It did not feel like a compliment when someone told me that I was the “prettiest” rabbi he had ever seen. Nor did it feel like a compliment when a congregant said he was really impressed with me although he always thought “ima” — Hebrew for mother — “did not belong on the bima.” I…
A couple of things became apparent during the Progressive Jewish Alliance’s annual gala in Los Angeles last week, factors which will surely shape the run-up to the 2012 election. These factors did not include the “Yiddish songs of the labor movement,” which were performed entertainingly enough by singer Cindy Paley as guests shmoozed pre-dinner, but…
To have, or not to have, the epidural? That is the question. More precisely, in the ninth month of a woman’s pregnancy, it is the only question that matters. In the fourth and fifth months, I was unsure if I wanted an epidural. How would I know? Women say that labor is intensely painful, but…
As it’s title indicates, Freddy Frankel’s “Job,” featured today on The Arty Semite in honor of National Poetry Month, is about the biblical figure tested by Satan to see whether his piety was sincere. In Frankel’s rendering, Job is at once the ancient figure of the Bible (“Desolate on the dung-hill”), as well as a…
I left the country for the first time when I was 23. I stood in line to board the plane, trying to stifle my panic attack, certain that I and everyone else on the flight was going to die, such was my intense fear of flying back then. I thought about turning around and running,…
Each Thursday, the Arty Semite features reviews and excerpts of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week, however, the poet and poem are contemporary in spirit, if not in fact. Morris Rosenfeld, born in 1862 in Russian Poland, became famous in the early 20th century as one of the Yiddish “sweatshop poets” of New York….
In all the excitement, controversy and dismay related to Israel’s Defense Minister abandoning his party, Labor, and forming a new faction, it seems that many of us overlooked the funny part. As the Forward reported here, in what many viewed as an act of self-preservation as Labor turned on him, Likud Barak has now set…
Larry Gopnik, the main character in the Coen brothers most recent and most Jewish film, “A Serious Man,” has been widely understood as Job-like figure. But what would Job be without Satan to test him? (Besides having more children and fewer boils, that is.) Enter Sy Ableman, Larry’s beardy nemesis, whose role as self-righteous cuckolder…
100% of profits support our journalism
