On Shabbat, I was sitting on our porch wearing my kippah, enjoying the gorgeous weather and waiting for a bunch of guests to arrive. An older African-American woman walked by pushing her grocery cart — looked at me, made longer than usual eye contact, and slowed down. …

this big white rocky mountain of a Tennessee man for a cigarette he obliges saying on a clear day, you can see north carolina from here eight glorious unfolding ripples of purple smoky mountains but that forest fire is burning out of control you can’t see the flames but you can see the…

18 months ago, Donald Trump wandered into America politics like an angry-drunk New York Post headline. Now, he is our President-elect. I want to scream. An actual fascist has assumed power in America. We will have to learn to resist. Yes, we need an accounting — what happened, what can…

I recently did an extended audio and transcript of an audio interview with an inspiring figure of the emerging Jewish movement IfNotNow, Simone Zimmerman. A condensed version of the interview was first published on +972, and in it, I wrote: Simone Zimmerman has become an inspiring figure for American Jewish…

As violence builds and echoes and reverberates on our streets and in our collective psyche, I’ve found myself paralyzed by inaction and confused about what to do. I don’t think I’m the only one. Now I see that I was hiding from the truth about how deep the problems are…

As Passover approached this year, there was something about the Exodus text that had bothered me for years. How exactly did the Israelites become slaves in the first place? Before we can be liberated, we had to become enslaved — and how did that happen exactly? As I dug deeper…

Wrote this up for the Forward on the Simone Zimmerman / Bernie Sanders / Israel debacle. Why Simone Zimmerman and Bernie Sanders Are Still on Same Side on Israel — Suspension or No Just weeks after thousands of Israel advocates applauded Donald Trump at AIPAC, some of the same voices…

Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of American’s Nones, by Elizabeth Drescher. Just started, but excited to hear another way of looking at the “Nones” phenomenon. Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition, by Rabbi Art Green. Reading this as a part of some Jewish learning I’m doing, and love the…

I recently got an email from a movement friend asking me for my “productivity tips,” and I wrote back a long note which is summarized below. I realized in the process of writing this up that I’ve thought a lot about this over the last few years — and figured…