With High Holidays so close, I’m happy to share with you some readings and links to deepen your understanding and appreciation of this solemn, but joyful, time in our Jewish year.

Ilana Kurshan is an American living in Israel. She is the mother of young children. This article featuring Eric Carle’s beloved story The Very Hungry Caterpillar, gives some very sage advice about how to handle the long services during the holidays and makes strong connections between Carle’s secular story and the story of creation. Kurshan is best known for If All the Seas Were Ink, her memoir about studying Talmud. She’s also the author of Why is This Night Different From All Other Nights: the four questions around the world and the translator of Meir Shalev’s A Snake, a Flood, a Hidden Baby: Bible stories for children. Continue reading →

We are now in the month of Elul. What’s special about this last month of the Jewish spiritual year? According to Judaism Unbound ” It is a time of introspection. Time to stop and take a look back at the past year to see how we did.  Where did we grow and how do we want to continue to build on that growth? Elul is a time of asking for forgiveness from others in ways we caused harm and offering forgiveness to people who have harmed us.”

Elul is the prelude to the main attraction and helps us get settled and in the mood as does the opening act or musical prelude to a show. Continue reading →

A.B. Yehoshua, Israeli literary giant and ardent humanist, dies aged 85. This headline from The Times of Israel sums up the life of one of Israel’s foremost authors.

A.B. (Abraham Gabriel, called Boli)) Yehoshua was born in Jerusalem in 1936. His father, an author and translator, was a fourth generation Jerusalemite while his mother was a Moroccan immigrant. This “mixed” marriage was not successful leading Yehoshua to vow that his marriage would be for love.

Continue reading →

I want to bring to your attention a most timely book. The Family Roe by Joshua Prager is not a “Jewish” book. However, the topic of abortion is of interest to many Jews and is, in fact, a Jewish topic.

Indeed, at the Shavuot tikkun, one of the study sessions was on the Jewish texts that dealt with abortion.

The Family Roe is a big book. There are more than 400 pages of closely written text and over 200 pages of notes. However, though highly detailed, the book reads easily because of the narrative nature of the story. Continue reading →

On Monday, the prestigious Pulitzer Prize winners were announced. The satiric, laugh -out-loud, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family  has been awarded the 2022 prize for fiction.

Set in a liberal arts college, the story looks at academia, campus politics, and Zionism with a harsh but humorous eye. Continue reading →