Judaism 101
Judaism 101
The Glossary of Jewish Terminology is constantly updated to reflect every Jewish term used in this site and to help you find results to common searches.
The Current Calendar is self-maintaining and shows calendars for the current month and the next two months, with links to information about holidays and the weekly Torah and Haftarah readings.
| September 29, 2024 | For the geeks like me who want to understand how the calendar works (mathematically, programatically), I've made some major changes to my page about The Jewish Calendar: A Closer Look. I've added information about the Four Gates, a trick that simplifies the calculations. I didn't really understand the Four Gates until I started working on automating the calendar, but it definitely makes things easier! Related to the Four Gates, I've added some information about the Keviyot, the codes that tell you everything you need to know about the year's settings. The Four Gates table provides these settings for you for your year. |
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| June 11, 2023 | I made some updates to the page about the Hebrew Alphabet, adding an illustration of the STA"M alphabet (the one used in Torah scrolls and other sacred documents) and more discussion of K'tav Ivri (the ancient Paleo-Hebrew alphabet). For K'tav Ivri, I added an illustration and discussion of the Gezer Calendar, an ancient example of the writing that is probably an ancient child's homework! And I reformatted all of the alphabet illustrations, making them lay out in the same way so it is easier to see what letter is what. |
| September 30, 2022 | I've had a page about the patriarchs, the forefathers of Judaism, almost since the beginning of this website. I'm long overdue for a page about the Matriarchs, the female physical and spiritual ancestors of Judaism, who played an important role in the founding of Judaism that is recognized even in the most traditional sources. |
| April 3, 2022 | This site contains a wide variety of traditional recipes scattered on many different pages that can sometimes be hard to find. I've also been posting on a blog a lot of vegetarian recipes for Passover, a hard time to maintain a healthy vegetarian diet when both beans and grains are restricted! To make it easier to find these many recipes, I have created a recipe finder, a page that lists all of the recipes I have posted with a short description and links to the recipes. It also includes some filters to help you find the kind of recipe you want. |
| April 1, 2022 | Yes, I do pay attention to the unsuccessful searches on my website now and then. And I noticed recently a number of people unsuccessfully searching for adultery, which somehow I managed to miss on the page about sex! That oversight has been corrected. |
| December 28, 2021 | I have resisted writing about the Holocaust for decades, on the theory that this site is about who we are and what we do, not about what was done to us. But recent events have made want to put something out there. Rather than tell the same facts that are adequately covered all over the Internet, I decided to tell some personal stories from my extended family. See Holocaust: A Personal View. |
| October 21, 2020 | All of the pages are now in the new mobile-friendly format, though I am working on tweaking it for the best experience.
The last piece left to enter the mobile world is the text of the Prayers and Blessings. I minimally updated it, but I am working on improving it by shortening each line of Hebrew text to be narrow enough to fit on a mobile screen. On larger screens, the Hebrew and English will appear side-by-side. I am finding that this shorter text makes it easier to see what the individual words and phrases mean, if you are interested in learning or understanding the Hebrew. I am also adding more information to the explanations to those pages. |
| August 23, 2020 | Yes, this is the same site that has been answering Frequently Asked Questions about Jews and Judaism in plain English for almost for 25 years. The information is the same, but I finally decided to join the 21st century, updating to a more mobile-friendly look and feel. I have already updated more than 30 pages, including all of the fall holiday pages like Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot. I aim to have the whole site updated before Rosh Hashanah. I hope you like the new look and feel! |
*For those who don't get the pun: "nu" is a Yiddish word equivalent to English words like "so?" or "well?," and can be used all by itself to mean "What's new?"