Johnna Kaplan
By Johnna Kaplan
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Life How to Give When You Have No Money To Give
The other day I got a postcard. It was from a chapter of a Jewish women’s organization I fleetingly belonged to, located in another time zone. The postcard was unusual in that it was requesting donations of clothes, rather than the usual appeal for cash. But the fact that it showed up in my mailbox…
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Life In Defense of Jewish Tattoos
For a while now, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a Jew with a tattoo. Those thoughts resurfaced last week when I read Jodi Rudoren’s New York Times story about the “handful” of Young Israeli Jews, children and grand-children of Holocaust survivors, who have decided to tattoo their older relatives’ death camp…
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Life When DIY Was More Than DIY
I recently discovered, and promptly became obsessed with, Emily Matchar’s blog New Domesticity. On the blog and in her upcoming book due out next year, Matchar explores the recent-ish explosion of “lost” domestic arts like bread-baking, bee-keeping and serious DIY laundry (handmade washboard, anyone?). I’d been noticing the popularity of this return to the ways…
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Life My Apartment, My Sukkah
Of all the holidays I’ve never observed, Sukkot has always looked like the most fun. Growing up, I didn’t know anyone who celebrated the autumn festival; my awareness of it came entirely from reading. Sukkot would have seemed exotic if it wasn’t somehow so familiar, a combination of Thanksgiving and being allowed to sleep on…
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Life Where Are the Wandering Jewesses?
In reality and imagination, Jews are a people who cannot stay still. The Israelites traipsed through the desert, the Wandering Jew was condemned to homelessness, refugees fled before disaster or scattered in its aftermath, and immigrants sailed for new shores. And this has always suited me, because I can’t stay still either. I thought my…
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Life Shhh, I Want Children
I love babies. I love their little hands, their puffy velvety cheeks, their quizzical expressions. I love to buy them tiny clothes. I have been known, upon seeing a baby, to squeal aloud. And babies love me. They stare at me over their mothers’ shoulders, their round eyes fixed on mine. They gaze at me…
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Life No God. No Treyf. No Conflict.
The moment I saw the title of David Meir Grossman’s latest piece on Jewcy.com — “Why I Gave Up God But Still Keep Kosher” — I thought, “Finally! Someone’s going to talk about how faith and custom can be unrelated concepts!” Of course, seeing as Jewishness has as many branches (and twigs and leaves) as…
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