There’s a particular sort of dread that accompanies a holiday you don’t enjoy. Every year it looms on the calendar, slowly but steadily coming closer, while you try to ignore it. Every year the pressure builds and arrangements must be made — or you risk being plan-less on that most momentous of nights. You guess…
The ongoing protests against the exclusion of women from the public sphere by some Haredim, and counter-protests by Haredi activists who say they are maligned by critics, have everyone in Israel talking. The subject was quite provocative enough. And then came the Holocaust reference to make it even more so. On New Year’s Eve night,…
When I participated in the Adamah Fellowship at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in the fall of 2006, I remember feeling such amazement at the way that the High Holidays perfectly lined up with the agricultural calendar. I arrived at the farm just in time to see summer turn into fall — to harvest…
For the New Year, a Facebook friend wrote as her status, “My New Year’s resolution is to be Happy all Year!” That sounds lovely, I initially thought. It’s almost Oprah-ish, a vision for living one’s best life, joyously. Or perhaps it’s more like what Dennis Prager advocates — the idea that we all have a…
It started about two weeks ago — the instant messages while I was at work, asking me about my New Year’s Eve plans and the incessant text messages, sending my phone into a vibrating jig while I made the rounds at holiday parties. I was shocked at the extent to which the simple question, “What…
Until I was a teenager, I had little interest in large social gatherings featuring other people, with one exception — the all-night New Year’s Eve skating party in town. This happened every year at the local rink, and I was never allowed to go. In the revisionist history in my head, everyone I knew was…
“There’s always been kosher champagne,” says Aron Riter, founder of the Kosher Wine Society. “Well at least for the past 30 years,” he clarifies. But, kosher Prosecco, the north Italian interpretation of a sparkling white wine, has only come into light in the past five years, he adds. A more affordable and equally palatable alternative…
Planning a trip to China? Make it quick. The world’s most populous nation is about to disappear. That’s just one of the “wild” New Year’s predictions that Israeli news website Ynetnews.com reported from Israeli mystics on September 17. “God will cleanse the world and erase China from the world this year, and there will be…
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