Jewish Voices, Jewish Lives

It’s what we do every day. Whether it’s the food we favor…a bagel with shmear… or the drive to repair the world…tikkun olam, we Jews are there, especially in Rockland County. We plan to bring Doing Jewish to you every Friday. Sometimes it’ll be fun, sometimes it’ll be serious.

How We Make the Sausage

As many of you now know, several days ago on August 9th, a sermon was given at a local mosque by an individual who was not the Imam or a regular speaker. The sermon was live streamed and uploaded to the website of the mosque. The speaker began in English, but when he continued in Arabic, the…

Barcelona Holiday

My regular readers know that I am and always have been a historian. History was my first love, and it sometimes takes you to surprising places.

In the fall of 803 CE, a Frankish army besieged Barcelona, at the time a stronghold of the Ummayad Caliphate. In late October or early November, af…

Dire Straits

Our tradition advises that these days between the 17th of Tammuz and the ninth of Av - especially the first nine days of Av - are described as ‘Bein Hametzarim’ or ‘In or between dire straits’ considering our historical calamities (the breaching of Jerusalem’s walls and destruction…

300

As most of you will have noted, yesterday marked 300 days of captivity for the hostages taken on 10/7. 300 days of darkness, privation, abuse and worse. So much has transpired in those 300 days, and yet we find ourselves still praying, still hoping, still advocating and still demanding the r…

Strange Days

One of John Lennon’s last songs, left unfinished and released after his death, was ‘Nobody Told Me’. One line in the first stanza has stayed with me since I was a teenager.

Nobody told me there’d be days like these, Strange days indeed, most peculiar mama!

We’ve all felt the trut…