***Please sign up for our Yom HaShoah ceremony on Sunday evening, May 5th at 6:30pm: https://jccjapan.jp/event-registration/No newsletter next week*** Japan’s role in the Shoah usually begins and ends with a discussion about Righteous Among the Nations Chiune Sugihara who as a young diplomat in Kovno, Lithuana issued visas saving thousands of Jewish souls. While the...
Perhaps no Passover dish is more iconic than matzah ball soup. With recipes going back hundreds of years to the old country or pulled more recently from a box of Manischewitz mix, the combination of matzah meal, egg, water, oil and maybe a drop of schmaltz embodies the taste of Passover itself. Strange thing then...
The late 2000s/early 2010s brought a wave of pop psychology fads that sought to make complicated ideas more digestible but in subversively simplistic ways. Gurus like Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Ariely told the world that if people only worked 10,000 hours towards a goal and happened to be born in the right month, they too...
Bagels. Lox. Kreplach. Challah. Stuffed Cabbage. Not all of the foods most closely associated with Jewish cuisine possess distinct Jewish origins. The forerunner to the modern bagel was first baked in the 14th century as a large, round and twisted piece of bread with a hole inside known as Obwarzanek. The boiled and baked doughy...
If not for a few hanging chads in Florida at the turn of the millenium, America may have gotten its first Jewish vice president. The passing of Senator Joe Lieberman calls to mind a different era in American politics when the nation’s biggest concern was how to spend the budget surplus and the idea of...
Many a rabbi cringes at the description of Purim as Jewish Halloween. Although there are doubtless similarities between the two, namely the focus on candy and costumes, the differences are vast. As a sort of teachable moment, Hebrew School educators will make an important distinction between the two holidays to their students. Halloween’s trick-or-treaters threaten...
Did Moses drink beer? It all boils down to one He’Brew word: שכר (pronounced shay-khar) Mentioned six times in the Torah, the translation of שכר has been hotly debated for thousands of years. Before you think these were just a bunch of rabbis in Babylon getting wasted on the synagogue’s dime before engaging in abstract...
***In honor of International Women’s Day, the JCC welcomes Israeli attorney and public policy specialist Ayelet Razin Bet Or to address us on Friday evening at 8:30pm. The topic of the lecture and discussion will be wide-ranging but with specific focus on women’s rights in Israel. All are welcome.*** “Resolved that we, Jewish women, sincerely...
An inquiry email from an Angeleno landed in the JCC inbox this week: “Shalom. I will be visiting in March and wanted to know if there are any Israeli dancing classes anywhere?” What followed was a fierce debate in the office as to whether ‘Israeli Dancing’ as a concept even exists. The American and Israeli...
Not since February 2016 has the calendrical oddity known as a leap year occurred simultaneously in the Jewish and secular world. The Gregorian calendar adds an extra day every four years giving children born on February 29th, known as leaplings, an extra bureaucratic nightmare to deal with for the rest of their lives. The Hebrew...