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Article 47

In Tablet Magazine today, Elissa Strauss celebrates the rich Yiddish lexicon for describing female genitalia. We present part 3 of Douglas Century’s epic report on the current state of Israeli...

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Article 46

Israeli society, alas, is a mosaic made of small conflicts. There’s the unease between eastern Jews and western Jews, for example, or the tension between ancient tradition and modern culture. All of...

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Article 45

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT? There’s nothing like a good countdown to get ready for Tisha B’Av, the day we grieve the destruction of the Temple. To get in a mournful mood, the three weeks prior to Tisha...

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Article 44

Today in Tablet Magazine, Lee Smith gives his column to some friends—including Elliott Abrams and Robert Malley—to opine about the Obama administration’s work in the Mideast so far. More tomorrow!...

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Article 43

Growing up and going to many a Jewish summer camp, I experienced Tisha B’Av in scores of unique ways along with my whole generation of Jewish-Americans, for whom watching video (no DVDs yet!) was both...

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Article 42

Today in Tablet Magazine (and everywhere else), it is Tisha B’Av: Here is everything you need to know about the holiday. Books critic Adam Kirsch has a long meditation on the continued relevance of...

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Article 41

I’ve never known much about the religious meaning of Tisha B’Av, which falls today—I’ve never fasted for it, and until Tablet Magazine published its FAQ about the holiday this week, didn’t know that...

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Holocaust education on Tisha B’Av

“Jewish people love summer camp,” comedian Donald Glover, star of the NBC series Community says during a standup routine. “They all went to the same summer camp. Which is weird, because if I was Jewish...

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Mitt Romney To Dine With Netanyahu in Israel After Tisha B'Av

• False: Mitt Romney was planning a fundraiser in Jerusalem on Tisha B’Av. True: the Romneys will eat dinner after the sacred day ends at the Netanyahus. [Weekly Standard] • Secretary of State Clinton...

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Essay: A Young Man Finds Spiritual Meaning While Hiking on the Appalachian Trail

I first hiked on the Appalachian Trail at the age of 13, on a three-day trek in the Poconos with Camp Ramah. Our packs were weighed down with prayer books, kosher cooking utensils, and kippot. At camp,...

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Daniel Gordis on the Ugly Ways Jews Talk to One Another

A week ago Sunday, I opened up my morning copy of Ha’aretz and found myself looking at a photograph of … myself. Initially, I had no idea what the story was about, but I was fairly confident this could...

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Dan Senor Is Mitt Romney's Key Emissary to Jerusalem and Washington

Four years ago, then-Sen. Barack Obama embarked on a whistle-stop tour that included stops in Baghdad, Kabul, Amman, Jerusalem, Berlin, and London. It wasn’t the first quasi-diplomatic mission by an...

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Essay: A Cancer Diagnosis Gives a Young Man a New Perspective on Religious...

The day before Tisha B’Av three years ago, I ate the egg and ashes prescribed as the meal before the fast begins, taking my last bite of the sliced white bread. On the eve of the darkest date in Jewish...

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Thirteen Signs That You Went to Jewish Summer Camp in the 1980s

It was the era of Walkmans, Love’s Baby Soft, Tretorn canvas sneakers with the gull-wing logo, and boy campers teasingly singing Frank Zappa’s “Jewish Princess” at girl campers. It was sleepaway camp,...

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A Year in Israel, Followed by a Lifetime in Exile

The summer of 1978, my family left Pennsylvania and made aliyah. Our stay would last just one year. It might have been the worst year of my parents’ lives. But from my perspective, that year was...

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An Army Chaplain Learns About Jewish Unity, Spending Tisha B’Av on a Base in...

Tisha B’Av couldn’t come fast enough. It was strange to be fixated on this holiday, since commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples had never figured prominently in my Reform Jewish...

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Tisha B'Av Takes on Heightened Solemnity One Week After Women of the Wall...

Tonight is Tisha B’Av, the mournful day in which we commemorate the destruction of the First and Second Temple, and the other Jewish tragedies that have historically fallen upon this date. The nine...

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How Political Commentators Miss The Point of Tisha B'Av

“What do you think about baseless hatred?” This is not the sort of question most academics are used to being asked, let alone by reporters. But at this time of year, when Jewish tradition mourns the...

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When I Converted to Judaism, I Found the ‘Jewish Mother’ I Never Had

I was born on Tisha B’Av—although I didn’t know that for forty-some years. Growing up in a small Midwestern city in an entirely agnostic home deliberately devoid of any religious influence, I’d never...

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When Ramadan and Tisha B'Av Coincide, Jews and Muslims Break Fast Together

On Tuesday night, in a large, floral wallpapered room on the second floor of Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, about 200 people came together for the Tisha B’Av fast break and the Ramadan iftar....

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Minds Full of Torah, Bowls Full of Sacrificial Blood: Our Literary Critic's...

Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world. Reading Daf Yomi this week, I learned the answer to a question I had been wondering about since starting...

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The Haftarah Reading That Inspired Martin Luther King, Jr.

Every January, Americans observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Rather than celebrating a broader Civil Rights Movement Day, we prefer to tell the story of a singular hero who represented and led the...

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The 17th of Tammuz, Which Falls on Tuesday, Has Additional Meaning This Year

Among the litany of Jewish fast days, Shiva Asar B’Tammuz—the 17th of Tammuz—is lesser known, lacking the familiarity of Yom Kippur or the cachet of Tisha B’Av. Coming three weeks before Tisha B’av, or...

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People Who Secretly Love Feeling Miserable on Tisha B'Av

My first memory of Tisha B’Av was when I was around 6 years old. My siblings were happily ensconced in front of the television watching cartoons, but because I was the oldest boy, my father told me...

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Spending Tisha B’Av in Rome by the Arch of Titus, the Ruler Who Sacked the...

In the afternoon of the fast day, a trance of sorts settled in. You can call it dizziness, but it was something more than that: a headache-laden sense of removal from the world as one knows it, which...

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How the Saddest Day of the Jewish Calendar Helped Make me a Happier Jew

The idea that Tisha B’Av, the day that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in ancient Jerusalem, could serve as my own personal means of identity integration came to me in what...

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The Perfect Tisha B'av Playlist

Tisha B’Av, the day we mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem and commemorate those epic tragedies with a reading of Lamentations, is arguably the most somber day in the...

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Tisha B'Av Offers a Language in Which to Mourn Modern-Day Injustices

I’m trying to sing Lamentations in Ladino, a sad book of the Bible in a dying language I don’t know. I couldn’t care less about the destruction of the Temple—what synagogues all over the world are...

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How Summer Camps Should—and Shouldn’t—Observe Tisha B’Av

Tisha B’Av commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. Thousands of years later and thousands of miles away, Tisha B’Av is also a day for some truly awful programming at...

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Pre-Fast Tisha B'Av Recipes With Meaning

Tisha b’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av, is the saddest day of the Jewish year. Here’s a short list of catastrophes that happened on that day: 1. Both Temples were destroyed. The first Temple was...

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‘Dancing on Tisha B’Av,’ a Short Story by Lev Raphael

In 1990, Lev Raphael published Dancing on Tisha B’Av, a collection of short fiction that wove together Jewish and gay themes. He has since followed up his award-winning debut with two dozen more...

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Lev Raphael Looks Back on 'Dancing on Tisha B'Av'—The Story That Put Him On...

When Lev Raphael’s debut story collection, Dancing on Tisha B’Av, was published 25 years ago, I was enthralled. For me, it was the first book of fiction that truly brought together my gay and Jewish...

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Why I Struggle To Observe The Three Weeks, the Mourning Between the...

Sunday, July 24, marked the beginning of The Three Weeks, one of the most morose periods of the Jewish calendar that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples, and many other...

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How the Spirit of Tisha B'Av Can Help Us Grapple with Black Lives Matter

As I get older, many of the moments that defined my Judaism as a teenager start to feel hollow. I think about nights spent around a lake at sleep-away camp in Pennsylvania, or in hotel dining rooms on...

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What We Can Learn From the Story of Tisha B'Av About Relating to the...

This Sunday, August 14, Jews will mark the fast of the Ninth of Av, an annual day of mourning commemorating the anniversary of the destruction of both the First and Second Jewish Temples in Jerusalem....

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On Tu B'Av, Embrace Thy Neighbor

Tu B’Av, or Jewish Valentine’s Day, is a festival of love that “dates back to ancient Israel when the daughters of Jerusalem danced in the vineyards looking for a mate,” according to the Mishnah...

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My Mother’s Fear of Losing Me—and Being Lost Herself

My mother forbade us ever to be lost. Nevertheless, in 1970, when I was 7, I wandered away from my parents. It was the night of Tisha B’Av and we were visiting Israel. While we were at the Western...

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The Real Lesson of Tisha B’Av: Standing Up for Values, Even at the Cost of...

Tisha B’Av, the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, comes this year at a particularly fraught moment for the Jewish people. The only surviving architectural element of...

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My Own Private Tisha B'Av: The Chinese Restaurant

To mark Tisha B’Av, The Scroll asked a few writers to reflect on a private Jewish temple they’d lost, a place that was meaningful to them and no longer exists. Despite the plethora of kosher dining...

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Rokhl's Golden City: Summer in the Golden City: Get Out While You Still Can

Summer in the Golden City. A fragrant three-to-four-month stretch more golden shower (Thanks, Donald) than golden season; something to be endured with the promise of a crisp fall arriving at some...

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Healing the World, One Halal Cart at a Time

Tisha B’Av this year hit a bit too close to home. Sitting on the floor, in the dark, and chanting the book of Eicha, or Lamentations, with my congregation, all I could think was: Great, another tale of...

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Yehuda Mirsky Remembers Manhattan's Hasidic 1960s Upper West Side

To get to the shtiebel, you would walk up a narrow flight of stairs, at the bottom of which a bitter Holocaust survivor named Morris sold newspapers. After Shabbos, my father would get an evening paper...

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On Tisha B’Av, Lamentation for a Swimming Pool in Jerusalem

It has been nearly a year since the closure of the Jerusalem Pool. The lot that housed the Olympic-size pool is now a giant hole in the ground, and an upscale supermarket is expanding into the area...

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How Jews Observe Tisha B’Av in Rome

When Titus walked into the Holy Sanctuary of the Temple in Jerusalem with his commanders in 70 C.E., he found it to be far superior to what he had previously heard, wrote Flavius Josephus, a Jewish...

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Tisha B’Av and the Jewish Detox Cycle

Several years ago, I discovered the world of the “cleanse.” You know, the yoga-meets-new-age-meets-alternative-medicine thing where you rid your body of “toxins,” re-zero the balance in your gut, and...

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Finding Timely Calls to Action in Ancient Traditions

In October 2011, during the harvest festival of Sukkot, a number of progressive Jewish congregations in New York City held a joint Sukkot service at Occupy Wall Street. It may or may not have been...

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Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Blames 220-Pound Boulder Dislodged From Western Wall...

Yesterday morning a 220-pound boulder was dislodged from the Western Wall and fell to the ground near Robinson’s Arch, a site currently used for egalitarian prayer. Fortunately, it missed 79-year-old...

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On a Mystical Shabbat in Sarajevo, Finding Solace in a Stranger's Story

It was Shabbos Nachamu, the Shabbos after Tisha B’Av, traditionally a weekend of partying and socializing for young observant Jews, which, coincidentally, falls this weekend. This, according to Isaiah,...

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Taking a Stand for Immigrants on Tisha B’Av

This Tisha B’Av, a coalition of progressive Jewish organizations—T’ruah, the National Council of Jewish Women, Bend the Arc, the Religious Action Center, Torah Trumps Hate, and J Street—propose that...

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When the Destruction of the Temple Isn’t an Abstract Historical Event

Last year, it was hard to get into the mood for Tisha B’Av. It fell during the only week of the summer that all three of my kids were home in Pittsburgh and we had a little staycation: Segway tour...

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