JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Miriam wiped the sweat off her brow in layers of heavy silk kimono woven with delicate pastel and bright red flowers. I could barely recognize my twenty year old daughter out of her baggy sweater and modest, flowing skirt. Here she was, dressed for her Seijinshiki, the Japanese Coming of Age ceremony, clip-clopping in her…
One of the great productive tensions between Jewish tradition and contemporary spirituality is that between time and the timeless. On the one hand, the passage of time is central in Judaism. Some of this time passes in a linear fashion — we age along with life-cycle events , from birth to death — and some…
Most people don’t know what to picture when I tell them that I was very active in the Beijing Jewish community when I lived in China from 2006 to 2010. They can’t seem to envision what Jewish-in-China looks like. Is it a minyan of all Chinese Jews? A Chabad rabbi wrangling businessmen and college kids…
“Do the dead know that life still exists, somewhere?” the 17-year-old literature-loving, sex-obsessed Samuel Glass asks in “The Odyssey of Samuel Glass.” Since his adored father’s sudden death, he is desperate to leave the confines of his north London suburban home. His desire to “get away from the doom-laden cloud that pervaded the house” is…
