In 2009, JCC Rockland named its community service award after Rubin Josephs, who had recently died at age 82. Ruby, was noted in his obituary as being a “champion of charity.” More than this, he defined what it meant to be a community leader. He led the way on so many causes, founding both the […]
When I was working my first post-college job in the library of the Dallas Morning News, I had more papers at my disposal than anyone in the pre-internet era would have known what to do with. As I did my work, filing and cross-filing clips and attending to back-end content of one of the first […]
I had already had enough of Thanksgivukkah and its menurkeys (that’s a menorah shaped like a turkey for you blissfully uninitiated) when I saw the bourbon pecan pie adorned with Chanukah gelt. This was supposed to be yet another recipe merging the Chanukah and Thanksgiving traditions, but really it was just a pecan pie with […]
This Friday we remember the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I am not old enough to remember the how Nov. 22, 1963 unfolded, but I was there. It was one of those events, that although I was too little to comprehend it, shaped the place I was from and my […]
Oh no! The sky is falling! The Jewish people are doomed! No, wait, that’s just the sound that the latest American Jewish population survey makes when it slams into the Jewish communal world. I wrote this column in the week following the publication of “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” the Pew Research Center’s survey […]
In early September, I stood outside JCC Rockland and with a group of about 50 people spanning generations, remembered the 11 Israeli athletes who were murdered in the 1972 Munich Olympics. You could say it was an off year memorial, the 41st since Palestinian terrorists took the athletes hostage. It was small and simple, and […]
Corey Gradin has new lungs — and with them, a chance for a future. She received her lungs in late May in an operation that took place at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. Who they belonged to, and how the family members decided to donate his or her organs to a dying 16-and-a-half year old, […]
Early in the summer, Rev. Weldon McWilliams IV along with 25 others, walked into Rockland Kosher Supermarket, tucked behind the intersection of Routes 59 and 306, and bought groceries. Not very remarkable. It is a grocery store, after all. But it’s a niche grocery store, a very large one that contains only kosher certified products. […]
The world is a really queer place. How else can you explain the idea that is gaining traction that Israel is using its favorable record on gay rights to mask abuses of occupation? But that is the argument of those who are touting pinkwashing. Promoted primarily by Sarah Schulman, a professor at the College of Staten […]
So much fuss over a matzah ball, nu? Well, not a matzah ball, but a knaidel. Or is it kneydl? Or knaydl? Or kneidel? Because when Arvind Mahankali, a 13-year-old from Queens, correctly spelled the word for a doughy dumpling that even the most unengaged of Jews have consumed, he unleashed an unabahsed frenzy of […]
