I recently conducted some research to explore how Jews define their own cultural identity through food. I analyzed interviews done in Europe -mainly in Germany- and in America -mainly Chile- and the results were somehow surprising. Both samples were very similar: mainly middle age, secular, and Ashkenazi women. Their answers were also relatively close in…
Let’s call it a Pew-haha, these last few weeks of hand wringing, debate, and general brouhaha about the recent Pew survey on American Judaism. “Of making books there is no end,” Ecclesiastes reminds us. Op-eds, too. Now that the dust is settling, perhaps it’s worth asking a seemingly obvious question: Who cares? And more importantly,…
Last June, Jane Eisner participated in a private roundtable discussion at the Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem about Israel’s Jewish identity. What came out of the talks was the sense that Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora face a similar challenge — how to be a modern people in a modern world while holding…
Last June, Jane Eisner participated in a private roundtable discussion at the Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem about Israel’s Jewish identity. What came out of the talks was the sense that Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora face a similar challenge — how to be a modern people in a modern world while holding…
I recently wrote an article in the Sisterhood entitled “Why I Check Both White and Jewish,” about white privilege, gentrification and my experience being marginalized as a Jew. My intention was to spark conversation amongst readers about privilege and racial identity in order to work towards dismantling racism both within the Jewish community and beyond,…
Recently I’ve read several pieces in which Jewish parents expressed their belief that day school is critically necessary to raising their children as Jews — and that without it, there would be no certainty that their children would maintain a firm footing in the Jewish world. One mother even wrote that she had decided to…
● Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity By Andrew Solomon Scribner, 976 pages, $37.50 In his ambitious new study of the relationships between exceptional or unusually challenging children and their parents, Andrew Solomon confesses, informs and enlightens with the same capacious sweep that distinguished his last work, “The Noonday Demon:…
Growing up as a single child to a Russian Jewish immigrant family, I have always felt the pressure to succeed. In a Russian Jewish home, success is often defined as perfection. Though I don’t know much about life in Russia, I can imagine that people were more invested in becoming “perfect” rather than taking a…
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