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...
View ArticleArticle 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...
View ArticleArticle 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...
View ArticleArticle 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!...
View ArticleArticle 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...
View ArticleArticle 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...
View ArticleArticle 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...
View ArticleHolocaust 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...
View ArticleMitt 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...
View ArticleEssay: 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,...
View ArticleDaniel 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...
View ArticleDan 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...
View ArticleEssay: 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...
View ArticleThirteen 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,...
View ArticleA 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...
View ArticleAn 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...
View ArticleTisha 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...
View ArticleHow 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...
View ArticleWhen 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...
View ArticleWhen 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....
View ArticleMinds 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticlePeople 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...
View ArticleSpending 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...
View ArticleHow 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleTisha 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...
View ArticleHow 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...
View ArticlePre-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...
View Article‘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...
View ArticleLev 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...
View ArticleWhy 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...
View ArticleHow 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...
View ArticleWhat 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....
View ArticleOn 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...
View ArticleMy 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleMy 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...
View ArticleRokhl'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...
View ArticleHealing 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...
View ArticleYehuda 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...
View ArticleOn 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...
View ArticleHow 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...
View ArticleTisha 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...
View ArticleFinding 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...
View ArticleJerusalem 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...
View ArticleOn 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,...
View ArticleTaking 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...
View ArticleWhen 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...
View Article
More Pages to Explore .....