Are You There, God? It’s Me, Rachel!
Although Judaism is front and center in Deborah Heiligman’s coming of age novel ‘Intentions,’ at the core of the story are questions of faith with which all teenagers grapple.
When Part Is Lost, What of the Whole?
The pace of Joshua Henkin’s novel, ‘The World Without You,’ is slow and deliberate. Each conversation, each passing hour, takes on the weight of something much larger.
'Our Bodies' Gets an Israeli Makeover
The groundbreaking women’s book ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’ has been adapted for Israel. Now we know how to say ‘menopause,’ in both Hebrew and Arabic.
A Tree Evangelist Who Connects Heaven and Earth
During a Sabbath evening service one Friday in February, Seth Goldstein and his 9-year-old son, Ozi, sat with their eyes closed in the synagogue in Olympia, Wash., where Goldstein is the rabbi. From the bimah, Nalini Nadkarni asked congregants to imagine a tree that was important to them. She described the maple trees that had lined the driveway of her childhood home. Amid the confusion of growing up, they had been a refuge. She would climb their limbs with a book and a snack, and spend entire afternoons up in the air.
Aliyah an Option for More North American Jews Escaping a Bad Economy
When Nisan and Gilan Gertz stepped off the plane at Ben-Gurion International Airport with their children last August, they were seven of almost 4,000 North Americans to make aliyah in 2009 — the largest number to do so in a single year since 1983.
Controversial Arabic School Stays Mum
As children, joking and gossiping, spilled out of Brooklyn’s Khalil Gibran International Academy on a frigid Friday afternoon recently, one stopped to answer a waiting reporter’s question about his experience there.
Digest: Agunot Stats, Reading John Stuart Mill in Hebrew
The Sisterhood Digest:
From Reform to Orthodox, Jewish Opinions Abound on Medical Marijuana
From the time Lisa Siegel was a little girl, she had terrible nausea, mental fog that came and went, and tightness and cramping in her muscles so severe that it would wake her in the night. She was 47 before she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but she remembers a childhood dominated by hospitalizations, doctors and pain. Nothing worked — not Advil, not Tylenol, not the other medications her doctors kept prescribing.
Digest: Virtual Plastic Surgery and a Bar Refaeli Boycott
The Sisterhood Digest:
Standing Against Abortion Restrictions in the Healthcare Bill
As the House and Senate hash out their versions of the sweeping healthcare reform bill in the coming weeks, several crucial women’s health issues hang in the balance. The most high-profile, and controversial, is abortion — the Stupak-Pitts amendment in the House and the Managers Amendment in the Senate would both severely restrict abortion coverage nationwide, even among private insurers — but coverage of other women’s health procedures, such as mammograms, are also written specifically into the bill (those are, fortunately, required to be covered).