Members of the Scribe
Lessons of a Broken Heart
It’s amazing how your first broken heart feels like the end of the world. Until your next broken heart which ...
Faking the Big A — Attitude!
Dating is all about attitude. If you’re in a pissy mood about something totally unrelated to your date, or if ...
Finding My Jewishness
At birth I was blessed with not one, not two, but four Jewish names. Tamar Avital is the name my ...
A Jewish Atheist’s Prayer
When I was little, I talked to God constantly. There were prayers for waking up, for the morning, for the afternoon, before ...
Passover in Pakistan
In 1990, I worked with Afghan refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan, then the site of the largest refugee population in the ...
The Ultra-Orthodox Backlash
When a former ultra-Orthodox Jew publicly reveals her story, she often faces ferocious attacks from her community of origin who will ...
The Power of the Aleph
I don’t speak Hebrew and, despite a few semi-earnest attempts to learn my aleph-bet, I don’t read it either. I recognize enough ...
Jewish Mother vs Bad Mother
There were two models for motherhood in my sprawling family: my great-great-aunt Riva and my great-grandmother Clara.My great-great-aunt Riva was ...
Home Away
I look for locations for my stories on CyberRentals and HomeAway. I find the houses described on these websites far ...
Obscene Recommendations
Some of the literary works I deal with in Unclean Lips are relatively well-known—Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1935) and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), for ...
The Best Overlooked American Jewish Novelist
Stephen Dixon is, in my opinion, the best and most overlooked American Jewish fiction writer in the country. If I ...
Can We Print “Motherfucker” Here?
There’s a little experiment I’d like to try, knowing that this blog post will be published by the Jewish Book ...