Currently Browsing: Judaism 40 articles
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 […]
Shtiebls Sans Frontieres
Sometime ago, before the ‘lockdown’, I was talking to a United Synagogue Rabbi who was bemoaning the lack of younger people in Shul on a Friday night; I guessed by “younger” he meant under 60, but he was thinking about those in their 20s. So, I told him they were all in their shuls. SHULS!? he spluttered with incredulity. Yes, shuls: […]
Locked Down Jews in Leicester
As the lockdown extends in Leicester, Lucy Michaels considers the pros and cons of being based in a small Jewish community during COVID-19.
Davening during the Pandemic
I am a regular shul goer and wherever I am I try to attend services. On a Shabbat I’m usually in shul and on a Sunday morning at home in Leeds I head for the 8.00 a.m. minyan. The pandemic has put a stop to all that. But since 22nd March 22, I have been a member of a virtual community led by the Reverend Albert Chait of the United Hebrew Congregation […]
How the virus turned us all a little bit Jewish
There was a moment during the lockdown when it seemed the whole world was turning Talmudic. ‘What if?’ became the question on everybody’s lips. Even the letters page of The Grauniad (noch) was filled with arguments straight out of the yeshiva. ‘I live alone’, one reader wrote, ‘If I go and meet my son and his partner in the park, I am breaking the rules […]
Davening during lockdown
Davening during the lockdown due to Covid-19 has been an entirely different experience. During normal times, davening is confined predominantly to morning Shabbat and Yom Tov services in shul. But during the pandemic, it has involved attending virtual Shacharit services led by Senior Minister Albert Chait of the United Hebrew Congregation, Leeds. I made a […]
Pandemic, Jewish Learning and Us
There is liberation to be gained through reading and writing. One can feel a kind of freedom through the process of placing words and finding order, by the idea that there could be necessity of a function in narrative. Reading and interpretation form much of our Jewish experience, and I wonder how might lived and inherited narratives be used within our private and public lives to develop strategies for […]