Scribe, the Forward’s curated contributor network, is a place for showcasing personal experiences and perspective from across our Jewish communities. Here you will find a wide array of reflections on Jewish issues, life-cycle events, spirituality, culture and more.
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You say matzah — and matzo and matzuh and matzee and more
Readers respond to our editor-in-chief’s column about a Passover copy-editing conundrum
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What the Bible Can Teach Us About Quarantine
The word quarantine comes from quarantena, or “forty days,” in the Venetian language. It was first used during the Black Death epidemic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to designate a period that ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore. As a rabbi and a student of religious history,…
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A prayer for George Floyd: ‘We take this pledge’
Innocent blood is calling out, God, Echoing through the universe. We must ask ourselves What have we done? What have we ignored, allowed, denied, Excused? But today we shed our excuses In a time of soul-searching. We take this pledge For our black brothers and sisters and for You, God: “I am my brother’s keeper”…
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Understanding how we understand George Floyd
In his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” the renowned critical theorist Walter Benjamin contrasts the “story” with the morning news, the primary mode in which information was disseminated in his era. Benjamin was not interested in the idea of a story: what makes something a story, how stories work. He was instead interested in the tradition…
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Judaism means putting obligation toward others before yourself
“Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.” (Mishna Sanhedrin 4:5) Los Angeles and other cities across the United States are experiencing riots and social unrest the likes of which we haven’t…
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Turn to the Talmud for instructions on anti-racism
Yesterday I was invited to a webinar called “How to make sure you are not raising the next Amy Cooper.” It is one of countless calls in the past few days about how to not be or not raise a racist. These lessons are essential. White America is just now beginning to learn how to…
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Dear Jewish community – here’s what to do now
As protests continue across the United States, we are witnessing at the forefront, a conversation about what the Jewish community relations field has long understood to exist under the surface: systemic racism underlies and permeates our societal structures. Policies such as housing and zoning practices, inequitable school funding, access to early childhood education, differential policing…
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The Red Cross still helps people learn fate of loved ones lost during the Holocaust
Read this article in Yiddish For over 14 years, I have been a volunteer for an extraordinary service at the Red Cross: helping Holocaust survivors find missing loved ones, after being separated from them all those years ago. This service is part of our Restoring Family Links department, which reunites people separated by war or…
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‘Queen of the broken English:’ remembering my bubby
The photos of my bar mitzvah that arrived recently in the mail from my parents coincided with the forty-fifth anniversary of that celebration. Metaphors, perhaps, for an adolescence I would prefer to forget, the pictures are blurry and poorly composed. Miraculously, I can identify nearly every one of my classmates from middle school, along with…
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Books Is there any good time to publish a book during a pandemic?
“Timing is everything.” Larry Cohler-Esses wrote that line in 1995 in a Forward news story about my book contract with Simon and Schuster. I was the American Jewish Committee’s expert on antisemitism at the time. I had written a report on the militia movement ten days before the Oklahoma City bombing predicting attacks on government…
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This isn’t about the bagel, nor the seltzer man
For me, it was a bagel – my last taste of normalcy before the “new normal” arrived, eaten mere hours before NYC effectively cancelled the school year for my children. The inevitable was fast approaching — had arrived in fact — and I was just slow to accept it. (Weeks later, my dad would die….
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Bringing Torah into the streets means fighting for justice
It was Shabbat afternoon and I was in the backyard playing frisbee with my son when a member of my congregation’s security team showed up unexpectedly. “We just received word that all synagogues in the Twin Cities should secure their Torah scrolls,” he said. I was taken aback. “Really?” I asked. I had seen shops…
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