Author: David Rutman

Rabbi Jillian Cameron of Beth Chayim Chadashim firmly insists that she is an introvert. Since no one has heard of such a rabbi, she, at times of professional requirement, undergoes a personality reversal. “I figured out how to do it,” she said. “So I became an extroverted rabbi.”  Rabbi Jillian was raised in Bergen County, […]

I was nine years old when we got our first dog … and I have had dogs on and off since then. My first dog’s name was Sandy — a beautiful golden Cocker Spaniel. She was a sweet, kind dog who cared for nothing but to be at our side and have her belly rubbed […]

The two most popular words in the Jewish communal world must surely be “Jewish education.” Walk into any board meeting of any Jewish organization and if you want the room to kvell, just talk about “the importance of Jewish education.” With the high rate of assimilation and the growing irrelevancy of organized religion to the […]

Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (ArbCom), the site’s version of a Supreme Court, announced on April 25 that two editors have been banned from the site entirely for “off-wiki misconduct” in the Palestine-Israel articles (PIA) topic area. In their announcement, the committee said it had reviewed a 244-page dossier that The Journal published in the “Gaming the […]

I am an interfaith hospice chaplain who on average handles 20 deaths every week; at times I manage 40. This number may sound staggering but it’s not. As people age and society understands death, more people will choose to die with the dignity of hospice. The career of a chaplain is not one of the […]

Amy Dell grew up in the restaurant industry and is still deli-adjacent. Her father, who is from Israel, owned Mr. Broadway kosher restaurant in New York City. Her husband, Jake, is the third-generation owner of Katz’ Deli. “When my husband and my father met, one of the first questions my father asked my husband was, […]

This week we celebrate modern-day Israel’s 77th Independence Day. On Hanukkah 1948, when Israel was 7 months old, it was fresh out of a War of Independence that claimed 6,500 lives, one percent of Israel’s population. The heroes who defended Israel were our modern-day Maccabees, the men and women of the newly established Israel Defense […]

This is the sermon I gave in the Krakow synagogue to a congregation mostly of teens in Poland for March of the Living, who walked the previous day from Auschwitz to Birkenau.  Shhhh.  Shhhhhh. In the Torah portion we read this Shabbat, when Aaron’s sons die, the Torah gives us two words — vayidom Aharon.  […]