Category: Science and Health

Literary depictions of love and friendship usually omit the part about cleaning the floor. But one anecdote in the Talmud breaks the pattern: There was once an incident involving a student of Rabbi Akiva’s who fell ill. The Sages did not visit him; but Rabbi Akiva did. Because Rabbi Akiva swept and sprinkled water and […]

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 […]

In 1990, George Franklin was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison based on the testimony of his 28-year-old daughter Eileen. She described seeing him rape her best friend and then smash her skull with a rock. When Eileen testified at her father’s trial, her memory of the murder was relatively fresh. It was less […]