Category archive for ‘Community’ 
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Free to Be Jew and Me
You–yes, you, and no one else–are in charge of your Judaism. Every Jewish choice you will ever be faced with is yours to decide, not your movement’s to decide for you. For prospective converts, that includes deciding on the type of Jew you want to be.
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You Take the Good, You Take the Bad
A Jew who’s always happy is like an Illinois Governor who’s always law-abiding. The concept is faulty on the face of it. Simcha and tsouris go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other. In life, or on the blogosphere.
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You Got Your Bar Mitzah Ceremony in My Shabbat Morning Service!
When the b’nai mitzvah crowds elbow regular synagogue members out of the sanctuary, whose Shabbos is it, anyway?
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Shake Hands with Whose Uncle Max?
All Jewish converts face the challenge of fitting into Judaism and into a Jewish community. But how do you find your comfort zone in a sanctuary echoing with the sounds of chanted Hebrew, and full of people with last names and lifetime experiences different than yours? You do, with practice. And time.
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Jewish with the Drawbridge Pulled Up
There’s a right way and a wrong way for Jewish institutions to welcome visitors. The moment the balance between security and openness starts to close an institution off from the wider community is the moment it gets harder to repair the world.
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One Fewer Online Community for Converts
It was fun while it lasted. It imploded unexpectedly. A sudden farewell to the now-defunct JewsByChoice.org.
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Life, the Universe, and Everything Jewish: Six Years of Chicago Carless
Three months after officially joining the Jewish people, things make sense in a way I never expected. Some say Jewish converts are born with a Jewish spark waiting to be realized. Now I realize how the past six years of my blog–and the past 41 years of my life–have led me to my Jewish self.
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A Blog Post from Camp
Hello, muddah. Hello, faddah. Here I am at camp OSRUI. An unexpected lesson on my first synagogue retreat to the Union for Reform Judaism’s Midwest overnight youth camp.
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“They think they’re the only ones up here.”
Which of these commonly held assumptions about Orthodox Judaism in America is true? A.) Orthodoxy is an unchanged, ancient tradition. B.) Orthodoxy has always been stringently observant. C.) Conservative and Reform Judaism emerged out of Orthodoxy as increasingly less “authentic” versions of Judaism. Actually, none of the above.
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Secular vs.
Shifting from a secular life to a religiously observant one can definitely teach you who your friends are–and aren’t. My social circle looks very different at the end of my Jewish conversion journey than it did at the beginning of it. That’s OK.
