Dear Jew in the City, I’ve lived across the street from an Orthodox Jewish for family for 32 years. We have always gotten along and helped one another out. Can they be friends to anyone other than their religion? We also are getting a lot of Syrian Jewish in our town (by the Jersey Shore) and […]
I recently sat down with Emma Green, staff writer at The Atlantic where she covers politics, policy, and religion. Religion is one of her areas of expertise. I asked Green for her thoughts on how Orthodox Jews are depicted in traditional media. She admitted that there can be a lack of nuance. “In general, certain religious minorities […]
My downstairs neighbor is an older, self-described “not so religious” Jewish lady who lives with her cat and is surprisingly friendly to my family. This has led me to conclude that she is either hard of hearing or soft on judging. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have lived below us for the last five years. In that […]
When one person hurts another, even if she did so unintentionally, she should still apologize. That’s why I’ve decided to write this post. Because I didn’t understand the pain that some people who grew up Orthodox experienced until pretty recently, and not understanding made me not sensitive enough. During my proud secular Jewish childhood, I […]
Orthodox Jews make up over 15% of the living kidney donors in the U.S. who give their kidney to a complete stranger. Here are some of those stories. (This statistic is based on on data from the US Department of Health and Human Services and Renewal.)
When I was 17 years old, I spent the summer studying in Israel. I knew I wanted to be religious, but at that point, didn’t know in which Orthodox sub-group I belonged. There were so many of them! I spent shabbos with a variety of families, including a charedi Sephardic ba’al teshuva family in Jerusalem. […]
