Beshert | Three Strikes, You’re A Schlimazel

Living in New York City circa 1979-1980 was a test of fortitude, not the least of which involved the rats. The rat harvest was plentiful that year because of a tugboat strike, which stranded the city’s garbage, which piled up on the streets because the tugs weren’t moving to haul it to Staten Island. Then the New York City Opera shut down when contract negotiations with the musicians stalled and while that didn’t devolve into rodent anarchy, it was a disappointment to opera fans. When 1979 spilled into 1980, the city’s transit workers went on strike.  All of this made it a great time to be a journalism student there. We covered these stories. Both Pope John Paul II and the Dalai Lama came to visit the city that fall and we covered them, too, and...

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Beshert | Miracle on 44th Street

“Most nights, there was one stray ticket that theaters were happy to sell cheap to a college girl with a debit card and frizzy hair. Not the case at The St. James Theater on West 44th Street, home to The Producers. You couldn’t get this ticket at TKTS and it was years before you could buy resold tickets online. Night after night, The St. James was my first stop to see if there was a ticket for sale. And night after night, the same ticket lady would turn me away. Until now.”

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Paul Reiser Headshot

A Moment with Comedian Paul Reiser on His NYC Return

Comedian Paul Reiser, best known for the hit 1990s TV sitcom Mad About You, is returning to the New York City stage to perform a stand-up routine for the first time in more than two decades. The event, which will take place at the Kaufman Music Center, is to raise funds for the nonprofit JazzReach. Reiser speaks to Moment Senior Editor Marilyn Cooper about his return to performing live comedy. Can you tell me about your interest in music and how tonight’s event relates to that? Tonight’s event is for JazzReach, a New York nonprofit—they bring live jazz music to young people. Kids who have never heard live music before in their lives will have musicians brought to their classrooms. I love music, but it isn’t what I’ve ended up doing. I’m doing stand-up tonight. They're really different...

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Jane Ziegelman on Food and the American Story

97 Orchard, by Jane Ziegelman, tells the story of five immigrant families living on Manhattan's Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century. The stories of these Irish, Italian, German and Jewish families emerge through the food they cooked and the struggles they faced. Ziegelman chatted with Moment about American food, Jewish food and the place of immigrants in the American story. What was the inspiration for 97 Orchard? The inspiration was the tenement itself. A while back, when I was a graduate student at NYU studying urban anthropology, I heard that this new museum was opening on the Lower East Side devoted to America’s urban pioneers, immigrants who settled in tenement districts on the Lower East Side. I worked as a volunteer collecting oral histories from former tenement dwellers. They needed people to go...

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A Sukkah for the 21st Century

By Symi Rom-Rymer When I think about sukkahs—which I admit is not that often—it is rarely in architectural or even creative terms.  As a child, around late fall, they would just  appear, typically made out of unbleached wood and long branches, in someone’s backyard or on the synagogue roof.  Pretty boring really.  The true excitement would come when the people arrived to fill it, arms full of dishes to share and enjoy with one another. Well, Sukkah City, an international design contest, is looking to change all that.  Playing with the paradox of transience and rootedness that the sukkah represents, they have invited architects from around the world to take the biblical design framework, place it in an urban setting, and propose a reimagined  sukkah.   The winning design will stand in Union Square Park in New York...

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