Hello friends! I would like to Take This Time to point you to an interesting new online magazine, jGirls. It’s a space for creations by all self-identified Jewish teenage girls - a “forum for girls to create and engage in a Jewish community of peers on their own terms,” in their own words. They’re super cool! The actual content is going to start rolling out really soon, and until then, any submissions you have would be Very Much Appreciated.

Here is the link to their current webpage, and here is a link to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

In response to the ask I just received (which I am looking into right now!), I want to clarify: I am 100% open to answering fanfiction trope halacha questions as well as fantasy questions. Like, I am so down for it. Please ask me fanfiction trope questions.

Hey,

I’ve been thinking a bit about this blog and… okay, so I get a decent number of asks/messages, and they’re pretty split: many of them are “hey look at this cool supernatural thing! can we talk about it in Jewish/halachic terms!” or “hey I have this halachic question!” while others are “is this antisemitism?” or “are Jews white?” or “can I convert?” or “can I call myself part of x/y/z group?” 

In the past, I’ve answered both types of questions, albeit occasionally uncomfortably. I am not going to do this going forward. 

I will continue to happily answer all of the weird halacha and similar questions from a Jewish perspective as thoroughly as I have been doing so far (… and probably with the same time delays… I’m sorry…). But I do not have the mental or emotional energy, or the expertise, to answer the second group of questions. That is not what this blog is for. 

Thank you all for understanding. 

blueandnoah asked: 

hi! so i’m a non-jew, but i lived in a jewish residential building last year that was home to jews and non-jews alike. we were supposed to keep kosher in the dining room, but other areas in the house were fair game (i say this as an indicator of how liberal/not the house was). as a vegetarian there wasn’t much for me to eat at meat dinners so i’d have bread and margarine, but now that i know about ma’arit ayin, i wonder if i shouldn’t have done so. certainly one of the cooks once asked me if the margarine was butter (so it wasn’t totally clear what i was eating). so basically, as a non-jew obligated to keep kosher because of the rules of the house, should i also have followed ma'arit ayin, or is that a separate thing that didn’t apply to me? (i’m not living there anymore, so this is a question borne of curiosity and not of necessity.) thanks for any consideration =)

That’s a really thoughtful question! The quick answer: because of the fact that margarine is commonplace, eating margarine during meat meals wouldn’t have been a problem of ma’arit ayin even if you were Jewish. 

Essentially, due to ma’arit ayin, some actions are prohibited despite not technically breaking halacha because they look like you’re breaking halacha - like, imagine you went to a Jewish community which had never seen soy burgers before and started eating one with cheese. They’d probably assume you were breaking kashrut, even if you weren’t, and so that wouldn’t be okay from a perspective of ma’arit ayin. 

In the modern day, margarine is well-known. People use it a lot, and even if it initially looks a little strange, we can reasonably assume that you weren’t eating butter. (The cook may have asked because you weren’t Jewish and they weren’t sure if you had, I dunno, forgotten about milk and meat, but given the respectful tone of the ask I’m going to assume you were reasonably well-trusted in this area.)

One caveat: the sources I looked at about this discussed only how Jews should behave. It is possible that I have missed a nuance that comes with you not being Jewish, or missed something elsewhere. As usual, followers please feel free to respond/add to the post. And anyone who wants to ask me a question can always do so in my ask box or by messaging me. 

What kind of cheese do we eat on Pesach (Passover)?

Matza-rella!

Have a happy end to your Pesach everyone!

“Choni Ha-Ma’agel,” or in English, “Honi the Circle-Man,”