Does Orthodox Judaism promote compassion and non-judgment or fire and brimstone? As a secular Jew growing up, I believed it represented the latter. There was nothing appealing to me about it. Then, I began to learn and meet Orthodox Jews and discovered that the Torah is “D’rachecha darchei noam v’chol n’tivotseha shalom.” (Its ways are those of […]
TVLand Network’s Younger, now in its third season, is a comedy series set in New York, starring Broadway sensation Sutton Foster as Liza, a forty-year-old divorced mother who realizes that in order to get a job in publishing, she has to pretend that she’s in her mid-twenties. Few people know the truth, other than her lesbian roommate Maggie (played […]
My parents made me a big bat mitzvah – like black-tie-affair-on-a-yacht-cruising-around-Manhattan-harbor-with-a-hundred-and-fifty-of-our-closest-family-and-friends big. But they weren’t just the people that planned the party and paid for it. They saw me through all my years of Hebrew school and bat mitzvah lessons. They helped me write my speeches and made me practice them. And although we had […]
Who could look up at the sky in the midst of the hells of Auschwitz and take a moment to thank God for its beauty? A 13 boy named Andrew Burian who was raised in an affluent, modern Orthodox home in Bustina, which was then part of Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine). Andrew’s childhood was idyllic. His world […]
With the results of the presidential election in, the country is divided between elated, devastated, and indifferent with Donald Trump’s upset last night. While we don’t do politics around here, there is one piece of this story that does relate to our work: history was made last night as there has never been a first child […]
“Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16). As an Orthodox Jewish woman, the first time I saw this verse in the Torah, where Eve is cursed with her husband ruling over her (as a result of having eaten from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil), […]
