Features
A chat with the son who wrote the viral obituary for his ‘plus-sized Jewish lady redneck’ mother
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — When Andy Corren’s mother, Renay Mandel Corren, died on Saturday in El Paso, Texas, at age 84, he did what many bereaved children with a creative bent would do: He wrote an obituary.
“A more disrespectful, trash-reading, talking and watching woman in NC, FL or TX was not to be found,” Corren wrote in the obituary that was published Wednesday in the Fayetteville Observer, the newspaper of the North Carolina city where Mandel Corren lived for many years.
He honored his “plus-sized Jewish lady redneck” mother thusly: “Hers was an itinerant, much-lived life, a Yankee Florida liberal Jewish Tough Gal who bowled ’em in Japan, rolled ’em in North Carolina and was a singularly unique parent.”
The loving yet warts-and-all obituary of the “zaftig good-time gal” quickly went viral after crime writer Sarah Weinman tweeted it on Wednesday evening to her 380,000-plus followers. This was much to the surprise of Corren, who describes himself in the obituary as “her favorite son, the gay one who writes catty obituaries in his spare time, Andy Corren, of — obviously — New York City.”
“When it comes to writing, you meet people where they are,” Corren told the New York Jewish Week, of how his words captured his mother’s essence. “That was the crux of my mother’s genius, it was to just completely meet you where you live.”
In the obituary, Corren describes his mother, who was known as Rosie, as someone who “played cards like a shark, bowled and played cribbage like a pro, and laughed with the boys until the wee hours, long after the last pin dropped.”
She was also, at some point during the 1980s, according to the tribute, “the 11th or 12th-ranked woman in cribbage in America, and while that could be a lie, it sounds great in print.”
Corren, a talent manager and writer who splits his time between New York and Los Angeles, said he never expected the obituary to go viral. In hindsight, though, he said he understands why the piece touched so many — and that it’s a fitting coda to his mother’s legacy.
“This time of the year, with the pandemic, the government, and the environment, things are feeling really bad. It’s nice to laugh, too,” he said. “That was my mother’s specialty, laughing in the face of quite a bit of tragedy.”
Corren is one of Mandel Corren’s six children, and said he grew up in the ’70s and ’80s on a military base in Fayetteville. The family is “100% Jewish,” he said, although he stressed they were non-denominational and not particularly observant. Funds were often low; in the obituary, Corren mentions his mother’s poor credit rating, multiple bankruptcies — and, intriguingly, an alleged affair with Larry King in the 1960s.
“Obviously there are poor Jews,” Corren said. “People just aren’t used to hearing that side of the story.”
Corren’s grandparents on his mother’s side were Hungarian Jews who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s who settled in Miami, and his father’s parents were Brooklyn Jews, themselves the children of Jewish immigrants.
His maternal grandparents, Corren explained, were deeply religious. His mother, however, was less spiritually or religiously invested in Judaism as much as she was culturally — actually, make that culinarily — interested. He remembers how his grandparents would bring Jewish deli items with them whenever they visited from Miami, and Corren took up the tradition when he moved out of North Carolina.
“My mother never lived near a Jewish deli,” he explained, “so I was constantly traveling with oily meats and stinky tongue from Katz’s in my checked suitcase to bring back for her.”
“She was a Jew, and she was a proud Jew,” Corren told the Jewish Week. “It was a humongous part of her self-image and her projected one, which is that she was a Jewish girl through and through, from McKeesport [Pennsylvania, where she was born] and until the day she died in El Paso.”
For those interested in a “very disrespectful and totally non-denominational memorial,” Corren and his siblings are planning a party at B&B Lanes in Fayetteville on May 10, 2022. “Bowling parties were a feature of our life growing up,” he said. “My mom worked at the bowling alley and that is exactly how we’re going to send her off on her birthday.”
Corren’s tribute to his mother has now been shared tens of thousands of times. Some people online said they plan to attend the memorial; others offered compliments such as, “This brief, brilliant obituary is funnier and more moving than most of the novels I’ve read in my lifetime.”
Twitter can be a “deranged cesspool,” Corren admits, “but it’s also this magical, charmed place where the story of a heavyset matriarch of this dirtbag American family justifiably gets her praises sung for surviving, for thriving, and for raising kids.”
“Please think of the brightly-frocked, frivolous, funny and smart Jewish redhead who is about to grift you, tell you a filthy joke, and for Larry King’s sake: LAUGH,” the obituary concludes. “Bye, Mommy. We loved you to bits.”
Features
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Features
Will the Democratic Socialists of America control the Democratic Party?
By HENRY SREBRNIK On June 23, radical Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates backed by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani won multiple Democratic Party primaries in New York City and elsewhere in the state. They also were victorious in other parts of the country.
The socialist victories in New York far surpassed anyone’s predictions. Who, three years ago, could have predicted that a Muslim anti-Zionist would be elected mayor of a city with 900,000 Jews and would lead insurgents to victories in that party’s primaries in 2026? Yet here we are.
Marxist Third Worldist ideology has moved out of the universities into the polling booths, after campus activism, divestment campaigns, and social media have reinforced an anti-Israeli framework for years. The DSA’s platform states it plainly: It pledges “support for Palestinian self-determination against Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.”
The mayor, a long-standing DSA member, worked overtime to appear at countless campaign events for a trio of candidates he dubbed “the Team”: Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander. The last two unseated incumbent Democratic congressmen. Mamdani has assembled a coalition in New York City that is capable of elevating like-minded candidates to office.
In the Seventh Congressional District, which straddles northern Brooklyn and southwestern Queens, an open primary to replace retiring progressive Rep. Nydia Velázquez saw State Assembly Member Claire Valdez’s’s defeat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. She was even further left than Mamdani himself. In the end, it was not even close: Valdez prevailed with 56.1 per cent of the vote to Reynoso’s 35.8 per cent.
In 2019, Valdez joined the DSA after seeing the rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and state senator Julia Salazar, both of whom were elected with the DSA’s help. Valdez emphasized her anti-Israel activism as a key part of her campaign. At events, her staff handed out signs that said “Free Palestine.” She launched her campaign alongside Mahmoud Khalil, a key anti-Israel leader at Columbia University that the Donald Trump administration has tried to deport.
Valdez referred to Israel’s war against Hamas as a “genocide” as early as October 13, 2023. She lambasted police for restraining anti-Israel mobs chanting “Globalize the Intifada” and waving Hezbollah flags outside a Brooklyn synagogue last June. “New Yorkers don’t just have the right to protest the sale of stolen Palestinian land — they have a responsibility to,” she declare. She has repeatedly criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She also boasted on social media of having “wiped my hand on the American flag.”
In the Thirteenth Congressional District, covering the upper Manhattan neighborhoods of Harlem, Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights and parts of the West Bronx, Darializa Avila Chevalier won a much more startling victory over Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a five-term incumbent Democratic Party power broker and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Espaillat’s campaign was heavily backed by AIPAC. Chevalier defied expectations and won by gaining 49 per cent to Espaillat’s 46 per cent. She told the crowd at her watch party that she had fought against the “Democratic machine.” Espaillat lost despite the backing of Democratic leaders in Congress and the state, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council.
When Chevalier, draped in a keffiyeh, first announced her candidacy in November of last year, few outside her immediate circle knew her name. But her message was clear: she presented herself as an organiser working to unite families torn apart by the immigration system and against “what we all know is a genocide in Palestine.”
Chevalier has publicly proclaimed her hatred for Israel, the United States, and “Western civilization” as a whole. She has called for the abolition of prisons, open borders and an end to deportations — even for people convicted of violent crimes. As a student at Columbia University, she was involved in Students for Justice in Palestine. In 2024, she returned to her alma mater to help organize an anti-Israel encampment that was ultimately disbanded by the police.
She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest: “We are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one,” it states.
The day after the October 7 attack, Chevalier attended an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square. “I can only say I have been advocating for the human rights of Palestinians for my adult life,” when asked about her attendance at the rally. Chevalier has said that her conversion to Islam was inspired by the Israel-Hamas war. Mamdani celebrated her win, describing Chevalier as a person “of clarity, of conscience and of conviction.”
The war was also on the minds of voters in former Comptroller Brad Lander’s race against another AIPAC-funded incumbent, Rep. Dan Goldman, in New York’s Tenth District, covering lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn. Both are Jewish, but Goldman has been a steadfast friend of Israel while Lander is the quintessential anti-Zionist and a key faction of his coalition was anti-Israel. It was a contest that laid bare the party’s divisions over the Israel-Gaza war.
At his son Marek’s bris, Lander gave a speech lambasting Israel. “We pray fervently that by the time you read this, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlements, the house demolitions, the violence will be history,” which was later reprinted in a 2003 book titled Wrestling with Zion. Lander enjoyed the night’s biggest victory, winning 65.8 per cent of the vote to Goldman’s 34 per cent. Many Democrats have suggested that Lander has proved useful to Mamdani and other leftists who have been accused of antisemitism for singling out the Jewish state for opprobrium.
In the run-up to Election Day, a chain of Brooklyn coffee shops called Poetica posted that it would have barred Goldman entry had they recognized him during a recent visit to their storefront. “We don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers,” Poetica declared. “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”
At the state level, seven of the eight candidates endorsed by the DSA for the New York State legislature also won their primary elections. One of them is Aber Kawas, a Queens-based community organizer. If she, as expected, wins in November, she will be the first Palestinian woman elected to state office in New York history.
“Were defeated congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat insufficiently anti-Trump?” asked Will Rahn, a senior editor and writer for The Free Press, rhetorically, in a June 26 column. “Of course not. They lost because they aren’t anti-Israel enough. ‘Free Palestine’ is now the binding issue on the left, the only thing that actually matters.” No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you refuse to fall in line on Israel, you risk being ostracized from communities you’ve long called home.
For most of the postwar era, support for Israel was one of the least controversial positions in Democratic Party politics. That consensus has not merely weakened; it has collapsed. Once viewed as a righteous anti-colonial cause, Zionism has been reframed by radical thinkers as the ideology of a colonial oppressor of stateless Palestinians. Opposition to Israel is now the litmus test in Democratic Party politics. “There’s a cliff, and we’re heading towards it,” warned Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton University professor who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush.
The DSA has now built an entire ecosystem that runs parallel to the official Democratic apparatus, equipped with their own consultant network, endorsing organizations, donors and even billionaires who back them.
A generation after Pat Buchanan was denounced as an antisemite by all proper liberals for saying things like “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory,” will the left now embrace him as a “premature antizionist”? Even satire can’t match this.
Think about it: Since October 7, Israel has done what every other country viciously attacked by implacable enemies throughout history has done: It has lashed back in a defensive war. This is a policy that any state that cared for the life of its citizens would have to adopt.
Yet Israel has become the “omnicause.” That’s why antisemitism and antizionism are two sides of the same coin: hatred of Jews. Jews around the world aren’t being attacked because of Israel. Israel is itself being condemned because it’s Jewish.
American Jews have been blindsided by this, as the French writer Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells us in a brilliant article, “Stand Up,” Tablet, July 6, 2026. “When anti-Jewish hostility arrives wrapped in the language of liberation, antiracism, decolonization, and human rights –when it emerges among allies, colleagues, students, professional peers, or other minority communities — the disorientation is deeper. It is inside the world in which one has built a life. It speaks in familiar accents. It borrows cherished values.”
In “A Profound Question Haunting Jews Today,” New York Times, July 6, 2026, Nicholas Lemann, the former dean of the Columbia University Journalism School, agrees. He writes that for half a century or more, American Jews could achieve, “through being successful, culturally Jewish, Zionist, liberal and not especially observant,” a status that elsewhere has persistently eluded them.
“This set of certainties has evaporated. Today, Israel is the pariah nation of the world, and ‘Zionist’ has become an epithet, something it’s unacceptable to be, at least in progressive circles,” where most Jews have usually found themselves.
So, are the Democrats going to become America’s anti-Israel party? And then what?
Henry Srebrnik is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
Discover Your Ultimate Smooth at Sets on Corydon: Nanoplasty vs. Keratin vs. Japanese Straightening
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