I grew up in a semi-religious household. My father was Orthodox; my mother was resentful. It wasn’t that she rejected Jewish beliefs, but she didn’t exactly respect them either. Nowhere was this more evident than in the small kitchen of our Lower East Side apartment. Keeping kosher was a constant source of conflict. Jewish food…
(JTA) – As Yom Kippur approaches, Jewish baseball fans hark back to the fall of 1965, when Dodgers ace Sandy Koufax said he would not take the mound in Game 1 of the World Series against the Minnesota Twins. Mind you, this was no ordinary pitcher. Koufax dominated on the hill that season for Los Angeles…
When the Jewish community learned that the March for Racial Justice was scheduled for Yom Kippur (September 30), outraged responses filled social media. It was the immediate aftermath of Charlottesville, and we Jews had been made keenly aware that we, too, remain objects of hate by White Supremacists. It had been made clear that, like…
Berlin 1945. American soldiers, male and female, occupy every available seat in the auditorium dominated by an American flag. The room barely stirs. A young chaplain draped in a tallit, the sort they all wore at their bar mitzvahs, stands behind a lectern placed off to the side. Approaching from the right, a young private…
Like a good cinephile––one of very few, it would seem––I was anxious to see ‘mother!’, the newest offering from lugubrious auteur Darren Aronofsky. So anxious, in fact, that I ensured there would be one night my husband would come home early from work to sit with our baby son, so I could attend a late…
There’s something compelling about the idea that as an Orthodox Jew, no matter where I am in the world, all I have to do to feel at home is find a synagogue. But after nearly four decades of as a female Jew in synagogues in the United States and Israel, I am finally, belatedly, starting…
Who will live, and who will die? Who by the length of their days, and who before their time? Who by wildfire, and who by hurricane? Who by repeal of their health care, and who by unjust pricing of their lifesaving medicines? The questions that we ask on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are not…
Editor’s Note: The following piece is satirical. The people and communities mentioned are fictional, though the broader themes and probability analysis are rock-solid. I met Rabbi Zoe Ichinomiya-Brodsky on a muggy Labor Day weekend in Austin. She was struggling with the same two dilemmas she struggles with each year at this time: What to serve…
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