Girls to the front

Bringing Judaism into the twenty-­first century

Featured in

  • Published 20241105
  • ISBN: 978-1-923213-01-2
  • Extent: 196 pp
  • Paperback, ebook, PDF

I DON’T KNOW when I learnt I was Jewish. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve always known. I went to a Jewish school from the age of three, where – alongside maths, science, English, art and French – I took a full program of Jewish studies, including Hebrew, chumash (Bible studies), navi (study of the prophets), yahadut (general Jewish knowledge) and parsha (the weekly Torah portion read in synagogue).

Most kids at school hated Jewish studies – the texts are dense and ancient, and the teachers in Australia are often underpaid and overworked. Plus, Year 12 exams don’t include chumash or navi, so why put in the effort? Yet I wasn’t like that. I loved Jewish studies so much that as a teenager I studied for the International Bible Contest, in which the best and brightest Jewish kids from each country memorise hundreds of Bible facts to win a free ticket to compete against each other in Israel. Sure, I was looking for creative ways to go overseas – growing up, money was tight and we didn’t go on family holidays – but I also genuinely loved learning about my faith.

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

The fair-go fallacy

GR OnlineRunning as an independent parliamentary candidate is like building a plane while flying it – there’s no party machine, no head office, no ready-made team. Everything rests on your shoulders, and more often than not, it comes down to one thing: money.

More from this edition

Land, sea and sky

Non-fiction YOU CAN ONLY imagine what it would have been like. On 1 July 1871, the warrior chief Dabad and his men stood and watched...

Adventures in the apocalyptic style

Non-fictionIt's easy to laugh at preppers, dismissing their ideas in the process. It’s also easy to adopt the prepper worldview wholesale, and make fun of everyone else – all those sheeple – for not seeing what a mess we’re really in. It’s harder, but ultimately more productive, to see prepping as a complex, contradictory response to the multiple crises the world is facing. Prepping is more than just a freakshow, although it is that. And prepping is more than a useful instructional manual, although it is that, too. Neither wholly reasonable nor wholly ridiculous, prepping culture is a vivid and alarming reflection of a contemporary Anglophone culture that exists in a state of perma-­crisis and can find only simple answers to wicked problems.

Feeling our way to utopia

Non-fiction JANE AUSTEN WAS just twenty-­one years old when she wrote her first novel, Sense and Sensibility. Today, we understand her works as more than...

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.