JWA chats with Persian-American cantor Jacqueline Rafii.

JWA talks to Dr. Galeet Dardashti, cultural anthropologist and singer, about her new album Monajat.

The new year, with its onslaught of messages about “improving” our bodies, can be especially hard for people with eating disorders.

JWA talks with musician, vocalist, and composer Daniela Gesundheit about how her new album, Alphabet of Wrongdoing, makes the sacred accessible. 

Not fasting on Yom Kippur can be rooted in a need to atone too.

Author Emily Barth Isler discusses what it means to her to have her debut novel, AfterMath, launch on Rosh Hashanah.

Atonement is tricky this Yom Kippur. Let's work on forgiveness, instead.

One year after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony to Congress, in light of the High Holidays, what have we learned?

Exclusively for JWA, poet Maia Evrona shares two poems for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

People view forgiveness as the secret to healing, as if it isn’t a long painful process of flashbacks, relapsing, shame, medication, and therapy, as if there’s some easy way to heal that I have been too prideful to consider. To view forgiveness as the apex of survivors’ progress trivializes each person’s individual struggle.

The 21st century in general, and this season in particular, is a high stakes time in the congregational rabbinate. Taking a break from my annual scramble to produce four 20-minute sermons that will change the course of history (that’s really what it feels like), I had the opportunity to re-read some High Holy Day words that actually did change the course of history.

While seeking stories of transformation this holiday season, most of the tales that have caught my attention involved women who exchanged quiet domestic lives for active involvement in the public sphere. Ray Frank did the opposite: she swapped her life as a trailblazing Jewish leader for one away from the spotlight.

Yesterday, as Yom Kippur approached, social justice organizers and progressive Jews gathered in downtown Boston to not only "remember" often underseen and undervalued laborers but also to stand in solidarity with the current labor struggles of our day. Here is Erica Concors', one committed organizer's, powerful speech. 

The iconic anarchist Emma Goldman believed that religion was inherently repressive.

For most of us, the break fast meal following Yom Kippur evokes images of bagels and cream cheese, coffee cake, blintzes and noodle kugel.

Even before Rosh Hashanah was over this year, my mind turned to what I should make for Yom Kippur.