Let’s get the meat of the gossip out of the way: Reality show star Tila Tequila (real name: Tila Nguyen) is converting to Judaism.

This week we were excited to receive news that our Hanukkah video, Women Who Light Up Our Lives, inspired Rabbi Janie Grackin to create a special project for "Rosh Hodesh Hanukkah." A Florida-based Jewish community educator and participant in JWA's summer Institute for Educators, Janie writes:

“[Debbie Friedman] emphasized the value of every voice and the power of song to help us express ourselves and become our best selves. As she wrote for JWA's online exhibit Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution: 'The more our voices are heard in song, the more we become our lyrics, our prayers, and our convictions.' The woman who wrote the song that asks God to 'help us find the courage to make our lives a blessing' herself modeled for us what that looks like.”—Judith Rosenbaum.
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The creators of the Gali Girls Chanukah video want you to think it's funny.

For those of you not around New York City in the 1970s, raising children was a challenge. City parks were infested with drug dealers and street crime was high.

Miriam Karp is an artist who has been creating hundreds of one-of-a-kind ketubot since 1976.

Change is definitely in the air, and it is filling me with hope.

A little over 15 years ago, I found my calling. While attending a Jewish Funder’s Network conference, I received a monograph on Jewish social justice circulated to all conference participants.

My bat mitzvah party theme was outer space. Each of the tables were named after the nine planets in the solar system at the time: Mercury, Venus, Mars.

“But there’s so much to learn!” This is the traditional lament of every bat mitzvah girl I have tutored, and I’m sure it escaped my lips a few times when I was preparing for my own bat mitzvah as well. Between the prayers, the Torah portion, the Haftarah, the d’var Torah, and everything else a bat mitzvah entails, there is no doubt that in becoming a bat mitzvah there is quite a lot to learn. But I would like to offer an alternative framework: the bat mitzvah girl not as a learner, but as a teacher.

Today I Am a Woman: Stories of Bat Mitzvah Around the World, (Eds Barbara Vinick and Shulamit Reinharz, Indiana University Press, 2011) is at once intellectual and imaginative.

As it does every year, the Forward recently published its “Forward 50” – and just like every year, the list is short on women.

I remember the crackling sound of late nineties alt-rock and the stench of roller-rink pizza like it was just yesterday.

I felt overwhelmed when deciding what to do for a bat mitzvah project.