The other day, I walked into a room and there was one of those bugs in it. You know the kind that looks like a centipede? It was orange? No? Just in my house? Anyway, because I am slightly unhinged, I yelled, “Dad, there is a scary bug — can you come and kill it please?” Now I know my dad can’t come and get it rid of it for me. But he was always the one who took care of these things. One weekend, I was on some NCSY shabbaton,...Continue Reading
The trauma of my family history weighed on me as we drove toward a cursed tract of land deep in the Polish province of Masovia, 70 miles northeast of Warsaw. On either side of the road, pine tree trunks soared 80 feet before their branches, thick with...Continue Reading
Each one of us who was old enough to be sentient on September 11, 2001, has memories and stories, and connections to friends who have their own sets of stories. This is my story. It started like a not-quite-regular day because of its startling beauty. There was what many...Continue Reading
![UAF 175 crashes into the south tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 [TheMachineStops
(Robert J. Fisch)]](https://static.timesofisrael.com/njjewishnews/uploads/2026/09/CS01-UA_Flight_175_hits_WTC_south_tower_9-11_edit-Topaz-Gigapixel-4x-scale-400x250.jpg "UAF 175 crashes into the south tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 [TheMachineStops
(Robert J. Fisch)]"){kind=tracking}
If every person is a world, as our tradition tells us, then a city is filled with so many worlds that it’s impossible to imagine all those rubbing-together universes. That’s particularly true of Jerusalem, one of the world’s oldest cities, at just about 5,000 years old, give or...Continue Reading
