As the daughter of Israeli immigrants, Sharon Bukspan always knew she wanted to spend a year in Israel before attending college, mostly to spend time with family members whom she saw sporadically after her parents moved to the United States. One night this summer, she was riding the New York City subway with her MCAT…
Linda Steinberg had worked in Philadelphia previously, for a short time, but she didn’t remember the summer heat. When she came back to town a few weeks ago, to a job at the new National Museum of American Jewish History, it was a hot day — upward of 100 degrees. For Steinberg, the contrast with…
In the days since Jews first put down roots in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, much has changed. The population — once mostly Ashkenazi — is now dominated by Sephardic Jews, most of whom emigrated from Syria. Avenue J, the main drag, offers sushi as well as kosher meat, and the synagogues of Coney Island…
Robert E. Lee and George Washington sound like an unlikely pair. Now, the college named after them, Washington and Lee University, is working toward another unification of very disparate backgrounds. Lexington, Va., the home of W&L, has no synagogue, no permanent rabbi and very few Jews, but soon that may change. The W&L alumni, faculty…
When she sees how excited her 7-year-old son, Isaac, is to go with her to pick up his younger sister, Tzipporah, at his old preschool, Ginna Green is convinced that she and her husband made the right decision to send their children to Gan Mah Tov, in Oakland, Calif. Green is confident that the Jewish…
I’ll never forget the spring day many years ago when my 4-year-old son began coming home from kindergarten chattering about someone named “Eet-er.” This kid, whoever he was, seemed make everyone miserable. I wondered who he was and where he came from. Who in the world was “Eet-er” and why was he getting away with…
It’s a story of a Sisterhood post done good. Last month, Elana Sztokman, a regular contributor to this blog, proposed a model for infusing Orthodox day schools with the kind of feminist values that have informed partnership synagogues and have advanced women’s leadership roles within Orthodoxy. The buzz that her blog post generated secured her…
Feminism has no doubt transformed Orthodoxy over the past three decades. Women have gone from begging to hold a Torah on Simchat Torah to holding their own services, to creating partnership synagogues in which women take active roles alongside men in running the service. It’s not only about women learning Talmud, but also about being…
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