By Bill Simons
When Esquire magazine named all-time baseball all-star teams for various ethnic groups, sarcasm preceded its Jewish selections: “There haven’t been many Jewish ballplayers, let alone Jewish ballplayers of quality, and this creates problems; anyone who is left off the team…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
“What’s this par-va thing,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. That question came from the mother of a non-Jewish friend. She’d just learned she was allergic to milk and her doctor told her to look for the kosher symbol with the word pareve next t…
How do people determine what city or country feels like home? This question was raised by two recent memoirs: “I Want You to Know We’re Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir” by Esther Safran Foer (Tim Duggan Books) and “I Belong to Vienna: A Jewish Family’s Story of Exile and Return…
by Rabbi Rachel Esserman
I have very eclectic tastes when it comes to reading. That’s a fancy way of saying I like many different types of novels. If a book is good, it doesn’t matter to which genre it belongs. In most genres, it’s easy to find novels with Jewish content. That’s not…
When you hear hoof beats, do you think of horses or zebras? Unless you live in Africa, the answer for most people is horses. Yet, according to Jordan D. Rosenblum, the ancient rabbis were more interested “in the anomalous rather than the mundane. In short, when they hear hoof beats, they t…
