This story was originally published in the Forward on April 7, 1936 Once upon a long time ago, 53 years ago in late April 1883, I found myself in my new hometown of New York City, about to spend my first Pesach in America. I’d disembarked from my ship ten months prior in June of…
Two summers ago, a female Purdue University sophomore stopped in at her campus Hillel house for a meeting. The building was empty, save for the student, a friend, and the man they had come to see, 53-year-old Hillel director Phillip Schlossberg. When she started at Purdue the year before, the student had been eager to…
Like a New Year celebration, Major League Baseball’s annual opening day brings with it an opportunity to start afresh: to leave the past behind and to begin anew with a clean slate. Every team begins the new season as a reborn entity: The reigning World Champions and last year’s losers are equal going into the…
Some Seders focus on the plot of the Haggadah — the hunger-fueled journey to Egypt, the 400 years of ensuing enslavement, the long and brutal struggle against Pharaoh’s cruelty and, at last, the triumphant Exodus. But in families like mine, the main event is not plot, it’s the vowels. Dinner is postponed indefinitely as relatives…
A group of rabbis who support the Conservative movement’s ban on intermarriage are mounting a highly unusual challenge to colleagues who have been hand-picked to assume the leadership of their professional body, the Rabbinical Assembly. The movement, a liberal denomination that adheres to Jewish law, bans intermarriage, but some of its rabbis bitterly oppose the…
Single until the age of 38, I’d had no shortage of getting together with women, but I was excited when I was invited to the New York Feminist Seder. This was the real deal, the one launched in the 70’s by Esther Broner, who with Naomi Nimrod had written “The Women’s Haggadah.” I was aware…
Steven Spielberg has said that he got into filmmaking mainly to defuse anti-semitism; to earn the respect and admiration that he couldn’t get as an isolated child. His quintessential success, “E.T.” (1982), is the story of his own childhood reconstructed, where the sensitive and cerebral daydreamer is vindicated by an otherworldly power. Anyone who says…
Amanda Morales hasn’t gone outside today. She didn’t go out yesterday or the day before, either. She is standing inside the Holyrood Episcopal Church in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, gazing out a window and waiting for her two eldest children to come home from school. Outside it’s cold and overcast, and the view isn’t much for…
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