My childhood friend Sami’s mother claimed she could drive down a residential street and pick out where fellow Jews lived. Granted, most Jews don’t select colonial décor — too Daughters of the American Revolution for our taste. But she denied relying on knotty-pine coffee tables to weed out the non-Jews. Rather, she claimed to possess…
This article originally appeared in Yiddish in the Forverts. The Jewish community of Charleston, South Carolina, wants everyone to know that Florida isn’t the only state where Jewish couples can enjoy their golden years basking in warm weather and Jewish community. Last week, Charleston’s modern Orthodox synagogue, Brith Sholom Beth Israel, hosted more than 40…
Life in the arts is never easy, especially in a bad economy. For some Jewish artists, it’s about to get a lot harder. The Six Points Fellowship, a program of the Foundation for Jewish Culture that has given away some $1.26 million to artists over seven years, is shutting down its flagship New York fellowship…
In this week’s Reporters Roundtable podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis is joined by deputy arts editor Ezra Glinter to discuss the new season of Arrested Development and its ‘talmudic’ qualities. Then, Ezra fills us in on the emergent ultra-orthodox cinema in Israel. Next, assistant news editor Larry Cohler-Esses drops by to discuss a possible reshuffling of…
Former Forward staffer, Grumpy Jeffrey Goldberg, thinks that lists of Jews are a bad idea, just because a few white supremacists enjoy using them. And also, because they don’t always include him and/or Natalie Portman. That’s ridiculous. First of all, Natalie Portman blew a lot of list-ability with “No Strings Attached.” And his logic is…
Ellie Goldenberg and Emily Blum are getting ready to immerse for the first time in the mikveh, or Jewish ritual bath. One might assume that Ellie and Emily are soon-to-be brides; in traditional communities, women immerse in the mikveh for the first time before they are wed. But they’re not — Ellie is an 11-year-old…
A shuttered 90-year-old Jewish nursing home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side has been declared a New York City landmark, a designation that will protect it from being razed. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission decided on May 22 to grant landmark status to the Bialystoker nursing home, which catered to generations of Polish Jews…
Contrary to his earlier claims, one of American Jewry’s most prominent leaders was warned about a serious Holocaust compensation scam more than eight years before the fraud became public. Julius Berman, who is chairman of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, then directed his own inquiry into the fraud allegations but failed to…
Indonesian human rights activists are protesting an American Jewish organization’s plans to honor Indonesia’s president with an award for religious freedom — a freedom that human rights monitors say has sharply deteriorated under his rule. The annual award, given by Rabbi Arthur Schneier’s Appeal of Conscience Foundation, has no significant profile in the United States….
Jewish LGBT leaders are joining the chorus of condemnation around the West Village murder of a gay man over the weekend by a convicted felon who spouted homophobic slurs before pulling the trigger on his 32-year-old victim. Just steps from the historic Stonewall Inn, widely considered the birthplace of the modern gay-rights movement, Elliott Morales…
Just as baby boomers defined what it meant to be a teenager in America in the 1960s and ‘70s, they are now redefining what it means to grow old. Every day, 10,000 people turn 65 in the United States, with baby boomers making up over a quarter of the U.S. population, according to a 2010…
