Author: Mark Hershlag

(JTA) — The weekday minyan at my synagogue has been moved from the sanctuary to its airy social hall. And whenever I attend I have the same lofty thought: This would make a great pickleball court. Pickleball, the subject of countless breathless articles calling it the fastest growing sport in America, is essentially tennis for […]

(JTA) — As a young child I often wondered why people light the hanukkiah, or Hanukkah menorah, in so many different places. Some light the candles on their front porches and driveways, some in the streets, others at in city parks, and a very select few even light candles at the White House. But with […]

(JTA) — The recent Israeli elections, the fifth in less than four years, returned Benjamin Netanyahu to the driver’s seat for the third time. The twice and future prime minister appears able to cobble together a coalition that has been called the most right-wing in Israeli history. It will include three far-right and two haredi […]

(JTA) — For his 2021 book “How the Word Is Passed,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, poet and journalist Clint Smith explored the landscape of American memory — specifically how the history of slavery is explained, commemorated, distorted and desecrated in sites across the United States. While on tour promoting the […]

(JTA) — I don’t find Dave Chapelle’s “Saturday Night Live” monologue funny, unlike my classmates who draw inspiration from him. About a year ago, in my eighth-grade English class, I was listening to my classmates talk about Holocaust denial. Some of them were joking, sure, but that didn’t make it any better. We’d been reading […]

(JTA) — A few days after the comedian Dave Chappelle appeared to justify the never-ending appeal of Jewish conspiracy theories, this sentence appeared in the New York Times: “Bankman-Fried is already drawing comparisons to Bernie Madoff.” I’ll explain: Sam Bankman-Fried is the 30-year-old founder of FTX, the crypto-currency exchange that vaporized overnight, leaving more than […]

(JTA) — Last week saw Dave Chappelle deliver a brilliant monologue on “Saturday Night Live” addressing the antisemitism controversies surrounding Kanye West and Kyrie Irving. Unfortunately, “brilliant” doesn’t inherently mean “moral” or “good.” Chappelle’s monologue was a masterclass in how to normalize and embolden antisemitic discourse, delivered in plain sight and with just enough “wink […]

(JTA) — Like so many other American Jews from the New York area, I have been eagerly awaiting “I’ll Have What She’s Having,” the new exhibit on the American Jewish deli now on view at the New-York Historical Society. After all, the deli was our family business. I grew up on Long Island during the […]

(JTA) — When I spoke recently at a conference on fighting antisemitism, I offered up one practical suggestion that might have surprised attendees: “I hope you’ll watch ‘Mo’ on Netflix.” I was on a panel called “Combating Hate Through Coalition Building” and I was making the point that when we are building coalitions and calling […]

(JTA) — My parents, children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, were named Irving and Naomi. They named their three sons Stephen, Jeffrey and Andrew. My kids’ names are Noah, Elie and Kayla. Our first names capture the sweep of the American Jewish experience, from the early 20th century to the early 21st. At each stop […]