Take a deep breath in, exhale, and congratulate yourself on making it to Friday! Shabbat is almost here. Just in time, it’s International Women’s Day! This morning, thousands of Jewish women gathered in the holiest place for Jews in the world, Jerusalem’s Western Wall, to pray together in celebration of the 30th anniversary of Women…
A Pew study has good news for Jews in pews and dues-paying Hebrews — going to synagogue, or regularly engaging with any religious community, really does make you happier. New analysis from the Pew Research Center found that “regular participation in a religious community” was linked to greater happiness for people in the US and…
Perhaps it’s just me, but there seems to be a general sense of dread in the air nowadays. And why shouldn’t there be? All of the insects are dying. The issue of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace is worse than many of us imagined (and just as bad as many of us suspected)….
● Happy Are the Happy By Yasmina Reza Other Press, 160 pages, $20 Yasmina Reza’s specialty is the excavation of long-simmering violence from underneath placid bourgeois surfaces. In her two best-known plays, the Tony-winning “Art” and “The God of Carnage,” the French-Jewish writer shows, to great comic effect, how quickly respectability gives way to offense….
Presaging the hit song of Summer 2014, Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav famously taught, “It is a great mitzvah to be happy always.” In fact, Rabbi Nachman further observed, a century ahead of his time, sadness can lead to illness; poetically, he explained that this was because the body needs ten different kinds of music to…
Getty Images // A smiling Gloria Steinem. In a recent column, the Guardian’s Jessica Valenti takes aim at our culture’s fixation on the happiness of women. She argues that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with whether or not feminism makes women happier because happiness is not the point. After all, a social justice movement seeks justice,…
Three years ago, Alvin Wong received a call from The New York Times. After asking him a few questions about his demographic background, the excited reporter on the line gave Wong a piece of news that would upend his life: He was the happiest man in America. His first response was utter disbelief. “Who would…
‘Jewish” and “happy” are words not usually found in the same sentence. But now, being Jewish and being happy are, if a bit tenuously, united at The Jewish Museum in “Six Things,” an exhibit that visualizes in sensuous three-dimensional letterforms what Stefan Sagmeister, one of the world’s most influential graphic designers, has learned about happiness….
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