Ripe Citrons and Ruby Slippers
On the first day of Sukkos, after tens of thousands of Jews had paid princely sums for flawless specimens of a particular citrus fruit, payments were made by others, too, for a very different...
Category: Religion
Ivanka Trump Got Me Thinking about Shabbat
Several statements by Ivanka Trump stimulated me to rethink my own Shabbat observance. The 35-year-old daughter of US president elect Donald Trump converted to Judaism seven years ago. She said that she and her...
Kotel Krusade
An op-ed of mine about the recent disruption at the Kotel engineered by non-Orthodox Jewish clergy and an Israeli feminist group appeared in Haaretz. It can be read at: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.750731?=&ts=_1478444374594
The Sukkah Still Stands
There is simply no describing the plaintive, moving melody to which Yiddish writer Avraham Reisen’s poem was set. As a song, it is familiar to many of us who know it thanks to immigrant...
Under the Weather
With hurricane season upon us, we might learn something from the models that meteorologists offer when a large sea-storm heads for land. Something about Shemini Atzeres. The maps created as a storm approaches often...
Greetings!
“How do you say ‘the horse died’ in Yiddish?” asked the African-American panhandler to whom I had given a quarter when he accosted me in lower Manhattan. It was many years ago, shortly after...
Commanded
Just in time for Rosh Hashanah, a number of media, including the Wall St. Journal and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, found a good “Jewish” story in the popularity and abundance of dogs in Tel...
Tempest in a Tallis
The image was, to be sure, jarring: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump being draped in a tallis. By an African-American pastor. In a Detroit church. To resounding applause. Bishop Wayne Jackson of the Great...
Summer Camps and Summer Camps
There are all sorts of summer camps. Most familiar to most of us are summer youth experiences like Camp Agudah’s various branch-camps and the broad assortment of others like them. They combine Torah-study and...
Silence Can Be Golden
What’s omitted from a discussion can sometimes speak quite loudly. And sometimes quite disturbingly. That’s true, I think, about the national conversation about the Khizr and Ghazala Khan/Donald Trump contretemps. Unless you’ve been summering...
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