Jewish Blogs

The Tenth of Teves – A Fast for Torah

The Rambam writes that the wise and the prophets should desire the arrival of Moshiach not because the stature of the Jews will have changed for the better, nor because they can then rejoice, but rather because they will be free to study the Torah without distraction. Exile is a time when we are all burdened with worries and afflicted ...

The Talmud Bandied about at Lincoln Center in ‘Disgraced’

The AP reported, “Comic actor shows dramatic chops in ‘Disgraced’”It’s an oft-used device in theater: The doomed dinner party, a gathering that starts out politely, with house gifts of wine or pastries and glasses clinking over civilized chatter, and ends up in horrific, angry chaos.But when that party chatter touches on Islamic and Judaic tradition, the Quran and the Talmud, ...

The Sway Machinery Play Michael Jackson

The Sway Machinery’s new album House of Friendly Ghosts, Vol. 1 won’t be out for another few weeks (who are they? check out our interview with the band) but this is too good not to share. The band, who recently returned from recording their new album in Africa, plays “Billie Jean” live in Mali.It’s everything we’ve come to expect from the band ...

The Sunrise and the Redemption of the Jews in Yerushalmi Berakhot and in the Book of Esther

Talmudic life extends the space-time continuum with an acute awareness of the physical here-and-now and deepens the spectrum of thought and meaning with trajectories back into the distant past of the scripture and forward to the hopeful expectation for salvation.This passage below from the Talmud Yerushalmi Tractate Berakhot demonstrates key aspects of the logic of a Talmudic life – what we ...

The Stranger’s Notebook

In my last post I mentioned the loneliness and alienation I felt during the first few months of the year I spent in Tunis. While my list of top ten favorite Jews of all time cheered me up, it wasn’t until I met Nomi Stone that I truly got out of my funk. Nomi is a poet and a scholar ...

The Stories that Don’t Make It

At a certain point in the process, I had to do the cutting. Not the small cutting, the excising of some misplaced lines, the usual reshuffling that revision turns into at the end, everything somehow feeling more surgical than therapeutic. But I had to really cut. To kill some stories. To take them out, shelve them, end them. This is ...

The Star-K will no longer pay you to marry older girls

The Star-K’s shidduch incentive program was hailed as brilliant when it first hit the mean streets of Baltimore. You see, Baltimore was suffering from a brain drain of sorts, the guys all left to New York and New Yorkers have long deemed Baltimore girls with that fretful status of GU – Geographically Undesirable, that left an abundance of aging girls who weren’t ...

The Simon Rockower Award Goes To…

We don’t like to toot our own horn, but last night, at the American Jewish Press Association’s annual Rockower Awards ceremony, MyJewishLearning.com walked away with one more trophy under our arm than we came in with.The Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism are Jewish reporting’s highest honor. For the second year in a row, we were honored with ...

The San Francisco Circumcision Ban: Not your typical view

I never thought that the circumcision ban was a big deal until I had the pleasure of eating with two different peopl;e involved in the fight to have it removed from the ballot, both were passionate, both were very liberal and both acknowledged that this was an attack on our religion.Prior to these encounters, I merely shrugged off the super ...

The Same One

Tonight (Sunday) at midnight marks the exact time when The Almighty split the Red Sea for the children of Israel. As such, the 7th day of Passover makes for a very inspiring day.The same G-d who performed miracles 3323 years ago is still around today, performing miracles. Just because a miracle is subtle doesn’t make it any less of a ...

The Rise Of Online Jewish Deals

Over the past few months, I’ve signed up for a couple of the online coupon deals like Groupon and KGB, mostly because I like getting things for cheap. It’s a scientific fact that food tastes better when it’s 50% off.The only issue I have with those sites is that they involve a daily e-mail for material that I really don’t ...

The Republic: New voices speak in the Jewish prayer book

Reform Jews are working on a new Machzor (prayer book) for the High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur:…The new machzor replaces the widely used “Gates of Repentance,” written in 1978 and to some, stale, stilted, and only marginally relevant to 21st-century life and consciousness.Count Rabbi Edwin C. Goldberg among them. Spiritual leader of Temple Judea in Coral Gables, ...