WAKE-UP CALL
Long after most of her neighbors have stopped, Rabbi Janise Poticha still salutes health care workers every day at 7 p.m. from her balcony on the Upper West Side.
- She blasts a shofar, and prays for the day when it makes sense to end the evening salute.
- Quotable: “The numbers are continuing to go up, frontline workers continue to be very stressed with what is happening, and there are too many people not vaccinated,” she told our colleague Shira Hanau.
THE BEN & JERRY’S BACKLASH
The list of local retailers boycotting Ben & Jerry’s after the ice cream maker said it would no longer serve the West Bank is growing.
- Shop Delight, Seasons Kosher, Aron’s Kissena Farms and Gourmet Glatt, all based in New York, said they would drop the brand, CNN reports. So did Cedar Market and Grand & Essex, two kosher shops in northern New Jersey.
- Leaders of Hempstead, Long Island said they would try to enforce their town’s anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) law against Ben & Jerry’s and its parent company Unilever. West Hempstead has a large Modern Orthodox community.
- Related: Israeli Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked said Wednesday that Israeli authorities were enlisting pro-Israel groups in the U.S. to boycott the brand “until they change their despicable decision,” Times of Israel reports.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Gov. Cuomo will direct the State Police Hate Crimes Task Force to investigate an incident Tuesday in which a woman smashed windows at a Hasidic Jewish school in Williamsburg.
- Surveillance video shows a woman as she takes a hammer out of a bag and thrice pounds the windows at Yeshivas Ahavas Yisrael on Franklin Ave. and Flushing Ave.
- The attack came a few days after a Jewish man was assaulted and robbed on his way to a synagogue in Flatbush.
- Quotable: “To the Jewish community, we are with you. We stand with you and we will fight with you against these horrendous displays of hate and anti-Semitism. You are loved and love will always win in New York State,” Cuomo said in a statement on Wednesday.
Menashe Shapiro, who helped Eric Adams win over Orthodox Jewish leaders, is a “key player” in a network of advisers to the Democratic mayoral candidate.
- The New York City consultant and Queens native is among about 30 “allies who could help shape [Adams’s] administration and his agenda,” The New York Times reports.
TODAY’S BIG IDEA
The BDS movement to boycott Israel is an attack on the legitimacy of the State of Israel. The Ben & Jerry’s boycott of the settlements is not that, writes Jo-Ann Mort in a JTA essay: It is a protest of a specific policy that is leading Israel “dangerously to one state.”
TODAY’S BIG EAT
Our friends at The Nosher bring you the history of Lender’s Bagels, the family business that introduced frozen bagels to America.
- Although launched in New Haven, Connecticut, the company’s founder “baked hand-rolled bagels in a coal-fired oven at the back of the property under the geographically perplexing name New York Bagel Bakery.”
WHAT’S ON TODAY
American Friends of Rabin Medical Center presents “Eating In & Eating Out: Our Changing Relationship With Food,” featuring food writers Mark Bittman and Ruth Reichl and Veestro co-founder Monica Klausner. Moderated by Robert Siegel, former senior host of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” Register here. 4:00 pm.
Paul Shapiro’s Midnight Minyan, a six-piece group that re-imagines Jewish music through a jazz lens, is joined by singer Lila Shapiro, a senior at the High School of Math, Science and Engineering at the City College of New York, for an in-person performance at Chelsea Table + Stage, 152 West 26th Street between 6th and 7th Ave. Buy tickets, $22, here. 7:00 pm.
Nessa Rapoport will read from and discuss her novel, “Evening: A Novel,” in person at The Hampton Synagogue Author Discussion Series, 154 Sunset Avenue, Westhampton Beach, N.Y. To RSVP, call 631.288.0534, ext. 10. 7:30 pm.
Photo, top: Since the early days of the pandemic, Rabbi Janise Poticha has kept up her shofar-blowing at 7 p.m. daily as a salute to health care workers. (Lydia Orias)
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