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Sep 23, 2026, 6:26 PM

The Happy Holiday: Succot Memories and Guests

The Holiday of Joy On Sukkot, we are commanded to be happy!! You shall rejoice in your festival, וְשָׂמַחְתָּ֖ בְּחַגֶּ֑ךָ, with your son and daughter, your male and female slave, the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow in your...

Sep 20, 2026, 4:57 PM

A Year of Firsts

I have no one to bless me this year. That thought had been stuck in my head since Rosh Hashanah. In my family, my father didn’t bless us every Friday night. Some families do. It wasn’t our minhag. But Erev Yom...

Sep 18, 2026, 12:14 AM

She stared at the poster pinned to her bedroom wall—the powder-blue wall directly across from her bed. The poster had hung there for years. Its colors had faded, as had her love of rap and hip-hop. But she was still...

Walter Estever Gonzalez

Sep 17, 2026, 6:51 AM

Seven Passports for a Journey That Never Happened

Walter Estever Gonzalez at approximately four or five years old in El Salvador. This surviving copy comes from a photograph taken for a passport intended for a family journey to Mexico that never took place. (Courtesy of the author)

There is a photograph of me from when I was four or five years old. I am wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt and looking directly at the camera with the seriousness children sometimes have when adults tell them not...

Carol Silver Elliott

Sep 16, 2026, 12:21 AM

We are beginning another year, 5787 on the Jewish calendar. These Days of Awe are a time for us to reflect on the year that is ending and think about the year that is to come. While making resolutions...

Tony D. Senatore

Sep 15, 2026, 7:53 PM

What Pro-Life Means to Me

What if being pro-life did not mean telling a woman what she must do, but instead meant creating a world in which fewer women felt that abortion was their only choice? I consider myself pro-life, but I do not believe...

Sep 15, 2026, 6:24 PM

Like son, like father: Both review same tractate before youngster’s bar mitzvah

How many bar mitzvah boys, preparing for their coming-of-age day by studying the Torah portion and maftir prophetical portion of their bar mitzvah date, also decide to include an entire tractate of the Talmud in their bar mitzvah preparation? Some...

Sep 15, 2026, 12:24 AM

Twenty-five years after 9/11

Twenty-five years after the Twin Towers fell, a reporter working on a story about our family’s 9/11 experience told me something that I had never realized: my son Jacob's first memory was breathing through a wet sleeve on the...

Janet Bond Brill

Sep 15, 2026, 12:05 AM

Never Again Means Recognizing the Sparks: The Sparks on Lexington Avenue

A woman I went to high school with posted something to Facebook last week. We were never close. She was a face in a hallway and she is a name in a feed now, which is how most of...

Sep 14, 2026, 7:11 PM

We fool ourselves

It is human nature to do things for what we think is a very good reason, but people fool themselves. An example is the modern-day practice of Hebrew-loving Jews calling their grandparents by names they think are ancient Hebrew....

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