For my Japanese mother-in-law, my moving to Israel was a disaster — and not just because I was tearing the family apart.
Richard Linklater’s coming-of-age epic ‘Boyhood’ shows the interplay between sublime moments and the everyday — just like in Jewish esoteric traditions, writes Jay Michaelson.
Alison Klayman was the bat mitzvah tutor of Beijing. In her four years in China, she coached five remarkable young Jewish women as they came of age.
“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 acute. Life has lost its purpose.