A few years ago, freshly moved to Los Angeles, I started practicing yoga. I was feeling anxious and worried, and if I were still a New Yorker, I’d have gone on anti-depressants. But I’m a big believer in doing what the Romans do, and, as it turned out, yoga helped a lot. Now, in class, ...

One of the convenient aspects of studying Jewish history is its 3,000-year-old paper trail—the texts and records of the rabbinical and intellectual elite allow us to examine contours of Jewish law and history. But we tend to know less about the lives of average Jews, who didn’t receive much attention in the writings of the ...

Monday, October 19th
Braiding Flesh and Spirit: Kicking off a weeklong examination of the Jewish body, by Jonathan Rosen
On the Bookshelf: New books on bodies visible and invisible, by Josh Lambert
Stumped: From the archives: A new father finds that the bris ends but the foreskin lingers, by Peter Hyman
Bottled Guilt: How the debate over breastfeeding is ...

Long before the July arrest of Levy-Itzhak Rosenbaum, the alleged organ broker swept up in the bust that netted an array of New Jersey politicians and Syrian rabbis, the writer Amy Fox had envisioned a fictional version of him. And well before a Swedish newspaper published a spurious account of IDF soldiers harvesting organs from ...

I remember a moment from my first trip to Israel 29 years ago. I was waiting for a friend at the entrance to Beit Hatfutsot, a museum on the Tel Aviv University campus. It was during a conference convened for Holocaust survivors, and as I watched older survivors flow out of the building, I glanced at the occasional uncovered arm to see the tattooed numbers there, remnants of their Holocaust experience. It was a powerful vision for a first-time visitor to Israel, one that underscored triumph over adversity and the human will to survive along with the need for the country as a safe haven for the Jews.

Joy Ladin is a poet and a professor of English at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women. For most of her life, though, she was a man named Jay, and her biological sex was a source of deep unhappiness. And so three years ago, Jay decided to start the process of becoming a woman. His marriage fell apart, and he worried about how the world would receive him after he became a woman.