The Jewish holidays remind me of my old vinyl records: They have an A-side and a B-side. The origin of the holiday and the rituals for observing it, as I imagine it, are on the A-side. On the B-side is my personal relationship with the holiday. For example, the A-side of Sukkot is found in…
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…
Purim 2021 will be a tamer affair than what we’re used to. While 2020’s festival was the last dangerous gasp of the old normal — replete with mixed drinks and droplets for many — we now know what we’re dealing with. COVID is determined to put a damper on our typical revels. But then, we’ve…
Our Purim plans are hanging in mid-air right now, thanks to coronavirus. Our school’s Purim carnival was canceled, and while services are still on and school is open — the anxiety is high. Definitely no bobbing for apples this year. With some New York-area Jewish day schools closing in recent days, there’s a lot of…
(JTA) — Every Purim, Richard Roberts sponsors a party for more than 2,000 people in the heavily Orthodox New Jersey city of Lakewood, where he gives out, by his estimation, some $200,000 in charity. This year, because of the coronavirus, the party is cancelled. Roberts, a philanthropist and former pharmaceutical executive, made the decision Wednesday…
To celebrate Purim, our Jewish social diarist went clubbing and protesting, back to back. She partied downtown, and protested in Midtown. She drank with Chabad and the club crowd, and marched with the beanie-wearing leftists. Here, she tells the tale of two very different Purims. The BASH. We knew we were close to “The Official…
It wasn’t a Purim joke, though it may have sounded like one. On Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told a Christian television network that it’s “possible” that God sent President Trump to save the Jews — just like he sent Queen Esther, from the Purim story. “Could it be that President Trump right now…
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Erez Eli (@rizo1572) on Mar 21, 2019 at 6:34am PDT Seen at a raucous Purim party Wednesday evening in Brooklyn: witches, wizards, leprechauns, Lucha Libre fighters, cowboys, aliens, various elements of law enforcement, The Marvelous Mrs. Maizel, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sexy Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sexy hamantaschen,…
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