Tag Archives: death

(Mishnah) Corpse Defilement (Happy Halloween)

Posted on October 31, 2022 by zjb

The rabbis’ task in their reconstruction of the biblical laws of corpse impurity is to determine at which point a dead body in its fragmented and ruined state is still a “corpse” that can convey impurity, and at which point … Continue reading →

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I See Dead Professors On Zoom (Yevamot 96b-97a)

Posted on November 22, 2021 by zjb

Ripe for parody, this article at Slate about an online lecture-course hosted at Concordia by a professor of art history who had passed away sometime before says a lot about the neo-liberal university and the degradation of higher education, about … Continue reading →

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Tablet Magazine Response to Coronavirus (Make Brooklyn Great Again)

Posted on August 31, 2021 by zjb

It is not just the this or that one-off, but the gamut of Covod related content that suggests that Tablet Magazine is a MAGA Jewish outfit. I’m offering below titles, subtitles, and links to what I think is a representative … Continue reading →

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(Star of Redemption) Spaceship

Posted on August 3, 2021 by zjb

Into life? Franz Rosenzweig was a futurist. Consciousness steps into a spaceship that spins around the axis of its own blood and time, lifts of from the historical time of planet earth singing Psalm 115, and flies straight into the … Continue reading →

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Spinoza Death Mask (Archive)

Posted on July 30, 2021 by zjb

This spectacular image was recently discovered in a box in an archive in a library at Columbia University, about which you can read here in this write-up by Marianna Najman-Franks (Barnard ’22). She found the death mask while working through … Continue reading →

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(One Little Goat) Chad Gadya (El Lissitzy)

Posted on March 30, 2021 by zjb

The 1919 Chad Gadya of El Lissitzky is a violent masterpiece that reveals, uniquely and as if once and for all, the brutal visual core at the Jewish world of this dark Passover classic, sung to this day in Aramaic, … Continue reading →

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(Force of Separation) Trump & Orthodox Judaism (Religion, Death, Chaos)

Posted on October 26, 2020 by zjb

  The conventional wisdom is that what draws religious voters to conservative politics is the appeal of order and structure. The more observant, the more devout the stronger this appeal. We know that 83% of orthodox Jews are supporting Trump, … Continue reading →

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(סמא דמותא) Death-Torah (Coronavirus)

Posted on October 20, 2020 by zjb

  As a rule, religious tradents associate kedushah (holiness) with life and images of life like light, water, and fruit. But with what kind of life? Life in this world or life in the world to come? In truth, religion … Continue reading →

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(Coronavirus) 100,000 (Human Toll)

Posted on May 24, 2020 by zjb

In case you’ve only seen this on a digital platform, this is what a physical copy of the front page + pages 12, 13, and 14 looks like on a digital platform.

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Care for a Corpse (Dignity) Coronavirus

Posted on May 17, 2020 by zjb

“There has to be some dignity in this, otherwise I might as well be a garbage man,” is what the funeral director told the journalist. The photographs by Philip Montgomery that accompany this article here in the NYT about two … Continue reading →

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