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.
It was once possible to embark on the 38-mile bus ride from Steubenville, Ohio, to Moundsville, West Virginia, and the time would change seven times. That likely didn’t impact too many time-traveling Jews in the 1950s, when cities and towns chose individually when, or whether, to institute daylight saving time. But now, in a move…
Purim has often been dubbed the “Jewish Halloween.” For Jeremy Sarnat, last year’s holiday was particularly scary. Friends in his Atlanta neighborhood were delivering the traditional festive food baskets and he was afraid to open them. It was in the very early days of the pandemic when epidemiologists were still honing in on how the…
David Schoen and I used to live in the same Atlanta neighborhood and we bumped into each other plenty of times – at the grocery store, at the airport, at synagogue. Each of those times, we were both wearing yarmulkes. For modern-Orthodox men like me and Schoen, one of President Donald Trump’s impeachment lawyers, covering…
Twitter erupted on Tuesday afternoon with the most existential of Jewish questions: Can a hand substitute for a yarmulke? The hoopla and hullabaloo began when David Schoen, the modern Orthodox attorney representing Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial, was making his case in front of the Senate. He grabbed the unmarked 8 oz. bottle…
Elie Klein and Barry Wendell have little in common other than both being Jews who grew up in Baltimore. Klein is 40, works for a non-profit and now lives in Beit Shemesh, a commuter town halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Wendell is 71, semi-retired and lives in Morgantown, W.Va. But the two men –…
Harvard's Avi Loeb is leading a $100 million project called the Breakthrough Listen Initiative.
Jon Ossoff, the newly elected U.S. senator from Georgia, will be sworn in Jan. 20 using a Hebrew Bible that belonged to Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild. Rothschild, who died in 1973, is an icon of the Jewish South who played an integral role in the region’s civil rights and social justice movements. In 1946, the…
Hackers disrupted the Rev. Raphael Warnock’s sermon at a virtual Shabbat service on Friday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, blocking viewers from hearing him and triggering problems at other synagogues across the country. Some congregants of The Temple, the synagogue that has hosted the annual event for more than a decade, assumed…
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