Members of the Scribe
Woody Allen’s Jewish Soul
Like Woody Allen, I can remember a childhood when being Jewish caused me a certain deep unease, partly because of ...
The Jewish Hall of Fame
I once heard Sarah Silverman tell a joke about the pride Jews inevitably take in the accomplishments of other Jews. To paraphrase, ...
Lessons of a Broken Heart
It’s amazing how your first broken heart feels like the end of the world. Until your next broken heart which ...
Faking the Big A — Attitude!
Dating is all about attitude. If you’re in a pissy mood about something totally unrelated to your date, or if ...
Finding My Jewishness
At birth I was blessed with not one, not two, but four Jewish names. Tamar Avital is the name my ...
A Jewish Atheist’s Prayer
When I was little, I talked to God constantly. There were prayers for waking up, for the morning, for the afternoon, before ...
Passover in Pakistan
In 1990, I worked with Afghan refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan, then the site of the largest refugee population in the ...
The Ultra-Orthodox Backlash
When a former ultra-Orthodox Jew publicly reveals her story, she often faces ferocious attacks from her community of origin who will ...
The Power of the Aleph
I don’t speak Hebrew and, despite a few semi-earnest attempts to learn my aleph-bet, I don’t read it either. I recognize enough ...
Jewish Mother vs Bad Mother
There were two models for motherhood in my sprawling family: my great-great-aunt Riva and my great-grandmother Clara.My great-great-aunt Riva was ...
Home Away
I look for locations for my stories on CyberRentals and HomeAway. I find the houses described on these websites far ...
Obscene Recommendations
Some of the literary works I deal with in Unclean Lips are relatively well-known—Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1935) and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), for ...