All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. – J.R.R. Tolkien The journey to and from Orthodox Judaism can leave people bruised. If you’re coming in, your family may reject your choices and your new adopted community may waste no […]

I recently became a fan of Billie Eilish. Full disclosure: I’m #old. So I didn’t know who she was until yesterday. From my brief online research, Eilish is a newly popular 17 year old singer who doesn’t like to smile. She came to my attention after I saw a headline about her wearing baggy clothes […]

Two-thirds of the world either doesn’t know that the Holocaust happened—or they deny that it did. The Jewish community has invested tremendous resources to spread awareness and education about the Holocaust, in order to prevent another one, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Additionally, 41% of Americans don’t know what Auschwitz is and 56% of Austrians don’t […]

Exactly six months to the day after congregants at Tree of Life, a Conservative Synagogue, were gunned down by a White Supremacist, another of his ilk, on the other end of the country, showed up at a Chabad House, an Orthodox Shul, with the same intent: to kill as many Jews as possible. As the […]

I never really appreciated the concept of freedom until I felt that I had lost it. So when my husband left the marriage after 10 years, slamming the proverbial door behind him, I was wholly unprepared when he refused to give me a get and trapped me in a marriage neither of us wanted to […]

In the merit of the righteous women who were in that generation, [the children of] Israel were redeemed from Egypt. (B. Talmud Sotah 11b) This midrashic statement gets a lot of press. Many people are intrigued by the idea that women played a central role in such a massively significant event as the exodus from […]