JOFA’s Torch

“Sarah” had a pretty average childhood, growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home in New York City with her mother, ...

“Question authority!” was the mantra of my peer group when I was coming of age in the late ’60s. How ...

In my modern Orthodox co-ed day school, a certain event this week caused me to stop in my tracks. This ...

Like everyone else, I balance different aspects of my identity: American, Jew, New Yorker, educator, feminist, mother, white, spouse, runner, ...

A few years ago my family was living in Israel and attending a synagogue near our home. One Shabbat, our ...

[A digital rendering of this originally hand-written epistolary blog post can be found here.]June 19, 2015Hello and Happy Pride Month!I ...

Kol Sasson Congregation was founded in Skokie, Illinois in 2003 as a Shira Hadasha-style minyan. At first, we met on ...

When I say I work at a domestic violence shelter that serves the religious community, reactions are divided and fall ...

I grew up 100 percent Camp Ramah and United Synagogue Youth (both Conservative movement institutions), but after marrying a Modern ...

“Why don’t you learn to read the megillah,” asked my husband a few months before Purim.I thought about it for ...

There is a particular photograph that adorns the imagination of every engaged couple; it is of a young girl, age ...

Jew. Woman. American. Those three attributes are as intrinsic to my identity as my own name.  A close fourth would ...