I began learning Hebrew as a toddler at Levine Academy. We began with the letters and then over the years dedicated more and more time to learning the ins and…
I spent a lot of my time over the past several years explaining to friends, family and strangers why I made aliyah and why I encourage others to do the…
People don’t really like us. We’ve been chased out of country after country, persecuted and discriminated against on six continents (the penguins seem generally averse to anti-Semitism) and in the…
I’ve always loved fast days. Maybe because feeling the dedication and mourning in my empty stomach makes my abstract faith feel suddenly very tangible, or maybe because I love breaking…
I’ve lived my life between the two largest Jewish communities of our time, those of Israel and the United States. And over the past several decades, drastically different levels of…
By Matan Rudner While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is disproportionately covered by Western media outlets, Americans are far less acquainted with the nonviolent, internal conflicts between opposing social groups in Israel.…
By Matan Rudner I have a complicated relationship with America. It’s the place where I was born and raised, where as an impressionable youth I first began to understand the…
By Matan Rudner In the seven decades since the establishment of the third Jewish commonwealth, we have revived our language, made the desert bloom, and ingathered the exiles of our…
By Matan Rudner Amid a rapidly changing world, the Jewish community, like all communities of faith, is trying its hardest to preserve its heritage, and pass it on to the…
Throughout millennia of our existence, we’ve transformed from family to tribe, and from people to nation. For thousands of years, we’ve retained a distinctly Jewish ethnicity, culture and system of…