Judy Cardozo, at The Blogs

Judy Cardozo

Nov 28, 2024, 7:19 PM

Common Ground: An Agricultural Solution to the Haredi Draft Crisis

Of the many issues currently dividing Israeli society, the Haredi draft exemption has become the most intolerable. In those terrifying first weeks of the war, the unprecedented country-wide mobilization seeded optimism that the Haredim who resisted serving in the...

Nov 3, 2024, 4:14 PM

Aliyah: 25 Years Later

Posing a question which entailed a “this or that” choice, a wise Torah teacher of mine would regularly highlight and gently mock his adult students’ need for simple constructs to complex issues. Again and again, we would fall headlong...

About Me

I have lived in Israel with my husband and three sons for 25 years. We made aliyah from Toronto but I am a New Yorker by birth and temperament. The issue of religious marginalization has always been central to my identity as a member of a very small remnant of the Spanish & Portuguese Jewish community. Our inability to be characterized with any one of the standard cultural framing devices -- we are Sephardim but not Mizrachim--has been a source of both pride and exasperation. In particular, the tyranny of parts of the Haredi world-view which has hijacked a masoret infinitely broader and deeper than the one they seek to impose as the authentic one.