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.
Community
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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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Half Jewish in Israel
Jewish on the wrong side. Dad-Jew. Jirish. Jew-ish. These are a few of the ways I have referred to myself over the years. I am “half-Jewish” a term usually reserved for people born to Jewish fathers, and non-Jewish mothers. My mother is of Irish-American descent. She is a musician, she teaches Yoga, and she has…
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Decision Points: insight into the US-Israel relationship
As the world hunkers down with the coronavirus pandemic and we learn to live in the new abnormal, technology has been a source of consolation. People are looking for content while they are at home, leading to an explosion in podcasts. I started my own podcast series last fall, “Decision Points,” looking to give listeners…
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Working from home and missing my morning commute
A recent meme featured a man standing in his shower room in work attire – jacket, briefcase, sunglasses and earbuds – gripping the curtain rod subway-style. The image was deliciously surreal, and conveyed an unspoken truth: Even amidst the extreme disruption caused by coronavirus and social distancing, we are happy to leave some things behind….
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From Jewish pride to self-doubt, teenage writers sound off on the rise in anti-Semitism
A young woman experiences the fear her ancestors must have felt for the first time. Another wonders if she should even talk about Israel around her friends anymore. A third feels the urge to fight back against anti-Semitism, but isn’t sure how. These are just a few ways that teenage girls participating in the Jewish…
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It’s all about relationships, especially in a pandemic
I write this sitting in a Hilton hotel room in what is known as “Med City,” Rochester, Minnesota. My wife Susie and I have been in this same room since February 6 when we arrived to enter the world-famous Mayo Clinic kidney transplant center. That amounts to nearly 60 days, isolated from most family and…
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Passover is the Jewish people’s real independence day
Standing on a mountaintop three days north of Eilat, I turned around for the first time. I looked back along the route I’d hiked, with its brown and gold hills and valleys, the shimmer of the Gulf of Eilat and the Red Sea in the distance. I was amazed at how far I’d come —…
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‘It felt more meaningful, more symbolic:’ Readers share their seder stories
We knew these seder nights would be different from all others. Turned out some of those differences were positive. My own extended family seemed to talk over each other less via Zoom than we do in person, and we relaxed our recitation of the hagaddah to make room for more personal interpretations, which may also…
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Rethinking Pharaoh’s leadership under the COVID-19 pandemic
National leaders have addressed the coronavirus pandemic in a variety of ways depending on their personalities and the forms of governments they lead. In China and Iran, for instance, the governments are authoritarian and the first response was denial. It seems that for authoritarian governments the presence of a virus is some kind of embarrassment…
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The Good People of Corona
I used to think the city reeked. The subway handles were a hub of germs and its people a taut rope, not yet snapped. But when the storm came here, to my adopted city, I no longer saw the dirt. What I saw instead was humanity. “You’re in the epicenter: New York,” they told me….
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Community is essential, to Judaism and recovery
In the Passover seder we are asked by the haggadah to treat ourselves “as if” we came out of Egypt — not just to tell the story but also to to experience the journey from slavery to freedom ourselves. We think that the hard part is sitting through many hours of storytelling (with family!), but…
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This is not our first seder in isolation
Jews are no strangers to seders in isolation. The first seder which ever took place was in the ancient land of Egypt (Mitzrayim), that narrow and constrained space. “None of you shall go outside the door of their house until morning.” These are not words from the health department’s recent report; they are words from…
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