Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of the robust lives of American Jews. Here there’s a little of everything about the multifaceted world of Jewish life. There are light-hearted Jewish celebrity stories and shocking Jewish celebrity news. Food is also plentiful,…
Life
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Yogi Berra loved my wife’s matzo-ball soup. You should make it for Passover.
In the early 1980s, I had just moved to New York and first witnessed the mystical quality of what’s ordinarily a Passover staple. It happened at the Second Avenue Deli, a bustling mecca in the pre-gentrified East Village. Without fail, my buddy Howie would order the ridiculously stuffed pastrami sandwich, a Dr. Brown’s cream soda,…
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The secret to parenting during a pandemic
Join us April 2 for our live panel discussion, “Parenting in a Pandemic: Home-schooling, canceled B’nei mitzvah and what will happen to camp? Before I became a parent, I had decided that I would not be a short order-cook, catering to everyone’s whims and desires. I would only prepare one meal for dinner — I…
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Rob Eshman joins The Forward to lead national expansion
Dear Reader, As we continue our commitment to both superb journalism and community-building during this pandemic, we are also deepening our investment to grow the Forward’s footprint nationally. To that end, we are thrilled to announce that we have hired Rob Eshman, the former editor-in-chief and publisher of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal to lead…
The Latest
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It Was Never About the Building
Today, April 1, is the 149th birthday of our synagogue. And it sits empty. When the time came to close our synagogue due to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, we were very careful to say that it was just our synagogue’s physical facility that was closing. Our doors were closing, but the synagogue itself…
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In quarantine, finding inspiration in the lives of great American Jewish women
Since childhood, I was drawn to the stories of women’s lives. I pulled so many biographies of famous American women—Betsy Ross, Clara Barton, Amelia Earhart—off the children’s shelves of my New Jersey township’s library that I assumed that famous women had their own juvenile series. But they didn’t. I just wasn’t grabbing the volumes on…
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Diary of a Day-School Mom: Even isolation is relative
Last week, I experimented with isolating myself further. We are fortunate to have ample space in our Brooklyn apartment in this time of quarantine, and I decided to take advantage of it. I hauled my computer and my personal hotspot into our back room, which has in it only a folding table, a single chair…
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I left the Satmar Hasidic community. ‘Unorthodox’ is a grossly inaccurate depiction of that world.
Scene: It’s Shabbes when Esty, a young Satmar Hasidic woman, is about to make her escape from her repressive community to Berlin, where she has decided to start a new life as a secular woman. So opens the new Netflix miniseries ‘Unorthodox’. She collects her valuables from her underwear drawer, pulls cash out of her…
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Coronavirus shrinks wedding of couple who courted at Shabbat dinners
It was supposed to be a big wedding with 550 guests, men wearing black ties and women in evening gowns. After all, this was the match that was made because one young Israeli man in Los Angeles hosted thousands of people at his house for Shabbat — both because he loved to do it, and…
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Thinking about food insecurity in a time of everything insecurity
My husband was itching to have an outing. He suggested a nearby farm that offers pick-your-own. After a knee-jerk no, we found three ways to justify it to ourselves (and anyone who might ask). One, get the kids out of the house, into nature, and away from their screens. Two, help our local farmers by…
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Passover therapy: Our holiday expert asked 6 rabbis to reflect on this very different year
It’s amazing how a slogan that wasn’t hackneyed two weeks ago is already tired: Why is this Passover different from other Passovers? But it’s apt. This is the first Passover in my lifetime that Jews will be forced apart during a holiday that is entirely about being together. This is the first Passover for many…
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Is the mikveh safe from COVID-19? Some women opt for the ocean.
It’s been years since I read ‘The Rebbe’s Army’, journalist Sue Fishkin’s 2003 book on Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim, but one anecdote has stuck with me ever since: when Chabad’s emissary to Alaska took a congregant to a local lake for her monthly immersion, the two women were surprised by a family of moose, who had chosen…
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