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Two-Way Giving

By Howard Shapiro

In October, they began. This time next year, they will have finished. In between, it’s a big commitment to become a docent. It takes a lot of knowledge and plenty of spare time.Read More

‘Detectives’ on the Trail of Family History and Long-Lost Relatives

By Howard Shapiro

The 1,000 people who came from all over to the International Conference on Jewish Genealogy are bubbes and mommies, fathers and sons, and professionals and retirees, and besides being Jewish, they all have one thing in common.Read More

Youngish, Yiddish and Staging a Revival

By Howard Shapiro

Yiddish was alive and doing quite well, for a sure few hours, at a synagogue on the edge of downtown Philadelphia. Onstage, six performers — in their 20s and 30s, which constitutes young for Yiddish speakers — were speaking the centuries-old language of European Jews with ease. The jokes were flying. The music was piping.Read More

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Jew

By Howard Shapiro

The young man, who calls himself an artist, looks out to an audience eying him from risers laid along the floor-level stage. He speaks of his reputation without irony. He calls himself a traitor. A self-hater. A blasphemer. His name is Asher Lev, he says, introducing himself by declaiming his legacy. “I am none of those things,” he tells us. “And of course, in some ways, I am all of those things.”Read More

Five Sites That Whet the Appetite for Travel

By Howard Shapiro

The other night, I went looking for a synagogue in France. When I began my journey on the Web, I didn’t know that this particular synagogue was the country’s oldest; I only knew that it was in France and it was said to be a beauty. I learned about its age — deep roots into the 14th century — later in the evening, when I took a turn down a path I never expected. There, I also discovered that the remains of ritual baths from that era are in that synagogue’s basement.Read More


     

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