With Simchat Torah this weekend, I am reminded of endings and beginnings. During this holiday, we will finish reading the final portion of the Torah and start reading the Torah once again from the beginning.

This week, I attended a conference sponsored by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture on young adults, culture, and Jewish engagement. The conference was based on their study Cultural Events and Jewish Identities on the social and cultural fusion of young unaffiliated Jews ages 25-35 in New York City.

As a young engaged Jew who falls on the fringe of the young adults defined by the study (I’m only 23), I was intrigued to find out more about the report.

This day, sixty one years ago, Bess Myerson was the first (and so far, only) Jewish woman, to be crowned Miss America.

This week, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences honored the first Iranian Jew with an Emmy. She also happens to a woman—Lila Yomtoob. The Forward profiles Lila today, noting that her award is for working as a sound editor on the HBO documentary "Baghdad ER." The film follows the daily lives of doctors, nurses, soldiers, medics, and chaplains working in the U.S. Army's Baghdad medical facility in Iraq's Green Zone.

On this weekend twenty six years ago, women paraded down New York's Fifth Avenue to mark the tenth anniversary of Women's Strike for Equality and the sixtieth anniversary of the women's right to vote.

I am a 23 year old Jewish female, born and raised in the U.S. Until this point in my life, I thought I had a fair amount of responsibility—I went off to college hundreds of miles away from home and moved into an equally far away home of my own after graduating to begin a career. Yet, in contrast to my fellow female Israeli counterparts in their 20s, the responsibility on my shoulders pales in comparison.