During the Days of Awe, the blasts of the shofar are meant to awaken our slumbering soul. As Maimonides writes: In the blowing of the shofar on Rosh Hashana, there is an allusion, as though saying: Awake you sleepers from your sleep, and slumberers arise from your slumbering…All who forget the truth in the follies […]

In early 2023, JITC Hollywood Bureau heard that podcaster Erin Foster was creating a series loosely based on her life. How she, a non-Jewish woman, fell in love with, converted, and married a Jewish guy. To make the plot salacious enough for a streamer, the Jewish guy became a rabbi. According to the 2021 Pew […]

Late Saturday night, the world received dreaded news – six Jewish hostages taken by Hamas on October 7  had been executed by the terror organization shortly before the IDF reached them. Among the slain was American citizen, Hersh Polin-Goldberg, whose parents have become symbols of an indefatigable fight to rescue their beloved son held in […]

I’m pretty sure that there’s a place in hell where the really bad people are trapped in a shoe store with hordes of short people who whine “Mommy” at them – forever.  There is a certain dread that fills my being at the end of every summer as we begin our back to school shopping. The […]

There’s a little game I’ve been playing with my children since they were old enough to speak. It’s a way to build up their self-esteem while simultaneously teaching them where we derive self-worth from in Judaism. This is how it goes: Me: Who made you so smart? My kid: Hashem (which literally means the name, but […]