A Conversation with Alyssa Gray
So back in the old days, a few months ago, before the plague, I started a weekly daf podcast. When I migrated from Soundcloud to the podcast platform Buzzsprout I described the project this way: I know that all the…
Category
Torah
The Rav, Reb Chaim of Brisk, & Socialism!
To many Americans, the term “socialism” conjures immediate feelings of suspicion and paranoia. For much of the population, socialism is a threat to the fundamental economic system that the United States is founded upon: capitalism and free enterprise. Yet, from…
Bereshit 20/20: What Torah Teachs Us About Democracy
When T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights embarked on our Torah 20/20 project this past October (with funding from Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah), the goal was to offer Jewish wisdom and language to frame and nourish the…
5 Podcasts on Reproductive Rights that Will Vastly Improve Your Life in 2020
Whether you’re a casual consumer of podcasts or you break into a cold sweat at the thought of not having any at the ready, check out this roundup of podcasts and podcast episodes about abortion and reproductive rights. Each of…
Speaking for G!d: The Meta-Miracle of Chanukah
Laynie Soloman is a faculty member and Director of National Learning at SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. Chanukah is filled with miracles—long-lasting surprise pockets of oil, an unexpected military victory, the legacy of zealous resistance in the face of hegemonic…
All these impermanent things: The Sukkot wisdom of Kohelet
by Rabbi Rami Shapiro On the Shabbat of Sukkot, this year October 19, we read the book of Kohelet, Ecclesiastes. But why read a book that famously disclaims the “vanity” of life on the holiday called “time of our rejoicing?”…
Radical Presence & the Practice of Rebuke
by Rabbi Benay Lappe in chevruta with Laynie Soloman Photo credit: Jess Benjamin, 2019 The Jewish new year season tends to have one “star of the show”—teshuva, the practice of recognizing whom we’ve harmed and repairing that harm, addressing where…
Mic’ing the Eshet Chayil: Resurrecting the Voices of Powerful Women in the Bible and Our World
by Noah Strauss Detractors of Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley, aka, ‘The Squad‘, have relentlessly attacked them over the past year, targeting them with disproportionate amounts of vitriol. In singling out these four strong…
Six Things to Do With Noam Sienna’s New Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts
It is hard to imagine the reader competent to review Noam Sienna’s new book, A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts From The First Century to 1969, so I will not try. As the title suggests, the sources…
Matot-Masei: Hiroshima, the Nakba, and the Cities of Refuge
I think the idea that we have to either accept or reject traditions, texts, works of art because they are tainted by cultural forces or even individuals who offend us is premised on a false dichotomy. I’ll go further. I…