By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
Ancient Rome has gone down in Jewish history as the ultimate enemy of the Jewish people. Even the Babylonians, who destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem, were not considered as evil. Perhaps that’s because the Jewish population was able to rebuild the Temple abo…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
People emigrate to a country for a variety of reasons. Some leave their native shores after experiencing persecution. Others come for economic reasons; a few even plan to return to their former homes once they’ve made their fortune. Then there are those looking to…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
When I took American history classes in high school, several aspects of our past were ignored. We never learned about the restraints placed on Jewish immigration to the U.S., even when it became clear how dangerous it was to be Jewish in Europe before and during Wor…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
According to the dictionary, an author is a person who writes a book. That leads to an interesting question: can someone be called an author if the overwhelming majority of the prose in her work was written by someone else? That question arose because Rachel Cocker…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
While I love a good, complex, many-paged literary novel, there are joys to be found in other types of writing. I prefer not to read too many books from the same genre in a row; it’s more fun to switch around and experience a variety of subject matters and plots.…
