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There wasn’t a Jewish grief group in Boston for young adults, so this rabbi started one
In Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated, a little girl named Brod is so familiar with grief and loss that Foer gives her a title: “Genius of sadness.” Brod sees melancholy everywhere, in the usual places — “the sadness of physical pain” — and in unlikely ones (“The sadness of domesticated birds”).
There is something of Brod in the Worst Club Ever, the group Rabbi Jackson Mercer founded this summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, dedicated to helping young Jewish adults process the many — and often unexpected — ways that grief interrupts everyday life.
Mercer, 31, established the club because he believed young Jewish adults needed better — or any — bereavement services. It’s an absence he first noticed six years ago, when two close family friends lost loved ones on the eve of his wedding. One was due to give a Sheva Bracha, a wedding blessing, but she was also “like, actively in Shiva,” as Mercer put it. She didn’t know whether she could even attend a celebration, let alone participate.
“It was clear people needed guidance in the practical pieces,” said Mercer, who, when we met for coffee on a cold and bright morning, had on a flat-brimmed baseball cap and a hiking jacket — which in Cambridge/Somerville, a hub for both young adult Jews and progressive politics, is kind of the rabbinical uniform du jour.
Mercer realized that bereavement was more common among young adults than he’d thought. In his community alone — he’s a rabbi at BASE Boston, a nonprofit that puts on events for Jews in their 20s and 30s — “every person knew somebody” grieving, he said. And Boston’s existing support groups plainly could not meet the needs of younger, grieving Jews. If they wanted a Jewish experience, “it was mostly with people in their 60s mourning the loss of their life partners,” he said. But the younger crowd was little better: “Usually very Christian-focused — above all, on eschatology.”
Mercer talked with at least ten people in his Cambridge community who had felt misunderstood in other grief groups on account of their Jewishness or their age. An idea crystallized in his mind: a space to grieve that was both young and Jewish.
He was hesitant, however, to lead the group himself. For one thing, he was more comfortable discussing very recent loss than longer-term bereavement. “There’s rituals for it at first,” he said. But his initiative appealed to a different constituency. It was “people one to three years after a loss,” he told me. “So I needed to pivot.”
A therapist family friend joined the project. She and Mercer decided to lead the group together. “We met for a really long time,” Mercer said, “going back and forth about what would be helpful through a therapeutic lens — of how grief shows up for some people — and then taking those experiences and looking for those in Jewish texts.” In short, a group that blended Jewish textual analysis with clinical expertise.
The Worst Club Ever’s inaugural cohort, 12 members in all, met this summer for six weeks. Participants shared a culture and perhaps a generation, but often little else. One of them, Mercer said, knocking on the coffee table between us for emphasis,“really was not interested in studying Talmud.” Two others, meanwhile, were the children of Orthodox rabbis and had only recently returned from studying at yeshivas in the occupied West Bank. Yet such differences, insurmountable in other Jewish contexts, hardly mattered.
Meetings typically went like this: an opening ritual; a group analysis of a Jewish text — almost always a rabbi riffing on grief or death or mourning; and, last, a guided discussion about a non-scriptural topic. Secular and religious concerns mingled freely. One week, the group tackled how to approach Jewish holidays; the next, a participant’s recent wedding. Mercer was careful not to overdo the exegesis, and avoided prescribing specific mourning rituals.
“They were coming from such different backgrounds, different timelines and relationships,” he said. “None of that stuff would make sense to talk about all the time.” Occasionally discussions were little more than a collective lament. “All we could say, sometimes, was, ‘Man, this fucking sucks,” Mercer said.
The Jewish texts he did use helped participants make sense of their discomfort in other young adult bereavement groups — especially in ones dominated by Christians, for whom death is sometimes seen as a prelude to more permanent bliss. Mercer recalled introducing one text about a grieving rabbi who carried in his pocket his dead son’s tooth. When Mercer explained that this rendered the rabbi “ritually impure,” one of the group suggested this was, surely, an act of willful defiance — that for the rabbi anguish was his chosen companion. “I didn’t think of that,” Mercer replied.
Insights like this happened from time to time: moments when the distance between Mercer — yet to be seriously bereaved, mercifully — and his participants seemed impassable. He embraced the feeling. “I didn’t always know how I fit into this,” he said. “And it was okay for them not to be clear about how I fit into it, too.”
Mercer hopes to bring together another cohort within the next year while offering monthly drop-in spaces in the meantime. As far as he knows, there’s no other resource like it in Boston for Jews in their 20s and 30s. He suspects this is in large part because institutional American Jewish life is built on metrics: on bums-in-seats and kippot-on-heads. By comparison, the Worst Club Ever “is not a sexy program,” said Mercer. In fact, it’s the club you never want to belong to. But Mercer believes this summer’s program gives the lie to the “perception that people in their 20s and 30s don’t experience grief,” he said. “They just don’t know what to do.”
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Stephen Spielberg wins Grammy, becoming 9th Jew in elite EGOT ranks
(JTA) — The legendary director Stephen Spielberg has become the ninth Jew to secure “EGOT” status after winning a Grammy for producing a documentary about the music of John Williams.
Spielberg was awarded the Grammy for producing “Music by John Williams,” which won best music documentary, before the televised ceremony on Sunday. The win makes him the 22nd person to win the coveted quartet of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards.
Spielberg has won three Oscars, including best picture for the 1993 Holocaust drama “Schindler’s List”; four Emmys for TV programming including two World War II dramatic miniseries; and a Tony for producing the Broadway show “A Strange Loop.”
Spielberg adds to a large proportion of Jewish artists to win all four of the top entertainment awards. Nine of the 22 EGOTs have been Jewish, including the first person to ever reach the status, composer Richard Rodgers. Rodgers and Marvin Hamlisch, who was also Jewish, are the only people to have added a Pulitzer Prize to the EGOT crown. The most recent Jewish winner before Spielberg was the songwriter Benj Pasek, who secured the status in 2024 with an Emmy.
One of Spielberg’s more celebrated recent works was a drama based loosely on his own Jewish family. “The Fabelmans,” released in 2022, earned him three Oscar nods — for best picture, best director and best screenplay — but no wins.
In promoting that movie, Spielberg said antisemitic bullying when he was a child had informed his sense of being an “outsider,” which he translated into his filmmaking.
“Schindler’s List,” meanwhile, spurred the creation of the USC Shoah Foundation, a leading center for preserving Holocaust testimonies that has also recently embraced the task of preserving stories of contemporary antisemitism, too.
“It was, emotionally, the hardest movie I’ve ever made,” Spielberg said about his most decorated movie — for which John Williams earned an Oscar for the score. “It made me so proud to be a Jew.”
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A border official mocked an attorney for observing Shabbat. Orthodox lawyers say the issue is not new.
Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official who led immigration raids in Minneapolis, reportedly mocked the Jewish faith of Minnesota’s U.S. attorney during a phone call with other prosecutors in mid-January. According to The New York Times, Bovino complained that Daniel Rosen, an Orthodox Jew, was hard to reach over the weekend because he observes Shabbat and sarcastically pointed out that Orthodox Jewish criminals don’t take the weekends off.
The call took place at a moment of extreme tension in Minneapolis, as federal agents under Bovino’s command carried out an aggressive immigration crackdown that had already turned deadly. It came between the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, both killed during enforcement operations, and amid fierce backlash from local officials and residents.
Bovino made the remarks in a derisive, mocking tone, the Times reported, casting Shabbat observance as a point of ridicule. Bovino had already drawn national attention for frequently wearing an olive double-breasted greatcoat with World War II-era styling, leading some critics to call him “Gestapo Greg” and accusing him of “Nazi cosplay.” Bovino, who pushed back on those comparisons, has since been reassigned.
Rosen, a Trump nominee, was confirmed as Minnesota’s U.S. attorney in October 2025 after a career in private practice and Jewish communal leadership. He has said that rising antisemitism helped motivate his decision to take the job, and that prosecuting hate crimes would be a priority for his office.
For many Orthodox Jewish lawyers, Bovino’s alleged remarks were not surprising. They echoed a familiar challenge: explaining that Shabbat — a full day offline — is not a lack of commitment, but a religious boundary that cannot be bent without being broken.
In a profession that prizes constant availability, that boundary can carry consequences. Some lawyers say it shows up in subtle ways: raised eyebrows, jokes about being unreachable, skepticism when they ask for time off. Others say it has shaped much bigger decisions, including how visibly Jewish they allow themselves to be at work.
David Schoen, an Orthodox criminal defense attorney who served as lead counsel for President Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial, said he has long been mindful of how religious observance is perceived in the courtroom.
“I have made a conscious decision not to wear my yarmulke in front of a jury,” Schoen said, explaining that jurors often “draw stereotypes from what they see.”
Those concerns were reinforced by experience. Schoen said he has noticed a “definite difference in attitude” from some judges depending on whether he wore a yarmulke. In one case, he recalled, a Jewish judge pulled him aside during a jury trial and told him she thought he had made the right choice — a comment Schoen said he found disappointing.
For Sara Shulevitz, a criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor, the Bovino episode brought back memories from early in her career.
Orthodox and the daughter of a Hasidic rabbi — now married to one — Shulevitz said her unavailability on Jewish holidays was often treated as a professional flaw rather than a religious obligation. “It held me back from getting promotions,” she said.
In court, the scrutiny could be blunt. “I was mocked by a Jewish judge for celebrating ‘antiquated’ Jewish holidays,” she said, recalling requests for continuances for Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. In another case, she said, a judge questioned her request for time off for Shavuot and suggested she had already “taken off for Passover.”
When another judge assumed Passover always began on the same day in April, “I had to explain the Jewish lunar calendar in the middle of court while everyone was laughing,” she said.
Not every encounter, Shulevitz added, was rooted in hostility. Sometimes judges simply didn’t understand Orthodox practice. When she explained she couldn’t appear on a Jewish holiday, judges would suggest she join the hearing by Zoom — forcing her to explain that Orthodox Jews don’t use electrical devices on Shabbat or festivals.
The misunderstanding often slid into a familiar assumption. “They think you’re lazy,” she said. “It’s not laziness. Any Jewish woman knows how much work goes into preparing for Passover.”
Rabbi Michael Broyde, a law professor at Emory University who studies religious accommodation, said that Bovino’s alleged “derogatory remarks” are “sad and reflects, I worry, the antisemitic times we seem to be living in.”
He added that the criticism of Rosen reflected a basic misunderstanding of how law offices operate, calling it “extremely rare” for a lawyer’s religious practices to interfere with their obligations, especially when senior attorneys delegate work and courts routinely grant continuances.
“No one works 24/7,” Broyde said.
The episode echoed a similar Shabbat-related incident during Trump’s first term. In his 2022 memoir, former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro described how a group sought to undermine Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s role in the 2020 campaign by scheduling a key White House meeting with Trump on a Saturday, knowing Kushner — who is Shabbat observant — would not attend. Navarro titled the chapter recounting the episode, “Shabbat Shalom and Sayonara.”
The tension between Jewish observance and public life is not new. Senator Joe Lieberman, the first observant Jew to run on a major-party presidential ticket, famously walked to the Capitol for a Saturday vote and ate fish instead of meat at receptions. His longtime Senate colleague Chris Dodd joked that he became Lieberman’s “Shabbos goy.”
Still, Schoen said, visibility can cut both ways. During Trump’s impeachment trial, while speaking on the Senate floor, he reached for a bottle of water and instinctively paused. With one hand holding the bottle, he used the other to cover his head — a makeshift yarmulke — before drinking.
The moment was brief, but it did not go unnoticed. In the days that followed, Schoen said he heard from young Jewish men and businesspeople who told him that seeing the gesture made them feel more comfortable wearing their own yarmulkes at work.
The attention, he said, was unexpected. But for some in the Orthodox community, it became a source of pride.
“I felt honored,” Schoen said.
My guess in all seriousness is that he normally wears a yarmulke and this was reflex. Schoen is modern Orthodox so that would make sense. But I defer to @jacobkornbluh https://t.co/MkKx6W03v2
— Jake Tapper 🦅 (@jaketapper) February 9, 2021
Jacob Kornbluh contributed additional reporting.
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Deni Avdija becomes first Israeli to be selected as an NBA All-Star
(JTA) — Portland Trail Blazers star Deni Avdija’s meteoric rise has officially reached a new stratosphere, as the 25-year-old forward has become the NBA’s first-ever Israeli All-Star.
Avdija was named an All-Star reserve for the Western Conference on Sunday, an expected but deserved nod after the northern Israel native finished seventh in All-Star voting with over 2.2 million votes, ahead of NBA legends LeBron James and Kevin Durant. Avdija’s breakout performance this season has earned him repeated praise from James and others across the league.
Avdija’s star turn began last year in his first season with Portland, when he further captured the adoration of Jewish fans across Israel and the U.S. But he took another step forward this season, averaging 25.8 points, 6.8 assists and 7.2 rebounds per game. His points and assists clips are by far the best of his career, and rank 13th and 12th in the NBA, respectively. He’s considered a front-runner for the league’s Most Improved Player award.
For close observers of Israeli basketball, Avdija’s All-Star selection is the culmination of a promising career that began as a teenage star with Maccabi Tel Aviv and made him the first Israeli chosen in the top 10 in an NBA draft.
“Deni Avdija being named an NBA All-Star reserve is an unbelievable achievement in the mind of every Israeli basketball fan,” Moshe Halickman, who covers basketball for the popular Sports Rabbi website, wrote in an essay for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “This is a dream come true for many — a dream that became realistic and even a must-happen during his breakout season — but something that in his first five seasons in the NBA never came across as something that was going to be real.”
Halickman, who has covered Avdija in Washington, D.C., and in Israel, wrote that Avdija is not only considered the greatest Israeli hooper of all time, but perhaps the best athlete to come out of Israel, period.
Oded Shalom, who coached Avdija on Maccabi Tel Aviv’s Under-15 and Under-16 teams, echoed that sentiment in a recent profile of Avdija in The Athletic.
“Even though he is only 25, I think he is Israel’s most successful athlete in history,’’ Shalom said. “We’ve had some great gymnasts — and I hope everyone forgives me for saying it, because we’ve had some great athletes — but I think Deni has become the greatest.”
Avdija’s ascension has also come against the backdrop of the Gaza war and a reported global rise in antisemitism, which he has said affects him personally.
“I’m an athlete. I don’t really get into politics, because it’s not my job,” Avdija told The Athletic. “I obviously stand for my country, because that’s where I’m from. It’s frustrating to see all the hate. Like, I have a good game or get All-Star votes, and all the comments are people connecting me to politics. Like, why can’t I just be a good basketball player? Why does it matter if I’m from Israel, or wherever in the world, or what my race is? Just respect me as a basketball player.”
Now, Avdija’s talents will be on display at the NBA All-Star Game, on Sunday, Feb. 15, in Los Angeles.
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