It occurs to me that with so many folks boycotting the site this week (fight the good fight, my friends!), I'd better get this out tonight. The Jewish holiday season begins in just a couple of weeks and it's time to start organizing our series of diaries. We're looking for a little bit of anything and everything having to do with Rosh HaShana, Tzom G'daliah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah. We need explanations of what the holidays are all about, divrei Torah, recipes appropriate to the holidays, traditions, anecdotes, etc., etc., etc.
Elders of Zion is a general Jewish interest group, open to anyone who wants to learn about Jews and Judaism. The group was created in order to facilitate such a space. Discussion of and questions about Jewish religion, ethnicity, history, culture, language, cuisine, music, literature, and identity are encouraged. Please keep this purpose in mind when commenting in our diaries. Antisemitism, diary hijacking, and I/P pie fights will not be tolerated and will be troll rated. For more information, see the inaugural diary.
Now, we could just leave it up to chance that people will post stuff, but experience shows us there won't be much if we just leave it all to chance. So we have a few goals in trying to organize things a bit:
1) Ensuring quantity: We want lots of posts this year!
2) Ensuring quality: You have a couple of weeks to work on whatever you want to post -- that should be plenty of time to come up with something good!
3) Setting up a posting schedule of some sort: It would kind of stink if we had 30 diaries going up at 6:30 pm on September 28, just as Rosh HaShana is starting. If we know what's coming, we can stagger things a bit.
So here's the request: in the comments, please let us know what you'd be willing to write about. Don't worry about if you're observant or not or particularly well-versed or not -- as we always say in the Elders of Zion group, you don't have to be Jewish to join, or even particularly knowledgeable. You just have to be willing to learn about Jews and Judaism from the group.
Reminder: Elders of Zion is an open space for discussing and learning about all things Jewish. This group is not the place for whatever I/P pie fight you want to start. It is not a group about Zionism or anti-Zionism. If you want to talk acrimoniously about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, regardless of the target of your anger, there are other diaries more suited to your preference. Antisemitism, diary hijacking, and pie fights are out of line with our group's mission and will be troll rated.