JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The house was clean, the chicken and kugel roasted, and a handsome apple cake waited on the counter. All that was left to do was make salad. The pretty salad bowl from our wedding registry, the one I barely use, was at the top of the tall pantry. My husband would be home in 10…
“A Jewitch Herbal: Mystical Reflections on Food, Nature and Urban Farming” is a regular column by Devorah Brous charting the ways we can use mystical Jewish wisdom, earth-based practices and herbal wellness to reconnect with ourselves in harmony with nature. Brous is an urban homesteader, lifecycle ritualist, and green consultant in Los Angeles. Find her…
When my wife first came home with an etrog, I was enchanted and aghast. This was before we were married, when we were just beginning to celebrate the cycle of Jewish holidays together. I knew that to observe the holiday of Sukkot, Jews traditionally constructed makeshifts huts, and performed a ritual waving tree fronds while…
Sukkot is one of the most beautiful and uplifting holidays on the Jewish calendar. As a young child, I was often taught that we leave our homes and spend time in our sukkot to remind us of the days when the Israelites were unhoused and wandering in the desert, on their way to redemption. The…
A feeling of “this is not how it was supposed to be” permeates our sukkah this year. Sukkot is supposed to be a time of abundance, but this Sukkot seems to be, instead, a time of grave concern. Like rain penetrating the sukkah, the suffering around us makes us uncomfortable. When it rains we find…
The harvest holiday of Sukkot feels immeasurably more relatable to me this year than it has in the past, because this year I’m in the midst of my own actual harvest. The garden I planted in the spring has gone from relative order to wildly overgrown; a beautiful, bountiful mess. The carrots, which I wrote…
Demeaning comments made in private by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo earlier in his political career about the festival of Sukkot raised some eyebrows in the Jewish community on Tuesday. In an extensive profile of Cuomo in the New York TImes Magazine, journalist Matt Flegenheimer reported that during the 2006 campaign for attorney general, Cuomo…
Most years, Sukkot lasts about a week. But in this year of plague, the holiday has become a months-long event, with no sign of ending anytime soon. Secular sukkahs are all around us. They’re just going by a new name: “outdoor dining.” On daily walks through my neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, I’ve watched…
THE TEMPLE EMANU-EL STREICKER CENTER and Virtual
Aug 10, 2022
7 pm ET ·
Will the last Jew left in New York’s congressional delegation be reelected? Will New York’s senior congresswoman receive another term? Or will one of the newcomers upend Manhattan politics?
