Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Hasidic Judaism, a sub-group of Haredi Judaism that adheres to the historical traditions of Eastern European Jews, including communicating in Yiddish.
Hasidic
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Opinion Vigilante Justice and the Jews
In early May, a circuit court judge in Baltimore found Eliyahu Werdesheim, a 24-year-old member of a local Shomrim anti-crime patrol, guilty of assaulting a teenager named Corey Ausby. According to prosecutors, in 2010 Werdesheim and his brother, Avi, set upon Ausby on a residential street in Northwest Baltimore and beat him with the butt…
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Culture Giving Voice to Kabbalah Masters
The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse From the Jewish Tradition Translated and annotated by Peter Cole Co-edited and with an afterword by Aminadav Dykman Yale University Press, 544 pages, $30 ‘There among the trees of God / … I’d enter the sacred shrine of the woods / … And as I sat at the edge…
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Life In Praise of the New Ex-Hasidic Reality Show
My friends and I are celebrating the news that a group of our friends — all former ultra-Orthodox Jews, or maskilim — are getting their own reality show. We maskilim have been living on the fringes of the Jewish world, many of us navigating dramatic journeys of self-discovery as we pull ourselves free of our…
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The Schmooze Rabbi Who Writes Too Much
Useless. Egocentric. Negligible. These are the words David Assaf, a professor of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, used to describe a condition called “grapho-mania,” or excessive writing. The subject was at the center of a talk delivered March 28 called “Hasidic Grapho-Mania: The Strange Case of Rabbi Eliezer Shlomo Schick of Brooklyn-Yavne’el.” The program…
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Life At Brooklyn Girls School, Facebook Is Off Limits
One Hasidic girls school is demanding its students remove their Facebook pages. Noncompliance means expulsion. Beth Rivkah High School, in the heavily Lubavitch Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, is requiring 11th grade girls with Facebook pages to cancel their accounts and pay a $100 fine. That’s quite a U-Turn from the school’s position in 2010,…
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Culture Serenading the Bobov Bride
Photos and video from the wedding of Avraham Yehoshua Heschel Halberstam, a son of the rebbe of the Bobov Hasidic dynasty, to Chana Sara Baila Friedman posted on this Chabad website, offer a fascinating peek into a world that is all but invisible to those who are not part of it. Still, even the most…
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News Alan Gross Plot Thickens; Hasidic-Inspired Fashion
In this week’s podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis talks with Forward staff writer Paul Berger and opinion editor Gal Beckerman about new revelations concerning Alan Gross, a Jewish American aid worker who is serving a 15-year prison sentence in Cuba. Then, Forward fellow Naomi Zeveloff stops by to discuss an about-face for the hawkish Israel advocacy…
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News Orthodox Women Form Volunteer Service
A group of women who have been seeking to join Brooklyn’s all-male Orthodox ambulance corps has now dropped its campaign, opting instead to establish a separate women’s service to tend to emergency births. “We are not looking to create litigation or controversy, we are just looking to find a way to serve other women,” said…
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Music For a Jewish jazz great, a 100th birthday is a time for a celebration and a new album
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Yiddish דער אתרוג ווי אַ סגולה צו האָבן קינדער — און נאָך סוכּות־טראַדיציעסThe etrog as a charm to bear children, and other Sukkot traditions
ייִדן האָבן באַשיט די ערד פֿון דער סוכּה מיט פֿײַנעם געלן זאַמד
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Opinion On Yom Kippur, my brother-in-law is still a hostage. How do I atone for that?
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Fast Forward Ta-Nehisi Coates says Harris funding Gaza war as first Black female president would be ‘nightmare’
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