In one of his hit songs, California Love, the late Tupac rapped, “It’s all good, from Diego to the Bay,” well his words have not stood the test of time. It isn’t “all good” for some Jewish residents of No-Cal.
Eight years after the infamous public hearings that doomed the Palo Alto eruv, Congregation Emek […]

If there’s one thing the Jewish community is all-too often missing, it’s self-criticism. Groups and movements tend to blame other groups and movements for their problems and the problems of klal yisrael.
In turn, there’s little that I respect more than seeing someone give an honest critique of their own.
So kudos to Rabbi Doron Beckerman over […]

Here’s a great resource for your next trip to Israel: the city of Jerusalem has prepared a series of tours in mp3 format, including Ein Karem, the Mount of Olives, Nahla’ot and Ha’Nevi’im Street, the Jewish Quarter and the Via Dolorosa, and others. You pick the tour to download the file to your player, and […]

Cantillation or trope has always mesmerized me. I know of no other religion that has a similar system for chanting sacred texts. For those unfamiliar with the process, there is a set of signs that accompany each word of Torah, Haftorah and other writings. Each of these signs represents a certain musical phrase. In chanting […]

The fast day of Tisha B’av begins tonight. Like Yom Kippur, this fast lasts a full 26 hours. Argh.
I know I’m not alone in my struggles with fasting…though that doesn’t make me any cheerier at 4pm when my husband is starting to look like a roast turkey with all the trimmings.
I’m used to a Judaism […]

On Sunday, I’ll be heading to Park City, Utah for a conference called called “Why Be Jewish?”
The 2 1/2 day affair, convened by Adam Bronfman and sponsored by the Samuel Bronfman Foundation, is meant to jumpstart a communal conversation about Jewish life and values that takes us beyond questions regarding survival, continuity, and intermarriage.
The conference […]

Rabbi Sherwin Wine, who founded the Secular Humanistic Judaism movement, died in a car crash this weekend. He was 79. (MORE)

A poll shows that in Israel, 27 percent of the Jewish population observes the Shabbat according to Halacha, while 20% were keeping the Shabbat to a certain degree and 53% not at all. There was strong support for giving up shopping in favor of “having public transport services operating on that day and enjoying leisure […]

Before there were Halliburton and Exxon-Mobil, there was United Fruit.
I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time over the last several months reading up on U.S. history, and one of the astonishing things that I’ve found is that before America allegedly/really (it’s not my place to say here) started to intervene in other countries […]

As I was browsing articles on Harry Potter, I came across an item from last year where Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter of the silver screen) reveals that he is Jewish, or at least halakhicly so.
Radcliffe tells the Australian “Today Show:”
“My mum was of Jewish blood and my dad was protestant,” he said.
He then proceeded to […]