Next time you’re playing Scrabble, you can put down “schmutz,” “schtum” or even “tuchus” without fear of being challenged. (“Tuchuses,” the plural, is also acceptable.)
The first official music video for Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” is making the rounds on the internet. And Dylan’s endorsement is only half the reason why.
Jewish humor and Jewish theology share something in common. I can think of any number of jokes whose punch lines say something profound about God (“Work with me here — buy a ticket!”). And we need only consult the Torah to discover how the matriarch Sarah responded when God revealed that she would bear a child in advanced old age: “Sarah laughed …” (Genesis 18:12).
When Naomi Jaye, who has been making short films in her native Canada for the past 10 years, told friends she was embarking on her first feature film, they cheered.
As an old Yiddish saying has it, Jews are like other people, only more so. The Pew study of Judaism in America reminds us of this truth. Although startling to some, the rise of orthodoxy is to be expected. In a world in which traditionalism/fundamentalism is growing in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and other faiths, Jews do what others do and turn forcefully to more orthodox modes of faith and worship. This is not a phenomenon peculiar to Jews, but a worldwide wave.
When Judith Schneiderman was 14, she was taken from Hungary and sent to Auschwitz. It seemed that all hope was lost — that is, until she opened her mouth.
Robin Solomon stood in the Ponary Forest in Lithuania, surrounded by fellow educators who wore white and sang Yiddish songs, accompanied by a violinist.
Mayor Eric Garcetti said his close ties to the Jewish community will not only enable him to respond better to communal concerns, but also spur him to draw on the community for its help in addressing some of the city’s pressing needs.
Being an alter-kacker — Yiddish for someone who’s an “old fart” — is relative. Many of the species, stereotypically, while away summer days at the beach cabana, sporting white shorts and knee-high dark-checkered socks, playing cards with the boys and grumbling about surgeries or high blood pressure medication.
I was alone in a small town in central Cuba, and I had lost the only person I knew. The town was Santo Domingo, and it had taken a full morning of driving to get there. It’s a sleepy, slow-moving place, where American cars from the 1950s share the road with horse-drawn carts — and many of those carts act as taxis.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.