Barry Joseph
By Barry Joseph
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Opinion I lost my dad to COVID. Opening up to a stranger helped me heal — and appreciate my Jewish community even more.
To Denise, I was an open book. For almost a year, through the endless blur that followed the first COVID shutdown, I shared with her the intimate details of my life. No, she wasn’t my psychologist, rabbi or spouse. She’s a sociologist running an oral history project. In April 2020, my dad died from COVID….
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Community How I hired Jackie Hoffman to be my pandemic celebrity Cyrano
What’s your pandemic guilty pleasure? My wife is cooking up a storm, my son is binging all 222 episodes of “Phineas and Ferb” and my daughter is posting dances to TikTok. Me? I’ve hired actress and comedian Jackie Hoffman ($20) as my personal avatar. You know how it is: My cousin graduates and we can’t…
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Community This isn’t about the bagel, nor the seltzer man
For me, it was a bagel – my last taste of normalcy before the “new normal” arrived, eaten mere hours before NYC effectively cancelled the school year for my children. The inevitable was fast approaching — had arrived in fact — and I was just slow to accept it. (Weeks later, my dad would die….
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Community Sitting shiva via Zoom, it turns out, has its upsides
Last week, we buried my father in the Long Island cemetery plot that had been waiting three decades for him to arrive. When I recall my mother’s 1990 funeral, in the pre-COVID era, I can still feel the love that came from the crowd surrounding us, and the support I drew from the Hebrew prayers…
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Culture How seltzer won Israel’s war for independence
'Cast a Giant Shadow' is like 'Exodus' with a shpritz bottle
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Culture Remembering Bernie De Koven — Sage Of The Gospel Of Play
In 2017, a week before Passover, I heard the news that Bernie De Koven was dying of cancer. I wanted to do something, for Bernie, for myself, and for others who might take inspiration from his life journey. The interview that followed turned into the article below, published on December 20, 2017. Now, in 2018,…
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Culture How Games Pioneer Bernie De Koven Taught The Gospel Of Play
Bernie De Koven is a beloved inspiration to generations of game players and designers. For almost 50 years, his Jewish roots have motivated him to follow in the footsteps of his father and become a rabbi of sorts, a “shaman of play” for the parks, and the streets, and the ballfields, leading his “congregation” to…
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Culture How A Funny Jewish Game Called Rummikub Became An International Sensation
This past fall I visited my friends Geraldine and Israel, formerly of the Queens neighborhood Forest Hills, at their new rustic fixer-upper along the Hudson. The fireplace was working, the couch was in place, but the room was still surrounded by a cityscape of boxes waiting to be unpacked. Geraldine reached into one, grabbing something…
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