The Jewish Catalog

Friends and collaborators Richard Siegel, Michael Strassfeld, and Sharon Strassfeld saw the need for an offbeat, warm-hearted guide to Jewish life, spiced with the spirit of the Jewish counterculture, and created one together: The Jewish Catalog: A Do-It-Yourself Guide. The three belonged to the Havurah movement in the early 1970s and remained involved with Jewish communal life in the decades since. Michael Strassfeld, a former rabbi for the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, has written and edited guides to Shabbat, Passover, and other Jewish holidays. Richard Siegel (d. 2018), who served as executive director of the Foundation for Jewish Culture, spent decades promoting Jewish culture, supporting Jewish artists, and editing Jewish books. The editor and author Sharon Strassfeld has written primers on Jewish holidays and customs, as well as an advice book, Everything I Know: Basic Life Rules from a Jewish Mother.