Retirement Living: Senior living communities adjust to Covid. 20-page special supplement
Museum director Claudia Gould
www.thejewishweek.com
Jewish Museum Faces Its Own Reckoning On Diversity
Abe Foxman’s Next Act: Helping Needy Survivors
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The Jewish Week Turns a Page Paper suspends its print run after 50 years.
Stay Tuned, Stay Connected The story of the Jewish community continues. Gary Rosenblatt Editor at Large
T
he very first e-mail I received after The Jewish Week posted its announcement that the print edition was going on hiatus at the end of July was from a longtime devoted reader I know and admire. It read simply: “How do you expect us to read it on Shabbat?” Of course, I empathize with the gentleman, and the many oth-
ers who were upset to receive the news. You didn’t have to be a Sabbath observer to look forward to holding and reading The Jewish Week on the weekend. My many years at the paper have been a labor of love, and the loss of the print edition, at least for now, feels like losing a friend. But looking back on the last 27 years, I take pride in having been part of an effort — risky, but I believe vital — to both cover the Jewish com-
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Last Words: An Ode to Print CLOSING A CHAPTER • Scenes from a long Broadway run 6 • Jewish Week staffers look back 10-17, 29 • 25 years of impact stories 18 • Jonathan Sarna on the paper’s history 22
Editorials 24 Opinions 26
Arts Guide 30 Sabbath 31
Small moments in back-page essays tell a big story about what a community newspaper can be. Robert Goldblum Managing Editor
A
former colleague of mine — we used to joke, gallows-humor style, that we were the last generation of print journalists — told me a classic newspaper story some years ago. It was back when the internet was beginning its marauding run through American newsrooms and laying waste to newspapers’ advertising revenue. We may have seen the writing on the digital wall, faint at that time, but enough to make the story all the more poignant. The tale involved my colleague’s friend, a loyal subscriber to the paper we were working for at the time, the Baltimore Jewish Times, and to the
metropolitan daily in town, the storied Baltimore Sun. The woman said that she not only liked the feel of a newspaper in her hands, ink smudging the tips of her fingers, but she loved to hear the “thump” at the door when the paper was delivered as the sun was coming up. For those of a certain nostalgiasoaked generation, that “thump” — solid, tactile, substantial — contains within it the log-splitting whine of the lumberyard and the keyboard pecks and righteous yawps of reporters and editorialists and the drone of the pressroom and the rumble of the delivery truck over city streets and rural lanes. In April 1997, the Red River, which runs right through Grand Forks, N.D.,
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