I cannot believe The Simpsons are STILL on television, since I was watching them back when I had braces and now have four children, two of whom are old enough to have braces! Being that it’s season TWENTY-EIGHT, you can imagine that the writers have needed lots of ideas over the years to fill up […]

In the last week, a movie from the 1970’s, “Last Tango in Paris,” has been all over the news. It’s a movie I had never heard of, nor one that I would ever watch now that I have heard of it. But the topic is trending because an old interview from its director, Bernardo Bertolucci, […]

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 […]