Judy Gruen

When I was a young mother, I thought: When the kids are grown, I'll have so much more time to work! What was I smoking? I still juggle many duties as the days and nights require, my family’s interests at heart. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

My friend Karen threw herself a sixtieth birthday dance party. It was the perfect celebration, because after spending a decade in the dancing wilderness, Karen found her way back to self-expression through Jewish dance.

Allison Josephs, founder of the website Jew in the City (JITC), has established the JITC Hollywood Bureau, which she views as the natural next step in her organization’s 15-year campaign to correct myths and misconceptions about Orthodox Jews.

I spent Shavuot in another part of town and therefore missed being in my neighborhood shul to celebrate the holiday. The two shuls where I am most active have excellent decorum during services. One of the shuls has earned a reputation as overly strict in their no-talking during services policy, which sometimes turned off newcomers.
But I like it that way. It’s not always easy to focus on a prayer in practice. There is an architecture to each service, poetry in the Tehillim and a backstory to ...

My husband was just seconds from a clean getaway, but I was too fast.
“Do you have lunch?” I asked. Jeff was trying to sidle his way out of the kitchen and toward the front door—and freedom from me and my food interrogation.
“I have lunch,” he claimed, while actually slipping a Rubbermaid food container under his sweater, an unprecedented act of sneakiness in our 34-year marriage. If Jeff had been reduced to scrounging so deep in the hinterlands of the refrigerator for edible scraps that were...

Every June, my synagogue reminds me of the upcoming anniversary of my mother’s passing. “We would like to remind you that the yahrzeit of your mother, Liebe Leah bat Dov Ber, is this month,” the email reads. I make a donation to the shul in honor of my mother’s memory, and the rabbi recites a special memorial prayer for her during services.
Twenty years ago, my mother passed away only two weeks before our eldest son’s bar mitzvah. When the shiva week was over, I tried to focus on floral arran...

Whether sounding the alarm over the COVID variant of the week, political infighting, social divisiveness, inflation, crime, or supply chain stoppages, what good is a COVID booster when a shot of the news can give you a heart attack?

I have always found librarians to be unfailingly helpful. Whether I’ve asked them to add a new title to the library’s collection (admittedly, sometimes those titles were my own), or where I’d find a particular book genre, librarians have leaped into service with kindness and enthusiasm.
But the other day at the Beverly Hills Public Library, I found that some librarians are a little too enthusiastic about leaping into service, even before they are asked. I was headed to the circulation desk to...

I often feel like I’m the owner of a gold mine, my pockets overflowing with priceless nuggets of Jewish wisdom. It has taken many years to accumulate this motherlode, a process that began when I summoned the nerve to commit to a Torah-based life. This is God-given wisdom about everything that matters: values, priorities, relationships, communication, sensitivity, and more. What I have learned from teachers, mentors, and friends has helped me live each day with the kind of clarity about life I...

Anti-Semitism on college campuses may be worse than you think. Here are several courageous students who are fighting back.

Menachem Kaiser was named after a grandfather he never knew, a man who was more of an abstraction than reality. “My grandfather’s absence is a dry and untragic fact,” Kaiser writes in “Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure,” which relates his efforts to relitigate the claim to the family property that his Zaidy had fought for more than twenty years and lost.

Hadassah Lieberman does something unusual in her memoir — she includes observations from her four children. In doing so, this daughter of Holocaust survivors is making a statement: “Their existence represents my ultimate defiance of Hitler’s goal: the extermination of the Jewish people.”

When Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965, with Martin Luther King, Jr., and other Black civil rights leaders, he cemented his status as a civil rights activist as well as a Jewish scholar and educator.
This new documentary shines a light on Heschel's activism.