Archive for March, 2010

Escaping from God to the city of sin. Without success.
Read more »

A section of the Jerusalem Talmud’s Tractate Bikkurim is now intelligible. No, really, it is. It was once missing a sentence, but the sentence has now been found in a tin can in the Geneva University, part of the…

I take a deep breath. I mustn’t seem too excited. I run a comb through my sheitel again and check the car mirror. Pretty pearl earrings, neatly styled wig.  Modest, attractive, reasonable. Above all, I want to look…

What is really so terrible about the Chasidic lifestyle?
Read more »

I usually trudge along with Chasidic women to the J train every morning. Like them, I’m close to the JMZ lines. All of us walk mechanically, like robots, toward the loud, screeching subway train.

“Speaking of loud and screechy,” I…

Some people dislike women who put on tefillin and pray with their own minyan. They dislike them so much that they believe they should be pelted with chairs. The incident occurred at the Western Wall in…

The Chanukah candles burn and sputter in the darkness, casting a warm glow around the room. They are so beautiful, slowly melting, slowly making rainbow puddles of wax. Right now, I am tied to the coffee table in…

Let’s start by judging this book by its cover, which cleverly illustrates the title. (I have a degree in design, so I’m allowed to do that.) The photo shows a Chasidic man, complete with shtreimel and bekishe, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge towards Manhattan. Thus, it highlights the ambivalence that many Chasidic rebels feel...
Read more »

“Git Shabbos, Reb Hershel,” the gabbai says to me with a smile. “Minche?”

He has it down to a science, Reb Yossel the gabbai. Every other week he asks me the same question. He needs someone to lead the services…

A Serious Man has been called hilarious comedy, genius high-brow tragedy, the best Coen brothers film, the Jewy-est, most auto-biographical Coen brothers film, a modern day story of Job, a medieval story of a dybbuk, and much else besides. But mostly it has been called dark and funny, confusing and mysterious. Dark and...
Read more »