Jewish Blogs

Shabbat: A Cure for Busyness

As I write this, I am simultaneously:1. Compulsively checking my email, Twitter, and Facebook.2. Waiting for an “important” text message to determine my weekend plans3. IMing with several co-workers4. Flipping through Internet radio to find the perfect balance of “listenable, without requiring too much thought” musicI have, it seems, a fantasy of reaching some sort of technological nirvana – by ...

“Sipping from the Nile”: A Memoir of the Exodus of Cairo’s Jewish Daughters

I was raised in a beautiful mansion on the banks of the Nile, in a multicultural multilingual Sephardic Italian Jewish family in Egypt: a Middle Eastern family, where men rose to prominence by their acts in a larger world, while women ran households, managed a large staff, volunteered their services to Jewish charities, and gained their reputations from their family ...

Dvar Torah Vayikra: The Fundamental Rift

There often lies within each parsha the potential for a disagreement between the Akivan and Ishmaelian perspectives, and although it may appear as a tangled mess of discrete points of dissension, in truth, there is a virtual fault line the separates the Akivan/Ishmalian divide into neatly defined positions that essentially constitute competing worldviews.Much of the disagreement develops forms the fundamental ...

Erica Brown’s Encomium of the Virtues of the Talmud

From Erica Brown, published at the Algemeiner, nice words about the Talmud while reflecting on the demise of the Britannica:…And the pause that I took to contemplate this new era also made me marvel all the more at our Jewish equivalent of the encyclopedia: the Talmud. Produced over several countries and four centuries, the Talmud has outlived the Britannica almost ...

Include women’s voices with JWA’s Passover Haggadah

Last week Kathleen Peratis shared her disappointment with the widely acclaimed The New American Haggadah by Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander:I loved it at first touch. Then I read the first line: “You are blessed, Lord God-of-Us, King of the Cosmos, who has set us apart with his mitzvot, and instituted us to eliminate all hametz.” “Lord”? “King”? “His”? Oh no.And ...

Find Me a Shidduch: Into BDSM and Math

I know a lot of you may not want to admit this, but frum people may actually have sexual preferences. It also appears that sexual preferences are quite important, but there’s no way that this sort of thing could make it into the shidduch resume template for some time – because frum Jews are typically squeamish when it comes to ...

Overweight Shidduch Dating Site: Why Not?

Before you crucify me, I’m actually being serious here. I saw someone on facebook had shared overweightdate.com and wondered when such a site would be created for frum people. It seems like all the dating sites geared towards the Orthodox Jewish singles community are devoted to the entire community, rather than one segment. When I was single I always wished ...

Spring Cleaning

My mother-in-law is an avid reader of The Jerusalem Post and awaits its daily delivery with great anticipation. As she peruses it, however, she becomes increasingly angry at the consistent chareidi bashing. I often wonder why she doesn’t simply cancel her subscription but suppose that she uses it as an outlet so that none of her minimal bad temper is ...

I Could Be An Adjunct Professor

This morning I was reading in the UK’s Jewish Chronicle about Footsteps, a Chasidic “recovery” house in New York where those who have left sheltered religious communities get schooled in the ABC’s of secular life:Footsteps was set up in 2003 by Malkie Schwartz, a young woman from the Lubavitch community who, in the process of becoming secular, realised how much support others ...

The Tea Partiers and Us

The Passover break gave me an opportunity to catch up on some reading, and I came across an article in Commentary Magazine (by Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard) about the NY Times’ Caricature of the Tea Party Movement. It is an interesting read, exploring the methodologies employed by a purportedly unbiased media to subtly —and not-so-subtly — ...

Craft Schooling Sunday!

It’s Sunday and that means it’s time to put the spotlight on my readers around the world! This week I’m trying out a new linking software that allows photos of the projects on the list, which I think is definitely a plus for my parties. I’m grateful to McKlinky.com for all their great assistance, but I think this format will ...

Stuff Yeshivish People Like

There are lots of things that Yeshivish folks like and don’t like. I suppose the goal of this series will be to pick somerandom isn’t that isn’t so obvious. Don’t worry folks, this is the first of many posts in the Stuff Jewish People Like seriesand I will get to the other sects of Jews in due time.Read More: @ Frum SatireReaders found ...