At a recent dinner party, a fervent argument broke out over the way one chooses romantic partners. Penny, an old friend of my partner Ellen, invited us to meet her new husband; she is Jewish, he is not. They had met at a mutual friend’s party. Ellen and I, I told them, had met on…
Human nature is funny. We are so easily distracted by things like our cell phones and our computer screens and nuclear warnings that turn out to be a false alarm that we are missing the life happening right in front of our very faces. Like, Amy Schumer’s marriage to a man named Chris Fischer. Surprise!…
They met in the Vichy-run Gurs concentration camp, in southwestern France. It was the winter of 1940. She was 16, he was 19. “There were many artists imprisoned in Gurs,” Hanne Liebmann reflects today, in her Queens home. “We had a cultural life there, despite the circumstances. They would organize concerts.” Hanne Hirsch had been…
Almost thirty years ago, my father invited me to attend a round table discussion on intermarriage. He was a leader in the local Jewish community, a vice president of an important Jewish organization. I was a rabbinical student, with clear instructions – sit in the corner; shut up. The various machers went around the room…
“When we meet him, how will we know he’s our bashert?” This was one of the questions I asked my teachers during my early teenage years. As an adolescent in a yeshiva high school, there was no topic more fascinating than bashert – the Jewish concept of soulmate. Though we students were from modern Orthodox…
Ivanka Trump is saying that she and her husband, Jared Kushner, were the matchmakers behind seven marriages, as she told Sean Hannity in an interview. Trump’s claims about her and Kushner’s matchmaking prowess came about after Hannity revealed that he had tried to set up a former employee of Trump’s through Hannity’s defunct dating website,…
Genesis famously offers two “versions” of Adam and Eve’s creation. The first, in the first chapter of Genesis, is a broad overview: “And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” The second chapter of Genesis presents a more detailed narrative: God forms…
JERUSALEM (JTA) – Israel’s rabbinical courts have in recent years ramped up their practice of blacklisting citizens they deem not Jewish, internal data released Sunday show. With increasing frequency, they have placed Israelis, almost all of them immigrants with Jewish heritage, on lists that prevent them from marrying Jews. They argue this practice is necessary…
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