My Skirt is My Korban Todah

Today I’m wearing a new skirt. That isn’t really enough of a subject for a column except that this particular skirt is long, falling well below my knees, midcalf. Rather than slinky, it’s got substance, wide flaring pleats and in this age of impossibly flimsy ladies wear, a real honest to goodness lining. My fashionable [...]

Uncle Martzi – The Son Who Wanted to Come Back

In the mid afternoon on Passover eve, a special guest would come to my parents home. Martzi Baci. Uncle Martin, my great uncle. I don’t recall him visiting us at any other time, only on Erev Pesach and for the Seders. His routine was as follows; he’d come in, take off his coat, light up [...]

Does Anyone on the U.S. Supreme Court have Kids?

Does anyone on the U.S. Supreme Court have kids? How about grandkids, nieces, nephews, even neighbors with kids? I wonder. In it’s final decision before adjourning for summer break the court struck down a California law intended to protect children from playing with video games that depict murder, maiming, rape and other forms of violence. [...]

Achdus in the Midst of Tragedy

Everyone’s minds and hearts are still with the Kletsky family. How can one absorb such a terrible, brutal and senseless crime commited by another member of our community? How could G-d let a thing like this happen to a young innocent child? That is a question that we cannot deign to answer but what be [...]

The Ascent to Haute Boro Park

This post was written in response to a Tablet magazine piece posting a slide show of a women’s change from jeans skirts to jeans. Dear Ms.Umansky, If you can run an entire piece plus a slide show on Dvora Meyer’s evolution (devolution?) from jeanskirt wearing into jeans, than I’d like to propose the opposite side. [...]

Join the Clean Team. Al Cheit 2010

Today I did something I’d like to delete from my supernal report card. I googled the name of someone I dislike just to take him down. Yes, I’m jealous. X is an uneducated boor, crass, ostentatious, but blessed, it seems with a talent for earning easy money. What my search turned up wasn’t the stuff [...]

Chelsea, Marc and Gitel – Studies in Dark and Light

Like millions of others this morning I opened my browser to photographs of Chelsea Clinton clad in a rhinestone studded Vera Wang gown embracing her new husband investment banker Marc Mesvinsky clad in tuxedo, yarmulke and tallis. According to news sources, Mesvinsky who attended Hebrew school as a child, is a halachic Jew, from both [...]

Guess Whose Not Coming to Dinner?

Ever since making aliya decades ago, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve been visited by collateral relatives. So it was with great excitement that I learned that cousin Adele her daughter Jan and Jan’s two young daughters would be in the Holy Land and that they wanted [...]

The Difficulties of Reconciling Feminism with Orthodoxy

I was raised in an egalitarian culture and graduated from Barnard College, a women’s liberal arts college. I am now integrated into the Orthodox world where the synagogue, an important center of Jewish life, has a strict separation of roles and the yeshiva offers the boys a significantly different curriculum than the girls. .Do you [...]

The Teshuva Diet

Its now been nearly two weeks since I stepped on the large metal scale at my produce market and discovered that I was overweight Until then, I rarely weighed myself.. I didn’t even own a scale because, hey, I wasn’t fat. I wore a small dress size and nothing I owned (except for two skirts [...]

Ayelet Waldman and Me – or – Dear Lord….Do Not Bring me to Challenges and Ordeals.

My Toughest Jewish Moment. In my other life—when I’m not being Anxious Ima, I’m a freelance journalist and it isn’t an easy road. Good writing gigs are hard to come by so it was with great delight that I snagged one — interviewing Ayelet Waldman for a top national webzine. I didn’t know much about [...]

On Disabling the “Frumkeit-Checker” In My Brain

It’s Shushan Purim, a school vacation day here in the Holy Land and I’m out with my brood at an amusement park. The children are scattered; some on the bumper cars, others on trampolines and I’m at the plastic picnic tables along with the other bored adults, waiting for the kids to tire out or [...]

I Think I Owe a Big Thank You to Susie Essman

I owe a big thank you to Susie Essman. Yes, you read right—Susie Essman, the vulgar fouled mouthed comedienne now staring in the forthcoming Hallmark Hall of Fame documentary “Loving Leah.” Its not because she makes me laugh—believe me, she doesn’t, but Essman reminds me of why I am here and why I want to [...]

A Modest Proposal for Ending the Shidduch Crisis (with apologies to Jonathan Swift)

Over the past few months I’ve started going to a shidduch club. Eshewing the traditional matchmaker model, our club essentially conducts a good natured swap meet for humans, each of us describing one or several singles we know, in the hope that someone listening will come forward with their beshert. Aside from our fastitidous attention [...]

Getting It

These past few weeks, I’ve been working my way through Daniel Mendelsohn’s “The Lost—A Search for Six of the Six million.” It’s a long book, 518 densely packed pages, but it’s fascinating, as it reveals the holocaust in great and chilling detail and yet, at the same time, this book, a masterpiece in its own [...]

A Lesson From my Sister

   She let me know during our Friday afternoon Gut shabbos phone call, the call that I had made to show what a nice sister I was and to ask about the plans were coming along for our Dad’s yahrzeit commemoration.    “ Yitz and I are coming round to the opinion that women shouldn’t be at [...]

Appreciating the Torah’s Separation of the Sexes

This week I had what I like to call a “Mi Kiamcho Yisroel Moment.” It came upon me as I was reading through a new book called “The Girls Who Went Away.” As you probably already guessed this book is no sefer. Its not put out by Artscroll or Feldheim. In fact it’s the kind [...]

Reading for the Recipes

It’s motzei Shabbos just minutes to havdallah. My husband and sons are in shul and I’m home alone clearing up after shalosh seudos. On the table sits quarter of a hallah, soft and fluffy on the inside, crusty, dark and sesame flecked on the outside, still fresh even now, as the Shabbos draws to a [...]

The Books in the Dumpster

Anxious Ima Last Wednesday morning , sometime between sunrise and the arrival of the school bus, I took a few dozen of my secular books off the shelf and deposited them in the green plastic dumpster outside of my house. This wasn’t easy for me; there is something deep in my soul that resists the [...]

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