Helen Chernikoff is the Forward’s News Editor. She came to the Forward from The Jewish Week, where she served as the first web director and created both a blog dedicated to disability issues and a food and wine website. Before that, she covered the housing, lodging and logistics industries for Reuters, where she could sit at her desk and watch her stories move the stock market. Helen has a Master’s of Public Administration from Columbia University and a BA in History and French from Amherst College. She is also a rabbinical school dropout. Contact her at chernikoff@forward.com and follow her on Twitter at @thesimplechild.
Helen Chernikoff
By Helen Chernikoff
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Life Our Time: A new monthly newsletter by and for Jewish women
Welcome to OUR TIME, a new monthly newsletter by and for Jewish women – an eclectic mix of inspiration for mind, body, soul and heart. It is produced by The Forward and distributed in partnership with Hadassah. I’m your host, Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, Life editor at the Forward. Growing up in a family of Soviet Jewish…
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Life Blewish,’ ‘Jew-ish’ and ‘Jew-theran’: interfaith families group renames itself
“Interfaith.” It’s so early aughts. For decades, the label connoted a family with one Jewish spouse and one of a different background. In 2001, an entire organization called “InterfaithFamily” was created. Now many such families are done with using a single label to describe themselves, so the group has followed suit and renamed itself “18Doors.”…
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The Schmooze The ‘Italian’ hand gesture’s also Israeli — plus, more Jewish emojis, please?
The Unicode Consortium, also known as “the emoji people,” released its list of 65 new icons on Thursday, thrilling at least two groups with their inclusion of what they’re calling the “Italian hand gesture” of pinched fingers and a raised hand. Of course, Italians love it — they use it to signal disagreement. But a…
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News Guardian Angels patrol outside Shabbat services amid Brooklyn hate crime surge
The crowd outside 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood on Saturday morning included all the regulars: Hasidic men in black robes tied at the waist, small girls in tights and Mary Janes, and women in wigs. Also hovering outside 770, as the worldwide headquarters of the Lubavitcher movement is known, were Benjamin Garcia,…
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Fast Forward Hanukkah Mass Stabbing Tips NYC-Area Violence Against Jews Into ‘Epidemic’
It hadn’t even been 24 hours since five people were stabbed in a heavily Orthodox village outside New York City when its residents gathered on Sunday, as had been long planned, to dedicate new Torah scrolls. A band on a truck led the way. Children towing their parents waved flags and held torches. Yet no…
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Fast Forward UPDATE: Suspect Published Anti-Semitic Posts Before Kosher Grocery Store Shootout That Killed Six
A suspect had published anti-Semitic and anti-police social media posts and camera footage suggests the kosher market was targeted, the New York Times reports. Three members of a small Jewish community and a cherished police officer were killed on Tuesday afternoon in addition to two suspects during a protracted shootout at a kosher supermarket in…
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News Two Obscure, Obsessive Jewish Groups Created And Saved This 1,000-Year-Old Bible
The 1,000-year-old Hebrew Bible that went on public view for the first time last week would not exist at all, or have survived this long, without the obsessive efforts of two obscure Jewish groups: the Masoretes and the Karaites. The Masoretes were a mysterious group of scholar-scribes, who starting in the Sixth Century worked to…
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News Ukraine’s Jewish President Is At The Center Of Trump’s Impeachment Inquiry
The saga of Volodymyr Zelensky — the Jewish comedian elected president of Ukraine — was already mind-boggling. Now it’s taken a turn for the surreal, as the 41-year-old has assumed a place not just as head of a country of 44 million people, but also at the center of a potentially historic American political scandal….
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