Members of the Scribe

Research and the Power of Bashert

I’m not a great believer in fate, but I certainly have encountered more than a few instances of bashert—that lovely Hebrew ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Saved by Leonard Cohen

Some people find Christ in their darkest hour. Others turn to Allah. But if you’re a Jew, young, and in ...

10 Ways You Can Promote Gender Equality in Your Local School

Gender messages are all around us. From images in schoolbooks to images on bus ads, from conversations on the train ...

10 Inspiring Ways That Women Are Fighting for Justice in Israel

In my previous post, I described seven frightening trends of religious radicalism in Israel threatening women’s well-being and in some cases ...

7 Places Where Religious Radicalism Threatens Women’s Well-Being in Israel

Women being arrested for praying out loud at the Western Wall – it’s a story so shocking that it has managed to ...

“Are You Jewish?”

Yes. But it’s complicated.My mother is Jewish, which, as my grandmother used to tell me, means that the Nazis would ...

The Previous Tenant

In October 2007, my husband and I were looking for an apartment in Brooklyn. We’d seen too many to count ...

Why I Write About Crime

For the past 10 years I have devoted my professional life – and my imagination – to things most people ...

The Jews and the Second World War: A Reading List

I started reading about the fate of the Jews during the Second World War when I was eleven. No one ...