By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
Making jGirls voices heard
Adults often look back at their youth through rose-colored glasses. But life is not always easy for the teenagers, something that becomes clear in the poems, stories, essays and artwork by Jewish teens that appear in “Salt and Honey: Je…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
The phrase “a woman’s novel” is considered an insult in many literary circles, as if the deeds of daily life can be easily dismissed and are of interest only to women. For me, a woman’s novel encompasses a wide range of basic and important human behaviors th…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
Scholarly works about the Bible can approach the text in a variety of ways. Some are interested in when the work, as we know it, came into being. Others are fascinated by the various strands they see in the text and attribute them to different authors. Two recent wo…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
When discussing what might be learned about the past from found objects, our first reaction might be to think of archeological sites. Scholars study the remains of former cultures to learn how people behaved and to hypothesize what life might have been like during t…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
Pages from the “The Koren Tanakh Graphic Novel: Esther (The Magerman Edition).” (Photos used with the permission of Koren Publishers Jerusalem Ltd.)
Biblical commentaries offer us new ways to look at the Torah text. However, there are limitations to using…
