Author: Meghan Froy

Eating at a Jewish delicatessen engages all your senses. You taste the juicy pastrami bursting between two slices of rye, smell the sweet scent of schmaltz, hear the hot dogs sizzling on the grill, and feel like you’re eating with family — welcomed, yet your privacy is invaded by the tad-too-nosy waiter. But what exactly […]

Today’s daf begins a new chapter of our tractate and a new series of questions about how to fulfill the mitzvah of dwelling in the sukkah, and it starts with the following mishnah: One who sleeps below the bed in a sukkah has not fulfilled their obligation to sleep in the sukkah. The Talmud never tells us why […]

Today, the Gemara asks: Why do I need all of these? No, the Gemara is not downsizing and looking to rid itself of sweaters that it hasn’t worn in three years. Rather, it’s asking about a mishnah that teaches that s’chach (roofing materials) that would normally render a sukkah invalid are fine if they are located at the outer edge of the […]

Those of us who are into interior design hang all sorts of things in our living spaces to personalize them. We hang pictures on our walls. We hang curtains in our windows. We hang plants in our windows and on our patios. Today’s daf asks about hanging something else — the wall itself! Most of […]

We’re looking for a part-time Social Media Intern to join our remote team for a paid, three-month internship. This job is right for you if you are passionate about food, interested in general food trends, love scrolling Instagram and TikTok, and are interested in creating dynamic content for social media specifically around Jewish food. The […]

Building a sukkah from scratch is a great deal of work. What if you could use something you already have — like your house? It turns out that although the sukkah must be a temporary structure, and it must be intentionally prepared in the days leading up to the holiday, you can use your house as part of that […]

The Jews of Jamaica make up a small but vibrant religious community centered today in the capital of Kingston. While the core of the community traces its ancestry to the Iberian peninsula, and the Jewish exodus that began in the late 15th century, Jamaican Jews today come from Poland, France, Italy, Africa, Israel, Turkey, and […]

In the Gemara today, we are deep into a discussion of appropriate s’chach (roofing material) for the sukkah. We learned in a mishnah that bundled materials are inappropriate, as the branches should be loose and scattered (though the Gemara accepts “naturally” bundled material, so you don’t have to physically rip palm branches apart). Plants that smell bad or that are […]

One of the challenges that face those studying the rabbinic mindset is to understand how difficult it is to translate accurately from one language to another and do justice to the concepts.  Nowhere is this more obvious than in discussing issues of tum’ah and taharah, which are usually translated as “impurity” and “purity.” In English, for example, these […]