When Rabbi Douglas Goldhamer arrived in Chicago from Cincinnati in the early 1970s, he found deaf Jews attending church services because they had no synagogue to accommodate their needs or view them as equals. So in 1973, Goldhamer founded Congregation Bene Shalom, a Reform synagogue in Skokie, Illinois, that interprets all of its services in…
Amid many gloomy predictions that American Jewry is shrinking, disengaging and assimilating, comes bracing news from Chicago: um, maybe not. A just-released Chicago Jewish population study — the largest one ever — found that the community is instead growing and diversifying: • The study shows that the Jewish population in Chicago is nearly 320,000, an…
A Chicago Jewish mother struggled in her relationship with her child’s father, but it wasn’t until she turned for help to a local Jewish agency that the reason became clear: she was a victim of domestic abuse. “For the first time, I felt heard and understood” said M., whose identity has been obscured for her…
“Matthew died last night. I’m shocked and sorry to tell you-it’s suicide. Hannah is a wreck.” I kept rereading the text as though the words would make sense if I inspected them more closely. I grew up with Hannah (For reasons of privacy, I’m not using the family’s real names here.) She and Matthew had…
Appropriately appearing just before the harvest festival of Sukkot, this column marks the beginning of a series on farming and food from Remi and Gavi Welbel, who run Zumwalt Acres, a sustainable Jewish farm in Illinois. Growing up, my sister and I often joked that our father thought asparagus could save the world. Driving along…
Author’s Note: After being pardoned by Trump for alleged cyberstalking, Jared Kushner’s longtime chum Ken Kurson is now facing similar charges. In light of this news, we are revisiting this article from October of last year, which plumbs Kurson’s musical oeuvre, a canon of paranoia and jealousy that gels quite well with the allegations. Ken…
The job market is booming across the country, and Lavie Margolin is here to help you navigate it. A career expert and author, Margolin has written a dozen books about job searching, including Can I Wear my Kippah on Job Interviews which he co-wrote with his spouse Rachel. His insights could not be more timely:…
Judy Chicago, whose immense body of work draws on overlooked women’s history, the tragedy of the recent Jewish past and features no small amount of literal fireworks, is having yet another moment. Born Judith Sylvia Cohen in (naturally) Chicago, the artist, whose name is regularly appended with words like “controversial,” will receive her first-ever retrospective…
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