Let me tell you a little about Yossele. No, no, not the famous one who could sing a mile and even the opera-goyim wanted him to perform for them.…

Several year ago, still sporting payess and a more-or-less Chasidic appearance, I met a girl in Greenwich village who stopped me on McDougal Street to tell me, “I think Hasidic Jews…

Do ex-Hasidim serve themselves well by establishing a vibrant community? Or does such community only amplify the narrative of struggle and displacement, inevitably confining them to the fringes?

Samuel Katz, a student at Stony Brook University, examines some of...
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This weekend I read a book called Fiedler on the Roof, a collection of essays about literature and Jewish identity by Leslie Fiedler. I received this book from a cyber-friend who, unaware that…

“My name is Baila Rothman, I’m from Ohio, I’m sixteen, I’m new here,” I said to each of my roommates when they wandered in to the dorm that night. Deborah Lee had the…

Tzomo Lecha Nafshi,

Put away the book. Put it away and listen to Kiddush. Stand up, your father’s waiting. Shhh. Come on.  Nu. Nu!  We don’t talk before grape juice, you’re a…

Rievi and I sit on rocks near the shallow stream, the water cascading over tangles of rocks, branches, and fallen tree trunks, seeking its way, as water always does, to the lowest…

He felt the vibration on his waist. He removed the phone from its holster and glanced at the caller-ID screen. The number was unfamiliar, and so was the voice. But what it said…

It is early in the morning, the Hampton air is still grey and soft with the end of night. The boardwalk, stretching along the beach’s edge, is empty. In front of me, the…

I push my way out when the pressure in my head becomes unbearable. There are voices, but I can’t really hear them. There is a lot of piety around me in this shul.…

We all love sex. We like it in the darkness of night when all we can hear are the strange house noises from electrical appliances, during broad daylight with the sounds of bustling crowds around us, or as the birds begin to chirp in...
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Chasidishkeit is not a way of life; it's a way of death. It manages to take everything exciting in life - food, sex, adventure, travel - and maul it, mangle it, distort it to a point where there's little left of their original allure....
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