Issue 26
Winter 2025
Adventuring Together: A Mother and Daughter Find Life-Changing Experiences in the Wilderness
When we went on our first trip, and I was telling some of my friends, they were shocked that I was willing to spend two weeks sharing a tent with my mom.
Memories Without Borders: Growing Community For Hungarian Jews In Toronto
That’s when we see, this is working. We’ve built something and we can see it grow.
Nobody Wants This Improves Its Portrayal of Jewish Women
In Judaism, it is never too late to make things right. Just over two months ago, we gathered for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. In its second season, Nobody Wants This performs a kind of teshuvah, a rehumanizing act of moral repair.
Festival of the Daughters: Recipes
Sweetened Couscous and Fruit and Nut Couscous Cake recipes . . . make great additions to any Hanukkah holiday dinner
Labkovski Meets Aleichem: Art as Testament
It is a meeting between a pen and a brush, between what was lived and what was lost, between memory and imagination. It invites visitors to stand in the space between, to listen, and to carry the conversation forward.
My Mental Room
In these rooms, space is psychological rather than physical. Their furniture is made of rituals, their walls of intrusive memories, and their windows—if they exist —open into uncertain skies.
Bookish Sex at an Outdoor Café
An event unparalleled in the history of North American publishing, my left buttock. Five members of one Jewish family having books on sex coming out in the same season, my right buttock.
A Memory
There I breathed sweet absence
Wonderful
As an Orthodox Jew, I have a ritual I perform annually this time of year: I watch It’s a Wonderful Life.
Two Poems
The river isn’t looking at you. She’s looking at me.
In The Belly Of The Jewish Bazaar
Yevbaz was a historic area, the former main marketplace of Kiev for many generations of its residents. It functioned for almost a century. Jews gave it life. It was a place where they gathered to trade, socialize, and maintain their traditions. After the war, the marketplace never returned to how it used to be.
In Fink’s Bar
The last person I expected to meet in Fink's Bar was the messiah. The reader will ask how did I know that he was the messiah? The simple truth is that he told me.
Jessie’s Father
In the distance, on a lush green meadow, Jessie is standing healthy and happy, holding her baby in her arms with her husband’s arms around them both.
You Can’t Say Kaddish for a Dog
Opal never became the perfect dog, but she was perfect with our family of four.