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In today's edition: Roe v. Wade, Yom Hazikaron, Jennifer Grey, the Beastie Boys, Doug Emhoff, Hulu, Star Wars, Pope Francis, Audrey Hepburn and Anne Frank.
OUR LEAD STORY
Today is Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day. For decades, it honored fallen soldiers. Thanks in part to Smadar Haran-Kaiser, since 1997 it has also been dedicated to those killed in terrorists attacks – like her husband and children.
Hillel Kutler, a freelance journalist, spent Monday with Haran-Kaiser in northern Israel, near the site of her family’s murder. A memorial – part shelter, part sculpture garden – marks the spot of the tragedy.
Living in a war zone: Haran-Kaiser, a child psychologist, said she pressed for the twinning because Israeli soldiers and civilians are part of the same struggle. “If you want to raise your kids close to the border, you know what it means,” she explained. “What maintains a border? People. I call it ‘soldiers without uniforms.’”
The attack: On the night of April 22, 1979, four men sailed in a small boat from Lebanon to Israel. They broke into an apartment building, captured Dani Haran, 31, and his 4-year-old daughter, Einat, brought them back to the shore and killed them. Haran-Kaiser, meanwhile, accidentally suffocated the couple’s 2-year-old daughter, Yael, as they hid from the attackers.
By the numbers: Israel counts 4,217 civilians killed in terrorist acts going back to 1881; there were 34 lost in the last year. The Defense Ministry puts the total of fallen soldiers at 24,068.
ROE V. WADE Opinion | Striking down Roe v. Wade will violate Jewish religious liberty: Jewish law allows for abortion in many cases, and requires it if the mother’s life is in danger. The overturning of the law would be “the culmination of a decades-long political organizing campaign by Christian conservatives,” writes Ephraim Sherman, a nurse practitioner and Hasidic Jew. “The fundamentalist Christian position is the exact opposite of the halachic approach to abortions.” Read his column ➤
Plus:
ALSO IN THE FORWARD Jennifer Grey at the 1988 Academy Awards. (Getty) Jennifer Grey knows you care about her nose: In her new memoir, the star of “Dirty Dancing” gives a candid account of her life and career, beginning with a moment that threw her rise off course: her nose job. Specifically, the second one. While Grey, who is third-generation Jewish entertainment royalty, writes with pride about her heritage throughout, our PJ Grisar says she at times seems to have internalized a negative view of stereotypically Jewish features. “Upset that her nose was a ‘problem’ for casting directors, if not herself,” he observes, “she nonetheless is guilty of sorting attractiveness and Jewishness into discrete boxes.” Read the review ➤
How Adam Yauch graduated from bratty Beastie Boy to a man of wisdom and peace: Today marks the 10-year anniversary of the death at 47 of Yauch, a seminal figure in modern music. The band was initially mocked; after all it consisted of three Jewish teenagers from New York playing fast and nasty punk rock. But their style matured, and accolades followed. Jim Sullivan, who spent a couple days with the band during its rise, looks back at Yauch’s complicated legacy. Read the story ➤
WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY ![]() David Birney and Meredith Baxter in an episode of 'Bridget Loves Bernie,' about an interfaith couple. (CBS via Getty) 😮 This may be the most bizarre story you read today: A writer for “Grey’s Anatomy” falsely claimed to have lost a friend in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. And that was just the first of her many lies that came to light this week. (JTA)
👏 New York Gov. Kathy Hochul chose U. S. Rep. Antonio Delgado as her new lieutenant governor. Delgado’s wife is Lacey Schwartz Delgado, a filmmaker who explored her Black and Jewish identity in an award-winning 2015 documentary. (NY Jewish Week, Forward)
✝️ Pope Francis has offered to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin to help facilitate an end to the war in Ukraine. “Such brutality, how can you not try to to stop it?” the pope was quoted as saying. “Twenty-five years ago in Rwanda we saw the same thing.” (AP)
📈 The ultra-Orthodox will comprise nearly a quarter of the world’s Jewish population by 2040, according to a new study. Haredi Jews not only tend to have more children than others, researchers found, but also live longer. (Haaretz)
🕍 Portland’s oldest synagogue was vandalized with a death threat and antisemitic hate speech. “I’m telling my members not to be afraid,” said Rabbi Michael Cahana. “This is a safe space, it is a sanctuary, and it remains a sanctuary.” The synagogue, Beth Israel, was founded in 1858 and burned down 100 years ago in what was believed to be an antisemitic attack. (KOIN)
🎬 Hulu is turning the Holocaust novel “We Were the Lucky Ones” into an eight-episode limited series. Joey King will star in the show, which tells the story of a Jewish family separated at the start of World War II and determined to reunite. (Hollywood Reporter)
Mazel tov ➤ To Cole Emhoff, son of Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, on his engagement.
Shiva call ➤ David Birney, a television actor whose 1970s sitcom about interfaith marriage irked Jewish groups, died at 83. The show, “Bridget Loves Bernie,” starred Birney as a Jewish taxicab driver opposite his future wife, Meredith Baxter, who portrayed a Catholic school teacher. It was canceled after one season. “One segment of the protesters is truly concerned about the dilution of their faith,” said Mr. Birney, who was Irish American. “The threat doesn’t come from a harmless show such as ours, but from within.” Read his obituary ➤
ON THE CALENDAR Audrey Hepburn with Otto Frank and Elfriede Geiringer, his second wife. (Photo by Luca Dotti) On this day in history: Audrey Hepburn was born on May 4, 1929, in Holland, weeks before and a few miles away from an icon of a different sort Anne Frank. Hepburn, of course, survived the country’s Nazi occupation, witnessing the transportation of Dutch Jews to concentration camps, while Frank died in Bergen-Belsen. Years later, Otto Frank reportedly requested that Hepburn play his daughter in the movie about her life, but she refused. “I was so destroyed by it again, that I said I couldn’t deal with it,” she said after reading the diary. “It’s a little bit as if this had happened to my sister… in a way she was my soul sister.”
Last year on this day, we reported on a lawsuit in which LGBTQ students at Yeshiva University say they were treated as “second class citizens.”
VIDEO OF THE DAY Can you solve the riddles that stumped King Solomon? Do you know how Stephen Sondheim changed the world of crosswords? Do you want to see a really cool puzzle that would take until the end of the known universe to solve? PJ Grisar talked about all this and more with A.J. Jacobs, author of a new book about puzzles. Watch the video ➤
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Thanks to Nora Berman, PJ Grisar, Jacob Kornbluh, Rudy Malcom and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at [email protected].
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