This is the Forward’s coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and its affect on Jewish communities around the world.
COVID-19
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News Orthodox Jews quietly defy coronavirus restrictions to celebrate last of the High Holidays
Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn proceeded with some indoor and outdoor holiday celebrations in their synagogues over the weekend, in defiance of restrictions limiting all religious gatherings to 10 or fewer people in neighborhoods where the rates of coronavirus infection have gone sharply up in recent weeks. On Saturday evening in Borough Park — a neighborhood…
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Community Trading places, Jewishly
Most Saturday afternoons, at around 3:00, I sit on a bench across the street from my apartment waiting for a friend to join me (masked, of course, and at a distance of at least six feet). My friend is Orthodox, and for most of her life she has taken Shabbat afternoon walks. These days I…
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News As seniors turn against Trump, are old Florida Jews among them?
So many seniors make their home in Florida that, for years, comedians have referred to the state as “God’s waiting room.” What every pollster’s mind these days is this: Who are they waiting to vote for? An estimated 29% of the state’s nine million voters are over 65, and recent polls suggest that support for…
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News Ahead of Simchat Torah street parties, mayor says NYPD not sure how to enforce new health rules
The New York City Police Department does not know how it will enforce new state restrictions on religious gatherings just days before Simchat Torah, a holiday typically celebrated in Orthodox communities with massive dance parties that spill onto the street. “The lawyers all have to get on the same page, and the NYPD has to…
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Fast Forward Orthodox journalist attacked, chased, called ‘Nazi’ at Jewish Borough Park protest
An ultra-Orthodox journalist who covers the religious Jewish community was set upon by participants in a protest against new coronavirus restrictions after the event’s leader ordered the crowd to chase him away. Jacob Kornbluh, who lives in Borough Park, Brooklyn, was covering an event organized by Heshy Tischler, an aspiring politician. Tishcler has recently risen…
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News In Borough Park, an anti-shutdown protest turns into a pro-Trump rally — and a journalist is assaulted
The religious Jews of Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood often pour into the streets during the harvest holiday of Sukkot to dance with Torahs in a celebration called “Simchat Beit HaShoeva,” a ritual having to do with rainfall. On Wednesday night, they danced along Borough Parks’s 13th Avenue holding Trump flags. Heshy Tischler, a community agitator…
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Culture Did the Trump White House really echo ‘Triumph of the Will’?
In film theory, there’s something called the Kuleshov Effect, which teaches that juxtaposing images in sequence can suggest completely different reads of a shot. The typical example is an image of a blank-faced man placed alongside an image of a baby in a casket, a pairing that makes viewers interpret the man’s expression as sad…
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News Jewish Twitter tried to pray for Trump, but Stephen Miller’s diagnosis generates only jokes
While a debate broke out among liberal Jews on Twitter, as to whether they should pray for the president of the United States after his positive COVID-19 diagnosis, nobody in those circles seems to have any such qualms about his senior aide, Stephen Miller. Widely known as the architect of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies,…
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Fast Forward DNC finding: Biden’s Israel backing cost Harris votes for president
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News What We Know About Jeffrey Epstein’s Childhood
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News An audiobook narrator told Zionists to kill themselves. A popular romance novelist hired him anyway.
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Opinion The dark message behind Tucker Carlson’s attempt to drum up drama in Israel
In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish זכרונות פֿון אַן אונטערבאַן־פּאַסאַזשירMemories of a subway passenger
אויף דער אונטערבאַן האָב איך זיך אויסגעלערנט מײַנע ערשטע זאַצן אויף שפּאַניש.
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Fast Forward Trump administration files lawsuit against UCLA, saying it failed to protect Jewish and Israeli employees
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Sports Israeli bobsled captain on Olympics exit: ‘Holy endeavor’ slammed into rigid rule
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Fast Forward The real Holocaust history behind ‘Papillon,’ the Oscar-nominated short about a star Jewish swimmer
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