Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. He covers Jewish religious organizations, synagogue life, anti-Semitism and the Orthodox world. If you have any tips, you can email him at feldman@forward.com. Follow him on Twitter @aefeldman.
Ari Feldman
By Ari Feldman
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News East Ramapo is racially segregated. Its school board campaigns are, too.
Soon after Jean Fields moved to Spring Valley, in Rockland County, N.Y., in the early 1990s, she drove around to get the lay of the land. One memorable moment was when Fields and her husband, both of whom are black, unwittingly drove into New Square, the Hasidic village run by followers of the Skverer rabbinic…
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News East Ramapo trial offers fraught question: Should Hasidic Jews be considered ‘white’?
Are Jews white? And if a white majority is overwhelmingly made up of Orthodox Jews, does it make any legal difference? These are among the fraught questions at the center of a trial unfolding in U.S. District Court regarding the East Ramapo School District, which serves a spread of suburbs about an hour’s drive north…
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News In East Ramapo trial, trying to untangle race and policy in school board elections
Testimony from two witnesses Thursday at the trial over the East Ramapo Central School District spoke to a key question at the center of the case: Are elections won and lost over questions of race, or of policy? Outside of a courtroom, it is often hard to separate the two things. For example, consider the…
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News If an algorithm thinks Hasidic Jews are black, is it wrong? Day 3 of East Ramapo trial
It’s a courtroom trial, but it felt like a math class. Wednesday saw expert testimony on racially segregated voting in the East Ramapo Central School District, a majority Orthodox suburban district that has been plagued by a battle over funding to the district’s public schools. The case concerns East Ramapo’s at-large voting system, which a…
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News East Ramapo trial begins: ‘The white community will always win’ vs. ‘literally whitewashing’ Hasidic Jews
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — Lawyers on Monday presented starkly different perspectives on identity politics in a suburban New York school district, as a federal trial opened in a voting-rights case that caps more than a dozen years of battle over funding between Orthodox Jews and their mostly black and Latino neighbors. The case concerns the…
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News In this diverse, changing suburb, liberal Jews are struggling to understand their Hasidic neighbors
Sometimes, when Katrina Hertzberg sees a visibly Jewish person in her neighborhood in Nyack, N.Y. — a woman wearing a wig, say, or a man in a black suit and hat — she thinks to herself, “Oh my God, are we next?” She wonders whether her area of Rockland County, N.Y., is next to receive…
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News One of our reporters got an email from a rabbi asking for gift cards. Here’s what happened next.
Here at the Forward, we get emails from rabbis all the time. I counted at least a dozen just last week in my inbox. So when Aiden Pink, our deputy news editor, received a vague email seemingly from Rabbi Sheldon Kleinman of Cong. House of Israel in Hot Springs, Ark. over the weekend, he didn’t…
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News ‘Rabbi’ gift card scam spurred congregants to spend thousands
The gift card email scam targeting American rabbis and synagogues has reached communities from New York to Hawaii, with some incidents of congregants falling for the scheme. Three members of a Conservative synagogue in Virginia responded to emails they thought were from their rabbi by buying a collective $2,500 worth of gift cards. So far,…
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