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Raffi Magarik

@raphaelmagarik.bsky.social
176 followers 47 following 16 posts

Si non vales, non valeo.

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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
For @jewishcurrents.bsky.social, I wrote about the Jewish Museum's Paul Klee exhibit, the angel of history getting held up in Jerusalem, and the vexed relationship between critique and aesthetic veneration in our present moment of danger. jewishcurrents.org/the-absent-a...
jewishcurrents.org
The Absent Angel
A reflection on the Jewish Museum’s Paul Klee exhibit
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Bshaah tovah
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
This is an unintentionally precise analogy: Black Lives Matter was a widespread, popular movement that was deliberately demobilized by centrist Democrats and then repressed by Trump in a reactionary backlash. In other words, what a liberal calls “ephemeral cultural opposition.”
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
Trying to figure out what this guy thinks the trolley problem is.
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
For @jewishcurrents.bsky.social, I wrote about the obligation to rebuke and the Marxist critique of moralism. jewishcurrents.org/shabbat-read...
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
For Jewish Currents, I wrote a short Pesah reflection about selling out, the slide from counter-culture to counter-revolution, and what happens after the Exodus. jewishcurrents.org/newsletter/s...
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
lol
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
Beg your pardon?
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Reposted by Raffi Magarik
Halachic Left @halachicleft.org · 23/03/2026
Featuring essays from @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social, @mhughesrob.bsky.social, Liana Wertman, @motownrabbi.bsky.social, Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein, Amit Gvaryahu, and Maya Rosen, and illustrations by Yavni Bar-Yam.
Table of contents for this year's  HL Pesach reader:

Contents:

Introduction • 7
Essays • 11
✶ On the Limits of Parental Education by Raphael Magarik • 11
✶ Liberation Isn’t Linear: Learning from Rambam’s Snatched
Matzah by Rabbi Margo Hughes-Robinson • 16
✶ Challenging Our Moral Imaginations by Liana Wertman • 22
✶ “I Behold the Tears of the Oppressed”: Nahmanides and the
Revolutionary Message of the Exodus by Rabbi David Polsky • 27
✶ “And God Commanded Moshe and Aharon Regarding the
Israelites, to Let them Free”: Lessons in Community Organizing
from the Exodus Story by Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein • 35
✶ It Is Forbidden to Live in Egypt by Amit Gvaryahu • 43
✶ Becoming Pharaoh by Maya Rosen • 49
Suggested Tzedakah • 57
About Halachic Left • 59
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
(See jewishcurrents.org/shabbat-read... for more.)
jewishcurrents.org
March 20, 2026
Breaking news, analysis, art, and culture from a progressive Jewish perspective. Sign up for our newsletter!
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
I and others were asked by @jewishcurrents.bsky.social for Haggadah recommendations; here was my slightly curmudgeonly answer.
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
Yes, the Postone Sefer (brought by his father, I believe, from Europe) is now at Rodfei. I’ve leyned from it a few times. From what I understand, he came to shul often. But I don’t know where he lived—the north side just seems a little unlikely to me.
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
I thought Postone lived on the south side, because he was a member of a Hyde Park synagogue and taught at the UOC. Was I wrong about that?
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
“on both the left and the right”
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 01/03/2026
Even when there was some truth to it, it was always overstated for polemical reasons, some benign (tactical moves by Israeli center-left) and some not so much (insulating Israeli society from criticism). Hirschhorn’s work is a clear example of the slide between this argument and hasbarah.
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
For @jewishcurrents.bsky.social, I write about Brecht, Vivian Gornick, the menorah, the labor theory of value, and commodity fetishism: jewishcurrents.org/parshah/febr...
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
Delightful little story about visiting the Holy Land from the anti-Zionist Hasidic Rebbe of Munkacz.
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