I’m pretty sure that there’s a place in hell where the really bad people are trapped in a shoe store with hordes of short people who whine “Mommy” at them – forever.  There is a certain dread that fills my being at the end of every summer as we begin our back to school shopping. The […]

Tisha B’Av – the infamous day in Jewish history on which both of our Temples were destroyed and many other atrocities befell our people – is linked to the episode in the Torah where the meraglim (spies) set out to see the Land of Israel before the Children of Israel entered it. All but two […]

I watch her in awe – the way a sports fan might watch a great athlete – but the thing that this woman has mastered is herself. Every time I’ve been a guest in this friend’s home over the last fifteen years, I am blown away by what a person looks like when she truly […]

For not just one alone has risen against us to destroy us, but in every generation they rise against us to destroy us…We will soon be saying these words at the Passover seder, but they ring so true right now. The murder of three Jewish children and a young rabbi in Toulouse this week was […]

Last week, the stock market took its biggest hit in three years. Then today, after news of the S&P downgrade, it got clobbered even further. This all happened on the cusp of the saddest, least auspicious day of the Jewish calendar year – Tisha B’Av. Some of the most cataclysmic events in Jewish history occurred […]

Yesterday I received the call I’ve been dreading ever since I fell in love with my husband over a decade ago – it was the police and something had gone wrong. OK, actually, it wasn’t the police. It was my husband who, after having disappeared for an hour, called my cell phone to ask me […]