Scroll through the hundreds of cartoons that Jason Adam Katzenstein has drawn and posted on his popular Instagram account and you’ll quickly notice a theme. There’s an executioner lying in bed, trying to remember if he locked his dungeon. A happy-looking chess piece on Zoloft. A fire hydrant worrying that everyone hates...
The author, the National Jewish Educator for Avodah, originally wrote this for the Avodah Service Corps. The Festival of Sukkot is about closure. It arrives dramatically as the culmination of not one but two holiday cycles, the Three Pilgrimage Festivals, and the High Holidays. Every time the Torah lists the pilgrimage festivals,...
Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature, Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, and Director of the Graduate Certificate program in Translation Studies at the University of Southern California Thought I saw an eagle But it might have been a vulture, I never could decide. Leonard Cohen, “Story of...
Yesterday I was floored by the callous disregard for justice – no, I’m used to that. What I was floored by was its blatentness. To have the only charges be for the walls of the neighbors’ apartments, and none for the senseless and terrible death of Breonna Taylor. At this time of...
The Torah gives just one unique commandment for Rosh HaShanah, to hear the sound of the Shofar, producing that raw, emotionally complex, array of sounds that evoke: the summoning of courage for dangerous battle (such as before Jericho’s walls came a-tumbling down), the awe accompanying realization of the implications of freedom and...
Worried about where the Kyle Rittenhouses and white militias/vigilantes will take us? Or maybe worse, are you not worried about it, thinking (hoping) it’s just a small group of people who will always be on the margins? No matter where you come down, it is worth all of us focusing for a...
by Aryeh Bernstein This devar torah for Parashat Ki Tavo and Labor Day was first written internally for the Avodah Service Corps, for which the author is National Jewish Educator. Around the world, Jews are nearing the conclusion of the annual cycle of reading the Torah. This week’s portion, Ki Tavo (Deuteronomy/Devarim...
Ian S. Lustick, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Almost half a century ago, in the early 1980s, many pundits warned that the window for creating two states was closing. Israeli geographer Meron Benvenisti, for example, described the situation as “five minutes to midnight.”...
A conversation with Pastor Cue Jn’Marie, a former Virgin Records rapper, turned evangelist, activist and organizer, and Rabbi Dr. Aryeh Cohen, of the American Jewish University and Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, about the history and context of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the movement to defund the police in Los...
CHE serves as a signal that Judaism’s language was important to support the “imagined community” of international Jewry. It’s less about learning a functional language, the authors argue, but rather helping campers and junior staff understand that Hebrew, the language of the Jewish people was worth knowing, and valuable enough to integrate...