Jewish Holidays and Culture

Dirty Diapers of Shavuot Past

May 13, 2013

It was Shavuot 1985. I had finished college and had come to Israel the year before, where I was in the flush of religious epiphany. Everything was new, exciting and, as I gushed to family and friends back home, true – my opinions still untarnished by politics, the wisdom that comes when you’ve got more than 23 years of […]

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Freeform Seder

March 28, 2013

The run up to this year’s Pesach Seder included a remarkable – and decidedly disturbing – discovery: no one in our family really likes Pesach. No, it was worse. Some of us really hatePesach. The preparation, the cleaning, even the Seder itself doesn’t rank highly on our list of peak Jewish experiences. How could this be? […]

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The Fattest Holiday of Them All? Purim, Pesach, Shavuot or Hanukah?

February 28, 2013

Purim may now be behind us, but some of the sweets still remain. The holiday, which is officially about retelling the story of how the Jews were almost annihilated in ancient Persia, is perhaps best remembered going forward by one’s increased belly size after partaking of one too many hamentaschen – the classic triangular-shaped Purim cookie Ah, […]

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Religious “Hot or Not”

January 14, 2013

When our daughter was a junior in a religious high school in Jerusalem, the institution instituted a modesty check. One of the teachers was stationed at the front gate to the school and gave the girls a thorough look up and down before pronouncing whether they were dressed modestly enough to enter. Girls were sometimes […]

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New Israeli-Made Documentary Takes Us to the “Fringes” of Jewish life

December 19, 2012

The most remarkable thing about Paula Weiman-Kelman’s new documentary, “Fringes,” is how unremarkable it is. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Rather, the Jerusalem-based filmmaker’s latest movie, which opened to a sold-out theater at the Jerusalem Cinemateque’s Jewish Film Festival last week, presents the lives of three communities on the “fringes” of Jewish […]

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Insourcing Judaism

September 25, 2012

It is Friday afternoon and the Tel Aviv Port is hopping. The lounge chairs at the beach-front restaurants and pubs are packed as patrons fill up on seafood and down decadently prepared cocktails and imported beer. Joggers, roller-bladers and cycling enthusiasts whip around the curved wooden plaza, fashioned after the waves of the water below, […]

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Ten Years of This Normal Life

September 11, 2012

The original logo for This Normal Life It was ten years ago that I started writing This Normal Life, my personal blog. And for ten years, I have posted a minimum of one essay per week. Actually, in the first year, I published more like 2-3 a week, but as the blog became more established […]

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Escape from Novogrodek

September 7, 2012

Jack Kagan has one of the most breathtaking – and little known – stories of heroism and escape during the Holocaust. Kagan was one of 250 Jews forced into a “work camp” near Novogrodek, Belasrus. I say “work” camp because it was clear that their fate would ultimately be the same as the 15,000 Jews […]

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Shmulik and Mushkie go to Kathmandu

June 8, 2012

Shmulik and Mushkie in top left and bottom right. Chezkie and Chani in the other squares. What a resemblance! (From collive.com) Shmulik and Mushkie are not the kind of protagonists you usually see on Israeli television. The newly married Chabad couple are all set to begin their shlichut (emissary period) in Brussels when a last minute change […]

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Ambivalence on Jerusalem Day

May 21, 2012

Yom Yerushalayim was yesterday, but this post on Israelity generated so much comment, I’m reprinting it here on This Normal Life. Motta Gur before entering the Old City in 1967 I’m never quite sure what to think of Yom Yerushalayim – Jerusalem Day in English. The day commemorates the reunification of the city following the […]

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