“SEDER (“order”)” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay, Poem

Author’s note: Last year, Passover felt impossible. In the wake of ongoing mass violence worldwide, across countries, across borders, within borders, within the clandestine, and so too the public sphere and space, it felt impossible to celebrate anything in the wake of so much ongoing grief. For one of my two weekly video series––“Behind the Poem”––I a piece, a poem, maybe simply a prayer in the order of the Passover Seder, which I shared across my social media last Passover. As Passover begins this year, I find myself returning to this piece, poem, prayer, as mass violence and human-made atrocities continue to eradicate not only livelihoods and lives, but our souls.  I believe that when we continue to operate under...

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“Dust” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

I was watching A Cowboy Christmas Romance on Netflix this past weekend—January 3, 2026— when, with 18 and a half minutes left to go in the film, a storm began to rattle the cattle ranch where the plotline took place. First dust (soon thunder, rain). Suddenly, I am 23 on a three-month solo road trip around the United States, trucking my silver Volvo sedan I called “Antelope” (after the Phish song “Run Like an Antelope”) across Arizona in the wake of a wild dust storm. My car felt mauled in that dust storm, but I learned—quickly—as a Midwesterner who’d gone to college in the Northeast, that the only way to safely survive—G-d willing—was to sturdy my insides, so that my...

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“Scabbing” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

I’ve been fascinated with the oval-shaped burn on my torso. First, a scab. Slowly, likely, a scar. It happened on October 11. I accidentally scorched my skin with a baking pan while heating up everything-flavored Brazi Bites while wearing a black midriff-exposing crop top and low rise while having a snack before getting dressed to attend the New York Emmy® Awards. At first, it was nothing. A little bit of red, tucked under the black Instagram-ad purchased shapewear I wore under the black Nicole Miller dress I’ve had since 2003. Then it blistered—the burn—and bubbled into a two-quarter-sized site of wide-open wet skinless juice. Then slowly—very slowly—a scab began to form. Starting at the edges. Then slowly—very, very slowly—rippling its...

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“I’ve Got the [Music] in Me” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

I once stopped talking to—and flirting with—a guy at a wedding—on whom I’d long had a crush—because Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” came on and I had to abandon both him—and my heels—to hustle to the dance floor. I think of this on a Saturday morning in 2025. I’m in the black cotton robe I bought at a department store in 2011 for a 20-minute-long performance art piece called “Baggage Claim,” where I stood on stage in a bra and underwear—having disrobed from the robe—to circle parts of my body with permanent marker and recite the emotional baggage I felt I carried there. In many ways, it is music—and movement and dance—that has allowed me to release my...

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“Ritual Ri(gh)t(e)s” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay, General

I am a ritual girlie. Maybe because I am Jewish. Maybe because I am on the clairvoyant / witchy / intuitive spectrum (although, honestly, I think we all are). Maybe because I’m human, and ritual is often an inevitable way we cope, usher, ground, anchor, transform our daily lives. My summer was hard. I know this to be the case for a lot of people I know. A lot of people on the planet. A lot of places where the scorching horns of hell engulfed daily existence with an unwanted ritual of famine, or scarcity, or violence, or devastation, or destruction, or even death. I don’t think death should be a ritual. Nor violence. Nor famine. Nor hell. But somewhere...

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“Prologue/Epilogue (Your Choice)” by Caroline Rothstein

Audio, Book excerpt, Essay

Tikkun olam is a Jewish concept that has—in modern times, by many Jews worldwide—become a rallying call to action in and for our collective efforts to repair (tikkun) the world (olam). I ask myself: What exactly is the repair? How can I best support collective efforts to repair the world? And how might I repair the harm I have myself caused in being white, in benefitting from white privilege, in enabling white supremacy? What might it look like for me—for anyone—to heal, repent, and transform? As part of a lineage that has built an annual atonement (Yom Kippur) into the genetics of our traditional and historical body of ritual and prayer, what might it look like for me—a white American...

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“Exile. Settle. Flee.” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

There’s a letter my maternal grandfather wrote his father on September 8, 1945. My grandfather, who died in 1991, was a Lieutenant for the United States Army in World War II, stationed in Munich after the war. In the letter, he wishes my great-grandfather a Happy New Year, and says: I must confess that I didn’t know the holidays were so early this year, until yesterday morning when I returned here to the unit. But we did have services here—very impressive services at that. You might have heard part of them, for we were told that they were being broadcast to the States. We used the opera house here in Munich. At least 2000 soldiers were there in addition to...

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“UNHINGING” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

Seven months ago, I got back on a dating app. Just one. Only. Hinge. I had—previously—sworn off dating apps. For good.  I am someone who—in general—thrives on the IRL meet (cute). The guy I met at a bar. The guy I met at a bar. The guy, the guy, the guy I met at a bar. The guy who asked for my number at a coffee shop. The guy who asked for my number on the subway (I slipped it to him on a page of a Broadway Playbill). The guy who was working the voting polls for the 2022 primaries and asked if I was single when he handed me my ballot and then came over and handed me...

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“No Bullshit: Welcome to Hooters in Maple Shade, New Jersey” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

I wrote this in April 2006—after four months of reporting—for a documentary writing class my senior year of college. It’s been sitting on my computer ever since. I felt compelled to pull it out of the archives and share it with the world. As I reread it, I wondered to myself, “Why now?” I think the reason it feels worthy of tossing into the ethers now, 19 years later, is because I wrote it thinking I was writing about the male gaze. But I wonder if—in retrospect—I was getting my sea legs as a journalist, and perhaps, what the piece is really—or also—about, is what it means to have a gaze at all. When I wrote this, I didn’t know...

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“Bag of Bones” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

The movers are already leaving Brooklyn, and I can’t leave the apartment. Everything I own in my adult life here in New York City is either at my cousin’s house in New Jersey or in the moving truck headed to a storage unit in Manhattan. There is nothing left in this two-bedroom apartment with a living room skylight that knowingly belongs to me said for the paper napkins from my Bat Mitzvah and my great-grandmother’s handkerchiefs, which I will have accidentally left in a plastic bag underneath the kitchen sink. And still, I can’t move. I am stuck standing on the edge of the living room in front of the brown couch I never liked. I am stuck wrapped in...

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