Purim is a holiday that is about women’s power, in its different forms. Thinking about the roles of Queen Vashti and her successor Queen Esther in the Purim story highlights some of the dilemmas that women have faced throughout history. I therefore think it’s particularly apt that Ta’anit Esther is International Agunah Day, the day…
It’s been over two decades since Zohar Zohar, the dark-haired, soft-spoken owner of Zucker Bakery, a new Israeli pastry shop and café in the East Village that serves Jewish delights, has lived on Kibbutz Sarid in northern Israel. She grew up there with her grandparents and parents (most of her extended family lived in Czechoslovakia…
Growing up, Purim was my absolute favorite holiday. I went to a yeshiva for elementary school, and Purim was always a big hit there. The school put on a quasi-carnival with raffles and games, leaving me covered in shaving cream after attempts to shave a balloon without popping it. Everyone dressed up in lavish costumes…
A funny thing happened in my house the other day. And by funny, I mean dismaying and somewhat depressing. My two-year-old daughter came home from preschool talking about a Bad Man. When we hear this Bad Man’s name, she told me with wide-eyed gusto, we make a lot of noise to scare him away. As…
The Kittel Collection is a series of clothing pieces that explores the different ways clothing is used as a vehicle for meaning and identity within our tradition and literature. The kittel is a simple, white, garment used as a burial shroud, and customarily worn by men on various Jewish holy days. Each month, The Sisterhood…
[ ![][2]][2] Theater, at its best, can thrill and inspire us, can take us to another world, can even make us feel that we, ourselves, are growing into new and better people. If only that had been the case at the new off-off-off Broadway production of “Aaron Goldfarb’s Bar Mitzvah,” which opened last Saturday at…
[ ![][2]][2] Organic food stores, children’s book publishers, LGBT groups and leprechauns have been thrown into turmoil by the discovery by Noah Obadiah, a professor at the Technion in Haifa, of an extra color in the rainbow. Although he discovered the color nestling between blue and indigo several months ago, he was waiting for the…
[ ![][2]][2] When I first started writing this weekly column, almost 115 years ago, Karl Marx was the Simon Cowell of the era — a loudmouth from Britain passing judgment on the working class. Being dead hadn’t stopped Marx and I’d be surprised if it stops Cowell. At that time it was barely acceptable to…
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