Novels based on true stories: there are several ways these can be written. One is to create characters who borrow from the experience of real people, but who are definitely fictional. Another is to treat a real person as a character and write a fictionalized version of a biography or memoir.…
by Rabbi Rachel Esserman
Different opinions and rabbinic debate: those were staples of Jewish religious dialogue as Judaism moved from a sacrificial-based religion to a prayer-based one. As technology changed so did debates on what Judaism thinks about everything from electricity to plant…
by Rabbi Rachel Esserman
“We’re not making riots... But if we cry at home, nobody sees us. We have to help ourselves.” Those were the words Rose Baskin spoke to City Magistrate Robert C. Cornell during her trial at the Essex Market Police Court on May 16, 1902. Although she received…
While I read a few classic mysteries in college (the works of Dashiell Hammett and Dorothy L. Sayers, for example), I didn’t follow any contemporary series. That changed after reading Stuart Kaminsky’s “Murder on the Yellow Brick Road,” which arrived as a bonus book from a mail-order…
“Time is one of the most basic examples of something that is socially constructed. We collectively create the meaning of time – it has no predetermined meaning until we give it meaning. To say that something, like time, is a social [construct] is not to say that it doesn’t exist or it …
