sovay | I know you do it like a Greek and you're hung like a Christmas tree

The sandwich I made for dinner tonight was probably not a Reuben by any canonical definition, but it was delicious: I toasted Wensleydale with cranberries on two pieces of challah, filled the intervening space with corned beef and a lot of red coleslaw, sliced the whole thing in half and ate it while reading more Alexander Mackendrick. The cranberries picked up on the orange and the tart cherries in the slaw and the Wensleydale combined very savorily with the corned beef. The sole drawback is that it will be almost impossible to repeat unless I feel like making this particular coleslaw again, which was something of an adventure—I had been aware for years that red cabbage can be used, like beets and onion skins, to dye Easter eggs, but somehow this failed to translate into a practical understanding that slicing enough red cabbage for eight people's worth of coleslaw turns your kitchen into a Tyrian dye-works and your fingernails cyanotic for the rest of the week. Everything I touched was going porphyry. (I took some photographs; I may post them. At the point where I gave up and dumped everything into the Cuisinart, it actually became quite attractive.) If I could get the red slaw Reuben at a local sandwich shop, I'd be a regular, but I'm not sure how reasonable it is to go around marking red-letter days on all the dishcloths every time I feel like a hot sandwich.

I discovered Schmekel last month in an article in the Jewish Daily Forward and then never posted about them or Berel-Beyle of Krizover. This weekend I saw they'd gotten a writeup in the New York Times. Today I actually bothered to figure out Bandcamp so I could download their last year's Hanukkah single. It's pretty awesome. Brooklyn's only 100% Transgender, 100% Jewish schtick-rock band. I should probably just preorder their first album: they have songs called "I'm Sorry, It's Yom Kippur," "Pharaoh/Moses Slash," and "You're Not the Only Bear I Fisted."

It feels infinitely more natural for me to be awake at three in the morning having stayed up translating Yiddish songs, as I've been doing since around one o'clock, than for me to fall asleep around three in the morning having gone to bed around midnight, as I did last night when I felt abysmal. By now there are years of evidence that it's worse for me. I find this very frustrating.

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The sandwich sounds glorious (but then I love red cabbage).

Wait a minute, “there are six recognized genders in the Talmud”?

Nine

All classified by equipment:

That's ish and isha, andgrogynos (both), tumtum (neither), ay'lonit (female at birth, becoming male), saris (male to female).

"The midrash (in Bereshit Rabah) posits that Adam, the first human being, was actually an androgynos. While in the Babylonian Talmud (Yevamot 64a) the radical claim is made that Abraham and Sarah were tumtumim, people
with indeterminate gender."

Nine

I can't follow your link--what are you citing?

What distinguishes ish and isha, if both are androgynous/have both sets of equipment?

I can't follow your link--what are you citing?

This article.

What distinguishes ish and isha, if both are androgynous/have both sets of equipment?

No, ish and isha are cisgendered man and woman.

That's ish and isha, androgynos (both), tumtum (neither),

Tumtum seems to be more complicated: it's not that the person is a clearly definable "neuter," but that it is difficult to determine whether s/he should be classified as biologically female or male, as opposed to androgynos with identifiable characteristics of both. There seems to be some implication that someone classified as tumtum might yet go either or both ways (presumably, one could also opt out of both) or is essentially nonbinary.

The significant point, I think, is that being a tumtum or an androgynos does not shut you out from being part of the Jewish community, even if it creates additional restrictions or confounds others. I've just hit a reference in the Babylonian Talmud to a tumtum who raised a family of seven children. There's a whole raft of Mishnah pertaining to the androgynos, including marriage. Which won't fix all the other problems with sexuality and gender in traditional or contemporary Judaism, but I still think it's nice to know that the issue c. 200 CE wasn't whether it was possible/permissible to marry as a genderqueer person, but exactly how you should go about it legally.

ay'lonit (female at birth, becoming male), saris (male to female).

These sound like categories originally designed to cover the cases of intersex children who turned out to have been misclassified once their secondary sexual characteristics came in and then the definition broadened to encompass transgender identity. Which is also cool.

This is just marvelous. I have to show Little Springtime, who's recently become very interested in the spectrum of sexuality and intersex states. The story of the tumtum who raised a family of seven children reminds me of Mary Alexandra Agner's poem "Sleeping Beauty," in which the princess ends up with both a husband and a wife, a career, and children and grandchildren. Talk about having it all!

Wait, I can't parse this - aren't Adam (androgynos), Abraham (tumtum) and Sarah (also tumtum) just duplications of categories already mentioned in the first list?

I know you do it like a Greek and you're hung like a Christmas tree

no subject

"So rested he by the Tumtum tree..."

Re: "So rested he by the Tumtum tree..."

Re: "So rested he by the Tumtum tree..."

Re: "So rested he by the Tumtum tree..."

Re: "So rested he by the Tumtum tree..."

Re: "So rested he by the Tumtum tree..."