‘Things have souls’: How a handwritten letter from 1879 became a very special bar mitzvah tallit
This tallit weaves multiple generations and cherished family artifacts into its fabric
family history
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Forverts in English Favorite Heirlooms: Bubbie’s challah cover with an upside down letter
My great-grandmother Chana Klein, whom we all called Bubbie, was a powerhouse at 4’10” and an accomplished Jewish cook who didn’t share recipes. When she was a widow, all the men in the morning minyan at my shul chased her, but she was faithful to her beloved husband who she met only once before her…
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Culture ‘Once We Were Slaves’ examines fluidity of race through a Jewish lens
Have you heard the story of the Jewish mother and children who were born enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York? Professor Laura Arnold Leibman was researching Jewish communities in Barbados when she discovered two small ivory portraits belonging to a Jewish heiress from New York. She traced…
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Forverts in English Reclaiming my great-great-grandfather’s prayer book and the Yiddish world he lived in
Read this article in Yiddish June 2020 through August 2021 was supposed to be a gap year for me as I moved from my undergraduate to graduate studies. I didn’t plan for the pandemic, let alone its impact on my Jewish, scholarly and music communities. We were all forced to adapt to online formats, reshaping…
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Opinion Isolating our grandparents – medically necessary, but devastating for Jewish continuity
Read this article in Yiddish It’s been more than a year since the COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed us all. During this time, more than half a million people in the United States have died of the virus. You’d think that a devastation of this kind would have thrown our society into shock. Last spring and summer,…
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Community Inside a forgotten camera, a time capsule
After my father – a Holocaust survivor — passed away in 1991 I found an old leather valise he had brought with him from Germany. Inside were hundreds of still photographs he had taken right after liberation with a Leica IIIc. They included scenes around Germany; in particular, Lubeck, where I was born in 1949….
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Culture Forverts Seeks More Stories About Your Favorite Heirlooms
Earlier this year, the Forverts asked readers to submit anecdotes and photos of their favorite heirlooms. Heirlooms are not only a way of keeping us connected to our past; they are also a wonderful way to transmit family history to our children and grandchildren The response to our search was an enthusiastic one and 22…
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Food Chocolate-Covered Jalapeños? It’s Not Bubbe’s Chocolate Anymore
When her new chocolate company needed a name, Sara Meyer and her husband, Corey, decided to connect it to his maternal grandmother — Faigele/Faigy/Fay, meaning little bird in Yiddish — and her love of chocolate. Both are memorialized in the name they came up with: Little Bird. While Fay usually kept several boxes of random…
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Culture The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets.
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First Person I’m a convert who used to love Hanukkah
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Bintel Brief Dear Bintel: I’m a Jewish anarchist, and increasingly uncomfortable in both communities
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Culture How Marty Feldman became the great forgotten Jewish comic