Articles, Announcements & Events
Changemakers: Jewish Federations of North America (15 June 2021)
As the founder of Asian Jewish Life, I'll be speaking with Changemakers Fellows about my story and the impact I'm making on the Jewish community and through a Jewish lens. This event is scheduled for [...]
The Vaccine Wasn’t Ready in Time to Save Mom
It’s Sunday, April 11, 2021. Two days from now, it will have been one year since my mother passed away, according to the Gregorian calendar. The yahrzeit, or anniversary on the Hebrew calendar, has just [...]
WJC Plenary: Diversity in Jewish Leadership – Pathways & Opportunities for an Inclusive Future (13 May 2021)
On 13 May 2021, 09:00 (New York), 15:00 (Brussels), 16:00 (Jerusalem) at the WJC Plenary, I will participate in a panel discussion on Diversity in Jewish Leadership – Pathways & Opportunities for an Inclusive Future. This event [...]
Text Message from Mom
I woke up today to three new text messages from my mother. We buried her in April, but apparently not her phone... A 100-word story To read more, go to Big Whoopie Deal
Why the escalating use of Holocaust images in the Hong Kong protests is deeply offensive
As the protests in Hong Kong continue, I can’t help but notice that the city is littered with Holocaust imagery and references such as “ChiNazi,” “Never Forget” and swastikas. Twitter is too. Holocaust images are, [...]
Our First Shabbat Home
We gather around the Shabbat candles. My fourteen-year-old daughter holds T, who’s almost four. I motion for her to take one step back. I’m worried that T is still too close. I light [...]
After the Fall
In years zero to 12 of expat life, I curated a series of standard quips in response to locals questions about what it is like to live here. A typical conversation would run something like [...]
Hong Kong and Israel have much in common
I took my children to Admiralty to the scene of the Occupy Central protests to teach them lessons about passion and persistence. I admired the incredible spirit, civility and intelligence of the protesters, but one [...]
Sorry to the Israeli Holding My Camera
I give my earnest apologies to the Israeli holding my camera. When it comes to Israel, I may have misspoken. Each time I come to Israel, some conversations have a certain recurrence, as regular as [...]
France Flashback
Since the start of Operation Protective Edge, my flippant response to questions about my safety in Israel was, “I am far safer here than I would be in Paris. Last night it was announced that [...]
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Should I stay or should I go now? If I go there will be trouble And if I stay it will be double So come on and let me know. Should I stay or should [...]
Get Your Holiday BOOKED
As a word of warning, this article is extremely biased and opinionated. As a general rule, I won’t read anything with the words princess or popular in the title (with the exception, of course, of [...]
Limmud China: A Generator for Next-Gen Engagement
One week post-Limmud China, most of us are still on a high. Bringing together approximately 160 participants was a large achievement for the Jews of the Far East. The post-conference flurry of Facebook friend requests [...]
My Big Fat Hong Kong B’nai Mitzvah
Nearly thirteen years have flown by in a way I never anticipated possible. I have woken up to find that I am suddenly the parent of a boy who is definitely taller than me, and [...]
The Art of Identity – Weaving Indian Jewish Narratives (in Conversation with Siona Benjamin)
The FACES jump from their frames, dance across the walls of the Flomenhaft Gallery. Life flows from the canvases, their stories swirl around them. It is clear that these are not mere pictures of people [...]
How Do You Say Horseradish in Cantonese?
It is late in the day before the first Seder. I am not having guests until the next evening and I stop to marvel at how organized my kitchen looks. Nearly everything is [...]
The Asian Jewish Life Story
The story of how and why Asian Jewish Life was founded is perhaps long overdue. Though I have recounted it numerous times, I have yet to tell it in our own journal, but it is [...]
The Asian Jewish Life Story
The story of how and why Asian Jewish Life was founded is perhaps long overdue. Though I have recounted it numerous times, I have yet to tell it in our own journal, but it [...]
The Jewish/ Israeli Response to Haiti: A Look at the Landscape Four Years Later
The distance from Port-au-Prince, in Haiti, to New York is only 1,684 miles and from Port-au-Prince to Jerusalem it’s a more formidable 6,494 miles. It might as well be a million miles from both cities. [...]
Read All About It: A Mother-Daughter Book Club
Book clubs are a bit like shopping for hats and I have tried on many in the past two decades. While I am most certainly a hat person, not all types suit me. It has [...]
On Rye Please, Hold The Stereotypes
In an effort to procrastinate, I occasionally like to bounce some ideas around. As I work from home with only my two cats for company, this often means waiting until my children return home [...]
On Choosing a Hero
Anyone who has a child and anyone who ever was a child has thought about heroes of some sort, at some point. Of course, there are great variations between chosen hero types. There are fictional [...]
Kung Hei Fat Choy from Our Jewish Home to Yours
Shabbat Dinner Menu for 15: Egg drop soup with crunchy noodles, Stir Fried Vegetables, Dan Dan Noodles, Roasted Chicken with Duck Sauce, Garlic Broccoli, Five-Spice Glazed Salmon, Mandarin Oranges and Almond Cookies. This is not [...]
The Great Cohen Bacon Debate
My father pointing to treyfe meats. I grew up in The Brady Bunch generation, or at least the generation that grew up watching The Brady Bunch in syndication. I can still hear Peter Brady intone [...]
Jews in China: Living in the Dragon’s Den for 14 Centuries
Today in China there are both synagogues without Jews, and Jews without synagogues, as in Beijing, where the growing community has created places of worship in renovated flats. The first reference to a Jewish presence [...]
Holy People in the Taxi
The streets of Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district are bustling with traffic. Yet people seem to be entirely oblivious to the cars and wander across streets pushing rickety carts piled with colored plastic house-wares, flattened [...]
In a Hong Kong Walkway, a Very Public Holocaust Exhibit
Students from two local schools create art to be shown alongside that of children from Terezin, for a mass audience with a lot to learn It is 6 pm, the height of rush hour in [...]
Sorting Through Old Things: Reflections On September 11th
I am a person made for the digital age. I save little. I throw away my children’s artwork and fail to understand why others complain that it has taken over their homes (though I am [...]
Home to One Jew, Harbin Synagogue to Renovate
A new tourism scheme by the Chinese government sets its eyes — and its funds — on an area once home to 23,000 Jews including a former PM’s grandparents HONG KONG — The Harbin Municipal [...]
Hong Kong Graduates its First Jewish High School Class
Though there are only four graduates, they are the realization of a communal dream begun in 1991 with a dozen toddlers HONG KONG — Hong Kong is a place where change can happen rapidly, small [...]
Reflections On Jewish Budapest
In the quaint and picturesque Hungarian town of Szentendre (Saint Andrew), just outside of Budapest, our group of five new friends who had gathered from throughout the Jewish world bask in the sunlight, seemingly frozen [...]
Reading Emma Lazarus in Hong Kong
Emma Lazarus It started as my daughter’s third grade assignment: choose a person to write about, preferably an American, preferably a Jew. We were going to do just that. I intended to help my daughter [...]
Studying the Future for Russian Jewry
I come from New York and studied in Washington, D.C., so perhaps I took the existence of specialized Jewish organizations for granted. Of course communities consist of several houses of worship, academic institutions, communal organizations, [...]
Five Star Refuge: A Week at The Pen
A refugee family at The Peninsula Hong Kong The lobby of Hong Kong’s Peninsula Hotel (or “The Pen” as it is often fondly referred to as) suggests the height of colonial elegance, framed [...]
Alone On Ward C
I met Mr. E at a poetry reading. Hong Kong’s literary scene is small and two Americans reading in one evening was an unusual event. We became Facebook friends, generally “liking” the same local literary [...]
Chinese Lanterns in the Sukkah
A Hong Kong symphony of sounds fills the air as local laborers shout across the shul courtyard in Cantonese while tossing bamboo in a pile for the sukkah: Filipino maids chatter in Tagalog hovering over [...]
Networking the Great Wall
Connectivity and networks have certainly become buzzwords in the Jewish organizational world. While new global and regional networks are constantly being formed, expanded, analyzed and critiqued, for the Jewish communities of Asia, a robust [...]
New Sefer Torah For Hong Kong
Hong Kong’s Ohel Leah Synagogue recently celebrated the dedication of a new Sefer Torah. Britain’s Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and Lady Elaine Sacks joined Rabbi Asher Oser and Assistant Rabbi Ariel Zamir of Ohel [...]
Limmud Debuts in China
When Taste of Limmud China takes place June 3 near Beijing, it will be the first conference bringing together Jews living in the many isolated communities throughout the Far East HONG KONG — Along the [...]
On Matzah & Mohels
Pesach means bite-sized sweet kidney mangos and the return of the longon. Shavuot brings back the pomelo. Chanukah means miniature Mandarin oranges. And its always star-fruit for Rosh Hashanah. While our palates might have changed, [...]
Teaching the Holocaust in Hong Kong
Inaugurated this week, the Hong Kong Tolerance and Holocaust Centre puts the atrocities of the Shoah into context by using Chinese national examples, such as the Rape of Nanking HONG KONG — In a nation [...]
Reflections from an Unlikely Witness
A Protestant woman from Hong Kong joins the 2012 March of the Living to ‘feel’ the Holocaust, not just remember Linda Cheung’s journey to the 2012 March of the Living began five years ago when [...]
Comic Strip Diplomacy
Sketching Chinese and Israeli history Yaakov Kirschen photographed by his wife, artist Sali Ariel. I suppose I should not have been surprised to open my friend's DIY child-friendly Haggadah and find a prominent Pesach Dry Bones cartoon. [...]
Purim in Hong Kong
A traditional Purim in Hong Kong requires an obligatory visit to Pottinger Street in the bustling Central District. Also known locally as Stone Step Street, Pottinger Street is more of a steep, irregularly paved pedestrian [...]
Candlesticks and Family Tales: What We Carry With Us
It was a single course my freshman year in college, Jews and the Immigrant Experience in America, that sparked the centrality of Judaism to my identity. This was no longer an identity forged by years of [...]
The Whole World is Jewish
I make my way through New York City’s busy diamond district with my children in tow. With only a few days in the city every two-years on a return visit from our home in Hong [...]
Frozen Pizza and Other Cultural Misunderstandings
"I am English,” I heard my then six-year-old son proclaim to his friend. “English?” I asked him. “Why would you say English?” “It’s really the only language I can speak well,” he stated simply. [...]
Laura Margolis in the Spotlight
Portrait of a heroine in Shanghai The story of Laura Margolis reads like an epic novel. She embodies what larger-than-life literary heroines are made of, though without embellishment, exaggeration, panache or hubris. She was the [...]
A Very Hong Kong Chanukah
To explain to my children what Chanukah was like for me as a young girl, I find I am just as inclined to recount what it wasn’t as I am to describe what it was. [...]
A Jewish Home in the Far East
On Saturday morning, the courtyard of Hong Kong’s Ohel Leah Synagogue is filled with a diverse and colorful mix of Jews. Sounds of Hebrew, Portuguese, English, and French fill the air, but language and nationality seem irrelevant. As kiddush lunch [...]
When Past and Present Collide
Reshaping the future of the historic Shanghai Ghetto Site of the former JDC office Street view of the former Jewish Ghetto areal Seemingly there is a real tension in Shanghai's Tilanqiao district. The tension is [...]
Aging Out of Generational Divides
Recent articles in the Jewish media have cited critical differences between Jews under 40 and ”older Jews” and have made reference to “stark generation gaps”, “deep generational divides” and certain ideas “not resonating with Jews [...]
How the Anne Frank Story Captured China
And then they came for me - being performed in China The Chinese have become unlikely fans of the Anne Frank story: a London theatre company is to take its production of And [...]
Siona Benjamin’s Interviews on Canvas
Faces of the Bene Israel When artist Siona Benjamin, an American, set out on her trip back to the India of her childhood in 2010, she arrived with an intense sense of purposefulness heavily laden [...]
Moshe Rabbeinu Lego: A Hong Kong Pesach Special
In Hong Kong, there are certainly some inconveniences involved in finding every last product necessary to recreate the Pesach we had in New York. But, we have found it is merely a matter of mastering [...]
Replanting Roots in Shanghai
Architect Haim Dotan’s Journey Architect Haim Dotan To understand the importance of the Israel Pavilion in Shanghai, it is necessary to understand the history of the ties that bind these two ancient peoples. The story [...]
Never Forget, Never Forgive In Feudal Japan – Not a comic social commentary
An image often has the power to transcend words. With beautiful, bold, black brush stroke sketches, graphic novelist Rami Efal screams out universal truths in his work Never Forgive, Never Forget, a recent nominee for [...]
Paradise Found
Backpacking and families do go together, especially on the laid-back island of Phi Phi, says Erica Lyons. We used to go on adventures, backpack, travel without an itinerary, carry only one bag between two of us for a [...]
Rescuing Shipwrecked Ancestors
A story in three generations Sadia Shepard Nana & Sadia in Denver, 1975 Sadia & Nana in Newton, 1977 Nana at eighteen It started with a promise to rescue a memory. Nana’s voice and the [...]
Animating Jewish-Chinese Relationships
A story of lasting friendship Judaism and Israel are hot topics in China. Over ten Chinese Universities now offer programs in Judaic Studies, at least one offering a doctoral program. China’s state-owned television network, CCTV, [...]