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The Lord, the Lord is gracious and compassionate, patient, and abounding in kindness and faithfulness, assuring love for a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin, and granting pardon. -Exodus 34:6-7

Like so many of the things we've done in the last few months, the annual Yom Kippur afternoon jaunt of my father and me to Barnes and Noble following the morning service at temple was more

I recently visited Majdanek, a concentration camp in Poland, with my classmates. Afterward, I wrote this piece - part poem and part essay - about what spoke to me there.

As a teenager, I would sit on my bedroom floor listening to old records of Belgian singer-songwriter, poet, and performer Jacques Brel. I didn’t need to keep a journal, because his lyrics wove together everything I felt at the time. Brel had a fire within, and his anger, longing, passion, and truth blazed through every word he sang. His music, raw and real, transformed and fed my soul; it informed and shaped who I am today.

I truly believe in the joy of Judaism. I love Jewish holidays (with Shabbat, Sukkot, and Purim at the top of the list), Jewish humor, and Jewish culture. I also find it joyful to teach Hebrew, cook and eat Jewish food, and do mitzvah projects.

On Yom HaShoah, which falls on April 28, I will remember the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust – and I will be thinking about a little town in the northeast corner of Lithuania, and a white-haired man searching for a

Much ink has been spilled since the release of the Pew Research Center survey on Jewish identity in the United States.

During one of my first years as a religious school teacher, my sixth-grade students and I had the privilege of meeting a Holocaust survivor and hearing his story.

Zachor. A powerful imperative to remember. An anthem in opposition to forgetting. A symbol of the Jewish approach to history: zachor, remember, remember as if you experienced it yourself.