Editor’s note: Last month, the Motion Picture Academy Museum added an exhibit on the Jewish founders of Hollywood after they had been conspicuously left out at the museum’s founding in 2021. While several reports indicate that the addition of the Jewish exhibit is steeped in antisemitism, Jews being excluded from recent museum exhibits seems to […]

Approaching Shavuot and counting the Omer–the Kabbalistic process between Passover and Shavuot—I remember my teshuva story. I was an Israelite unknowingly enslaved to a foreign culture, only to break through the goo of exile and receive the treasure of Torah. I returned to myself in isolation. Perhaps it had to be that way. I was living […]

I was sitting in my Middle Eastern studies class at my public state school, listening to my professor talk about how sneaky Jewish lawyers stole land from the poor Palestinians after World War II. “The Jewish people were smart and used misleading contracts to take Palestinian properties and land,” he said. “The land was not […]

For many years during the Passover seder I have struggled with how to handle “the wicked son.” We are told that there are four sons: wise, wicked, simple and one who doesn’t know how to ask. Says the hagaddah: “What does the wicked son say? ‘What does this ritual mean to you?’ To you and […]

Curb Your Enthusiasm just aired its series finale this week, which gives me an opportunity to discuss a question that’s been on my mind for some time: is Larry David’s representation good for the Jews? Let’s start off by stating the positive – the man is hilarious and a comedic genius. I never watched the […]

Last year, at a car rental company, a Muslim man from Iraq who was bringing us our car, noticed my younger son, who looks the most like me of all of our children, replete with olive skin. It was the end of January, and even so, both my son and I looked brown. The Iraqi […]