Tag Archives: memoir

You Can’t Do What You Can’t Do

Posted on May 3, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            Sometime over the winter, one of the rabbis at my synagogue announced that there would be a week-long volunteer trip to Israel in August, for teenagers and adults, and, oh yeah, they were applying for a grant to subsidize half the cost of the trip.

            That was all the information available at the time, but I already knew I wanted to go, desperately. I fought against the loud voice in my head telling me that going to Israel during the hottest month of the year, and volunteering, most likely outdoors, would be impossible for me, because the idea of going to Israel with people I knew, and being able to learn more about the situation on the ground, and to be of use, at an affordable price, just seemed like the answer to a lot of my prayers.

            So, I started to prepare myself. I wrote out a long list of what I’d need to bring with me (meds, sunblock, water bottle, adapters for the electricity, sim card for the phone, a week’s worth of clothes, Icy Hot patches, extra pain meds, etc.), and I wrote through all of the reasons not to go (fear of the effect of the heat on my autoimmune symptoms, fear of being lonely, fear of pain and exhaustion, fear that something would happen to Mom or Tzipporah while I was gone, fear that I would be too shy to use my Hebrew, fear of feeling bored, or trapped, or disappointed, or confused, etc.). And then I wrote out as many ideas as I could think of for how to deal with those fears.

“Wait, what’s going to happen to ME?!

But despite all of my efforts, I couldn’t plan for the trip until I knew exactly what the trip would entail. So, I reached out to the rabbi with my concerns (how much time would be spent outdoors, would the volunteering activities be things I could actually do, would there be rest periods for recovery, etc.), and she sent me the planned itinerary, with the proviso that, because all of the volunteering locations were small and relatively new, there wouldn’t be any room for adaptations.

And it looked amazing! They would barely be staying in one place for more than a day, traveling to the north and the south and in between, meeting people who were rebuilding in the north after a year of bombing from Hezbollah, and meeting Israelis of all religious backgrounds working to help each other, and meeting families of those who were killed on October seventh, and families of hostages, and Palestinian citizens of Israel, and helping rebuild the agriculture sector in the south that was impacted both by October seventh and by so many men being pulled into the army reserves and out of the fields. There was one afternoon set aside for potential beach time, but other than that, free time didn’t exist.

            I was in awe of the opportunity to meet so many different people working in so many different parts of Israeli society, and the more I read, the more I wanted to go. But no matter how I tried to move things around in my mind, and research all of the sites and turn the pages this way and that, it became clear that I would barely survive day one, let alone a whole week. Except, a big part of me was still in denial, imagining that if I just spent the next few months in physical therapy, and had a miraculous recovery from all of my health issues before August, and maybe found myself a full-body airconditioned suit to wear, I’d be okay.

            The tour guide who would be leading the trip (and who had been leading bi-weekly zooms for us since October seventh, to help us understand how Israelis were reacting to the Hamas attack and the ensuing war), came to the synagogue for an in-person visit leading up to  registration for the trip. I sat in the sanctuary and listened to his impassioned thoughts on the current political turmoil in Israel, and the moral quandaries of the war, and the grief and anger around the hostages still trapped in Gaza, and the communal efforts to support those who were struggling, and I could envision myself in Israel, marching for the hostages, and marching for democracy. In my imagination I could walk for miles, in the heat, singing and calling out at the top of my lungs, even though I’ve never been able to do anything like that here at home.

At one point in the evening, when I was sitting next to the older rabbi from our congregation, who had either led or participated in every previous synagogue trip to Israel, and who had marched in many protests over the years, I told him how much I wanted to go on this trip, and he told me that he would not be going because it would be too much for him. “But, but doesn’t it look amazing?!” I asked, and he shrugged and said, “You can’t do what you can’t do. There will be other trips.”

            And the bubble burst. I knew he was right, and that he was speaking as much to my situation as to his, whether he meant to or not. Of course I couldn’t go on this trip, and it felt awful to have to know that; just like it feels awful every time I have to accept a reality I don’t like. You would think I’d be more practiced at handling disappointment by now, but I suck at it every single time.

            I still made a point of applying for a new passport though (after years of putting it off), just in case, and I kept my packing list and my research on the different volunteering sites, and I continued to add hundreds of Israel-related videos to my YouTube watchlist to fill out my understanding of the culture and the people. One day, hopefully not too far in the future, the right opportunity to go to Israel will come up, and in the meantime I will keep doing the work I am capable of doing so that I’m ready to go when the time comes.

“Puppy, cover my ears!”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Improvisation

Posted on April 26, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            One of the things I have had to learn how to do since I started teaching in the synagogue school is how to improvise. You never know what mood the kids will be in after a long day at public school, or what changes will come up in the outside world, or in our own worlds, and really, there has been a lot of change in the Jewish world over the past six years. Each year, there’s also the reality that a different group of kids will have different interests and different abilities and limitations, and I have to adapt my plans to fit what works best for them.

“Do you know what works for me? Chicken.”

            It has turned out that, this year, the one thing all of my students seem to love is performing; and while some of them like to sing, or dance, or tell jokes, they all like to act. I discovered this mostly by accident one Sunday morning, when one of my most energetic and curious students looked at the day’s quote from Leviticus, and dropped her head onto her desk and asked, “Why are there so many words in this book? What happened to all of the stories?”

            And she was absolutely right. Other than an interlude wherein two of Aaron’s priestly sons are killed for, um, inappropriate practices in front of God (which I did not share with my students, for obvious reasons), most of Leviticus is made up of a list of laws: fascinating and complex laws, divisive and bizarre laws, laws that only applied in the past and laws that can still serve us well today. And all of that can definitely lead to interesting discussions and many stories shared from their own lives, but it’s true, there aren’t many good stories in the text itself. So I, literally, tossed my lesson plan aside and asked her and her classmates which stories they remembered learning the year before, when they studied the book of Exodus, or the year before that, from Genesis. It became clear that though they remembered a lot of details, they tended to assign them to the wrong stories and often had no idea of the order of events (was it Moses who put all of the animals in the ark? And then he split the sea and ate an apple, right?). Instead of correcting them, I thought it would be more fun to have them act out the stories, one scene at a time, from the beginning.

            By the time the bell rang for the end of class, we were halfway across the sea of reeds (with Moses) and each student had played at least three roles (God, Isaac, and the dove, or Noah and God and Leah, for example). And it was fantastic! And exhausting. We had to drag ourselves through the rest of the activities of the morning. But the following week, they begged to do more of Genesis or Exodus, which was, as you can imagine, unusual. I did my best to add more acting into my lesson plans after that, though I had to argue for the value of singing, dancing, drawing, and writing, as well.

            And then, as a gift to the synagogue school from a generous congregant, we had a visit from a Jewish improv group, called The Bible Players (https://www.thebibleplayers.com/). They came for our last school day before Passover and worked with every possible age group. First they worked with the teachers, so we could learn how to lead some of the improvisations ourselves and adapt them for different holidays and lessons (they also gave us a packet full of every activity they’d done with us, and plenty more that we didn’t have time to try), and then they worked directly with the kids – getting them to play different characters, and mirror each other, and laugh and imagine and be brave and play. By the end of their time with The Bible Players, my otherwise sarcastic, eye-rolling students were glossy-eyed with joy and asking when they would be able to do it all again. How about tomorrow? Could we come back to synagogue school tomorrow and do it again?!

            And, of course, part of me was sitting back and saying, hey, what about me? Am I not fun? Didn’t I come up with exciting, enlightening, and innovative activities all year long? But a larger part of me was already looking through the packet of activities and planning how to add them into my lesson plans. They had taught us an especially effective clapping game to get the kids to quiet down that I intended to practice right away.

            The reality is, my next class of students may not love acting in the same way, and not every activity will work out, nor will I be able to match the level of enthusiasm and buy-in of the Bible Players, but they taught me something I’ve been struggling to embrace on my own: not only are we always improvising, but as teachers, we are at our best when we are improvising. In fact, if we know 100% what we’re going to do next, in class or in life, we are going to be bored, or bore everyone else. Learning needs to be exciting, and engaging, and interactive in order to work.

            I wish I could say that I am always ready to try something new, and always eager and open to new challenges, but I am really not. I move towards change reluctantly, and with as much side-eye as any of my students. I was exhausted the day the Bible Players came to teach us, and annoyed, and shy, and wishing I could just go home and take a nap. It wasn’t until I saw how much my students loved what they were doing that I started to open up and embrace the possibilities. Though, of course, when I tried the really effective clapping game, after the Passover break, it did not work at all, and a couple of the girls made sure to tell me that, “that was so two weeks ago.”

            To be honest, I am really ready for summer break. I am exhausted in every way. I have a lot of students this year, and they are all challenging and fascinating and full of energy and full of piss and vinegar, and they take pretty much all of my energy in every class. My one week off for Passover did not even begin to remedy the bone-deep fatigue that has set in, and yet, I’m still revising lesson plans to finish out the school year, and I’m still excited to try new things and see how they go over, and I’m still looking for new skills to learn so I can give my next batch of students more of what they need. It’s intoxicating to always be learning, and growing; and being in the classroom is like a whirlwind that I get caught up in every time, whether I mean to or not, and whether my body can sustain the effort or not.

            So, I will gratefully take my summer to recover and recharge, and then I will try it all over again next year, with the next class, improvising every step of the way, and hoping to get things right at least as often as I get them wrong.

“Is it nap time?”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Passover Week

Posted on April 19, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            I don’t understand all of the people who were able to clean their houses top to bottom, switch over to Passover dishes, AND cook for 18 to 20 people, all before vacation even started. It makes no sense to have vacation during Passover if the house needs to be cleaned for Passover. There was no way I was going to have the energy to do spring cleaning (going through every cabinet, vacuuming every corner and under every piece of furniture, etc., etc.) when I was also working and trying to live up to my regular commitments. It was only when I got a week off – during Passover – that I had the time and energy to even start cleaning.

            This is clearly a holiday for people who are more organized, and more energetic than I have ever been, or for people who can afford to go to specially prepared Passover hotels, where families can spend the whole week away and never have to clean their houses for Passover in the first place.

            Having a week off from teaching allowed me to notice all of the things I had left undone during the school year, of course. And I finally forced myself to go through my drawer-of-papers, and realized that I hadn’t opened the damned thing since before Covid, except to shove more papers into it. Tzipporah stayed in her bed in the living room to avoid all of the chaos, and dust, and grumbling noises.

“Puppy, save me!”

            I managed to look through all of the clothes in my closet that don’t fit, but might someday, and the medical test results that were supposed to be edifying but weren’t, and all of the lesson plans that I didn’t have a chance to try for one reason or another, and it has been exhausting to look through all of the work I’ve done over the past few years, without much sense of accomplishment or progress to show for it. I tend to think of myself as lazy, because I haven’t reached the goals I’ve set for myself (successful author, diagnosis and treatment for medical issues, overcoming mental health difficulties, etc.), but the piles and piles of evidence tell me that I’ve worked very hard, no matter how little it shows in the outside world.

The heavy emphasis placed on Passover cleaning, or more specifically, cleaning out all of the random crumbs of bread and other leavening that have landed in the corners of our homes, belies the fact that the real purpose of Passover is to celebrate the exodus of the ancient Israelites from Egyptian slavery. The goal is to tell the story, in detail, and thereby to remember that it is possible to get out of the narrow places we are trapped in today and find true freedom. This is always a meaningful lesson, but especially right now in the United States, where our promised land is starting to feel a lot more like ancient Egypt. But even before this particular moment in history, I felt like even though I had escaped the narrow place of my childhood, my own personal Egypt, I am still wandering in the desert; and if God plans for this wandering stage to last forty years, like it did for my ancestors, then I still have a lot of wandering left to do.

            Unfortunately, as my rabbi often tells us, the reason for the forty years in the desert was for the generation who had experienced slavery to die out, so that only those who had been born into freedom would enter the promised land. I worry that maybe that will be the case for me too, that the closest I will get to the promised land is these years of wandering and seeing that hope just over the hill, out of reach.

            I look at Tzipporah, named after Moses’s wife in the Passover story, not incidentally, and I think she is in the same place as me; she is no longer in the narrow place (the puppy mill), but it seems to me that she is still wandering through the desert, trying to figure out how to feel free.

            But now that I think about it, the story we read at the Passover seder each year isn’t really about entering the Promised land. In fact, we end each seder hoping to be in Jerusalem next year; meaning that, no matter where we are in our lives, or in the world, we have not yet reached the promised land. Maybe the real lesson is that everyone will find themselves in a narrow place, at some point in their life, and will need hope and help in order to escape, and even then, that exodus will feel much more like wandering in a desert than like reaching a promised land. And that’s okay. Because the process of standing up for our rights, and believing that we deserve better, and then wandering in the desert, in confusion, trying to figure out how to be free, is the point of the journey. And we go through the Passover seder every year as a way to teach ourselves that the wandering itself is meaningful, and worth all of the effort. No matter how much we might wish for an easier ending to the story.

“And they lived happily ever after…”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?           

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The Purple Life

Posted on April 12, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            I’m loving my new Hebrew class! The Purple level is much more challenging than the previous levels, but in a great way, with more interesting content and vocabulary and homework and conversations. The teacher is fantastic, not just because he knows how to do weird tech stuff like broadcasting announcements to all of the breakout rooms at once, but also because he’s able to keep track of all of our stories and quirks and make sure we are all seen and heard and made part of the flow of the class.

“But what about me?”

            The only problem, if there is one, is that I am surrounded by classmates with much more Hebrew fluency than I have. But surprisingly, I don’t really mind. I thought I would prefer being at the top of a lower-level class, but instead I feel energized by how much more there is to learn, and how much more there is to look forward to.

The homework at the purple level is also a lot more fun. We used to just translate sentences, from Hebrew to English or English to Hebrew, to practice our new vocabulary, but in Purple we do something called Field Research, where we take three of the words we learned in class that day and look up blog posts or articles or memes using those new words, then screenshot and post them to our class WhatsApp group. Being me, I spend a lot of time searching, reading dozens of posts until I find something that makes me laugh, or cry, so not only is it fun, but it also forces me to read a lot more Hebrew than I otherwise would have.

My favorite homework, though, and the one that challenges me the most, is when we are given a random topic and told to record ourselves speaking off the cuff in a short voice note, no editing allowed. For now, I tend to talk around the holes in my vocabulary, as if I’m avoiding land mines, but my braver classmates jump right in and bring up new words for us to learn in the next class. We also get to know each other really well, from family stories, pet peeves, and random trivia that would never come up in the course of normal conversations.

Possibly because of the voice note practice, or maybe because I’m just like this anyway, I’ve been talking to myself a lot in Hebrew lately, telling myself stories from my day and then rushing to Google Translate with a list of words that I now need to know how to say in Hebrew. I am, at least, willing to be more adventurous in my Hebrew speaking when I am only talking to myself. Hopefully, one day, I will have the confidence to just start speaking in public, with no plan for where I will end up.

Somehow, we’re already halfway through this semester, and I am not happy about that at all. We have a short break for Passover, and then Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israeli Memorial Day, and Israeli Independence Day, which all come in a clump, and that will give me an opportunity to feel some of the impending grief at the loss of the class and then dive back in for relief. But I know that when this class really ends, I’m going to resent it. I already feel bad for our next teacher (of course, I’ve already signed up for the next class), because there will be a lot for them to live up to.

“I’d be a great teacher! You’d be barking in no time!”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Tzipporah Has Eyes Again

Posted on April 5, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            We finally took Tzipporah to our groomer for the first time, a few weeks ago. I was nervous about how she would manage being with strangers, but other than a small panic attack when the groomer got to her front paws (she told us to pre-medicate Tzipporah with doggy Xanax next time), she did surprisingly well. The best part is that I can see her eyes again, and that means I can see how much her facial expressions have changed since she first came home. She looks curious and interested now, instead of frightened and exhausted.

“I see you. Mommy!”

I was so inspired by how well Tzipporah did at the groomer, that I brought her to therapy with me the next day, to show off her new haircut and to test her ability to sit in the car by herself (instead of with Grandma holding her). She survived the short trip by flattening herself on the backseat, totally unlike Cricket’s habit of climbing every which way while I was driving (though I’m still planning to get a car harness for her, just in case), and then she sat on my lap during therapy, and listened intently to what ended up being a long conversation about how freakin’ cute she is.

And, yes, she is still spending most of her time marinating in her bed, but she’s usually awake now and looking around intently for clues about her new world. She even twists around in her bed to watch me when I leave the room, or, God forbid, leave the apartment altogether. She still hasn’t barked, but she makes the most of her soft voice, waking us up in the morning with her persistent cry, like a tiny car alarm. She’s usually looking for Grandma, to give her breakfast or a treat, but sometimes she even comes looking for me, and then she waits until she’s made eye contact and then runs back to the living room, expecting me to follow. 

After her success with the groomer, I decided to move her food and water bowls halfway to the kitchen, rather than near her bed, to encourage her to walk around more often. And I even added toothbrushing into her daily routine (she loves the chicken flavored toothpaste!), and she seems to be tolerating the indignity quite well.

“Wait, that was toothpaste?!”

            As the weather warms up, the next big challenge will be teaching her how to tolerate walks. She still looks at the leash like it’s a boa constrictor about to strangle her, and when I try to put her on the ground out in the yard, she shakes, so there’s a lot of work ahead. Maybe she’ll have to take some doggy Xanax for walks, as well as for the groomer. In my imagination, I see her running along the beach in the wind, and playing with Kevin-the-Golden-Doodle in the backyard, the way Cricket used to do (except without the violence), but that might be asking too much. We’ll see.

I’m trying to moderate my expectations and just be happy whenever she makes progress, but then I worry that I haven’t challenged her enough or given her enough opportunities for growth. With that in mind, I brought one of Kevin’s squeaky tennis balls into the apartment one day, hoping the smell of him would interest her. I threw the ball a few times, and squeezed it to make it squeak, but Tzipporah just watched intently, with no signs of wanting to participate. She hasn’t quite figured out that life is supposed to be interactive, instead of a movie to be watched from the cozy seats, but I have the same problem, so really, who am I to criticize?

“These are the best seats in the house!”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Reading the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew

Posted on March 22, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

Starting in elementary school, and now in my online Hebrew classes from Tel Aviv, I’ve been learning Modern Hebrew, the version of the language spoken in Israel today, and it is much more my speed than Biblical Hebrew. The last time I studied Biblical Hebrew, if I ever really studied it, was back in high school, and for the most part I found it impenetrable. The text was most often translated by our teachers, including the six or seven commentaries we would read for each sentence. I mean, sure, if we’d had mysteries written in Biblical Hebrew, I might have paid more attention, but reading through the laws in Leviticus word by word, a sentence or two per day, did not capture my attention.

“Oy. Leviticus.”

But recently, I’ve been making a point of reading along in Hebrew, during Bible study sessions at my synagogue, as someone else reads the English translation out loud, and I’ve started to notice some of the differences between Modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew, and to understand why it was all so hard to understand when I was a kid. I’ll find myself reading along, mostly understanding the Hebrew words and feeling pretty good about myself, and then suddenly a word that is clearly in the future tense in the Hebrew will be translated into the past tense in the English, or a word that I was sure I understood from Modern Hebrew will be given an entirely different connotation, and I’ll be lost all over again.

Even though it’s all Hebrew, the gap between Biblical and Modern Hebrew is at least as wide as the gap between today’s English and Shakespeare’s, but probably wider. There were only 8,000 or so attested Hebrew words in the Bible, including words borrowed from Akkadian (used by the Assyrians and Babylonians) and Egyptian and Greek. Today, there are over 100,000 words in Modern Hebrew, including loan words from all of the different cultures Jews have lived in for millennia, including Arabic and English and German and Spanish and Russian and Persian and on and on. In the interim, along with the added vocabulary, the grammar, and syntax, and even pronunciation have also changed, by a lot.

Actually, Hebrew was only the spoken language spoken in ancient Israel until sometime before the Common Era, when Aramaic took over. And then, after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem, in 70 CE, most of the Jewish population was scattered around the world, and each community spoke the language of their new homes. Biblical Hebrew was still used by the rabbis in their commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, though, and by Jews in general during prayer and study, and as a result, the word count of written Hebrew grew to 20,000 or so, including many words borrowed from Aramaic and other neighboring languages. And then the Medieval sages added another 6,500 words, while writing their own commentaries and sacred poetry.

Eventually, in the 1800’s, a movement to revive spoken Hebrew began, with some Jewish writers using Hebrew to write secular literature, instead of just keeping Hebrew in the study hall or the synagogue anymore. Eliezer Ben Yehuda codified this new version of Hebrew in the early 1900’s, and when the Modern State of Israel was created, Hebrew was chosen as the national language. And today, Modern Hebrew is evolving much more quickly, but it is still the same language. Some words that were used in Biblical Hebrew have been replaced in daily usage with new words in Modern Hebrew, but they still exist. You can even use the older words in your everyday life and be understood, but you will sound kind of like an English speaker reciting Shakespeare as you order your coffee.

The most important discovery, for me, in researching Biblical Hebrew, was the Conversive Vav. This was the mystery that started the whole thing: how are verbs that are written in the future tense in Biblical Hebrew suddenly transformed into the past tense in the English. I found a bunch of long, drawn out, incomprehensible explanations for how the Conversive Vav is used, but suffice it to say that when it shows up it can change future tense into past tense and past tense into future tense. Like magic. In Modern Hebrew, if you find the letter Vav in front of a Hebrew word, it usually means “and,” and if you see something written in the future tense, it remains in the future tense, no hocus pocus allowed.

            You can, of course, go much deeper into studying Biblical Hebrew, to the point where you can even date when the different books of the Hebrew Bible may have been written, or figure out which parts of each story may have come from a previous era and were then added into a more recent re-telling of the story. My rabbi is fascinated by all of this stuff, and I’m happy to let him do the work of figuring it out so I don’t have to.

            I am not a linguist, or a grammarian, or even a very good speller, but I am fascinated by the idea that a language is a living thing, that changes as the people who speak it change. I still much prefer Modern Hebrew to the Biblical version, but I love that I get to visit my ancestors and hear their particular dialect each time I open the Hebrew Bible. Who knows what future generations will be able to learn about us when they read through our writings? A lot depends on what they will have access to: they could be reading non-fiction histories, or true crime, or young adult science fiction, or page after page of shopping lists from the height of the egg-price crisis. And what they read, and the way they interpret it, will determine who they think we were and what they learn from us.

I often wonder what the rabbis chose to edit out of the Hebrew Bible along the way, and why. I bet my ancestors wrote their own version of shopping lists, and wrote all kinds of other things the rabbis didn’t think we needed to know, for one reason or another. Just imagine, there could be a treasure trove of ancient Biblical fan fiction, or diaries of young girls complaining about the horror of animal sacrifices and all of the chores they had to do around the farm, all buried in a cave somewhere in Israel, waiting to be discovered. If anything like that comes up, I may have to rethink my resistance to learning Biblical Hebrew. Only time will tell.

“How many languages do I have to learn to live in this house?!”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Tzipporah Got Sick

Posted on March 15, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            We don’t know what set it off, but Tzipporah was sick for a week. One afternoon she had a loose poop, and the next poop was even more liquidy, and the next was all liquid, and then she was vomiting, in her bed. Right away, I was having flashbacks to the last few months of Cricket’s life, when she was suffering from kidney disease and we had to spread wee wee pads everywhere. But I tried to stay calm, and when I gave Tzipporah her first bath-at-home, and she hated it, the energy with which she fought off the washcloth and the water made me hopeful. And then we gave her some Pepto Bismol, enrobed in peanut butter, to see if we could stop the flow in its tracks, and she ate the newly crunchy peanut butter gleefully, and then threw it all up. The next morning, she didn’t eat her breakfast at all, so we called the animal shelter’s clinic and they gave us an emergency appointment. Tzipporah needed to have her butt washed one more time before her appointment, which she hated, again, and then we wrapped her in a towel and brought her to the car.  

“I don’t feel so good.”

She sat shaking in my arms in the waiting room at the clinic, leaning her head under my chin to hide. When we were called into the examination room, she let me place her on the exam table, but she stayed as close to me as possible, and then, when the vet came in to examine her, she tried to climb me like a tree. But she survived, and even let me hand her off to the vet tech, who took her away for blood tests and an x-ray, and then brought her out to us in the waiting room wrapped in a wee wee pad, because she’d had another accident during the x-ray.

I held her close and whispered to her and scratched her ears, and she started to relax. And I realized that somewhere along the way Tzipporah has decided that I am her Mommy. There was no one moment that clinched it for her, as far as I could tell, it was just a gradual realization that I can be trusted to feed her, and wash her, and comb her hair, and to comfort her when things go wrong.

When we were called back into the exam room, the vet told us that there was nothing in the blood tests to worry about, except some small elevations caused by stress, but the x-ray showed that Tzipporah’s large intestine was swollen, which could be a sign of a blockage, or not. The vet wanted us to come back the next day for a follow up x-ray, hopefully to find that the swelling had reduced, but if not, she said, we might need to think about surgery. She sent us home with a few medications (all in liquid form, in case Tzipporah still wasn’t up to eating solid food), and a lot of anxiety.

When we got home, I gave Tzipporah yet another bath while Mom cooked up her newly prescribed bland diet (boiled chicken and rice), and then we gave her the prescribed appetite stimulant and she gobbled up her lunch and even let me give her the rest of her meds, sort of. And then she and Mom rested while I went out to teach.

Tzipporah happily ate her dinner later that night, and there was no more vomiting, but she did continue to have diarrhea overnight. The next morning, we were only allowed to give her a little bit of food to go with her meds, because the doctor wanted the second x-ray to be as clear as possible. And then I gave her yet another half-bath and we were off to the vet again.

These visits to the animal shelter clinic, the same one where we used to take Butterfly (our first puppy mill mama), were bringing up a lot of grief and fear, and it was hard to remember that this was probably just a blip, not an illness, yet, and not fatal. When Butterfly came to us, she was eight years old and had significant health issues, so we spent a lot of time in and out of that clinic, especially towards the end of her life, almost five years later. That clinic was a god-send, honestly, and helped us keep Butterfly for much longer than we’d ever have expected, but the grief has never really faded. And watching Tzipporah, another puppy mill mama, going into those same exam rooms, was a lot.

Miss Butterfly

Tzipporah’s second x-ray was better than the first one, with signs that the inflammation was passing, but the vet said to keep an eye out and if she vomited again, we should take her to the emergency vet for an ultra-sound, all of which sounded terrifying and expensive. Thank God, Mom had thought ahead and bought health insurance for Tzipporah the day we adopted her, which, after a deductible, would give us 80% of the cost back.

Before we left the clinic for the day, two vet techs gave Tzipporah subcutaneous fluids and a B12 shot (which also reminded me way too much of Cricket’s final months), and the doctor prescribed another medication to add to her cocktail, and we went home.

Miss Cricket

I spent the rest of that day doing laundry (both dog beds, a whole pile of towels and blankets and toys, and all of the clothes I’d worn to the vet and while giving Tzipporah her many baths), and Tzipporah spent the rest of the day eating and sleeping.

By the next day, there were no more signs of diarrhea or vomiting. It still took her a few more days for her to get back to normal (AKA running down the hall to beg Grandma for chicken treats), and even longer for us to stop watching her anxiously, but we eventually began to add some kibble back into her diet, and she had the energy and presence of mind to toss the kibble out of the bowl and focus in on the chicken and rice.

The whole experience was overwhelming, especially because of the memories it brought up, but something good came out of it too: when Tzipporah was sick and needed help, I had to help her, whether she liked it or not. I’d been so careful with her through her first few months with us, because I didn’t want to re-traumatize her, and I wanted to give her time to acclimate to life with people, and because I was afraid of making mistakes. But when she was sick, I stopped worrying about all of that and gave her the care she needed, and she responded by leaning on me, and asking to be picked up, and looking to me for reassurance. She’s still suspicious of me, of course, but she seems to understand that I can be trusted. I’m also realizing that I was probably too careful, worried that she would reject me or worried that I would love her and lose her too soon. Cricket and Ellie’s deaths last year, within months of each other, left a deep mark on me, and I think some part of me was holding Tzipporah at arm’s length, just like she was holding me at paw’s length for her own reasons.

Cricket and Ellie

But she looks at me now, and communicates in her own unique way, and even recognizes me as a particular person, who she might even like. We still don’t know what set all of this in motion, maybe a stray piece of chocolate or a dropped pill or something else she managed to find on the floor during her nightly wanderings. But whatever it was, it passed, and she seems more confident in the aftermath. And I think we’re more confident too, and willing to be more proactive with her, even when she looks at us with suspicion. It’s still a work in progress, and we still have a long way to go, but we’re finally getting somewhere, and she even seems to be a little bit happy to be here. Sometimes.  

“But only sometimes, Mommy.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Coloring Within the Lines

Posted on March 8, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            I have been coloring a lot lately. In coloring books. They are “adult” coloring books, so the designs are more complicated and intricate than my old Little Mermaid coloring books, but I’m struggling to stay within the lines just like I used to as a kid, and I feel silly for needing to do this instead of creating something of my own from scratch. I used to knit and crochet as a way to calm down, but I haven’t had the mental energy to focus on a project like that. When I received a handful of gift cards for Chanukah, from my students, I decided to buy coloring books and markers, as a way to de-stress. And they worked. I’ve always needed distractions like this to help with anxiety, but since the presidential election in the United States, and then even more so since the inauguration of our current president, the anxiety in the air and the onslaught of news each day has been overwhelming me.

            I haven’t been writing much about our current political climate, in the United States, in Israel, or in the world at large, because there’s too much to process each day, even each hour sometimes, and I feel like I have nothing to add that hasn’t been said a hundred times already. I’m frightened, and overwhelmed, and feeling helpless, and all of the suggestions for how to take action have overwhelmed me even more, because they assume I have resources (like energy and money) that I don’t have.

            So, I color. I’m on my third coloring book, and I’ve graduated from simple markers to gel pens in every shade. I started with pictures of animals in general, then birds in particular, and then I moved on to abstract designs. I’ve also been watching tons of Hallmark and Hallmark-like movies on YouTube, and the combination of the movies and the coloring have been helping, somewhat.

            I’m still writing and teaching and going to my Hebrew classes and taking care of Tzipporah and going to doctors’ appointments and listening to podcasts and Israeli music and forcing myself to watch and read the news, but I’m depending more and more on my hours of coloring each day to help me organize my brain, following the lines someone else has created and trying to figure out which colors will make the patterns become clear to me.

            I wish I was up to doing something more. I wish I could get more writing done each day, or knit a few sweaters, or go out into the streets, or just fix the world snip snap, but this seems to be what I can do for now. It feels selfish to spend money on pens and coloring books instead of sending that money to various organizations supporting reproductive rights or immigrants’ rights or children in Ukraine, but I can’t help anyone else when I feel so lost. I wake up feeling like everything is out of control and the world is breaking apart like pieces in a kaleidoscope, and then I turn on a Hallmark movie and open a coloring book and I feel a little bit more together and a little bit more capable of doing the things I need to do.

            I don’t know how everyone else is coping. Maybe there are even people who don’t feel stressed at all by the current state of affairs, though I don’t know them. People keep telling me that we just have to survive through the next four years, but I don’t have confidence that I will survive four years of this, or that this will only last four years, and that level of fear makes it hard to plan ahead. If the rules change every day, and I have no idea what the new rules will be, it’s hard to believe that I will ever be able to play the game. I remember this feeling from my childhood, where the only way my father could feel safe and secure was if he pulled the rug out from underneath me, or someone else. His security and mine existed on a seesaw, and that’s how it feels with our current president, that the things that make him feel better will inevitably make me feel worse.

            I wish I could fix this, or go back in time to prevent it somehow, or create a world of my own that I could crawl into and avoid the news completely, but I don’t know how to do any of those things. So, I color, and I get by, and that’s the best I can do, for now.

Tzipporah prefers naps to coloring.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Purple

Posted on March 1, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            I am starting a new semester of online Hebrew classes, and I’m excited, but also anxious. I’ve been back in these classes since the summer, with renewed energy and purpose after a long break, and all of that effort has paid off, because I am moving up to Purple, the highest level. One of the things I love about Citizen Café, the school where I take my Hebrew classes, is that instead of offering three levels (beginning, intermediate, and advanced) like most language classes for adults, they are continually adding levels so that each student can start and continue in a class that is suited to their real abilities, without being too challenged or too comfortable. I cannot explain their color wheel, though, which starts with Red and Orange and, for now, ends with Purple, and makes stops along the way in Lime, Pink, and Turquoise.

            I spent six semesters at the Indigo level, the second to highest level, where there are multiple semesters worth of content to help build vocabulary and fluency, but also a lot of repetition. During my sojourn in Indigo, I kept hoping that they would create a new level, between Indigo and Purple, so I wouldn’t have to keep going over the same material, or move up to the final level, which feels so, I don’t know, final, but no such luck. Eventually, my teachers decided that I was getting too comfortable in Indigo and needed to move up to Purple for a new challenge, and I agreed with them, but now I feel like I’m being thrown into the deep end without my water wings.

From what I hear from friends, purple level is a different animal. The content changes each semester, depending on what the students in each class are interested in, and there are people who have been at the purple level for a dozen semesters or more, to make up for not having anyone in their outside life to speak to in Hebrew. I’m one of the few students at the advanced levels at this school who has never actually been to Israel, let alone lived there, and I worry that I will be intimidated by my classmates who either live in Israel now or have visited many times in the past. At some point soon, I’m sure the school will figure out that if I belong in Purple, then there really should be at least one more level above Purple for the really advanced students. And then they’ll have to come up with a new color to add to their color wheel, like ultra-violet, or maybe chartreuse.

            I’m sure that, originally, when they were teaching classes in person in cafes around Tel Aviv, they assumed their students would only stay for a few semesters, since they’d already done their official six months in Ulpan (when you move to Israel, you take a six-month Hebrew course subsidized by the government). They probably thought that all their students would need was some practice and fine tuning and then they’d be ready to get a job and continue to work on their Hebrew with their new Israeli friends, but the reality is that Hebrew is really hard to learn, and most Israelis are too busy, or too impatient, or too terrible at grammar themselves to be of much help. And most people want to be able to do more than just read road signs or buy cherry tomatoes at the Shuk, they want to be able to watch (and understand) the news, or read novels at the beach, or scream at their friends over loud music at a party and actually know what’s being said back to them. So, the school grew.

            But something else also happened along the way. Once the school went online, during covid, they found out that they had a lot of potential students who didn’t live in Israel at all. Suddenly there were students from around the world who wanted to learn Hebrew before moving to Israel, or so they could speak Hebrew with their Israeli wife’s family, or chat with their grandkids over Zoom. And then there were people, like me, who wanted to speak Hebrew for a million reasons other than moving to Israel. There are a lot of us who are fascinated with Hebrew for reasons of culture, ancestry, community, connection, family and on and on, rather than just wanting to be able to navigate the bus routes from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.

I am still, usually, the only person in my classes who has never been to Israel, though. And hopefully, someday soon, I will be able to afford a trip, but for now, I’m doing my best to travel there in my mind, and on Zoom, and it is bringing me a lot of satisfaction, and a lot of joy, and just a little bit of crippling anxiety.

“I understand anxiety, new Mommy.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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The Stranger or Sojourner or Neighbor

Posted on February 22, 2025 by rachelmankowitz

            All of the recent rhetoric, and actions, on mass deportation of migrants in the United States has made me think about what I believe is right, or wrong, or complicated, around the issue of immigration. There are people who believe that there should be no borders at all, and that all deportations are wrong, and there are others who think that anyone who speaks Spanish instead of English while in the United States should be on the ICE deportation list, no matter what their citizenship status may be. I know I don’t agree with either of those extreme points of view, but I’m not sure what I do believe.

            We have a tendency to simplify and generalize in our public discourse, relying on pithy sayings that can fit in a hashtag or on a protest sign, instead of having in-depth discussions about what we believe is right. And especially now, when we are being told that the only solution to illegal immigration is to hunt down anyone with questionable status, guns blazing, in hospitals and schools and houses of worship, it is even more important to take a breath and take responsibility for figuring out who we are and who we want to be, and why.

I teach the Book of Leviticus in synagogue school, so I spend an unreasonable amount of time marinating in the Hebrew Bible and what it has to say about who our ancestors were, and where they went wrong, and which lessons they did and didn’t learn from those mistakes. So, when I am confused about a moral issue, the Hebrew Bible is one of the first places I look for edification (other than Hallmark movies, of course). And we are reminded over and over again in the Hebrew Bible that we were strangers in Egypt, and therefore we should be compassionate to others in the same position. It is said so many times that we almost don’t hear it anymore, like we miss the birds chirping outside our windows, or the nagging inner voice telling us to exercise, because it is just so ubiquitous. And, to be honest, I’m not sure I ever spent much time thinking about what it means to be kind to the stranger, or even who qualifies as a stranger in our modern, globally connected world.

            But in a recent bible study session, my rabbi told us that even though the word Ger in the Hebrew Bible is often translated into English as “stranger,” it actually meant something more like “sojourner” in biblical times, and referred to someone who was a migrant from somewhere else, without land of his own in ancient Israel.

            We are told, in Leviticus 19:34-35: “When strangers reside with you in your land, you shall not wrong them. The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens; you shall love each one as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

            So, first of all, don’t wrong the stranger. Don’t do anything to the stranger/sojourner that would be abhorrent to you, like making them into your slave, or stealing from them, or hurting or killing them. Basically, recognize that the laws of good behavior are not nullified in your interactions with the stranger as if they are less than human. But why tell us to treat the stranger as if he is a citizen? If there’s not supposed to be a difference between how we treat a citizen and a non-citizen, then why not just say, treat everyone the same?

In fact, the Hebrew Bible has a separate law for how we should treat someone who isn’t a stranger. In Leviticus 19:18, it says: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” or in another translation, “Love your fellow human being as you love yourself.” If there’s no difference between a stranger and a neighbor, why are the two laws stated separately?

If we assume that every word in the Hebrew Bible is there for a reason, which not everyone assumes, but hear me out, then just like “stranger” really refers to a sojourner or non-citizen, maybe the “neighbor” or “fellow human being” here refers to the opposite of the stranger/sojourner, AKA a citizen. So, we are being given guidance on how to treat a fellow citizen and on how to treat a non-citizen.

Before settling in the land of Israel, the ancient Israelites were wanderers, and slaves, so they knew about being sojourners in other lands more than they knew about being landowners. And once they owned land, they needed to learn how to treat each other all over again, and how to treat outsiders, given these new blessings and responsibilities. But as their past experiences started to fade from their everyday thoughts, they had to actively remind themselves that they didn’t want to be the kind of landowners they’d known in the past. They wanted to retain their empathy for the outsider, without losing the rights and freedoms they had so recently won for themselves.

One of the important things to remember about the sojourners in ancient Israel, is that they were not bound by all of the same laws as the Israelites (like keeping kosher, or celebrating the Sabbath, or giving of the produce of their land to the Levites, or to the widow or orphan), though they were bound by certain laws that applied to everyone equally (Don’t kill, steal, etc.).

But if the sojourner is so different from the neighbor, why do the laws about how to treat them sound so similar? Or do they? Further along in the Hebrew Bible we get a little more detail on how we are supposed to treat the stranger/sojourner. In Deuteronomy 10:18-19, it says: “[God] upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing food and clothing. You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

            Here we are being told to befriend the stranger (which is pretty vague), and to supply food and clothing to the stranger, the way one would for anyone else in the community who is in need. This suggests that we’re not being told to treat the stranger the same way we would treat a fellow citizen, but rather to be generous to the stranger in the same way we would be generous to anyone in our own community who is in need, specifically, someone who lacks food or clothing. It’s interesting, and maybe significant, that the law doesn’t mention offering shelter to the stranger, which I would have thought of as a primary need, especially for someone without land of their own.

In ancient Israel, those who owned land were members of the twelve tribes of Israel. Period. These are people who, maybe like us, were worried about losing the property and the rights and the freedoms they had so recently won. And they were struggling with their competing desires to keep what was newly theirs and to be generous to those who were not as lucky.

As I often remind my synagogue school students, we don’t have laws in the Hebrew Bible for things we would already do without being told. And I think the two laws, for how to treat the sojourner and how to treat the neighbor, are a way to remind us that both our relationships with our fellow citizens and our relationships with non-citizens will be complicated, and that we will make mistakes, and we will struggle to know what is right or fair, and we will struggle with our own greed and generosity. We need these laws to remind ourselves that we should still strive to treat everyone with respect, especially if they are different from us, or have different status from us. And, maybe more importantly, we need to be reminded that being a stranger is not a character flaw, or a status below that of other human beings. The reality of needing to leave home in order to survive is a vulnerable state to be in, and usually reached through no fault of one’s own, like the Israelites having to leave the land of Isreal during a famine and travel to Egypt. We may not be obligated to the migrant to the same degree as we are obligated to our fellow citizens, but we are still required to see them as people who need and deserve our respect and generosity.

We are struggling with all of this in the United States right now. We are struggling both with how to treat our fellow citizens, when they are different from us, in gender, sexuality, religion, race, culture, belief systems, etc., and how to treat sojourners in our land, those who are here legally or otherwise. We are not sure we can afford to be generous, financially or emotionally, even with our own communities, let alone with outsiders.

And the fact that there are separate laws for the neighbor and the stranger in the Hebrew Bible tells me that my ancestors understood that struggle. They knew that everyone wouldn’t be treated the same, and that maybe they couldn’t, or even shouldn’t, always be treated the same. We are human beings, after all, and we will never be perfect, whatever that is. But there’s also a clear sentiment among the ancient Israelites, at least in their published works, that no matter how flawed and imperfect we may be, we should always be striving to do better, rather than worse.

Right now, it feels like we, as a collective, are doubling down on our deepest fears about the other. And it’s important to recognize that these fears are deep and pervasive and sometimes even accurate. The impulse to protect ourselves, even at the expense of someone else, will always be there within us, and is not, in itself, wrong or evil. It just is. The question is, can we survive and thrive if we feed only the most frightened parts of ourselves? Can we, maybe, also feed the more generous, compassionate, curious, and empathetic parts of ourselves as well, and let them help us make our decisions about who we want to be and what we want to do? Our ancestors believed that if we made an effort, we could do both: take care of ourselves and take care of others. And I’d like to believe that they were on to something.

“I am a stranger in a strange land, too. But I think I like it here.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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