Thoughts of Eli Sharabi, Or Levy, and Ohad Ben Ami have interrupted my sleep for days. They are the three emaciated hostages who were released from Hamas’s dungeons last week, after sixteen months of being trapped in the bowels of hell. Eli Sharabi, being freed only to learn that his wife, two daughters, and brother […]

President Trump has issued a lot of executive orders in his first week plus in office. Depending on how you voted, you’re either devastated or thrilled. As we don’t discuss politics on this site, I will not be commenting on my political views, but there was one executive order that caught my attention on Holocaust […]

The culmination of the Three Weeks, an annual time of mourning the destruction of The Beis HaMikdash (Holy Temple) is Tisha b’Av. It is the saddest day of the Jewish year and the most calamitous in our history. So great was our pain on this day as a nation, that each year we commemorate it […]

Poland is disgustingly beautiful in the spring. I went to bear witness where my people were annihilated, but I never expected to see plains and hills so deep and richly green. I never saw such vibrant rows of yellow flowers. The weather was perfect. I wanted to mess it up, spit on it, hack at […]

Last night, Jewish director Jonathan Glazer won an Oscar for The Zone of Interest, his harrowing film about the commandant of Auschwitz during the Holocaust. The film was noteworthy because it didn’t show the horrors of the camp: we mostly just hear gunshots, screams, and other sounds in the background as the family goes about […]

“Should I take down my mezuzah?” A friend asked me the other day. I shuddered at the thought. The idea of hiding my Judaism by removing such a fixed item on my home, one that ironically is there to protect that home, was a level I just couldn’t imagine getting to — that I didn’t […]