Book Covers

You’re the daughter of a King! A king! How awesome is that? Not as awesome as being a son, apparently. I’ve heard, ad nausem, all the apologetic explanations about how women are not less, they’re just DIFFERENT. How the true home is built around the Jewish woman (Look! Jewishness passes...

One of my biggest struggles, even when I was still religious, was with the realization that as a person I had grown way more from therapy and self-help books than from any amount of “Torah wisdom”. This was unacceptable to me. I didn’t want it to be this way. Torah...

I hate this time of year. I hate personal growth that gets scheduled on a calendar. A month where everyone goes on their best behavior, like they’re being audited by some heavenly oversight authority. I hate scripted apologies. A specific time of year wherever everyone needs to ask everyone else to...

“There are no atheists in a foxhole,” Noah Weinberg used to love to say, swiftly eradicating all actual atheists who undoubtedly have existed in foxholes. That statement further disregards all the individuals who became atheists in foxholes, like the blaspheming Rabbi in Elie Wiesel’s Night. From the moment I...

Interesting anecdote about this book cover. It's a composite of two different Rabbi faces, i.e. it's not any specific Rabbi, so that I wouldn't poke fun unnecessarily at someone. That's how much of a tzadik I am. From the back cover: Rabbi Shlomo Levi Birenshmaltz (ZATZHA"L: of blessed, blessed memory), like...

In Judaism, we're taught, everything has the right context. Some days, you shouldn't eat anything.Other days, you should stuff yourself like a pig. Some days you shouldn't have sex at all.Other days, sex is a big mitzvah. Some days, you should be happy.Other days, sad.And others still, you should get so blacked...

If you believe in God from a philosophical point of view, you shouldn’t need any emotional scaffolding to keep things up. The absurdity of one-off inspirational stories of any kind should be obvious to even the most casual of contemplators, and yet it forms a huge part of religious culture. I...

“Judaism is about relationships,” sayeth the narrative. “It’s about aligning yourself with truth. It’s about becoming more like God, so that you can connect with God (how that doesn’t work is the subject of a separate article).” Furthermore, “Only dim witted people, like women and children (a pretty direct paraphrase...

Spot the meme. Also, double negatives are so not not cool.

"Never was there as happy a time," the Mishna says, "than Tu B’av. Because on that day all the young ladies would go out to the vineyards to sing and dance, and the dudes would hide in the trees and pick out the one they wanted to marry." Have you...