What’s the key ingredient to help a secular Jewish BBC producer achieve his life-long dream of becoming a stand-up comic? For Ashley Blaker all it took was becoming ultra-Orthodox. Blaker grew up in a traditional home in the UK and attended private  school – the same one that Sacha Baron Cohen went to. He had dreams […]

  Read The Groundbreaking Orthodox Film Story That’s Now An Award Finalist The Haredi world is generally viewed as an insular patriarchal community that shuns movies, but a fledgling, shadow film industry has been growing quietly for a decade within the confines of this improbable universe. These flicks — dozens of them — are produced, […]

  The Grape Juice Wars of Passover Orthodox Jews bless and drink a cup of wine three times on the Sabbath and four times at each of the two Seders for Passover. The almost 150-year-old American titan of grape juice: Welch’s, whose name is practically a synonym for grape juice, and the 129-year-old Manischewitz, the […]

  How to Host a Shabbat Dinner and Why You Should—Even if You Aren’t Celebrating The rituals of this Friday night tradition have become so much more than a religious experience. What’s better than winding down the week at home filled with your favorite people and the scent of a chicken roasting in the oven? […]

  Dear Jew in the City- In the upcoming movie remake Beauty and the Beast, the main character Belle is kept prisoner by a mean Beast whom everyone hates and fears, yet Belle somehow sees the good in him, which (not-so-spoiler-alert) transforms him. What does Judaism say about seeing the good in other people? Thanks! Dear […]

  Houston, we don’t have a problem! That’s because when Aerospace Engineer, Aaron Brown, first encountered Torah in an in-depth way, he thought it was out of this world. Brown, who specializes in trajectory analysis, design, and operations at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, sees no contradiction in being a rocket scientist and […]