I came to the Forward in 2019 to help reinvigorate this storied publication for the digital age. I’d barely started down my list of Jewish leaders to get coffee with when, six months later, a global pandemic shut down the world as we knew it.
As we hurtled from one intense, unprecedented news cycle to the next, I started sending little dispatches to help you ease into Shabbat. One Friday that spring I wrote about my amateur efforts at growing kale, another about a cool online photo project we were part of called UrbanArchive. Over time, these mini-reflections morphed into reported essays and we renamed the newsletter “Looking Forward.”
Writing it — and, especially, engaging with your responses — has been one of the most meaningful experiences of my career.
A few years ago, my friend and mentor Ethan Bronner, the Israel bureau chief for Bloomberg News, told me that I’d “perfected the genre of ‘The News & Me.’” I don’t think that’s actually a genre, but it has been the perfect way for me to practice what we call “Jewish journalism,” to connect my lived experience as a Jewish mother and wife and kaddish-sayer and soup-swapper and sukkah builder with the dizzying headlines of war and antisemitism and politics and polarization. I’ve tried to bring a kitchen-table perspective to some of the world’s big problems. To offer a bit of wisdom as I learn from every person.
The husband and twins were remarkably game. “Newsletter!” they’d fairly sing whenever we encountered some Interesting Jewish Happening that could make good copy. They are at the top of the list of people who teach me.
There is not enough space to list even a fraction of what I have learned from the incredible assemblage of impassioned people who make the Forward. Our staff and freelancers have shown me different ways to be Jewish and different ways to do journalism; they’ve made me a better boss, and a better friend. I know I’ll keep learning from them as a Forward reader (and donor!), as they keep asking “Vos hert ziilch” —that’s Yiddish for “Hey, what’s happening?” — across our fractured and fractious Jewish landscape.
I’ve learned resilience and grace from Rachel Goldberg-Polin, hope and hard work from Seba Abudaqa. I’ve learned history from Deborah Lipstadt, and from Rashid Khalidi. Alex Edelman made me laugh — and made me think. Jonathan Greenblatt made me mad — and made me think.
Then there are the rabbis. I remember when Abigail Pogrebin (an important contributor to the Forward both journalistically and philanthropically) was embarking on this series talking to 18 rabbis about God, she asked who “my rabbis” were — who I went to for Jewish advice or pastoral care. I had three back then: Benji Samuels, leader of the Modern Orthodox shul in which my parents raised me; Elliot Cosgrove, the Conservative scholar who officiated at my wedding; and Marc Katz, who runs the Reform shul where my kids had their “Zoom Mitzvah.”
They each answered Looking Forward queries over the years, along with a whole constellation of others.
Rabbi Sandra Lawson, who leads the Reconstructionist movement’s diversity initiatives, taught me how to mark Juneteenth in a Jewish way and how journalism can hurt even when it follows the rules. Rabbis Avi Shafran and Motti Seligson guided me to use the term “Haredi” instead of “ultra-Orthodox.” Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky showed me liturgy is not etched on tablets and Rabbi Brent Spodek taught me how to pray.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl answered my call during the Texas synagogue hostage crisis even though she could not talk on the record. Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman told me the truth, in December 2023, when I asked how Israeli Jews on the left were absorbing the devastation in Gaza: “I’m ashamed at how my heart has shrunk.”
It was Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann of Mishkan, an alternative synagogue in Chicago, who reminded me of Ben Zoma’s adage after I shared news of my resignation. She was complimenting me, but what she said applies to our entire team’s journalism.
“You really take people seriously,’ Rabbi Lizzi said at a meeting of the Forward advisory board. “You don’t innately have a bias this way or that way. My experience of you has been really just wanting to understand what is happening and then report back on it — whether or not it’s what people want to hear.” | 