The 13th Annual Other Israel Film Festival arrived in Manhattan this week, filled with films and inspiring, and uncomfortable discussions. So Jewish, no? Equal doses of discomfort and entertainment;...
TJS S3E18 The Eichmann Trial
The Holocaust was so dark and vast that Jews around the world struggled to integrate it into their consciousness, despite the hundreds of thousands of survivors in their midst. One of the turning...
TJS S3E17: The Kastner affair
The memory of the the Holocaust is dark and traumatic enough that it threatens to overwhelm even the light of the present. Here is the first part of an exploration of Holocaust memory in...
TJS S3E16 Israel at age ten
Life offers so few opportunities to stop and reflect that we need to seize every chance. What better time to look back at the questions with which we began this season than in Israel’s tenth...
“I had been bested” Megan Phelps on Sam Harris...
Megan Phelps Roper was on the Sam Harris podcast to talk about her recently released book Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church. My favorite part? Where she talks about...
TJS S3 Interlude: Kingdom or client state
Sukkot is a time to sit in the Sukkah and reflect, so here are a few thoughts from my Sukkah. This is an exploration of what it means for the state of Israel to be a kingdom and and it what means to...
Yom Kippur: Some Fave Online Live Webcasts 5780
For those not able to get to a synagogue physically, or for those who fear a scene like that in the 1939 Yiddish film “Overture to Glory,” below are some live webcasts of services that...
JewliciousReads: Four Cookbooks and a Numeral
As Erev Yom Kippur approaches, my thoughts are focused on repentence and cookbooks. Four new ones hit the shelves in the past few weeks. They include: SABABA Fresh, Sunny Flavors From My Israeli...
Unfollow on Good Morning America
The first time Megan Phelps Roper and I interacted was just before Yom Kippur in 2009. In a now famous tweet she spoke about Judaism’s “dead rote rituals” and chided me for...
TJS S3 Interlude: 5780 A New Horizon
The High Holy Days are also know as the Days of Awe which can be awesome, or awful. Here is a look at how to tie the work of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot together into an approach to building...