The journey to “The Boat” — a prison barge floating in the East River of New York City — is long. The Bx6 bus winds through the most industrial parts of Hunts Point. I get off at the head of a road flanked on either side by a wastewater treatment facility and the fish market….
On Tel Aviv’s Frishman Beach stands a statue of Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion — on its head. Wearing only blue briefs branded ‘Tel Aviv’, Israel’s first prime minister performs a handstand in the sand in the iconic pose made famous in a photograph from 1955. This flippant tribute to Ben Gurion is the…
For many years, I had my own personal tradition that I would observe on Yom Kippur. The day before, I would go to the big supermarket in our neighborhood in Southern Jerusalem and buy myself a watermelon. On the morning of Yom Kippur, I would split the watermelon in half, and declare the official beginning…
A small group of children stand behind the fence in the early morning. They are waiting for the gate to be unlocked. In their hands are empty plastic jugs their mothers have given them to fill for the day’s cooking needs. The gate is supposed to be unlocked every day at 6 a.m. But this…
Last month, American parents across the country drove their daughters and sons to college to begin a new academic year. These parents had little to temper their excitement and optimism, except maybe some concerns about costs, or academic performance, or perhaps their beloved offspring’s choice of extra-curricular activities. American Jewish parents, however, were not quite…
For many Orthodox Jewish women, the mikveh is fraught with tension: a secret space for married women only — who immerse only after the completion of a menstrual cycle and after childbirth -– occasions inevitably tied to sexuality. Immersions are obligatory, and are done in the privacy of night, only after the stars come out….
Earlier this month, a woman who had broken with ultra-Orthodox Judaism welcomed another ex-Orthodox man into her home in New Jersey. The man had promised to advise her on managing divorce proceedings with young children. He claimed to have been through a similar ordeal, she said. Instead of asking her about her upcoming trial, the…
In 2010 I was contacted by the chief editor of a volume called “Khazars: Myth and History,” put together by the Russian Academy of Sciences. She knew my books on Ashkenazic names, and was familiar with my ongoing study of the history of Yiddish, eventually published by Oxford University Press in 2015 as “Origins of…
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