February 8, 2012

 

 

Two Baseball Aficionados in Havana

by Larry Lefkowitz

April 25, 2011

 

In this new short story, author Larry Lefkowitz imagines a meeting between two very different baseball fans in Havana, Cuba - one an American Jew, the other, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. As Lefkowitz's narrator and protagonist makes his way through the winding streets of this venerable Caribbean city, the reader is drawn into his world and begins to see the landscape around him through the character's eyes.

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One Shabbat

 

by Clifford Lamm

March 22, 2011

 

In this new short story, author Clifford Lamm takes his readers on a journey through time and space, touching on Jewish culture, history and religious practice. In doing so, he draws a beautiful thread of connection, linking the Jewish past, present and future in a moving and though-provoking way.

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Shabbes Goy*

 

by Paul Beckman

February 23, 2011

 

*Shabbes Goy— A gentile doing physical work for a Jew on the Sabbath.

 

This Rabbi of my youth, who shall be nameless, not for his protection, but because I swore to myself that I would never utter his name again, called me into his office one Saturday morning. He was tall and powerful looking, with a scraggly beard that I heard some women say made him look younger instead of more mature. In this Orthodox Shul, when only those saying Kaddish stood or even remained in the Shul, the Rabbi would leave the bema during this prayer. His parents were still living and he used this time to take a break from leading the services. This is when he called me in.

 

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Running from Christmas

by Josh Zelikovitz
January 29, 2011

 

In this new short story by Canadian author Josh Zelikovitz, the author brings us into the world of a young Jewish child, caught between a burgeoning sense of Jewish identity and the Christian society in which he lives.

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Jail Bust

 

by Wendy Marcus

December 5, 2010

             

Two young women carrying shimmery scarves hurried past the mostly gray-haired Silver Sneakers ladies. Exercise class matriarch Estelle, whose pearly coif resembled a football helmet that never, ever moved, leaned in to slyly elucidate, “Belly dancers.” Like it was vulgar.

 

Sally remembered her doctor’s charge. She stepped away from the ladies in the YMCA lobby. “Go on, I’ll catch up with you.” She’d been a University District Y member for about a month. This was the first she’d heard of belly dancers. She walked down the hall and peeked around open double doors into a dance studio.
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Middlemen

by Hal Klopper

November 11, 2010

 

How unsettling it is to admire someone and find that one day your unfortunate situation quite unintentionally mirrors his. As in: after losing your girlfriends the both of you have trouble finding a date—especially if that person is your grandfather.

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Shomer

by Racelle Rosett

October 8, 2010

 

My father is a cantor, an old school baritone with a voice that is a place. He is also a television executive, starting out as an entertainment lawyer and becoming later a producer and finally an Executive Producer on shows you’ve heard of, but on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur he is a cantor, and Jews who grew up Conservative and cannot bear the thin sound of a woman’s voice come to the temple to hear him pray. Sarah Silverman’s sister is a rabbi - it’s that kind of town. I bring my books with me from Oakwood and sit in the back of the sanctuary while he rehearses with Rabbi Beth.

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The Cemetery Plot

 

by Martin LindauerSeptember 24, 2010  

“You don’t know where zayda’s grave is?” I asked my father, not hiding my astonishment. A red-eye from Brooklyn to Jerusalem, a four-hour layover in Frankfurt, a cab from the hotel to the cemetery at the Mount of Olives, a schlep up the hill from the gate--and all for nothing.

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The Baal Shem Tov's Midnight Visitor

by Ted Roberts

September 23, 2010

The followers of the Baal Shem Tov love to tell of his courage in facing up to his opponents. The holy man, they used to say, could walk among wolves without drawing a deep breath.  But the most epic confrontation of his life is rarely told. And never when children are near.  And never after nightfall. It is a fearful story unless one has pulled the cloak of faith tightly around one’s body and even then it’s best to first recite the Shema under your breath.

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Himmelshine

by Bernard Brachya Cohen

August 18, 2010

 

You could never really believe women found him attractive. A squat body, capped by a thicket of carrot-red hair that defied combing, this was Himmelshine--friend, then enemy. After more than a quarter of a century, I forced myself to see him again.

 

He reentered my life when his name appeared on the bulletin board of the only synagogue in our South Carolina town.

 

Meet Our New Rabbi

Rabbi Herschel Himmelshine

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The List of the Dead

by Lior Klirs

August 2, 2010

 

Marc L. Levinsky sat aiming a missile through the stained-glass window when he heard his name: “Marc L. Levinsky,” intoned with solemn enunciation amid the list of the dead.  After services, Marc hurried to the coat closet.  He always preferred to be the first one out.  This time, he needed to exit with special urgency.  But throngs of old men in slow-footed seminars slowed him down (his students had considered him an old man too, but there were essential differences, Marc believed, between him and these codgers who shook with palsy and smelled of pickled herring).  The Rabbi caught his sleeve.

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Yeshiva Student

by Larry Lefkowitz

July 27, 2010

 

He did not stop as was his custom to read the notices pasted on the wall, not even one signed by the rabbinical council which denoted a matter of extreme importance. Once he would have devoured such a message – perhaps there would be a demonstration. For a respected yeshiva student like himself, one who drove himself to excel, demonstrations were a way of clearing his head, in addition to performing a mitzvah.

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Was God a Libertarian?

by Ted Roberts

 

There’s no question that mountains of research have been directed to our bible. Every chapter, every verse. Lo, every word has been examined. Whole libraries have been devoted say to Leviticus or even a minor league prophet like Habakkuk. His mother, by the way, made a huge mistake in naming him. With a name like Habakkuk, who’s gonna take him seriously? Amos, Jeremiah, even Hosiah - those are thundering names, well chosen to keep us on the paths of righteousness.

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Waiting

 

by Ted Roberts

September 12, 2009

 

As in every construct in G-d’s world, there are only two sides.  So it is with the Cosmos - not only stars, constellations, and galaxies, but the Divine mind we call the universe.  One side lived like us; suffering, exalting, hoping, dreaming.  In my villiage, they tell the story of Israel, the kite flyer, who lived a mile or two down the road towards Vlank. A nice stroll from the Shtetle.

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Closing Doors

by Linda J. Goldberg

May 19, 2009

 

At last, the sun shone through the blue gray sky. Bessie fastened her glasses squarely onto her nose and remembered the phone call from her son Harry. “Come next week for the High Holidays. We all want you to come.” Bessie pictured Harry’s dark bushy eyebrows frowning as she said, “I’ll let you know.”

 

We all want you to come reverberated in her ears as she remembered the days when she entertained the family for the holidays. She spent the week setting the table with her Israeli hand-woven red tablecloth, her mother’s Russian wine glasses, and her grandmother’s silver candlesticks. For almost fifty years her husband Sam had reminded her to “Clean my Pa’s brass samovar so we can use it for tea.”

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The Parade

by Martin Lindauer

 

Shmuel crowed with obvious pride. "Our boy is the first in the family to graduate from college--and the first to be an officer of the United States Army of America."

 

"And a Jewish officer, too," Ruchel beamed.

 

"Our boy is a real American," Shmuel said with matching fervor.

 

A son with a Lieutenant’s commission in the Army of their adopted country was well worth the five-hour bus trip from Brooklyn to Fort Evans, Massachusetts. Ruchel and Shmuel, impressed by the official invitations to attend officer’s boot camp graduation, stamped with the engraved seals of the United States Army and the Department of Defense, sent off their acceptance letter the day the announcement was received.

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HAMSA

by Nina Schneider

 

On Ben Yehuda Street, you can get anything you want:  a meal, jewelry, fine wine, pastry, a lover, a fabulous haircut.  Six days a week, except for Shabbat, I work in my shop, Salon Yosi, next to the Cafe Rimon.  I like to watch people walk by, each with a story to tell, as I perform my magic with scissors and a brush.  Everyone in Israel knows this pedestrian mall in the heart of downtown Jerusalem—a few blocks outside the Old City walls--with upscale rents for shopkeepers like me.  Think Boston’s stylish Newbury Street, without the traffic, and add the random terror attack.  We live in the moment, I constantly reassure my nervous parents in Boston.  “Yeah, Ma, me and the girls, we never take the bus.”

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ECHOD

 

July 11, 2008

by Hugh Fox

 

Feeling Friday after noon begin to run down into holiness, aiming the laser beam on her cornea, goofy disease, presumably the reaction of the body to a fungus generated by leaves, earth, dog-stuff...so that the eye began to devour itself. She was lucky, if the lesion had ruptured and bled into the eye, at least at the present state of the art, she would have gone blind.

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The King and His Leg

 

(A Parable)

by Zohar Atkins

April 23, 2008

 

THERE was a king who lived in a splendid castle far from the rest of the kingdom.  One day, the king’s toe became infected.  For a long time, the king did not notice the infection.  The king, as it happens, was a giant, and it took years for his toe’s sense receptor to send signals to his brain.  By the time the king looked down at his toe, the infection had moved all the way up his leg.

 

 

 

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An Excerpt from the Novel Who by Fire, Who by Blood

April 21, 2008

by Jon Papernick

 

      The sun was setting as Stone and Gabby arrived at the Fulton Landing, just in time to see a tense wedding party dressed stiffly in full regalia, mock smile, and pose at the photographers insistent commands, shrilly barked with all the decorum of a middle-school gym teacher. The party looked miserable. Gabby quipped, “And they wonder why I’m not married.”

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Chopped Liver

(Part 1 of 2)

by Alexander Edelman

 

I boarded the L two blocks from my apartment. It was a cold, January afternoon. Bitterly cold. The kind where when the wind gusts up it feels like the cold is coming from inside your bones. It doesn't blow, it cuts.

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The Clearing

by Nina Schneider

 

Before the Aktion reached across Mittel Europa into the small village of Soleczniki, off the beaten track of civilization. Before it encircled 900 souls that hot and sleepy June afternoon in 1941, just before dinner, while Irina, the farm girl in pigtails tied with straw, picked blueberries growing along the edge of the clearing.

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