Does Orthodox Judaism promote compassion and non-judgment or fire and brimstone? As a secular Jew growing up, I believed it represented the latter. There was nothing appealing to me about it. Then, I began to learn and meet Orthodox Jews and discovered that the Torah is “D’rachecha darchei noam v’chol n’tivotseha shalom.” (Its ways are those of […]
Who could look up at the sky in the midst of the hells of Auschwitz and take a moment to thank God for its beauty? A 13 boy named Andrew Burian who was raised in an affluent, modern Orthodox home in Bustina, which was then part of Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine). Andrew’s childhood was idyllic. His world […]
President Obama appointed Norm Eisen to serve as US Ambassador in the very same country where his mother’s family was decimated in the Holocaust. “The house in which the United States Ambassador lives…was built by a Jewish family and taken over by the [Nazis]… We returned…and put mezuzahs on the door, made the kitchens kosher, […]
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 […]
Best Foreign Language Film is not usually the most talked about award at the Golden Globes, but it will be this year – at least for the Jewish community! Last night at the 73rd annual Golden Globe awards, Son of Saul, a Hungarian film about the Holocaust won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language […]
She was pleasant enough as she got her luggage in place and we found our seats. There was no way I could anticipate what would come next. Gum cracking. One. Straight. Hour. Of gum cracking, as I helplessly sat there – a prisoner of noise (popping) pollution – tethered to a seat 30,000 feet in […]
