Tag Archives: inter-faith relations

October 20, 2025 · 7:30 am

Daffodils and Nuns (1957)

By Annette Friend (Del Mar, CA)

Daffodils, ridiculous, happy flowers with
small pinched faces in yellow or orange
gaze innocently at the world haloed
by petals like the yellow habits of nuns.

A day off first grade, I was dusting wine bottles
in Pop’s liquor store when black-cloaked nuns
with pinched white faces and fleshy foreheads 
pressed into white bands shuffled into Pop’s store.

The bells over the door chimed their welcome,
but I didn’t see heaven, only over-sized
penguins with huge silver crosses blazing
like lightening across broad chests.

I remembered my mother’s warning
never to enter a church where nuns 
might steal a Jewish child and
a story foraged from the forests

of Poland that told me of priests 
inciting pogroms at Easter from 
their pulpits, and I ran up the stairs
to Pop in the backroom, screaming,

“Nuns, Nuns, here in our store!”
Pop touched a finger to my lips,
held me close in his arms, said,
“They’re only here collecting charity,
money for Saint Mary’s down the street.”

No matter where my fears first blossomed,
I know I would have preferred nuns in yellow
and orange habits. Maybe I would have even 
given them the quarter I had buried deep in 
the pocket of my red overalls.

Annette Friend, a retired occupational therapist and elementary school teacher, taught both Hebrew and Judaica to a wide range of students. In 2008, she was honored as the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Jewish Educator of the Year from San Diego. Her work has been published in The California Quarterly, Tidepools, Summation, and The San Diego Poetry Annual.


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August 5, 2024 · 7:30 am

An Unexpected Encounter

By Julie Brandon (Downers Grove, IL)

An unexpected encounter at a grocery store

In Downers Grove on a Sunday morning

Pushing my cart down an aisle

Stopping to grab something from a shelf

A young woman and her mother take my cart

Calling after them, I hear them laugh at their mistake

Time stops as they eye my Star of David necklace

And I their hijabs

For a brief terrible moment, we wonder

Threat or friendly strangers

This

This is how fears grows in a Midwestern grocery store

Longing to reassure them, I hurry away to buy a carton of eggs

Julie Brandon is a poet, playwright and liturgical lyricist. She began writing in earnest in her fifties. Her work has been published in Corner Bar Magazine, Awakenings Review, Bewildering Stories, Poetica Magazine, Mini Play Magazine, Fresh Words,  “Am Yisrael Chai Anthology” vol. 1 & 2 and “Writing of Love During War: Poems” among others. Julie’s short plays and monologues have been published and produced in the US and Great Britain. She has taken up the baritone ukulele because that’s what all the cool kids are doing. If you’d like to read more of Julie’s work, you can check out her new collection of poems that she’s written since 10/7: My Tears, Like Rain

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June 3, 2024 · 6:15 am

Something Lost, Something Gained 

by Miriam Aroner (El Cerrito, CA)

My bubbe never tasted hummus or shakshuka.

Gelfilte fish, pickled herring, matzo ball soup: 

these were her inheritance 

from the old country, the cold country,

the country unfriendly to Jews.

She did not know Jews who spoke Arabic or Spanish 

or were, chas v’ chalila, Black. 

If they did not speak Yiddish and disliked gefilte fish, 

Not Real Jews.

She had escaped the Tsar, 

the arranged marriage, the sheitel,

the orthodox rituals from birth to death.

But every Friday she lit candles and made matzo ball soup.

She kept a kosher home, but not glatt.

Her daughter, my mother, born in Chicago, 

had no interest in the old country.

She wanted to be a “real American.”

She disliked bubbe’s home-made yogurt, 

her heavy stews, her kugel concoctions.

A few times a year she made matzo ball soup

with Swanson’s chicken broth.

Borscht came from Maneshevitz,

gefilte fish from Rokeach.

No pork or shellfish, all the rest was commentary.

Uncomfortable in restaurants other than Jewish delis

she would never order  pizza

 and was suspicious of Chinese food.  

But she liked McDonald’s Fish Filets.

Now I live far from my roots, such as they are,

from Ukraine to Chicago to San Francisco.

Some of us are intermarried, 

some are Jews of color, 

We collect money for Ukraine, and admire its Jewish President.

We mix nature worship, a bissel of Buddhism,

our High Holidays a tsimmes of shehecheyanus and Leonard Cohen.

All gods are welcome at our feasts, 

although most of us are agnostics or atheists.

We eat pho, won ton soup, avgolemono, albondigas,

clam chowder.

We still eat matzo ball soup: with a felafel or samosa.   

A native of Chicago, Miriam Aroner has lived in the SF Bay Area most of her adult life. She has worked as a librarian in private and university libraries, including Tel Aviv University. She has published several children’s books, and poems in print, and enjoys traveling “because she always wants to see what’s  around the corner or over the hill.” She is a member of a humanistic Jewish congregation. 

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May 3, 2010 · 9:18 am

“You a Jew?”

By Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

“You a Jew?”
“Yes, I believe I am.”
“Never met a Jew before.”
This from a sparkling, fresh-faced girl of nineteen,
a future film actress, I’m sure, on her day off
from the fundamentalist camp by the lake.
With the weight of my ancestry
pressing down on my back,
I felt the instant spokesman for my tribe.
Shouldn’t I be wearing a yarmulke and sporting payos?
Shouldn’t I be blessing this fair maiden in Hebrew?
“Ask me any question you like,” I said,
my ancestors from the Holocaust
rolling over in laughter from their graves.
“Do Jews believe in heaven?” she tried, innocently.
“No, St. Pete,” I said, using humor to shield my ignorance,
“but I respect your beliefs,” I added unnecessarily,
trying to extinguish the fires of the crematoriums
while posing as the even-handed poster child
for a religion that was as new to her as it was to me.

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years.  Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in a new YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy,  edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

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