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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Community What the Bible Can Teach Us About Quarantine
The word quarantine comes from quarantena, or “forty days,” in the Venetian language. It was first used during the Black Death epidemic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to designate a period that ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore. As a rabbi and a student of religious history,…
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News In the wake of protests, here’s how you can help
After yet another police killing of an unarmed black man, protesters across the United States are demanding criminal justice reform on behalf of George Floyd and others who have died at the hands of law enforcement. Organizations and activists are mobilizing on several fronts. They’re working to protect the protesters, to reform policing, to change…
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News How New York’s Haredim are responding to George Floyd protests
A crowd of police in riot gear marched down Crown Heights’ Eastern Parkway one day this week to applause and salutes from some of the neighborhood’s Haredi residents. Another day, amid another Black Lives Matter protest, a Jewish man with side curls offered the throng in Williamsburg a double thumbs-up. Over on Williamsburgh’s Bedford and…
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Fast Forward Trump’s ‘gift from God’ drug, espoused by Jewish doctor, does not prevent coronavirus: study
Hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug touted by President Donald Trump as a treatment for Covid-19 — and taken by him to prevent contracting the disease — does not prevent against coronavirus infection when taken prophylactically, a new study found. The study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first double-blind, placebo-controlled study…
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News He was a combat pilot. He’s married to a rabbi. James Mackler is breaking the Jewish political mold.
James Mackler has been thinking a lot about certain words from the Talmud during his long-shot run for U.S. Senate in Tennessee: “In a place where there are no worthy people, strive to be a worthy person.” They were especially prescient on Monday, after a weekend of nationwide protests against racism and police misconduct sparked…
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Books Is there any good time to publish a book during a pandemic?
“Timing is everything.” Larry Cohler-Esses wrote that line in 1995 in a Forward news story about my book contract with Simon and Schuster. I was the American Jewish Committee’s expert on antisemitism at the time. I had written a report on the militia movement ten days before the Oklahoma City bombing predicting attacks on government…
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Community This isn’t about the bagel, nor the seltzer man
For me, it was a bagel – my last taste of normalcy before the “new normal” arrived, eaten mere hours before NYC effectively cancelled the school year for my children. The inevitable was fast approaching — had arrived in fact — and I was just slow to accept it. (Weeks later, my dad would die….
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Culture Why Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’ is the perfect poem for these times
In this spring of fear and torment, COVID Spring, a spring when we mourn our dead, Jews are saying Kaddish too many times. When I grew up in a casually Jewish household we lit yahrzeit candles, and nothing focused my thoughts on the passing of all things like the familiar melody of Kaddish, As I…
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Opinion I spoke out against Mamdani. Then he won. Here’s how we walk forward together.
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News Indiana University removed its Jewish studies director. His replacement has ignited a firestorm over Israel.
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Fast Forward Groundbreaking analysis of Hitler’s DNA shows no Jewish ancestry — but finds a genetic disorder
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Culture Is the movie ‘Nuremberg’ about the wrong psychiatrist?
In Case You Missed It
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Fast Forward German auction house calls off ‘shameless’ sale of concentration camp artifacts
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Opinion A new scheme dishonoring victims of Oct. 7 — hatched by Israel’s own government
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Culture Hey, Irving — why are there so many Jews named Irving?
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Fast Forward Trump defends Tucker Carlson, whose interview with antisemite Nick Fuentes split Republicans
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