In the past, my husband and I would rush out after Yom Kippur services to break the fast with friends, either at their house or at ours. The transition always felt jarring, a stark contrast with the immersive, meditative day. So one year, we decided to stay put and attend the Temple-sponsored Break-the-Fast. I’d always…
As a kid, I didn’t know much about charity beyond the blue-and-white rectangular boxes that my father kept at the cash register in his retail store in Berkeley. The boxes jiggled heavily, satisfyingly, as loose change piled up inside to help make the faraway land of Israel green with trees. Charity was a matter of…
This book is brilliant, chilling and necessary. Dr. Sztokman does a comprehensive and insightful job exploring sexual abuse among rabbis and other high-profile Jewish professionals and donors. As a survivor of abuse at the hands of a congregational rabbi in a Reform setting, I found some of the book especially painful and resonant — for…
On a dreary January morning in 1986, I sat in my hospital bed weeping, trying to pretend to my husband, Mark, that it was the hormones. It should have been a joyous day. The night before last, I’d given birth to a beautiful, healthy baby boy. This morning was the circumcision. Mark and I are…
Originally published in the S.F. Chronicle, Sunday, October 11, 1998 Thousand Oaks Elementary School is gone now, and I suppose one could argue that the field of dirt on which a new structure will ultimately be built is already an improvement over what the place had become. Years of neglect had ravaged the once…