“What if something happens and you never come home, Em?” I hear my mother’s voice in my head as I pack for a trip to New York. I can feel the knot in my stomach move up to my throat and suddenly, I’m nauseous. I go to the bathroom and vomit. This isn’t the first…
The group of girls, ponytailed and dressed in pink, stretched their arms out to the sides and pivoted onto their toes, trying desperately to hold still. Eagle-eyed, the instructor surveyed Gaza’s latest crop of would-be ballerinas. Fifty girls aged five to eight are now enrolled in the ballet school at the Al-Qattan Center for Children…
In a ward at Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, child therapist Rabeea Hamouda is trying to elicit a response from two small brothers, Omar and Mohammed, aged three and 18 months, hoping for some words or perhaps a smile. For seven straight minutes the children, peppered with burns and shrapnel wounds sustained in Israeli shelling that…
If you went to Hebrew school, you probably have one of these. No, not a prayer book given to you by the sisterhood — though of course you have one of those, too (with the program from your bat mitzvah still stuck inside). I’m talking about something else: a story about a Hebrew school moment…
Yehuda Kurtzer is the author of “Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past.” His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: When my son Noah was about 3 or 4, he came home…
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