Shabbat shalom, everyone.

Welcome to the second Shabbat together! This is a weekly thread where we can come together at the end of the week.

Tell others about yourself. Say something that's alive in you, your thoughts, feelings, something on your mind.

Whatever this Shabbat looks like for you, you’re welcome at this table.

One sentence is plenty, and the thread will still be here afterwards.

The second Rugela bake!

There have been a large number of behind the scenes changes this week, so less visible changes to you all, but still a lot of wonderful updates

• The home feed has a sort menu - This is something several of you asked for. You wanted to sort by most Active posts (default) and Newest. Now you can!
• No more jittery home page - We had a feature that inserted random stories on the home page. That's gone and the home page feels more stable now.
• You can now star a post from the home page - Several of you asked for this. Now it's there!
• Links in posts and comments render better. - There was a bug in the renderer. That's fixed.
• Link previews work for more sites. - Some sites weren't giving link previews. We now support more sites!

Some smaller but still important changes:

• Phasing away from toasts - This is a bit more insider, but when you change a setting, it won't show the temporary notification thing on the side anymore. Those things are unpleasant, and less accessible, so they're going away. Most of them are gone already.
• Profile tabs work better now - There was a bug around tabbing that's fixed.
  The settings menu link is labelled "Settings". - The old phrasing of "Personal Profile" was confusing.

Hope you all enjoy the changes! Be sure to send your suggestions to suggestions@rugela.com and stay tuned for next week's update!

This week has gone by so fast, I'm ready for a break.

In anticipation of tomorrow (Shabbat) he's a video of Frum It Up's Shabbat dinner prep.

I find her videos chill and somewhat inspiring. I hope you do too!

A teenage science prodigy from Belgium who got his doctorate in quantum physics at the age of 15, is heading to Israel to be a researcher at Bar-Ilan University.

Rugela offers ways to filter out content based on Content Warnings.

What are your thoughts on them?

Useful? Not useful?

Too broad? Too narrow?

Do you wish we covered topics we don't?

Heya everyone! I'm new here, and am hoping I can meet some coolio peeps on this platform, especially once it's fully launched.

I guess as a first question, does anybody have a favorite work of fiction they especially like the depictions of Judaism and/or Jewish culture in?

It turns out Han Solo, Indiana Jones, and the president who told terrorists to get off his plane is a Jew.

Harrison Ford's mother, Dorothy Nidelman, was a Russian Jew Minsk. His father was Irish Catholic. In an interview with Kveller, he said that as a man he felt Irish, but as an actor he felt Jewish ( kveller.com/harrison-ford-makes-an-excellent-joke-about-his-jewish-mom/ )

Sandys Row Synagogue, one of only two shuls still functioning in London’s East End, has received nearly £200,000 in grants to support a project which aims to ensure its future as a place of worship, heritage, and learning.

“Sandys Row Synagogue has a very special history, and we have many members who trace their ancestry back to the founders,” said synagogue chair Harvey Rifkind.

Study in human ovaries found they have increased inflammation, structural changes in tissue decades after menopause

This article talks ostensibly about LLMs being used to make your smart TV dumb, but the larger point is getting rid of the things in your television that you don't want to be there and having it do what you bought it to do.

A lot of content online sits behind a paywall, especially news sites.

Should we have a policy for moderation around that?

Some thoughts/possibilities:

1. No policy

Some content is paywalled, others aren't.

2. We disallow paywalled content

Then you know everything you see on the site is free to browse, but we might miss out on good stuff and discovering new things.

3. We treat paywalled content as a CW

You can choose to filter out paywalled content, but this places more work on the submitter to ensure the CW is in place. More importantly, this changes the CW to be about distribution rather than Content.

What do you think?

Yale University Press has created a highly successful, award winning, profitable series profiling the lives of contemporary Jews, but has inexplicably decided to end the series, capping it at a maximum of a hundred. Is that enough to capture a slice of Jewish life?

The scroll, found in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds, is an astonishing 717 centimeters long or 23 and a half feet. It was written in 125 BCE, so yes, it is more than two thousand years old.

Seeing it is frankly a spiritual experience; the neat handwriting, the editing—yes, later scribes changed what the first scribe wrote, and the sheer fact that it is two thousand years old and complete.

Shabbat shalom, everyone.

Since this is our first Shabbat with Rugela on, I thought I'd try a little thing where we create a thread that we can come together at the end of the week.

What are you bringing to the table this week? It could be something good, something difficult, what you’re cooking, something you learned, someone you’re thinking about, or simply that you survived another week!

Whatever this Shabbat looks like for you, you’re welcome at this table.

One sentence is plenty, and the thread will still be here afterwards.

gut shabbos!

How can Judaism help us get free?

In our moment of polycrisis, this is an urgent question for those of us invested in Judaism. Many formations and organizations have emerged to attempt to offer alternatives to the stultifying and content-less (except for pro-Israel work) identity-based Judaism on offer from an increasingly less mainstream “mainstream.”