This is the Forward’s coverage of Brooklyn, a borough of New York City home to a major population of Hasidic Jews.
Brooklyn
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Culture Escape from Williamsburg
Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots By Deborah Feldman Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $23 Deborah Feldman’s memoir, “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots,” begins with Feldman describing her father, a mentally disabled Hasid employed by pitying community members to preform simple tasks, like picking up people from the airport. Sometimes…
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News Shorn Matisyahu Takes Different Path
No one noticed Matisyahu when he climbed onstage at a downtown Manhattan concert venue in early January, drinking a cup of tea under dark red lights. It wasn’t until the onetime Hasidic reggae superstar took off his fleece cap, revealing a velvet yarmulke, that fans connected the gaunt, stubble-faced man with the yeshiva boy who…
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Fast Forward Anti-Semitic Spree Eyed as Insurance Scam
An arson attack last year on cars in a predominately Jewish neighborhood of New York reportedly is being investigated as an insurance scam instead of a hate crime. The attack on Nov. 11, the day after Kristallnacht commemorations, included the spray-painting with anti-Semitic graffiti of the nearby sidewalk and park benches. Elected officials and Jewish…
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The Schmooze A Speakeasy Grows in Brooklyn
In the 1920s, at the height of Prohibition, underground saloons called speakeasies proliferated around the country. They got their name — according to an 1891 New York Times article — from one Kate Hester, who ran such a saloon in her Pennsylvania home, and who was known for telling her customers to “speak easy” when…
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News Orthodox Push for Own Districts
In Texas, Republican state officials have recently gone to the U.S. Supreme Court to defend their plan to break up a heavily minority state Senate district. At the same time, in New York, state Republicans are reportedly pushing a plan to consolidate another minority — Brooklyn Orthodox Jews — in just such a district. It’s…
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Opinion The Brooklyn D.A. Stonewalls
Three weeks ago, the Forward published a story about the dramatic increase in arrests of Orthodox men for child sexual abuse in Brooklyn. The figure that the Forward published — 89 men arrested and charged between October 2009 and October 2011 — was given to this newspaper during two separate conversations with the Brooklyn District…
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News All You Need to Tie the Knot Right
A wedding expo is, above all, an education in the do’s and don’t’s of tying the knot. And at My Big Fat Jewish Wedding Expo — a one-stop shop for all things matrimonial — these lessons were wrapped in layers of tradition. Dozens of vendors ringed the main banquet hall in Brooklyn’s Grand Prospect Hall,…
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News Inside the Ultra-Orthodox Shomrim Force
Among Righteous Men: A Tale of Vigilantes and Vindication in Hasidic Crown Heights By Matthew Shaer Wiley, 256 pages, $25.95 When 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky went missing in Brooklyn last June, it took two hours for anyone in Leiby?s ultra-Orthodox neighborhood to inform the police. The local volunteer Jewish security patrol heard almost immediately. The patrol,…
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