Certain words or phrases I hear when I am out and about make my "antenna" go up. You could understand that terms like Jewish, Judaism, and the like do that. As does the word antisemitism. This word has been at the forefront of my mind, as you could probably guess, based on my past columns, b…
There are moments from my past I remember vividly. One of them was the Shavuot service back in 1990 when I was 16 and went through Confirmation as part of a 38-member class at Temple Isaiah in the Bay Area. I remember how tight-knit my class was and how much fun we had together. In fact, man…
When Hannah, our oldest daughter, was 12, she turned to me in the car one day and told me she had finally figured out what I did for a living. I said, “Really… and what is that?” With a sense of innocence, she said, “You shmooze.”
While I have shared that story with the community …
Yesterday was an important day in the lives of many of our community's teens…. College acceptance day. Each year, on May 1, graduating high school seniors nationwide must select the school they intend to begin their college education. Back in 2021, Hannah, our daughter, chose to attend the…
In 1990, when I was 16 years old, I went to Israel for the first time as a participant on a six-week trip to Israel with 45 other teens from the East Bay. I had dreamed of visiting our ancestral homeland for many years, and I was the first person in my family to walk on the land described i…
