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Jewish marriage rites are robust. Now a rabbi is innovating rituals for Jews who divorce.
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — For Lyssa Jaye, throwing the wood chips into the Tuolumne River felt in many ways familiar to the tashlich ritual performed on Rosh Hashanah. But rather than casting off her sins, she was tossing away feelings: shame, resentment, anger.
They were the emotions that had taken residence inside Jaye since her divorce eight years ago, along with a sense of failure. And she had come to a Jewish retreat to rid herself of them.
“I’ve been carrying around these feelings for years now,” Jaye said. “I have a completely different life now, and I needed to let them go.”
Jaye was taking part in Divorce & Discovery: A Jewish Healing Retreat, the first-ever gathering in a series conceived by Rabbi Deborah Newbrun as part of her training, held this month at Camp Tawonga in the Bay Area.
One of the requirements at the Pluralistic Rabbinical Seminary, where Newbrun was ordained last year in the first graduating class, “was that each of us had to do an innovation, or something that didn’t exist before,” she said.
Newbrun, who directed Camp Tawonga for more than two decades, has been recognized for innovative programming for such achievements as initiating Tawonga’s LGBT family camp and founding its wilderness department. She even won a prestigious 2018 Covenant Award for Jewish educators. But as she started thinking about how to fulfill the seminary requirement, her first thought was, “I don’t have any ideas left in me.”
Then she began reflecting back on her divorce years earlier. She remembered how she had approached numerous rabbis and colleagues in search of Jewish support around the grief she felt. And how they all came up empty-handed.
That’s when she realized: “I can put together something meaningful and helpful for people going through divorce.”
From the moment participants arrived at Camp Tawonga near Yosemite, they knew this would be no ordinary Jewish retreat. At the opening event, all of the facilitators, several clergy members and a therapist shared their own divorce stories, “to set the standard and normalize vulnerability, transparent sharing and establish that we all know what it’s like to have a marriage end,” Newbrun said.
Most participants were from the Bay Area, with a handful from farther afield. They were in different life stages, from those in their 30s dealing with custody battles over young children, to empty nesters in their 60s. Some had separated from their partners years ago, while others had gone their separate ways more recently. Some split amicably; a good many did not. But all had come up against a lack of Jewish resources or support when navigating this major life passage.
Rabbi Deborah Newbrun, the founder of Divorce and Discovery at the recent weekend. (Photo/Margot Yecies)
Jaye said she left no stone unturned in seeking out support, an experience Newbrun said she heard echoed by many participants. Jaye attended a retreat at a local meditation center. She read self-help books. She joined a support group for divorcees. She went to therapy.
And while they all helped in different ways, none was specifically Jewish.
“I knew I needed some kind of spiritual way forward,” she said. “I needed to do this in my own language, with my own people.”
Even though the retreat came nearly a decade years after Jaye’s divorce, “it was profound. It felt like coming home, and that this is what I needed all along. This model could be extremely powerful. The rituals we did could be taught in rabbinical schools or to Jewish educators so it’s not just ‘sign this get and goodbye,’” she said, referring to the Jewish divorce document.
Rather than create new rituals, Newbrun and her facilitators took familiar Jewish rituals and retooled them.
The tashlich ritual, led by Newbrun and Maggid Jhos Singer, had a call-and-response portion, and participants also could call out what they personally wanted to cast off. “One person ‘tashliched’ their wedding ring into the river and felt it was such a perfect place to let it go!” said Newbrun.
An optional immersion in the Tuolumne River followed. Jaye, who years ago went to the mikvah alone, with only the attendant there for support, said there was no comparison with how much more healing it felt performing the ritual in community.
A session on sitting shiva for one’s marriage, led by Rabbi Sue Reinhold, allowed participants to share and mourn the loss of what they missed most about being married. That resonated for Robyn Lieberman, who does not attend synagogue services but went to every session at the retreat on innovating Jewish rituals.
“I did need to mourn what I’m losing,” said Lieberman, who had been married to an Israeli. “We had a very public, open house around Jewish religion, and a constant Israeli identity, which fulfilled my Jewish needs.”
Rabbi Jennie Chabon of Congregation B’nai Tikvah in Walnut Creek reflected on how much time she has spent with couples preparing for their wedding day, both in premarital counseling and in planning the event, and on how many marriage-related topics are covered in rabbinical school.
“And when it comes to divorce? Nothing,” Chabon said. “We’re all out here on our own trying to figure out how to wander through it.”
She was tasked with creating a havdalah ceremony with a divorce theme, in which she reimagined the wine, spices and flame typically used to mark a division between Shabbat and the rest of the week.
“There’s a fire that burns within each of us, and that flame doesn’t go out,” said Chabon, 47. “When you’re married for a long time, your identity, energy and spirit is so woven into that of another.” Her ritual was meant to affirm that “you are on fire just as you are, and you’re a blessing as an individual in the world. You don’t need a partnership or family to be whole.”
Even the Shabbat Torah service was on theme.
Rabbi Jennie Chabon reads from the Torah during a service at the Divorce and Discovery retreat. (Photo/Margot Yecies)
Rather than focusing on Noah’s emergence from the ark after the flood, Chabon spoke about a lesser-known section of the week’s Torah portion, in which Noah builds a fire and offers a sacrifice to God. But if the entire earth was drenched from the flood, Chabon asked, what did he burn?
“The answer is he must have burned the ark,” Chabon said in recalling her talk at the retreat. “What does that mean for people going through this incredibly painful and tender time in their lives, when what was once a safe container and secure and protected them, they have to burn it down in order to start life anew?
“This is a perfect rebirth metaphor. But what’s being birthed is a new self and a new identity in the world as a single person,” Chabon said. “You have to release and let go of what was to make room for the blessing for who you’re going to become.”
At a ritual “hackathon” workshop presented by Newbrun, participants suggested standing during Kaddish at synagogue to mourn their marriages, and offering their children a Friday night blessing that they are whole whether they are at either parent’s home.
Not all of the sessions centered on Jewish ritual. In a session on the Japanese art of kintsugi, or mending broken pottery, attendees made vessels whose cracks they fixed with putty, symbolizing that beauty can be found in imperfection. Many danced in a Saturday-night silent disco.
Everyone was assigned to a small group, or havurah, that they met with daily, so they could establish deeper connections within the larger cohort.
“To have gone through some of these practices was very meaningful to me,” said Lieberman. “It’s not like I put a seal on my marriage and wrapped it up in a bow and put it behind me, but it was a nice catharsis for completing a transition that I’ve been very thoughtful about.”
Newbrun aims to recreate the retreat in communities around the country. Both Jaye and Lieberman said they found value in being in community with people “who get it,” without the judgment they often face.
“I was a little skeptical that all I’d have in common with people was that we were Jewish and divorced, and that that wouldn’t be enough for me to form a relationship,” said Lieberman. “But having the willingness to talk about it and explore it did open up a lot of very vulnerable conversations. The expert facilitation really made us think about the fact that divorce is not about your paper [certificate], it’s about reexamining the direction of your life and who you want to be.”
A version of this piece originally ran in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is reprinted with permission.
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Northwestern agrees to pay $75M, void encampment deal to end Trump’s antisemitism investigation
(JTA) — Northwestern University will pay $75 million to the Trump administration to recover nearly $800 million in federal funding frozen by an ongoing antisemitism investigation, in the second-largest agreement of its kind.
The deal, which will last for three years, also means the Chicago-area private university will no longer abide by an earlier agreement it struck with pro-Palestinian protesters that included a commitment to dedicate space on campus for Muslim and North African students.
“The cost of a legal fight was too high and the risks too grave,” the offices of Northwestern’s interim president Henry Bienen posted in a lengthy statement explaining why the school capitulated to Trump’s demands. “If our $790 million in federal research funding remained frozen, the freeze threatened to gut our labs, drive away faculty, and set back entire fields of discovery. Our overarching goal is to protect people and preserve the institution, and to enable life-saving research to continue.”
Northwestern’s deal with the Trump administration was announced late Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.
“The Northwestern agreement is a huge win for current and future Northwestern students, alumni, faculty, and for the future of American higher education,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement praising the agreement. “The deal cements policy changes that will protect students and other members of the campus from harassment and discrimination, and it recommits the school to merit-based hiring and admissions.”
Northwestern is the sixth university to strike an agreement with the Trump administration to end investigations and free up federal funding; its payout is second only to Columbia’s $221 million. Trump’s team has continued to apply pressure on schools like Harvard and UCLA to compel them to sign similar agreements. Critics of the agreements have compared them to shakedowns, questioned their relevance to fighting antisemitism, and claimed they threaten academic freedom.
Northwestern denied that final allegation, with Bienen stating, “Northwestern runs Northwestern.” Yet the terms of the agreement also address other conservative culture-war topics unrelated to antisemitism, including policies on race-based hiring and transgender athletes.
Unique to Northwestern’s deal is its voiding of what the school refers to as the earlier “Deering Meadow agreement” with its protesters, which dated back to 2024. The school’s former president Michael Schill, who is Jewish, had struck the agreement in order to compel the pro-Palestinian encampment to disperse peacefully without involving law enforcement.
Schill received vociferous criticism from some corners, including Jewish staff and prominent alumni such as Jonathan Greenblatt, who felt the agreement was rewarding antisemitic behavior. He was soon forced to testify before Congress, and this fall stepped down from the presidency.
Now, following the agreement with the Trump administration, Northwestern is no longer offering what had been billed as a temporary space for Muslim and North African students that it created as a result of the encampment agreement, and it is no longer committing to building a promised permanent space for those students.
The school’s leading pro-Palestinian student groups did not immediately respond publicly to the deal with the Trump administration. A request for comment to the school’s Jewish Voice for Peace chapter, which was a member of the encampment coalition that struck the now-invalidated Deering Meadow Agreement, was not immediately returned.
The Chicago Jewish Alliance, the Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern, and other Jewish activist groups praised the agreement. CAAN, a primarily alumni-driven group that also lists Northwestern Hillel and Chabad as partners, thanked what it called “our federal partners” for “their continued commitment to protecting Jewish students and faculty.”
Under the new agreement, Northwestern has agreed to implement a climate survey of the type that has surfaced concerns about antisemitism on other campuses. A detailed section of the agreement dealing with Jewish students reaffirms a host of other policies that the school says it was already implementing, including specific prohibitions on protest activities and on-campus demonstrations. A Jewish advisory council to the president, established after the dissolution of a similar advisory council effort under Schill, will continue as well.
“Over the past two years, Northwestern has implemented numerous measures to strengthen our campus environment: new training requirements, expanded reporting systems and greater support for Jewish students. All of those measures predated this agreement,” the school’s FAQ page states. “Incidents have significantly declined as a result.”
But even following the leadership change, Northwestern’s campus has experienced tensions around antisemitism. This fall a few dozen incoming students refused to take a new mandatory antisemitism training session, saying the framing was “unscholarly” and “morally harmful.” Those students were blocked from enrollment following a federal judge order.
The post Northwestern agrees to pay $75M, void encampment deal to end Trump’s antisemitism investigation appeared first on The Forward.
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How a troublemaking private school dropout became the Johnny Appleseed of tech
David Lerner was a difficult mensch.
Lerner passed away on Nov. 12 at the age of 72 and in the days that followed some who were close to the man recounted his kindnesses but they also used the word “difficult” to describe him.
“He was a difficult man but he was still my guy,” his wife Lorren Erstad told me.
Jan Albert, who met Lerner when they were both teenagers volunteering at the countercultural radio station WBAI, posted on Facebook: “I will always remember David for his immense generosity and the fact that he was an unfailingly fair and ethical (if difficult) human being.”
And Harold Berkowitz, who volunteered with Lerner at the Lifelong Peer Learning Program (LP2), offered perhaps the most eloquent description of how he was difficult. Berkowitz wrote that Lerner was “gruff but kind, curmudgeonly but sweet, blunt but tactful, modest yet very knowing.”
As for the mensch that was David Lerner, Ruth Mackaman, another LP2 volunteer, recalled that during the COVID lockdown Lerner got the organization up and running on Zoom, then shelled out his own money to buy iPads for at least ten members who didn’t have computers. He then proceeded to pedal around Manhattan and Brooklyn on a Citibike and give them away. This prompted one of his friends to joke about Lerner being the Johnny Appleseed of tech.
From time to time, Lerner would ask me about the radio stories I was working on. When I told him I had just finished a piece about a young woman in the South Bronx afflicted with cerebral palsy who had no voluntary movement of her arms and legs, the Johnny Appleseed of tech sent her a new iPad.
He was a baal tzedakah, a master of charity, and lived his life by the most important line in our holy texts: Justice, justice, thou shalt seek. The line comes from the Torah, specifically the Book of Deuteronomy, chapter 16, verse 20. Go look it up.
Most New Yorkers know Lerner from Tekserve, the independent Macintosh computer store he cofounded in Chelsea and helped to run for close to 30 years. Over the course of that time the business grew from occupying half of his partner Dick Demenus’ loft to a cavernous 25,000-square-foot storefront on West 23rd Street.
After news of Lerner’s passing reached them, former Tekserve employees and customers all over these United States shared memories of Lerner the mensch online. Former Tekserve workers thanked Lerner for being such an uncommon boss. And not just because he and Demenus provided health insurance and free lunch to their employees.
One Tekserve alum recalled that when his father passed away, Lerner offered to cover his airfare to North Dakota to spread the man’s ashes. Another who now runs a store in Scranton, PA wrote: “He taught me more about business than anyone.” A former Tekserve customer praised Lerner for dispensing advice on the NY Macintosh Users Group (NYMUG) bulletin board before the web existed. Another remembered that Tekserve printed and gave away the booklets Lerner wrote with answers to Frequently Asked Questions about keeping a Mac running.
Perhaps Lerner’s Tekserve partner Demenus put it best in a poem he wrote and posted on Facebook — “So many of us have counted on you for so much.”
Lerner and Demenus ran Tekserve as a capitalist enterprise — in 2011, the store had $100 million in revenue from sales and services — but the impact of their years at WBAI was apparent in the diversity of Tekserve’s workforce.
In the 1970’s, WBAI was housed in a church where it became home to a bunch of Jewish troublemakers. Bob Fass, who helped start the Yippies, referred to his radio audience as “The Cabal.” Margot Adler, the granddaughter of Austrian psychotherapist Alfred Adler, went to Mississippi to register African-American voters during the civil rights movement. And the Yeshiva of Flatbush graduate Paul Fischer anchored the station’s legendary Vietnam War summary before moving on to write for Dan Rather at CBS.
In 1969, Lerner dropped out of an elite private school on the Upper West Side and joined the fun at WBAI. He was 16 at the time. He and Demenus worked out of the tiny engineering office at the church which was identified by a sign that read “Department of Redundancy Department.” Back then, the only thing to indicate that Lerner was another troublemaker was the letter of reprimand sent to his parents from the management of the Peter Cooper Village housing complex. Young David was cited for unauthorized use of a water gun on the premises. The framed letter hung on the wall of his Manhattan apartment many years later.
There is no doubt that there are some who feel that it was a subversive act to run a profitable business like Tekserve and treat your workers like they were family.
Derek Davis, who started the pro audio division at Tekserve and is now the head archery coach at Columbia University, described Lerner as “the most honest and fair person” he has ever worked for. The day Davis came into the store for an interview Lerner hired him on the spot.
“It was years later,” Davis wrote on Facebook, “that I figured out that David wasn’t hiring workers. He was hiring family members.
David Lerner sent financial support to an eclectic assortment of non-profits. He contributed to the Hebrew Free Loan Association and, it turns out The Forward. But his wife Lorren said his favorite charity was the Catholic Worker, which may seem an odd entity for a Jew to support.
But Lerner knew that the Catholic Worker fed, sheltered and clothed the poor less than a mile away from his West Village home.
A memorial for David Lerner will take place on Dec. 8 at Poster House, the museum that now occupies Tekserve’s home on West 23rd Street.
When a Jew like David Lerner leaves us, it is customary to say May his memory be a blessing.
The expression comes from the Book of Proverbs 10:7. Go look it up.
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Pro-Israel Event Was Cancelled at Brooklyn Law School, While Palestinian ‘Celebration’ Was Allowed to Proceed
Brooklyn Law School. Photo: Wiki Commons.
The Jewish Law Students Association (JLSA) at Brooklyn Law School recently attempted to host an on-campus event featuring Hillel Fuld, an Israeli tech columnist, global speaker, and pro-Israel advocate.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) then sent a letter to the administration that also circulated around campus, accusing Fuld (and by extension JLSA) of such extreme Islamophobia that his mere presence would pose a threat to Muslim and Palestinian students. While a few other student groups endorsed SJP’s statement, these claims are categorically false. The administration effectively caved to the angry mob, and members of JSLA let them off the hook.
Ultimately we were forced to cancel the event in all but name, supposedly because the national accreditation committee was visiting the same day, and the school could not offer adequate safety resources or administrative support. Specifically, they explained that our event required administrators to be present to support sensitive students and make immediate decisions, but that none were available due to the accreditation committee.
The problem with this explanation is that no other group’s events were given the same treatment. What’s worse is that when SJP went ahead with their now celebratory “protest” — itself arguably a violation of the Time, Place and Manner school policies — not only did the school provide security, but multiple administrators showed up to monitor the situation. When I spoke with one of them, she rebuffed my concerns about Jewish students being afraid to be on campus due to this sort of behavior. So much for neutrality.
SJP boasted in an email to their list-serve that “this outcome is exactly the kind of awareness and action our coalition was created to achieve.”
There is a pervasive double standard at my school that has emboldened the local anti-Zionist ideological movement on campus. The latest incident involving the Jewish Law Students Association has shown that it doesn’t matter if pro-Israel Jewish students follow all the rules and SJP actively breaks them.The outcome is predetermined: SJP is supported, and we are marginalized and pushed off campus.
Before SJP hosted a vigil on October 7, 2025 that disregarded Hamas’ war crimes, JSLA requested to move it to another day so our community could mourn, but they refused and the school said nothing. Last April, they hosted a so-called “Passover Liberation Seder” on campus featuring a woman in a keffiyeh — an act of cultural appropriation mocking an important religious holiday to demonize Zionist Jews.
That same month, multiple bathrooms were vandalized with “Free Palestine” and nothing substantial seems to have been done about it.
If the school considered Hillel Fuld’s Tweets too controversial, there are dozens of National SJP tweets that fall into the same category. But that doesn’t matter to school administrators.
Unfortunately, this situation isn’t unique to Brooklyn Law School, and Jewish students across the country have responded in various ways. I believe that our community needs to fight this head on to ensure that antisemites like SJP are not permitted to discriminate with impunity, and to prevent incidents like this from becoming the status quo. But there are some who have chosen a more passive route. They believe that trusting the administration and taking a soft stance on SJP’s behavior will eventually ease the targets on our backs.
While I sympathize with that line of thinking, it is ultimately a mistake.
It is easy to believe that if you behave in a respectable manner, then people will respect you in return. As someone who believes in the inherent goodness of people, I would love to be able to assume that others would treat me fairly. Unfortunately, SJP will not stop antagonizing us, and we cannot expect the administration to stop them for us.
Thankfully, some members of JLSA agree with me. We have upcoming events and will continue hosting speakers. Each one of these will be a test for the administration to prove that they aren’t a bunch of cowards or low-key antisemites. We will not stay silent in the face of these inconsistent applications of policies and seemingly arbitrary constraints.
Instead of trying to personally reassure alumni that there isn’t a systemic antisemitism problem, maybe Brooklyn Law School should come out with a statement admonishing SJP for their behavior.
The discrimination Jewish students like me are facing will continue until the pressure to abandon it exceeds the pressure to maintain it. There’s a fundamental difference between imposing censorship and demanding equal treatment, which is exactly what I’m calling for. As it says in Pirkei Avot ,“If I am not for myself, who will be?”
Robert Dweck serves as Vice-President of the Jewish Law Students Association and the Federalist Society at Brooklyn Law School. A second-year law student and CAMERA Coalition member, his work focuses on antisemitism, campus climate, and freedom of expression.