May 2014

What is a Community?

A few days ago, I ran across an article asking a rabbi what a person could do instead of going ...

Vienna: A Stroll Through a Haunted City

I was in Vienna earlier this month to talk about my book and to show the documentary film I made at the U.S. Embassy’s ...

Great Books for—and about—Jewish LGBTQ Teens

According to education theorist Rudine Simms Bishop, fiction should serve as both a mirror and a window. That is, books ...

Rock and Roll, Religion, and Leonard Cohen

With very few exceptions, the story of American popular music in the last five decades is largely a story of ...

My Favorite Camp Clothes

Here in New York, the temperature is eking up into the 70s, and after continuous blizzards this winter, I couldn’t ...

Torah for One. Torah for All.

Two years ago a number of parents in my community approached me for assistance. Their daughters would all become b’not ...

Bringing to Light Quiet Heroism

I feel extremely fortunate to have been able to tell this very dramatic, and heretofore almost completely unknown, Holocaust rescue ...

Next Chapters (We’ll Miss This Southern Jewish Chapter!)

I am a lover of stories and often find myself drifting into worlds outside my reality.  My young mind fought ...

The Gift of Generations: A Mother’s Song

Mom. Mommy. Ima. Madre. Mother. No matter how many ways I say it, the concept still catches me by surprise ...

Our Girls, the 1 in 5 and the 250

How the United States responds to the kidnapped Nigerian girls and the epidemic of rape on the college campus will ...