As a Jew, I’m torn when I read debates on whether it’s right to write stories with sympathetic Nazi characters.
They say that you don’t really know something until you’ve taught it to someone else. It’s true: despite growing up Jewish and going to Hebrew day school, there’s a lot about Judaism I didn’t know until I explained it to Boyfriend, who is not Jewish. Specifically, it never occurred to…
I don’t think I believed it literally, not even as a little girl. We chant it over and over, several times throughout each service on the yamim noraim, the Days of Awe. On Rosh Hashanah, it is written. On Yom Kippur, it is sealed. The verses refer to one of…
When I was a girl, I’d often have a nightmare in which I was somewhere with religiously diverse friends — when I was younger, usually Guides, and school friends as I got older. There’d be food. Someone would offer me a plate, and I’d accept unthinkingly. And then, somewhere after…
Hello, my lovely friends, family, acquaintances, and Internet strangers! Some of you celebrate Christmas! Some of you do not! Many of you in the former category sometimes worry about including those in the latter. I know it can feel like the season is littered with word-bombs that may unintentionally hurt…
I didn’t notice how fashionably people in Toronto dress until I spent some time near the small town where my mother, her siblings, and some of my cousins grew up. It’s not that it didn’t occur to me that particular outfits I saw on the subway on my way to…
(A couple months later, ’cause writing and thinking take time!) Passover is a holiday about freedom. It celebrates the liberation of the Israelites, the forerunners of the Jewish people, from slavery in Egypt, as told in Exodus (or, for the less Biblically inclined, in Dreamworks’s Prince of Egypt or by…
Last week, I posted the first five of the ten 10 Hebrew school lessons I’ve been glad to take forward with me into my adult life. Here are numbers 6-10.
There are many things I learned in Hebrew school that no longer apply to my life, or that I choose, wilfully, to reject. I can no longer abide some Jewish thought about the differences between men and women, or between Jews and non-Jews, or between heterosexual monogamists and those of…
(ICYMI: Part 1) Usually, I give myself an hour between waking up and needing to be out the door. I guess the nice thing about waking up on Yom Kippur is how much you don’t need to do. On Yom Kippur, you don’t have to make breakfast. You don’t have to…