The Hebrew calendar, also called the Jewish calendar, is a lunisolar calendar used today for Jewish religious observance and as an official calendar of Israel. It determines the dates of Jewish holidays and other rituals, such as yahrzeits and the schedule of public Torah readings. In Israel, it is used for religious purposes, provides a time frame for agriculture, and is an official calendar for civil holidays alongside the Gregorian calendar.
Elul is the twelfth month of the civil year and the sixth month of the religious year in the Hebrew calendar. It is a month of 29 days. Elul usually occurs in August–September on the Gregorian calendar.
Scholastic Corporation is an American multinational publishing, education, and media company that publishes and distributes books, comics, and educational materials for schools, teachers, parents, children, and other educational institutions. Products are distributed via retail and online sales and through schools via reading clubs and book fairs. Clifford the Big Red Dog, a character created by Norman Bridwell in 1963, serves as Scholastic's official mascot.
In Judaism, the High Holy Days, also known as High Holidays or Days of Awe consist of:
- strictly, the holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur ;
- by extension, the period of ten days including those holidays, known also as the Ten Days of Repentance ; or,
- by a further extension, the entire 40-day penitential period in the Jewish year from Rosh Chodesh Elul to Yom Kippur, traditionally taken to represent the forty days Moses spent on Mount Sinai before coming down with the second ("replacement") set of the Tablets of Stone.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is an American publisher of textbooks, instructional technology materials, assessments, and reference works. The company is based in the Boston Financial District. It was formerly known as Houghton Mifflin Company, but it changed its name following the 2007 acquisition of Harcourt Publishing. Prior to March 2010, it was a subsidiary of Education Media and Publishing Group Limited, an Irish-owned holding company registered in the Cayman Islands and formerly known as Riverdeep. In 2022, it was acquired by Veritas Capital, a New York-based private-equity firm.
Harcourt was an American publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for adults and children. The company was last based in San Diego, California, with editorial/sales/marketing/rights offices in New York City and Orlando, Florida, and was known at different stages in its history as Harcourt Brace, & Co. and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. From 1919 to 1982, it was based in New York City.
Hillel Halkin is an American-born Israeli translator, biographer, literary critic, and novelist who has lived in Israel since 1970.
Alexander Chee is an American fiction writer, poet, journalist and reviewer.
Stacey D'Erasmo is an American author and literary critic.
Jane S. Gerber is a professor of Jewish history and director of the Institute for Sephardic Studies at the City University of New York.
Rosh HaShanah is the New Year in Judaism. The biblical name for this holiday is Yom Teruah. It is the first of the High Holy Days, as specified by Leviticus 23:23–25, that occur in the late summer/early autumn of the Northern Hemisphere. Rosh Hashanah begins ten days of penitence culminating in Yom Kippur, as well as beginning the cycle of autumnal religious festivals running through Sukkot which end on Shemini Atzeret in Israel and Simchat Torah everywhere else.
Jill Bialosky is an American poet, novelist, essayist and executive book editor. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, three novels, and two recent memoirs. She co-edited with Helen Schulman an anthology, Wanting a Child. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, O Magazine, Real Simple, American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and chosen for Best American Poetry, among others.
Anita Silvey is an American author, editor, and literary critic in the genre of children’s literature. Born in 1947 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Silvey has served as Editor-in-Chief of The Horn Book Magazine and as vice-president at Houghton Mifflin where she oversaw children’s and young adult book publishing. She has also authored a number of critical books about children's literature, including 500 Great Books for Teens and The Essential Guide to Children's Books and Their Creators. In October 2010, she began publishing the Children's Book-A-Day Almanac online, a daily essay on classic and contemporary children's books.
Carolyn Cooke is an American short story writer and novelist.
Tablet is a conservative online magazine focused on Jewish news and culture. The magazine was founded in 2009 and is supported by the Nextbook foundation. Its editor-in-chief is Alana Newhouse.
Jewish apple cake is a dense cake made with apples which originated in Poland, but is now sold mostly in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. Apples are common in Jewish Ashkenazi cooking and are a part of the traditional food served during the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. Jewish apple cake is traditionally made without dairy products, and may, therefore, be eaten with meals containing meat, in accordance with Jewish dietary laws of kashrut, which forbid the mixing of meat and milk products in the same meal.
Elisa Albert is the author of the short story collection How this Night is Different, the novels The Book of Dahlia, After Birth, and Human Blues, and an anthology, Freud's Blind Spot: Writers on Siblings.
Raúl the Third is a Mexican American artist and illustrator.
Eshel is a nonprofit organization in the United States and Canada that creates community and acceptance for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ+) Jews and their families in Orthodox Jewish communities. Eshel provides education and advocacy, a speaker's bureau, community gatherings, and a social network for individuals and institutions. It was founded in 2010 to provide hope and a future for LGBTQ+ Jews excluded from Orthodox and Torah observant communities.
Dina Najman is the rabbi of the Kehilah of Riverdale, a synagogue in Bronx, New York city, founded in 2014, which describes itself as "an Orthodox Jewish Congregation dedicated to creating a serious and meaningful tefilah for our kehilah, committed to learning Torah and living by its values and seeking to promote individual and communal acts of chesed (kindness)" and as "supporting spiritual and lay leadership irrespective of gender."
