Hebrew bible discussed at Jan. 6 hearings, rabbi says Shabbat services should not last three hours, NBA player teaches Holocaust to Muslim children, and Billy Crystal's next gig. Plus: Play today's Vertl puzzle, the Yiddish Wordle |
Ahead of Father’s Day on Sunday, our contributor Hillel Kutler asked three professional athletes and their dads to talk about how sports and Jewishness play into their relationships. Baseball and basketball: Elliot Steinmetz, 41, is head coach of the Yeshiva University men’s basketball team and his 18-year-old son, Jacob, is a rookie pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Shabbat-observant duo enjoy long walks to whatever field Jacob is playing on that day. “It’s amazing to watch your kid chase what he loves and succeed at it,” Elliot said. “I’ve probably learned as much throughout this process as he has.” Faith and football: Alexander Marpet, 29, retired this year after seven seasons with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, including a Super Bowl win. His dad, Bill, traveled to almost every game. One memory that sticks out was a Hanukkah they spent together: Bill, now 71, made both men chuckle when he recalled that he didn’t bring presents. “Yeah, no Hanukkah gelt,” Ali said. From Odessa, with love: Dmitriy Salita, a retired boxer, remembers how his father managed to keep Judaism alive when they were growing up in post-Soviet Ukraine. “Somehow, my father found a way to buy matzos” for Passover, recalled Dmitriy, who is 40.“We didn’t know most other things, but to his best ability he’d tell me the story of the exodus from Egypt and what matzo meant.” Now living in Detroit, Dmitriy sends his two daughters to a Jewish school. Read the story ➤ Plus, a trio of Father’s Day essays : Finding out I wasn’t genetically related to my father brought me closer to him.
Dying of brain cancer, this father read Dr. Seuss to grandchildren he’d never meet.
My father spoke like Tevye the Dairyman and may have coined hundreds of Yiddish expressions. |
U.K.'s top rabbi says the pandemic made people think 'you can have a Saturday morning without going to shul.' (Getty) |
U.K. chief rabbi says services don’t need to last for three hours: In a new survey, Britain’s Orthodox Jews complained about the length of Shabbat morning prayers. Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis is embracing it as he thinks about how to get Jews back in the pews after the coronavirus pandemic. “I’ve never heard anyone complain about a short sermon,” he noted. Read the story ➤ No, Ben & Jerry’s does not make new employees watch videos on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:The Jewish internet was aflutter this week about a news report that the ice-cream company, which last year announced it would stop selling in the occupied West Bank, included in its onboarding a video featuring Human Rights Watch, which has accused Israel of practicing apartheid. But it turns out the video in question was of an optional, one-off “lunch and learn” session last summer. Read the story ➤ When the Hebrew Bible came up in the Jan. 6 hearings, it wasn’t by accident: Thursday’s hearings led to plenty of revelations, and one from former Vice President Mike Pence’s lawyer, in particular, caught our attention. While he and Pence were in the bunker hiding from the mob storming the Capitol, he pulled out his Bible and turned to the story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den. Daniel “refuses an order from the king that he cannot follow,” the lawyer told the committee. “And he does his duty — consistent with his oath to God. And I felt that that’s what had played out that day.” Read the story ➤
And one more: A new movie starring Dakota Johnson tells the story of a “motivational dancer” for bar and bat mitzvah parties. It debuts today in theaters and on Apple TV+.
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WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY |
Left to right: Jerry Seinfeld, Amy Schumer, Hugh Grant and Melissa McCarthy. (Getty) |
🤣 Jerry Seinfeld has a famous joke about the invention of the Pop-Tart. It’s now being turned into a Netflix movie starring Melissa McCarthy, Amy Schumer and Hugh Grant. The story unfolds as sworn cereal rivals Kellogg’s and Post race to create a pastry that will change the face of breakfast forever and the movie is described as “a tale of ambition, betrayal, sugar, and menacing milkmen.” (Variety) 🏀 Enes Kanter Freedom, an NBA player who was raised in Turkey, visited a Muslim school in Brooklyn to teach the students about the Holocaust. “I’m going to educate our kids so they can have some empathy, they can have some sympathy, so they can put themselves in other people’s shoes,” he said. “If you understand other religions or cultures, if you get to know them better, the better you’re going to respect them and love them.” (NY Jewish Week) ✌️ The Jan. 6 hearings shined a light on the complicity of two Republicans endorsed by AIPAC. Newly released video footage shows Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia giving a tour of the Capitol in which a dozen participants were allowed to snap photos of tunnels, entry points and security positions. And Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania reportedly asked for a presidential pardon for his involvement in the insurrection. (Haaretz) ⛪ A lone gunman killed two people and injured another on Thursday evening inside an Alabama church. The incident came one day shy of the seven-year anniversary of a mass shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine people were killed in 2015. (CNN, AP)
📕 A publisher produced an annotated and accessible version of the Mishnah. The price tag? $645. The cost has turned off some customers, but the publisher defended it, explaining that work on the project took a decade and is “intended as the definitive edition of the founding text of rabbinic Judaism.” (JTA)
🎭 “The Garden of Alla,” a one-woman play that opens today, tells the nearly forgotten story of a 1920s Yiddish actor, director, writer and queer icon. “ I started doing a little research,” said the show’s creator, “and I was intoxicated by her story.” (NY Jewish Week) 🎬 Fresh off his Yiddish singalong at the Tony Awards, Billy Crystal has been cast in a TV series directed by Barry Levinson, about a recently widowed child psychiatrist who encounters a troubled young boy. (Deadline) Mazel tov ➤ To Joy Sisisky, the new CEO of the Jewish Community Federation in San Francisco. Long weekend reads ➤ How an obscure religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit … Denver’s mushroom rabbi arrest could change precedents for religious practice … How a Jewish saxophonist tricked the KGB by encrypting secrets in music. |
In this week’s edition of our printable magazine: An interview with a Jewish comedian who’s become a viral TikTok sensation; a drag queen explains why Israeli boycotts don’t work; an Orthodox rabbi implores his colleagues to take a stronger stance on gun control; the Jewish Agency may have found its next leader; and the Dodgers honor Sandy Koufax by unveiling his statue on Shabbat. Get your copy now ➤ |
M.B. Curtis, a Jewish actor, is known as the man who lit Lady Liberty. (Richard Schwartz/Getty) |
On this day in history: The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York on June 17, 1885. Shipped from France in pieces, the statue was reassembled and dedicated on Oct. 28 of the following year. Ten days later, the statue’s famous torch was snuffed, because Congress refused to allocate funds to keep it lit. What got the torch burning again, the Forward’s PJ Grisar reported in 2018, was the intervention of M.B. Curtis, a Hungarian Jewish actor who declared he would pay for the torch to stay lit through the run of the play he was in. Eleven days after Curtis had the torch relit, Congress agreed to fund the torch in perpetuity, “ensuring,” as Grisar wrote, “Curtis’s distinction as the only individual American citizen to keep Lady Liberty lit.” Last year on this day, we delved into the most confounding issue of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s leadership: how he kept his kippah on his bald head.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, we recall the work of Harry Rosenfeld, a newspaperman who survived Kristallnacht and covered the Nixon scandal.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met on Thursday in Kyiv with (left to right) Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi and Romania’s President Klaus Werner. “We want the atrocities to stop and we want peace,” Draghi said. The European Commission recommended on Friday that Ukraine be granted “candidate status” for the European Union, the first formal step in a process that normally takes more than a decade. ––– Thanks to Samuel Breslow, Eliya Smith, Jake Wasserman and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at [email protected]. |
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