\”Keeping Up With the Steins\” proves that you don\’t have to be Jewish to make a funny, insider Jewish film, or that if you grow up in the Bronx or went to school in North Hollywood, you become a Jew by osmosis.
I expected to be dealing with an empty nest when my daughter started college. I projected my availability to friends who had yielded my attention during my childrearing years. I dragged writing projects onto my computer\’s desktop to await the plane ride from NYU to the rest of my life. Instead, the levees broke in my hometown. I spent the next three months as a relief worker with the Red Cross and the New Orleans Jewish agencies in service to those displaced and/or traumatized by Katrina.
The High Holidays bring a special dilemma to American congregations. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur attract more Jews to synagogue — and more attention to American Jews in general — than at any other time of year.
The bride circled the groom under the chuppah. The groom stomped a wine glass at the end of the ceremony and was greeted with shouts of \”mazel tov.\”
Despite these traditional touches, this wedding was not performed by an Orthodox rabbi, and therefore not registered by the Chief Rabbinate, which has sole authority over Jewish marriage in Israel.
For non-Jewish partners, even with the best good will, the seder experience can be strange and unfamiliar. Jewish family members prioritize coming together at this time of year.
When Elizabeth Cobrin goes to Israel this winter break with Birthright Israel, she and her friends have devised a plan to find each other when participants in all the different Birthright trips get together.
\”I\’m more nervous about the speech than I am about reading the Torah,\” Jonathan Shainberg told The Journal. \”When you are reading the Torah you aren\’t looking at people, but when you give the speech you have to look out at the whole crowd and seeing the faces makes me nervous.\”
After a year\’s sabbatical in Boston, my family (a husband who is a Conservative pulpit rabbi, myself, and our three children aged 6, 11 and 14) returned to our home in Victoria, British Columbia. The sabbatical year had a profound experience on us — one that we had not anticipated. We decided that after 16 years living in a small Jewish community, where we found ourselves stretching in ways we never intended, where open-mindedness and adaptability were the ultimate virtues, and teaching religious parameters and structure to our children was viewed as parochial, it was time to move to a larger and more engaging Jewish community.
To what extent do we (and would we) internalize the essence of the Torah?
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