Scribe, the Forward’s curated contributor network, is a place for showcasing personal experiences and perspective from across our Jewish communities. Here you will find a wide array of reflections on Jewish issues, life-cycle events, spirituality, culture and more.
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You say matzah — and matzo and matzuh and matzee and more
Readers respond to our editor-in-chief’s column about a Passover copy-editing conundrum
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Post Wedding Mental Health Challenges Are More Common Than You Think — Here’s What You Can Do To Conquer Them
After months of planning, and years of anticipation, the wedding was beautiful. Family and friends. Dancing. A real simcha. She and her family never dreamed a mental health challenge would appear after the wedding. She would be a bride! So why was she feeling depressed afterward? For some newlyweds, it may just be “post-wedding blues.”…
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What Moses And The First Menorah Can Teach Us About Fighting Terror
On the way home from the funeral, we discussed Amalek. It was Purim time, 1996. Israel was living through one of its worst spates of terrorism in years. Two students, Matt Eisenfeld and Sarah Duker, boarded a bus together and were killed, along with 24 other people. Matt was my friend. He and Sara were…
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My Post Traumatic Election Disorder Pushed Me Back to New Zealand
It’s been 10 days since I returned to my other home in New Zealand. When I first returned to live for the majority of the year in the United States this past spring, I wrote a short piece explaining why Ruth Bader Ginsberg had the right idea when she chided that if Donald Trump became…
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Can Ivanka Trump Become Our Queen Esther?
I am not an overly religious person, but I do remember the biblical story from The Book of Esther. For Jews, it’s a story we hear every year on the holiday of Purim. To summarize: once upon a time there was a powerful king who was easily manipulated by his entourage. His wife, the Queen…
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My Incredible Mormon-Jewish Encounter in the Christmas Market
The city of Bath, England is a quiet and small one. In fact, I’m not entirely sure how it constitutes a city; with a population of barely 100,000 and no buildings exceeding ten stories in height, it’s hardly the teeming metropolis of Manhattan that I grew up in. Nevertheless, it is a city that I…
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The Secrets of a Jewish Santa
In 1949 my father first began to play Santa Claus for the kindergarten class at Mason School in St. Louis. My dad, Paul Blumenthal, owned a nearby neighborhood pharmacy, Paul’s Drug Store, and he soon became well-known in South St. Louis for his animated Santa portrayals. Perhaps part of the allure was the fact that…
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The Era of Jew Hating Politics is Back
In 1992, in the midst of a tough primary against Republican President George H. W. Bush, Pat Buchanan said that “David Duke is busy stealing from me. I have a mind to go down there and sue that dude for intellectual property theft.” David Duke, of course, is the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard…
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Was Adam a Hermaphrodite?
I am responding in this series to frequently asked questions about some gender-bending translations of Torah texts I have proposed in a few articles since 2008, and in an Op-Ed in The New York Times, “Is God Transgender?” (August 12, 2016). So far, we have looked at Eve as “he”, Noah repairing to “her” tent,…
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Why I’m Keeping Our Jewish Identity on the Down-Low This Holiday Season
If you drive around my neighborhood in the Northern suburbs of Chicago, you can probably count on your two hands the number of homes with Christmas lights. I guess that’s my way of admitting I’m raising my kids in a bubble. My oldest son even acknowledged to me that he doesn’t have any Christian friends,…
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What Steve Bannon and Keith Ellison Have in Common
The U.S. Senate unanimously passed “The Anti-Semitic Awareness Act,” which endorses the U.S. State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism in investigating ethnic and religiously motivated crimes on campus. The is as follows: “Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward…
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Cool Places to Shop in Tel Aviv (Sponsored)
In Tel Aviv, you’ll run out of money long before you run out of great shops in which to spend it. Here are just a few suggestions that reflect everything you’d expect from such a vibrant city. The emphasis isn’t on high-end or low — it’s how to get your hands on stuff you won’t…
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