The Yankees win! The Yankees win! Oh, I’m sorry. That would be in the “Worst of the Week.” Quick rant: Instead of 50 game suspensions for baseball players caught using steroids, how about they make a rule that every time a player’s name is ever mentioned in the media again, whether it be in newspapers, […]

David Ostow, the comic artist behind So Punk Rock (And Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother), and his sister, Micol Ostow, are guest-blogging all week with MyJewishLearning and Jewish Book Council.
These are the first two pages of a strip I’m currently drawing with the working title “In Defense of The Irrational: A Brief and Not […]

Some editor over at FunnyorDie.com must have gone to Jewish day school. There is no other explanation as to why they would decide to post this video now.
This week’s Torah portion is Vayera, which includes the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. So why not make a viral video about it? During the filming of Year […]

In her last posts, Ellen Frankel looked at how to make the Bible PG and asked “What is Jewish Literature?”
In this week’s parshah, Noah, we read about the Tower of Babel, constructed at a time when “everyone on earth had the same language and the same words” (Gen. 11:1). But because the Tower’s builders […]

Of all the gigs I’ve ever had, this had to be the most extreme. And I wasn’t even there.

To celebrate reading the story of Noah in the Torah, Amsterdam Jewish Salon had a cruise. And they showed the Noah G-dcast, which I {humbly} narrated.

You might think it’s heretical to take a leisurely cruise in […]

Ellen Frankel is the author of the JPS Illustrated Children’s Bible, as well as the Editor-in-Chief and CEO of the Jewish Publication Society.
For most of Jewish history, the Bible was “one size fits all.” There was simply no such thing as a children’s version.
The second-century rabbinic anthology Pirkei Avot counsels: “At five years […]

It was 10 p.m. on a Thursday night at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, and I was finally learning how to lay tefillin. I took in all the details with wonder: Seven times around the arm, the shape of a shin on the hand, kabbalistic meanings…The only unusual thing was that these weren’t tefillin […]

I haven’t looked forward to a book’s release so much since the final installment of Harry Potter. Here is a new biography of Rashi [1040-1105], part of Nextbook’s Jewish Encounter series, written by one of Judaism’s most revered living authors, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. Who better to write about Rashi, the French Talmud scholar, than […]

One of my favorite things about being a full-time professional Jew is that you, our clientele, kind of view Judaism as a public service. Rather than thinking, “What does this millenia-old tradition have to do with me?”, every day we get letters from people who ask, “What can this millenia-old tradition do for me?”
Or, in […]

There’s this weird trend going on at my shul recently. Hadar has always been big on people bringing in new tunes to use for kedusha and other parts of the service. It’s always beautiful, and I like that moment where you’re singing along and trying to figure out how you know the melody. Recently I […]