Saturday mornings are busy in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay neighborhood, as residents run errands and grab meals. The Underground Boxing Gym on Avenue X is strangely quiet, though. No one is sparring in the ring, or punching the heavy bags that hang from the ceiling, as they are Sunday through Friday. “We’re not open on Saturday,”…
Forget Chinese food. While American Jews nosh on sinful servings of moo shu, their Russian-speaking neighbors indulge in a syncretic Christmas ritual of their own, preparing for New Year’s celebrations. Over 1.7 million Jews left the Soviet Union since the 1970s, with some 500,000 settling in the United States. My own family arrived in 1989,…
A group of Russian immigrant families who all lost a loved one on 9/11 have become a tightly-knit support network since the attacks
Alexander Kalantirksy speaks halting Hebrew with a heavy Russian accent. He was seated in a straight-backed chair in his small, dark apartment in Bat Yam, a suburb of Tel Aviv. “Nu, I am not a hero,” he said matter-of-factly, and a bit impatiently. “I am an engineer. I knew what it meant. It had to…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. When Meribel Goldwin arrived from Belarus in 1994, she was ten years old and skinny. A couple years of eating hot dogs and sliced white bread on a food stamp budget, as well as traditional Russian foods prepared with sugar, salt and hydrogenated fats, turned her into…
Despite its origins in the work of the Jewish Karl Marx, and its early Soviet Jewish advocates, communism never served the Jewish people particularly well. Less than two decades after the Russian Revolution, Josef Stalin’s Great Purge made a particular — if unofficial — target of Jews. One decade after the 1938 end of the…
In conversations with other parents, we often discuss what we would say if our children told us they were gay or transgender. It’s possible that I get this question more often than other people because I am an out-and-proud conservative living in the liberal enclave of Park Slope, Brooklyn. Having rarely come across a conservative,…
(JTA) — Bucking a slump in Western immigration to Israel under its law of return for Jews, movement from Russia has increased in 2017 and more than doubled from Turkey. In total, the 23,415 immigrants who have come to Israel from Jan. 1 to Sept. 30 constituted a 2 percent increase over the corresponding period…
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