Merissa Nathan Gerson
Leave it to feminist power-Jew Jill Soloway to take a sex worker and have her revive a Silverlake couple’s Jewish practice.
Sex in Silverlake
Author: Merissa Nathan Gerson
Merissa Nathan Gerson is the author of AskYourYenta.com, an advice column with an occasional Jewish bent. She is a contributing writer to the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles and is presently a yeshiva student in Jerusalem. Merissa holds an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, CO where she focused on post-Holocaust trauma in the body.
Miley Cyrus and a Whole Lot of Wrong
Merissa Nathan Gerson
Is Miley the social ill, or is she the catalyst to revealing our deepest issues?
German and Soldier, Falling in Love
Merissa Nathan Gerson
It was two AM on a Sunday, and I found myself with a German woman and a male U.S. soldier in the middle of a Vermont field.
A-Salaam Alaykoum
Merissa Nathan Gerson
Somewhere between San Francisco and Berkeley I developed a craving for hummus. Not hippie grocery hummus, not coffee shop hummus, not deli hummus but hummus, the real deal. I took a gamble with a Google search on my cell phone and followed it far down San Pablo Avenue all the way to a small place… Read more »
The Satin Kippah
Merissa Nathan Gerson
Recently at a gas station I saw a kippah on the security camera. It struck me as odd and exciting to see not only a kippah but a woman with a kippah at a Berkeley, CA gas station. It took a moment to register the black dress, the pink belt, and a wave of fear… Read more »
America is wonderful during the week
Merissa Nathan Gerson
“America is wonderful during the week, but painful on Shabbat.” This is what my friend Malika wrote me after her first Shabbat back in America. I am a Shabbat nut. I love everything about it, the slowness, the meals, the niggunim. I love remembering my grandmother and finding my people and feeling part of something… Read more »
Jewish in Israel and America
Merissa Nathan Gerson
The difference between being Jewish in Israel and Jewish in America hinges on the perceiver. In Israel I was either the least or the most Jewish. Either I knew too many prayers, or too few. I was either the secular or the Orthodox, and once in a blue moon, rarely, I was simply Jewish, simply… Read more »
Ashram
Merissa Nathan Gerson
On a break from a Hindu Ashram in the Catskills I stopped into Wal-Mart. Yes, Wal-Mart in the mountains of New York happens to, in addition to an odd myriad of all types of strange people, house the Chasidic population on summer vacation from Brooklyn. Amidst a sea of Indian gods and goddesses, a frum… Read more »
There are Rules
Merissa Nathan Gerson
There are rules, somewhere, about how to be a Chasid on an airplane. In that same rulebook there are most likely also a set of behavioral norms for a woman in stretch pants lying about in the back of the plane. My leg started swelling on a flight to Budapest. I went to the flight… Read more »
Ba'al Tshuva
Merissa Nathan Gerson
A ba’al tshuva friend suggested I read William Zinsser’s On Writing Well to help clean up my prose. I read it like bible roulette. Make a wish, close your eyes, and open to a random page. It works better with the bible because Torah is a better fortune-telling wisdom-yielder, but it still works. This week’s… Read more »