This week on Slate I read a controversial piece: “American Jews Are Secular, Intermarried, and Assimilated: Great News!” which was written about the recent Pew study on American Jews. The author, Gabriel Roth, tells American Jewry to embrace their secular, intermarried selves and that unless they’re Orthodox and believe, there’s no reason to keep this “race purity” going […]

This week I let my eldest child (my super responsible ten year old daughter) use a sharp knife for the first time. A couple days later, I let her take something out of a hot oven. But the real craziness began a week ago when I let my daughter walk to a playground – which […]

Keep your eyes on the cross, and see what happens to the images as you continue to stare at it. Peripheral vision is whacked, no? That’s the name of the GIF below which began circulating around the internet a few months ago. When I first saw it I thought it was cool, but then I […]

Almost exactly five years ago to the day, my parents got a call that all people dread: their home (the one of my childhood) was up in flames. Fortunately, no one was in it at the time of the fire, and the major damage was confined to the back of the house. But still, it came out […]

There have been a few people who have hurt me pretty badly this past year; more this year than other years, actually. Jew in the City’s profile has risen over these last many months, and I think, or maybe I fear, that that thing they say, that “it’s lonely at the top,” is truer than […]

In Judaism, life is the most holy thing that exists; the Talmud teaches, “He who saves a single life, saves the world entire.” Twenty-five years ago, an Orthodox Jewish man named Jack Forgash read a statistic in the newspaper that troubled him: one in eleven pregnancies in Israel were ending in abortion. He wondered if […]