If you haven’t heard, tonight starts Christmas — which I think is the only non-Jewish holiday that starts at sunset, the way that Jewish holidays do. And of course, there are tons of ways for Jews to deal with Christmas, from parties (our picks, if you’re in New York: JDub/Jewcy’s awesome Jewltide, featuring Dan Saks of DeLeon, and the always-rocking Moshav with Soulfarm at B.B. King’s) to the huge Hasidic chess match at 770. And, though many Jews try not to study specifically Jewish subjects on Christmas, it doesn’t mean that you can’t learn about Jewish perspectives on the day, as well as the history of Jews and Christians, in these new articles on MJL.
But that’s not all! This Sunday is the Fast of the Tenth of Tevet. As our article says:
The fast day of the 10th of the Hebrew month of Tevet symbolizes the first of a series of events which led to the destruction of the First Temple: the beginning of the siege of the Babylonians on Jerusalem, the capital city of Judea…Two other events which are related to the first days of Tevet are the completionof the translation of the Torah into Greek on the Eighth of Tevet by the “Seventy Scholars” in the days of Ptolemy and the death of Ezra on the ninth of Tevet. READ MORE >
Hasidic
Pronounced: khah-SID-ik, Origin: Hebrew, a stream within ultra-Orthodox Judaism that grew out of an 18th-century mystical revival movement.
Tevet
Pronounced: TEH-vut, Origin: Hebrew, Jewish month usually coinciding with December-January
Torah
Pronunced: TORE-uh, Origin: Hebrew, the Five Books of Moses.
