Leah Bieler, at The Blogs

Leah Bieler

Nov 21, 2023, 2:17 AM

Featured Post

Don’t give up on college campuses

Demonstrators gather with signs near the Butler Library on the Columbia University campus in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City on October 8, 2023. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

The rhetoric around this war can feel as if it is being engaged in by people who never took a humanities class

Oct 31, 2023, 9:07 PM

The Lie We’ll Never Stop Telling

In the hours after the horrendous attacks in Israel, My husband and I, along with our youngest son, sat watching Israeli channel 12 news on my phone. We didn’t really talk to one another so much as let out...

Nov 21, 2022, 12:58 AM

Featured Post

Was the brutal attack on me in my home just bad luck?

Or was he also a victim - of bad actors who manipulate vulnerable people with their conspiracies and hate?

Mar 15, 2022, 12:46 AM

On Purim, feelings about Ukraine turned upside-down

This Purim, I’m making my signature triangular whoopie pies in blue and yellow. I am, in a way, Ukrainian. Ask a non-Russian speaking American Jew where their family comes from, and they’ll almost never say, Ukraine. Galicia, they’ll offer, or...

Jan 12, 2021, 9:50 PM

Locking our history in a box

If you had the Holocaust education I did, in the 1980s, you certainly would have been assigned more than one essay with the list. The list of things you would put in your suitcase if you were given just...

Oct 7, 2020, 6:55 PM

A plea from across the chasm

Some of us, both here and there, live in the space between Israel and America. Often that space feels like a millimeter, almost a whisper. We watch the same shows on Netflix, munching absently on Bamba. Or Pringles. We...

May 21, 2020, 8:04 AM

Featured Post

Family group text, COVID style – a found poem in six stanzas

The ephemera of lockdown include shared messages about meals, laundry and, above all, remembering to count the days of the omer

Nov 17, 2019, 9:44 PM

Featured Post

Anniversaries we’d just as soon forget

In the year since a stranger with a knife attacked me and my family at home, I've learned empathy for those who have suffered even worse

Jan 24, 2019, 9:52 PM

Featured Post

Someone else’s memories

The mass of jeering, mocking, vaguely threatening young men immediately brought Cossacks to mind. Or maybe Nazis

Nov 1, 2018, 1:03 AM

On name-calling, and Seinfeld

Let’s all just agree to blame Jerry Seinfeld. His infamous ‘Soup Nazi’ episode killed two birds with one stone. It was a green light to Jews to laugh publicly, out loud, about something that had until then been largely...

About Me

Leah Bieler has an MA in Talmud and Rabbinics. She teaches Talmud to students of all ages and backgrounds. Leah spends the school year in Massachusetts and summers in Jerusalem with her husband and four children. Sometimes she writes to get a break from them. The children, that is.