Talya Zax here, filling in for Benyamin on the Forwarding desk this week. I'm the Forward’s innovation editor and aspiring amateur clown.

Today: Why this year’s Seders are so expensive, Hebrew Union College closes a historic campus and a farewell to comedian Gilbert Gottfried.

OUR LEAD STORY

What if I hadn’t slept in? A gunman shot up my train this morning.

“It could have been me”: Jacob Kornbluh, our senior political reporter, changes trains at Brooklyn’s 36th Street subway station most mornings at around 8:30. Yesterday, he slept in a bit — only to learn that a gunman set off a canister of smoke and opened fire on an N train at that very station at 8:24 a.m., just when he might have been there himself. With 10 people suffering gunshot wounds, and 13 others injured in the rush to escape, the morning commute had turned into a scene of terror and chaos. “Yes, of course, I immediately thanked God I wasn’t on that train,” he wrote in a personal essay reflecting on the attack. “But what if?”

A morning like any other: Part of what the incident highlighted is the uncertainty that comes from living in a city where various forms of violence, including antisemitic hate crimes, are on the rise. Violent attacks on the subway in particular have escalated in frequency. “The victims of this shooting, five of whom are in critical condition, literally could have been any of us who walk onto the subway each day assuming we will get to our destination,” he wrote.

The city demands answers: Kornbluh walked to the crime scene, which was swarmed by law enforcement. At a news conference shortly after noon, he writes, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Police Commissioner Keechant L. Sewell proved frustratingly short on answers. “What, I, and presumably other reporters, demanded to know: what were the authorities doing to keep New Yorkers safe?” Kornbluh wrote. “With no other way to get to work, with no way of identifying the next offender equipped with a knife or a gun, with no visible police presence in the subway stops I traverse daily, what are we supposed to do?”

Read the essay ➤

Plus: There were no functioning cameras in the station at the time of the shooting, an issue we covered in an examination of reports of antisemitic hate crimes filed in New York in 2019. “Surveillance cameras, even those in the subway, cannot always be relied upon to capture vandals who paint or carve hateful messages,” Molly Boigon wrote then.

And: Frank R. James, the man the police announced on Tuesday evening they were seeking in connection to the shooting, posted lengthy videos on YouTube comparing Black Americans to Jews during the Holocaust, The Times of Israel reported.

ALSO FROM THE FORWARD

Gilbert Gottfried in February 2020. (Slaven Vlasic/Getty)

Gilbert Gottfried, an iconic and inimitable comedic voice, died at 67. Gottfried, a comedian known for his trademark adenoidal shrill, died following a long illness. Known to many as the voice of both Iago in “Aladdin” and the Aflac duck, Gottfried also made a reliably filthy addition to celebrity roasts and was unafraid to challenge taboos, including the Holocaust. As PJ Grisar writes, Gottfried was domesticated in later years, showing an unexpected tender side. “Always a subversive act, Gottfried's voice will echo in the annals of Jewish comedy,” Grisar writes, “having given us all tinnitus.” Read his remembrance ➤

Plus: Watch a 2012 interview with Gottfried in which he talks with Rabbi Dan Ain about being a non-observant Jew.

The fifth question: Why is this year’s Seder so much more expensive?With inflation causing a nearly 7% hike in grocery prices, our Louis Keene headed to a Los Angeles kosher market to talk to shoppers. One couple said they expected to shell out a startling $2,000 — significantly more than they had spent in past years. Meanwhile, the Met Council, the country’s biggest kosher food pantry, expects to feed about 10% more people this year than last and has put out calls for emergency funding. Yes, the holiday is always expensive, explained the council’s executive director, but “this year it’s a killer.” Read the story ➤

Hebrew Union College to end Cincinnati rabbinical program.In a controversial move, the board voted to sunset its ordination program there in 2026, after those currently enrolled have completed it. HUC, which also has campuses in New York, Los Angeles and Jerusalem, had long reported declining enrollment and revenue from its Cincinnati outpost, where the Reform seminary was founded in 1875. “We recognize the pain that this decision causes,” the president of the seminary said in a statement, “and expect to take the appropriate time and care to implement this decision in a sensitive and constructive manner.” Read the story ➤

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Juan Soto of the Washington Nationals. (Todd Kirkland/Getty)

⚾ The family of Jewish real estate developer Ted Lerner is looking to sell the Washington Nationals, the baseball team it has owned since 2004. Lerner, 96, built a real estate empire off $250 he borrowed from his wife in 1952. He transferred control of the team to his son Mark in 2018. (Washington Post)

✡️ For Ukrainian Jews, Passover is newly personal. The international Jewish community has mobilized to get Passover supplies to the war zone, and organizations like Chabad and the Joint Distribution Committee are hosting Seders for refugees across Europe. Those who left Ukraine long ago are struck by the holiday’s particular relevance this year. “We’re in the middle of a modern-day exodus,” said Alina Spaulding, whose parents fled the country with her in the 1970s. “I can’t even imagine the stories I will hear.” (Associated Press)

🏃 Israeli-born endurance athlete and mind reader Oz Pearlman embarked on a mammoth 19-hour run last week, raising almost $115,000 for Ukrainian children by doing 19 loops around Central Park. “I had a spectacular day,” he said of his 116-mile jaunt. “There’s just no other way to describe it.” (New York Times)

🎥 After making recent films on Benjamin Franklin, Muhammad Ali and Ernest Hemingway, documentarian Ken Burns’ next project focuses on the U.S. response to the Holocaust. The miniseries, which has been years in the making and is scheduled to air in September, will be “all about immigration and who’s an American and who’s not an American,” Burns said in 2019. (JTA)

💎 Israeli diamond dealers may be exploiting a legal loophole to get around Russian sanctions. Russia produces some 28% of the global diamond market, and about 10% of those stones pass through Israeli distributors. The U.S. and U.K. have banned imports of Russian diamonds since the war in Ukraine began, but the European Union has not. Haaretz reports that a number of Israeli dealers continued to handle diamonds from Alrosa, a mining company owned by the Russian government, at least until mid-March. (Haaretz)

🎉 “Curb Your Enthusiasm” will return for a 12th season, Larry David confirmed Tuesday. David had previously been cagey about the show’s future, telling journalist Rich Eisen in October: “I need to see how I feel, you know.” (Rolling Stone)

What else we’re reading ➤ Her mother died in a terrible fire — and 35 years later, a stranger helped her find peace … The quest for the best bagel in Washington, D.C. … The Iranian revolution came, and her Jewish grandfather refused to leave.

ON THE CALENDAR

On this day in history: Pope John Paul II visited the Great Synagogue in Rome on April 13, 1986, the first time any head of the Catholic Church entered a synagogue since Saint Peter in the first century A.C.E. During his visit, John Paul condemned antisemitism “at anytime” and “by anyone” and repudiated the church’s history of antisemitism. Born in Krakow, Poland, at a time when a quarter of the city’s population was Jewish, John Paul was also the first pontiff to officially recognize the state of Israel. But as Jerome Chanes wrote in the Forward in 2013, his overall record with regard to Judaism was ambiguous, and even the Great Synagogue visit had some uncomfortable elements. Read the story >

Also on this day, in 1954, J. Robert Oppenheimer, considered the father of the atomic bomb, was accused of being a Communist.

Last year on this day, we reported that Fox News told the ADL it would not fire Tucker Carlson for endorsing a theory that Jews are orchestrating a “great replacement” of white westerners.

VIDEO OF THE DAY

When we asked our Yiddish editor, Rukhl Schaechter, and her new deputy, Rabbi Zach Golden, to do a Zoominar for our 125th birthday about the past, present and future of the Forverts, we expected an insightful and lively conversation. But like our dynamic Yiddish report, which includes music videos, cooking shows, and interactive puzzles, the hourlong conversation was dotted with unexpected delights. Check out the video above to see Rukhl playing Yiddish patty cake, and watch all the way to the end for Zach’s stirring rendition of a Yiddish folk song that he once performed in front of his entire public high school in Long Beach, California.

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Play today’s Vertl puzzle (aka the Yiddish Wordle)

Thanks to Jacob Kornbluh and Jodi Rudoren for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at [email protected].

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