Posts in Jewish Education
The Names Everyone Should Know: Mitzi’s Bat Mitzvah Shiur

On July 27th, Mitzi celebrated becoming Bat Mitzvah.
I love celebrating my students for who they are and this student loves to cook. She has a strong Jewish identity emerging from her connections with her family and communities. As we learned together this past year, Mitzi found family recipes she wanted to learn to make and I suggested some to her that had particular histories or came from parts of the Jewish diaspora she hadn’t yet explored. When it came time for her to choose what she would teach about, the choice was pretty easy. I’m honored to share her shiur here with you.
Mazel Tov to you Mitzi, and to your family!

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Guidance for Jewish Grown-Ups: Helping Schools and Organizations Respond to Antisemitism and This Moment

Antisemitism means prejudice against or hatred of Jews. I am 49. I reflected this morning that when I was in 7th and 8th grade my peers in a small town in Missouri said things to me like, “You would fit so well in an oven.” Antisemitism affects us, but it is not about us. It feels hard right now because it is hard right now. It’s real.
I’m here to help however I can. 

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Book Review! Who Even Cares? A Rebbe Nachman Tale As Told By Rabbi Gavriel Goldfelder

In which I share my first blogged book review, because this book was just that good.
Thanks to this brilliant work by Rabbi Gavriel Goldfeder, I have new language to help me focus my mind and my energy and my intention when I get off-track, even just a little, distracted by rivers of wine and giants, in my quest to find the princess. I even put a quick drawing of an apple on a post-it and affixed it to my computer screen.

This is not a story of a damsel in distress. It is not a love story. It doesn’t have a happy ending. It doesn’t have a tragic ending, either. Looked at a little sideways, it might not have an ending at all.

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Hebrew and the Unfolding of the Universe

I was seventeen the first time I remember engaging with Hebrew. I’d gone to my first, ever, High Holiday services just weeks before. I’d gone to Friday night Shabbat services enough times that I could sing along with some of the prayers - which I thought of as songs - reading along with the transliteration. That Friday night as we sang Shalom Rav I remember I touched the Hebrew letters. I touched that first one, that “sh” one, all round on the bottom and reaching up with three fingers. I touched the last one, the one that sounded like “mmm” that was a squared-off circle. I didn’t know their names, and I didn’t know that the last one was in its final form. My eyes scurried mouse-like around the page hungry for the morsels of “sh” and “m.” My hand shook. I wanted these letters. I wanted ALL of these letters.

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