Tuesday night is Tu Bishvat, the New Year of the Trees. To celebrate it, our great friend and supporter Edgar Bronfman wrote about road-tripping with his brother Charles. Just the idea of the two of them on a let’s-discover-America campaign is brilliant and otherworldly, like an Easy Rider of Robin Hood-type do-gooders instead of druggies, but [...]

Hanukkah started last night, and one candlelighting, one family Hanukkah party, and one early-morning Hallel later, I’m channeling the spirit strong. And actually enjoying the Hanukkah music, which is weird. Didn’t Jewish music used to be incredibly cheesy? Instead of looking at Jewish music videos as a competition — which one will score more hits, [...]

This Hanukkah enjoy the holiday with more than just latkes and dreidels. MyJewishLearning is hooking you up with a Hanukkah mad libs that you can play with your family. As with all mad libs, these work best when you go with the craziest words you can think of. Enjoy! The Miracle of Hanukkah Place _________ [...]

If you’re getting ready for Hanukkah — lighting candles? doing seasonal meditation? throwing a party? — and you need the perfect soundtrack, please let me be the first to encourage you to check out our collection of free holiday mp3s! That said, sometimes you just need some original music. Partly to combat all the Christmas [...]

Last week was the first week of early Shabbat. Once the clocks go back, Shabbat jumps back an hour, too. So candlelighting in my zipcode today is at the somewhat startling time of 4:18pm. How to get everything done in time? (Seriously, I don’t know.) On these short Friday I wake up and it’s like [...]

What’s your way of giving tzedakah? Our friends at American Jewish World Service are launching an exciting new project. Where Do You Give? aims to engage the Jewish community in thinking critically about different Jewish questions: * What are the recipients ? * Why are these places a priority for us? * How do we [...]

So yesterday was Halloween, a holiday that causes me no end of consternation. You know how the Official Jewish Community is always talking about being Jewish on Christmas, and feeling peer pressure, and not knowing how to deal with it? Well, Christmas is easy to ignore — all my non-Jewish friends are non-Christian anticapitalist anarchists of [...]

Thank you to everyone who entered our High Holiday Photo contest. We were on the hunt for great pictures of  Jews celebrating the holidays, and we got some amazing entries. Almost all of the entries will be featured in MyJewishLearning and Kveller articles in the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled for pictures [...]

Tonight starts Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, the final round of Jewish holidays — for this month, anyway! Here’s a little mix that I stumbled into putting together, song by song. This morning at synagogue I was getting ready for Shemini Atzeret, which starts tonight, looking ahead in the prayerbook — you know, like peeking [...]

Earlier this week, Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote about  Sukkot and social justice and asked, “Does place matter?“ As I write this blog post, I am preparing to teach at Occupy Wall Street on Monday. Following a successful Kol Nidrei service, a Jewish contingent there has constructed a sukkah — the temporary hut in which Jews traditionally eat — [...]