Recently, as I daven (pray), there is something that continues to leap out at me. Each time I say a bracha (blessing), I think about the fact that it begins by addressing God in the second-person, Baruch ATAH (Blessed are YOU). As I utter those first two words I am speaking to God, rather than about Him, […]

There was a video going around yesterday – people warned me that it was gruesome – but I was en route to a speaking engagement and wasn’t really paying attention. Before I boarded the plane, I quickly checked Facebook and the video started playing on my feed. I saw a car ram into people. A […]

“I recently learned that my mother’s mother’s mother was Jewish,” she wrote in her email. Apparently Cynthia’s grandmother had converted to Catholicism before World War II as anti-Semitism was rising. (Her great-grandmother had perished in the Holocaust.) Cynthia understood that although she was raised Catholic, according to Jewish law, she was considered a Jew. Despite […]

Sorrow. Anger. Numbness. Disbelief. Those are the emotions that have been swirling around inside me ever since I heard the news two nights ago that a group of men who were praying in a synagogue in Har Nof (a neighborhood I lived in for a year when I was nineteen) were literally butchered to death […]

As a child, I had a recurring dream that I was in the Holocaust. Twenty-five years later, much of it is hazy, except for the intense fear of trying to escape from pursuers who considered it a crime to be Jewish. I wondered if this was a common thing. “Do you think most Jews have […]

The shloshim (the end of the thirty day mourning period) for Eyal, Gilad, and Naftali – the boys in Israel who were kidnapped and killed by terrorists last month – was yesterday. There is a question I have been wondering about ever since their bodies were discovered and the tape of their phone call to the […]