If my husband and I had tried to meet through an online dating site, it never would have worked. He would have said he’s looking for a woman who enjoys an active, outdoorsy lifestyle. I would have said I like to sit on couches. Indoors. I also like to sit on beaches (but only if indoors […]

Last year, my 15 year old daughter asked if she could fly to New Orleans with other girls from her Orthodox Jewish high school to rebuild houses in some of the poorest areas of New Orleans that still had not recovered from Hurricane Katrina. The group was also scheduled to help a neighborhood prepare for future […]

The Child Victims Act went into effect last week. In January, after it passed, I wrote about how it’s good for Orthodox Jews because we have an entire Talmudic tractate dedicated to compensating damages, but we have no statute of limitations on bringing a claim against a perpetrator. We are commanded to surely pursue justice, but […]

In an unexpected turn of events, my life has become consumed with helping broken people heal, since the launching of Makom a few years ago. My original passion of making Jewish observance accessible and meaningful to non-Orthodox Jews expanded to a new area when I discovered a population that had been hurt by a skewed version of […]

Dear JITC, I grew up in a secular Jewish home, and converted to Orthodox Judaism in my twenties (I converted because my mother wasn’t Jewish, only my father). Initially I was so gung-ho and extremely meticulous and passionate about my observance, I was on such a spiritual high and it was amazing. But it was […]

“You’re really hot!” he exclaimed as I walked into his office. I immediately regretted showing up. A colleague of mine is friends with a successful publicist who said he’d meet with me as a favor to him. I was taken aback that this publicist would speak to a woman like this during a professional meeting, […]