I was 5 years old when I realized that I was a freak show. In Macon, Ga., good ole boys go huntin’, muddin’ and beer guzzlin’. Peroxide blondes drive pick-up trucks with gun racks. Prayer kicks off sporting events. A Jewish girl is like a werewolf-midget contortionist. My mother always dreamed I’d be married in…
When my wedding photo was published in the Forward in 2002, it accompanied an article about creative Jewish rituals found online, including a blessing for children at the time of their parent’s remarriage. I remember thinking, as I looked at the photo, what’s so unusual about this? Oh, right. Most people don’t have their five…
The feminist project of rethinking the Seder has begun — and my home is its next front. My eldest daughter, who recently became bat mitzvah, received as a gift a Miriam’s Cup. I’m not wild about such feminist flourishes, but as a father of three daughters, I dare not oppose them even if I find…
Depending on how you look at it, Masha Gessen’s “Blood Matters” (Harcourt) is either an unusually philosophical memoir of a cancer diagnosis or an unusually personal account of the complex ethical questions surrounding the issue of genetic testing. What do we want to know, and what don’t we want to know, about our own fates?…
‘So, are they going to do a mezinke at your brother’s wedding?” a Jewish friend asked this past spring, one eyebrow raised quizzically, as we watched our children play on a jungle gym. I shrugged my shoulders and changed the subject. To her, it was a question of tradition. To me, it was a full-fledged…
It was just before Rosh Hashanah when poet Dinah Berland, estranged from her son for 11 years, stumbled upon a book of women’s prayers that she believes led to her reconciliation with him. As Berland tells it, in 1998 she had wandered into a Los Angeles store that sells used books, when a slim book…
Often, words and expressions change meaning by happenstance, or because a secondary meaning gradually becomes a primary one. There’s no wider significance to it. Sometimes, though, the change is indicative of a real cultural shift. I had this thought the other day, as I was reading an article about the current trend in some American…
The idea for best-selling author Hope Edelman’s latest book was born as she sat in bed during the weeks leading up to the birth of her second daughter. With her swollen feet needing some tender loving care, a toddler scrambling around and a husband keeping long hours at the office, Edelman wished she could do…
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