Our master teacher Yehudit Feinstein has a great show up with other Israeli artists that closes Friday, so get your “toosiks” (that’s the Israeli version of tuchis) over to see it.

Louis Ginzberg (1873-1953) is credited with composing one of the standard English “blessings for our country” which is often recited at the Torah service on Shabbat morning in American congregations.
Here is Ginzberg’s text, composed during the Second World War:
Our God and God of our Fathers,
We invoke Thy blessing upon our Country, on the government of […]

My friend Daniel Bodner has another extraordinary show at the Allen Sheppard Gallery in Chelsea.
Please go see it.

My father used to say to my sisters that I was the sensitive one. “Like a deer in the woods who hears a twig snap,” which I guess meant I had a kind of high strung alertness.
I learned this after he died, twenty four years ago. And in my own personal mythology, that […]

I’m in Milwaukee this week.
At a local candy store I grew up going to in search of the perfect malted milk ball, I stand with my daughter in pursuit of Polly Pocket dolls and candy.
They’re out of malted milk balls and there’s no string licorice and I’m thinking, “I flew jetblue to Chicago, […]

Bronstein and Waskow: Round Three.
Both men have degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so there may be something deeper going on here.
If you are amused by this exchange, it must mean that Adar is coming.

First thing yesterday morning a young man came to see me to talk about his path toward conversion. An African American from the Midwest, he’s pursuing his career in New York and giving weight to the voice of ethical monotheism that has been calling out to him since his youth. Like so many […]

7th graders sitting in a room around Torah, talking about it, eating after school candy, dwiddling with their cell phones, arguing about God and covenant, while in the background their peer chants from an actual Torah Scroll in preparation for becoming Bat Mitzvah on Saturday morning. On the practice run of her Torah blessings, […]

Rabbi Dan Bronstein, upset over the Chicago Bears having lost the Super Bowl to a team from Indiana, takes out his frustration in a dialogue with Rabbi Arthur Waskow in a debate on the spirituality of Renewal inJewcy this week.

Theory and practice collided this past week in the Jewish community with the publication of Steven M. Cohen’s essay, A Tale of Two Jewries: The Inconvenient Truth for American Jews.
Here the noted sociologist shares his latest research in which he shares many disturbing conclusions:
“As compared with the in-married, only half as many of the […]