Sue Fishkoff
Tweaking tradition
Online project modernizing Jewish texts with today’s lingo
Morgan Friedman loves the way people talk. He wants others to love it, too.
The 35-year-old social media entrepreneur, formerly of Brooklyn, N.Y., and now living in Buenos Aires, launches new digital projects like marshmallows from an air gun.
Pow! Here’s Overheardinnewyork.com, a site for offbeat conversations that his team of eavesdroppers hears on the streets.
Pffft! Here’s Yiddishisms.com, Yiddish expressions culled from half-remembered witticisms of his grandmother.
He’s got a million of ‘em — or a few dozen, at least.
After Santa Monica bombing, shuls ponder openness vs. security
Nobody thought much about the shabby but quiet middle-aged man who showed up last weekend at an Orthodox study hall in suburban Cleveland.
But when police came last Monday and arrested the man, Ron Hirsch, 60, on charges of setting off a bomb next to the Chabad synagogue in Santa Monica, Calif., it sent shock waves throughout the Jewish community.
Meanwhile, a fire in a prominent Hollywood synagogue on April 14 has been classified as arson. It was set in a classroom on the second floor of Temple Israel of Hollywood early on April 14. The suspect was caught on a security camera and is believed to be a transient known in the area, according to The Los Angeles Times.
From oranges to artichokes, chocolate, and olives
Using seder plate as a call to action
Passover, which commemorates the Jewish people’s liberation from slavery, has a political message at its heart. So it’s not surprising that the seder – especially the seder plate — has been pressed into the service of all kinds of freedoms.
The country’s first Freedom Seder, held in a Washington church on the third night of Passover on April 4, 1969, marked the first anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Participants used a haggadah focused on black-Jewish solidarity that was rewritten by the Shalom Center, a Jewish peace group. The 800 guests included blacks and whites, Jews and Christians.
Conservatives take kashrut challenge up a notch
The Conservative movement’s ethical kosher initiative may not have been intended as a wedge into the Orthodox monopoly over kosher supervision. But the planned rollout this summer of the Conservative-backed seal of ethical kosher production, the Magen Tzedek, coincides with an increase in the number of Conservative rabbis acting as kosher supervisors.
“I see an uptick,” said Rabbi Paul Plotkin, chairman of the kashrut subcommittee of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, the legal body of the Conservative movement.
At a time of growing activism in the Conservative movement around the issue of kashrut, the Conservative rabbinate seems to be moving into the kashrut business like never before.
