Co-Creation: The New Imperative

Pam Edelman

A dozen New Jersey parents, reviewing a recent field trip, discuss their children’s progress in an experiment in family-driven Jewish education. A California mother organizes a group of families to study traditional Jewish texts through storytelling. Local experts are hired to facilitate discussion. A group of Atlanta families participates in a home school [...]

Developing and Accepting Choices: An Exchange of Letters on Jewish Education

Susan P. Fendrick & Jill Jacobs

Dear Sue,
My daughter Lior is only 2, but already she is learning to live in multiple worlds. She spends her weekdays in a daycare facility populated mostly by the children of Dominican immigrants — with an Arab American and an Irish American thrown in for good measure.
At [...]

Blurring Boundaries: Creating and Consuming

Wayne L. Firestone

Dalia, a college student from Boston I met with recently, equated her current Hillel internship with her work as a camp counselor; she has both the responsibility to organize and serve others and the feeling that she is a part of a larger community from which she receives tangible support and a [...]

Consumers of Elder Care

Elana Kogan

Of the Ten Commandments, honor one’s father and mother, kibud av va’em, is one of the most straightforward. In fact, we’re taught that honoring one’s own parents isn’t enough; we must honor all of the elderly: “You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old; you shall fear your God.” [...]

Co-opting Compassion

Mara Einstein

Corporate America has reframed charity as a consumer proposition. Instead of writing a check or volunteering our time, more and more Americans are donating to charities by buying products adorned with a pink ribbon or by inputting a code to an online site in order to generate a donation. Consumers do so because [...]

Synagogue Membership: What’s the Deal?

Sara Moore Litt

I have been involved in synagogue leadership for many years as a board member, executive committee member, congregation president, and board chair. You can trust me, then, when I tell you that if you are a Jewish consumer looking for value in any traditional cost/benefit sense, don’t join a synagogue. It is [...]

Power and the Purse: A Jewish Approach to Ethical Consumerism

Jason Kimelman-Block

The ripple effects of American consumerism are felt far and wide. As consumers, we live as the primary beneficiaries of a system of trade and production that has no parallel in human history. Like it or not, these arrangements are transforming our communities, our country, our planet, and people across the globe. Some [...]

Creating and Sharing Our Bounty

Jonathan Rubenstein

A well-known passage from Pirke Avot, 3:16, signifies the importance and interrelatedness of both spiritual and physical sustenance in our tradition: “Im ein kemach, ein Torah; im ein Torah, ein kemach” (“without bread [literally, ‘flour’], there is no Torah; without Torah, there is no bread”). The phrase is commonly understood to mean that [...]

Sh’ma Blog: Politics

BY: EMILY GOLDBERG
I despise politics.
Between the Democratic hippies and the right-wing Republicans, I consider myself somewhere in the middle, where most of the ignorance lies. I simply do not see the point for politics to consume the lives of average Americans. Because of politics, families have been torn apart; something as futile as a misunderstood [...]

Sh’ma Blog: Voting for Life and Peace, Sing the Voice of Your Heroes

BY: LEE FRANKEL-GOLDWATER
There are always heroes, and they walk among us.  Great figures from the past live in our hearts and minds for generations to come.  Images stirring recollections of old, and we breathe their spirit back into us as we need wisdom, guidance, and courage.
For the past year, I spent time in the [...]