Andrew Esensten

Sep 3, 2024 | jweekly.com | Andrew Esensten

Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area. Liz Kleinrock was at a writers retreat in 2021 when the idea came to her for a children’s book about notable Jews from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. She immediately texted Caroline Kusin Pritchard, another children’s book author with whom she had struck up a friendship on Instagram a year earlier, and asked her: Would you do this with me?

Aug 30, 2024 | timesofisrael.com | Andrew Silow-Carroll |Andrew Esensten

JTA — When Michael Lerner and his then-wife Nan Fink launched Tikkun magazine in 1986, it was a shot across the bow of a Jewish establishment that he said had lost touch with its prophetic roots and was too unwilling to push Israel to seek peace with the Palestinians. The mid-’80s was “a time when the liberal voices were being increasingly marginalized in the Jewish world,” Lerner told J. The Jewish News of Northern California earlier this year.

Aug 30, 2024 | forward.com | Andrew Esensten

This article originally appeared in J. The Jewish News of Northern California.Editor's note: Rabbi Michael Lerner of Berkeley passed away Wednesday, his wife, Rabbi Cat Zavis, confirmed. He was 81. To mark his death, we're republishing this piece from April of this year on a major part of his legacy: the landmark Jewish progressive magazine Tikkun. Tikkun, the groundbreaking magazine published in Berkeley that served as a forum for liberal Jewish ideas, is folding after nearly four decades.

Aug 29, 2024 | jweekly.com | Andrew Esensten

Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area. Tikkun, the groundbreaking magazine published in Berkeley that served as a forum for liberal Jewish ideas, is folding after nearly four decades. Rabbi Michael Lerner, its founding editor, announced the closure Wednesday in an email to subscribers, citing his health. “These are difficult times for anyone seeking a world of love and justice,” Lerner wrote.

Aug 28, 2024 | jweekly.com | Andrew Esensten

Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area. Samson Nderitu Njogu was raised in a Messianic Jewish family in Kenya. Today, the 34-year-old is a third-year rabbinical student at the Conservative movement’s Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles. Njogu’s journey from East Africa to the West Coast of the United States — and from Messianic Judaism to mainstream Judaism and rabbinical school — is a uniquely modern Jewish story.