More on: Judaism

Content warning: this story includes a depiction of sexual violence. SALIM PEERS THROUGH the peephole in the men’s room in Temple B’nai Moshe and sees two girls standing side by side at the row of sinks in the ladies’ bathroom. One is tall and slim with golden hair that cups her scalp like a swim…

I came into the land as if into a kiln to add more fire to the fire burning. To add another body for the keen blade of the Hebrew destiny. And at a gloomy hour I feel myself in the land of Israel as if deep in the cut of the wound— and it is…

in every generation, each person must regard himself or herself as if he or she were the one liberated, on the very night of Passover, from Egypt                                         adapted from the Passover Haggadah This won’t do, the Seder your grandmother cooked and indexed on cards to leap down the generations; this won’t do, the Seder…

THE THREE OF US got on bus 20 and rode from Ir Ganim to the Jaffa Gate of the Old City. The other two, a lieutenant-general from the air force and an Australian reporter who hated Jews, sat facing me, knees touching knees. I reminded them who I was, the man who when young swore…

THIS IS WHAT THINGS ARE LIKE HERE. The Palestinian fedayeen raids continue without mercy. Hardly a week goes by without a civilian being shot or ambushed in the Israeli Sector. Aubrey visits now and then, the young man’s face unalterably severe. He says there is a sense of foreboding in the air, a quiet dread,…

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…

Like one nation divided, the older—by three minutes—bragged: We had a race, and I won. The younger would respond: We had a fight. I kicked him out. Impossible to tell them apart— in photos, in home movies— hairy and smooth in equal measures, matching clothes, thin bodies, freckled, blue eyes behind black-framed glasses— as babies,…

At the Synagogue Rummage Sale during Holocaust Remembrance Day Basement, Butler, Pennsylvania, the gentiles bargaining for old tallises, worn yarmulkes, a torn challah cover, a stained torah, a hundred thumbed copies of Anne Frank— I walk out and past a circle of bat mitzvah-aged girls and our rabbi, who stops me and asks if I’ll…

A shape less recognizable each week, A purpose more obscure. ________—Philip Larkin, “Church Going” In spite of fundamentalists, it keeps on being true, what Larkin said. I’m walking through with my Jewish daughter and her three boys, the stone and glass saying not a word to make any of us believe, but I’m seeing the…

_____The row of goyim, that’s us, family of half the family, those who don’t talk of Israel at dinner, here because of fate, because of the strangeness of our children, because of this grandchild in his tallis, his kippot, words we read the leaflet to know. We watch the Torah lifted from its rainbow tomb,…