The El Al security officer’s dark gaze bored into mine, then flicked over the middle name on my passport. “Shay. That’s Arabic, isn’t it?” “No, it’s Irish.” I was being questioned for my Birthright boarding pass for my first trip to Israel and it wasn’t going well. The rapid-fire inquiries left me reeling: Was I…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. As editor of the Forverts, most of the questions I get from readers involve either the price of an obituary or a request to decipher a handwritten postcard written by a deceased relative. Recently, though, I got an email with a very different sort of question: “I’d…
Jewish AND Latina? When I was in junior high school in Newton, Massachusetts, a middle class suburb of Boston with a large Jewish population, my friends could not believe that I, a blonde blue-eyed Jewish girl, had a brother named Fernando. “Is he adopted? “ they would ask. This was the 80’s, and Jewish kids…
It was a Friday night in mid-August, and about a dozen Jews, most under 30, congregated around a coffee table in Nashville. Almost all had moved to the city in the past three years. We opened up instrument cases and passed around egg shakers. Someone started strumming guitar. “Lecha dodi, lekrat kala…” When I was…
Back when I was serving as editor of my college Jewish newspaper, one of our staff members wrote an article about making the Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPI) Jewish fraternity more Jewish – namely through increased religious observance. Frat brothers celebrating Jewish holidays, attending Shabbat services, and wrapping tefillin were the obvious ways by which to…
By most accounts, I am not a self-hating Jew. I wrote a doctoral dissertation on a Jewish-studies topic, have a blog with the word “Zionism” in the subtitle, and have published enough articles on Jewish-related topics that there’s a (charming) post dedicated to me on one of those big white-supremacist websites. There’s a poster of…
My 8-year-old son Cai didn’t like the tension around the Brexit talk. He knew an “out” vote meant we’ll probably move from our new home in Luxembourg since my Welsh husband would become ineligible to work in his current job for the EU. As the only British people he knows voted to stay, he can’t…
After Gal Beckerman diagnosed in his final column as opinion editor, we invited Forward readers to prescribe solutions. Here are seven of your responses, edited for style and length. 1) Kill the Idea of “Authenticity” On Beckerman’s reading, we have [American Jewish] humiliation on the one hand and [Israeli] narcissism on the other. Is it…
איידל מלובֿיצקי איז געבוירן און דערצויגן געוואָרן בײַ אַ חסידישער סלאָנימער משפּחה אין ווין, עסטרײַך.
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