S Blog: On money, stuff and renunciation.

BY: CARYN AVIV
In these days of foreclosures, high unemployment, and increasing poverty, a focus on consumption might be considered a frivolous pastime for the upper middle classes.   But this month’s Sh’ma really provoked a reckoning with some uncomfortable truths.  And wherever we might stand on the socioeconomic class ladder, I think it’s a good opportunity [...]

Sh’ma Blog: On politics, shame and anger

BY: CARYN AVIV
“Shame is the work of memory against forgetting.  Shame is what we feel when we almost entirely – yet not entirely – forget social expectations and our obligations to others in favor of our immediate gratification….And nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent….The shame of parenthood – which is a good [...]

Sh’ma Blog: It’s not easy.

BY: CARYN AVIV
I want to sit down for coffee with Marci Shore and Shulem Deen.   I want to talk with them about how they’re both rootless cosmopolitans, in their own particular, yet very different ways.  They’re both global travelers and itinerants, literally and metaphorically.  Both seem to identify as secular Jews.  Marci, in her piece [...]

Sh’ma Blog: For every idea, a non-profit?

BY: CARYN AVIV

As a sociologist, I’ve always been interested in what kind of frames and metaphors people use to talk about and galvanize collective social action.   Innovation is a buzzword in the Jewish world, much the way the concept of ‘continuity’ exploded onto the Jewish communal agenda in the early 1990s.
In [...]