Currently Browsing: Judaism 16 articles
My Metal, My Judaism
Adam Kammerling reflects on metal, theatre and Judaism. The first song to move me to tears was the Avinu Malkeinu, as sung by the congregation of the Bristol and West Progressive synagogue. I was fifteen years old and it took me by surprise. It was the hyper-normative, mega-hetero, small-town, the early noughties. Boys couldn’t just […]
A Scholarly Unorthodox
Karen H. Skinazi reviews Zalman Newfield’s Degrees of Separation. When my teenage son was little, he used to sway back and forth if he was concentrating hard on something—a book, a puzzle, a Lego creation. ‘Who knew shokeling was hereditary?’ we joked. My husband comes from Hasidische stock. If my son still shokels while he […]
At the Flamingo Las Vegas Hotel and Casino
A new poem by Shai Afsai. There are flamingos in the Flamingo Habitat at the Flamingo Las Vegas Hotel and Casino – eight pink birds, each balancing itself on one twig-like leg. And there are a few full-length mirrors fastened to trees in the Flamingo Habitat, which the flamingos gaze into attentively. I ask the caretaker, who is aggressively […]
The Mysterious (Jewish) Monoliths
Nathan Abrams considers the religious symbolism of the mysterious monoliths that have been recently appearing. Strange monoliths have suddenly started appearing and disappearing at various locations around the world. No one knows who put them there or why. Immediately, the lyrics of the immortal Spinal Tap came to mind: In ancient times,Hundreds of years before the […]
Jews & Chess
Tim Cowen asks if chess is a Jewish game. Beth Harmon, a 9-year-old orphan chess prodigy, walks into a high school. She beats all 12 of the school’s best players simultaneously. The Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit is entirely fictional, but it reveals the reality of the ancient game. An orphan girl can succeed against the […]
Reflecting on Rosh Hashana: A Call for Contributions
JewThink would like to mark this extraordinary Rosh Hashanah by collating and publishing some reflections on other Jewish new years past and present. These can be brief, funny and irreverent or longer and more reflective. What was your most disastrous Rosh Hashanah? What was your most uplifting? What new possibilities does Rosh Hashanah in semi-lockdown […]
A Pickler on the Roof
Jarrod Tanny discusses An American Pickle. *Contains some spoilers* At the risk of deploying an overused pun, we need to begin by alluding to the now well-known pickle Seth Rogen got himself into in July. While discussing his new film, An American Pickle, on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, where he spent an hour schmoozing with the host about all things ‘Jewy’ and their shared inability to escape their yichus. Rogen was […]
Faithful, Fruitful
A short story by Tamar Hodes. The winter of 1876 was cruel, even by Lithuanian standards. Citizens and animals were numb with cold; foliage was edged in frost; the soil froze. My great-grandfather was a woodcutter in the Algirdas forest where firs stood like giants’ legs against a vanilla sky. All day, he chopped trees […]
How Matter Means: BLM and Mixed Judaism
My family is Jewish, Muslim, and of color. Though our children are white-passing, they are 1/4 African-American, and we are raising them Jewish through a Sufi lens. We live in a predominantly Black working-class neighbourhood where we are welcome and seen. As a third generation survivor, I was immersed in stories of the Holocaust since […]
Spiritual Triage: Jewish Chaplaincy in the 21st Century
Reading the Jewish press, you cannot fail to notice the exceptionally busy role of University Chaplains. Undeniably, they do a good job in reaching out to, and sometimes bringing into the fold, Jewish students as they venture into their new lives, away from home. But somehow it is likely that the students who do become […]