Every year, the same thing happens at work: you put in for Rosh Hashanah. Fine, everyone’s heard of that one. Then Yom Kippur, still fine, if a little tighter smile from your manager. Then, less than two weeks later, you’re back in their inbox asking for Sukkot. And Shmini Atzeret. And Simchat Torah, because in the Jewish calendar, the holidays don’t space themselves out to be considerate of your Slack status.

By the third request, you can feel it. Nobody says it out loud. It shows up in the reply that’s one degree cooler than the last one, the meeting suddenly scheduled for the one day you’re out, the “again?” that lands in a tone that wasn’t quite a question.

The fact is the Jewish calendar has roughly 3000 years on the office one, and the truth is, it was never built to fit inside 10 vacation days.

A few the office calendar has genuinely never met:

Sukkot. Seven days, a hut, a lot of joy, and approximately zero name recognition outside a Hebrew school classroom.

Shavuot. Marks getting the Torah at Sinai. Most calendar invites just see “OOO.”

Tisha B’Av. A day of mourning old enough that explaining it in a Slack thread feels almost insulting to the day itself.

Purim. Costumes, noise, and a work culture that assumes you took the day off for fun, not for a holiday that started with a plot to wipe out the Jewish people.

None of that is the part that actually stings. The part that stings is doing the math on your own calendar before you even ask, wondering if this is the year you skip Shavuot so nobody raises an eyebrow at the next PTO request.

Jews have become very good at pricing our own holidays against other people’s patience.

You don’t owe anyone a syllabus on Jewish practice to justify a day off for it. Rosh Hashanah gets a company Slack banner in a lot of places now. Sukkot probably won’t for a while yet. That’s just the current state of things, and it only changes when we keep asking anyway.

Put in for the holiday. All of it, every year, without the pre-apology. It’s just what being fully, unapologetically Jewish looks like on a calendar built around someone else’s year.

That’s the whole idea behind Luxe Jewish Life, really: building a Jewish life you don’t have to shrink, explain or apologize for.

Holidays included.

With so much love and Jewish joy, Karen

This week I posted a carousel about Bubbemaxxing — basically, living like a Jewish grandmother as the ultimate wellness trend — and it went a little bit wild.

I think I invented it. And if I did, I have my grandmother to thank.

She didn’t have a wellness routine. She had something older and more reliable — a way of moving through her days that kept her fulfilled, connected, and strong even when the world felt like too much.

It wasn’t complicated. It was soup. Tea. Phone calls. Family. Shabbat. Feeding people. Being fed. Saying it how it is. Resting before you completely fall apart. And nobody called it self-care - It just was.

What she knew that we’ve forgotten

The research on what actually lowers cortisol and builds long-term resilience reads like a description of a Jewish grandmother’s Friday afternoon. Scheduled rest. Communal meals. Rituals that mark the shift between one kind of time and another. Gratitude spoken out loud, to real people, over actual food, or through handwritten notes. Jewish tradition encoded all of this into the weekly calendar 3,000 years before the wellness industry discovered it and put it in a $45 supplement.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote that Shabbat is the “still small voice” in a world addicted to noise. Your ancestors just called it Friday night.

What Bubbemaxxing actually looks like

It means giving yourself permission to rest before you need to recover. It means cooking something from scratch on a Sunday not because you meal-prepped it into a spreadsheet but because the act of making food for people you love is, it turns out, genuinely good for your nervous system. It means saying what you mean, and having strong opinions, without a disclaimer. It means sitting down. It means lighting the candles even when the week was a disaster — especially when the week was a disaster.

You already know how to do this

You carry this in your bones whether you light candles every Friday or haven’t been to shul since your bat mitzvah. The capacity for simcha — real, felt, chosen joy — is part of what you inherited. Modern life has just made it very easy to override. The group chat, the news cycle, the low-grade hum of having too much to do and too little time to feel anything properly. You know the feeling (you’re probably in it right now).

Your grandmother didn’t need a method - but you’re living in 2026, and a little structure goes a long way.

Want to bring this into your actual life?

The Jewish Joy Method™ is my simple framework - a tiny daily practice rooted in 3,000 years of Jewish wisdom, that takes just five minutes a day.

On Sunday, June 28, I’m running a live 90-minute workshop to walk you through the whole method — what it is, why it works, and how to make it a practice that actually sticks. It’s a small group, fully moderated, and genuinely warm — a small group of like-minded Jewish women, designed to help you reconnect with yourself and take action on what matters most.

It’s the closest thing to sitting at your grandmother’s kitchen table and having her hand you something that genuinely helps.

Join me on Sunday, June 28 →

My mother used to say that the most powerful thing a Jewish woman could do was walk into a room and simply be herself. Fully, unapologetically, joyfully herself.

She said it like it was easy. I spent years wondering why it felt so hard.

For years I felt overwhelmed - running on caffeine and to-do lists. Looking successful on the outside, busy and loved – but not always feeling calm, happy, or fully myself on the inside.

Then, within two years, I lost both my parents, I lived through October 7 alongside every single one of you, and I turned 50.

Those years taught me more about resilience, and about where real strength comes from, more than anything else in my life. And here's what I know now: the strength (that I never thought I had) was inside me all along. It's inside all of us. We just shouldn't need adversity to find it.

What actually helped was three simple daily things:

GRATITUDE - writing down three small things every morning helped move my brain away from, “What is there to worry about?” towards, “What is right in front of me that I can be grateful for?”

AFFIRMATIONS - an affirmation is a simple, statement that helps you interrupt fear, self-doubt, or overwhelm. The powerful thing is, you don’t even have to fully believe it at first. Saying one out loud three times every morning had a remarkable effect on the course of my day.

LETTING GO - letting go meant trusting that I was not holding this alone. Hashem was in the gap between what I had planned for my 40s and what actually happened.

With all this newfound resilience I then went deep. Into Jewish wisdom, into the science of joy and resilience, and everything I'd learned from years of building communities for Jewish women, listening to their stories, struggles, hopes, and dreams.

And I turned it into the Jewish Joy Method™.

What is the Jewish Joy Method™?

It’s a simple daily practice — rooted in Jewish wisdom and backed by science — to help you go from overwhelmed and anxious to your happiest, calmest, strongest, and most fulfilled self.

Modern wellness tells you to change yourself, fix yourself. Jewish wisdom knows the happiest version of you is already inside you. It just has to come out.

The Jewish Joy Method™ Workshop

On Sunday June 28th I’ll be guiding a small, intimate group of women through the Jewish Joy Method™ live on Zoom through real conversation — warm, interactive, and intentionally small so that you’re actually seen and heard, not just watching from the back of a Zoom crowd.

The session is moderated and safe. A room full of Jewish and Jew-ish women who get it, because they’re living it too. You don’t need to prepare a single thing. Just show up with your coffee, your journal if you have one, and yourself.

You’re going to leave knowing exactly how to tap into feeling happy, calm, and fully YOU - and become the light your family, your community, and your world needs right now.

The Jewish Joy Method™ Workshop Sunday June 28th | 3pm EST 🇺🇸 / 8pm UK 🇬🇧

Early bird pricing: $19 — use code EARLYBIRD at checkout, on 6/18 it goes up to $29.

REGISTER HERE

The happiest, most self-assured version of you has always been inside you.

Love,

Karen x

It meant everything to be one of 200 changemakers invited to the Voices for Truth Summit, organised by Combat Antisemitism — a gathering of Jewish voices from across the world, all there to fight against the rising tide of Jew hatred. I heard from extraordinary speakers, including , a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, who said that growing up knowing his grandparents survived the Holocaust, he and his brother had decided amongst themselves: we have no right to complain about anything. Because it’s not as bad as the Shoah.

But it wasn’t just Yuval. Both speakers and attendees I spoke to throughout the Summit carried the same inheritance. Grandchildren of survivors who had shown up to combat antisemitism precisely because of who they come from — because the memory lives in them, because the responsibility feels personal, because when you are the generation after survival, fighting for Jewish life isn’t abstract. It’s everything.

I heard that same story throughout the room, in different accents, from different countries, across different generations of trauma and resilience.

My family's story

And then there’s my own story. My grandparents and their young family (including of course my mother) were persecuted. My mother and her family were forced from their home in Iraq and fled to Israel in 1948, part of a mass exodus of Jewish families who left behind everything they had ever known — their homes, their community, their entire world — because staying was no longer safe.

It wasn’t the Holocaust. But it was loss, rupture, and survival. And that legacy travels. It sits in the body. It shapes the way you move through the world, even decades later, even in a life your grandparents could only have dreamed of for you.

To come from people who survived the unsurvivable, who rebuilt entire lives from nothing, who loved and married and had children and made Friday night dinners in countries that weren’t theirs — that is not a small thing. That is one of the most astonishing human stories ever told.

The privilege and the pressure

At the summit last week, a young Jewish American student named Tessa Veksler said something that so many of us feel — that she doesn’t want to be a broken link in the chain of Jewish survival.

That instinct is sacred. It’s devotion to something so much bigger than yourself. The desire to honour what came before, to pass something forward, to keep the chain intact. And it sits right alongside the fear that you might not be doing it right, or doing enough, or being enough.

Both of those things are true at the same time. The pride and the pressure. The privilege and the weight. And most of us are carrying both without anywhere to put them down and look at them honestly.

A place for the feelings to go

For me personally, when it all feels like too much, I write it down in my Jewish Joy Journal. There is something about getting the feelings out of your head and onto a page that makes everything feel more manageable. It creates a little space between you and the overwhelm. And in that space, you can also find the good. The joy. The extraordinary privilege of the life your family fought for you to have.

Am Yisrael Chai 🩷

(From L-R: Karen Cinnamon [that’s me!] , Ariel Stein, Daniella Rabbani, Mona Molayem, Sara Rouse)

I was so thrilled to be invited (one of two hundred influencers, thought leaders and content creators) to the Voices for Truth Summit in Miami last week, organized by the Combat Antisemitism Movement.

A gathering of Jews and allies, united by one belief: that truth has to spread as fast as hate does. We don’t fight back. We fight forward. And we have to stop waiting to just defend the lies and start owning the narrative, spread the light, and do it from a place of complete certainty in who we are.

The learnings, the connections, the conversations — all of it has refuelled me and will stay with me. Here are my four biggest takeaways.

1. In person connection is what strengthens us as a people

The most powerful thing of all was being together with people who are in it too. Day to day we’re standing up, speaking out, and so often doing it alone.

So to be in a room with two hundred people who understand that — from different countries, different backgrounds, different languages, wildly different voices and approaches — all united around the same mission... it was incredibly energizing.

And then there were my friends. Women I’ve known in this industry for years — , , , ,Alyssa Goldwater, Ariel Stein, Liz Rose — people I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with on different delegations and trips, and it was incredible to reunite with them in person.

I also made a real effort to meet new people, and I’m so glad I did... it widened my circle, widened my lens, and I’m so grateful for that.

2. We have more allies than we realise

Yes, we were like-minded. But what impacted me most was how diverse we were at the Summit. Jews, Muslims, Christians, seasoned journalists, former extremists turned allies, all together. This isn’t just a Jewish fight. And being in that room made that clearer than ever.

3. Hate can be unlearned — and these men are proof

A former neo-Nazi, a former gang member, and a Yemeni Muslim influencer — sitting together, talking with complete honesty about how they got into hate and how they got out, and what they now do to bring others with them.

Arno Michaelis, Dr. Yehuda Pryce, Luai Ahmed. These men are doing slow, unglamorous, essential work that I was unaware of in such detail until I sat in that room and heard it directly from them. That panel alone was worth the trip.

4. What I’m taking home

My 5 biggest learnings are:

• 85% of antisemitism comes from social media.

• When good people stay silent, the haters fill the void.

• Anti-Zionism is antisemitism dressed up in a different costume — and it will come for anyone who stands with us, Jewish or not.

• We don’t fight back. We fight forward.

• Stop defending. Start creating the narrative.

I’m coming home more certain than ever — to keep spreading light, to encourage every Jew to own every part of who they are, and to put the beauty and joy of Judaism out into the world.

An enormous thank you to Sacha Roytman and everyone at the Combat Antisemitism Movement for investing in us, for bringing us together, for understanding that this is exactly what we need.

I cannot thank you enough.

Am Yisrael Chai. ✡️

PS If you have any questions about the Summit, ask in the comments below!

Last night, I couldn’t sleep, so I reached for my phone (yes, I know — quite literally the worst thing you can do when you’re trying to fall asleep) and found myself scrolling through Jewish account after Jewish account. Creators, writers, organisations, people I admire, and almost every single post was about antisemitism. Videos of crowds booing the Israeli Eurovision entry. Defiant responses to the latest incident. Screenshots of things said, things done, things that should never have happened.

And I understood it. I really did. Because it’s real, and it matters ,and we cannot pretend otherwise.

But here’s what I kept thinking: if an alien landed on earth and tried to understand what it means to be Jewish from Jewish social media alone, they would think we are defined entirely by the people who hate us. They would know nothing of who we actually are.

My focus has always been elsewhere. On the joy, the kindness, the values, the traditions, and everything that makes being Jewish the most special thing in my life. That is what Luxe Jewish Life was built on. And that is what this piece is about.

This is who we actually are

In the wake of October 7, the Jewish community moved as one, organising events, campaigns, vigils, fundraisers, you name it. In every city, across every time zone, Jewish people showed up for one another with a speed, solidarity, and sense of shared responsibility that took the world’s breath away.

We did not wait to be asked. We did not wait to see if it was convenient. We showed up because that is what we do. That is who we are.

Last month, Immanuel College, a beloved Jewish secondary school in London that has been part of the fabric of British Jewish life for 35 years, announced it was closing. Funding had run out, financial pressures had become unsustainable, hundreds of families were scrambling for school places, and children were facing GCSE exams with no school to attend . It was devastating.

A small group of parents refused to accept it. They picked up the phone and reached out to donors, foundations, and eventually rabbinical leaders who flew in from the United States to help. They fielded an overwhelming wave of calls and donations for nine days straight.

In ten days, the school was saved.

One of the parents said afterwards: “What the community has achieved in ten days and the support from around the world is testament to the strength of the Jewish people. From all walks of life, from tiny amounts to large amounts, the school has not only been saved but will now flourish for generations.”

That is not a community defined by its enemies. That is a community defined by its love for itself.

Then there is the story of Hatzola.

In April this year, four ambulances belonging to the Jewish volunteer emergency service were deliberately set on fire in Golders Green, north London, in what police investigated as an antisemitic hate crime. Vehicles used by Jewish volunteers to save lives ( regardless of faith) were burned to the ground.

Within 24 hours, the Jewish community had raised £1 million in donations.

That is not a community broken by hatred. That is a community that meets hatred with love, with action, with an absolute refusal to be diminished. We don’t wait to be saved. We save each other.

This is also who we are

Landing in Israel does something to you that is almost impossible to describe. The ground feels different. The air feels different. A connection to something ancient and alive rises up to meet you… to every generation that prayed to return to this land, every person who built something on it, every family that calls it home.

And the resilience of Israelis is unlike anything I have witnessed anywhere else on earth — a mental toughness forged by history, by faith, by an unshakeable determination to keep living fully even when the world makes that extraordinarily hard.

That is the Jewish story.

When I meet another Jewish person for the first time — anywhere in the world — something happens before a single word is spoken. A recognition. A connection. A sense of belonging. We share something that transcends geography, language, even level of observance. We are one people, and we feel it in our bones.

That is the Jewish story.

When my daughter’s bat mitzvah class gathered, and the mothers and daughters danced together to Israeli music — laughing, completely unselfconscious — I felt something ancient and joyful unfolding in real time. L’dor v’dor. Generation to generation. The same dances. The same songs. The same glorious feeling of letting go of everything the outside world asks of you and simply being — freely, fully, joyfully — Jewish.

That is the Jewish story.

When we sit down together at Rosh Hashanah, on Seder night, or around the Friday night table — with old family and new friends, and somehow always room for one more — the evening stretches long, the food keeps coming, the conversation flows, and there is that unmistakable feeling: unbridled Jewish joy.

That is the Jewish story too.

And we get to decide what that story looks like.

We do not have to hand them the pen

There will always be people who want to define us by our suffering. And there will always be moments where we cannot look away from the darkness that still follows us.

But we do not have to hand them the pen.

The Jewish story is not a story of victimhood. It is a story of survival so extraordinary it borders on the miraculous. Of a people who have outlasted every empire that tried to erase them. Of a culture so rich, so warm, so full of wisdom and laughter and food and argument and love that it has been changing the world for three millennia.

So the next time you find yourself scrolling through a feed full of darkness, remember the school saved in ten days. Remember the ambulances replaced in a day. Remember the mothers and daughters dancing. Remember the stranger who wasn’t a stranger. Remember the feeling of Israeli soil under your feet. Remember the Rosh Hashanah table that always has room for one more.

That is our story.

And we are the ones who get to tell it.

Share this with every Jewish woman in your life who needs to remember who she is. 🩷

My mother didn’t talk about being Jewish the way I do. She didn’t need to. She simply was — bold, Israeli, completely herself in every room she entered.

Zmira was born in Basra, Iraq, swam in the Tigris River as a child, and left everything she knew when her family fled persecution after Israel was created in 1948.

She arrived in a new country with nothing, spent time on a kibbutz, served in the army, and eventually made her way to London, where she spotted my father across a room and asked him to look after her coffee. Six months later they were married.

She sculpted her life, piece by piece, exactly as she wanted it — the friends, the travel, the career, the home, the family. My husband once wrote that she went about life entirely on her own terms, that indifference and neutrality were simply not words in her vocabulary. He was right. If she wanted something to happen, she made it happen. That was just who she was.

As a child, I was attached to her skirt. I got all my strength from her, even when I didn’t know it yet.

What I carried without knowing

My mother was Sephardi Israeli. Judaism for her wasn’t a set of rules or a performance — it was warmth, family, hospitality, defiance, fun. We spent summers in Israel every year, surrounded by family, festivals, food. It felt completely natural. She never told me explicitly to be proudly Jewish. She also never told me to hide. She just lived — fully, fearlessly, entirely herself.

What I’ve come to understand, now that she’s gone, is that she was giving me exactly what I needed even when I couldn’t see it. She was showing me what it looks like to be a woman who knows what she wants and goes out and gets it. Who doesn’t wait for permission. Who sculpts her own life and fills it with the things that bring her joy.

That is the most Jewish thing I know. V’samachta — and you shall rejoice. Not when conditions are right. Now.

What I’m passing on

I’m quite intentional about making Judaism fun, meaningful and relevant for my girls. We talk openly about why we love being Jewish and what it means to us. The girls help me set tablescapes for holidays. Zara once invented a tradition where everyone decorated their own cupcake for Rosh Hashanah — and now it’s ours, forever.

I only started wearing a Star of David regularly after October 7. I wanted my daughters to see that you don’t hide the things that matter most about you, even when the world makes it harder to be visible. What I fear more than antisemitism is internalized shame — the quiet, accumulated cost of calculating how Jewish is “too Jewish.”

I never want them doing that calculation.

I want them to grow up knowing they already belong, just as they are. Not because the world is always kind, but because their sense of self is solid enough not to be dictated by other people’s comfort levels.

That’s what my mother gave me, even without saying it in so many words. She showed me what a woman who belongs to herself looks like. She showed me that a life fully, joyfully, unapologetically lived is the greatest thing you can give the people who come after you.

Mummy — I will keep shining your light. The fun, the care, the deep love, the creativity, the bold thinking.

And I hope my daughters will shine it too.

To every Jewish mother raising proud Jewish children today — you are doing the most important work there is. Happy Mother’s Day. 🩷

There's a specific kind of loneliness that Jewish women don't talk about enough.

Walking into a Jewish space and thinking: “this isn’t me”. The room feels cliquey, or showy, and we feel like we don’t fit in. You’re Jewish, technically you belong here, and yet you leave feeling more alone than when you arrived.

And then there’s the other side. The non-Jewish spaces where you’re quietly calculating how much of yourself to bring in. Where being Jewish feels like a fact you’re managing rather than an identity you’re living.

Too Jewish for one world. Not Jewish enough for the other.

If you grew up feeling this, you are not alone.

WHAT'S ACTUALLY HAPPENING BENEATH THE SURFACE

Rabbi Sacks wrote that Jewish identity is not a membership card. It’s a covenant — personal, direct, yours. There is no panel of judges. There is no correct version of Jewish you’re supposed to be performing.

And yet most of us have spent years performing anyway. Shrinking in one room, overcompensating in another, never quite landing as fully ourselves in either.

Here’s what took me years to understand: the judgment I feared from the room was almost always the judgment I was already running on myself. The cliquey room didn’t make me feel like I didn’t fit. It confirmed something I already felt about myself.

Hypnotherapist (whose episode on ’ School of Greatness podcast stopped me mid-commute) says that in 25 years of working with thousands of clients, the single most common root belief she finds is this: “I am not enough”. Not “I am struggling” or “I am sad.” Specifically: I am not enough.

She says it drives almost every form of anxiety, disconnection, and self-sabotage we experience. And that the most powerful thing a human being can do is systematically, deliberately, tell themselves a different story.

YOU ARE ‘ENOUGH’ JUST AS YOU ARE

You don’t have to be more observant, more connected, more knowledgeable, more anything.

You don’t have to be thinner, more polished, wealthier, or better dressed to belong in any room.

You just have to be you. Exactly as you are, right now, today.

I know that sounds almost too simple, but Marisa Peer’s entire methodology (backed by neuroscience) is built on the fact that the mind responds to repetition. Say something to yourself every day and your brain begins to accept it as true.

The same mechanism that made “I’m not enough” stick is the exact mechanism you can use to replace it.

My mother understood this long before I did. She was a bold, daring, deeply alive woman who lived by Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway and passed those tools to me like they were family heirlooms.

When I was 17, inspired by her, I painted the word ‘NOW’ on my bedroom wall in huge letters. A reminder to stop waiting to be ready. Stop waiting for the room to approve of me before I walk in as yourself.

It took me decades to fully feel what that meant.

WHAT JUDAISM HAS ALWAYS KNOWN

V’samachta — and you shall rejoice — is a commandment in Torah, not a suggestion.

The rabbis understood something that takes most of us decades to learn: you cannot wait to feel worthy before you show up. You practice your way into it.

Affirmations are ancient. The mezuzah on your doorpost. The Shema said twice daily. The blessings over food, over candles, over wine. Judaism has always known that the words you repeat become the truths you live by.

And l’dor v’dor — generation to generation — this is how Jewish women have always passed strength to each other – through the words they said out loud, and through the things they wrote down.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY

1. WRITE IT DOWN.

Research on expressive writing from psychologist James Pennebaker at the University of Texas found that writing about your thoughts and feelings significantly reduces anxiety, builds self-understanding, and shifts how you relate to yourself over time.

The beauty of the Jewish Joy Journal – the bestselling 6-month gratitude journal for Jewish women — is that the prompts are already there waiting for you. About what your Jewish identity actually means to you, what brings you joy, who you are when nobody’s watching. A few minutes a day — and the results speak for themselves.

2. SAY IT OUT LOUD.

Put “I am enough” somewhere you’ll see it every single morning. Your mirror. Your phone lock screen. Your coffee cup. That repetition definitely rewires.

3. NOTICE THE VOICE.

The next time you feel like you don’t fit in a Jewish space — or any space — ask yourself: whose voice is that really? Because nine times out of ten, the room isn’t rejecting you… it’s an untruth you’ve been telling yourself (I know that sounds woo woo, but I genuinely think it’s true!).

YOU WERE NEVER DOING IT WRONG

You don’t have to be a different kind of Jewish. You don’t have to be more, or less, or other than what you already are.

Your Jewish identity has been there the whole time — whole, complete, entirely yours — waiting for you to stop measuring it against rooms that were never built with you in mind.

It always was.

If this is you — share it with someone who needs to hear it too. We all need know that we are enough.

This morning I was thinking about my grandparents (pictured above).

They left Iraq in 1948 with nothing and built a life from scratch in Israel. They lit the candles, they prayed, they made T'bit (the Iraqi Jewish version of cholent), and passed everything worth keeping to the next generation at the kitchen table.

They never once asked themselves if they were doing enough for the Jewish people. They just kept being Jewish. Fully, unapologetically Jewish.

Seventy-eight years later, I hear so often from Jewish women in the diaspora how guilty they feel. Guilt for not being Jewish enough. Guilt for not speaking up about antisemitism at work. Guilt for scrolling past and saying nothing. For doing the mental calculation — is this room safe enough for me to mention I’m Jewish? — and deciding it isn’t.

They think they’re failing their people.

They’re not… and I want to talk about why.

THE SCIENCE BIT

Epigenetics researchers at Mount Sinai found that trauma reshapes how genes express across generations. The vigilance you carry in your body — the hyperawareness, the threat-scanning, the quiet calculation of whether a room is safe — has roots far deeper than this news cycle.

Your great-grandmother’s survival instincts are literally running in your system right now.

Your body is doing exactly what it was shaped to do - the question is what you do with all that aliveness.

NOBODY APPOINTED YOU SPOKESPERSON

wrote something this week that every Jewish woman needs to read.

“You don’t owe anyone a tweet.”

Or a comment reply, or a confrontation in the office, or a fight with your cousin at dinner. None of it is owed. The fact that Jewish women have been made to feel otherwise is itself the problem.

Going to work. Making Shabbat dinner. Calling your mom. Showing up to your synagogue or not. Lighting Shabbat candles or ordering DoorDash instead. Living your Jewish life, fully and without apology, in whatever way is yours — that is the work.

The Jewish people have outlasted every single force that tried to erase them — not because every woman was a warrior, but because ordinary Jewish women just kept showing up. That’s always been enough.

You don’t have to speak for all of us. You just have to keep being one of us.

YOU ARE ALLOWED TO PROTECT YOURSELF FIRST

Speak up when you feel ready, and when the moment is right for you - in a way that feels right for you.

Stay quiet when the cost of speaking is something you cannot carry right now.

A Jewish woman who holds onto her life — her work, her relationships, her place in the world — is doing something that matters deeply, even when it feels like it’s not enough.

The guilt that you’re sitting with? It belongs to the people who built a world where this calculation even has to happen. You can put it down now.

JOY IS THE MOST ANCIENT JEWISH ACT OF DEFIANCE

My grandparents left Iraq in 1948 with nothing. They didn’t have a following or a megaphone. They had each other, their faith, and the absolute refusal to stop being Jewish.

And that’s what you’re doing right now. Maybe it looks like Shabbat dinner. Maybe it looks like getting through the week. Maybe it looks like reading this and feeling a little less alone.

All of it counts. All of it is your ancestors smiling.

YOU ARE ALREADY THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING THEY PRAYED FOR

Your ancestors didn’t survive millennia of persecution by being Instagram activists. They survived by loving each other, building their communities, lighting the candles, and refusing to disappear.

That’s what you’re doing.

You don’t have to earn your place in Jewish history. You’re already in it. Just by being here, being Jewish, and choosing to live your life with joy — you are the continuation of everything they fought to preserve.

The guilt was never yours. Put it down.

Send this to a Jewish woman who needs it today.

And if you want to go deeper into living your most joyful Jewish life — that’s exactly what Luxe Jewish Life was built for.

This morning, two Jewish men were stabbed on Golders Green Road in London, UK. One of them was putting on his kippah at a bus stop. The other was just walking down the street.

Five minutes from my home.

I am truly horrified, but not shocked.

As a Jew in Britain in 2026 you sadly develop a kind of muscle memory for this. Your phone buzzes with a news alert and before you’ve even read it, your body already knows. The tightening in your chest. The group chat lighting up. The awful, exhausting ritual of waiting to find out how bad it is this time.

This is what last month looked like, in the city I was born in and have lived in my whole life:

A synagogue in Finchley was set on fire. Jewish ambulances in Golders Green were torched. A synagogue in Harrow was attacked. And this morning, a man walked down Golders Green Road with a knife, looking for Jews to stab.

This is not a history lesson. This is not something from my grandmother’s stories. This is London. April 2026.

I want to talk about what they want from us. Because I think it’s important to name it clearly.

They want us scared. They want us to take our Magen Davids off before we get on the Tube. To walk past our own shul with our eyes down. To have the conversation with our kids about when it’s safe to look Jewish and when it isn’t. To quietly, gradually, make ourselves smaller and less visible until one day we’ve disappeared into the background of this city and nobody has to think about us anymore.

Honestly… some days, the weight of it makes that feel tempting…

And then I remember who I am.

I am not a Jew with trembling knees.

My grandparents didn't flee Iraq in 1948, arrive in Israel with nothing, and build a life from scratch so that I could shrink. My culture didn’t outlast every empire that tried to destroy it (Babylon, Rome, the Inquisition, the Nazis) so that I could take off my Star of David on the Northern line.

I will walk to shul on Shabbat with pride.

I will wear my Star of David where everyone can see it.

I will raise my children to be proud Jews. Full stop.

There’s a question I keep asking myself, and I don’t have a clean answer to it: why does it feel like Israel is the only place left that will truly protect us? Why does every Jewish school in London need armed security at the gate when the school two streets over doesn’t? Why are we, in 2026, still having to explain to people that this is happening? That it’s real? That it’s getting worse?

The Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents across the UK in 2025. In October of that year, a man drove his car into people gathered outside a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur and stabbed someone to death.

Horrified. But not shocked.

I am writing this because I know many of you are feeling exactly what I’m feeling right now. That particular combination of grief and fury and exhaustion and love for our community that has no name in English but that every Jewish woman reading this will recognise immediately.

You are allowed to feel all of it at once.

You are allowed to be furious at the people who did this, and at the systems that allowed hatred to fester to this point, and at the friends who said nothing after October 7th and are saying nothing now.

You are allowed to be tired.

And you are also — this is the part I most want you to hear — allowed to be proud. Fiercely, unapologetically, loudly proud of who you are and where you come from and what we carry.

We are grieving. We are defiant. And we will rise.

עם ישראל חי

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If this resonated with you, please share it. And today, please check in on your Jewish friends.

It’s Friday and the sun will set in a few hours. So this feels timely.

What a week - and I seem to say that every week.

Being Jewish in 2026 is so many good things - intertwined with carrying a lot…

The news. Your inbox. The group chat that never sleeps. The low hum of something feels off that you can’t quite name but you feel it - in your shoulders, in the way you reach for your phone before you’ve even fully woken up.

You are not imagining it. And you are not alone.

Jewish anxiety is real. Historically, culturally, neurologically - we are a people wired for vigilance.

For thousands of years, staying alert kept us alive. But in 2026, that same wiring is running on overdrive, and there is nowhere to discharge it.

So what if I told you that our ancestors - long before neuroscience had a name for any of this - built the antidote into the week itself?

enter: Shabbat. (stay with me.)

If that word feels like it belongs to a more religious version of you, a stricter household, a set of rules that was never quite yours, know this:

Shabbat was never meant to be a performance. It was meant to be a gift.

And here’s the thing about gifts. They’re yours. You get to decide what you do with them.

You don’t have to light candles the way your grandmother did. You don’t have to follow every law as others observe it. You are no less Jewish, no less worthy, no less loved - by your community, by tradition, by G-d for making this day look different from anyone else’s.

Shabbat, at its beating heart, is simply this: one day that feels different from every other day.

A day that belongs to you. Not to your productivity. Not to your notifications. Not to the endless scroll of the world’s demands.

what the science actually says

Here’s where it gets interesting — because it turns out our ancestors were onto something that neuroscience is only now catching up to.

Chronic low-level stress — the kind most of us are swimming in — keeps your nervous system in a near-constant state of activation. Your cortisol stays elevated. Your brain never fully shifts out of threat-detection mode. And over time? That’s the architecture of anxiety.

What brings it down isn’t a holiday twice a year. It’s regular, predictable rest.

Research on what psychologists call ultradian and circadian rhythms shows that the brain needs not just sleep, but socially anchored downtime — rest that is structured, anticipated, and separate from ordinary time — to properly regulate stress hormones and restore executive function.

In plain language: your brain needs to know that rest is coming, and that it is safe. A weekly anchor does that. It tells your nervous system: you can let go now. This time is protected.

Three thousand years ago, the rabbis called this menuha — a Hebrew word that doesn’t just mean rest. It means completeness. A sense that, for now, nothing is missing.

That feeling? That is not spiritual indulgence. That is neurological medicine.

so what could your Shabbat look like?

This is where I hand it back to you — because this is your life, not mine.

Maybe it’s putting your phone in a drawer from sundown to sundown (ie ‘going tech-no’, as my lovely next door neighbour calls it), or even just digitally detoxing for the afternoon.

Maybe it’s a long walk somewhere green. Maybe it’s cooking something comforting, with music on, for no one’s Instagram.

Maybe it’s reading an actual book — the kind with pages — with nowhere to be.

Maybe it’s calling a friend and talking properly, without half your brain somewhere else.

Maybe it’s lying on the sofa in the particular afternoon light and letting yourself feel, for once, like enough.

There is no Shabbat police. There is only you, and the radical act of choosing — once a week, as the sun sets on a Friday — to step out of the current and simply be.

the invitation

Today is Friday. The light will change in a few hours. The week will try to pull you back in — one more email, one more scroll, one more thing you should probably check.

And you can. Or.

You can try something 3,000 years in the making.

Not because it makes you a better Jew. Not because anyone is watching. But because you deserve one day — just one — that is fully, entirely, unhurriedly yours.

Shabbat Shalom. Whatever that looks like for you.

Sources: Research on allostatic load and stress recovery; Seligman et al. on restorative experiences; circadian rhythm studies from the Sleep Research Society. The concept of menuha drawn from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath (1951).