What makes two rabbis who disagreed about almost everything the most celebrated pair in Jewish history? This week we sit down with Hillel and Shammai, the original dynamic duo, and the answer turns out to be the way they argued, not what they argued about.

In this episode, we get into:

• The lost art of disagreeing with someone you actually like and respect, and why Judaism treats a good argument as something close to sacred.

• Machloket l’shem shamayim: what makes an argument “for the sake of heaven,” and where the line gets crossed

• The Hanukkah menorah debate: do you start with eight candles or one, and why each side is right

• The gentile who asked to learn the whole Torah on one foot, and the very different answers Hillel and Shammai gave

• Why Hillel’s golden rule (”what you don’t want done to you, don’t do to others”) is not the same as “love your neighbor as yourself”

• Lenient versus strict: how two yeshivas, two personalities, and one open door shaped Jewish law

• Why we almost always rule like Hillel, and the surprising reason it comes down to humility

  Pull up a chair, pick a side, and remember: the rest is commentary.

Resources:

• Hillel and Shammai, sayings and character

• Machloket l’shem shamayim (a dispute for the sake of heaven)

• Korach’s rebellion against Moses and Aaron

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We made it to the finish line. After two earlier episodes, we wrap up the Twelve Prophets and tie a bow on them all. Along the way we get into why these texts barely show up in yeshiva, a much-debated Midrash about Adam and the animals, and whether religion or just plain ideology has driven the worst of human history. Then we go prophet by prophet, all the way to the very last words of prophecy.

In this episode, we get into:

• Micah, and the “swords into plowshares” verse that 99 percent of the world wrongly credits to Isaiah

• Nahum and the fall of Nineveh, plus a thorny question: if God wanted the exile, why blame Assyria for carrying it out?

• Habakkuk, who opens by arguing with God and reduces all 613 commandments to one: the righteous shall live by his faith

• Zephaniah on fear, fight-or-flight, and the command “do not fear”

• Haggai, Zechariah’s colored-horse visions, and Malachi closing the prophets with the hearts of parents and children turning back to each other

Grab a book of the prophets and read along with us. It only takes a few minutes a day, and as we say in here, it’s no great honor to be ignorant.

Resources:

• Micah

• Nahum

• Habakkuk

• Zephaniah

• Haggai

• Malachi

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We picked up where we left off with the Twelve Prophets (Trei Asar), and Hosea throws us straight into one of the strangest stories in all of the Tanakh. Gd is furious that the Jewish people are chasing idols, so He gives Hosea an unusual assignment: go marry a woman of ill repute, have kids with her, and name them “Not My People” and “No Mercy.” It’s harsh, it’s strange, and the Rabbi calls it the most dramatic living metaphor any prophet was ever asked to act out.

In this episode, we get into:

• Hosea, the harlot metaphor, and the Kabbalistic question of whether Gd can actually be affected by what we do

• What a prophet (and a leader) is supposed to be: tough on the people, defender to Gd, never a politician

• Joel and the locusts, the seven-year famine, and when punishment came measure-for-measure

• Famous Amos (great cookies, great prophet) and why prosperity might be the harder spiritual test

• Obadiah the convert who saved 100 prophets from Jezebel, the rabbinic tradition that Rome is Edom, and the famous widow with the miraculous oil

• Micah and the morality prophets: how “idolatry” in our day reads as money, power, and the corruption that comes with success

We also kept circling back to something: most American Jews don’t think about Gd as Someone with expectations. That’s exactly the tension Hosea was preaching into 3,000 years ago. Same story, different costumes. Hit play, and stay with us for Part 3, where we close out the Twelve.

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We are so sorry, but we need to postpone tonight’s edJEWcation Zoom call.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we reshuffle things a bit. We’ll reschedule very soon and promise to return with all the Jewish history, existential questions, and mildly concerning digressions you were hoping for.

We really appreciate you showing up, learning with us, and being part of this strange little Jewish corner of the internet.

More details soon — and again, apologies for the last-minute change.

Warmly,
ChayaLeah, Rabbi Perelmuter & Jay

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I’m going to write about certain aspects of the books I’ve read, focusing on key themes and events that I think might interest our listeners, from time to time (as my schedule allows).

This will be a test run, so let me know what you think…

Enjoy.

-Jay

Sources for this article:

Army of Shadows by Hillel Cohen

The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 by Kenneth W. Stein

“Sheikh Rashid Hasan was a fine and well-known figure. He was the mukhtar of the town of Beisan and, of course, there were many people in the town who were interested in selling…not a single plot in Beisan was sold without his knowledge”[1] – Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows

If you were to make the grievous mistake of going on to Instagram, TikTok, or X and trying to learn about the history of the Jewish-Arab conflict in the Middle East, along with the genocide claim and apartheid, the other claim you would hear is one involving how the Jews stole the land from the Arabs in the British Mandate of Palestine. And as with all these other stories, this claim is equally false. The reality is that between 1917 and the time of Israeli independence, thousands of Palestinians willingly sold land to the Zionists.

During World War I, in November 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, whereby it explicitly provided its support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in what would later become the British Mandate of Palestine, which inherently included immigration and land acquisition by the Zionists in the region. By 1930, the Yishuv had purchased approximately 1.2 million dunams of land: roughly 450,000 from foreign landowners, 680,000 from large local estate owners, and 75,000 from fellaheen smallholders.[2]

Today the question is moralized. For the Arabs who sold the land, it was material.

The Arabs sold because they needed the money. The 1930s brought crop failures, drought, locusts, insufficient plow animals, and usurious interest rates, conditions Stein calls “all totally unrelated to Zionist policies.” The Yishuv could offer prices that were “high, sometimes exorbitant,” and for many sellers the temptation was impossible to refuse.[3]

For the Arab elite, owning land had long symbolized strength and influence. As that symbolism faded, they chose the cash over the symbol.

From this emerged the samasirah, a professional class of Arab brokers, which included some of the most influential Arabs in the region: the mayor of Tulkarem ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Hajj Ibrahim and his sons, the mayor of Jaffa ‘Omar al-Baytar and his sons, several prominent sheikhs, and Sheikh Rashid Hasan of Beisan, whom we referenced at the top. Their tactics could be predatory, including manufactured debt traps that forced families into distress sales. The samasirah operated as independent actors with their own financial interests, not as Zionist agents.

From the Zionist perspective, the desire for land was effectively unlimited. What capped the purchases wasn’t the demand for land or offers from Arabs to sell the land; it was the Zionist capital available to acquire it. Initially, the Yishuv acquired land wherever it was made available. Later, it decided to focus on contiguous plots of land to build larger communities in more defensible areas. As Stein wrote, “[t]he only factor limiting the pace and scope of Jewish land purchase prior to and after the institution of the Mandate was insufficient funding.”[4]

Ultimately, opposition to Arab land sales to Zionists became, as Cohen said, “one of the principal focal points around which the Arab national idea in Palestine coalesced” and “the archetypical act of treason.”[5] And yet:

· Of 89 members of the Arab Executive elected between 1920 and June 1928, at least one-quarter had been involved in land sales personally or through family.

· Of 48 attendees of the Seventh Arab Congress in June 1928, at least 14 had been involved.[6]

· Of an Arab delegation which visited London in March of 1930, “One-third... might be described as somehow having personally compromised their nationalist goals” through prior sales.[7]

So stark was the difference between some Arabs’ leaders’ words and deeds that the Arab national activist, Akram Zu‘itar wrote in his journal:

Both the Arab community and the British mandate authority made efforts to stop the sales. What broke the Arab silence was that after the 1929 riots the Arab press began printing the names of brokers, for which they were attacked as enriching themselves “from the lives of the country.” It was at this point that Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, issued a fatwa forbidding sales to Zionists.

However, when the Arab community started formal organizations, such as the Arab National Fund, to combat the Zionist land purchases, the defensive strategies proved ineffective. According to Stein, this was due in large part to the community being “generally poor, unorganized, uneducated, unsophisticated, and splintered”[9].

The British tried a variety of tactics to create roadblocks to the Zionist land acquisitions: bureaucratic maneuvers such as the Shaw Commission, the Hope Simpson Report, and the 1930 Passfield White Paper, and laws such as the Transfer of Agricultural Land Bill, the Protection of Cultivators Ordinance, and the Land Disputes and Possessions Ordinance. The MacDonald letter of 1931 neutralized all this work by nullifying the Passfield White Paper and postponing land restrictions for a decade.

You would think that at the very least, during the years of the Arab revolt from 1936 to 1939 Arab land sales to Zionists would have decreased dramatically and while there was a decrease, it was not nearly as severe as one would have imagined. During that period, Arabs still sold approximately 140,000 dunams to the Zionists, only about 30% below the previous four-year period.[10] This included Arab sellers offering the Jewish National Fund between 200,000 and 300,000 dunams in December 1937.[11]

As Cohen wrote in Army of Shadows, “Neither the rebellion nor the murder of dealers nor the British Land Transfer clause was able to halt the sale of land.”[12]

Two decades of contemporary land records from British, Arab, and Zionist sources describe the same market: Arab sellers approaching Zionist buyers in numbers that consistently exceeded the Yishuv’s capacity to pay. The land that ultimately became the State of Israel was not seized at gunpoint. Rather it was sold how any other good is sold, with one side providing the supply and the other side providing the demand.

So, the next time a TikTok video tells you the Jews stole the land, think of Sheikh Rashid Hasan. The mukhtar of Beisan. The Arab leader of the town. And not a single plot in Beisan was sold without his knowledge.

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[1] Army of Shadows, page 33

[2] AS, page 32

[3] The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939, page 69

[4] LQP, page 37

[5] AS, page 45

[6] LQP, page 67

[7] LQP, page 69

[8] AS, page 47

[9] LQP, page 217

[10] LQP, page 189

[11] LQP, page 69

[12] AS, page 214

Let’s be honest: when someone you’re not a fan of gets bad news, there’s a tiny, guilty dopamine hit. We open this episode by confessing that impulse out loud and digging into what Pirkei Avot (and King Solomon) have to say about rejoicing at your enemy’s fall. Spoiler: it’s a whole thing.

In this episode, we get into:

• The ethics of Schadenfreude and what Pirkei Avot teaches about resisting that guilty satisfaction

• Shavuos 101: the forgotten major Jewish holiday, why your boss has never heard of it, and why it matters

• How the giving of the Torah turned a tribe into a nation (and why shared ancestry alone isn’t enough)

• The Sam Harris morality debate: can you have ethics without God?

• The trolley problem, Jewish style: why the Torah says you can’t pull the lever

• The Book of Ruth, the ultimate story of loyalty, conversion, and the origins of King David

Whether you’re prepping for Shavuot or just want to know if you’re a bad person for enjoying celebrity gossip, grab some cheesecake and press play. 🧀

Episode References

• Pirkei Avot 4:19

• Proverbs 24:17

• The Ten Commandments

• Book of Ruth

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This Sunday, May 24th, at 8PM EST / 5PM PST will be the next edJEWcation zoom with the Rabbi, ChayaLeah and me.

Put it on your calendar. Link to come…

The rabbi’s out this week, so we’re are doing what any self-respecting book nerds would do: geeking out about reading.

In this episode, we get into:

• Jay breaks down his “30 pages a day” habit (spoiler: it adds up to 10,000 pages a year)

• ChayaLeah confesses her Shakespeare regrets

• Jay’s system for building a daily reading habit (and why you should keep three books going at once)

• The “Chan-book-ah” book haul: Arab nationalism, Elie Wiesel, Holocaust memoirs, and Jewish prayer

• ChayaLeah’s pitch for Cultural Amnesia by Clive James and why Remains of the Day is still on her mind

• Why understanding Jewish prayer word by word is a total game changer

• Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, a book they both call the best they’ve ever read

Hopefully you’ll get some ideas for your next book from this episode.

Quote of the episode:

All the books we mention:

• Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century by Adeed Dawisha

• God in Search of Man by Abraham Joshua Heschel

• Souls on Fire by Elie Wiesel

• Sages and Dreamers by Elie Wiesel

• Night by Elie Wiesel

• The Last Consolation Vanished by Zalmen Gradowski

• Hostage by Eli Sharabi

• On Killing by Dave Grossman

• Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism by Steven Zipperstein

• As a Driven Leaf by Milton Steinberg

• Anonymous Soldiers by Bruce Hoffman

• To Pray as a Jew by Hayim Halevy Donin

• The Hour of Our Death by Philippe Ariès

• Arrows of the Dark (two volumes) by Tuvia Friling

• Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

• The Road by Vasily Grossman

• Cultural Amnesia by Clive James

• Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

• The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris

• My Prayer (two volumes, Chabad teachings on prayer) — could not confirm Amazon listing, may need manual search

• Rebel and Statesman-The Early Years: The Life and Times of Vladimir Jabotinsky: Volume One by Joesph Schechtman

• Fighter and Prophet; The Jabotinsky Story; The Last Years by Joesph Schechtman

• The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons - this is ChayaLeah’s book. Jay dissavows

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What does it actually take to be a prophet? Spoiler: it’s not just hearing voices and shouting in the marketplace (though there’s some of that).

In this kickoff to our new series on the Trei Asar, the Twelve Prophets of the Tanakh, we set the stage before diving into the individual books. Think of this as Prophecy 101 with a side of cult talk, because honestly, the line between “biblical prophet” and “guy with millions of YouTube followers” is thinner than we’d like to admit.

Quote of the Episode:

In this episode, we get into:

• 📜 What prophecy actually is in Judaism, according to Maimonides, and why Moses was working on a totally different frequency from everyone else

• 👑 The three pillars of Jewish leadership (king, high priest, Sanhedrin), and where the prophet fit

• 🎤 Who got tapped to be a prophet, why some were reluctant

• 🚫 Why prophecy ended after Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, and what replaced it

• 🤔 What we’d actually do if a prophet rolled up today (hint: probably an institution)

• 😬 False prophets and cults like, Sabbatai Zvi, Jim Jones, the Moonies

Get ready to learn everything you ever wanted to know about prophecy but were afraid to ask.

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One small change we are making to the newsletter. From now on, along with our news articles, we are going to include a section on both Zionism and Ancient Jewish History to add a little more educational flavor to the posts.

⭐ Featured

Bubbe Detectives, Assemble: The Center for Jewish History Just Opened a Cold Case Unit Genealogy meets True Crime, except the stakes are entire vanished families.

The Center for Jewish History’s new “Histories and Mysteries” project pairs trained researchers with descendants trying to piece together what happened to relatives lost in the Holocaust, using the institution’s vast archives as a forensic toolkit. Each case is a tiny, painstaking restoration of memory: names, dates, photographs, last known whereabouts. A refusal to let the gaps win, and a model of what an institutional archive can actually do for living people. (The Forward, April 14, 2026)

🏛️ Ancient Jewish History

Before the Bonfires, There Was a Revolt Lag B’Omer is Tuesday. Here’s the failed war that gave us bonfires, bows, and a cautionary tale about declaring people the messiah.

With Lag B’Omer arriving Tuesday, the JVL entry on the Bar Kokhba revolt is the historical anchor most Lag B’Omer celebrators have never read. Rabbi Akiva declared Simon bar Kokhba the messiah, the rebels actually held Jerusalem for a hot minute, and then Hadrian came back with six legions and a grudge. The plague that tradition says killed 24,000 of Akiva’s students broke on the 33rd day of the Omer, which is exactly why we light fires Tuesday night. (Jewish Virtual Library)

📜 History & Heritage

Indiana Jones Gets a Software Update Tel Aviv University figured out how to look beneath Jerusalem without lifting a shovel.

Israeli scientists are using muon detectors, cosmic-ray particles that pass through dense rock, to map underground voids beneath the City of David without disturbing a single stone. The technique, borrowed from physics labs and previously used to peer inside Egyptian pyramids, gives archaeologists a way to study Jerusalem’s layered subterranean history without the politically and physically explosive process of excavation. Less crater, more clarity. (Times of Israel, April 23, 2026)

✡️ Weekly Zionist History

*The Visionary Who Manifested a Country Yom Ha’atzmaut just passed. The man who started it all turns 166 this Saturday.

Sandwiched between Yom Ha’atzmaut and Yom Yerushalayim, and one day before what would have been his 166th birthday, the father of political Zionism gets a re-read. Herzl’s resume reads like a particularly intense LinkedIn profile: Vienna lawyer, Paris journalist, witness to the Dreyfus Affair, author of Der Judenstaat, founder of the World Zionist Organization, and visionary of a state he wouldn’t live to see. He died at 44, leaving us with one of the most-quoted lines in modern Jewish history, which doubles as the world’s loudest manifestation mantra: if you will it, it is no dream. (Jewish Virtual Library)

🕎 Religion & Jewish Life

The Rambam, Translated and Triumphant Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz spent his last years on Maimonides. Volume one is now in English.

The first English volume of Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz’s commentary on the Mishneh Torah has just been released, completing the inaugural installment of what was the Talmudic giant’s final scholarly mission before his passing in 2020. Steinsaltz already democratized the Talmud for a generation. This project does the same for Maimonides’ towering legal code, opening the Rambam to readers who never had a yeshiva chavruta. (Chabad.org, April 2026)

🎭 Culture & Identity

Welcome to the Tribe, Doc Northern Exposure was the most Jewish show on television, and almost nobody noticed.

David Samuels makes the case that Joshua Brand’s Northern Exposure, the early-90s dramedy about a Jewish New Yorker exiled to small-town Alaska, was the most quietly profound Jewish show in television history. Cicely, Alaska turns out to be a stand-in for the diaspora itself: a place where outsiders build something tender out of difference. If you’ve been meaning to revisit the moose-in-the-credits show, consider this your nudge. (Tablet Magazine, March 2026)

The Knife Whisperer A Bessarabian shtetl shochet’s memoir finally gets the English translation it deserves.

Pinye-Ber Goldenshteyn was an itinerant Jewish ritual slaughterer who roamed late-19th-century Bessarabia, and his memoir, recently translated by scholar Lane Igoudin, is one of the rare firsthand accounts of shtetl life written by someone who was neither a rabbi nor a rebellious son. It’s daily, granular, occasionally bawdy, and full of the texture that “shtetl” usually gets reduced to in the popular imagination. A primary source you can actually enjoy reading. (Tablet Magazine, April 7, 2026)

On His Honor, and His Mother’s Orders Six decades after his Brooklyn bar mitzvah, Ricky Mason is running the Scouts.

Ricky Mason, who joined the Boy Scouts as a Brooklyn kid in the 1960s and credits his Jewish mother for the entire trajectory, has just become the first Jewish board chair of Scouting America in roughly 50 years. Mason talks openly about how Jewish values shaped his leadership philosophy and why he sees Scouting as a natural fit for Jewish American kids. A nice quiet-civic-Jewishness story for the week. (JNS, April 10, 2026)

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King Solomon had a thousand wives, wrote a book of proverbs, and still felt the need to write a whole passionate love poem about a shepherd boy and a maiden. Coincidence? We think not. In this follow-up to our Valentine’s Day episode, we go deeper into what Judaism actually teaches about love, including what Song of Songs reveals about God’s relationship with the Jewish people, and we bring it all the way down to earth with real talk about marriages stuck in a rut, whether people can truly change, and why “I can’t” usually means “I don’t want to.”

In this episode, we get into:

• Shir HaShirim (Song of Songs): literal love poem or divine allegory?

• Why love is the only personality trait with its own dedicated book in the entire Hebrew Bible

• What Adam and Eve tell us about whether opposites actually attract

• Why real love has nothing to do with infatuation, Hollywood, or Taylor Swift (though we do have opinions about her and Travis)

• Practical advice for married couples who have drifted apart and want to find their way back

• Trust vs. love: which one is actually the foundation of a lasting relationship

• The Baal Shem Tov’s classic “you can, you just don’t want to” and why it applies to your marriage right now

• Why the Rebbe and Rebbetzin’s relationship might be the greatest love story you’ve never heard

  Quote of the Episode:

  "Love goes deeper than what you can do for me. You love the person for who they are and what they are, not what they do for you." - Rabbi Perelmuter

Whether you're happily married, newly in love, or just trying to remember what you liked about the person across the breakfast table, this episode has something real for you. Come learn, laugh, and maybe text your spouse something nice when it's over. 🕯️❤️

Referenced Material-

• Shir HaShirim (Song of Songs)

• Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) by King Solomon

• Mishlei (Proverbs) by King Solomon

We’re kicking off a brand new segment called “Dear Rabbi,” where we bring real-life issues to the Rabbi and actually get into it with honest, often hilarious, sometimes painful conversations about the stuff people are quietly struggling with.

First up: how to care for elderly parents without losing your mind, your marriage, or your lunch break.

In this episode, we get into:

• Setting boundaries with elderly parents (and why that’s easier said than done)

• The difference between being a caregiver and being a nurse

• Why your parents just want to feel significant — and no, a text does NOT count

• The generational divide around phones, Uber apps, and why nobody remembers their Kaiser password

• What to do when your relationship with your parents is, well, complicated

• The Rabbi’s reflection on his Holocaust-survivor father and putting yourself in your parents’ shoes

• Jay on caring for his mom while raising a young daughter and feeling guilty about feeling guilty

• ChayaLeah admitting which of her four sons she’d trust with her medications (spoiler: it’s not all of them)

Plus a hot take on Matzo manufacturers who dare to sell non-Kosher-for-Passover matzo. The audacity.

Whether you’re navigating aging parents yourself, trying to figure out how much you’re really capable of giving, or just looking for permission to laugh about the hard stuff, this one’s for you. Grab a coffee, settle in, and remember: your parents just want you to call.

Quotes of the Week

• A tweet does not help. A text does not help. Call me. Even if it's for two minutes. Call me. - The Rabbi

• When you're young, you always think there's gonna be time. Then you get older and realize there's actually not a lot of time - Jay

Got a question for Dear Rabbi? Email us at edjewcationpod@gmail.com or message us on Substack.

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We kicked off this month's Zoom talking about the Rebbe's birthday and why his legacy still hits so hard, from growing Chabad's global mission to his no-nonsense philosophy on turning obstacles into opportunities.

Then we got into full Passover mode: ChayaLeah is prepping a community Seder for 120 people and her game plan is SPEED. We broke down the Ten Plagues (why those plagues, why that order, and how long they actually lasted), talked about why you don't need a minimum number of people for a Seder (but the more the merrier), and heard from Moshe Perelmuter live in Israel about what Passover looks like during wartime, with packed grocery stores but empty Jerusalem streets.

We also explored studying the Tanya, which the Rabbi describes as essentially a self-help book for the Jewish soul. And Goldie dropped some hilarious childhood stories about sharing a bedroom with ChayaLeah. It's Passover prep meets life advice meets family chaos.

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Peacock on the Menu: Inside the Wildest Kosher Dinner You’ve Never Been Invited To When “is it kosher?” becomes the most interesting question at the table.

At the Biblical Museum of Natural History in Beit Shemesh, over 100 guests sat down to a multi-course feast featuring water buffalo, peacock, and goose eggs, all prepared under strict halachic supervision. A bespectacled rabbi introduced each exotic dish alongside a taxidermized baby giraffe. This is food writing, Jewish law, and sheer chutzpah rolled into one unforgettable evening. (Tablet Magazine, April 2026)

📜 History & Heritage

500 Years Young: The Prague Haggadah That Shaped Every Seder Table Since The OG illustrated Haggadah is still influencing your family’s copy half a millennium later.

The 1526 Prague Haggadah, printed by Gershom Cohen, was the first complete illustrated Haggadah produced by Jews. Its woodcut illustrations established the visual template that Haggadot have followed ever since. One copy, brought to Charleston, SC by an immigrant family in the late 1800s, now sits at the Museum of the Bible with three generations of family milestones handwritten into its margins. A perfect Passover-week read about how one book became an eternal blueprint. (JNS, March 20, 2026)

AI Meets Alef-Bet: New Tool Unlocks Centuries of Handwritten Yiddish and Hebrew Texts Your bubbe’s letters just became searchable.

Vilnius University in Lithuania has launched VILNISH, an AI-powered service that converts handwritten and printed Yiddish and Hebrew manuscripts into searchable digital text. The tool can process diaries, synagogue records, and family letters, then translate the material into English, opening doors for genealogy researchers, historians, and anyone whose family’s story is locked inside old documents. Think of it as OCR with a Yiddish accent. Could be a game-changer for anyone chasing their roots. (JNS, March 23, 2026)

🎭 Culture & Identity

Is This America’s Largest Seder? 1,500 Gators Just Took Over a Basketball Arena to Find Out When your campus Seder outgrows every room on campus, you book the arena.

At the University of Florida, Chabad moved the annual Passover Seder into the 12,000-seat O’Connell Center, drawing roughly 1,500 Jewish students, faculty, alumni, and community members. With Passover falling during the school year rather than spring break this time around, students who don’t usually attend Chabad events showed up in droves. It’s a vivid snapshot of the post-October 7 surge in Jewish campus engagement that shows no signs of slowing down. (Chabad.org, April 2, 2026)

All Aboard the Seder Express: 60 Jews, One Subway Car, Zero Afikoman Grape juice sloshing with every bump. Peak New York Judaism.

For the third year running, rapper Kosha Dillz organized a full Passover Seder on a New York City subway ride from Union Square to the Bronx, complete with a rabbi, Seder plate, the Four Questions, and spirited rounds of “Dayenu” while a Yiddish singer played guitar. The only thing missing was the afikoman hunt, which, given the competition from Pizza Rat, was probably for the best. Public, proud, joyful Judaism in motion. (The Forward, April 1, 2026)

🕎 Religion & Jewish Life

Challah at a Passover Ad? Georgia Politician Learns the Hard Way That Hametz Has Consequences “It’s the thought that counts, I guess.”

A Georgia state Senate candidate placed a Passover greeting in the Atlanta Jewish Times featuring a fluffy challah draped in an Israeli flag. The internet did what the internet does. Conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg compared it to serving a BLT on Yom Kippur, while Georgia’s only Jewish legislator, Esther Panitch, offered herself up for future “holiday consults.” The candidate apologized with grace, and the whole episode became an unexpected lesson in why knowing your audience matters. Also: hire a Jewish consultant for Jewish content. (JNS, April 5, 2026)

For Some Seniors, It’s Their First Seder in Decades. Chabad Is Making Sure They’re Not Alone. A 95-year-old woman in Phoenix broke down in tears when she learned she was still welcome.

Across three continents, Chabad emissaries are bringing Passover to elderly Jews in care facilities, many of whom haven’t participated in a Seder in years. From distributing shmurah matzah and abbreviated Haggadahs to coordinating full Seders inside nursing homes, the effort is rooted in the Rebbe’s decades-old initiative to ensure no Jew is left behind on the holiday of freedom. Sometimes the most powerful Jewish outreach is simply showing up. (Chabad.org, March 2026)

Chag Sameach everyone!

On this chag episode, we tackle a section of the Haggadah that almost everyone breezes past: Jacob's fateful decision to "temporarily" settle in Egypt, only to buy land, put down roots, and stay for 17 years.

From that ancient real estate deal, the conversation spirals into the big questions Jewish families are wrestling with right now:

• What does Israel really mean to diaspora Jews?

• Is "dual loyalty" just an antisemitic trope, or something worth actually thinking about?

• Why did 80% of Jews choose to stay in Egypt even after centuries of slavery?

We don't talk about rising antisemitism, the war with Iran, and what it means to say "Next year in Jerusalem" from your living room in Long Beach. ChayaLeah shares her family's Passover prep rituals (poster boards, car detailing, kids moving the fridge), and we a passionate case that any level of observance counts.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. 🍷

Resources Mentioned

• Genesis 46:27 - Jacob’s family settling in Egypt

• Exodus 13:18 - Circuitous route out of Egypt

• The Four Questions explained - Chabad.org

• The Rebbe’s seder table - Chabad.org

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As a reminder, we will be hosting our pre-Pesach Zoom call exclusively for our edJEWcation family this Sunday, March 29th at 1PM EST / 10AM PST.

Find the link below and we hope you all can make it!

Gut Shabbos!

Zoom Link

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86050937135?pwd=uRWbDqTsgpbAggNAm4xtrdeQW9UqQy.1

Meeting ID: 860 5093 7135

Passcode: 712881

The Great Jewish Manuscript Sell-Off

When the institutions entrusted with Jewish memory quietly sell the originals, who’s minding the store?

📜 So here’s a fun thing that happened: the Jewish Theological Seminary sold its entire collection of personal letters by the Ramchal (that’s Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto for the uninitiated, only one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the last 300 years, no big deal). They did this in 2016. Nobody found out until a single letter popped up at auction in February 2026 and sold for $392,700. Nearly four hundred grand. For one letter. From a collection they let go of wholesale. We’re talking about a mystic-poet-ethicist whose fingerprints are on everything from the Baal Shem Tov to the Mussar movement, and his personal correspondence is now scattered to the winds of the rare Judaica market like confetti at a bar mitzvah nobody was invited to. Sclar’s point is devastating and simple: once the originals vanish into private ownership, scholarly possibilities vanish with them. Think of it this way: JTS was basically the Library of Alexandria for Ashkenazi intellectual history, and they held a quiet garage sale. 🔥

Read the full article (Tablet, February 19, 2026)

History & Heritage

You Can Now Walk to the Temple Mount on a 2,000-Year-Old Road. Yes, Really.

After 20 years of digging, Jerusalem’s ancient Pilgrimage Road is open for the first time since the Romans buried it.

🏛️ For two decades, archaeologists have been tunneling under modern Jerusalem to uncover the stone-paved road that millions of Jewish pilgrims once walked on their way up to the Temple for Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. On January 20, 2026, the first public tours finally began. The road runs about 600 meters from the ancient Siloam Pool to the Western Wall area, still bearing the original Herodian paving stones that were sealed under rubble after the Roman destruction in 70 CE. “This is one of the most magnificent archaeological discoveries in Jerusalem in the last decades,” says IAA chief archaeologist Amit Re’em. “For the first time, you can see this direct link between the Siloam Pool and the Temple Mount.” Let that sink in: you can literally retrace the footsteps of your ancestors ascending to the Beit HaMikdash.

Read the full article (Times of Israel, February 2, 2026)

The Torah Ark That Took the Scenic Route to the Museum

From “Little Jerusalem” to the Boston MFA, via Texas and a rabbi with a moving truck.

🚚 This story has the narrative arc (pun fully intended) of a biblical journey: impending destruction, a last-minute rescue, a long wilderness wandering, and eventual redemption. A nearly 12-foot wooden Torah ark sat at the heart of Chelsea, Massachusetts’ Orange Street Synagogue until the shul closed in 1999. Chelsea was once so Jewish they called it “Little Jerusalem,” with 15 to 20 synagogues in two square miles. Rabbi David Whiman grabbed a crew of friends and salvaged the ark, then basically schlepped it across the country like a sacred carry-on for years before it landed at the Boston MFA. The kicker? With synagogues closing at a record pace, there’s now more supply of orphaned arks than there are homes for them.

Read the full article (The Forward, October 30, 2025)

Culture & Identity

Was Gatsby Jewish? Hemingway Seemed to Think So.

David Samuels reopens the Jewish question hiding in plain sight in American literature’s most famous novel.

📖 OK, this one is a banger for the literary nerds in the room (you know who you are). David Samuels, Tablet’s literary editor, looks at The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises, published just 16 months apart, the two novels that arguably defined American fiction more than any other pair, and argues they’re essentially in a dialogue with each other about... Jewishness. The self-invention. The outsider striving to belong. The name change (hello, Jay Gatz). Hemingway, who was not exactly subtle about his feelings on Jewish identity (see: Robert Cohn), may have written Sun Also Rises partly as an answer to what Fitzgerald was doing with Gatsby. It’s the kind of essay that makes you want to reread both novels immediately and then argue about them over too much wine. Which, honestly, is the highest compliment you can pay a piece of literary criticism. 🍷

Read the full article (Tablet, March 19, 2026)

Lore Segal Is Gone, But Her Characters Won’t Stop Talking

The Kindertransport survivor’s posthumous story collection is a masterclass in aging with wit intact.

✍️ Lore Segal died in 2024 at age 96 and left behind Still Talking, a posthumous collection starring her beloved “Ladies’ Lunch” crew: a group of fiercely intelligent Upper West Side women in their 80s and 90s who refuse to go gently into anything, thank you very much. These characters agree, without discussion, that they are “not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on. They were going to die.” That’s the energy of the whole book. Segal escaped Nazi Austria on the Kindertransport at age 10, grew up in English foster homes, and became one of the sharpest short story writers in the American canon. Her life and work are also the subject of an exhibit at the Leo Baeck Institute running through April 15. If you’ve never read Segal, start here. If you have, you already know you’re going to read this immediately. 💀❤️

Read the full article (The Forward, March 18, 2026)

Education

Teddy Bears, Barbie, and the Jews Who Invented American Childhood

From Lionel trains to Curious George, first-generation Jewish immigrants didn’t just assimilate into American culture. They built it.

🧸 Here’s a sentence you didn’t expect to read today: the modern American concept of childhood was, to a remarkable degree, engineered by Jewish immigrants. Jeffrey Salkin reviews Michael Kimmel’s Playmakers, which traces how the children of refugees from pogroms, who grew up in poverty, imagined something different for the next generation: a childhood they themselves had never had. Teddy bears. Lionel trains. Baseball cards. Curious George. Barbie. All created by Jews. But Kimmel goes further than a “who’s who” list. He argues that these entrepreneurs didn’t just make toys; they helped construct the entire cultural infrastructure of American childhood, from developmental psychology to parenting advice columns. It’s basically the ultimate “wait, that was Jewish too?!” book, and Salkin’s review makes a compelling case that it belongs on your shelf. Right next to the dreidel collection and that Mel Robbins book you haven’t finished. 😏

Read the full article (Tablet, February 26, 2026)

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In this edJEWcation Book Club episode, Jay brings the crew one of his all-time favorite books: Up From Slavery, the autobiography of Booker T. Washington.

Born into slavery in 1856 and emancipated at nine, Washington went on to found the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and reshape what education could mean for a freed people. Jay, ChayaLeah, and the Rabbi explore the surprising parallels between Washington's vision of education as moral training and the Yeshiva model, debate the Torah's relationship with labor and productivity, and push back hard on today's victim mentality culture.

The Rabbi even draws a line from Booker T. Washington to the Rebbe and the Maggid of Mezritch. It's a wide-ranging, warm, and surprisingly moving conversation about resilience, legacy, and what it really means to build something from nothing.

Books mentioned in this episode:

• Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington

• Open by Andre Agassi

Hello edJEWcation fam!

We figured it would be good to fit in our next zoom with everyone before Pesach, so everyone can ask the rabbi their last minute seder questions.

We wanted to make this Zoom at a time when our listeners from Europe and Israel could join, so we’ll be meeting this Sunday, March 29th at 1PM EST/10AM PST.

Link to come soon.

We hope to see everyone there!

FEATURE STORY

Everybody Wants to Run This Play: Zionism as Template for National Renewal What if Zionism is less a Jewish grievance and more a technology the whole Western world desperately needs?

Alana Newhouse’s January cover essay for Tablet is one of those rare pieces that reframes a supposedly settled argument from the ground up. Rather than defending Zionism as a Jewish right, she asks why Zionism has become the thing everyone is fighting about and concludes the answer has far more to do with the West’s identity crisis than with Israel. She argues that Zionism, having fulfilled its promise for the Jews, now functions as a technology for national renewal that others could, conceivably, use themselves.

A must-read for anyone trying to make sense of the cultural moment.

(Tablet Magazine, January 2026)

RELIGION

Your Seder Is in Two Weeks. Here Is How to Actually Make It Meaningful. Passover begins April 1 this year, which means the clock is ticking.

With Passover two weeks out, My Jewish Learning’s comprehensive seder planning guide is the right thing to put in front of your listeners right now. Hosting a Passover seder is a deeply meaningful opportunity to participate in one of Judaism’s most ancient and significant traditions, and the guide covers everything from choosing the right Haggadah to setting the table to thinking through how to tell the story of the Exodus in a way that resonates with every guest around the table. It also includes a reminder that the Haggadah itself does not actually tell the Exodus story for you, leaving the table to do that work. Worth a read before you start cleaning out the chametz.

(My Jewish Learning, ongoing / updated for 2026)

CULTURE & IDENTITY

Closer Than You Think (and Farther Than We’d Like) Peoplehood is not a WhatsApp group.

Mijal Bitton reflects on three recent moments that crystallized the growing distance between American and Israeli Jewish life, from coalition proposals about egalitarian prayer at the Kotel to the unmediated reality of following Israelis on social media, and argues that presence, not posts, is what actually sustains the bonds of peoplehood. Her prescription is not guilt but genuine, sustained connection. Characteristically wise, and a useful corrective for anyone who thinks “solidarity” mostly happens online.

Committed by Mijal Bitton

Our Heart Is in the East. We Are Far Away.

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4 months ago · 31 likes · 13 comments · Mijal Bitton

Dues-Free, Tri-Mechitza, Orthodox: How a South Philly Shul Is Defying Every Expectation The fastest-growing shul in American Jewish life is in a neighborhood that had no synagogues for decades.

The South Philadelphia Shtiebel, founded in 2019, packs around 175 people into its sanctuary every Shabbat without charging mandatory dues, uses a three-section mechitza that includes a space for nonbinary congregants, and is intentionally apolitical, drawing congregants across the ideological spectrum. The Forward’s deep-dive is a genuinely surprising story about what Jewish community building can look like when someone throws out the rulebook. If you care about the future of Jewish belonging, this is the experiment to watch.

(The Forward, January 30, 2026)

EDUCATION

We Are the People of the Book. Let’s Not Become the People of the Screen. A visit to a Tunisian Jewish community offers a bracing reminder of what Jewish learning was actually built for.

Adam Eilath visited the 2,000-person Jewish community of Djerba, Tunisia, and watched students spend hours in rhythmic repetition, memorizing Torah texts in the ancient tradition of mishneh. He came away with a provocation for modern Jewish educators: digital tools that promise efficiency and access may be quietly hollowing out the discipline that made Jewish literacy durable across millennia. A short, lucid, and important piece for anyone involved in Jewish education at any level.

(Mosaic Magazine, February 5, 2026)

ART

Culture & Sacred Art “49 Ways to Be Jewish: A New Exhibit Paints the Sacred” The Forward, March 13, 2026

A new exhibit at the Derfner Museum of Judaica, “Envisioning the Sacred,” brings together paintings, prints, drawings and linoleum cuts by Jewish artists across generations, tracing a lineage from Chagall and Soutine through the New York abstract painters to contemporary voices, all grappling with how to render Torah, Moses, and Jewish spiritual life in visual form. A wonderful culture piece with real depth for listeners interested in Jewish art and identity.

(The Forward, March 13, 2026)

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