Joanne Palmer, at The Blogs

Sep 17, 2021, 10:18 PM

Remembering Bob Is it really true that some offices become family? Experts often tell us not to think in those terms; your family, they intone, is the people you share genes or marriage with. Then there are your friends, the people you chose. Colleagues from...

Sep 17, 2021, 9:04 PM

Is that a sukkah? (No, it’s a restaurant shed.)

A restaurant shed in midtown Manhattan earlier this spring.
Janine & Jim Eden/Wikimedia Commons

You know the expression “A stopped watch is right twice a day?” It’s true. So it makes sense that once a year it really will be Sukkot, even if local streets, at least here in New York, look like Sukkot all year round now. That’s...

Sep 9, 2021, 6:23 PM

9/11 and Yom Kippur

The Firemen's Memorial at Riverside Drive and 100th Street on September 12, 2001

The pandemic has warped our sense of time. I think about that — and so I write about it — all the time. (Or maybe it seems like all the time, given all the warping.) But every day being basically the same as every other...

Aug 19, 2021, 6:24 PM

A week of disaster

It’s hard to be chipper this week. There are two ongoing disasters — thankfully, they have nothing to do with Jews — that are clouding everything, the way that the volcano in Iceland spewed smoke that fogged most of Europe, or the way that smoke...

Aug 11, 2021, 11:45 PM

Sitting around a Shabbat table, feeling hope

Coming back to life is an interesting experience — with any luck it’s also a once-in-a-lifetime one.We’ve had a quite a few Shabbat dinners since the world gingerly started to reopen, most at our home, some around friends’ tables. It’s always been with a small...

Jul 29, 2021, 5:56 AM

Featured Post

Vaccinations, community, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu with her son, Edward Wortley Montagu, and attendants (CC via Wikimedia)

Kudos to the mother who, during a terrifying pandemic, let an old woman 'rip open' her children's veins and stick them with 'the best sort of small-pox'

Jul 23, 2021, 6:25 PM

Finding comfort — Nachamu, fireflies, and goats

It is of course the opposite of coincidental that Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of comfort, comes after the raw pain (and soul-stirring beauty) of Tisha b’Av. And we all really can use some comfort. It makes me think about the cover story this week, about...

Jul 16, 2021, 6:00 PM

Thoughts on Tisha b’Av

It’s not as if Tisha b’Av isn’t powerful — and powerfully odd — every year. This year brings its own specific challenges. Last year we still were grappling with the formless, terrifying pandemic, with the still-puzzling because still-unpredictable dangers it posed, and the economic destruction...

Jul 8, 2021, 7:47 PM

Volare! Let’s fly!

Last week, as I walked up Broadway on the Upper West Side, I came to a restaurant that put up many open-sided tents, festooned with fairy lights, as soon as it was allowed to, and has done great business ever since. The restaurant’s been getting...

May 28, 2021, 6:31 PM

Memorial Day, anti-Semitism — the best and worst of times

Memorial Day always is complicated. It is possibly the most solemn day on the American civil calendar, honoring the memories and sacrifices of the service members who died protecting the rest of us. It’s also the unofficial start of spring, marking the season when we...

About Me

Joanne is the editor of the Jewish Standard and lives in Manhattan with her husband and two dogs, so she has firsthand knowledge of two thriving and idiosyncratic Jewish communities. (Actually that's three communities, if you also count the dog people.)