Samantha Barnett

Good teachers inspire us to grow. By expecting the best from us, they make us better.

When I was younger, I thought that being a bat mitzvah meant having a party...

As a child, I insisted on wearing dresses and the color pink. I guess I was born a feminist, in the nonpolitical sense. I celebrated my girlhood and was proud of it.

Religion that is motion without emotion is missing something.

Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year, and also the anniversary of the creation of man. In fact, the first time a shofar was heard in creation was when G‑d created Adam. G‑d blew Adam’s soul into him, and the sound it made was the sound of the shofar. Just...

Yet it wasn’t until a few years later that I learned how to connect to the formal Jewish prayers. Staying over at a friend’s house for Shabbat, I was completely embarrassed when she handed me a prayerbook. I sat on the sofa, pretending to read the Hebrew ...

I had only one question I was trying to get an answer to: Have the rules of love changed as our society has become more technologically dependent?

The Jewish definition of joy is anticipating the future. We are joyful because we are planning, through hard work, to have a future together...

How could someone say that to me? I thought. I took cotillion as a child. I took etiquette classes in college. I was a classy lady . . .

In my experience, I have noticed that it is a red flag when people voluntarily start a statement with “I promise,” when no one asked them to. It usually means that whatever follows those words will not come to fruition...