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shelby handler

@shelbeleh

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writing, organizing, translating

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Weaving together interpretative translations, research, interviews, and sounds, Ways of Awe is a queer anti-Zionist audio companion for the Jewish High Holidays. We just passed 5,000 downloads! 🎉 Thank you to everyone in this web of listeners.

Will you help us to create Season Two? We have a goal to fundraise $3,000, and it will go towards studio hours, editing, and production costs, as well as to Signal Fire Co-op for hosting and promoting our project. In this time where money is needed to fund so many essential efforts, we invite you to match whatever amount you give to Ways of Awe towards the movement for Palestinian liberation. Link in bio. by @shelbeleh

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10 days ago

Belatedly beaming out this Elul poem at the very end of Tishrei, after dear @dancingmobot. Based a true story where I was utterly gobsmacked by blowing shofar back and forth with some anonymous neighbor. I never figured out who it was, which feels exactly right. Thank you to @themassachusettsreview for giving it a place to sing in this season. 🌬 by @shelbeleh

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11 days ago

“When we chant Kol Nidre, a space is created where we are togethered in unfathomable ways.” - Shelby Handler, from the Kol Nidre episode

Weaving together interpretative translations, research, interviews, and sounds, Ways of Awe is a queer anti-Zionist audio companion for the Jewish High Holidays.

Link in bio to listen.

Shelby Handler is a writer and organizer living in Seattle on Dxʷdəwʔabš (Duwamish) land. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, Redivider, Poetry Northwest, Black Warrior Review Online, The Journal, Southern Indiana Review, among others. Shelby organizes full-time with Jewish Voice for Peace. Follow them @shelbeleh and shelbyhandler.com. by @shelbeleh

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a month ago

Thank you @jewishcurrentsmag for sharing @waysofawe in On the Nose today.

Thank you to everyone who has written to us. It's beautiful all the places people are listening: at work, on the way to work, on the way to shul, cooking dinner, writing their d'vars, on planes and buses and trains and bikes and walks, early in the morning, late at night. Thanks to our weird podcast stats page, I know that people are listening in Philly and LA and Chicago and Brooklyn and Vancouver and Montreal and Minneapolis and Ireland and the UK and beyond! We are almost to 3k listens and that is pretty damn cool.

I'm grateful to be in this weird sonic textual ancestor web with all the listeners & readers & daveners & skeptics & nerds & study partners. Imagining all of us with our little headphones and glowing transcripts. Towards more awe and more liberation right now and in the year to come. G'mar tov.

📸Thank you to @hzepst for this beautiful photo and all our gorgeous design by @shelbeleh

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a month ago

Film art made for H+S, 2026. Portra 800 on Holga. #filmweddingphotographerboston #filmweddingboston #fineartweddingphotographerboston #bostonweddingphotographer #destinationweddingphotographerboston film wedding photographer in boston, fine art weddingphotographer in boston, film wedding photographer new england, alternative wedding photographer boston, cool ass wedding photos 😆 by @shelbeleh

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a month ago

Verklempt to be on this stunning list. Thank you @rika99 for choosing this bossy daughter poem and thank you to @prairie_schooner for publishing it. So damn cool for this poem to have multiple homes amidst so many other beautiful poets 😭

#bestnewpoets by @shelbeleh

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a month ago

Hi I'm here to offer up a juicy late-summer slice of belated & effervescent gratitude for these four poems being published in the @prairie_schooner summer issue! 💫✨️💫✨️ (insodoing I aim to prove that summer cannot be quite over yet)

These poems are from a second manuscript project that I'm starting to dig back into. The precipice of fall is ripe time to go back to forms. Shout out to any nerds who can spot the terza rima & accentual verse in this set. Thank you @timothy.schaffert for giving these poems a home in this stunning issue.

Thank you @hzepst for being the best poem photographer in the biz 📸 by @shelbeleh

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2 months ago

H+S in Seattle on film. Porta 800, Holga. 2026 ❤️ taken in Nordic Heritage Museum by @shelbeleh

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2 months ago

Celebrate Ways of Awe during the Days of Awe. RSVP to attend or join us via livestream—link in bio.

We’ve been calling our launch party Ways of Awe Live because it will mirror the collage style of the project itself. We’ve invited friends to share creative responses to the prayers our episodes feature: Kol Nidre, Al-Cheyt, and Kaddish. Their songs, poems, stories and teachings will be woven together with sounds, music, and time for self-reflection & journaling.

Saturday, September 19th
6:30p Doors | 7pm Start
Jack Straw Cultural Center
4261 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105
Masks encouraged.
(or join via Livestream on the Jack Straw Cultural Center YouTube!)

Thank you @seaofficeofarts for supporting our launch!

Thank you @hzepst for this design and all of our beautiful designs.

Thank you @basbaslev for this Elul banger. ✨️🎶 taken in Jack Straw Cultural Center by @shelbeleh

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2 months ago

A few weeks ago, Han and I wedded each other, and wedded the web that holds us. It was a joy-grief-kinship-fest of cackle weeps, friends feasting & pulling each other into the Yiddish dance spiral, an unforgettably ridiculous Tisch, being completely throttled by ritual, and being joined by ancestors under the chuppah, in the lake, on the dance floor. Not only did we get to experience it all (in awe that we get to love all these humans), but over and over but I had my memories expanded by our beloveds: hearing about all the little meetings & moments our dear ones had with each other. And it was somehow big enough to hold all the losses & estrangements inside a shelter of utterly life-affirming familiedness and big gay sacred absurdity! My molecules were rearranged by the witness of our people.

Which is to say I actually do feel changed by ~~marriage~~! The ritual of it is still composting, renewing, expanding, tenderizing & challenging me. Meaning, it was also hard: I felt some spiritual muscle fibers split and knit more strongly together: the steadydeep cord between Han and me, the lines between us and those across the veil, the braid of our chosen & blood families woven tight.

I can't believe I get to be a wife to someone who I become more whole by being wifed to her. Wife, in this useage, is a verb for the expansive belonging and grounded presence Han has showed me is possible. (Also look how hot she is in that suit.)

Thank you to every dearly beloved who made it all possible--in disbelief just to know youse.

Beautiful 📸 by brilliant Connie @silverandsaltphoto 🙏🙏 by @shelbeleh

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2 months ago

Weaving together interpretative translations, research, interviews, and sounds, Ways of Awe is a queer anti-Zionist audio companion for the Jewish High Holidays. Episodes go live next week—on Rosh Chodesh Elul 5786 (August 12/13 2026). ✨️

Join talmud scholars, rabbis, and artists as they unearth the meanings, grammar, and ancient gossip inside the holiest prayers of the Jewish year. Created by Maia Brown and Shelby Handler, these audio collages range from meditative to liberatory, grief-stricken to playful, irreverent to awestruck, and from the ancestral to the immediate.

From Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, the Days of Awe, or the Yamim Noraim, are a portal for collective reckoning and return. Each episode of Ways of Awe features a different prayer and could be listened to during the ten days, or in the month of Elul leading up. Whenever and wherever these sounds find you, we hope they deepen your relationship to and reinvention of our annual traditions—in service of diasporic flourishing and decolonial imagining. by @shelbeleh

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2 months ago

Ways of Awe is live. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or visit the links in our bio. ✨️

Weaving together interpretative translations, research, interviews, and sounds, Ways of Awe is a queer anti-Zionist audio companion for the Jewish High Holidays.

Ways of Awe was written by Maia Brown and Shelby Handler, based on translations originally shared with the Kadima Reconstructionist Community in Seattle, WA on unceded Coast Salish, Duwamish land. All episodes edited by Maia Brown. Audio engineering by Daniel Guenther. Thank you to Ross Kirshenbaum, or Levoneh, and Peter Lippman, and Jimmy Austin for our show music, and to Jenny Asarnow for their field recordings. Thank you to the Jack Straw Cultural Center Artist Support Program and the King County Office of Arts & Culture, Smart Ventures Program, and Signal Fire Coop. by @shelbeleh

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2 months ago