‘I can’t wait for Sukkot.” An expression of anticipatory excitement coming from a fellow member of my temple? Our rabbi? My Orthodox cousins? It was the 13-year-old son of our non-Jewish neighbors. And another piece of evidence of a remarkable phenomenon our family has discovered about the holiday: That it is magic. No, it’s not…
A few hours after the Kol Nidre service that marks the beginning of Yom Kippur, 11:07 p.m. Chicago time, my phone buzzed. My iPhone was on for emergencies: with the kid away in college and my 91 year old mom alone in her apartment, I had to check. The message spelled “W-O-W.” “Dad, Cubs had…
A Chicago Public Schools teachers’ strike was narrowly averted when union leaders, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and school board officials came to a tentative last-minute agreement late Monday night, just minutes before the deadline at midnight October 9. The strike, which would have kept nearly 380,000 students out of class, had been scheduled to begin at…
As Tzedek Chicago’s rabbinical intern, I was interested in Mira Sucharov’s recent Forward opinion piece, “My Problem With the Idea of a “Non-Zionist” Synagogue,” which explores how the issue of Israel impacts congregational life. It’s an important subject, and Sucharov raises some important questions that American Jewry should address. I was disappointed that her article…
It’s like the beginning of a Jewish joke: A young boy obsessed with the statistics in “The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract,” and with creating rosters on the old Apple II computer game MicroLeague Baseball, grows up to become the general manager of not one but two major league baseball teams. And of course they…
Rabbi Brant Rosen started Tzedek Chicago last year, a synagogue that bills itself as “non-Zionist” (and whose name means “justice”). Rosen’s recent Rosh Hashanah sermon, circulated in blog form, calls for a “Judaism beyond nationalism,” one “openly acknowledging that the creation of an ethnic Jewish nation state in historic Palestine resulted in an injustice against…
Herschell Gordon Lewis, the film director and producer celebrated as the Godfather of Gore, died September 26 at his home in Pompano, Florida. He was 90 years old. Lewis was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in Chicago, where he earned his bachelors and masters degrees in journalism at Northwestern University. After brief stints teaching…
Twenty-seven-year-old Jonah Berele died in Lake Michigan recently under unclear circumstances, abruptly ending the life of a local Orthodox Jew who began life as Sarah Berele — and who, from there, as his family and friends put it, went on to exemplify a generosity and compassion that he did not always find in his own…
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