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How I found freedom in a Passover Seder, an amp and a red Fender Duo-Sonic guitar
Passover at my cousin Doug’s house was always a strange blend of ritual, impatience and barely contained chaos. None of us was particularly religious, but we knew the drill: Read the Haggadah, dip the bitter herbs, eat a boatload of matzo, and laugh along as Uncle Sonny delivered his annual denunciation of religion. We rushed through the Seder with the urgency of people trying to outrun a bullet train. Everyone wanted to get to the oleshkas, the tzimmis, and my Grandma Min’s gefilte fish.
At some point during the adult drone that followed — politics, real estate, digestive-related medical complaints — I slipped away from the table in search of Doug’s electric guitar: a red Fender Duo-Sonic. Sleek, curved, impossibly alluring. The first time I saw it, Doug, then 17 or 18, played a halting version of “Hey Joe” for my sister and me. But it wasn’t only the sound that hooked me; it was the shape of the thing. I was 13, only a few months after my Bar Mitzvah, and the guitar felt like contraband, akin to the pot I would soon be smoking. I stared at it with the same stunned focus I reserved for an occasional glimpse of the bare backside of a Playboy centerfold.
The Haggadah asks: Why is this night different from all other nights?
For me, the answer was simple: It was the night I transformed from a pimply suburban teen into something mythic. If daily life — compulsive worry about my untamable Jewy hair, god-awful grades, and a steady stream of unrequited urges — felt like Egypt, then that red Duo-Sonic was my personal Moses.
A few weeks after Passover, my father — a serial entrepreneur who once marketed his own brand of car battery, opened the first Suzuki motorcycle shop in Minneapolis, and launched an eight-track cassette store he called Tape-O-Rama — bought Doug’s Duo-Sonic guitar and his Princeton Reverb amplifier for $150. He was as thrilled about it as I was. I remember him standing in my room, sleeves rolled up, trying to look like he knew what he was talking about. It was endearing and a little sad when he pointed at the amp’s knobs — treble, bass, tremolo, and reverb — and suggested I set them all to five.
“Let’s make ’em all the same, Pete.” He said. “Even Steven.”
My dad knew less than zero about rock, but as always, he wanted to help with something that mattered to me.
The guitar changed my life. Not instantly, but decisively. The first time I played with another kid my own age, my drummer friend Andy Kamman, an impressive musician even as a fifth-grader, I felt something shift. It wasn’t like school band, where I played the alto sax while the band director hovered over us, selecting songs notable only for their excruciating lameness. This was fully ours. No supervision. No rules. No permission required. I pulled my Duo-Sonic and the Princeton amp down the street in my Radio Flyer and set it up in Andy’s basement.
When he and I started playing, it felt shockingly intimate — frightening at first. Not that I knew what a sexual encounter was, but that’s what it felt like: two separate things — guitar and drums; two separate people — me and Andy — merging into a kind of oneness. I had no idea that this sudden unanimity would become an aspiration, not only in music but in all things. Music was simply the clearest expression of that spiritualized coming-together.
I’d play a riff; he’d shift the rhythm; I’d shift again. Words I hadn’t planned poured out. It was as close to conception as I’d get for a while. That transcendent aspect of music — its weird mixture of beauty, ego, and power — was already becoming clear.
By sixth grade we had a band: me on lead guitar and vocals, Andy on drums, Steve Grossman on bass, and Aron Goldfarb on rhythm guitar. We were rehearsing for the Peter Hobart Elementary Spring Concert in Andy’s basement and the whole neighborhood seemed to show up. We had a makeshift PA — one microphone duct-taped to his brother’s stereo — and we played our three originals on repeat. Most of them barely counted as songs. “Sorrowland” was two lines of lyrics and a four-chord progression. “Down by the River” had two chords and one line clearly stolen from Creedence Clearwater.
Our masterpiece was “Exit,” which I wrote during Drug Prevention Week. Every kid had to make a filmstrip warning against marijuana. Mine consisted entirely of dinosaurs I’d rubbed from National Geographic onto overhead projector sheets. I told the class that pot would make you hallucinate brontosauruses, which — completely contrary to the purpose of the curriculum — made drugs sound irresistible.
“Exit” was about a boy who tried to touch his girlfriend’s breast before she was ready and, to soothe his rejection, turned to pot. Its last verse closed with these lyrics:
Your hopes are down and you pick up a J,
it ain’t gonna help you anyway.
But you strike a match and you let it burn
now your mind is ready to turn…
I hit the tremolo pedal on the line “strike a match,” making my voice wobble in druggy vibrato. Everyone went nuts.
With all the attention, the band drama kicked in. Aron, our rhythm guitarist, kept insisting he sing lead — even though we had only one microphone and it was plugged directly into the stereo’s single input. “Hey, Goldfarb, stop being such a dickfarb,” I said into the mic. It got a big laugh. I repeated it until the phrase turned into a song. I strummed some chords and chanted “Goldfarb’s a dickfarb,” over a riff stolen from “Exit.” The room roared. Aron turned red, threw down his gorgeous sunburst Vox Teardrop — an absurdly expensive guitar his parents bought him before he could even play — and stormed upstairs.
Things began to snowball. Kids at the school drinking fountain hummed my guitar riffs. Laura Bloomenthal finally noticed me. And then: incredible news. Mrs. Perhofsky called my house to ask if our band would perform for residents of the Saint Paul Cerebral Palsy Center. $25 plus unlimited orange pop and Fritos. I was ecstatic — and terrified. I had a problem with inappropriate laughter. Not cruelty — just a tendency to laugh when I wasn’t supposed to. A waitress once spilled pancakes at Uncle John’s Pancake House, and I burst out laughing for no good reason. I worried this gig might trigger the same response.
We practiced nonstop: our originals, Creedence’s “Who’ll Stop The Rain,” a few Beatles songs. My nerves tightened with every rehearsal.
The center’s cafeteria was huge. We set up our amps and waited. Then the audience poured in — dozens of people reaching toward us, smiling, stomping, yelling with unbounded eagerness. One guy’s head was long and cylindrical, strapped to the back of a metal wheelchair. A pretty teenage girl with no hands drew a beautiful picture with a crayon held between her toes. An older woman with skin so thin I could see every vein greeted us warmly and made us feel at ease. When we started to play, the place exploded. People pounded on tables, shouted, danced and laughed. Andy played better than I’d ever heard him. We all did.
I felt something then I couldn’t name, a sense of having stepped into the world, of finally being part of something important. I was so overwhelmed I almost cried then and there. I probably would have, if I hadn’t been afraid the guys would laugh at me. After our originals and the Creedence numbers, they demanded more. So we played everything again. We cracked open my Beatles songbook and sight-read our way through half its pages.
I didn’t laugh. I didn’t feel the need. Not even close.
Without question, it was the best day of my life so far.
Freedom is like that.
The post How I found freedom in a Passover Seder, an amp and a red Fender Duo-Sonic guitar appeared first on The Forward.
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Irish Jews report 143 antisemitic incidents in 6 months through a new reporting system
(JTA) — Jews in Ireland reported over 100 antisemitic incidents through a communal reporting system within six months after it launched, according to a new report.
The findings published early Monday by the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland constitute the first attempt to document antisemitic incidents in Ireland.
Irish Jews, a small community of about 2,200, reported 143 incidents between July 2025 and January 2026. These were dominated by verbal abuse, vandalism, threats, exclusion or discrimination and direct digital hate messages. Physical assault was less common, with only three instances reported.
All incidents were self-reported to the JRCI, which cannot independently investigate or adjudicate them. Ireland does not have an official state mechanism for recording antisemitic incidents, the group said. And while the police record hate crimes based on nationality, ethnicity or religion, they do not isolate crimes motivated by antisemitism.
The JRCI said that 30% of incidents were triggered by cues of Jewish identity or Israeli origin, such as a Jewish symbol, an accent or speaking Hebrew in public. Such patterns often crossed the boundaries of hate driven by nationality, ethnicity and religion.
“These dynamics cannot be adequately addressed through generalized anti-racism frameworks alone,” JRCI chair Maurice Cohen said in a statement. “Antisemitism presents distinct characteristics requiring targeted policy responses.”
Cohen called for “a dedicated, standalone national plan to combat antisemitism in Ireland.”
Of the reported incidents, 25 included “Holocaust distortion” or antisemitic conspiracy theories. These findings add to a Claims Conference survey in January, which said that 9% of Irish adults believed the Holocaust was a myth, while another 17% believed the number of Jews killed had been greatly exaggerated. Half of Irish adults did not know that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
At the same time, a November 2025 survey by the European Commission surfaced broad recognition of antisemitism in Ireland. 41% of respondents said that antisemitism was a problem in the country and 47% said it had increased over the past five years.
At a ceremony for International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, Ireland’s taoiseach (or prime minister) Micheál Martin said, “I am acutely conscious that our Jewish community here in Ireland is experiencing a growing level of antisemitism. I know that elements of our public discourse has coarsened.”
Martin has strenuously criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza, saying at the United Nations last year that Israel committed genocide and demonstrated “an abandonment of all norms, all international rules and law.” Catherine Connolly, a socialist politician who has faced backlash for saying Hamas is “part of the fabric of the Palestinian people,” was elected as Ireland’s president in October.
Ireland has historically supported the Palestinians, a stance often linked to the country’s own history of British imperial rule, and formally recognized a Palestinian state in 2024.
In Martin’s Holocaust commemoration speech, he also condemned the most recent event to inflame the Irish Jewish community. Late last year, a proposal to rename Herzog Park in Dublin — named for Chaim Herzog, the son of the first Irish chief rabbi who became Israel’s sixth president in 1983 — was decried by Irish Jews who said it would erase Irish Jewish history. The proposal was later tabled.
Martin, who also denounced the proposal when it was active, said the Jewish community “has every right to be deeply concerned and to express that concern.”
Gideon Taylor, president of the World Jewish Restitution Organization and an Irish Jew who grew up in Dublin, said the JRCI report showed a picture of antisemitic incidents that were separate from “a debate about the policies of Israel or a debate about the Palestinian state.”
“When you have discontinuation of service because somebody is heard speaking Hebrew, or has a Jewish-identifying symbol on them, that’s not about a political position on the spectrum towards Israel,” said Taylor. “That’s something that crosses into antisemitism.”
Ireland’s chief rabbi Yoni Wieder said the report reflected experiences he already heard from his congregants.
“The report does not claim that antisemitism has become a daily reality for all Jewish people in Ireland — it has not,” said Wieder. “What it does show is that antisemitism surfaces often enough, and in ordinary enough settings, that it cannot be dismissed as rare or confined to the margins of society. This means that for many, Jewish belonging in Ireland feels more fragile than it should.”
The post Irish Jews report 143 antisemitic incidents in 6 months through a new reporting system appeared first on The Forward.
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Yet again, Israel’s public shelters become sites of camaraderie amid steep danger
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Spirits ran high inside a large public bomb shelter in the Israeli coastal city of Jaffa, with loud chatter, singing and greetings of “Happy Iran Holiday,” an incongruous soundtrack to the joint U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran and the hundreds of missiles that followed.
The room itself looked much cheerier than most shelters, with a ball pit and bright Gymboree mattresses left over from its other job in peacetime, when it doubles as a kindergarten.
A day earlier, the shelter became the accidental venue for a bar mitzvah celebration, when worshipers from the synagogue across the road took refuge there.
One particularly raucous group was made up mostly of American-Israelis from the neighborhood. One of them, Steph Graber, said she was in a good mood despite being exhausted from middle-of-the-night runs to the shelter.
“I’m not sure why, maybe it’s the adrenaline of war or something,” she said on Sunday morning. “But also it’s amazing to see the U.S. and Israel as allies working together to reduce the threat from Iran.”
Graber said she had been sheltering elsewhere but had “FOMO” about not being with her friends, so she switched over in the brief lull between sirens.
Martine Berkowitz, a friend of Graber’s, also said the community around her was what made the disruption feel manageable. Sirens kept interrupting even basic tasks, she said, including her attempt to take a shower, which she tried five times.
“My friends live on my corner, so I’m doing great. We’re all together all the time,” she said. During the last Iran flare-up in June, she didn’t have that kind of built-in circle nearby, she said. “Being alone then was really rough.”
The mood wasn’t confined to Jaffa. Across the country, similar scenes played out in shelters and spread on social media, including one from Nachlaot in Jerusalem of people singing “For the Jews There was Light and Joy,” a Purim song marking the story’s turn after Haman’s plot to kill the Jews was thwarted. The parallel to the current moment, as the Jews once again sought to topple a Persian rule who had called for their death, was not lost on anyone.
In a sprawling underground parking lot turned shelter at Dizengoff Center in central Tel Aviv, Shabbat prayers gave way to dancing and songs of “Don’t Be Afraid, Oh Israel” and “Am Yisrael Chai.” Saul Sadka, who was there, posted a video of the revelers, captioning it “joy and stoicism.”
Sadka later said he was struck by the “sense of solidarity,” and noted that it was Shabbat Zachor, when Jews read the passage about Amalek, a nemesis that they are commanded never to forget. “People seem willing to suffer for a while if it means the defeat of the IRGC,” he said.
Another bomb shelter in Tel Aviv struck a less pious tone, turning into a makeshift night club with red lights, a DJ and people dancing.
In one video, one of hundreds of comedic shelter clips circulating online, a comedian quipped, “The nation of Israel lives” — but only as long as the shelter “has wifi and the iPads have battery.”
Natalie Silverlieb was in the mamak, the communal reinforced safe room on her building’s floor. She said the logistics of repeated alerts had become harder since she became a mother.
“Doing this with a baby is crazy,” she said. The room was packed, including other babies and dogs, and she and her partner tried to follow a system that would get their baby back to sleep quickly.
“I’m so, so, so exhausted,” she said. “When I was doing this on my own the last time, I could at least come back to my apartment and just lay on the couch. But now there’s no laying on the couch. It’s go, go, go.”
For Silverlieb, the uncertainty of the past few weeks hadn’t disappeared so much as changed shape. “The waiting for it to end is more stressful than the waiting for it to begin,” she said. “I just hope it ends quickly. It’s a lot, period.”
In a nearby grocery store, another siren, the 30th or so in as many hours, sent shoppers scrambling. In the residential building next door, the shelter downstairs was decrepit and doorless. Children played limbo with a strip of red cloth. One woman began pitching HAAT, a new, mostly Arab-run delivery service she said was giving Wolt a run for its money. A few people pulled out their phones to download the app, trading jokes about whether it would deliver to shelters, and during sirens. Because it is Ramadan, Muslims in Israel are doubly on edge, from fasting on top of the missiles.
Sasha, who lives in the building, said she was “half happy” the waiting was over. The repeated dashes up and down the stairs, she joked, were at least getting her to her daily goal of 10,000 steps. Still, she said, it “won’t help us if the [Iranian] regime doesn’t fall.”
A Ukrainian who grew up under Soviet rule, taught her what it meant to live without freedom, she said. “We want to see the Iranian people free and a better Middle East for everyone.”
Evyatar said he doubted the regime would fall “unless the Iranian citizens themselves finish the job.”
Ma’or, another neighbor, said he would “happily sit in my bomb shelter if it meant giving my Iranian friends, both in Iran and out, a chance at a normal life.” He pointed to a friend in Tehran who works as a tattoo artist, an illegal trade under the regime.
“I mean, he’s not even free to give someone a tattoo without going underground,” he said. “I’m baffled by the people cheering [on] the IRGC. People who say this war is illegal are out of their goddamn minds.”
Evyatar said he began Saturday uneasy, but grew calmer as the hours passed and he gauged the pattern of the strikes. The alerts came far more often than the 12-day war, but the blasts felt less intense. “At the beginning I felt scared, like it was June all over again.” Over time, he said, he has learned to tell the difference between the sounds of interceptions, shrapnel and direct impacts.
As he spoke, a loud boom hit outside, rattling the shelter and stopping the conversation. “That, for example, was a June sound,” he said.
It turned out to be shrapnel coming down not far away. The impact was part of a wider series of strikes across central Israel, including one that turned lethal in Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem, when a public bomb shelter was hit. Nine people were killed including multiple from the same family. Dozens more were wounded, and others still were unaccounted for.
In Beit Shemesh, the strike changed the atmosphere in a city that had so far heard only occasional sirens, during both this round and the last one.
Netanel Alkoby, a Beit Shemesh resident who spent 12 years in the reserves with the Home Front Command, said he has always taken alerts seriously, but that over time a degree of complacency still set in. The strike, he said, “changed our perspective a lot,” forcing him to be more careful, more on guard, and to treat every warning “with the utmost seriousness.”
In the underground shelter at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, a sign overhead read “the safest shelter in existence.” Patients hobbled in, some with casts and crutches. With doctors also sheltering there, patients used the moment to buttonhole them with questions.
One staffer watched a line of women form to speak to a physician. “Poor thing, he can’t even enjoy the siren in peace,” she said.
Back in the central Jaffa shelter, a couple in black leather and dark glasses stood apart from the banter around them.
“Any fear and terror that Israeli citizens are feeling right now is a direct result of this violent racist Islamophobic power hungry greedy fascist government,” said the woman, who declined to give her name, referring to the Netanyahu-led coalition.
Asked whether she thought attacking Iran was a bad idea, she said: “I think it’s a bad idea to attack anyone in 2026. We teach toddlers not to fight and here we have fully grown men doing this, dooming all of us.”
“It’s time we take the power from aging white men,” she said.
Nearby, Martine Berkowitz agreed — in part. “Yep, they are behaving like toddlers. And they are aging white men. Who are fighting evil brown men. If it brings freedom to Iran then it was worth it. But if it doesn’t, then it was all for nothing.”
The post Yet again, Israel’s public shelters become sites of camaraderie amid steep danger appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu: ‘Our Forces Are Striking the Heart of Tehran With Increasing Strength’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu participates in the state memorial ceremony for the fallen of the Iron Swords War on Mount Herzl, in Jerusalem, Oct. 16, 2025. Photo: Alex Kolomoisky/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that Israeli forces had “eliminated the dictator Ali Khamenei” along with dozens of senior officials of Iran’s regime during a statement delivered from the roof of the Kirya, Israel’s defense headquarters.
“Yesterday, we eliminated the dictator Khamenei. Along with him, dozens of senior officials from the oppressive regime were eliminated,” Netanyahu said after a meeting with the Minister of Defense, the Chief of Staff, and the Director of Mossad. He added that he had issued instructions to continue the offensive.
According to Netanyahu, Israeli forces are “now striking at the heart of Tehran with increasing intensity,” a campaign he said will “increase further in the days to come.”
The Prime Minister also acknowledged the toll of the conflict on Israel, calling recent days “painful” and offering condolences to the families of victims in Tel Aviv and Beit Shemesh, while wishing a speedy recovery to those injured.
Netanyahu emphasized that the operation mobilizes “the full power of the Israel Defense Forces, like never before,” in order to “guarantee our existence and our future.” He also highlighted US support, noting “the assistance of my friend, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, and of the American military.”
“This combination of forces allows us to do what I have hoped to accomplish for 40 years: strike the terrorist regime right in the face,” Netanyahu concluded. “I promised it — and we will keep our word.”