile peasants in Russia by the Tartars. While each Eastern European and Middle Eastern community has its own twist, Jews lean toward the sweeter sauce.

At some point between the 14th century and the 21st, it became a specialty food served on Sukkot. As Sukkot is also known as the harvest holiday, the filled cabbage was meant to symbolize a bountiful harvest “stuffed” with plenty of delicious things to eat. Sukkot may be over, but stuffed cabbage has thankfully become a winter staple, allowing it to represent good times, as well as good food.

So you must be asking yourself what’s the “but”? Why am I reinventing the wheel if it rolls just fine?

There are many reasons to love your Bubbe but one of them is that they are just about the only people with enough patience to actually make stuffed cabbage. While stuffed cabbage makes your day, it also takes an entire day to make it. That’s where this recipe comes in handy. It’s stacked up like lasagna, and simple, like any staple kugel recipe. Like your favorite kugel it’s a cinch to make and a crowd favorite.

This recipe has that great taste that you love from your Bubbe’s, but let’s you spend more time with the Bubbe you love.

Not Your Bubbe’s Stuffed Cabbage
Serves 5-7

Ingredients:

2 lbs. green cabbage

Meat Filling:
1 lb. chopped beef
1 cup long grain rice, cooked
1 small yellow onion, diced
2 medium eggs
1 tsp. ginger
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper

Sauce:
1 (28 oz) can crushed tomatoes
1 1/4 cups cranberry juice
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
3/4 cup craisins
1 tbsp. ginger
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsps. Black pepper

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Rip the leaves off your cabbage—do your best to keep them as whole as possible. If you accidently rip them to pieces it’s ok; it just won’t look as pretty.

3. Mix the meat filling ingredients together in a large bowl.

4. Combine the sauces ingredients in a different large bowl.

5. Spray a large round baking dish with to prevent sticking.

6. Evenly cover the bottom of the baking dish with cabbage leaves. You want to have about 2-3 layers of leaves on top of each other.

7. Cover the leaves with half of your meat filling.

8. Ladle a third of your sauce onto the meat filling.

9. Repeat the last few stages, as if you are making lasagna.

10. Your final layer should be the last of your sauce.

11. Cover the stuffed cabbage kugel with tin foil and bake for an hour.

12. Remove the foil and bake for another half an hour. Baste the top leaves with sauce every 10 minutes in order to prevent them from burning.

13. Serve with a sharp knife and spoon in order to scoop up all the layers.

Also try:

Not Your Bubbe’s Squash Pie

Not Your Bubbe’s Kasha Mac and Cheese

Not Your Bubbe’s Honey Chiffon Cake

The post Not Your Bubbe’s Recipe: Stuffed Cabbage Kugel appeared first on Jewcy.

After Yom Kippur ended this year, my family began to prepare for Sukkot. We took the sukkah out, set up the frame, and then carefully put on the top and covered it with leaves. We then hung up construction paper fruit and two bunches of plastic grapes. Between two of the poles, my mother tied a piece of string, and then, one by one, hung up Rosh Hashanah cards.

Together, we then set up the tables and chairs, placed a plant near a rear pole and a basket of apples near another. Finally, just before sukkot started, we set the table with a tray of black and white cookies, a plate of cupcakes, two bowls of fruit, and bottles of seltzer and wine. All of this was on the same table.

The sukkah we so meticulously set up and decorated is my grandmother’s tabletop sukkah, which my family curates each year. I say curate because it will always be my grandmother’s sukkah, and anything we place in it was not in the original design, but honors her artistic vision.

When my grandmother, an artist and rabbi’s wife, came up with the idea for the sukkah, she had a florist create the frame. The frame consists of four green wooden rods that serve as poles and a green wooden rectangle, which sits on top of the four poles. In the center of the rectangle is mesh wiring. The sukkah’s design reflects that of a traditional sukkah, only on a much smaller scale.

I never celebrated Sukkot with my grandmother so I never had the chance to see how she set up and decorated her sukkah. My Aunt tells me that it sat prominently on the table and that my grandmother adorned it with evergreens and hung miniature squash from the wire. Since my grandparents lived in an apartment in Chicago, it was this small sukkah that was the Cohen family sukkah.

A few years before she passed away, my grandmother gave us the sukkah. Sitting proudly on our dining room table, the Cohen sukkah was decorated to match our backyard sukkah. Construction paper apples, oranges, and bananas were hung with string from the wire, just as plastic fruit hung from the top of our sukkah. We turned to my dollhouse for a table that would mirror the patio table from our backyard, and then sat the family that lived in the dollhouse around the table.

This lasted for several years, until the dollhouse contents and residents were misplaced when my mother moved into an apartment in Manhattan. Last year, a sukkah remodeling was needed, and we took the task very seriously. My mom went to a dollhouse store and purchased the equivalent of a backyard bench and chairs, a small table with plates and cups, and a mini basket of apples. We still had the construction paper fruit, and bunches of plastic grapes that had once hung in our backyard sukkah.

But then last week, as we started setting up the tabletop sukkah, we realized that the new furniture was not enough. The structure felt incomplete. To make it into my grandmother’s sukkah again, we had to do more. More dollhouse items—a floor plant, a full table set, and food and beverages—made it feel warm, but we needed more of a sense of family tradition. We settled upon our longtime suburban ritual of hanging Rosh Hashanah cards from the top of our backyard sukkah.

My mom took a card we had recently received from a family friend, and from it made a dozen mini cards. Then, we made the first major change to the sukkah frame since it sat in my grandmother’s apartment in Chicago. We added cloth walls, a significant addition to the structure and a pretty emotional renovation.

All together the furniture, construction paper and plastic fruit, food, cards, and cloth walls make this year’s sukkah one that we would very much like to sit in, were it full size. More important, it’s a structure that honors my grandmother. How the sukkah is decorated may have changed, but its meaning remains the same—it’s the Cohen family sukkah, and we’re very proud of it.

The post Remembering My Grandmother Each Year on Sukkot appeared first on Jewcy.

Fall can be confusing. There are so many Jewish holidays to keep track of, and only so many times you can tell your employer it’s a ‘Jewish holiday’ without raising some eyebrows (see: Janney, Allison). If only there was a website to tell you whether each day was a Jewish holiday!

Introducing Isitajewishholidaytoday.com, a website that does exactly that. How else would you know that today was the fourth day of Sukkot? Now we just need a website to explain whether that holiday is a legitimate excuse for missing work (FYI, the fourth day of Sukkot is not).

Isitajewishholidaytoday.com

The post New Website Tells You Whether Today Happens to be a Jewish Holiday appeared first on Jewcy.

Sukkot comes but once a year, but some make a career out of the festive ritual of putting together a proper piece of architecture, with carefully chosen ornamentation (perhaps not always fertile fruit).

Dankmar Adler was the second half of the architectural team that let Chicago touch the sky. Adler (the father of skyscrapers and described by Frank Lloyd Wright as the “American Engineer” and his “Big Chief”), with his design draftsman-turned partner Louis Sullivan, Adler’s excellence in civil engineering brought the second city its Stock Exchange Building and the former home of Chicago’s opera and symphony orchestra, its Auditorium Building on Michigan Avenue, which, in addition to being the largest building in the United States at the time, also exhibited his expertise in acoustics. He also brought into being Buffalo’s Guaranty Building and St. Louis’ ten-story Wainwright Office Building, among the first skyscrapers in the world. Dankmar’s dankest form of temporary construction came about in the midst of the world’s finest sukkah city, when he contributed the Transportation building for Chicago’s World’s Fair. Putting him over the edge, he even served on the Union side in the Civil War. The array of downtown buildings, churches, and synagogues he contributed to the Chicago landscape along with his influence on other iconic architects of the late 1800s make him the #1 badass of Jewish architects.

Another Chicagoan, Max Abramovitz took his talents eastward. Like Milton Glaser, Abramovitz was another Romanian Jew who hearted New York in the 60s, shaping the city’s culture through art. You can thank his prolific modernist eye for the Avery Fisher Center along with several skyscrapers in midtown, colleges, and state buildings. In his NYT obituary, he is described as working, for much of his career, in the shadow of his well-connected partner Wallace K. Harrison (chief-architect on the Rockefeller Center), with whom he whipped up the United Nations complex and Brandeis University among hundreds of other dents in the world’s Y-axis.

Hopping back to Chicago, Abramovitz’ contemporary Bertrand Goldberg encapsulated the brilliance that would have made for a mean sukkah, specializing in innovative concepts under restrictive conditions, like temporary army compounds, mobile vaccination labs, and his sukkah-style construction for North Pole Ice Cream in the 1930s, which was an easy-to-disassemble structure made to wander diasporically. After a stint at Berlin’s Bauhaus and some time in Paris, Goldberg made it to Chicago and joined forces with the Midwest modernist gods Keck & Keck, Paul Schweikher, and Howard Fisher. While the Avery Fisher Center rose up, Goldberg was busy constructing the tallest residential concrete building in the world at the time, the iconic-beyond-Wilco-and-Sly-and-the-Family-Stone-album-covers Marina City, a pair of corncob towers off the Chicago River that until recently housed the other popular Chicago landmark, Oprah Winfrey. Rumored to be the city’s most photographed building, the multi-purpose compound is the Helvetica of architecture: inspiring many in the arts, and put into being as a practical solution to social needs (funded mostly by the city’s janitorial and elevator unions in their attempts to reverse white flight). He went on to commissions for hospitals and other housing projects in the country, including complexes for SUNY Stony Brook and Chicago’s Hillard Homes.

Like other impressive Jewish American architects, these thinkers and do-ers were real participants of their time and setting, and kept the progress in urbanity and the sweet fruit of humanitarian service symbolically strewn along their edifices’ walls.

The post Everyday Is Sukkot: Jewish Architects Who Shaped Our Cities appeared first on Jewcy.