Author: Mark Hershlag

(JR) — “Look mom, he’s a beautiful butterfly,” a child shouted, pointing at me, as I marched up Fifth Avenue in drag on June 4 at the Celebrate Israel Parade. I could only imagine how meaningful it would have been for me as a kid to see drag included as part of this annual Jewish […]

(JR) — “Although I was born in Germany, my formative years were spent in the early, idealistic days of the cooperative Jewish settlements, in pre-Israel, Palestine,” wrote Amitai Etzioni in his 2003 memoir, “My Brother’s Keeper.” In writing about his early years in a cooperative settlement called Kfar Shmaryahu, the Israeli-American sociologist and polymath provided […]

This story originally appeared on My Jewish Learning. (JR) — Over the past few weeks, a lot of sad faces were peering at their screens as two popular television shows came to an end. Two HBO staples, “Succession” and “Barry,” aired their season finales in late May. And as happens with all high-drama prestige television, the […]

(JR) — My 95-year-old mother knows a thing or two about trauma. Not only because she is a survivor of Auschwitz but also because she is a psychologist. “What worries me,” my mother says, “is that we Jews will succumb to our past trauma rather than rise above it.” I share my mother’s concern. Jewish Americans […]

(JR) — When my wife and I were planning our wedding, we thought it might be cool to hire a klezmer band. This was during the first wave of the klezmer revival, when groups like The Klezmatics and The Klezmer Conservatory Band were rediscovering the genre of Jewish wedding music popular for centuries in Yiddish-speaking […]

This story originally appeared on My Jewish Learning. (JR) — The Shavuot holiday that we observed last month commemorates two different kinds of harvests. Originally an agricultural festival, Shavuot marked the culmination of the wheat harvest in the ancient land of Israel. Only later did the rabbis layer on the receiving of the Torah to the holiday. Just as we […]

(JR) — Rabbi Arthur Green gave the commencement address last week at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative flagship where he was ordained 56 years earlier. His talk was mostly a response to political turmoil in Israel, but he also urged the graduates to pioneer a “new Judaism.” “I had the good fortune, as a […]

(JR) — On the way home from the hospital where I was given my diagnosis of grade 2 invasive lobular breast cancer, I directed my husband, through my tears, to stop at the kosher store. “I don’t want to see anyone right now,” I said, knowing the inevitability of running into someone we knew in […]

(JR) — Recently, I watched a mother reunite with her son for the first time in 41 years. On May 9, I was part of a delegation of the Jewish Agency for Israel that accompanied Ethiopian olim (immigrants) from Addis Ababa to Ben Gurion Airport and new lives in Israel. The mother had made aliyah […]

(JR) — As the Biden administration nears the long-awaited announcement of its National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, tensions have emerged over what definition of antisemitism the White House will use. According to Jewish Insider, “major mainstream Jewish groups” are battling against the “left” to define antisemitism, suggesting that the groups’ preferred definition, that of the International […]