Aside

Each month the journal Sh’ma posts a couple of essays from the print publication. To read all of the essays—which create a “conversation-in-print” —click on “Subscription” above. This month, we focus on stories — from the Bible through midrash, how we create stories with words and images (see Peter Pizele’s “hand-made midrash in our artistic [...]

Story Tellers: A New Story of Jewish Identity

Barry Shrage
Two different kinds of storytelling take place as part of Jewish holidays — zachor and sipur.  While the memory of other holidays is transmitted through the zachor (remembering) process, Passover requires the more active process of sipur — active, personal, storytelling. 

iPhoning It In

Ken Gordon
Running through the ”fifteen steps of the haggadah,” this seder is conducted from  an iPhone.  Here’s a Passover tweet of the future: “Manischewitz = the wine of affliction.”

Authoring, Authority, and Authenticity: The Storying of Jewish Education

Tali Zelkowicz
A Jewish educator asks how to make explicit and transparent some of the stories Jews tell about themselves and to each other about the authentic and authoritative, and ultimately generative, versions of Jewish identity formation. 

Silence and Wondering

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
It has been almost five years since my father last spoke to me. He is no doubt hurt and disappointed by what I’ve written about my childhood spent in a small Trotskyist organization known as “the party.” “It is an attack on the working class,” he would probably say. He is still a leading [...]

Sustainable Agriculture

Devora Kimelman-Block
A year ago, I found myself in inner-city Baltimore, shoveling manure into a garbage bag in a gas station parking lot. The gas station attendants were none too pleased when my farmer’s trailer, with live cattle in [...]

Bible Raps: All Tatted Up

Matt Bar
While rap greases a teenager’s pores with slimy booty, curiosity, intellect, and abstraction  — also part of the rap experience — are central to Bible raps, which create modern midrash that serve as edifying bridges to Jewish text.  

NiSh’ma – Stories & the Jewish Narrative

Featured Artist: Siona Benjamin, David Wander and Peter Pizele

Our Homes, Our Story

Jason Guberman-Pfeffer
The Jewish narrative, as any other, has an evolving storyline, composed of the interplay between history and memory. Twenty-first-century digital mapping technology affords a unique opportunity to enhance our understanding of this narrative by making thousands of Jewish heritage sites not just visible, but “visitible.” This essay is in memory of Sylvia Guberman, z”l, who made the work of Diarna possible.

Authenticity Artifacts for Tali Zelkowicz

Authenticity Artifact:
I am bringing in a promotion used on UCSD college campuses for Israel. It was a condom that said, “Israel: It’s still safe to come.”
What boundaries does it push?

At least two boundaries are pushed. First, it pushes the boundaries of how we want to define Israel. This condom defines Israel as a place where people [...]