Today is Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. It closes out the High Holidays, the really important holidays for Jews (please not that Hanukkah is not in there). They begin with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. On that date tradition says that judgement on each person is written,…
There is a loose conglomeration of Facebook groups, for and by Jews, that for varying degrees of community and discourse are known collectively as “Jewbook”. And last monday the community imploded on itself in an unprecedented wave of racist comments in response to an editorial by Nylah Burton, a JOC…
This has been a weird holiday season. I feel like since the election last year I’ve been saying that for each Jewish holiday. It’s like Trump has codified a modern American bigotry. This Passover the 🙄 has ranged from the benign, well-meaning gentile telling me about their non-Jewish seder1 to articles claiming…
In the second grade, my classmates and I were tasked with sewing our own Christmas stockings. I was a fairly oblivious kid, and somehow coasted through to the age of 7 without ever acknowledging the existence of Christmas. But we worked hard on those stockings, and I was excited when…
Now that Thanksgiving is over, it’s officially Christmas season. I just wanted to give a gentle reminder that Christmas isn’t everyone’s goal. If it is your holiday, that is great. But many of us have our own winter holidays, not always analogous to Christmas, and aren’t in need of a Christmas. Basically,…
שנה טובה (shanah tovah) and happy new year! Tonight is Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year (5778)! Actually, it’s one of four new year days each year, but this is the one that is we really celebrate since it’s the new year for the calendar and for seasons. All sorts…
Recently, it’s been a strange time to be a Jew in the US. Antisemitism is on the rise, racists and white supremacists occupy the highest levels of government, anti-immigrant policies are running rampant, and the separation of church and state is now in a dire place due to the Supreme…
Jewish holidays generally follow a formula: someone tried to kill us, they didn’t, we eat. It’s currently Passover for the Jews and this holiday is no different. It’s not among the high holidays, the most sacred of Jewish holidays, and yet Passover is the platonic ideal of the Jewish holiday.…
Since I’ve picked Chanukah apart, now I’ll attempt to put it back together. Chanukah is a great holiday. As far as “the world seems to be dying, let’s light things on fire to prove we’re alive” holidays all cultures have, I side with this one. It’s spread over more than a…
Don’t worry. Part 2 is titled Chanukah: Why it’s a wonderful holiday. Chanukah is a problematic celebration. If you were to ask any gentile (and most Jews) what it was about, they’d tell you that a part of the story is the Maccabees conquering the Greeks. And yet military victories are…
I’m going to tell the story of how I lost religion. I had given up god some time before that. The god concept went out the window with science and philosophy. But religion seemed more of a practical matter. It was community, prepackaged ethics, and in the case of some…
