Jewish Blogs

Can I Be the Fantastic Jew?

Larry Harlow (given name: Lawrence Ira Kahn) is a big shot in the world of salsa. Born to a family of Jewish musicians in Brooklyn, he is not Cuban, but embraced Cuban music as a teen and ultimately dropped out of college to move to Havana and take music classes. (I am trying to imagine what would have happened if ...

Can Day Schools Survive?

In describing its news-making $33 million grant to the Hebrew Union College, the Jewish Theological Seminary and Yeshiva University to train a cadre of more than 1,000 Jewish educators, the heads of The Jim Joseph Foundation were clear about where they envision most of these teachers working.“The vast majority will not necessarily go work at day schools,” Al Levitt, president ...

Can Cheese Be Jewish?

“Goats are the Jews of the animal kingdom,” Aitan Mizrahi told a group at the Hazon Food Conference on Friday morning. The workshop participants, gathered in the warm, cream-scented air of a small industrial kitchen at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, immediately picked up on the tongue-in-cheek theme: They wander, they are intelligent, and they are stiff-necked, they said. ...

Can a woman blow the shofar?

The following is a conversation that happened at kiddush this past shabbos – I tried desperately to keep from laughing and spitting my cholent everywhere, so instead I laughed inside and kept to my straight and mature face.“Hey rabbi will you blow a shofar that a woman touched?”Of course, I can blow it if a woman touched it, she can ...

Caffeine Any Way Possible

I remember my old roommate once asked me, “If I could choose between being addicted to coffee and not being addicted to coffee, which one would I choose?”Without batting an eye, I screamed, “Addicted to coffee!” Getting addicted to coffee was probably one of the best decisions I ever made in my life. Honestly. I love coffee. It’s wonderful. The ...

“C” is for “Cookie.” And “Color Me Annoyed.”

I am having a dream where I am surrounded by cookies…chocolate-enrobed wafers piled up at my feet…stacks of coconut caramel chewies blocking doorways…a tower of lemon sugar drops threatening to topple on my head…Wait, this isn’t a dream. It’s my living room.The boxes that Little Yenta Girl sold for her Girl Scout troop have arrived, turning my house into an ...

Building Harmony in the Home

In Sichot Mussar, Rav Chaim Shmuelevitz discusses the question of why Rachel called her first son Yosef. Rashi writes that she could now blame her son for minor infractions in the home. Rav Shmuelevitz explains that she was happy that her husband would now not get upset with her as he would assume that their son was guilty. Our Sages ...

Building a New Social Safety Net: Sara Horowitz and the Freelancers Union

In 1909, Jewish women revolutionized the American labor movement. Before the huge garment industry strike known as the “Uprising of the 20,000,” union leaders saw women workers as irrelevant to the labor movement because they did not fit into the model of the traditional male union member. But these garment workers, many of them young Jewish women, proved that women ...

BRS decides to take on FrumSatire and attack the Kiruv movement

In a move clearly targeting the FrumSatire.net blog and its satirical attacks on the Orthodox community, a cabal of anti-kiruv members of the Boca Raton Synagogue have secretly launched their own parody site designed to denigrate the frum community and attack the Kiruv movement. This BRS-based attack project is called “S.O.S — Share Our Shabbos”. You can find some of the bitingly vicious videos on YouTube:Read More: @ ...

Brown is the New Jew?

By now you’ve heard about Arizona’s new immigration law, a racially-bigoted, short-sighted solution to the challenge of border patrol and undocumented workers in this country.Read More: @ yoyenta.comYou might also like:Schooling Glenn BeckGuns Are For People Who Underestimate the Power of WordsSatire Isn’t Supposed to Be StupidArm CandyMay Day: Celebrating through Protest

Brother, Can You Spare a Gold Cap

I didn’t like Hebrew school very much for a couple of reasons. First of all, Shoshana, the prettier of the two girls in class, never paid much attention to me. Some of the other boys in class were more roguish and savvy-tongued than a freckle-faced, strawberry-haired kid like me (who was nothing more than merely cute and sensitive), and Shoshana ...

Brises for Non-Jews?

She said that Louis even had a bris, presumably soon after they brought him home as a newborn in January. This was long before Jesse’s mistresses surfaced so he would have been there for the Jewish ceremony.Read More: @ myjewishlearning.comTags: Brises, jews, non-JewsYou might also like…Holocaust HandbagJerusalem, 1995-1996: Eating Standing UpFriday Night CelineDodging Suicide BombsYou’re Not Jewish. Deal With It.