Tag: Jewish

The Jewish Museum is saddened to learn about the passing of Kynaston McShine (1935–2018). He was a visionary curator, and on the staff of the Jewish Museum from 1965–1967 as Curator of Painting and Sculpture, and from 1967–1968 as Acting Director. McShine organized many exhibitions...

“When I saw the Houthis saying that we are an artificial Crusader entity that came and stole lands belonging to Palestinians who have been here for generations, I said to myself that someone needs to tell them the truth. The map I published was in order to trip them up,” he explains. ...

Not to be confused with the fact that Hebrew is the official language of the state of Israel. I’m not talking about the unholy behavior of that country in how it deals with its surrounding Arab neighbors. So please set that to the side as we proceed. Thank you. My source for this post is&nb...

As my 2023 came to a close and I reflected on the outgoing year, I saw some cars coming and going three days in a row for what appeared to be a shiva for a resident in my housing complex. It got me thinking about life, mortality, the closure of another year, and what being Jewish has meant...

“Her ways are ways of pleasantness, And all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to those who take hold of her, And happy are all who retain her.” Mishlei 3:17–18, a verse held to be about the Torah, the traditional guide at the heart of Jewish life. Qibya is now a Pale...

In the rich tapestry of Jewish spirituality, a unique and often less-explored path exists — Jewish Shamanism. Rooted in the ancient traditions of Judaism, this spiritual approach weaves together mystical elements, ritual practices, and a deep connection to the Divine. Judaism, one of the ol...

I’m not playing a psychological game where I try to make you admit that suddenly “All Lives Matter” seems an empty evasion when you compare the lives that are special to you to everyone else’s. It makes you think, though, doesn’t it? I’m not setting up the &ldq...

One of the holiest sites for the Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It was on this hill overlooking the rest of the city that King Solomon built the first Jewish Temple in 957BC in order to serve as the nucleus for the Israelite faith and as a means...

Today was the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. What started in Israel as Simchat Torah, a sacred Jewish holiday of joy (and Shabbat) mutated into a terrorist attack tantamount to America’s 9/11. An Islamist jihad on Israeli civilians by Hamas has left 700 dead so far, with ...

I went to a Channukah lighting ceremony and one of the key Rabbinical authorities in this country kept inserting every 3–5 minutes in his speeches how much we were hated and it came across as a form of fear-mongering to me. The Ultra-Orthodox communities who do bad things to their children ...

The current reality seems to contradict everything I was raised to value in Judaism. I was raised to value anti-racism, justice, compassion, sensitivity to the other, a belief in education, reasoning and clear communication, non-violence, humane-ness. I was taught that if one could think and speak c...

Asa kid, I had no stable connection to my Jewishness except my last name and infrequent visits to my aunt and uncle’s house for Rosh Hashanah. We barely did Passover, I didn’t understand a lick of Hebrew, but my goy mother still brought out the Lenox menorah and made latkes using the rec...

Imagine reading the libretto of La Boheme out loud in the original Italian without knowing the language. You’d be bored to tears. With an English translation, you would at least understand the plot. But there’d be no magic there. The plot is a formulaic bit of melodrama. The words aren&r...

The Jewish people have been called the people of the book. But how can we access that timeless knowledge? One simple step in communing with the expanse of Jewish wisdom is build a Jewish library of your own. Fill your home with books that make you a little higher. Not to stand on, or reach wit...

I found the book extremely powerful, full of stats, proof and references. I will not be including those here. The examples, the case studies. That’s what you can do by getting the book yourself. The author was very eager to SHOW the success in the numbers and the results, in order to suppor...

The Logos (Word) was a common term in many religions/philosophies of the first century. So the many proposed overlaps between these beliefs and John 1:1–18 are not unsurprising. Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin offers a unique perspective. A Rabbi immersed in the origins of early Judaism and...

What do Abraham Lincoln, The Ben Ish Chai from Baghdad, Fariduddin Attar, and Anton Chekhov have in common? It turns out to be a special fondness for an ancient Jewish folktale, which goes like this: "King Solomon once searched for a cure against depression. He assembled his wise men toge...

I was raised Jewish, but for most of my adult life I have not considered myself to be Jewish. However, something unexpected happened to me on October 7th. I woke up, learned of the horrible news perpetrated against the people in Israel, and for the first time in my adult life I felt Jewish. How, exa...

I want to tell you about the day I got a little too high, took a walk and imagined all the ways anti-Semitism might impact me. Might the maitre-d at the fancy restaurant greet us at the door and say, “Stern? Jews? No, we don’t serve Jews here.” Or about the young Jewish looking cou...

Sometimes I’d lie on my back among the sleep-breathing sounds of my bunkmates, thinking about how in bunks similar to these — shoddily constructed wooden barracks — just over 50 years prior, Jews slept the sleep of the almost-dead. They starved and burned with fever, scratching at ...

I was in the park last week with my wife, our twin five month old boys, and our black and white Havanese puppy, Kugel. It was a gorgeous, unseasonably warm day, and we were enjoying taking a break from our phones, from the never ending cycle of horrific news stories about Israel, harrowing personal ...

In the nascent days of Israel, a mystery unfolded — one that continues to haunt the nation’s conscience. As waves of Yemenite Jews reached the promised land, seeking refuge and hope, whispers of an unsettling enigma began to surface. Reports of missing children, plucked from their fam...

A charismatic server, white linens, bubbles of balsamic in dishes of yellow green olive oil, and wine. We are nestled in a low lit Italian restaurant in the Marina District of San Francisco. I don’t feel comfortable here because they gave me food poisoning a decade ago, but it wasn’t my ...

I found G?!d through the words of the poet Mary Oliver. She came to me in the summer of 2018 as this city kid expanded their love for nature, working at a farm camp for teens. When I first read her lines “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it,” I imm...

Iancient Israel, a visit was required three times a year to the Temple to “behold” God, as we learn in the Bible (Exod 23:17; Deut 16:16). One might like description of such a remarkable experience, and there is a passage in the Talmud—which more than one commentator has pronounced...

I began writing this October 8th 2023, watching as the rockets from Gaza indiscriminately decimated innocent people of all faiths and ages in Israel, and continued looking into my saddened heart as Israel lobbed their bombs into Gaza ever since. The question? Where am I to stand in the face of such ...

As my 2023 came to a close and I reflected on the outgoing year, I saw some cars coming and going three days in a row for what appeared to be a shiva for a resident in my housing complex. It got me thinking about life, mortality, the closure of another year, and what being Jewish has meant...

The Tikkunei Zohar is a mystical and enigmatic work of Jewish spirituality. It stands as a cornerstone of Kabbalistic literature. This text, often referred to as the “Tikkunim” (meaning “repair”), is a fascinating exploration of the first word of the Torah, “Bereshit...

I was born the daughter of a German Jewish Holocaust Survivor and a ‘poor white’ Afrikaner ‘boere meisie.’ Both, in the year that I was born in ‘sunny South Africa,’ were outcasts in their society. As their daughter, the English called me a rock-spider, the Afrika...

Over the past few weeks, American Jews have been brutally reminded how rampant and entrenched antisemitism still is in this country. After Kanye West’s remarks and threats against the Jewish people, Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving came under fire for promoting an antisemitic documentary to his...

Ashkenazi Jews are undoubtedly one of the most successful ethnic groups in the world. Richard Lynn (2011) and Steven Pinker (2011) have both written and made remarks to that effect. Lynn records that wherever Jews have gone they’ve shown exceptional educ...

DNA tests look for Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) in people’s genomes and compare them with similar genomes in their database. Based on the similarities. They can guess the person’s ethnic background. If so, how can these tests identify Jewish ancestry, which is a religious id...

One of the holiest sites for the Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It was on this hill overlooking the rest of the city that King Solomon built the first Jewish Temple in 957BC in order to serve as the nucleus for the Israelite faith and as a means...

The question posed in the title of this essay is deeply troubling to anyone sympathetic to the Jewish people, and should also concern any disinterested lover of humanity. As someone put it many years ago, when the beast of “antisemitism” seemed to be in deep hibernation, if Judaism could...

After the wild acclaim of his illustrations of the Christian Bible, Tissot began a project to illustrate the Hebrew Bible. He made one of many trips to Palestine in 1896 to draw inspiration, observing the landscape where the biblical stories took place and producing what he felt were historically ac...