Jews marry people who aren’t Jewish.
Am I telling you something you never heard before?
One of the most famous examples is told in this week’s Torah portion, where Joseph the Dreamer is down in Egypt, languishing in a jail cell for being falsely accused of a youthful dalliance (a term often employed for American politicians to […]
I don’t know if there’s a backlash as much as a grammatically awkward headline in the Jewish Week that says so.
So it goes with our people.
We’re an impatient lot. And so when the community invests in change, we sometimes want to see it faster than change itself can come along.
A few friends […]
One of the true pioneers of doing something Jewish for the hipster crowd at Hanukah time is the band Yo La Tengo. For many more years than the New Jew crowd has been doing its thing, Yo La Tengo has had a running tradition of playing Maxwell’s in Hoboken all eight nights of the […]
There’s a story told in the Talmud about a man who raped a woman on Yom Kippur and then died. She eventually gave birth to a son, who obviously never knew his father.
One day, while walking past the town cemetery, the boy heard the groanings of a tortured man in pain. Drawing near […]
Toward the end of the book of Genesis, Joseph emerges as the central character to lead the Israelite people down into Egypt. He gets there not by any decision of his own; rather, he is sold off into slavery by his jealous brothers who are annoyed by his arrogant sense of self, his egocentric […]
If you don’t mind, I’d like to go back to the point I made a couple days ago about this idea of a Religion for Adults.
One of the ideas that many educators and thinkers have hung their hat on for more than a century is that since the dawn of Modernity, Jews must liberate themselves […]
Walking back from Southpaw last night, Rachel, 38, said, “Man, do I feel old.” At 42, I didn’t disagree. We had left behind a crowded bar, still reeling to the last sounds of the night from Balkan Beat Box, a tight ensemble collection of Israelis, Americans, Serbs and Persians, who wove together sufficient […]
Of the many great challenges that face our generation of Jews, one that looms largest is a crisis of literacy. My peers, schooled in the best districts and catapulted into the greatest universities in the country, are often reduced to describing Torah in child-like terms. They only remember the vague outlines of the […]
The transit strike is over and there’s not much I did except go about my business here in Brooklyn. Near our apartment, one can see the major thoroughfares of this section of town–Flatbush Avenue, Eastern Parkway, Prospect Park West–and since the strike, these roads have been teeming with traffic.
One of the most noteworthy aspects […]
Well, it’s Christmas time in New York.
The strike is on. The economy is tanking. People are getting irritated. And you know what that all means?
Our own Jewish Santa Claus’ face will be adorning large vans and driving around the city blasting tacky music and attempting to convince the world that we have […]