Blog

After two years of teaching remotely and watching far too many movies and television series on Netflix on the same computer screen I use to interact with these students, I wonder if I feel less connected to these "virtual" students than the hundreds of young people I taught in person over the past decades.

Whispering into the ears of the foolish king, our calculating villain puts his fiendish plan into action. This is the moment he has been waiting for. Nothing less than perfect acceptance can launch his heinous plot.

In meetings with the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, Defense Minister Benny Gantz, Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Transportation Minister Merav Michaeli, and Foreign Minister and Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid, we discussed the crisis in Ukraine, the future of the Kotel, ensuring more funding and rights for non-Orthodox Jews, combatting racism, and stopping extremist violence against Palestinians, in addition to other pressing issues.

I had been wanting to write about Queen Vashti for a while. A big part of my rabbinate and my writing focuses on uplifting the stories of women in the biblical narrative, especially those who do not get enough attention.

As Russia's vicious attack on Ukraine continues, we feel anger, pain, and a desire to act. Here are some steps you can take to support the Ukrainian people, including the Progressive Jewish community.

On the face of things, Prayer for the French Republic, a new play by Joshua Harmon, is about several generations of a French-Jewish family living in Paris and contemplating whether they're still safe in the country they call home. In actuality, it is a discomfiting examination of the state of the Jewish diaspora.

The first episode of the new season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel starts out with a single word, "Revenge!" As the show slowly makes clear, this isn't just revenge against Shy Baldwin, the singer and entertainer who left Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) stranded on the tarmac as he took flight to Europe without her.

As a graduate of both Tougaloo College and Jackson State University, the recent bomb threats to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are personal to me. Since January 2022, over a dozen HBCUs have received bomb threats; several of those threats were received on the first day of Black history month. The continuous attacks on institutions of higher learning; places of worship and individual attacks are a direct threat to our everyday existence.

My children have learned so much, and have taught me so much, about what it means to be a mensch, a good person, from their summers at Camp Harlam.