Despite its regular appearance on the Jewish calendar, Purim tends to take me by surprise each year, leaving me scrambling to bake my hamentashen and assemble a costume for our synagogue’s all-ages party. Last year, though, I was prepared. “I’m going as a nun,” I announced to my husband. A friend had a costume from…
Purim is the Israeli Halloween. Pop-up costume shops appear in the weeks ahead, children dress up for school and hamantaschen are as ubiquitous as mini Snickers bars. But there’s a darker side to the holiday, too. The Purim story is a tale of revenge. After Esther and Mordechai foil Haman’s plot to kill the Jews,…
Purim is coming up this Saturday, and we found the perfect six videos for you to watch in celebration. You know, in between digging through your closet for a last minute D.I.Y costume and shoving endless hamantaschen into your mouth. “Esther’s a Jew” by Erez Cohen Esther, JSwipe and a well-produced spin on Ellie King’s…
The story of evil trying to triumph over good is a story the Jewish community knows well. Every Purim, we remember the heroic actions of Queen Esther, who took a stand against evil and reversed the plot of a man who planned to persecute and annihilate the Jewish people. Her quiet diplomacy helped her husband,…
In an exclusive on-the-record interview with The Backward, three members of the Nobel Prize Committee broke off from listening to Abba to explain their reasons for awarding the Literature Prize to a 1960s folk singer who sounds like a punctured accordion. “Oh, yah. We gave it to him mostly to keep screwing with Philip Roth’s…
Is that an angel on your shoulder or are you just unhappy to see me? I ask this of the “Prayer Police” — the folks who put the “nag” in “synagogue” — who reported Jared Kushner for mispronouncing a word and thus changing a sentence from malche ha-mlachim, “King of Kings,” to melach ha-malachim, “Salty…
I have a confession: my best friend is a Nazi Twitter egg. It started when I humbly wished the Twitterverse a Happy Hanukkah. Not much traffic from my 11 followers, but @zeeg88 — a stranger! — responded with a picture of an oven captioned “lol is this where you’re celebrating.” @zeeg88, I thought, you haven’t…
Among the many luminaries of the Trump administration, one person has emerged as a globetrotting man of mystery, carrying out top-secret diplomatic missions for his boss – Michael Cohen, formerly Trump’s personal lawyer and now consigliere-without-portfolio to the White House. The Backward has obtained fragmentary transcripts of Cohen’s delicate missions, opening a window onto his…
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