I arrived at a café in L.A. for my monthly writing group last spring and walked to the counter to order tea and a slice of cake. As I headed back to the table, I noticed one of the other patrons watching me as I walked past him. A few minutes later, as I shared the short story I had written with the other four women in the group, I noticed the same young man glancing my way again. And then again.

I assumed that my elaborately wrapped, sparkly headscarf and gold ring clearly marked me as married; yet, there he was, looking my way.

Continue reading "An Admiring Glance Brings a Married Woman’s Anxieties to the Surface" at...

My uncle died recently in Havana.

I knew a few things about him: He was an atheist, an idealist, clever, quiet and serious, tall and guapo. But the most important thing, in terms of our family history, is that he was known to us as “the communist.”

Continue reading "My Uncle Stayed in Cuba When the Rest of My Family Fled in 1962. He Never Fully Explained Why." at...

The abuse of power, said the artist Jenny Holzer, comes as no surprise, and it certainly never has to me. I spent my childhood beneath the omnipotent thumb of the omniscient God of the Old Testament, and nobody abuses power like Yahweh abuses power.

Do what I say, proclaimeth the Lord, and nobody gets hurt. I might even turn you into a great nation.

Continue reading "Shalom Auslander’s Favorite Rabbi Faces Accusations That He Molested Yeshiva Students" at...

In Gangster Squad, a movie opening Friday, Sean Penn plays Meyer “Mickey” Cohen, a ruthless Jewish mobster who operated in Chicago, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles in the mid 20th century. Cohen, like many of his colleagues, was the son of poor immigrant parents who was enticed by the financial rewards of organized crime. In a 1957 interview with Mike Wallace, Cohen recalled, “I got a kick out of having a big bankroll in my pocket. Even if I only made a couple hundred dollars, I’d always keep it in fives and tens so it’d look big. I had to hide it from my mother, because she’d get excited when she’d see a roll of money like that.”

Cohen wasn’t the only Jewish mobster carrying around piles of cash. In fact, I discovered just a few years ago that I’ve got a gangster just like him on my own family tree.

Continue reading "My Husband’s Great-Uncle Was Sammy ‘The Mustache’ Norber, a Jewish Mobster in Detroit" at...

About a decade ago, novelist Emily Raboteau went to Jerusalem to visit a childhood friend who’d made aliyah. The trip provoked yearnings in Raboteau, the biracial daughter of an African-American father and white mother, for a place where she could feel at home, a Zion of her own. Six years later, that yearning led her to embark on a long journey to learn more about those who leave everything behind in search of a better life in a place they feel they belong. Following in the footsteps of others in the African diaspora, she traveled back to Israel to talk to Ethiopian Jews and African Hebrew Israelites; to Jamaica and Ethiopia to meet with Rastafarians; and to Ghana, home to expats from the United States and elsewhere who wanted to return to the place from which their ancestors were forcibly deported as slaves.

As she chronicles in her new book, Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, Raboteau learned how difficult and disappointing the pursuit of Zion can be and came to recognize Zion less as a geographical destination and more as a place of inner strength and well being. In this episode of Vox Tablet, she speaks with Julie Subrin about these and other discoveries. [Running time:23:28.]http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/podcast_feature010812_raboteau.mp3

Continue reading "After Visiting Israel, Writer Emily Raboteau Sets Out to Find a Promised Land She Can Call Her Own" at...

When I bought a pair of jeans earlier this year, I felt like I was driving home with a terrible cargo of guilt and sins. They were the first jeans I’ve ever purchased.

As a proper Orthodox girl, I’ve worn skirts for as long as I can remember. Not only were skirts simply what my community, not to mention my parents, deemed appropriate dress for women. To me, pants represented Sinful Temptation. Sure, it’s an extreme association to have with an item of clothing, but the Judaism with which I was raised excelled at playing the guilt card, and I’ve been an eager card-carrying member my whole life. So, dutifully and without question—although rarely happily—I wore skirts.

Continue reading "An Orthodox Woman Grew Up Wearing Skirts—Until a Pair of Jeans Changed Her Definition of Modesty" at...

Continue reading: A 9-year-old dance-class reject

Continue reading "My Lifelong Quest for Dance-Fitness Program That Isn't Humiliating, by Vanessa Davis" at...

Our wedding took place on Aug. 23, 2009, on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Friends and family recited the seven blessings. We exchanged rings. We drank the wine. The rabbi pronounced us married. I stomped on the glass with great vigor. It was the day I’d long hoped for, marrying a nice Jewish girl.

But when I first met my wife, she wasn’t Jewish. In fact, by the time we’d started dating, I’d given up on Jewish women, and my dream of a perfect Jewish wedding, altogether.

Continue reading "I Gave Up Dating Jewish Women. Or Maybe Jewish Women Gave Up On Me—and I Can’t Blame Them." at...

Wendy and I were best friends when we were in our late 20s and 30s. We raised babies together, double-dated with our spouses, and shared family vacations. Then I moved away, and, over the years, our friendship cooled a bit. When I found out that she was dying of pancreatic cancer—at 59—I decided the best way to honor her was to show up. During a long and difficult 10 months I flew from my home in California to hers in New Jersey many times, and I called almost daily. We became very close again.

I knew when I left for a writing residency in France last year that Wendy was days away from dying. I had spent a weekend with her two weeks before; we had both struggled to say a last goodbye. But when I got the news that she had passed on, it was sudden and shocking all the same. I cried for hours, for days, using up boxes of Kleenex and wandering around the town of Vence in southern France with swollen eyes.

Continue reading "In Front of Chagall’s Grave in France, I Found the Words To Mourn My Lost Friend" at...

Sometimes, bad decisions turn into farces. If you’re unlucky, they can turn into tragedies; if you’re lucky, they become life lessons. I am, it seems, both lucky and unlucky.

Last week, the Jordanian Tourism Ministry issued a warning advising visitors to avoid wearing Jewish garb or performing Jewish rituals in public. It was a sad reminder for me of my own experience there. In 2006, I joined the Peace Corps, beginning a two-year stint in Jordan. The organization does not have any official rules about discussing religious identity, but during a pre-service orientation session in Amman, the trainer recommended that Jewish volunteers wait at least a year before sharing their backgrounds with locals, to get a full sense of what the response might be. A Jewish volunteer who’d served in one of the first groups to go to the country suggested that I tell anyone who asked that I was Christian.

Continue reading "A Peace Corps Volunteer Hides His Jewish Identity During a Stint in Jordan" at...

On Aug. 9, 1982, the day before my fifth birthday, my grandfather killed himself. After taking a fatal dose of sleeping pills, he went into the living room and lay down on the couch, where my grandmother found him the following morning.

I have few memories of my grandfather, whom we called Papa. Occasionally, there was a hushed comment or two about “the war,” but when I was young, I had little sense of what that meant. According to my mother, Papa had terrible nightmares, his screams occasionally waking her and my uncle when they were young. Like most Holocaust survivors, my grandparents rarely discussed the war with their kids, and so my mother assumed that the night terrors were perfectly normal, that all fathers occasionally woke their children with their shrieking. It was all she knew.

Continue reading "I Visited My Grandfather’s Village To Understand How He Died. Instead, I Discovered How He Lived." at...

The clinic looked like many clinics I’d visited before as part of my work around HIV and AIDS: rainbow flags, earth-tone décor, and stacks of literature urging people to “Know Your Status!” and “Get Tested!” This time, though, I was in the clinic as a patient, getting tested for HIV, and that made my heart race.

My finger was pricked to draw blood for the test, and I was sent to the empty waiting room for 20 minutes to await the results. I’d come in feeling guilty, but now that guilt was replaced with a sharp sense of anxiety. Vulnerable before a power I could not change, I felt like it was neilah and the rabbi was urging me to make my final appeal. What does one do during those moments while your fate is being sealed?

Continue reading "After Years of AIDS Anxiety, I Turned to God for Comfort While I Waited for HIV Test Results" at...

Tonight, a documentary I wrote and produced in Israel, The Invisible Men, will screen at the Other Israel Film Festival in New York City. The film tells the untold stories of gay Palestinians hiding in Tel Aviv, seeking refuge from the families and Palestinian security forces that want them dead and the Israeli authorities that want them out of the Jewish state. Five years after I moved to Israel and three after embarking on this project, these screenings present me with less a homecoming than a privilege: I return to my hometown more proud than ever to be Jewish, American, Israeli, and gay.

I grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and I was, to put it simply, your all-American Jewish kid with all of the attendant neuroses and privileges. I was educated at the Ramaz School and Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, two flagship institutions of Modern Orthodox Judaism and American religious Zionism. I excelled in school. Socially, I was in the middle of the pack—somewhat awkward, always chubby, but who cared. I was accepted to Princeton University and graduated with a degree in Russian Literature with high honors. I wrote a thesis on Woody Allen. In the competitive worlds I was raised in, was accepted to, I was a “winner.” To my parents, especially my father—born to Polish Holocaust survivors, shtetl Jews, in a German Displaced Person’s Camp in 1946—I was living the life that he had always wanted for himself but could never have had.

Continue reading "Filming Gay Palestinians Hiding Out in Israel Allowed a Closeted Jewish Filmmaker to Accept Himself" at...

When the UPS driver pulled into my driveway in August 2011 and opened the back doors to his truck, I gazed transfixed at the 32 boxes packed tightly from floor to ceiling, some toppled sideways, ready to tumble out into my garage. These were my boxes now. One by one, the driver took them into the basement and set them on the rug in my son’s playroom.

For months, I’d researched how best to get the boxes to my house in the Bronx from my parents’ new home in a long-term care facility in Overland Park, Kan., that did not have enough space for them. So, the delivery wasn’t a surprise, by any means. But as I collapsed on the pink, floral-patterned 1950s sofa, a gift from my aunt when she closed down her deceased parents’ furniture business, the tears that had eluded me for the past few years came down my cheeks. Mentally, I had worked hard to rationalize each sign of decline in my father’s health with the false hope he would get better. But seeing these boxes now in my home abruptly ended that illusion.

Continue reading "How I Almost Gave Away a Precious Inheritance From My Father" at...

In another few hours, I’ll be boarding a plane from Tel Aviv to Warsaw, and the truth is that I’m very excited. Not about the flight, and certainly not about Warsaw. After all, I’ve been in that city at least a dozen times. I’m excited because this time, I’m not going there as a tourist or a writer promoting his book. This time, I’m going to my home.

True, that home isn’t really very wide. It’s actually very narrow, apparently the narrowest home in the world, but still, even a 122-centimeter-wide home is still a home. And I’m very excited because my family hasn’t had a home in Warsaw for more than 70 years.

Continue reading "An Architect Built Etgar Keret a Home in Warsaw, Right Where His Mother Once Faced the Nazis" at...

The hot flash begins at the soles of my feet and races up my legs to my chest, scaling higher until sweat beads on my forehead. The hormonal medication I take to prevent any breast cancer cells I may still harbor from binding to estrogen is knocking my internal thermostat out of whack.

Fanning my face with my left hand, I raise my right.

Continue reading "Israeli and Palestinian Breast-Cancer Survivors Find a Common Language " at...

I can still remember with resounding clarity all these years later the note of horror in my mother’s voice the first time she called me and I sounded audibly drunk. I must have been in my early 20s, I was living in a dark little apartment all the way over on the less genteel reaches of the Upper East Side, and had come home after an evening in which much alcohol had been imbibed. I was delighting in the feeling that being drunk gave me—that floaty, nothing-can-get-at-you sensation of being freed from the usual confines of your mind. I was happy being drunk, and I suppose this—as much as the fact that I was slurring my words—is what took my mother aback.

“You sound drunk,” she said, in a tone heavy with accusation.

Continue reading " Daphne Merkin Knows About Good Wine, But Still Has a Soft Spot for Manischewitz Concord Grape" at...

When Theodore Ross moved with his newly divorced mother and brother to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi at age 9, the family pretended not to be Jewish. This deceit was his mother’s idea, and years later it led Ted to question whether he should consider himself a Jew at all, having been discouraged from embracing any religious identification as a young person. In recent years, the desire to answer that question led him to seek out other Jews who are outliers in some way, from crypto-Jews in the Southwest, to the “lost tribe” Ethiopian Jews now resettled in Israel, to ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn who welcome him into their homes for Shabbat.

Ross writes about these journeys in Am I a Jew? Lost Tribes, Lapsed Jews, and One Man’s Search for Himself. He joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about why his mother demanded that he hide his religious identity, what it was like pretending not to be entirely himself, and why he chose to spend time with non-mainstream Jews as a way to re-engage with what being Jewish might mean for him. [Running time: 18:50.]http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/podcast_feature082712_tedross.mp3

Continue reading "This Writer Grew Up Pretending He Wasn't Jewish. Then He Sought Out Other "Outliers" Like Himself. " at...

I’d been in plenty of churches when I was growing up—carnivals, voting booths, the Sistine Chapel with a fanny pack and a Eurail pass—but the first time I pulled up a chair and actually prayed in a church was in November 2009, in Los Angeles.

I’d returned several days earlier from family week at the rehab center where my husband was staying for a month, a world-renowned residential treatment facility with bright white buildings and a state-of-the-art gym, perched high upon a mint-green hillside, the drug rehab version of the Emerald City. The treatment center’s anchor building was its auditorium, with rows of red-cushioned movie theater seats and flaxen light streaming in through its rectangular glass windows. The Twelve Steps and The Twelve Traditions, the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous, were painted on its walls. There, during lectures on chemical dependency by experts in the field, I learned that addiction is a disease. I had known that before, in the abstract. Now, there was a PowerPoint presentation with diagrams of the human brain and the limbic system and spiked dopamine levels to prove it.

Continue reading "When My Al-Anon Meeting Incorporated the Lord’s Prayer, I Felt Left Out as a Jew" at...

To pilfer a phrase from the late Nora Ephron, I feel bad about my sheitel, the matron’s wig I wear for religious reasons.

The one I’ve been wearing for the past four years is part of the problem: Not only is the cut dated, the hair has gotten so stiff and dry that it could probably be mowed into toothbrush bristles. As my calendar has grown crowded with upcoming family events, I’ve started to search for a replacement, though I realize it’s not likely to make me feel much better.

Continue reading "A Woman’s Long Search for Wigs That Make Her Look More Like Princess Di and Less Like Marge Simpson" at...

Before I met any Jewish people, I learned about Jews in my Mormon Sunday school classes. But no one used the word “Jews.” Instead, it was always “Israel,” or “the tribes of Israel,” or “Israelites.” Or maybe even “Hebrews.”

During sacrament meeting on Sunday morning, I would trace the movements of the Israelites charted on the colored maps at the back of my scriptures. Perhaps the most important of these movements, I learned, was the exodus of a small family of Israelites led by a righteous man named Lehi away from the land of their ancestors and across the ocean to the Americas, where they grew and divided and clashed and became the civilizations of the Book of Mormon. In Sunday school, I studied the colorful Arnold Friberg Book of Mormon illustrations that my teacher propped up on her knees as we all sat in our little semicircle of child-sized chairs. The Israelites in these pictures were tall, dark-haired, and heroically muscled. Their expertly crafted wooden ships parted the waters as they approached some unspecified American coastline. At the center of the painting stood Lehi, the white-bearded patriarch, looking toward the heavens in prayer as the rest of the traveling party strained to see land on the horizon; his wife, Sariah, clung to him and silently rested her head upon his shoulder, eyes closed.

Continue reading "A Mormon Girl Raised on Stories of the Israelites and End-Times Marries a Jew" at...

The day before Tisha B’Av three years ago, I ate the egg and ashes prescribed as the meal before the fast begins, taking my last bite of the sliced white bread. On the eve of the darkest date in Jewish history, as I sat on a milk crate and gazed into a field and its tree-lined background, I began to cry.

I wasn’t only crying because of Tisha B’Av, but also for myself: I knew something was wrong. For weeks, while I’d been teaching at an Orthodox Jewish summer camp in upstate New York, I had been waking up in bed sheets dampened by sweat, despite sleeping in air-conditioning. My exhaustion and the lumps in my chest and throat had grown so rapidly that even in my bed, I could find no rest. Before settling upstate for the summer, I had gone to see a dermatologist to deal with an insatiable itch throughout my body; like a fire spreading, it gave no warning, no sign of rash. A prescription for an ointment to soothe my skin was filled but never used. And now, weeks later, I was getting worse.

Continue reading "Essay: A Cancer Diagnosis Gives a Young Man a New Perspective on Religious Observance" at...

I hadn’t been back to my old Jewish summer camp in a decade. But last summer, when I was visiting family in Chicago, my mother told me she was driving up to visit my younger sister, who, at 19, was working as a counselor at OSRUI, the Reform camp in Wisconsin where I’d spent nearly every summer of my youth. I decided, spur-of-the-moment, to go along.

Walking the dusty path to my sister’s unit, I passed the landmarks that were still etched into my brain from childhood: the barn where Charlie Smith kissed me, the waterfront with its sun-bleached canoes, the dusty Israeli army tents propped atop concrete slabs where we used to sleep. Inside the tents, the air retained its particular camp scent: hormones and sweat, mixed with Herbal Essences shampoo. My sister and her fellow staffers subscribed to the same aesthetic my counselors had—cute and slightly crunchy, in an Abercrombie-approved way.

Continue reading "Essay: After a Bad Summer at Camp, I Rejected Judaism. Years Later, I Returned—to Camp, and My Faith" at...

Every Sunday morning in the summer, I play softball—even though I’m 49, and as terrible at the game as I always was. I drop the ball, I make errors; so do the other middle-aged men in our group. Why do we persist in a game for young men while our bodies creak with age and strain?

Many can recall a time early in life when we became entranced with the sport. We played it on the streets, or in the park. Perhaps we collected baseball cards and kept tabs on our favorite players, argued passionately in our bunks at summer camp about which team was better. Maybe some of us even had fantasies of becoming major league players. These fantasies fade rather quickly for most people as we get on with the business of life, but a few fall permanently, hopelessly in love with the game and find a way to remain faithful to this love affair despite the passage of time and our diminished capacity and the things that test all of life’s loves.

Continue reading "Essay: The Many Pleasures of Softball at Middle Age" at...

It was a cold and windy December night in 2004, when four teenage girls walked into Jerusalem Pizza, a kosher pizzeria where I was working in the heart of Monsey, N.Y.

When the girls took off their coats and settled into a booth, I noticed three of them wearing the strict uniforms of Bais Yaakov of Monsey, an Orthodox girls’ school: dark flats, high black socks, pleated skirts three inches below the knee, and blue button-down shirts. The fourth girl, however, her blond hair in a ponytail, wore sneakers, short white socks, a denim skirt an inch above her knee, and a light blue top that said “FBI.”

Continue reading "The Girl in the FBI T-Shirt: The Girl I Fell For Liked Me, Too—But She Was Religious, and I Wasn’t" at...

Soon after my father passed away in 1995 at age 86, my mother presented me with his watch, enclosed in its red case adorned with gold letters. The 18-karat gold Patek Philippe was the only expensive thing my father ever bought for himself.

We were very poor when I was young. We shared, with another family, a small, one-bedroom apartment in a poor Haifa neighborhood, living off rationed eggs and butter. By the time I reached the age of 13, however, our financial condition had improved. Although by nature modest and humble, my father surprised us by buying himself the gold watch. “After 120,” he would proudly tell me, “this watch will be yours.”

Continue reading "Essay: An Heirloom Watch, a Hidden Photo, and the Discovery of My Father’s Holocaust Secret" at...

To some kids, overnight camp is about as appealing as military school. No air conditioning, no sleeping late, no television; what kind of summer is that? But Jews are different. We love camp. Throughout the ’90s, I gave up hot showers and Sega Genesis every summer so I could spend eight weeks among New England’s Goldbergs, Schwartzes, and Cohens.

By seventh grade, my friend Jeff, who’d heard me rave about camp for three years, decided he wanted to partake in this tradition, too. The only problem was that he was Catholic. Camp Tel Noar in Hampstead, N.H., wasn’t just a camp that Jews happened to attend. It had a Hebrew name. (The direct translation is “Youth Hill.”) We ate kosher food, said prayers before and after meals, and endured Jewish culture classes. The most Jewish thing Jeff had ever done was sit through my bar mitzvah.

Continue reading " An Alien at Jewish Camp: When My Catholic Best Friend Accompanied Me to Camp Tel Noar" at...

Shortly after I arrived at Jews in the Woods—a spiritual Shabbaton at a campground in Rhode Island—on a Friday evening in March, I was approached by two girls who asked if I’d come with them for a moment. Following them over the hardened snow, I came to a small blue sedan loaded with food. Visibly nervous, they took turns explaining that, since sunset had fallen and very observant students would not eat meals carried inside by other Jews, they needed me, a gentile, to bring all of the food to the kitchen. To alleviate the discomfort of observant Jewish participants, I had been appointed the Shabbes goy.

My head was spinning; I was surprised, angry, humiliated. It was not the best way to start the weekend.

Continue reading "At Jews in the Woods, a College Retreat, a Potential Convert Searches for Belonging" at...

To read more Tablet in Warsaw coverage, click here.

When my grandfather Leszek was alive, he’d tell stories of his life in Krakow before the war. About how he’d sneak out of his ultra-Orthodox yeshiva to attend the Zionist gymnasium down the road. Or the times he played soccer with his grandmother’s neighbor, a boy named Karol who would eventually become Pope John Paul II. Or how he courted the beautiful older daughter of the famous Karmel family, a girl who was Jewish royalty in Krakow but somehow was convinced to love him back.

Continue reading "What My Grandfather Never Told Me About Surviving the Holocaust" at...

It was a supreme role reversal, as I stood next to my former nanny’s bed in Newark’s Beth Israel Hospital, feeding her Kozy-Shack rice pudding and wiping the residue from her lips.

No longer a boy with a neat auburn bowl-cut, I was now an unruly-haired twenty-something with a thick Semitic beard. Looking like an ancient Levite, I stood in sharp contrast to the others in Dezna’s hospital room—the Caribbean churchwomen from her Seventh Day Adventist congregation who sang hymns, held my hands, told me about Jesus, and gave me a book about the afterlife. Though I appeared a distinct outsider, I knew I could reveal our surprising shared identity simply by opening my mouth. Because unlike most Jewish boys from New Jersey, I have a Jamaican accent.

Continue reading "A Jewish Boy’s Jamaican Nanny Leaves Behind an Unexpected Legacy: Her Accent" at...

As I filled out the forms to change my last name back to my grandfather’s original surname, I wished my ancestors had been Burmese or Chinese, instead of Polish. Win or Wong would have been a lot easier to fit on a new credit card than Sochaczewski.

But we have little control over whose descendants we are. My grandfather, Josef Sochaczewski, came to America from Kalisz, Poland, then part of Russia, in 1912, during the great wave of European immigration. His family—my grandmother Esther, my father Samuel, and his older sister, my Aunt Syd—followed in 1913. I have an old family portrait that I treasure from back then. My mustached grandfather looks like a Polish Pavarotti, while my grandmother, pregnant with my uncle Bill, resembles a weary but very wise Madonna. Apparently she had tuberculosis when the photo was taken and died a year later.

Continue reading "Changing a Surname Reveals a Family's Lost History" at...

I only ever met one person who had anything bad to say about Anne Frank.

I was 12 years old, among a hundred other Hebrew school students in the social hall at our temple in northern New Jersey, eating our weekly dinner at long, uncovered banquet tables, when the oldest woman in the world walked in the door. In truth, Rabbi Helga Newmark was only 67 then. But the darkness in her eyes gave her a worn toughness where she might have been inviting, like impermeable black stains on a welcome mat. She was sturdy, though petite. She was wearing a fuchsia suit.

Continue reading "Remembering Helga Newmark, the First Female Holocaust Survivor to Become an Ordained Rabbi" at...

Although my father is a citizen of the United States, he lives in his own republic: the republic of the Talmud.

To be sure, every man lives in his own republic. In one republic, love is the currency; in another, lust; still another, and it is industry. But my father lives in the republic of the Talmud—along with several other relatives—where discourse is valued above all else.

Continue reading "Growing Up Observant in the Republic of the Talmud, One Man Peeks Through the Border Into Secular America" at...

As people across New Mexico commemorate 100 years of statehood in 2012, I’d like to celebrate two people who helped secure a century of Jewish life in my home state: David and Annie Meyer, my great-uncle and great-aunt.

In 1912, when much of the nation still regarded the Southwest as a land of outlaws and Indian raiders, Louis and David Meyer, Yiddish-speaking brothers from Latvia, made their way to New Mexico, the nation’s newest state. With their wives, sisters Yetta and Annie, the pious tailors settled in Albuquerque. The bustling town of 15,000 supported a hospital, university, streetlights, and several moving-picture theaters. And despite the fact that Jews made up less than 1 percent of the population, New Mexico’s largest city had already elected two Jewish mayors.

Continue reading "Marking a Century of Jewish Life in New Mexico" at...

Before Ilya Khodosh went off to graduate school, he spent a lot of time online, especially when he had insomnia or felt anxious. For Khodosh, moving to a new city was a new opportunity to go cold turkey and stop websurfing, which meant no Internet at home. As he explains in this story, which recently won first prize in a Jewish storytelling slam, that deprivation didn’t last long.

Ilya Khodosh is currently enrolled in a graduate theater program where he is studying criticism and playwriting. [Running time: 8:11.]http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/podcast_feature030212_khodosh.mp3

Continue reading "How I Stole Wifi From Chabad, by Ilya Khodosh" at...

It was still Shabbat in St. Paul. I was staying at the home of Chabad friends, less than a block from the shul. We were in the middle of eating a late lunch when there was a knock on the door. A friend of mine, a fellow right-wing activist—not Orthodox—was standing there, pale as a ghost. “Rabin’s been shot. He’s dead. An Orthodox guy did it. I thought you should know.”

“Peres?” I asked. “Did he get Peres, too?”

Continue reading "On Yitzhak Rabin's 90th Birthday, One Man Recalls Being Told to Kill the Israeli Leader" at...

I never attended services in the civilian world. But all that changed when I joined the Army.

It didn’t start as a religious awakening. During Basic Training, I thought that going to services would be a good opportunity to get away from the drill sergeants for a while, and maybe I’d even get a nap out of it. Maybe not the purest of intentions, but priorities are different in Basic.

Continue reading "A Soldier Connects to His Jewish Roots During Basic Training" at...

On Sept. 29, 1929, a group of 20 or 30 Jewish men, draped in talleisim and chanting prayers, marched down North Union Street, the main thoroughfare in Olean, a small city in rural Western New York. Their sacred mission: carry the Torah from its former home in rented space in an office building to its new location—the imposing new Temple B’nai Israel several blocks away. When they arrived at the building— its most dramatic feature was a massive arch that framed a leaded-glass window with a Star of David and three large wooden doors—marchers were met by local dignitaries and rabbis and cantors from Syracuse and Bradford, Pa. The Jews of Olean, this elaborate public demonstration announced, were here to stay.

This month, Temple B’nai Israel was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a cultural and architecturally significant site and cited as a “highly intact example of an early twentieth-century synagogue in a small city.” Jewish communities in small cities rarely get the attention they deserve, overshadowed by their more prevalent and visible urban compatriots, so this honor is particularly welcome.

Continue reading "Temple B'nai Israel in Olean, N.Y., Added to the National Register of Historic Places" at...

My great-grandparents lost their German nationality twice: First by choice, when they made aliyah, then in absentia, when they were stripped of their citizenship by the Nuremberg Laws. I don’t know if they would have wanted their descendants to accept German passports—I doubt it, since they left for Palestine in 1925 out of the belief that Germany was no home for the Jews—but we did.

The loss of my own German passport was not the result of ideology or historical injustice, and not in the least bit noble or tragic. First, I couldn’t find my naturalization certificate, which I may not have even received in the mail. And then I lost my passport.

Continue reading "A Lost German Passport Teaches a Lesson in History and Identity" at...

When the matchmaker said she had a poet-rabbi for me to meet, I ran over.

Malka, who lived on my block, had previously set me up on blind dates—shidduchim, as they’re called in our Jerusalem circles—and in the process had come to understand my affinity for creative, spiritual men. We sat down at her kitchen table and she sorted through adzuki beans as she told me about the guy.

Continue reading "Falling for the Matchmaker, Not the Match" at...

I keep a sign on my wall that says, “There’s no limit to the good you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” Despite being grateful for the awards I’ve received, I don’t need credit, in the sense of having my name engraved on a plaque, or with the promise of an award, to motivate my efforts. What I do need, however, is praise from the people I care about.

Organizations are often ridiculed for hosting testimonial dinners for prominent businessmen—and they are mostly men—not because they are saints or scholars but because they can help the organization sell tables. But that misses the point. We don’t honor rich people for making their money; we honor them for giving it away. And by bestowing a plaque or naming something after them, we valorize tzedakah, charity in the service of justice, a holy enterprise.

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1. I stood at the back of the crowded room. Before me, like sunflowers ripened and swaying in the breeze, or like lighters at a rock concert when the slow song comes on, was a sea of raised hands, each holding a smart phone or camera aimed at the rabbi and the children assembled at her feet. She was telling the story of Hanukkah to a captive audience sitting cross legged on the floor in clumps, each representing a pre-K class at the Riverside Church Weekday School. Among them sat my daughter. She is 4 years old, but not for long. I stood in the back because I am very tall and can see over everyone, and I did not want to block anyone’s view. Also, because it affords me distance, which I need in order to observe, analyze, and to feel apart from the proceedings, across which now and then I allowed a flicker of emotion and feeling to leap. In alternating beats these emotions were kind, warm, and hostile, annoyed.

2. My daughter has taken to drawing a curious form, a kind of sign: It’s a U shape at the ends of which are arrows. As iconography it could be read as a smile, or instructions for a U-Turn.

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Four years ago, my father, a rabbi, decided on Christmas Day to make his annual pilgrimage from Queens, where he lives, to Kova Quality Hatters, the landmark and institution in Borough Park, Brooklyn, to buy hats. Kova provides black hats, fedoras, homburgs, and other varieties of headdress to thousands of Orthodox Jewish men, and now that I’m well into my 40s, I have been going there with my father for decades.

While other precincts of New York City take on a tranquil, almost ghost-green glow on Christmas, Borough Park, the Hasidic enclave, teems with commerce and activity on this holy day. Its main drag, 13th Avenue, has the feel of an Asian city: Shanghai or Hong Kong minus the rickshaws and the pedicabs. Cars and pedestrians compete for room and air in narrow straits, and the street has the ambience of an urban bazaar, with chains and banks nestled next to mom-and-pop stores selling clothing, housewares, and just about everything else. The primary objective on our annual shopping trips was to buy a hat for my father, but the outing came with a number of blandishments and outright gifts for me: usually an article or two of clothing, and a post-shopping meal in a neighborhood restaurant.

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The first time we hypnotized Norman, we made his body stiff like a board. We lifted his head while his feet were on the ground. Then we lifted his feet while his head was on the ground. Then we hung him between two wooden chairs, with his head resting on one, and his heels on the other.

We were just following orders. There was a general acknowledgement among us ninth-graders that we walked in the shadow of Joe Bower’s genius, and so we did as we were told. As a recent yeshiva refugee, I knew authority when I faced it. But Joe Bower—a tall boy with a thin brown mustache, a digital watch with a calculator, and an unnerving air of quiet competence—was compellingly different from the rabbis who had populated my life until then.

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Nearly all academic oncologists in Israel have had fellowship training at medical centers in the United States. Most look back wistfully on the people they met and the knowledge they acquired abroad. When they get together to reminisce, there is good-natured bickering about the quality of their respective American institutions, but there is uniform agreement that one of the highlights of the years they spent in the United States was the celebration of Thanksgiving. And why not? It’s a long weekend of copious eating that displays a unique national character that, unlike Christmas, transcends religion and, unlike Super Bowl Sunday, rises above cultural predilection. Lately, though, the concept of thanksgiving has come to acquire new resonance among oncologists in Israel.

The Hebrew phrase seudat-hodayah—“thanksgiving feast”—has inserted itself into the lexicon of both cancer doctors and patients here over the past seven or eight years. A seudat-hodayah is a cancer survivor’s celebration of having beaten the disease. I am invited to participate in them not only in November but throughout the year.

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It is almost Thanksgiving, and so my wife and I are making plans. We are making calls. Unfortunately, we discover, the Xs, with whom we often share the holiday dinner, are going to be out of town this year.

“Family?” I ask.

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Halfway through an article about immigration fraud in the erev Sukkot edition of the Globe and Mail, Canada’s leading daily, I realized that its subject, Earl Seth David, aka Rabbi Avraham David, had been sitting right in front of me in shul for the last five or six years.

Amused as I was to find out that Avrumie, as he was known in shul (with the accent on the second syllable), had been calling himself a rabbi—imagine Colonel Sanders claiming to have commanded the 82nd Airborne—I was amazed to discover that U.S. government investigators allege him to be the ringleader of “one of the largest immigration fraud schemes to have ever been committed in our country.”

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My mother was a hillbilly from Tennessee by way of Indiana, my father was and is a Jew from Schenectady, N.Y. I’m not sure I’d have known I’d be forever split between gentile and Jew had they not divorced when I was 2 years old. Thereafter I was a Jew on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and every other weekend, and my mother’s the rest of the week. Jew days in my father’s apartment, across the river from my mother’s house in Scotia, near Schenectady, meant Spaghettios, kosher salami on Triscuits, and, on holidays, chopped liver at my Aunt Roslyn’s. It seems to me now that the rest of the time we went to the movies, although I can only remember two, Excalibur and Hair.

My goyishe mother also took us to the movies. She found a job baking cookies and brownies for a concession stand at our town’s movie theater, rehabilitated by a band of hippies who didn’t want to peddle corporate candy. My fourth summer, while my mother baked, I played in the theater. On the sunniest of days I sat in the dark eating warm cookies and watching reverently as the hippies threaded the two movies they owned through the projector, over and over: Woody Allen’s Sleeper and Harold and Maude. This constitutes my early Jewish education.

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These days there is a lot to worry about: global warming, financial collapse, terrorism—you name it. For writer Max Brooks, the threat that trumps them all is zombies. He sounded a warning call about these walking dead in 2003 with The Zombie Survival Guide, followed three years later by World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, an immensely popular account of a massive zombie outbreak (the movie version, starring Brad Pitt, is due out in December 2012).

Brooks joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry on the podcast to discuss the perils of dressing up like a zombie on Halloween, the particular horrors that a zombie infestation represents to Jews, and the origins of his own zombie fears—traced to one fateful night circa 1985 when Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft opted not to hire a babysitter. [Running time: 14:40.]http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/podcast_feature102811_zombies.mp3

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