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.

I Was In Love With A Medicine Worker

Merissa Nathan Gerson

I was in love with a medicine worker. We sat in the mountains at an outdoor café towards the end of my four-month trip to South Africa. We were sealed at that point, two hearts attempting to find a way to gracefully detach. During our meal a station wagon drove up and my mentor got… Read more »

Becoming a Man in my Family

Merissa Nathan Gerson

In a hot tub in California I met my cousin Ruthie for the first time. I had known her my entire life, but never like I did in our bathing suits, in the steam, family ditched poolside. We were there for our cousin Mara’s Bat Mitzvah, the whole family, gathered exiles from New Jersey, Florida,… Read more »