“I can’t fall asleep,” my son told me as he walked into my room one evening last week. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “We watched a movie about the Holocaust today in camp,” he explained. The Holocaust, I thought – giving Jewish children nightmares since the Holocaust. It was the right thing to show at camp, since […]

Although it was only a pretend cell phone it came really close to hitting my father’s head after my three year old son slung across the room the day we arrived in Israel for our yearly Passover trip. It played annoying music and had no volume control, but I had bought it the day before […]

I’ve been known to eat cookies in bed even though mothers tell you not to. Such a yummy food in such a cozy place is almost the perfect combination were it not for those tiny crumbs that irritate the skin more than they ought to. This time of year (before Passover) crumbs irritate the soul […]

The Manischewitz at my family’s Passover table left a bad taste in my mouth. By the time I was a teenager, I knew I didn’t want it, the jarred gelatinous fish lumps, the giant crackers or any other part of Judaism in my life anymore. Insert decade of drinking and drugs here. I searched, I […]

Chanukah and miracles. The words go together like latkes and oil. Ask most people and they can tell you about the two pivotal miracles that took place on the holiday of Chanukah: the miracle of the few over the many and the miracle of the oil which lasted eight days. What is interesting about the […]