In the late ’60s, in the very first years of our marriage, Sandy and I were living in a tiny rent-controlled apartment ($79.66 per month) in the northernmost Irish and Italian neighborhood in …
more
Rabbi James Rosenberg
|
7/7/23
|
A few weeks ago , Mark Elber, my colleague, friend and fellow poet, sent me a brief email posing the following question: “If you had to pick ten Jewish poems by any writers in any language, do …
more
Rabbi James Rosenberg
|
6/1/23
|
April 18, 2020, the day of my granddaughter Clara’s Bat Mitzvah, dawned with a surprise blanket of heavy, wet, soon-to-melt snow covering southern New England.
Rabbi Toba Spitzer took her …
more
Rabbi James Rosenberg
|
5/4/23
|
Back in the summer of 2014, I began my column for what was then called The Jewish Voice with the following words: “I confess that I am a liberal Zionist. I am proudly pro-Israel. …
more
Rabbi James Rosenberg
|
4/2/23
|
“My father went to sleep in his skin in the sun-flushed morning, in the flatlined morning / That shoveled a pit into my 35th year spadeful by spadeful and the sky collapsed over …
more
Rabbi James Rosenberg
|
3/3/23
|
On the morning of Sept. 15, 2021, members of Barrington’s Temple Habonim gathered together to celebrate Yom Kippur, 5782. All of us, having recently tested negative for COVID, and wearing …
more
Rabbi James Rosenberg
|
2/3/23
|
On Dec. 13, President Joe Biden signed into law the Respect for Marriage Act, which ensures that residents of all 50 states have the right to enter into same-sex and interracial marriages.
This …
more
Rabbi James Rosenberg
|
1/6/23
|
Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) is Israel’s best-known contemporary poet; his work has been translated into 40 languages. In my bookcase stand several of Amichai’s volumes in the Hebrew …
more
Rabbi James Rosenberg
|
12/2/22
|
Edmund de Waal’s “The Hare with Amber Eyes” is about many things. Towards the very end of the 350-page book, the author confesses, “I no longer know if this book is about my …
more
Rabbi James Rosenberg
|
11/4/22
|
It was as a high school sophomore, in 1960, that I first encountered “Ozymandias,” a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).
In the first line of the 14-line poem, Shelley tells …
more
Rabbi James Rosenberg
|
10/7/22
|