NEW YORK -- If your mother has never seen your face -- if you have never had a face to be seen -- if, in a sense, you have never been born -- do you have a mother? If your mother has always called you "son," can you ever really become her daughter? For...
By JTA Staff, 6nobacon.com
• Published February 14, 2012
NEW YORK -- She may not be the 2012 cover girl, but Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli is back in this year's edition of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Three months ago it was reported that Refaeli and Israeli supermodel Esti Ginsburg would not be...
Our deepest relationships are not defined by strength, but by vulnerability. Our parsha begins with Judah approaching Joseph from a position of weakness. He offers his own life in exchange for his younger brother, Binyamin. In his plea, his vulnerability...
BY RABBI JUSTIN KERBER
• Published January 4, 2012
I noticed something peculiar in the story of our ancestor Jacob's young adult life. "And G!d went up from him." (Gen. 35:13) It looked almost as if God "lifted off" from him. Could it really be, I wondered, that with the ending of Jacob's conflicts with...
By Rabbi Roxanne J.S. Shapiro
• Published December 14, 2011
A "ketonet passim" (ornamented tunic/striped tunic/robe of many colors) caused all this mess? Joseph was hated for this?It was not the tunic itself...but rather what it represented. Why should Joseph be blamed? He could not help that his father loved...
By Rabbi Justin S. Kerber
• Published December 7, 2011
Less than a week before the start of the Jewish New Year, Erev Rosh Hashanah, our family was blessed with a new baby. Amid the joy of this fall, as we have entered him into the Covenant of Abraham and formally named him after beloved family members we...
As the Torah portion Vayetzei (Gen. 28:10 - 32:3) opens, our spiritual ancestor, Jacob, is running from his brother, Esau's, wrath after obtaining his brother's birthright blessing by trickery. Jacob makes camp, and has an amazing dream: angels are going...
BY ROBERT A. COHN, Editor-In-Chief Emeritus
• Published April 27, 2011
Clifford Odets, one of the leading playwrights of left-wing social protest and a master craftsman of Depression-era Jewish family dynamics, would no doubt be proud of the soaring New Jewish Theatre production of one of his best plays, "Awake and Sing,"...
