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In Orthodox communities where women don’t read Torah, Purim offers a rare opportunity
(JTA) — When Alyza Lewin became a bat mitzvah in 1977, the fact that she had a ritual ceremony at all was still relatively revolutionary in Orthodox circles. But she took the rite of passage a step further, and did something that, for Orthodox Jews at the time, was considered the exclusive province of men.
She chanted the Scroll of Esther, known as the megillah, in front of a mixed-gender audience in suburban Washington, D.C. on the festival of Purim. Among the crowd were her grandfathers, who were both Orthodox rabbis. Lewin was the eldest of two daughters, and her father wanted to find a ritual she would be allowed to perform while remaining within the bounds of traditional Jewish law.
“My father, when it came time for the bat mitzvah, was trying to figure out what was something meaningful that a young woman could do,” she said. “So he decided: My Hebrew birthday is four days before Purim — he would teach me how to chant Megillat Esther.”
For many modern Orthodox women more than four decades later, women’s megillah readings have moved from the cutting edge to squarely within the norm. The increasing number of women’s readings is an indication of the growth of Orthodox feminism — and its concrete expression in Jewish ritual.
According to the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, at least 105 women-led megillah readings, for both mixed-gender and women-only audiences, are taking place worldwide this year. In 2019, according to JOFA, the number hit a peak of 139, up at a relatively steady pace from 63 in 2012, when the group began collecting data. The number of readings dipped last year due to COVID-19 precautions, but JOFA expects this year’s total to come close to the pre-pandemic high once congregations get around to notifying the organization of their events.
JOFA’s executive director, Daphne Lazar Price, said she had observed but did not quantify a related phenomenon where she’s seen “tremendous growth:” girls marking their bat mitzvahs with megillah readings, as Lewin did.
“Instead of a traditional Torah reading service or women’s tefillah [prayer] service or a partnership minyan service, we’ve seen a lot more… girls read, in part or the entire, Megillat Esther,” Price said.
Alyza Lewin’s personal megillah scroll cover is embroidered with an image of Mordecai being led on a horse by Haman on one side, and her name on the other side. (Photos courtesy of Alyza Lewin. Design by Jackie Hajdenberg)
Although traditional Jewish law, or halacha, obligates women to hear the megillah on par with men, many more traditionalist Orthodox communities still do not hold women’s megillah readings. Some Orthodox rabbis may believe that women need to hear the scroll chanted but should not themselves chant the scroll. Another objection stems from the idea that synagogues should gather the largest audience possible to hear the megillah, rather than fragment the crowd into smaller readings.
Still others worry that a women’s megillah reading will act as a sort of gateway to non-Orthodox practice more broadly. Gender egalitarianism is one of the principal dividing lines between Orthodoxy and more liberal Jewish movements, and some Orthodox rabbis say women who organize a megillah reading of their own may then venture into chanting Torah or leading public prayers, which women in the vast majority of Orthodox communities are not allowed to perform.
“The fear is, if we give a little, it’s a slippery slope and once we allow women’s megillah readings people intentionally will manipulate or maybe even accidentally just get confused,” said Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb, an Israeli Orthodox rabbi formerly based in Baltimore, describing some rabbis’ concerns regarding women’s megillah readings in a lecture last month surveying a range of perspectives on the topic. “If women’s megillah readings are OK, then women’s Torah reading is OK, then women rabbis are OK and before you know it, I don’t know what.”
In recent years, a growing number of Orthodox women rabbinic leaders have weighed in on the question as well. Maharat Ruth Friedman, a spiritual leader at the Orthodox congregation Ohev Sholom: The National Synagogue in Washington, D.C., said women reading megillah may feel more acceptable to Orthodox communities that see women’s performance of other rituals as a step too far away from Orthodoxy.
“It is kind of the one semi-kosher or kosher thing that women in more [religiously] right-wing communities can do,” Friedman said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that the rabbis allow them to meet in the synagogue space, but at least that there is a contingent of women who will go to them.”
In some communities, women’s megillah readings might take place in private homes or in other spaces outside the synagogue. Some Orthodox rabbis permit women to read the megillah for other women, but prohibit it in front of men.
The idea of feminist megillah readings has become so mainstream that it was a storyline on “Shababnikim,” an Israeli comedy series about renegade haredi Orthodox yeshiva students. One of them is alarmed by his fiancee’s determination to read the megillah for a group of women and barges in to stop the reading. He later decides that despite his discomfort he should be more flexible in the future, within the constraints of Orthodox law, to make the woman he loves feel respected.
As women’s megillah readings have increased in popularity, they have reached the farthest parts of the globe, even reaching as far south as Antarctica. (Courtesy of Raquel Schreiber via JOFA)
At the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, a liberal Orthodox synagogue in New York City, women have been reading megillah for decades. Founding Rabbi Avi Weiss wrote a Jewish legal analysis explaining why women are permitted to read the scroll in 1998.
“I personally am someone who advocates, and in our synagogue community looks to expand, women’s roles and give more opportunities for women,” said the synagogue’s current senior rabbi, Steven Exler.
Lewin is also watching the practice expand at her synagogue, Washington, D.C.’s Kesher Israel Congregation, where women have read from the megillah for nearly three decades. This year, she’s reading the fewest chapters of the megillah she has ever read. She usually reads half of the scroll, including a difficult passage in the ninth chapter. But for this week’s women’s reading at her synagogue, a new volunteer signed up to chant the ninth chapter.
Still, despite her pioneering reading at age 12, and her decades of chanting, Lewin has encountered the Orthodox community’s ambivalence around women and megillah firsthand. For many years, she borrowed her father’s scroll when Purim came around. But about eight years ago, Lewin asked him for her own scroll as a gift, which can cost upwards of $1,800.
Lewin’s father traveled to Israel to find a scribe to commission the megillah. But he wasn’t comfortable telling the scribe the megillah would go to a woman, and instead said it was a gift for his son-in-law.
Years later, Lewin was at a wedding where she met the scribe who wrote her treasured megillah, and revealed to him that the scroll belonged to her.
“He was thrilled,” Lewin said. “I think it was his individual personality. There are some individuals who are very supportive of the increase in opportunity for women, that women are becoming much more learned in terms of Jewish law.”
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What the private equity takeover means for the bagel industry
The bagel’s stock is, apparently, rising — literally.
Private equity investors have decided, apparently en masse, that bagels are the new frontier for expansion.
A fund called Stripe invested $8 million into PopUp Bagels shortly after the trendy bagel shop, which hawks “rip and dip” bagels, first opened in 2023. A year later, they added $24 million to their contribution and became the majority owner. Now, PopUp Bagels boasts 30 locations.
Invus, an asset management fund, is now the majority owner of Call Your Mother, which began in D.C. but has expanded to 15 locations across the D.C. metro area and, for some reason, Denver. And Manhattan Funds, a large private equity firm, has a specific Bagel Equity Fund devoted to taking over bagelries. The industry is, they write on their site, “under-optimized at the national level.”
Even H&H Bagels, the iconic New York City institution — famed for its cameos in shows like Seinfeld and Sex in the City — has gotten shoveled onto private equity’s giant bagel baking tray. Though Wall Street investor Jay Rushin bought the brand over a decade ago, H&H, too, is beginning its boom era, opening dozens franchises outside of the city.
It’s time, these investment firms all contend, to scale bagels. But can the art of the perfect New York bagel be scaled?
Making the New York bagel in bulk is famously hard. The rings are finicky to roll out, they require boiling, and — perhaps most importantly — the long mythos to the New York bagel has at its core the premise that New York bagels cannot be made without New York water.
Many connoisseurs believe there is an alchemical process to the sought-after chew and crust only achievable with the particular water flowing in the city’s pipes, cascading down from the Catskill reservoirs almost unadulterated. Food science has somewhat debunked that concept, but the legend remains so strong that H&H is promising to par-boil its bagels in NYC water before shipping them to its new franchise locations to be finished in the oven. Even if it’s only marketing, that marketing is powerful.
This is far from the first time that companies have attempted to scale the bagel. In fact, it has worked, in a way: “bagels” can be found, at mass scale, in every major grocery store in the country, offered in plastic sleeves of a half-dozen.
The problem is that those bagels are gross. They’re made by machine, and steamed instead of boiled, which gives a glossy surface, yes, but none of the chew of a true boiled crust. The grocery store bagels are convenient and shelf-stable, sure, but they’re the Wonder Bread of the form: mushy and milquetoast. They have none of the hallmarks of a true bagel.
It’s possible that the private equity masterminds have landed on a secret to scaling the bagel without eventually reducing it to a wan grocery store offering. The results of the Wall Street takeover of the form are still emerging, and the business model could be dependent — at least at first — on devising the perfect product, and not just a passable one.
It just seems unlikely. The investment firms are built around, well, investors, not consumers. Their goal is producing equity and capital for their investors, not making the perfect bagel.
The term “enshittification,” coined by writer Cory Doctorow, has been around for a few years. It describes exactly what it sounds like — the phenomenon of everything growing, uh, worse. Specifically, it describes the way that large companies, often funded by venture capital and private investors, make their products worse over time in the process of wringing money out of the business to serve their CEOs and investors.
Doctorow, in his book on the subject, Enshittification, focuses largely on tech platforms as he examines the term. There’s Amazon: Long gone are the days of a well-priced product you could find more easily online than in a store. Now, search results are polluted by whatever someone has paid to boost to the top of the page, and it’s not even that cheap anymore. Or Twitter, which once bought by Elon Musk, fired its content moderation team to cut costs and turned its user verification, which was once limited to public figures, into a pay-to-play feature. As a result, the platform may have more income streams, but any regular user can attest that their feed is now full of neo-Nazis who shelled out for an algorithmic boost.
But it’s not just platforms — culture and aesthetics are targets for cash extraction now, too, with bad results. Netflix now churns out a constant stream of shows that are, instead of cultural touchstones, basically interchangeable, a far cry from their acclaimed early efforts like Orange is the New Black. Clothing brands like Reformation and even high-end designers like Escala, once symbols of luxury, taste and quality, are turning to lower quality materials and production in an attempt to churn out more designs, faster, and make more money. I’m trying to buy a couch right now, and have found through my research that age-old companies once lauded for their design and durability have been bought by private equity and changed their frames from hardwoods to particle board. (That information took a lot of research because you know what else has fallen prey to enshittification? Review sites.)
That means, regardless of whether these bought-out businesses have suffered yet, bagels are likely to fare poorly in the private equity boom eventually because of the need to extract increasing amounts of cash out of the project; the product itself is ultimately secondary. The Bagel Equity Fund is running trials on steaming their bagels instead of boiling them in its projected 400 shops it runs, the exact strategy that led to the mushy grocery store bagel. And a Washington Post review for the hyped new H&H location in D.C. was brutal, calling the bagels “generally unappealing” and “flavorless.”
But the bagel itself is only part of the mystique of the food. Which brings me to the more spiritual offerings of a good bagel: an ephemeral cultural cachet. That may be at even greater risk.
Having a favorite bagel shop or loudly defending your bagel order as the only possible correct way to eat a bagel — untoasted, scallion schmear, with capers, red onion and lox, and anything else is heresy, thank you for asking — makes you a real New Yorker. Or, if you don’t live in New York, it’s the mark of a devout cultural (and maybe religious) Jew.
Other, earlier attempts to innovate on the theme, and make it trendier and more lucrative, were all one-and-done fads that eventually crashed and burned, becoming a kind of scarlet letter of cringe. (Remember the vanilla-flavored rainbow bagels that were all over social media in the 2010s? They came with funfetti cream cheese. Disgusting, and also deeply uncool.)
Bagel shops are not just places that produce chewy bread with a hole in the center. They have a cultural value. Each is often unique, with its own set of delightful quirks — the place selling Lactaid loosies behind the counter, the brusque man who nevertheless remembers your order. They’re a symbol of uniqueness and authenticity — which, of course, is definitionally impossible to buy. The more constructed something is, the less authentic.
Yet that’s really what the private equity investors are trying to monetize: the idea of a bagel. If it didn’t have that symbolic power, it wouldn’t be a particularly interesting business, given how difficult the baking is to scale well.
The Bagel Equity Fund describes its target market as “fragmented, inconsistent, and devoid of a dominant brand.” But isn’t that the charm of your local bagel place? Not to those investors, which promise to rebrand every store they take over as “Go Bagels,” likely alienating the exact “strong customer bases and community presence” at the stores they aim to acquire.
Bagels have long been a metonym both for New York and for Jewishness. See: the phrase “pizza bagel,” describing people of mixed Italian and Jewish heritage. Good bagels inspire poetic food reviews — and literal poetry — but also lengthy cultural takes. There are dissertations on its history — and I don’t mean that as a kind of humorous exaggeration, I mean actual papers filed to receive a doctorate.
They were also core to unionization of American workers. The Beigel Bakers Local, which conducted its meetings in Yiddish, led strikes over pay and conditions, and standardized the bagel’s form into the icon we all know. That union was so powerful that its members put the city, during strikes, into what is memorialized as a “bagel famine” — a near-emergency for the city’s devoted consumers. The bagel and its attendant culture is a product of the blood, sweat and tears of New York City’s Jewish workers.
The union was ultimately undone by the mechanized mass production of grocery store bagels — an inferior product, yes, but one accessible at a mass scale, exactly what private equity is attempting to reproduce. The fact that a paltry imitation of a bagel still had enough financial power to destroy a once-powerful union is also worrying. People in cities other than New York — cities, that is to say, with a poor selection of bagels — will probably eat the sub-par private equity bagels, because there’s no other option, a key element of enshittification, as Doctorow observes.
But once the big conglomerates have the power, will they be so strong that the bagels they produce take over even on the bagel’s home turf? Will they exterminate the original New York bagel, and with it, its cultural history?
I don’t want to overstate the symbolic power of private equity buying the bagel brand. But at a time when antisemitism is rising, and Jews are increasingly being accused of, once again, greed, malicious control and undue influence, it certainly can’t help. If the bagel represents Jews, and the bagel has sold out, well, that’s a bad look.
But the real deal can still shine through the enshittification haze. “I just stayed in Brooklyn for the first time and felt so alive surrounded by all those bagel shops!” wrote one user on Reddit. They were there to complain — about Denver’s newest private equity bagel. Clearly, the New York bagel’s brand remains strong, even to outsiders.
The post What the private equity takeover means for the bagel industry appeared first on The Forward.
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Suspicious Explosive Package Targeting Jewish Leader Heightens Antisemitism Fears in Argentina
People hold up pictures of the victims of the AMIA Jewish center bombing during a ceremony to mark the 22nd anniversary of the 1994 attack in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 18, 2016. Photo: REUTERS/Enrique Marcarian
Argentina’s authorities are investigating yet another suspected antisemitic incident after a suspicious package addressed to a local branch president of the country’s main Jewish umbrella organization was intercepted, further heightening alarms among community leaders amid a recent surge in attacks.
On Wednesday, the Pilares del Rosario medical center received a package containing explosive material addressed to Gabriel Dobkin, who serves as both the institution’s director and president of the local branch of the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations (DAIA) in Rosario, a major city in the central-eastern Santa Fe province.
According to local media, clinic staff received a package containing a pack of Philip Morris cigarettes wrapped in transparent tape, which the facility’s manager said felt unusually heavy and immediately aroused suspicion.
Because the package had arrived unrequested via a delivery service, the clinic’s manager quickly raised concerns and called in the police explosives unit.
Police bomb squad dogs later detected explosive material inside the cigarette pack. According to the ongoing investigation, the package also contained a strange substance, though authorities have not yet released further details.
After digging a pit in the facility’s backyard, police experts carried out a controlled detonation of the material.
Even though the package did not include an automatic triggering mechanism, it reportedly contained a number of coins intended to serve as shrapnel in the event of an explosion.
Local law enforcement is treating the incident as a targeted antisemitic attack, describing it as either an attempted act of violence or, at the very least, an act of intimidation.
As the investigation continues, detectives are still analyzing the substance found inside the package but have not yet determined its composition or origin. Surveillance footage from the area is being reviewed, and staff from the clinic are also expected to be interviewed.
DAIA Rosario strongly condemned the attack, describing it as a troubling escalation of threats against Jewish institutions, reflecting a wider atmosphere of hostility toward the community.
“This is an expression of hatred that not only targets the Jewish community, but also undermines the fundamental values of coexistence, respect, and democracy. Such acts must be condemned unequivocally and confronted with resolve. Simply denouncing them is not enough — decisive action is essential,” the organization said in a statement.
“Impunity cannot be an option. Every act of antisemitism that goes unpunished sends a message of tolerance toward hatred,” it continued. “Every firm response from the state is a clear signal that society will not back down. To prevent these acts from recurring, determination, action, and justice are essential.”
This latest incident comes amid heightened security concerns within Argentina’s Jewish community after unknown individuals threw a homemade firebomb at the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish Community Center in La Plata, a city in southeastern Buenos Aires Province, last Sunday.
The Buenos Aires Security Ministry and Police Counterterrorism Division have opened an investigation into the incident, examining possible links to another attack last week that appears to share a similar modus operandi.
The Israelite Literary Center and Max Nordau Library in La Plata were also targeted last Thursday when unidentified individuals threw a homemade Molotov-type device at the building’s entrance.
Although the device failed to ignite, it shattered the building’s windows and caused some material damage. Fortunately, no fires broke out and no injuries were reported.
In response to these latest attacks, Jewish institutions across the country have strengthened preventive protocols and reinforced internal security and surveillance measures.
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US, Israel Cripple Iran’s Nuclear Weaponization Work, New Report Shows
Symbolic mock-ups of Iranian missiles are displayed on a street, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 22, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
More than two months into the war, Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons has suffered a major setback as US and Israeli strikes have ravaged critical facilities, crippled essential infrastructure, and killed personnel central to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, according to a new analysis
On Friday, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington, DC–based think tank, released a new assessment of the impact of Israeli and US strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, concluding that the attacks significantly damaged Tehran’s ability to advance nuclear weapons development, particularly by disrupting its weaponization activities.
A nuclear program generally begins with uranium enrichment, the process of producing material that can power civilian reactors or, at higher levels of purity, be used in a nuclear weapon. Much of Iran’s enrichment infrastructure was destroyed during last year’s 12-day war.
The second element is weaponization, which involves the design, testing, and production of the components needed to assemble a functioning nuclear device — a central focus of the more recent Israeli and US military campaign.
According to ISIS’s newly released report, at least six confirmed nuclear-related sites were destroyed so far, with three additional locations possibly connected to the program also struck, bringing the total number of targeted facilities linked to nuclear weapons development to between nine and 12.
Since the start of the war earlier this year, Israel and the United States have struck a wide range of military-industrial facilities involved in missile, drone, and conventional weapons production.
However, the report indicates that some previously undisclosed sites may also have had connections to Iran’s nuclear activities, potentially raising the true scale of the damage.
By analyzing satellite imagery, the report concludes that Iran’s ability to successfully complete a nuclear weapon has been significantly degraded, with the strikes greatly extending the timeline required to produce a bomb while sharply increasing the likelihood of technical failure.
Before the June 2025 war, intelligence assessments estimated Iran could likely produce a nuclear weapon in less than six months with a high probability of success.
Now, the regime’s chances of successfully completing the weaponization process are considered technically low even over a one- to two-year period, largely because the strikes destroyed not only facilities, but also critical equipment and personnel involved in the final stages of bomb development.
ISIS’s latest findings contradict earlier US intelligence assessments, which reportedly concluded that Iran’s nuclear timeline had not been significantly delayed, arguing that such data is inconsistent with extensive visible destruction across key nuclear sites.
The report also argues that there are no signs Iran has resumed uranium enrichment activities, as facilities repeatedly targeted by Israeli and American airstrikes remain heavily damaged with no detectable reconstruction efforts underway.
Despite extensive damage to the regime’s infrastructure, the report cautions that Iran’s nuclear threat has not been fully eliminated.
ISIS has identified tunnel complexes near Esfahan and Natanz in central Iran that were not directly targeted and are believed to contain most of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, including roughly 440 kilograms enriched to 60 percent — far above civilian requirements and much closer to weapons-grade material.