Holly Lebowitz Rossi
By Holly Lebowitz Rossi
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News ‘Mitzvah Projects’ Fuse Creativity and Community
When Sara Charmé-Zane, 13, reminisces about her bat mitzvah, she doesn’t prattle on about disc jockeys. Or outfits. Or presents. After being encouraged by her rabbi to do a “mitzvah project” to mark the rite of passage, she was uninspired by the idea of simply writing a check to a charity. So she began thinking…
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News The Spiritual Life of Dreams
Call me crazy, but I am suspicious of anyone who claims to have heard a message from God delivered through his or her dreams. But if anyone could convince me that such a communication is possible, it’s Vanessa L. Ochs. Ochs, a professor at the University of Virginia who is an expert on the history…
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News False Idols and Endless Quests: Setting Out To Kill a Few Gods
Holly Lebowitz Rossi is a freelance writer in Arlington, Mass. Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible By Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet Free Press, 304 pages, $25. * * *| In the beginning there was the Bible. It is a blueprint for human experience and “the book waiting for a sweaty-palmed rendezvous in every motel…
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News A Traveling Holiday
This year, Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 27. Or so they would have you believe. With life as complicated as it is, and everything from DVD players to the Internet being “wireless,” doesn’t it stand to reason that holidays can be portable too? Holidays, especially Thanksgiving, are usually happy, food-filled marks of a specific time…
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News Making Judaism New, Minus the New Age
ll those years, I had no idea. I was a High Holy Days-only synagogue attendee growing up. My enormous Reform temple had velvet-covered seats, a lofty choir that, majestically, sang from out of sight and an impressive collection of both Torah scrolls and shofars. Every year, I ate apples and honey on Rosh Hashana for…
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Israel News At 28, a Woman Finally Feels Like a Jewish Adult
Over the past two months, I’ve been in synagogue on Shabbat four times, way more than normal, because of back-to-back family bar and bat mitzvahs. I was asked to read from the Torah at two of the services, for the first time since my own bat mitzvah 15 years ago. It seems only fitting that…
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