Judy Brown used to say her little brother was “crazy as a bat.” Nobody in her community or even in her family understood the boy who terrorized baby sitters and flapped his hands in the air. Even Brown wished he would go away. If Hashem performs miracles, she wondered, why couldn’t He “cure” her brother?…
Photograph courtesy of Sarah Zell Young After college, I became traditionally observant for the first time, taking on a chunk of religious obligations without really understanding them. Newly relocated to New York, I was new to graduate school and new to the study of Torah. I found a rabbi to teach me the ins and…
This is the thing you didn’t know: that motherhood is not all joy; that birth leaves scars forever; that often you will feel no love, only desperation. This is the thing you didn’t know: That pregnancy could fill you with that much dread, that you would weep from misery and they would call it postpartum…
Once, life in Brooklyn’s Boro Park was simple. There was the inside and the outside and an impenetrable wall in between. Then came the Internet, and everything changed. In the beginning, we did not fully understand. The computer seemed to be a rather innocuous box: glass screen; dark plastic, flat keyboard, and a cursor that…
On a Tuesday in July 2007, I learned that the sun is a star. A friend of mine, formerly Hasidic, told me the secret. She informed me that the heavens look nothing like we think. I said, “Huh?” “Look,” she said reasonably, “I swear. It explains it here, in this incredible astronomy book. The sun…
I was certainly wearing pantyhose. It was just that they were wet, and this is what caused the confusion. To the young Hasid passing the yard where I sat, the damp Lycra, transparent in the glinting sun, looked like my nude legs sprawled over the edge of the pop-up pool, bare as a careless whore….
אַבֿרהם שוואַרץ איז געפאָרן אַהין מיט דרײַ חדשים צוריק, נישט וויסנדיק אַז אין גיכן וועט צווישן איראַן און ישׂראל אויסברעכן אַ מלחמה.
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