“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 […]

Dear Jew in the City, I would like to know what your thoughts are on the recent articles about the newspaper Hamevaser’s photoshopping of female leaders out of the photo of the French Unity March in Paris the other day. By the way, I love your site and I’ve gained a lot of insight into […]

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 […]

Every Rosh Hashana we say the prayer Unsaneh Tokef : “On Rosh Hashanah we’ll be inscribed and on Yom Kippur we’ll be sealed – how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; […]

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 […]