Sukkot, the feast of Tabernacles, our temporary hut holiday, is also the Great Jewish Guest-a-Thon. This year, with guests from our world banned, let’s welcome more guests from the mystical world. The Kabbalistic ushpizin custom – guests in Aramaic – welcomes one of Israel’s “seven shepherds” …
An earnest plea to rabbis for non-partisan sermons this Yom Kippur
The Rosh Hashanah death of the 87-year-old Supreme Court Justice and liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg has sent the already edgy American Jewish community into a tizzy. One synagogue replaced the traditional Rosh Hashanah Haftorah with an earnest but culture-clashing and cringe-worthy singing of Ginsburg’s …
Isabel Wilkerson’s New Book ‘Caste’ Clings to the Past
In March 2008, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign nearly imploded when reporters revealed that his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., regularly blasted the United States as irredeemably racist. “[The United States] government lied about their belief that all men were created equal,” Wright preached. “The truth …
Natan Sharansky on the virtues of a life lived backward
This essay was adapted from a new book Natan Sharansky wrote with Gil Troy, “Never Alone: Prison, Politics and My People.” After living my life backward, the usual sequence seems overrated. Whenever I hear of friends separating after decades of marriage, I wonder, “Maybe they did …
CoroRosh Hashanah: 5780 has been a year to absorb – and to sift
Whenever I jog in the Old City, I stop at this amazing spot overlooking the Western Wall, grasp the top of the railing, and prop myself up about five times. I look like I’m exercising my biceps, but I’m really stretching my soul. Last week, …
The left and the right are both wrong: For American Jews, Zionism is not political.
Among all the things Jewish students have missed out on in the age of COVID-19 is the Birthright trip. Since last spring, tens of thousands of young Jews haven’t been able to have that transformational moment, that “Aha” experience, that intense feeling of connectedness, that …
Take It From a Refusenik: Jews Win When They Are United
By: Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy A few years after I, Natan Sharansky, arrived in Israel, a neighbor who moved to Jerusalem from New York saw me playing with my children in the backyard. Looking wistful, she said, “You know, Natan, it was such a …
Three Warning Signs of Ideological Totalitarianism
Three decades after the Soviet Union fell, embers of the kind of totalitarian thinking that spawned the Communist Revolution are inflaming Western debate—and inciting Americans. Anyone born into Soviet oppression, and who resisted it, knows how important America’s freewheeling culture of free speech and free …
Our Days of Awe nurture shirt-off-your-back givers, not takers
The New York Times recently ran a stunning report: “Parents Got More Time Off; Then the Backlash Started.” The article detailed how America’s wealthiest tech companies unintentionally “created a rift between parents offered more benefits” this year “and resentful workers who don’t have children.” Haves weren’t …
Natan Sharansky’s memoirs are a made-in-Jerusalem story
This week, PublicAffairs of Hachette published Never Alone: Prison, Politics and My People , by Natan Sharansky and me, culminating a three-year dialogue about the Israel-Diaspora dialogue. The copyright page says: “Printed in the United States of America” – but the book truly was made in …