A Bisel Kisel With Masha Kisel, The Dayton Jewish Observer “You’re a Jubu!” exclaimed my friend Jaime, who was also Jewish and much more worldly than me. Jaime was coming through town on her way back to the University of Santa Barbara, where apparently “Jubus” were plentiful. I took her

With Masha Kisel, The Dayton Jewish Observer On the High Holy Days, Jewish people all over the world will recite the Unetaneh Tokef liturgical poem, anonymously authored a thousand years ago, that urges worshippers to repent so that they may be inscribed into the Book of Life: “On Rosh Hashanah

A Bisel Kisel with Masha Kisel, The Dayton Jewish Observer My great-grandmother Valentina lived surrounded by plants. Her balcony was lined with potted geraniums and violets; inside were wall to wall cacti. Our ritual when I came over to her small apartment in the center of Kiev, which was often,

A Bisel Kisel Masha Kisel, The Dayton Jewish Observer At a recent Jewish Film Fest screening in Dayton, I picked up a pamphlet listing classic Jewish authors. There were notable omissions of many Eastern European names, which I hope to remedy by telling you about Isaac Babel, a Russian-speaking Jewish

A Bisel Kisel with Masha Kisel, The Dayton Jewish Observer “You’re a Jewish mother. You understand,” I said to a mosaic of the Virgin Mary in the University of Dayton courtyard. I sought the mothering spirit wherever I looked, mentally conversing with trees, flowers, with images of mothers on cereal

A Bisel Kisel with Masha Kisel, The Dayton Jewish Observer I recently taught about the 1973 classic movie The Way We Were, directed by Sydney Pollack, for my Jewish-American Film course at UD. In this class, we examine cinematic depictions of Jewish characters against the backdrop of immigration and acculturation

New Column: A Bisel Kisel with Masha Kisel, The Dayton Jewish Observer We decided to spend part of our honeymoon in Krakow because I wanted to share with my new husband “a magical city” that I knew and loved well. I fell in love with Polish language and literature in

By Masha Kisel, Special To The Dayton Jewish Observer In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, American Jewish communities went out of their way to welcome refugees from the former Soviet Union. They opened their hearts and homes to grateful, meekly smiling families. There was a lot of nodding and

By Masha Kisel Tikun olam, the notion that we have been tasked by God to repair the world, has rarely been associated with garbage. Yet, from an environmental perspective, wastefulness is a destructive act. If we are to repair the world, we would do well to not destroy it in