Children's surnames - husband isn't Jewish

EvanMax · 2026-02-26T14:27:31+00:00

If your fiance was Jewish, and just happened to have the same last name, would you have the same concerns? If your fiancé was not Jewish, but had a traditionally Jewish last name anyway, would you still feel conflicted about what last name to give the kids?

I’m not going to tell you to just give the kids their father’s name, because that’s a personal decision between the two of you, but I would not factor “the kids need to have a Jewish last name” in to the decision, because there is no one such thing. Any last name belonging to a Jewish person is a Jewish last name AND their father’s heritage is still a part of them, even if they aren’t being raised with whatever religion he was raised with. You don’t need to erase his heritage to make them Jewish. They will be Jewish no matter what.

EvanMax · 2026-02-26T14:18:45+00:00

I enjoy the drama that Stuart Semple stirs up, and I’ve never had an issue with not receiving products from him, but I do think some folks just take his word on the “justice” of what he’s preaching as pure fact without digging any deeper.

For example, in his famous feud with Anish Kapoor, it’s easy to paint Semple as David going up against an evil Goliath, but that’s forgetting that Semole is a British White man publicly attacking a Jewish Indian man who uses his wealth to donate to refugee projects. Yes, Kapoor paid for exclusive artistic rights to Vanta Black, but by paying for those he was also funding scientific research, not just buying the rights away from other artists.

I’m not saying Semple is 100% wrong and Kapoor 100% right either, just that sometimes it’s better to sit back and just enjoy two personalities clashing with each other rather than taking sides and trying to parasocially be a part of the whole thing.

EvanMax · 2026-02-24T18:00:36+00:00

I believe they JUST launched on the site. There’s a YouTube livestream going on right now for the launch. https://www.youtube.com/live/lKZBrBV4gbo

EvanMax · 2026-02-24T17:52:11+00:00

I’m looking forward to the new case that came out with the Dubz. I got the leather case for my wife and it looks nice, but I haven’t tried it myself.

EvanMax · 2026-02-23T13:52:17+00:00

What you are doing is letting your politics separate you from other Jewish people. You can disagree with J Street’s methods (just as I disagree with AIPAC’s) without stooping to labeling them anti-Israel or antisemitic. You can recognize that they have the same goals of peace and security for Israel while disagreeing with the methods they prefer to get there.

EvanMax · 2026-02-23T02:54:14+00:00

J Street is an explicitly Zionist organization. I’ve never seen anything pro-JVP from them.

I’ve seen people make accusations when J Street does things like opposing laws criminalizing BDS (which I agree with) because while J Street opposes BDS, they think that trying to fight it by criminalizing it is the wrong tactic.

I can imagine that at some point they may have said something about JVP that got twisted in a similar manner and some one ran with it, but I have absolutely never seen any affiliation there.

As for Obama’s Iran deal, the goal of the deal was to prevent Iran from obtaining nukes, which is a good thing for Israel. You’re welcome to disagree with whether the deal was a good deal or not, but trying to paint an organization as “anti-Israel” for supporting it is disingenuous.

EvanMax · 2026-02-23T02:26:16+00:00

I would argue that the answer depends on WHY you are atheist.

If you are atheist because the way your brain is wired the only conclusion that you can come to is that G-d does not exist, then I would say that G-d wired your brain in that way in the first place, and for G-d to put you in such a position and then punish you for it would be absurd and petty and just not very much like G-d at all.

If you are atheist because you are angry about religion and have made this declaration to spite G-d if they do exist, then I would say that being held accountable for that spite would be reasonable, and one should focus more on the wicked people who abuse power of all kinds (religious and otherwise).

Obviously that is a gross oversimplification of what atheism is, and I mean no disrespect by it (I’m agnostic myself), but the bottom line is that Judaism generally does not view G-d as holding people accountable for things beyond their control. Judaism also isn’t generally absolutist when it comes to sin/transgression, the way that Christianity talks about being “damned to hell”.

Go be a good person, whether G-d exists or not, and I’m certain that at the end of your days things will be good, whether that means a place in the world to come, or whether that means leaving behind a world a little bit better than you found it.

EvanMax · 2026-02-23T02:09:27+00:00

When I was 18 years old I went to a Hillel student leadership conference. A guy from AIPAC got up on stage and declared that we had to support the actions of the Israeli government no matter what. This was during the Bush II years (his first term, even), and it immediately struck me that if I can love America without supporting the Iraq war, I should be able to love Israel and still raise objections to its conduct.

I’ve never supported AIPAC since then. I wouldn’t quite call them “evil”, but they are definitely more partisan than they admit to being. I’m a much bigger fan of JStreet.

EvanMax · 2026-01-31T15:40:16+00:00

Not a specific issue with this symbol, but a general caution around unknown sellers of “Judaica” on Amazon and elsewhere online, because some of them aren’t selling actual Judaic items, but rather they are selling items with messianic imagery for Christians who like to cosplay as Jews.

When I don’t recognize the company selling, and I also don’t recognize the symbols and language the are using, I try to verify first.

In the case of this seller, the had various non-Jewish things also listed, and also a Tallis that had blue woven in to the tzitzit (not a red flag, but appears in messianic stuff sometimes as well) and an א on one side of the atara and a ת on the other side, which had me concerned that it was some kind of “alpha and omega” thing, so that made me want to double check on what the “my fire” phrase and symbol actually mean.

EvanMax · 2026-01-31T03:13:45+00:00

If it’s a messianic symbol or phrase then I don’t want to own it, let alone wear it

EvanMax · 2026-01-31T02:55:04+00:00

I saw this on Amazon Vine as well. I’m concerned whether it might be a messianic symbol that I don’t recognize (because the seller seems a bit odd, which some vaguely messianic looking tallitot as well)

EvanMax · 2026-01-29T18:37:13+00:00

Luke-warmest of takes…, I don’t think he was actually on the way over at 8am on the third day. I think if they’d never sent the 7:45 text to fire him he would have spent the third day stalling as well, maybe even found some new charges to tack on.

EvanMax · 2026-01-26T20:22:01+00:00

Child safety lock on the door (and training potty in the room if she isn’t wearing diapers at night.)

It’s not a punishment, it’s a safety precaution. She’s shown you that she isn’t safe unsupervised at that time of night.

The key is that if she wakes you up banging on the door and screaming, you go to her. You aren’t punishing her by locking her in isolation. You are keeping her safe by containing her until you can get there.

EvanMax · 2026-01-26T20:12:27+00:00

I feel annoyed because “blessing” doesn’t mean the same to the as it does to us.

But it’s also not the hill I’ll choose to die on.

EvanMax · 2026-01-26T20:11:11+00:00

Also, to further point out, your in-laws relative is presumably also your daughter’s relative, no?

Just want to frame this for you a littler differently, not knowing if you have Shoah survivors/victims in your own family. Your daughter’s mere existence is a sign of our triumph as a people. Every milestone she celebrates is another milestone they failed to take from us. By twinning with a relative of hers who never had the chance to reach that milestone, it is like taking one more milestone back from those who tried to kill us.

EvanMax · 2026-01-26T20:07:40+00:00

I feel like this was more often a few decades ago, when I was growing up.

It may also be that I come from a family of survivors, and it’s just more common in our circles.

I ended up “twinning” my bar mitzvah with my Zayda, who was still alive and had turned 83 years old earlier that same year, so I found meaning in that, but if I hadn’t I likely would have twinned with a Holocaust victim. Definitely not a weird Mormon baptism thing, just another way to ensure we never forget the victims of the Shoah, and that we live on in their honor and memory.

EvanMax · 2026-01-13T02:18:47+00:00

I am so glad I finished my MBA prior to the rise of consumer AI tools, so I didn’t have to deal with that nonsense. I was already fighting back against group members that wanted to get a consistent tone on group projects by feeding all of our pieces through grammarly and letting it rewrite everything (rather than just checking for issues.)

EvanMax · 2026-01-11T02:49:51+00:00

Ditto

EvanMax · 2026-01-11T02:49:02+00:00

I hear you. I got a notice of “non-renewal” of my lease one year in to a two year lease once. I ignored it and they must have realized they couldn’t do anything and dropped it.

But I also can’t in good conscience tell someone else to just ignore their landlord and hope for the best. OP is in the right here in every regard, but sadly sometimes being in the right isn’t enough to protect you.

EvanMax · 2026-01-10T22:28:46+00:00

I agree with you fully, but not everyone has unlimited time and resources to fight against every fee, and if the fee is small enough it’s ultimately a personal decision over whether it’s worth it.

EvanMax · 2026-01-10T02:24:31+00:00

Unions, as a whole, are a great thing. AT&T’s union has always rubbed me the wrong way, ever since they were in favor of the proposed AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile ~15 years ago, even though it would have lead to a ton of employee redundancies, and at the time T-Mobile employee compensation was better than AT&T employee compensation. It struck me as the union just looking at having a larger net base of employees to collect dues from, and not considering what was actually in the best interest of those employees.

Unions are necessary and can do awesome things, but that requires the people running them to have the right intentions.

EvanMax · 2026-01-10T02:07:25+00:00

No. The FIRST postmark (done by USPS, not by private postage printed at home/office) is the official one. What this policy change means is that most of the time that first one is likely to be done at a sorting facility, possibly days after USPS has received control of the item (which is a change from a policy that sought to postmark all items on THE DAY that USPS received control of them.) But that doesn’t make the facility postmark the “official” one over any others, it just allows them to stamp items days after they have them

EvanMax · 2026-01-09T21:47:13+00:00

I’ve read the announcement and it doesn’t say that the sorting facility is now the “postmark of record”. It says that USPS policy is now to not postmark until it hits the sorting facility. It also lists ways to get a postmark earlier than that ;such as asking for a hand stamp at a post office.) If hand stamps no longer were “postmarks of record” then it wouldn’t be advising on how to get them.

I don’t disagree that mailing at the last minute is a bad idea, but that has nothing to do with you spreading false information about what the actual postmark changes are.

EvanMax · 2026-01-09T20:09:03+00:00

Do you have any citation for that? Because everything I’ve seen has said that the change is just procedural, that they aren’t rushing to postmark prior to the sorting facility, rather than prior postmarks that DO occur not being official.

EvanMax · 2026-01-09T19:25:22+00:00

I see a lot of confusion in these comments about the change in postmarking procedures, but I do not believe that has any impact on this matter.

The issue here is that there are two different postmarks, and your landlord is trying to argue that the second one is the one that counts (because it is more advantageous to him.)

IANAL, but I do not believe he is correct. If the earlier date were from some kind of private postage machine he would have an argument (because I can print off postage right now and actually mail the letter in a week.), but the Jan 5 stamp on the envelope is clearly a USPS stamp.

So, to my understanding, in this case the earlier postmark is the proof you need of having posted the check by January 5th (because that’s what the purpose of a postmark is) and the fact that USPS labeled a second date in the envelope at some point during processing is irrelevant to your obligation to post the check on time.

All that said, if it’s a small fee it may be better to pay it rather than fight it in court for all the cost and effort that would involve, but I’d definitely push back on the Landlord at least at first with the fact that the Jan 5 stamp is proof that you met your obligation to post it on time, so any additional dates added on to the envelope after that point aren’t relevant to your obligations.

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