Rabbi Amy R. Perlin

It was a quiet Jerusalem day at the Wall, one of those brutally hot June afternoons with the sun beating down on the sandy hues of Jerusalem stone. The day seemed familiar yet something was different. Nowhere to be found were the plastic chairs filled with women praying in the

"Success" is a song sung by the immigrant Jew, Tateh, in the Broadway play Ragtime. In the song, a father sings to his young daughter that "hope is in the air." They have journeyed to America, the new Promised Land, so that he can give his daughter a better life

“If every Jew does whatever s/he wants, wherever s/he wants, Judaism won’t survive another generation.” You can imagine this as a Twitter entry (a tweet), the beginning of a scholarly article on Jewish survival, as an ad on the side of a bus in Jerusalem, or as the opening line

"If every Jew does whatever s/he wants, wherever s/he wants, Judaism won't survive another generation."

Every Yom Kippur afternoon, congregations all over the world read the Book of Jonah, as set out for us in the Babylonian Talmud, M'gillah 31a. Most people believe that this haftarah is chosen because it models complete repentance. From the king to each individual, by decree, everyone fasted and turned