Rabbi Shmuel David Weissmandl, a 69-year-old resident of the village of Mount Kisco in upstate New York, was one of the more than a dozen people who died from flooding that swept the New York region on Wednesday night. Weissmandl was driving home from Rockland County when his car was caught in high water near…
I am grieving. I am grieving the small seeds of hope for change I have witnessed over my time living in Israel. I am grieving as I sit with my Palestinian housemates, both of us afraid to leave the house for fear of rockets and rioting blazing through our community. I have enmeshed myself in…
Tommy Raskin was, by all accounts, a deeply empathetic individual, whether fighting on behalf of humans or animals. His father, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, wrote in a statement published on Medium that his son “hated cliques and social snobbery, never had a negative word for anyone but tyrants and despots, and opposed all malicious…
(JTA) — Joan Micklin Silver, a pioneering female filmmaker who directed two of Hollywood’s most Jewish films, has died at 85. The cause was vascular dementia, according to The New York Times. Silver was best known for directing “Crossing Delancey,” the Lower East Side rom-com involving a pickle maker, and “Hester Street,” an influential low-budget…
Shiva, the traditional Jewish mourning period for close relatives, is normally seven days long. It makes sense that shiva should be seven days. Seven (shiva in Hebrew) is a number with special significance in Judaism. The seven-branched menorah, a symbol of Judaism since ancient times. The seven times a bride circles the groom at the…
Twitter users who applied seemingly Christian terminology and concepts to the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg came under fire over the weekend, as Jewish internet users and their allies struggled to process the death of the Jewish Supreme Court justice. Some questioned the use of the term “RIP,” which is used in many Christian services…
In the wake of his passing on August 7, 2020, I remember Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz in conversation, as the ever youthful rebel, questioning the whole universe, with a biting sense of humour. In the Orthodox world, where clothing defines the person, he made sure to stand out as a unique creature, combining worn jeans with…
In his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” the renowned critical theorist Walter Benjamin contrasts the “story” with the morning news, the primary mode in which information was disseminated in his era. Benjamin was not interested in the idea of a story: what makes something a story, how stories work. He was instead interested in the tradition…
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