Marla Brown Fogelman
By Marla Brown Fogelman
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Community Meet Biden’s first rabbi, Rabbi Leonard Gewirtz
Most of the Jews in my former hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, as well as expats like me, would probably concur that President Joe Biden has shown up for them throughout his four-plus decades as Delaware’s senator — attending synagogue events, giving briefings on his many trips to Israel at the JCC, and even making unexpected…
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Community I always sang for my father
My father, a fan of life, music and his home state politician Joe Biden, died soon after the first case of Covid-19 was reported in Delaware — although fortunately not of Covid-19. He was felled by “natural causes,”also known as the physical vicissitudes of old age. Dad’s death was not unexpected, but because of the…
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Life When A Synagogue Was Sold To A Church — The Community Held A Funeral
Several months ago, before it was to be sold to a Baptist church, the synagogue of my youth held a funeral, although the event was billed as a farewell ceremony. The oldest synagogue in the state of Delaware, Adas Kodesh Shel Emeth (or AKSE), had made its home in a red-brick building on a major…
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Life HBO’s ‘Bright Lights’ Documentary Brings Comfort to Mourning Fan of Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds
Six months ago, I wrote an open letter to Carrie Fisher, for the Sisterhood, asking Fisher and her mother Debbie Reynolds to Mother’s Day lunch with me and my mother at Steven Spielberg’s mother’s restaurant on Los Angeles’s Pico Boulevard. The abruptness of their deaths was a shock. “It’s a tragedy,” my own still vibrant,…
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Life A Mother’s Day Note to Carrie Fisher
Dear Carrie, The last time I wrote about reaching out to you was five years ago, just after reading your book “Shockaholic.” I did a review of your book for this newspaper, mentioning what we specifically had in common—long-deceased Jewish-Communist relatives and being adult children of song-and-dance mavens, and what we didn’t—cocaine habits, marriages to…
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Life How Veterans Stories Transformed My Son
I am sitting in my office, in Bethesda, Maryland, when my millennial son Benjamin calls, from northern California, to talk about Jewish veterans of World War II — specifically about the latest Bernie, Harry, or Murray war story he has just transcribed. Read: Portraits of Our Fallen Although the hushed, cubicle farm where I spend…
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Life Why Couldn’t My Two Bubbies Love Each Other?
illustration by Lior Zaltzman My grandmothers, Bubbie R. and Bubbie G., lived next door to each other throughout my childhood in Wilmington, Delaware. They had also been next-door neighbors throughout my parents’ childhoods in that same city. Yet even then they were striking in their differences, as dissimilar to each other as night and day,…
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Life Learning to Love Christmas, Eggnog and All
Photograph via Flickr/Creative Commons As an Orthodox Jew who believes in the world to come while participating pretty fully in the world at large, I will admit that there are certain things I like about Christmas aka “the holiday season.” I like the festive spirit, the Starbucks sweet and spicy Christmas blend coffee, and the…
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