Beth Schwartzapfel
By Beth Schwartzapfel
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Books Are You There, God? It’s Me, Rachel!
Intentions By Deborah Heiligman Knopf Books for Young Readers, 272 pages, $16.99 ‘I wish I were Amish,” says 16-year-old Rachel Greenberg. “Or a Hasidic Jew … All the rules are set for you, all the decisions made. Wouldn’t that be nice?” The narrator of Deborah Heiligman’s new young adult novel, “Intentions,” is neither Amish nor…
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Culture When Part Is Lost, What of the Whole?
The World Without You By Joshua Henkin Pantheon, 336 pages, $25.95 Leo Frankel is dead. He died on July 4, 2004, while on a reporting trip in Iraq. The action of “The World Without You” takes place over the weekend of his unveiling, in 2005, and while Leo is, in some ways, at the center…
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News ‘Our Bodies’ Gets an Israeli Makeover
If you’re a “woman of a certain age” in Israel, you don’t have a straightforward term like “menopause” to refer to that stage of life. In Hebrew you’re stuck with gil ha’blut, which translates roughly to “the age of worn out.” In Arabic it’s sinn al-ya’s — “the age of despair.” So when Dana Weinberg…
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Culture A Tree Evangelist Who Connects Heaven and Earth
During a Sabbath evening service one Friday in February, Seth Goldstein and his 9-year-old son, Ozi, sat with their eyes closed in the synagogue in Olympia, Wash., where Goldstein is the rabbi. From the bimah, Nalini Nadkarni asked congregants to imagine a tree that was important to them. She described the maple trees that had…
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News Aliyah an Option for More North American Jews Escaping a Bad Economy
When Nisan and Gilan Gertz stepped off the plane at Ben-Gurion International Airport with their children last August, they were seven of almost 4,000 North Americans to make aliyah in 2009 — the largest number to do so in a single year since 1983. There were a lot of reasons that the Gertzes chose to…
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News Controversial Arabic School Stays Mum
As children, joking and gossiping, spilled out of Brooklyn’s Khalil Gibran International Academy on a frigid Friday afternoon recently, one stopped to answer a waiting reporter’s question about his experience there. “It’s a cool school,” he said. “It’s a good school to go to —” he continued, before another student cut him off. “Don’t say…
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Life Digest: Agunot Stats, Reading John Stuart Mill in Hebrew
The Sisterhood Digest: • In the spring of last year, Sara Hurwitz became the first Orthodox Jewish woman to be ordained as a rabbi. Sort of. Her mentor and teacher, Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, in the Bronx, didn’t call it an ordination; he called it a “conferral ceremony.” And he…
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News From Reform to Orthodox, Jewish Opinions Abound on Medical Marijuana
From the time Lisa Siegel was a little girl, she had terrible nausea, mental fog that came and went, and tightness and cramping in her muscles so severe that it would wake her in the night. She was 47 before she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but she remembers a childhood dominated by hospitalizations, doctors…
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Yiddish World Frankie’s Menorah (a Yiddish Hanukkah story)
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