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In Jewish life, we are rarely afforded the luxury of a single, uncomplicated value. Instead, we live in the tension between competing obligations. For years, I have sat between shmirat halashon (guarding one’s speech, Sefer Chofetz Chaim) and tochechah (the responsibility to offer rebuke, Arakhin 16b). I have tried to uphold lo levayesh, the prohibition…

Jewish Peoplehood Becomes Infrastructure When Crisis Hits and the Safety Net Activates The image represents a very difficult reality. A woman embraces Chana, an evacuee from Beit Shemesh. Her home was damaged by a missile strike in the most recent war with the Iranian Regime. Her husband, living with dementia, keeps asking to go back…

[Writer’s Note: Despite interfaith theoretical debates, I do not believe that all folks pray to the “same god.” I believe the Jewish God is specifically Adonai/HaShem/AdoShem. Please also note how I use lower case and upper case G as well as a differentiator between Jewish and not.] The response to my recent piece on what…

In recent days, the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival has found itself at the center of a significant and very public communal rupture. [AJFF is recognized as the largest Jewish film festival in the world, often attracting over 38,000 attendees annually.] The Israeli Consulate in Atlanta announced that it was withdrawing its partnership and financial support…

The Work of Adding Our Spark to Everyday Items In the early 2000s, when I was working at Congregation Shearith Israel in Dallas, Rabbi David Glickman gave a sermon that has stayed with me for more than two decades. He began, unexpectedly, with Harry Potter. He talked about how, because Harry was a wizard and…

A Grandfather I Never Met, and the Legacy I Inherited Today, January 29, 2026, is my maternal grandfather’s 68th English yahrtzeit. My maternal grandfather was murdered when my mother was thirteen years old. I never met him. I know him through stories, newspaper clippings, and the quiet rules that shaped our home. We were not…

Religion in Public Charter Schools, and Why We Shouldn’t Push for Exception I have been thinking a great deal about this new article from eJewishPhilanthropy, which examines how Oklahoma’s Jewish community is pushing back against a proposed shift in a Hebrew charter school model. Years ago, I was invited to sit on an exploratory committee…

When Justice Spaces Become Unsafe for Jews This piece is being published on MLK weekend intentionally:not because this is a moment of moral clarity, but because it is a moment of moral strain. Jews have long stood in public spaces alongside vulnerable communities because we recognize the terrain. Displacement. Demonization. Conditional belonging. We do not…

Language, Identity, and the Problem of Shared Words “I’m a secular Jew.” It’s a phrase that appears constantly in American Jewish life. People use it as shorthand. Sometimes as a disclaimer. Sometimes as protection. Sometimes because it feels like the only available option when none of the familiar denominational boxes fit. The problem is not…

Back in 2018, while working on my doctoral pursuits, I wrote this blog about how Jewish identity cannot be framed in the Christian construct of “Religious or Spiritual” and began developing a framework based in lived Jewish experience. During that process, with feedback and a few iterations, I landed on a version released in this…

My head is spinning from the total overwhelming nature of JewHate around the world. I was sharing with my non-Jewish psychiatrist how overwhelming it can be to be a Jew right now and even moreso a Jewish professional. I expressed sadness that I am not sure if I will ever have again in my lifetime…

So much of my Judaism is connected to my maternal great-grandmother. While she passed when I was three months old (and we only met once), so much of her Judaism was passed to me through her seven children, her 16 grandchildren, and dozens and dozens of stories. When my mom would use the food processor…