The trees are more than landscaping. They are my neighbors, my deep-rooted friends. But our neighborhood, like our climate, is changing.

In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Eastern Europe, Jewish women served their communities as spiritual leaders and paid religious functionaries. The main women’s leadership roles documented in Yiddish literature, memoirs, memorial books, and ethnographic studies include the midwife, the evil eye healer, the cemetery measurer, the prayer leader, and the mourning woman. 

JWA chats with Persian-American cantor Jacqueline Rafii.

The British Library shares a fifteenth-century prayer book commissioned by a father to his daughter, Maraviglia, a testament to women’s participation in fifteenth-century Italian Jewish ritual life.

JWA talks to Dr. Galeet Dardashti, cultural anthropologist and singer, about her new albumMonajat.

Roz Bornstein interviewed Magda Altham Schaloum, on June 5, 2001, in Mercer Island, Washington, for the Weaving Women's Words Oral History Project. Schaloum shares her experiences growing up in Hungary, including enduring antisemitism, the impact of anti-Jewish laws, her family's separation and deportation to Auschwitz, her survival through slave labor camps, and her life after the war, including immigrating to Seattle and building a new life with her husband and children.

The new year, with its onslaught of messages about “improving” our bodies, can be especially hard for people with eating disorders.

JWA talks with musician, vocalist, and composer Daniela Gesundheit about how her new album, Alphabet of Wrongdoing, makes the sacred accessible. 

Thekittel is commonly worn by men on Yom Kippur, but their ancient use by young maidens to attract husbands is little known.

Not fasting on Yom Kippur can be rooted in a need to atone too.

Author Emily Barth Isler discusses what it means to her to have her debut novel,AfterMath, launch on Rosh Hashanah.

Atonement is tricky this Yom Kippur. Let's work on forgiveness, instead.

Episode 46: Virtual Holidays: Lessons from our Muslim friends (Transcript)

One year after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony to Congress, in light of the High Holidays, what have we learned?

Exclusively for JWA, poet Maia Evrona shares two poems for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

People view forgiveness as the secret to healing, as if it isn’t a long painful process of flashbacks, relapsing, shame, medication, and therapy, as if there’s some easy way to heal that I have been too prideful to consider. To view forgiveness as the apex of survivors’ progress trivializes each person’s individual struggle.

The 21st century in general, and this season in particular, is a high stakes time in the congregational rabbinate. Taking a break from my annual scramble to produce four 20-minute sermons that will change the course of history (that’s really what it feels like), I had the opportunity to re-read some High Holy Day words that actually did change the course of history.

Read the 1890 Yom Kippur sermon by Ray Frank, the first Jewish woman to preach formally from a pulpit, and consider what unites and divides the Jewish people both historically and today.

While seeking stories of transformation this holiday season, most of the tales that have caught my attention involved women who exchanged quiet domestic lives for active involvement in the public sphere.Ray Frank did the opposite: she swapped her life as a trailblazing Jewish leader for one away from the spotlight.

Holocaust survivor Magda Altman Schaloum speaks out on behalf of all Holocaust survivors and their families. Born and raised in Hungary, she endured acts of antisemitism throughout her childhood, and in 1944 and 1945 Magda was sent to several concentration camps. She lost both her parents and her brother. Magda met her husband, Isaac Schaloum, in a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany. Isaac was from Salonika, Greece. They emigrated to Seattle in 1950, where Isaac became a tailor and businessman, and they raised three children. Although of Hungarian descent, Magda became an active and beloved member of Seattle’s Sephardic community. She volunteers for many Jewish organizations, including the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center, and continues to bear witness to the horrors of hatred and antisemitism.

Yesterday, as Yom Kippur approached, social justice organizers and progressive Jews gathered in downtown Boston to not only "remember" often underseen and undervalued laborers but also to stand in solidarity with the current labor struggles of our day. Here is Erica Concors', one committed organizer's, powerful speech. 

The iconic anarchistEmma Goldman believed that religion was inherently repressive.

For most of us, the break fast meal following Yom Kippur evokes images of bagels and cream cheese, coffee cake, blintzes and noodle kugel.

Even before Rosh Hashanah was over this year, my mind turned to what I should make for Yom Kippur.