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The Jewish holiday of Purim has gone to the dogs
(New York Jewish Week) — The American Kennel Club’s Museum of the Dog, just two blocks south of Grand Central, can boast many things, including an extensive library about dog breeds and one of the world’s largest collections of dog-themed art.
As of this past weekend, it’s also a place where dogs and their owners can celebrate Jewish holidays together.
As part of the museum’s “Furry Fridays” program — a biweekly-ish event in which four-footed friends are welcomed inside the galleries — Sarah Moshenberg, the museum’s manager of learning and engagement, created the institution’s first-ever Jewish event: A “Pawrim” party for Purim, in which humans and canines were invited to dress up in costumes, socialize with one another and eat hamantaschen (yes, there were hamantaschen for dogs).
“Being Jewish myself, I was really excited to do a Jewish event,” Moshenberg, dressed in a bright pink homemade flamingo costume, told the New York Jewish Week. “I would love to do more holidays; more opportunities for all sorts of folks who celebrate all different types of holidays to come here and enjoy them with their their dogs — that’s the excitement.”
“I have three human children,” she said. “My oldest is 8, so I love taking them to the Purim celebration at shul, and then getting to do the parade, watching them in their costumes, showing off… Being able to do that here, but with your dog, is really fun.”
The Purim party, Moshenberg explained, was an outgrowth of an upcoming Furry Friday that happened to fall on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17. In planning the events calendar, Moshenberg had the idea for a “St. Pawtrick’s” party and, from there, the punny themes came easily — Feb. 17, for example, was “Mardi Paws” in honor of Mardi Gras.
Pawrim, as it happens, was inspired by my best girl Shayna Maydele, the adorable Upper East Side-dwelling white coton de Tulear with a charming Instagram account whom the New York Jewish Week called “possibly the most Jewish dog in New York” last year.
“I saw the article on Shayna Maydele and I really wanted to do something with her,” Moshenberg said. With a Furry Friday scheduled just three days ahead of Purim (which begins tonight!) — and once Shabbat availability was cleared with Shayna Maydele’s “manager,” Heidi Silverstone — the party was a go.
On Friday evening, Shayna Maydele, dressed as an aviator for the occasion, took to her first-ever party hosting duties with aplomb. She and her pal Vito, a shih-poo dressed in a penguin costume, gamely posed for the “paw-parazzi” on the museum’s stairs.
“We came for Shayna Maydele!” said Vito’s owner Mina Kim, a dentist who lives in Midtown. “She’s just the sweetest dog.”
Kim, who is not Jewish — “I grew up in Bergen County; I’ve been around Jewish people my whole life!” — added that “doggie hamantaschen” was the second major draw.
Henry, a mixed-breed pup wearing a bark mitzvah outfit, enjoys the Purim festivities. (Courtesy The AKC Museum of the Dog)
As Kim and I chatted, an adorable mutt named Henry — dapper in a very “Wall Street”-esque pinstriped suit — entered the scene and immediately demanded belly rubs. “I couldn’t find his costume,” his owner, Robyn, who declined to provide her last name, told me. “I just grabbed a shirt — he wore it to a bark mitzvah.”
Robyn, who lives in Murray Hill, said she and Henry had previously been to a Furry Friday event before. “He needs to learn his Jewish roots,” she said, adding, “it’s something to do.”
Upstairs, in the museum’s spacious third-floor gallery, klezmer music played quietly in the background as dogs sniffed one another’s tushes and owners gushed over the adorable panoply of costumed canines. Among them was Finley, a papillon who was dressed as an airplane — unintentionally twinning with the dog of the hour! — and Loli, a tiny shih-poo who was dressed as was Sulley from “Monsters, Inc.”
Liz Karpen and her sister, Rebecca, were there with their Havanese, Allen Bader Ginsberg, who was dressed in a homemade hamantaschen costume. “I was already going to make her a costume, but it was just going to be to wander around in the house — maybe I would strut her around the street in it,” said Liz, who learned about the party from Shayna Maydele’s Instagram. “This gave me an excuse to make something that people are going to see.”
The sisters have additional plans for the holiday, but this was their only opportunity to celebrate Purim with Allen. “I tried finding other things for dogs, but there’s not much,” Liz said. “I also didn’t want to assume this costume would last more than one night.”
Sisters Rebecca, left, and Liz Karpen with their Havanese, Allen, in a homemade hamantaschen costume. (Courtesy The AKC Museum of the Dog)
Shara Safer, a law school student who lives in the Village, had learned about the party while at a dog park with her shih tzu, Clem, and immediately knew they had to attend. “I really need to get more involved in Jewish events,” she said, adding that she’s “not super practicing” right now. For Purim itself, Safer said she may visit her family and make some hamantaschen.
“I would love it if I could bring him to shul,” she said of Clem, who was dressed as Cerberus — the three-headed dog that guards the underworld in Greek mythology. (The clever costume, handmade by Safer, took “too long” to make, she said.)
Indeed, much like Moshenberg pointed out, being able to celebrate the Jewish holiday with their dog — instead of having to leave him or her at home — was a draw mentioned by several partygoers. Upper West Siders Andres and Nicole Gannon said they came to the party because they were excited by “the opportunity to have him in costume and celebrate Purim,” said Andres Gannon. Their pug, Monster, had been dressed as the Beast from “Beauty and the Beast,” but they had removed his costume before heading out into the drizzly evening.
When asked about other plans they had for the holiday, they said: “This is our Purim celebration.”
As for Shayna Maydele, Silverstone said in an email after the event that her pup “loved interacting with the other dogs. It was very different than her regular playing in a dog park — all of the dogs were leashed, and it was in a museum setting. Since it was new to her, she had so much fun exploring.”
“It definitely made me feel good about what I am doing on social media, since sometimes I wonder whether it is a productive use of my time, posting photos of my dog,” Silverstone said. “However, when I see the happiness it brings to people, and the awareness it brings about the goodness of Judaism, I realize that it is definitely worthwhile.”
As for future Jewish events at the museum, Moshenberg said she’s open to departing from the Furry Fridays routine. “I would love to do this again,” she said. “I also think I wouldn’t have it on Shabbos next year — I would plan something around it so we wouldn’t have a conflict in that case, and we could definitely invite more of the Jewish community.”
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The post The Jewish holiday of Purim has gone to the dogs appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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When Assassination Attempts Stop Shocking Us
US President Donald Trump takes questions from media at a press briefing at the White House, following a shooting incident during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 25, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
The villagers of Chelm once faced a serious problem.
A wooden bridge at the edge of town had a loose plank in the middle. People kept stepping on it, falling through, and breaking their legs. The town elders gathered for an emergency meeting. Some said, “We should put up warning signs!” Others said, “We should add lights along the bridge!”
Then one leader stood up and said, “I have the answer! Let’s build a hospital at the bottom of the bridge!”
This, I fear, is where America stands today.
Just a few days ago, during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., a gunman rushed past a security checkpoint and opened fire. The President, the First Lady, and members of the Cabinet were evacuated. The suspect, a 31-year-old teacher with an engineering degree, had written a manifesto targeting administration officials, and investigators later found anti-Trump and anti-Christian rhetoric on his social media accounts.
Regardless of where one stands politically, this news should shake our very core. A civilized society cannot become comfortable with such evil acts of violence. And yet, by morning, the conversation had already shifted: More security. Stricter gun laws. Better screening.
All of it sounded like building another hospital at the bottom of the bridge — because while some of these ideas are worthy and necessary, they do not answer the deeper question that should be at the forefront of our minds: How did we arrive at a moment when evil has become so banal that it no longer shocks us?
Many blame all sorts of reasons — from political extremism to mental illness, from social media to economic anxiety — and while each of these may contain parts of the truth, none addresses the root of the problem. Because the broken plank is not only political. It is a crisis of the nation’s soul.
Shortly after the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 at the same Washington Hilton in Washington D.C., the Lubavitcher Rebbe addressed the nation with remarkable clarity. The Rebbe rejected the explanation that crime grows from deprivation and poverty, as some suggested. The Rebbe noted that Reagan’s attacker lacked nothing materially. The real issue, the Rebbe said, was that he lacked education. Not education of the mind alone, but education of the conscience.
A child must grow up knowing that there is “an Eye that sees and an Ear that hears,” that human life is sacred, that actions matter even when no one is watching, and that freedom is not permission to do whatever one wishes, but responsibility to do what is right.
Without that foundation, a society may produce people of dazzling intellectual brilliance, but with almost no goodness to guide it.
Alas, history has already shown us where that road leads. The Nazi era proved that reason alone can rationalize anything, even evil. Germany of the 20th century produced philosophers, scientists, poets, and composers. And yet, it also produced Auschwitz.
In Schindler’s List, there is a haunting scene during the liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto in which a little girl, hiding near a piano, is shot by an SS guard. As her tiny body lies in blood, another guard sits down and begins to play the piano. One guard asks the other, “Is that Bach?” His friend replies, “No. Mozart.” And they continue to discuss the music as if nothing had happened. That was Nazi Germany: murder alongside Mozart.
Elie Wiesel once asked the Lubavitcher Rebbe how he could still believe in God after Auschwitz. The Rebbe responded with a question of his own: “In whom do you expect me to believe after Auschwitz? In man?”
Because without God and the absolute truth of His Bible, morality becomes negotiable. Without grounding ourselves in Divine commandments such as “Do not murder,” even cultured and educated people can descend into evil.
We must act responsibly in the face of real threats, increase security, and pass legislation where needed. But if we truly want to prevent the next attack, we must repair the bridge itself. And that repair begins with teaching our children not only how to think, but how to live. Not only how to succeed, but how to serve. Not only how to respect life, but how to recognize “the Lord your God” Who gives us life and Who commands us to protect it in ourselves and in others.
A few years ago, here in Arizona, I had the privilege of working with Governor Doug Ducey and others to help bring a statewide Moment of Silence to the beginning of the school day. Just one quiet minute in which students can pause and remember that life has purpose, that actions have meaning, and that there is something greater than themselves.
This responsibility belongs to all of us. Adults and children alike must know that kindness is not optional, that words matter, and that every human being — even those who are different from us — is created in the image of God. And the simple moral truths that built our civilization must once again guide the way we live: “Honor thy father and thy mother.” “Love your fellow as yourself.” “Do not stand idly by while your fellow’s blood is being shed.”
Let us repair the bridge. Let us return to God and His guidance, and strengthen the soul of our country. For when a nation strengthens its soul, it not only survives. It rises.
Rabbi Pinchas Allouche is the founding Rabbi of Congregation Beth Tefillah and the founding dean and spiritual leader of the Nishmat Adin High School in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he resides with his wife, Esther, and 10 children.
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The Conspiracy Architecture Doesn’t Need Jews: It Just Prefers Them
A 3D-printed miniature model of Elon Musk and the X logo are seen in this illustration taken Jan. 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
Within hours of the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD), a comment on The Young Turks’ social media pages offered one theory of the case.
The shooting, the commenter explained, was the work of “the family that owns and brags it founded that country and stole our fed and our way of tying our currency to its value in gold.”
Another, on the same channel, called it “another convincing Mossad-CIA joint charade.”
A sitting president had nearly been shot at a press dinner in Washington. The shooter, a 31-year-old California tutor named Cole Tomas Allen, was already in custody. None of this had any plausible connection to Israel, Jews, or the Federal Reserve. The audience supplied that connection anyway.
At NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism, my colleagues and I collected and annotated 2,000 YouTube comments from 10 major US news outlets in the first 24 hours after the attack — left, center, and right — and compared them to our earlier work on the Charlie Kirk killing in September 2025 and on the saturation of antisemitic conspiracy during last summer’s US-Israeli campaign against Iran.
What we found is a structural shift in how online publics process political violence in real time. It is not, on its surface, what a Jewish reader might expect. It is more troubling than that.
At first glance, what I am about to describe might look like a decline in antisemitism. It is not.
In the Kirk corpus, roughly three in 10 comments performed conventional blame attribution: it was the Left’s fault, the Right’s fault, the media’s fault, Kirk’s own rhetoric. At the WHCD, that figure collapses to one in 20. Conspiracy theories — false flag claims, staged-event narratives, claims that Trump himself or the security state orchestrated the shooting — jump from a marginal six percent to roughly one in four. Within a single news cycle, the question being answered shifted from *who is responsible?* to *did this even happen?*
And it shifted across the entire spectrum.
At CBS, the most-engaged comment in the entire corpus — 1,887 likes — read: “That’s a helluva way to get out of the dinner berating.” The second most-engaged, 1,875 likes: “And the band played on.” A Titanic metaphor, Trump as the doomed captain.
One-word assertions reached the engagement-leading tier without any humor cover at all: “STAGED” at CBS, 659 likes. “Faker than 3 dollar bill BS” at CNN, 1,233 likes.
The same logic ran in the opposite direction at Fox News, where the staging frame was inverted into “MAGA-HOAX” — left-leaning commenters arriving on the Fox thread accused MAGA itself of having staged the attack. Different villain, identical architecture: a manufactured event, a hidden orchestrator, a perpetrator framed as a patsy, security-camera footage read as evidence of staging.
The motives stacked on top of one another — mutually exclusive, but co-existing without friction. Trump staged it to escape being roasted at the dinner. Trump staged it to manufacture sympathy for his $400 million ballroom expansion. Trump staged it to distract from issues like the Iran war, or from his collapsing poll numbers.
This is what a comment section now looks like in the hours after a political-violence event in the United States. Not partisan blame. Not grief. Not even shock. Instead, we see conspiracy as the default register of interpretation, stable across editorial positions.
What does this have to do with Jews?
Six weeks ago, during the US-Israeli campaign against Iran, the same architecture was running through the same comment sections — and the orchestrator slot was filled by Israel, by Mossad, by AIPAC, by “the family that founded that country,” by Trump-as-Israeli-asset. The mechanics were identical. What rotated was the villain.
This is what Jewish readers need to see clearly. The conspiratorial machinery that saturates American comment sections after political violence is not ideologically fixed. It is a template. It takes whatever villain the moment makes available — Israel during Iran coverage, Trump and the CIA at the WHCD, regardless of context, because that audience already carries the frame.
Antisemitism, in other words, has become structurally optional but instantly available. The infrastructure no longer needs a Jewish orchestrator to function. It still has a slot ready for one.
That is why a comparatively low antisemitism rates at most outlets this week is not a reprieve. It is a measurement of which villain the architecture happened to reach for. The infrastructure built up during the Iran coverage has not gone away. It has gone latent. The next event that supplies a Jewish or Israeli connection will reactivate it instantly, because the architecture itself was never dismantled.
One qualifier. Our corpus closed on April 26, before reports surfaced of writings recovered from Allen’s hotel room. What those documents revealed about his motive, they cannot affect the finding here. We are not diagnosing the shooter. We are diagnosing the commentariat.
Two things follow.
For those tracking online antisemitism: monitoring systems calibrated only to antisemitic markers will systematically miss what is actually happening. The threat to Jews is not located only in explicitly antisemitic comments. It is located in the universalization of the conspiratorial template that produces them whenever the conditions are right.
For those thinking about platform governance: we already know how to see this in close to real time. The bottleneck is not technical. It is institutional. Moving from documentation to early warning and intervention is a political choice, not a research problem.
The empty chair after the evacuation was Trump’s. The chair where antisemitism used to sit in this kind of discourse is, at most outlets this week, also empty. Neither absence is permanent.
Dr. Matthias J. Becker is AddressHate Research Scholar at New York University’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the founder and lead of Decoding Antisemitism, the largest study of online antisemitism conducted in Europe, and now directs its successor project, Decoding Hate, at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism.
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‘Aliyah Buddies’: How Moving to Israel Helped Me Find My People, My Community, and My New Life
Illustrative: New olim disembark at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport on the first charter aliyah flight after he Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, arriving to begin new lives in Israel. Photo: The Algemeiner
When I made Aliyah to Israel last September, I knew another war with Iran was possible. So, on February 28th, when we all woke up to sirens, I wasn’t shocked. But I was surprised at how quickly ballistic missile attacks became almost a normal, routine part of reality.
Even so, as attacks continued with multiple impacts near where I live in Tel Aviv, I was still so glad that I had moved to Israel. Despite everything going on, I still wish I had done it 10 years ago. Now that I am here, I can’t even remember the fears that held me back for so long.
Part of the reason I feel this way comes from the support and community I have built here in Tel Aviv, largely with olim, and specifically those who were on my Aliyah flight.
Nearly seven months later, a group of us from the flight, organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh, in partnership with the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, the Jewish Agency for Israel, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, and Jewish National Fund-USA, are in touch almost daily in an online chat group.
The group was born out of what I call “the Israel effect,” the phenomenon of people gravitating toward each other, looking for ways to help or get to know new people.
This happens in bomb shelters, at the grocery store, in the street — and it happened on our flight. Pretty immediately, I started talking to another olah who was sitting next to me on the plane. When we landed, we ended up in the airport waiting to complete the process of immigration with several other olim our age. We discussed everything from where we were from to where we were going to live and work, to our reasons for moving across the world and our army processes. Because we were starting a similar chapter of life, the connection was natural.
Eleven of us opened a group chat that day called “Aliyah Buddies.” At first, our questions revolved around finding ulpans and learning how to settle bureaucratic matters like converting our drivers licenses. Even though I had plenty of Israeli relatives on my father’s side of the family who were excited to accompany me to the Interior Ministry or the bank, this group was still a lifeline.
It was a place for us to put all of our worries, our doubts, and our struggles, and to be supported by the other people in the group who were experiencing the same problems. We moved from practical matters to inviting people out to events, planning reunions, asking for help choosing LinkedIn pictures, and giving general life updates. No matter what time of day or what the topic was, there was always somebody willing to help, encourage, or commiserate.
“I love this chat,” one member wrote in the Fall after a fellow group member posted photos of a single friend looking for a relationship. Just recently, a friend in the group chat got engaged and invited us all to her engagement party.
Under missile fire, this feeling is amplified. Shortly after the war’s first sirens, someone posted “Everyone good?” with a heart emoji. That led to everyone checking in from places across the country, then discussing the Home Front Command’s system of early warnings, alerts, and all-clears. In the weeks since, there have been constant check-ins along with photos from shelters, sharing fears and stress as well as more humorous stories about missile alerts interrupting showers.
In a post October 7th world, these connections are more meaningful to me, especially after I, like so many others, went through several friendship losses in the wake of the attacks. Friends who I had known for years unfollowed me or blocked me without so much as a single word. It doesn’t compare to what the State or people of Israel went through, but I definitely lost my spark for months, and felt guilty that I was living a safe, comfortable life in the Diaspora while so many were fighting and losing their lives here in Israel. Now, being here and building new communities like we’ve done in our group chat means everything to me.
Aliyah has shown me, more than anything, how deeply we as Jewish people care for one another — even if we don’t fully know them yet. What I didn’t fully understand before I moved to Israel was the strength of the community here. The sense of camaraderie among immigrants, the way people show up for each other — it makes the challenges of building a life here seem doable.
Anyone considering aliyah should understand that coming to Israel doesn’t solve all of your problems. But I’m finally in the right place, the place that feeds my soul, and where everything comes together. It is exhausting, frustrating and has challenged me in countless ways, but it is more amazing and fulfilling than I could have hoped — and at the end of the day, that’s what counts.
Arielle Gur made Aliyah to Tel Aviv in September 2025 out of love for her family, the country, and the people of Israel.