Nathan Jeffay
By Nathan Jeffay
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The Schmooze Sh-t Westerners in Israel Say
The latest group to feature in the “sh-t” meme may be familiar to you. Since Sh-t Girls Say went viral in December, there has been a steady stream of videos caricaturing the conversation of different groups around the world. Now, the new focus is Israel’s English-speaking community. The video went online on Monday, and has…
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News Women Seek Role in Deciding Halacha
Even as Orthodox women take on clergy-like roles, the task of interpreting Jewish law has long been the exclusive domain of men. But a new group called Beit Hillel aims to bring down that barrier. An alliance of 120 Orthodox rabbis and 30 female religious scholars, Beit Hillel was formed to counter the increasingly hard…
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The Schmooze Yair Lapid Applies for Ph.D.
For Yair Lapid, things tend to work out well. He’s handsome, and everything he touches seems to turn to gold. He’s an author, screenwriter and one-time actor. Until recently he was a popular columnist for the best-selling newspaper Yediot Aharonot, but then he left to enter politics. Again, this move went super-smoothly — before he…
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The Schmooze Sacrifice for Ailing Rabbi
Israel’s Orthodox community is anxious, as the country’s most revered rabbi, Yosef Shalom Eliyashiv, is in a serious condition at a Jerusalem hospital. The 101-year-old scholar has been in a coma for almost two weeks. In synagogues across the country worshipers are praying for him — but some people are going further. One Orthodox Jerusalemite,…
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The Schmooze Public Transportation on the Sabbath?
Of all the ways that religion impacts the Israeli public sphere, the lack of public transportation in most of the country on Sabbaths and religious holidays has possibly the largest week-to-week impact on people’s lives. It means that those who don’t have their own vehicles can’t get far from home on these days. The difficulty…
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The Schmooze Cows Spared From Reality TV
It’s the ultimate guilty pleasure here in Israel: “Big Brother.” As always, the contestants are having a ball, but the current season seems to be arriving upon increasingly bizarre situations. Keen to set increasingly off-the-wall “challenges” for contestants, the producers wanted to bring a cow in to the contestants’ house. But it seems that the…
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News Be My Israeli Valentine
Valentine’s Day is our annual chance to signal how much we love someone or perhaps would like to start a relationship. Such gestures can be tricky, though, in a place like Israel, where cultural differences complicate the back and forth of romance. That is especially true for American-Israeli couples. Aliyah among single American Jews was…
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News Reaching Out To Save Lives
The image of Israel’s Haredim has taken a public battering over the past few months, particularly over the issue of discriminatory conduct toward women, which even a few Haredi groups have disavowed. But in an unusual act of outreach, some of these ultra-Orthodox Jews have recently found an original way of engaging with people outside…
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