What other group has to share their location and promise to text their loved ones hourly as a matter of safety because they are going to a peaceful protest? Well, apparently, I, as a Jew, must, because that’s how my day began. But I was lucky. I came in contact with nothing but peace and …
Tomorrow will mark the seventh day since Hamas massacred civilians in Israel. In Judaism, after a person passes away, a formal mourning period of seven days, known as shiva, is observed by the immediate family of the deceased. So, tomorrow, Shabbat will be the end of a sort of shiva period for the wider Jewish …
Tonight I went to a vigil for Israel. Four days and the pain is still as constant as the numb feelings, the shock. New details every day highlight more horror. Kidnapped grandparents, decapitated babies, the sheer numbers. It seems too outlandish to even write as fiction. Despite the horror I’ve seen in the online discourse, …
Sometimes you must be the voice you wish you were seeing online. The discourse (especially on social media) around what is happening in Israel and Gaza right now is taking the form of social justice clickbait. I’ve been posting some warnings and information over the past week, on my own social media channels, about how …
“I don’t speak because I have the power to speak; I speak because I don’t have the power to remain silent.” – Rabbi A.Y. Kook Today I must speak, once again, in solidarity with other victimized groups across our country. The tragic and heinous events this morning at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh …
When I was in high school I had a teacher who told me that the swastika was not a symbol I should find upsetting. When my sister was in middle school a boy drew a swastika on her notebook and the principal said that the boy didn’t mean anything by it and it was only …
It’s only Wednesday. But it’s already been a hard week. A bomb threat was called into the JCC in my community. And today I went on strike for International Women’s Day. These two events may seem unrelated, except in timing, but they have become combined in my mind. This week there were many people in …
This time it is my city. This time it is my community. This time it is my people. This time it is not my family. I am lucky it is not my family, as I was lucky when it happened in St. Louis, and Philadelphia, and not here. But I am writing now when perhaps …