Tag: Jewish

After the wild acclaim of his illustrations of the Christian Bible, Tissot began a project to illustrate the Hebrew Bible. He made one of many trips to Palestine in 1896 to draw inspiration, observing the landscape where the biblical stories took place and producing what he felt were historically ac...

The question posed in the title of this essay is deeply troubling to anyone sympathetic to the Jewish people, and should also concern any disinterested lover of humanity. As someone put it many years ago, when the beast of “antisemitism” seemed to be in deep hibernation, if Judaism could...

One of the holiest sites for the Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It was on this hill overlooking the rest of the city that King Solomon built the first Jewish Temple in 957BC in order to serve as the nucleus for the Israelite faith and as a means...

DNA tests look for Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) in people’s genomes and compare them with similar genomes in their database. Based on the similarities. They can guess the person’s ethnic background. If so, how can these tests identify Jewish ancestry, which is a religious id...

Over the past few weeks, American Jews have been brutally reminded how rampant and entrenched antisemitism still is in this country. After Kanye West’s remarks and threats against the Jewish people, Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving came under fire for promoting an antisemitic documentary to his...

I was born the daughter of a German Jewish Holocaust Survivor and a ‘poor white’ Afrikaner ‘boere meisie.’ Both, in the year that I was born in ‘sunny South Africa,’ were outcasts in their society. As their daughter, the English called me a rock-spider, the Afrika...

The Tikkunei Zohar is a mystical and enigmatic work of Jewish spirituality. It stands as a cornerstone of Kabbalistic literature. This text, often referred to as the “Tikkunim” (meaning “repair”), is a fascinating exploration of the first word of the Torah, “Bereshit...

As my 2023 came to a close and I reflected on the outgoing year, I saw some cars coming and going three days in a row for what appeared to be a shiva for a resident in my housing complex. It got me thinking about life, mortality, the closure of another year, and what being Jewish has meant...

I began writing this October 8th 2023, watching as the rockets from Gaza indiscriminately decimated innocent people of all faiths and ages in Israel, and continued looking into my saddened heart as Israel lobbed their bombs into Gaza ever since. The question? Where am I to stand in the face of such ...