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 […]
Around Shavuot, my children come home from school with projects about the Jewish people accepting the Torah. Holding their sweet drawings, I am transported beyond the mundane routine of my life to my own unexpected decision many years ago to accept the Torah. Raised in a nice Midwestern non-Jewish household, I regularly attended church and […]
Mother’s Day is here, and I’m already preparing for an emotional rollercoaster. This year, the holiday arrives the day after one of my children’s bar mitzvahs, and it’ll be his first time wearing tefillin with a blessing. But it’ll also be our first Mother’s Day without my maternal grandmother, Frances, who died just before Passover […]
