The year 2020 has been a brutal one for the restaurant and catering industry — unless you happen to own a small, kosher catering company in Memphis, Tennessee. , Marisa Baggett, the Jewish founder of Zayde’s NYC Deli, enters her second high holiday season looking back on a year filled with struggle and who-would-have-thought-it success….
(JTA) – For the Rochelle Zell Jewish High School in suburban Chicago, it took just three days of in-person instruction last month before two staff members tested positive for COVID-19, sending the school back to remote learning for six days. Now they’re back in the classroom. That experience of opening, closing and reopening is likely to…
Weary though we may be of screens, that’s where most of us will find ourselves this holiday season. If Pesach was an out-of-town preview, the High Holiday season is opening night on Broadway. Congregants, especially in Reform and some Conservative communities, have come to expect a certain level of performance when it comes to Rosh…
A Brooklyn hospital that serves a large Orthodox Jewish population is fighting in court to try to fire a pediatric resident who posted antisemitic and homophobic tweets, according to legal filings. New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital tried to boot Walid Khass from its pediatric residency program after staff learned of his social media posts in…
Scott Stringer, who announced his candidacy for New York City mayor on Tuesday, has more campaign donations from Manhattan’s heavily Jewish — and wealthy — Upper West Side than anywhere else, according to the New York City Campaign Finance Board data. Stringer, currently New York’s comptroller and former borough president of Manhattan, has built a…
The Brazilian chef and activist David Hertz has been preparing for this pandemic long before it hit. When it did, the virus laid bare a lot of gaps in American society, but perhaps the harshest one is this: between those who can enjoy the time to make sourdough, cook meals with their family and plant…
Guards are installed at the doors, entrance lights are turned off, and guests are asked not to share on social media: That’s how some Orthodox weddings are being organized today, taking place indoors. “Most problems of weddings end with hiring a guard who stands at the door and watches that more than fifty people shouldn’t…
Sam Yebri was a year old in 1982 when his Jewish family fled Iran, stopping in Rome, Vienna, Switzerland and New York before settling in Los Angeles in 1983. Looking back, he recognizes his family’s good fortune. Not only did they escape the new Islamic regime under Ayatollah Khomeini, Los Angeles gave the Yebri family…
Long before Black Lives Matter, there was the End Jim Crow in Baseball movement. For more than a decade before Jackie Robinson broke the sport’s color line in 1947, black newspapers, civil rights groups, progressive white activists and unions, the Communist Party, and radical politicians waged a sustained protest campaign to integrate the national pastime….
If Donald Trump is reelected president, expect more violence from white nationalists and far-right extremist groups. If he is not reelected, expect more violence as well. That’s the depressing forecast from numerous experts who monitor US-based extremist groups. “Should he win, they will feel increasingly empowered,” said Ken Stern, director of the Bard Center for…
The trial of a young man accused of vandalizing a synagogue has revealed the thought process behind a neo-Nazi group’s decision last fall to accelerate its activities. Yousef Omar Barasneh, 22, a member of the group known as the Base, pleaded guilty last month to spray-painting anti-Semitic messages and swastikas on the walls of the…
