Simon Yisrael Feuerman
By Simon Yisrael Feuerman
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Culture What A Pleasure It Is To Feel Lost On Passover
Nowadays, my father who is 87 (till 120!) and I are at odds. Even though we are as attached as ever (we speak on the phone every morning), we are lost to each other. In fact, he won’t be coming to my seder nor I to his. In my family growing up, it was a…
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Culture After Havdalah, a Sense of Exile
I remember, when I was 6 or 7 years old, a ritual: Immediately after Havdalah my mother would run over to the phone — a yellow rotary phone embedded in the kitchen wall, to call her parents. It was 1970 or thereabouts. We lived in Montreal then, and it was a long-distance call to New…
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Culture Caught Between the Yeshiva and the Deep Blue Sea
When I was in yeshiva, there was a man who had been in beit medrash every day since 1953. Yes, every day in the afternoon he came to study the holy books, without fail. He had started as a young boy, and by the time I was 20, he was in his 50s. He had…
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Culture Remembering Thomas Toivi Blatt, Survivor of Sobibor
Can we grieve for a man we don’t know? If he was a holocaust survivor who was part of a group that led a revolt and escaped from Sobibor we might. If he was someone who reminded of us of our grandfather, our father, people we knew throughout our lives, we might. If he were…
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Culture A Plea for Remembrance — and for Forgetting
Not too long ago, my bubbe and zayde lived in a crowded apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was a place filled with books and Yiddish newspapers strewn over the armchairs (the Forward, Die Morgen Journal, Der Algemeiner). There was a sense of holy, righteous and predetermined doom, as though all the…
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Life The Shallowness of Men Who Won’t Sit by Women
Copyright Thinkstock What’s up with these men — my brothers — who refuse to sit next to women — my sisters — on planes and trains, buses and light rails? The situations of frum men refusing to sit next to women lend themselves to a kind of grade-school snickering. Methinks the man doth protest too…
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News The Ascension of Ed Koch
Much has been and will be written about former New York City mayor Ed Koch, who died February 1 at the age of 88. He was such a New Yorker, and such a Jew. My contemporaries who came of age in the 1970s and ’80s will no doubt remember his nasal voice, his Yiddishisms, his…
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