Peter Bebergal is the co-author of The Faith Between Us. He lives in Massachusetts and blogs at mysterytheater.blogspot.com.
The long history of Jews and the occult
| 6:59 AM Oct 30, 2009
While some Jewish families see Halloween as a pagan holiday that should not be observed, the fact is, Jewish tradition is itself no stranger to the otherworldly, with its own history of golem-makers, sorcerers, and demon wranglers, and throughout the centuries Jews have been as afraid of evil spirits as anyone else.
As early as the ...
On a northern Atlantic shore, I discovered how to mourn—and honor—my brother
| 10:07 AM Dec 11, 2008
The first thing that happened the morning after my brother Eric killed himself was my sister and I told our father. It was early in the morning so we let ourselves into his house where he had been living alone since our mother died five years earlier. He sat on the edge of the bed, ...
Why projects like the Creation Museum induce religious stupor and cripple imaginations
| 12:00 PM May 21, 2008
During bar mitzvah studies with my heavyset, hirsute rabbi, I often asked questions that weren’t on script for a twelve-year-old. I grew up in a mainly secular home, and had a private belief in God, not one formed by ritual or liturgy. My faith was a preadolescent fantasy, having more in common with my obsessive ...
Samuel G. Freedman wrestles with how to write about his mother, and ends up doing some kind of penance.
| 12:58 PM Apr 29, 2005
In Who She Was, Samuel G. Freedman attempts to discover his mother, who died of cancer at 50 and whose grave he avoided for 30 years. Eleanor Hatkin grew up in a strict, cloistered home in the East Bronx in the 1930s, clashed with her domineering Polish-born mother, and gave up the love of her ...