Part III According to a profile in the New York Times: “Rabbi Wallis, 64—who was born in Israel and raised in New York—is the son

It is late March and the weather is still cold. The sounds of mizrahi music and exuberant conversation emanate from an elegant ballroom in Brooklyn,

Part II The Abarbanel (or Barbanel) family from Eastern Europe is another interesting case. It is worth mentioning that quite a few eastern European Ashkenazim

Part I In an interview I conducted in the Tel Aviv home of the renowned Israeli historian of the Hasidic movement Dr. Isaac Alfasi, he

Part 1 When did the Jewish practice of naming children after someone begin? The practice seems to have been instituted in Judea sometime after the

A leaf from Machzor Yannai, discovered in the Cairo Genizah. Yannai was one of the great liturgical poets who flourished in the Land of Israel

Part I It’s September in Sparta, and the merciless Mediterranean sun beats down on the assembled crowd. The observer picks up a mingling of Greek

Why did these given names from medieval Ashkenazim and those from Anglia (England) fall out of favor among later Ashkenazim? Saadiah Gamaliel Yosi (as in

What has been overlooked in this debate is the role of other centers of Jewry in the founding and sustaining of the Eastern European Jewish

Part II There is other intriguing evidence for the existence of Jews in the Roman colonies of Pannonia and Dacia (the Roman names for modern

Part I In 2013, an Israeli geneticist named Eran Elhaik published a bombshell article in the Genome Biology and Evolution Journal (published by Oxford University

Firstly, it is hard to believe we are already at Parshat Noach and past the jam-packed month of Tishrei. I hope all of you spent