As a lawyer, linguist, and all-around nerd, I like words. A lot. I especially like fun words: unusual words for normal concepts, foreign slang, anachronisms, and words that are just fun to say. Mamish, davka, and shtark all fall into both the first and last category above. They are unusual-to-me words for very “normal” concepts, […]

Let’s momentarily get back to the practical, “don’t make a fool of yourself” advice that this blog is known for. In this topic especially, I welcome the comments of others. This post is based solely on what I’ve been able to pick up in approximately 10 years of reading and discussions with others. The problem:

Today, we’re going to discuss something heavy, and I’m going to share one of my “conversion woe” stories.  A rabbi once asked me inappropriate questions. Nothing physically inappropriate happened, and he didn’t look like he was relishing every detail of the answers he made me give, but it was inappropriate and exploitative nonetheless. Unfortunately for

In a jaw-dropping moment of public relations FAIL, the Israeli political party Shas released an election ad stereotyping and bashing Russian converts (perhaps all Israeli converts?). Here is the video. There are Hebrew subtitles on the video, but if you click the CC button on the bottom so that captions are on, the English translation

As promised, the new and improved “conversion test” is posted! I took it down almost a year ago, but before then, the test was the number one search engine path to this blog. Hopefully you newbies will find something on the blog worth staying for after you’ve seen the test! It is very long, and

If you haven’t picked up on this yet, I’m a Type A list maker extraordinaire. I love lists and checkboxes and forms. This means that the beginning of both the Jewish and secular years make me re-think my lists and habits. It’s always much worse as the secular year approaches because it seems the entire

Quite literally. Yesterday was my first day in a modern Hebrew language class. I had forgotten how much I love learning languages!  I wanted to share a funny story with you from my first day: Moreh (Teacher): “Kochava, tell me a word with the letter reish.”Kochava: “Uhhh…rasha?”Moreh: “LOLZ” The day’s other contenders included, but were not

Whether changing your name for marriage, divorce, or other reasons, American society has seen fit to make each of us reinvent the wheel.  Apology: Sorry, this is very US-centric. Despite the fact that thousands of people change their names each year (the BBC estimates 58,000 in the UK alone in 2011), it is as though name

Mazal tov to Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who will be the next Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth! Current Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks will retire this September. Lord Rabbi Sacks is a tough act to follow, but hopefully the world will give Rabbi Mirvis a fair chance. Commonwealth, you say? I thought he was only the

I hope you’re all prepared for the end of the world on Friday! I’m relieved to know that I can skip preparing for Shabbat. Erev Shabbos gets so crazy, it’ll be nice to relax while the world ends. But seriously. I’ve been spending a lot of time updating the pages. The Facebook page has also