Benyamin Cohen is a senior writer at the Forward. Follow him on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter, and sign up for his morning newsletter, Forwarding the News, which gets you caught up on all the Jewish news to know each day. He is the author of two books, My Jesus Year and The Einstein Effect, and has written for The New York Times and The Washington Post. He lives with his wife in West Virginia with their three dogs, a cat and a flock of chickens known as the Co-Hens.
The Entenmann’s Freezer was taller than I was. To be fair, at 5-foot-2, most things are taller than I am: grocery store shelves, that chain to turn on the overhead fan, your average adult human. The Entenmann’s Freezer was an iconic part of my childhood. Most families that have an extra freezer use it to…
Meet Barry Wendell, a liberal gay Democrat
An 11-hour standoff at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, ended late Saturday night with the rabbi and other hostages released safely and the suspect dead, police and political officials said. The suspect, a 44-year-old British national named Malik Faisal Akram, disrupted Shabbat-morning services as they were being livestreamed on Facebook and held its rabbi and…
A rare 54-page manuscript with Albert Einstein’s early scribblings on the general theory of relativity sold for $11.4 million at Christie’s auction house in Paris on Tuesday. The documents were expected to sell for $3 million, but many in the room seemed surprised when the bidding went on for more than 15 minutes. The sale…
Kim Kardashian West and Rabbi Moshe Margaretten chartered a plane to help a soccer team of teenage girls flee Afghanistan for Britain. Leeds United, a U.K. soccer club, has offered to support the players, according to the Associated Press. Rabbi Margaretten, who is based in New York, is the founder of the Tzedek Association, a…
Ted Sarandos, CEO of Netflix, defended Dave Chappelle’s new comedy special “The Closer” – which contains jokes about Jews and trans people – drawing a line between artistic expression in standup comedy and hateful speech in the workplace. In a memo to staff, Sarandos brought up the popular Netflix series “My Unorthodox Life,” which is…
Mark Oppenheimer tells the story of how the Pittsburgh Jewish community rebounded after tragedy
Senator Jon Ossoff denounced recent antisemitic attacks while speaking at Yom Kippur services on Thursday. The freshman senator attended services at Temple Emanuel-El, a Reform congregation in Sandy Springs, a suburban area north of Atlanta. There have been two antisemitic incidents at Cobb County high schools in the past week. First, at Pope High School,…
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