I was on a Zoom about how to grow a podcast audience when the power went out on Tuesday afternoon. Sitting on the basement couch that has served as my office for five months, I'd been hearing the wind and rain howl, so I wasn't exactly surprised when the room went dark and the WiFi disappeared. It only took a few seconds for me to Zoom back in via mobile phone -- I apologized in the chat for looking a bit shadowy as I asked my question about how much one needs to spend on marketing to get people to listen.

I texted my afternoon meeting lineup to say we'd need to do phone calls instead of Zooms -- until a colleague pointed out that I probably should preserve my phone battery in case something more serious happened, either in news or family needs (Beirut, after all, had blown up that morning). Good point, but by Wednesday morning I was set up with WiFi and extension cords for three devices on a colleague's porch across town, running home midday to use the bathroom -- we're still Covid-distancing, after all -- and grab a picnic lunch from my darkened refrigerator for myself and the other two friends who had joined our makeshift co-working space. My husband, meanwhile, taught his "Written Out Loud" workshops for kids from the car, keeping the gas running to ensure the phone he was teaching from stayed charged (and, truth be told, depositing our own kids at tennis and Tikkun Olam activities mid-class). 

What resilience a pandemic makes. For months now, this virus and its attending shutdown has forced all of us to confront challenges we never considered and make do with circumstances far from ideal. To focus on the essential elements of everything we do -- and find new ways of getting that important stuff done. Take away our offices? Hello, lapdesk. Shut down our shuls? Zoom-Mitzvah. This is the summer of the backyard barbecue and the board game (the Rudorens are newly obsessed with Settlers of Catan). And I have to admit that when my daughter and I were reading before bed these past few nights with this neat camping lantern the husband picked up at the hardware store, I liked that it felt a teeny bit like sleepaway camp. In this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year, a few days in the dark, a few garbage-bags full of rotting food, feels like the epitome of no big deal. What else you got, universe?
 
Stories, we've got stories. Carly Pildis spoke to five superhero Jewish moms about how they're balancing work and everything else in the pandemic. Ari Feldman took a close look at a Black-Jewish institutional partnership in Baltimore. A Hasidic wedding photographer took us behind the mechitza, And speaking of the mechitza, modern-Orthodox synagogues are planning to have in-person services for the high-holidays -- in shifts, and without singing. You can download and print those stories via the blue button below.
 

 Also in that PDF is Rob Eshman's guide to DIY pickling, in honor of Seth Rogen's new movie; a visit to Manny's Deli in downtown Chicago; the latest Bintel Brief, in which a man mulls whether to tell his friend about his (not great) sexual experience with the friend's fiance; a Sarah Maslin Nir essay about on Jews and horses; and P.J. Grisar's rap response to President Trump's "Yo, Semites!" gaffe (don't forget the T-shirt!). 

Speaking of embarrassing gaffes ... A number of you wrote to correct my rendering in last week's newsletter of the Hebrew word that Israeli spinning teachers use for the "resistance" knob that makes pedaling harder. I said it was ometz, which actually means courage, or valor, as Avia Carmi, an Israeli-born Forward subscriber was the first to point out. She and others reminded me that hitnagdut is the actual Hebrew word for resistance. 

I was sure, though, that my friend Ellen -- whose untimely death was the subject of the newsletter -- had never said hitnagdut in spin class. So I asked around, and figured out that the word those fitness instructors were using was omes, with a samech at the end and not a tzadi, which means burden or load. I'm sorry for the mistake -- but grateful that my mention of my Hebrew teacher from the late 1980s, Gabi Mezger, found its way to her and put us back in touch.  Yay, Internet! Yo, Semites!

I'm heading out Sunday for a vacation with my parents, sisters and their families, so we all got Covid-tested, which was remarkably simple and smooth (pre-power outage, and yes, negative) and made this photograph particularly resonant. It's from 1947, and shows people getting the small-pox vaccine -- inside the old Forverts building on East Broadway. It's featured in our latest story on the Urban Archives app, compiled by our archivist Chana Pollack, and Virginia Davies, who leaves the Forward this week after nearly a year as an editorial intern (thank you!) . Maybe when there's a coronavirus vaccine, we'll invite some of you loyal readers down to 125 Maiden Lane to get inoculated with us!

Until then, may your ometz be great, your omes be light, and your lights stay on.
Shabbat Shalom,


Jodi Rudoren
Editor-in-Chief
[email protected]