One of the biggest disadvantages I had growing up in an extreme, unhealthy Orthodox Jewish community is that I learned from an early age to view the world as black and white. They’re wrong. We’re right. We follow Torah correctly. They don’t. We’re living the life that God intended when He created the world. They’re […]
I was raised in an extreme religious environment that stressed fear and punishment over love and joy. Anti-Semitism was taught as a rebuke from a vengeful God. And it’s followed me everywhere. Because of this negative messaging, my relationship with Judaism was fraught from a young age. By early adulthood, I found myself drifting away. […]
Since 2007, Jew in the City has been reversing negative associations about religious Jews by highlighting an approach based on kindness, tolerance, sincerity, and critical thinking and making engaging and meaningful Orthodox Judaism known and accessible. At first, we thought we only needed to disseminate this information to non-Orthodox Jews. Several years ago, we sadly […]
My paternal grandfather’s family assimilated so long ago that my great-great-grandmother used to spoil my grandfather by sneaking him pork chops in place of veal chops! Only one of my four grandparents was raised religious – my mother’s father. But like the rest of my recent ancestors, he too walked away from the ways of […]
In the 1940’s, Vered Ben Sa’adon’s Dutch grandmothers grew up close to one another in terms of distance, yet were living worlds apart. As teenagers, one of them hid from the Nazis while the other aided them. Like Anne Frank, her paternal grandmother, Liesje de Vries, not only lived in hiding for years, she also wrote […]
Several months ago, we were filming a mini-documentary about Orthodox Judaism with Blue Chalk Media, but we weren’t allowed to say more than that. We’re thrilled to announce that this short film was for Pearson Education – one of the largest education publishers in the world – and this film is being shown to 1 […]
