In 2017, I attended a conference in San Francisco for Jewish video creators. During the 3 day program, I got to meet some wonderful people, including Alli Thresher, who is the Digital Content Lead at PJ Library. PJ Library is the program that sends free children’s books to families raising Jewish children. While I grew […]

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 […]

While there have been a spate of stories detailing the lives of those who left Jewish observance, people often wonder, where are the memoirs for those who have returned? Enter award-winning author and humorist Judy Gruen, a passionate ba’alas teshuva whose memoir The Skeptic and the Rabbi: Falling in Love with Faith presents her personal journey, complete with laughs, tears, […]

Several months ago, I started seeing promos for Menashe, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2017. I was really impressed. There have been only a few movies over the years which successfully depict the Hasidic world with nuance and depth and have gotten critical acclaim (Ushpizin, Fill The Void and The Wedding Plan). Menashe seemed to be […]

Now that “Fake News” is well established as a thing, Reza Aslan has introduced us to “Fake Documentaries” via his CNN Believer series which aired last week. I’ve read that his coverage of Hindus and Catholics was pretty awful. Critics have said he focused on fringe groups with little legitimacy while offering no context or overview […]

Growing up in secular America, it was always a major event when they would broadcast The Ten Commandments on one of the major, primetime networks. Although I watched it on a television screen decades after it “played on the big screen, it still took my breath away – even as a child of the eighties, […]