GOP nominee compares gun control to Nazi policies, girl sues Jewish basketball league, interfaith group erases $6 billion in medical debt – and the best blintz recipe, in Yiddish. Plus: Play today's Vertl puzzle, the Yiddish Wordle |
Rabbi David Okunov, whose father is Ukrainian, reads the Torah in his Brooklyn synagogue. (Getty) |
Soviet? Ukrainian? Russian? The war has some young Jews asking: ‘Who am I?’ For Michelle Barsukov, who just graduated from Yale University, the war in Ukraine feels personal. As Russian soldiers poured over the border, her grandfather canceled a surgery for prostate cancer and enlisted in Ukraine’s civilian corps. She felt powerless, as her Yale classmate Gabriel Klapholz reports, “as though she were a grain of sand being churned in a tidal wave.” Barsukov, 22, a child of immigrants from Kyiv and Dnipro, was born and raised in the Chicago area. And like many of the more than 500,000 post-Soviet Jews who now call the U.S. home, the war has made her reflect anew on her heritage. While Barsukov and other young people are inspired by Ukrainian nationalism, some older folks view their homeland, as one sociologist put it, as a “land of pogroms.” And though there are fresh divides between those from Ukraine and those from Russia, many still see their prime identity as Jewish. “At the end of the day,” said Ilya Bratman, who immigrated to the U.S. from Moscow in 1992, “the Ukrainian Jews, the Russian Jews, the Moldovan Jews, the Latvian Jews — I don’t even know where people are from, and I don’t care. It’s just like you don’t care if somebody is from Boston or Dallas. The only difference is do you like the Cowboys or New England Patriots.” “Between these poles,” writes Klapholz, “lies a web of hyphens, interwoven genealogies, and untold family histories that traverse borders, empires, revolutions, and dynasties.” The war, now its fourth month, will inevitably continue to change the places Jews once called home. Read the story ➤ |
Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano at his primary night victory party last month. (Getty) |
GOP nominee for PA governor likened gun-control to Nazi policies: Douglas Mastriano, a Trump-endorsed Christian nationalist, in a 2018 debate likened gun restrictions proposed by Democrats to the Nazis’ confiscation of weapons from political opponents and Jews. “We saw Lenin do the same thing in Russia. We saw Hitler do the same thing in Germany in the 30s,” Mastriano said, according to an archived video of the debate reviewed by our political correspondent, Jacob Kornbluh. Mastriano, a retired Army colonel who attended the Jan. 6 “stop the steal” rally at the U.S. Capitol, was running for Congress at the time of the debate. He lost. Read the story and watch the video ➤ Couple trying to retrieve their son’s remains from Gaza say they have new reasons to hope: Hadar Goldin, a lieutenant in the IDF, was killed in the Gaza Strip hours before the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas was quelled by a ceasefire. His parents have been trying to retrieve his body ever since. Now, after meeting with officials from the Biden administration and the United Nations, they finally see potential closure. Read the story ➤ Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff didn’t expect his Judaism ‘to be such a big deal’: Representing the Biden administration as a Jewish person has been extremely “meaningful” to him and other Jewish Americans, Emhoff, who is married to Vice President Kamala Harris, said at a Zoom event on Tuesday. “You really realize how much this representation matters to people,” he explained. Read the story ➤
And one more: A kindergarten teacher who sought to save lives during the Holocaust had death-defying near misses, in which luck, heart, cleverness and personality all seem to have played a role. A new book tells her story.
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WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY |
'I am so thankful for all of the great work that J Street has done,' said Nancy Pelosi. (Getty) |
🇺🇸 J Street, the left-leaning pro-Israel, pro-peace group, endorsed Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday for the first time, joining the more conservative AIPAC, which Pelosi has had a close relationship with for decades. (Haaretz) 🏫 Rabbi Shlomo Noginsky, the Boston rabbi stabbed last summer in front of a Jewish day school, has raised $1 million to launch a rabbinical school. Noginsky plans to train eight rabbis a year – “one for each stab,” he said. (Jewish Journal) 🏀 A boys’ basketball team from an Orthodox settlement in the occupied West Bank refused to play against a kibbutz team that included a girl, 11-year-old Ayala Yamin. Now she’s taking the Israeli youth league to court. (Haaretz) 🚑 And in a grownup version of gender discrimination claims: Many Jewish emergency-medical services use the word “Hatzalah,” Hebrew for “rescue,” in their names. A New York-based group is suing a Florida one for trademark infringement. Representatives of the Florida group say the suit is retaliation for their inclusion of female EMTs, which the New York group does not allow. (New York Post) 💰 An interfaith coalition erased $6 billion in medical debts owed by more than 2,000 people in the Chicago area. The group was inspired by an ancient Jewish custom – the Biblical law to release people of debts during the shmita year. “I fell in love with it,” said Pastor Chris Harris. “And I said listen, let’s keep this thing rockin’.” (JTA) 🫶 An Israeli woman was reunited with her mother on Tuesday, months after she spotted her on TV walking through the rubble of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol. “We can finally let out a sigh of relief,” the daughter said. (Times of Israel) 🎬 A Saudi Arabian edition of “The Office” is in the works. It would be the 12th international edition of the popular comedy series and the first Arabic-language version. (The Hollywood Reporter)
What else we’re reading ➤ An Israeli private detective used Indian hackers in a job for Russian oligarchs … Rabbi’s new memoir recounts the interfaith movement’s hits and misses … Actor Liev Schreiber says his Jewish grandfather’s roots inspired his relief efforts in Ukraine.
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On this day in history: June 1, 1494 marked the first recorded historical mention of scotch whisky. Scotland’s exchequer rolls noted that one Friar John Cor had been given a portion of malted barley with which to make “aqua vitae,” or distilled spirits. As the Scottish liquor’s renown spread in ensuing centuries, Jews were among its acolytes — including some who preached its glories in the pages of the Forward. Drinking a particularly resonant pour, Austin Ratner wrote in 2016, “was like talking to an older gentleman who had seen much of the world and thought much about it and refined his long experience into a complex reticent wisdom.” Last year on this day, we reported that Danny Fenster, a Jewish journalist from Detroit, was detained in Myanmar while trying to leave the country. He was jailed for six months before being released in November. On the Hebrew calendar, it’s the second of Sivan, the yahrtzeit of Rabbi Chaim Elazar Spira, a Hasidic rebbe in western Ukraine, who died in 1937.
In honor of Pride Month, which begins today, here’s a timeline of how the Forward covered LGBTQ history. Plus: Our archivist, Chana Pollack, looks back at the queer stories we covered – and some that we missed.
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The festival of Shavuot, when it’s a custom to eat dairy foods, begins at sundown on Saturday. Rukhl Schaechter, our Yiddish editor, and Eve Jochnowitz show you how to make cheese blintzes with homemade applesauce in this classic episode of their cooking show. Watch it now ➤ ––– Thanks to PJ Grisar, Jacob Kornbluh and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter.
You can reach the “Forwarding” team at [email protected]. |
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