About

Slouching Towards Bushwick is about being young and Jewish. Topics include: thinking about if/how/why I want to celebrate Shabbat; the current conversational climate on being of my generation and Jewish at the same time; Torah’s relevance as literature and/or moral guide; historical questions vis a vis Israel, the persecution of Jews, Jewish philanthropy, and Jewish celebrities.

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My name is Sam. I’m Jewish by birth (and don’t identify as “very religious“) and went to Israel for the first time on a Birthright Israel trip in June 2008.  I applied for an alumni grant from Birthright Israel NEXT to host a creative seder which I named Slouching Towards Bushwick. Elise and I co-hosted the seder and co-author this blog. We were in the same confirmation class.

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I am Elise, Sam’s friend. We have spent a lot of time recently being unemployed, so our husbands thought we should find an activity to keep ourselves occupied.

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Bushwick is a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.  To the West is the largest Hasidic community in the U.S. It is 15 min. from the Lower East Side of Manhattan and is the 7th most impoverished neighborhood in New York City.

The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation has a page about Bushwick.

The name Bushwick comes from the Dutch word “boswijck,” meaning “heavy woods.”

BushwickBK is a website that aims to help one navigate Bushwick.