June 2020 through August 2021 was supposed to be a gap year for me as I moved from my undergraduate to graduate studies. I didn’t plan for the pandemic, let alone its impact on my Jewish, scholarly ...

On Shemini Atzeret, the eighth day of Sukkot, Jews read tefillat geshem, an ancient Hebrew prayer for rain, during synagogue services. The prayer beseeches God to bring the Land of Israel enough rain ...

My first language is Yiddish, a Jewish vernacular which originated in central and eastern Europe, and was spoken by up to thirteen million people before the outbreak of World War Two. Among them were ...

Spoken by over 11 million Jews in Eastern and Central Europe before WWII, Yiddish is still today spoken by an estimated 600,000 people. It is also widely used in in traditional Jewish religious ...