This is the Forward’s coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and its affect on Jewish communities around the world.
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Fast Forward After Borough Park protest leader arrested for inciting a riot, his followers mob home of Hasidic journalist
(JTA) — A dispute that has roiled Borough Park, an Orthodox neighborhood in Brooklyn, took a dark new turn Sunday night after Heshy Tischler, the man who led protests against COVID-19 restrictions there last week was arrested and charged with inciting a riot. The New York Police Department announced Sunday night that it had taken…
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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 Jews paused Indiana’s abortion ban — by turning a religious freedom law against the evangelical right
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Culture In 1989, Harold Pinter and Jerry Schatzberg made the perfect Holocaust movie for 2026
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Opinion An abominable new Israeli law is a death warrant for democracy
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Culture Inside the ancient Christian theology driving modern antisemitism
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Film & TV This Christian conversion comedy should have left Jews out of it
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Fast Forward Jewish families and a rabbi ask to join lawsuit to block Oklahoma Jewish charter school
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Fast Forward Sponsors back out of festival that invited Kanye West to headline despite record of antisemitism
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Fast Forward Wisconsin mosque leader detained by ICE in latest case tied to US antisemitism concerns
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