Montana Tucker isn’t quite what you expect – and to be clear, that’s a good thing. She may, at first glance, look something like the blonde, perennially-upbeat influencers popping up across the social media landscape — but wait until she starts talking. “My motivation?” she said in a recent interview. “My Grandma Lilly, definitely.” Tucker,…
Kosher pareve semi-sweet chocolate chips have been returning to Trader Joe’s stores across the country in recent weeks, a delectable sight for halachic shoppers since they disappeared from the shelves in 2012. It was a great kosher calamity at the time, reminiscent of the bank runs before the Great Depression. Frantic shoppers cleaned out the…
As athletes converge on Japan for the Olympic Games that begin July 23, they won’t find any restaurants that serve kosher meat, but they will find a rich Jewish history dating back to the arrival of Portuguese conversos (Jews who converted to Catholicism under severe persecution) who arrived in Japan as merchants in the early…
It was the barbed wire that made me sense that something evil had happened. Thick, coiled and with fierce barbs every inch or so, I found it in some undergrowth on Alderney, a British island that lies just seven miles from the coast of France. You won’t find examples of it anymore, for in the…
If you want to eat at Miami’s oldest and most authentic Jewish deli, you’ll have to drive to Hialeah, Miami’s most Cuban neighborhood. You drive down a gritty industrial street, once home to a thriving district of Jewish-owned garment factories. One side is lined with sprawling warehouses, auto body and tire shops, the other with…
Eric Adams and Andrew Yang, two of the leading candidates for mayor of New York City, have stepped up their get-out-the-vote efforts in the Orthodox community in Brooklyn as early voting in the June 22 Democratic primary is underway. Both campaigns are touting their commitments to work with the community, protect its rights and enhance…
“I guess I’m a Jew,” Andrew Young says with surprise, like it’s occurring to him for the first time, which it probably is, although it definitely shouldn’t be. It is June 7th, 2021 and we are facing each other in a basement studio of the Georgia Public Broadcasting building in Atlanta, which also houses the…
What do empty swimming pools have to do with racial justice and income inequality? To Heather McGhee, a lot. “In the middle of the 20th century, there were about 2,000 lavish, publicly-funded pools around the country. When the Civil Rights Movement enabled Black families to say, ‘Hey, those are our tax dollars funding those pools….
When she was growing up in Woodland Hills in Los Angeles’s suburban San Fernando Valley, Ora Yashar felt very American. But at home, her parents were preoccupied with their native Iran. “I always heard stories,” Yashar told the Forward. “My parents were always talking about life before the Revolution. They always talk about Iran.” The…
(JTA) — BRIARCLIFF MANOR, N.Y. — David Harris grew up in a Russian-speaking home in New York and was raised to hate communism. In 1974, he was among a handful of Americans allowed to live and teach in the Soviet Union — an experience that left an indelible mark on his life. It set Harris…
(JTA) — Two tiny sects with Jewish roots have been dragged into yet another diplomatic fight between Russia and Ukraine. The few hundred Karaites who remain in Ukraine today are remnants of a sect that broke off from mainstream Judaism in eighth-century Iraq. They were was documented in Crimea in the 13th century and nearly…
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