JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Editor’s note: The letter below comments on the original headline of Jodi Rudoren’s Nov. 19 “Looking Forward” column. That headline was changed shortly after publication, unrelated to this letter. To the editor: It is not easy being part of a religious minority in the United States, a country with European settler colonial origins and a…
What does tikkun olam look like? On Yom HaTzedek, a new holiday that falls on Pesach Sheni, it looks like a box. For Tobi Kahn, the renowned painter and sculptor, that box looks like a city awash in deep blue, its interior reflecting the heavens, its slot like a mailbox to God. On a Wednesday…
Gift guides for men are perplexing documents. In their haste to assure our dads and ourselves that men don’t like clothes, cosmetics, or anything that can’t be classified as a “gadget,” publications have urged the purchase of some truly deranged items. Doorbells that connect to his iPad. Camping knives with functions that almost no dad…
The red-Starbucks-cup, jingles-in-pharmacies, wrapping-paper-raffle holiday season may have ended on Jan. 1, but for the more than five million Americans of Asian descent who celebrate Lunar New Year, the stretch of holidays isn’t quite over. For many, one of the most important holidays of 2021 falls on Friday, Feb. 12 — a coincidence some have…
During the pandemic, Jessica Tamar Deutsch has been considering exile as she relearns how to paint. Specifically, she’s been thinking about the title character in “The Lost Princess,” a story by Rabbi Nachman, the mystic founder of the Breslov Hasidic movement, about a young woman who disappears from her home after displeasing her kingly father….
Los Angeles is getting a special gift for Hanukkah this year. Emmy-award winning actress Tiffany Haddish, along with Tom Kenny (“Spongebob Squarepants”), Mark Feuerstein (“Royal Pains”) and more, have brought to life a new Hanukkah-themed animated short, “The Broken Candle.” The film follows a Hanukkah candle box (voiced by Eugenio Derbez) that comes with a…
When the COVID-19 lockdown was at its most severe in Israel at the end of April, I was scrolling through headlines and came across a deeply troubling article detailing the discovery of a dead body in a small apartment in Beer Sheba. The body was that of Dr. Magda Graif, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor, who…
What would’ve happened if the ancient Israelites had endured the coronavirus pandemic? If they were told to stay inside and completely alter their daily lives: no visits to markets, temples or anywhere else? This would have challenged them, no doubt, but would we, their descendants, still be talking about it today? Every year, we remember…
