I once asked my mother, when I was a young girl, why she fasted on Yom Kippur. She isn’t particularly religious, doesn’t believe in all the Bible stories and questions the existence of God as depicted in traditional Judeo-Christian texts and ideologies. My young brain simply assumed that anyone who fasted on the holiest day […]

Growing up as a Reform Jew in Southern Connecticut, I knew very little about the Orthodox Jewish community, let alone Hasidim. I knew that theirs was a separate kind of Judaism. I knew that many religious Jews wouldn’t even consider me a Jew. At least this is what my father would tell me. (Though in […]