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Judaism doesn’t want you to wander and live just anywhere — or does it?
(JTA) — I was a remote worker long before the pandemic made it a thing, but it was only last month that I really took advantage of it. Early on the morning of New Year’s Day, I boarded a plane from Connecticut bound for Mexico, where I spent a full month sleeping in thatch-roofed palapas, eating more tacos than was probably wise and bathing every day in the Pacific. I’ll spare you the glorious details, but suffice it to say, it wasn’t a bad way to spend a January.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found myself again and again coming into contact with expats who had traded in their urban lives in northern climes for a more laid-back life in the tropics. There was the recently divorced motorcycle enthusiast slowly wending his way southward by bike as he continued to work a design job for a major American bank. There was the yoga instructor born not far from where I live in Massachusetts who owned an open-air rooftop studio just steps from the waves. There were the countless couples who had chosen to spend their days running beachfront bars or small hotels on the sand. And then there were the seemingly endless number and variety of middle-aged northerners rebooting their lives in perpetual sunshine.
Such people have long mystified me. It’s not hard to understand the lure of beachside living, and part of me envies the freedom to design your own life from the ground up. But there’s also something scary about it. Arriving in middle age in a country where you know nobody, whose language is not your own, whose laws and cultural mores, seasons and flora, are all unfamiliar — it feels like the essence of shallow-rootedness, like a life devoid of all the things that give one (or at least me) a sense of comfort and security and place. The thought of exercising the right to live literally anywhere and any way I choose opens up a space so vast and limitless it provokes an almost vertiginous fear of disconnection and a life adrift.
Clearly, this feeling isn’t universally shared. And the fact that I have it probably owes a lot to my upbringing. I grew up in an Orthodox family, which by necessity meant life was lived in a fairly small bubble. Our house was within walking distance of our synagogue, as it had to be since walking was the only way to get there on Shabbat and holidays. I attended a small Jewish day school, where virtually all of my friends came from families with similar religious commitments. Keeping kosher and the other constraints of a religious life had a similarly narrowing effect on the horizons of my world and thus my sense of life’s possibilities. Or at least that’s how it often felt.
What must it be like — pardon the non-kosher expression — to feel as if the world is your oyster? That you could live anywhere, love anyone, eat anything and make your life whatever you want it to be? Thrilling, yes — but also frightening. The sense of boundless possibility I could feel emanating from those sun-baked Mexicans-by-choice was seductive, but tempered by aversion to a life so unmoored.
The tension between freedom and obligation is baked into Jewish life. The twin poles of our national narrative are the Exodus from Egypt and the revelation at Sinai, each commemorated by festivals separated by exactly seven weeks in the calendar, starting with Passover. The conventional understanding is that this juxtaposition isn’t accidental. God didn’t liberate the Israelites from slavery so they could live free of encumbrances on the Mayan Riviera. Freedom had a purpose, expressed in the giving of the Torah at Sinai, with all its attendant rules and restrictions and obligations. Freedom is a central value of Jewish life — Jews are commanded to remember the Exodus every day. But Jewish freedom doesn’t mean the right to live however you want.
Except it might mean the right to live any place you want. In the 25th chapter of Leviticus, God gives the Israelites the commandment of the Jubilee year, known as yovel in Hebrew. Observed every 50 years in biblical times, the Jubilee has many similarities to the shmita (sabbatical) year, but with some additional rituals. The text instructs: “And you shall hallow the 50th year. You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family.”
Among the requirements of the Jubilee was that ancestral lands be returned to their original owners. Yet the word for liberty is a curious one: “d’ror.” The Talmud explains its etymology this way: “It is like a man who dwells [medayer] in any dwelling and moves merchandise around the entire country” (Rosh Hashanah 9b).
The liberty of the Jubilee year could thus be said to have two contrary meanings — individuals had the right to return to their ancestral lands, but they were also free not to. They could live in any dwelling they chose. The sense of liberty connoted by the biblical text is a specifically residential one: the freedom to live where one chooses. Which pretty well describes the world we live in today. Jewish ancestral lands are freely available to any Jew who wants to live there. And roughly half the Jews of the world choose not to.
Clearly, I’m among them. And while I technically could live anywhere, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to. I like where I live — not because of any particular qualities of this place, though I do love its seasons and its smells and its proximity to the people I care about and the few weeks every fall when the trees become a riotous kaleidoscope. But mostly because it’s mine.
A version of this essay appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Recharge Shabbat newsletter. Subscribe here.
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The post Judaism doesn’t want you to wander and live just anywhere — or does it? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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This Orthodox filmmaker strove to find common ground between Jews and non-Jews
Menachem Daum (1946-2024) was not your typical Orthodox Jewish filmmaker. In his work, the late director often strove to find common ground between Jews and non-Jews, Orthodox and secular Jews, Polish Catholics and Jews (which he wrote about in these pages) and even between Palestinians and Holocaust survivors.
Fordham University is hosting a free retrospective of his films at Lincoln Center in New York. Called “Hidden Sparks,” the retrospective kicks off with Daum’s 1997 work A Life Apart: Hasidism in America — the first in-depth documentary portrait of Hasidim in New York City, produced and directed by an insider who knew the community intimately. The film is narrated by Leonard Nimoy.
In the documentary, we see a grandfather chatting in Yiddish with his children and grandchildren at home on Purim; a lively scene at the local butcher’s, and a young African-American’s unexpected reaction to a group of Hasidic men engaged in the tashlikh ritual in Brooklyn.
The film will be followed by a panel discussion that includes anthropologist Ayala Fader; filmmaker Oren Rudawsky (Daum’s frequent co-producer and co-director) and Daum’s wife, Rifke Daum.
On Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026, Fordham will also host a screening and discussion of Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance after the Holocaust — a documentary that follows Daum as he travels with his two grown sons to the Polish village of Dzialoszyce to track down the Christian farmers who hid their family from the Nazis.
What’s fascinating about the film is the obvious reluctance of his sons, married yeshiva students, to go on the trip at all, poking fun at their father’s liberal attitude towards the Poles — and then seeing their reaction when they finally meet the now-aging children of those farmers.
As Oren Rudavsky put it: “A Life Apart was our attempt to humanize Haredim for outsiders. Hiding and Seeking is our attempt to humanize outsiders to the Haredim.”
The post-screening discussion for Hiding and Seeking will include the Polish-born historian Natalia Aleksiun, filmmaker Oren Rudavsky, and Daum’s son, Tzvi Dovid Daum. To register for the film, go here.
The retrospective also includes the 2026 film The Ruins of Lifta (2016), a documentary centered around the only Arab village abandoned in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that wasn’t destroyed or repopulated. It will be followed a week later by a conversation with Israeli historian Hillel Cohen about the legacy of The Ruins of Lifta.
There will also be a screening of portions of Menachem Daum’s unfinished film Memory Keepers, about a group of non-Jews — mostly Christian Poles — working to restore and preserve Jewish cemeteries in Poland.
The film retrospective, which takes place at the McNally Amphitheater in Manhattan, runs from Jan. 27 — Feb. 17. For more information and to register, go here.
The post This Orthodox filmmaker strove to find common ground between Jews and non-Jews appeared first on The Forward.
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Could a video game help combat antisemitism on college campuses?
At a time of escalating antisemitism in the online gaming community, Julia Sebastien’s upcoming PC game, StrangeLand, which explores the difficulties of Jewish life at an Ivy League college, offers an alternative: the digital game not as an agent of antisemitism, but as a bulwark against it.
“What I want players to experience with this game,” Sebastien told me over Zoom, “is the sequence of choices and trade-offs a Jewish student in a really rigorous institution has to make.”
Yet she also has a longer-term, and perhaps loftier, aim for StrangeLand: That college educators and administrators use it as a guide of sorts to Jewish student life in general, and in particular, to “antisemitism on campuses,” she said.
Still, its target audience is one you might expect — current and former Jewish students at North American colleges, who, Sebastien believes, need help communicating “to family and friends when they’re feeling too tired or burnt out by everything that’s been going on.”
Sebastien has made digital games before. Indeed, she’s had a couple, both also academic in tone, published in digital journals. (One explored the effects of burnout in academia.) But thanks to a grant from the nonprofit Maimonides Fund, StrangeLand is her most ambitious, well-funded effort yet.
It’s also a little more personal.
Sebastien grew up in what she described as a “pretty religious Jewish suburb,” a modern orthodox community in Toronto. She attended Jewish day school and was fluent in Hebrew. But she never really took to prayer, she told me, and even as a teenager she had begun to see her Jewishness as an intellectual pursuit more so than a religious one.
She stayed in Toronto for her BA at York University, but then ventured south to Cambridge, Mass., where in 2022 she got a Master’s in Learning, Design, and Technology from Harvard, before starting a PhD in media psychology at Cornell (she’s partway through).
StrangeLand is loosely based on her own experiences in the academy, though it also comprises anecdotes from dozens of other Jewish undergraduates, graduates and alumni, whom Sebastien consulted via a survey. Players will “inhabit the life of a Jewish student who has just left home to start graduate school at an Ivy League university, sometime in the 2010s,” she said. There, they’ll be presented with a series of scenarios, organized thematically.
These scenarios will be “evergreen” Jewish student dilemmas: negotiating obligations around Jewish holidays alongside the traditional academic calendar; staying late at a laboratory on a Friday night versus leaving to meet other Jewish students for Shabbat dinner. And some will have a grain of antisemitism, at least according to Sebastien: how to respond to an off-color remark in a social setting, say, or whether or not to wear a Magen David necklace in public.
There’s no winning or losing, per se. Rather, StrangeLand will aim to illustrate the “impossibility of satisfying the demands of these two worlds; that, really, is the crux of the gameplay,” Sebastien said.
Notably absent from StrangeLand, however, are Zionism and Israel, the very topics that have elevated the Jewish collegiate experience to something of a national issue. Their omission is no accident. “I’m not trying to shine a light on what’s happening now,” Sebastien said. “I’m trying to educate people about antisemitism.”
And to include such divisive subjects wouldn’t help Sebastien fulfill this aim, she feels. “As a designer, I need to consider the very real possibility that for some players, StrangeLand might be their first exposure to antisemitism as a distinct concept,” she said. “And I feel that the best way to bring antisemitism awareness to diverse audiences is to use examples that are clear, universal, and evergreen.”
These hot-button issues, moreover, would seriously upset the vibe Sebastien is going for. “I actually don’t want characters in the game shouting horrific things,” she said. “I don’t want to jar the player. I want to explore concepts in a safe way that can still be emotionally poignant and meaningful and educational.”
The game will have a retro feel, then, a lo-fi aesthetic — the heavily-pixelated, Game Boy-style gameplay that Sebastien adored as a child — which she’s confident will reinforce these feelings of comfort and safety. (She cited Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin’s best-selling 2022 novel about a pair of Jewish, Harvard-educated video game developers in the ‘90s, as one of the game’s inspirations.)
In short, Sebastien wants StrangeLand to be a respite from the pressures of campus life, while at the same time illuminating, especially for those non-Jewish players, the complexities of the Jewish student experience.
How it can accomplish this without meaningfully discussing Zionism is an open question. To my mind, StrangeLand seems to be as much a work of history as anything else. The antisemitism Sebastien repeatedly referenced during our conversation was of the classical U.S. variety, the WASP-y strain of the 1960s and 1970s often found in Roth and Bellow novels. Nowadays, of course, discussions about campus antisemitism are typically focused on something else entirely. So it’s a little hard to square Sebastien’s broader goal for StrangeLand, that it eventually be part of DEI curricula, with its lack of contemporary examples.
But Sebastien is confident players will leave StrangeLand with a more complete understanding of Jewish student life. “I want this to speak to and for Jewish students now and in the past,” she said. “That’s what this game is to me.”
The post Could a video game help combat antisemitism on college campuses? appeared first on The Forward.
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People are enchanted with this 12-year old singer of Yiddish songs
דאָס איז איינער פֿון אַ סעריע קורצע אַרטיקלען אָנגעשריבן אױף אַ רעלאַטיװ גרינגן ייִדיש און געצילעװעט אױף סטודענטן. די מחברטע איז אַלײן אַ ייִדיש־סטודענטקע. דאָ קען מען לײענען די פֿריִערדיקע אַרטיקלען אין דער סעריע.
אין זומער 2020, בעת די װעלט איז געװען פֿאַרשפּאַרט צוליב קאָװיד־19, האָב איך געקוקט נאָך אַ מאָל און װידער אַ מאָל אױף אַ װידעאָ װאָס האָט זיך באַװיזן אױף דער סאָציאַלער מעדיע. דאָרטן האָבן צװײ קינדערלעך — דינה סלעפּאָװיטש און פּיניע מינקין — געזונגען אַ ייִדיש פֿאָלקסליד װעגן די בולבעס װאָס אָרעמע ייִדן האָבן געגעסן אין מיזרח־אײראָפּע.
איך בין פֿאַרכּישופֿט געװאָרן. אַ פּנים בין איך נישט געװען די אײנציקע, װײַל באַלד נאָך דעם איז אַן אַרטיקל װעגן דעם װידעאָ אַרױס אינעם פֿאָרװערטס.
דעמאָלט האָב איך אָבער נישט געװוּסט אַז דינה סלעפּאָװיטש, נישט געקוקט אױף איר צאַרטן עלטער, איז שױן געװען אַ געניטע זינגערין פֿון ייִדישע לידער. דאָ זעט מען װי זי האָט צו פֿיר יאָר אויף אַ חנוכּה־פֿאָרשטעלונג אין דער ניו־יאָרקער אַרבעטער־רינג שולע געזונגען פֿון אױסנװײניק דאָס קינדער־לידל „האָב איך מיר אַ מאַנטל“. איר טאַטע, דער כּלי־זמר און כּלי־זמר־מוזיק פֿאָרשער זיסל סלעפּאָװיטש האָט זי אַקאָמפּאַנירט אױף דער קלאַװיאַטור. מען הערט אינעם װידעאָ װי דער עולם זינגט מיט מיט איר דעם רעפֿרען.
דינה און איר טאַטע האָבן רעקאָרדירט אַ היפּשע צאָל װידעאָס פֿון ייִדישע לידער במשך פֿון די לעצטע פֿינעף יאָר. אָט איז אַ שפּיל־רשימה װוּ מען קען קוקן אױף זײ. איך האָב ספּעציעל ליב „שנירעלע פּערעלע“, װאָס דינה זינגט מיט אַ בעכער אין דער רעכטער האַנט, װי דאָס ליד באַשרײַבט. „דײנו“, װאָס זי זינגט מיטן טאַטן, איז מונטער און אָפּטימיסטיש. „דאָס עלנטע קינד“, קאָמפּאָנירט אין דער װאַרשעװער געטאָ מיט װערטער פֿון שמערקע קאַטשערגינסקי, זינגט זי װײך און מיט טרױער.
אין 2025 האָט דינה צו צװעלף יאָר אָפּגעהאַלטן אין אַ ניו־יאָרקער טעאַטער די װעלט־פּרעמיערע פֿון איר טאַטנס ליד „אױפֿן טײַכל שלום“. די קאָמפּאָזיציע איז באַזירט אױף אַ ליד פֿונעם פּאָעט און שרײַבער באָריס סאַנדלער, װעמענס 75סטן געבוירן־טאָג האָט דער קאָנצערט אָפּגעמערקט. זי האָט אױך דעבוטירט װי אַ סאָליסטקע מיט דער נאַציאָנאַלער ייִדישער טעאַטער־פֿאָלקסבינע בעת זײער חנוכּה־פּראָגראַם אין היברו־יוניאָן קאָלעדזש. זי פֿיגורירט אויך אין װידעאָס, אַרײַננעמעננדיק „זאָל שױן קומען די גאולה“, קאָמפּאָנירט נאָכן חורבן מיט װערטער פֿון שמערקע קאַטשערגינסקי.
לעצטנס האָב איך געשמועסט (אױף ענגליש) מיט דינה און איר טאַטן װעגן איר באַציִונג צו ייִדישע לידער — אַמאָל, הײַנט צו טאָג און האָפֿנטלעך אין דער צוקונפֿט.
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שטערן׃ װי אַזױ האָט דינה אָנגעהױבן צו זינגען לידער אױף ייִדיש?
זיסל סלעפּאָװיטש: זינט זי איז געבױרן געװאָרן האָב איך איר געזונגען אױף ייִדיש. זי האָט נאַטירלעך אָנגעהױבן נאָכצוזינגען די ייִדישע לידער. מיר רעדן רוסיש בײַ אונדז אין דער הײם, װײַל איך און מײַן פֿרױ זענען אױפֿגעװאַקסן אין בעלאַרוס. אַװדאי רעדט דינה ענגליש אין שול, און ענגליש און רוסיש מיט די חבֿרים. ייִדיש און ייִדישע לידער זענען אָבער געװען אַ טײל פֿון אונדזער משפּחה־לעבן, און זי האָט זײ אײַנגעזאַפּט אין זיך במשך פֿון איר טאָגטעגלעך לעבן. כאָטש זי האָט זיך נאָך נישט געלערנט ייִדיש סיסטעמאַטיש — גראַמאַטיק אאַז״װ — הערט מען װי נאַטירלעך זי זינגט אױף ייִדיש.
שטערן׃ דינה, װי לערנסטו זיך אַזױ גוט אױס די לידער?
דינה סלעפּאָװיטש: קודם־כּל זינגט מײַן טאַטע פֿאַר מיר אַ נײַ ליד, אַזױ פֿיל מאָל װי איך דאַרף. כ’האָב אַ גוטן זכּרון, הײב איך גיך אָן צו געדענקען די מעלאָדיע. דערנאָך דיסקוטירן מיר די װערטער, זעצנדיק זײ איבער אױף רוסיש און אַ מאָל אױף ענגליש. װײַל איך קען אַ סך ייִדישע לידער זענען עטלעכע װערטער מיר שױן באַקאַנט — מער און מער װערטער מיט דער צײַט.
שטערן: װאָס זענען דײַנע באַליבטסטע ייִדישע לידער?
דינה סלעפּאָװיטש: איך פֿיל זיך פֿאַרבונדן מיט „שנירעלע פּערעלע“, װײַל איך האָב דאָס געזונגען אין מײַן ערשטן װידעאָ בעת קאָװיד־19. און אַװדאי איז דאָס ליד װעגן בולבעס נאָענט צום האַרצן, װײַל אַ סך מענטשן האָבן געקוקט אױפֿן דאָזיקן װידעאָ און הנאה געהאַט פֿון אים. „אַרום דעם פֿײַער“ האָב איך אױך זײער ליב. װען איך זינג דאָס ליד פֿיל איך זיך רויִק און פֿאַרבונדן מיט אַנדערע מענטשן.
שטערן: װאָסער מין רעאַקציע באַקומט איר אױף די װידעאָס?
זיסל סלעפּאָװיטש: מיר באַקומען זײער אַ פּאָזיטיװע רעאַקציע. איך פֿאָר איבער דער װעלט צוליב מײַן מוזיק־אַרבעט, הער איך אָפֿט אַז מוזיקערס און ליבהאָבערס פֿון ייִדיש אין אַנדערע לענדער קוקן אױף די װידעאָס, אָפֿט מאָל מיט זײערע קינדער. לערערס פֿון ייִדיש און פֿון ייִדישער מוזיק װײַזן זײ אין די קלאַסן.
דינה סלעפּאָװיטש: מײַנע חבֿרים קוקן אױף די װידעאָס, און איך מײן אַז זײ האָבן זײ ליב!
שטערן: דינה, װי פֿילסטו זיך װען דו זינגסט פֿאַר אַן עולם, ספּעציעל אין אַ טעאַטער אָדער אױדיטאָריע?
דינה סלעפּאָװיטש: נערװעז. מײַן מאַמע העלפֿט מיר אָבער אַ סך. זי איז אַלע מאָל בײַ דער זײַט װען איך האַלט בײַ זינגען. מיט איר הילף באַרויִק איך זיך און מאַך זיך גרײט צו גײן אױף דער בינע.
שטערן: צי װילסטו זיך לערנען ייִדיש סיסטעמאַטיש, אפֿשר מיט ייִדיש פּאָפּ?
דינה סלעפּאָװיטש: יאָ, דעם קומעדיקן זומער, װען איך װעל נישט האָבן אַזױ פֿיל שולאַרבעט צו טאָן. האָפֿנטלעך װעל איך זיך לערנען רעלאַטיװ גרינג, װײַל כ’האָב געהאַט ייִדיש אין די אױערן לעבנסלאַנג. און איך קען שױן אַ סך װערטער.
שטערן: צי װעסטו װײַטער זינגען ייִדישע לידער פֿאַר אַן עולם און רעקאָרדירן װידעאָס?
דינה סלעפּאָװיטש: יאָ. נאָך דעם װי איך װעל זיך לערנען ייִדיש מער סיסטעמאַטיש װעל איך קענען זינגען װײַטערדיקע לידער. איך זינג מיטן ניו־יאָרקער פֿיליאַל פֿונעם נאַציאָנאַלן קינדער־כאָר, װאָס העלפֿט מיט געזאַנג־טעכניק. מיר זינגען אױף ענגליש, שפּאַניש, יאַפּאַניש, העברעיִש, האַװאַייִש…די דיריגענטן העלפֿן אונדז מיטן גוט אַרױסרעדן די װערטער בעת מיר זינגען. איך האָב ליב דאָס זינגען אױף פֿאַרשײדענע שפּראַכן. ייִדישע לידער װעלן מיר אָבער בלײַבן ספּעציעל װיכטיק, װײַל ייִדיש איז אַזאַ גרױסער טײל פֿון מײַן לעבן.
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