Joanne Palmer

New York

United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism's communications director, CJ: Voices of Conservative/Masorti Judaism's editor, avid New Yorker, compulsive grammarian

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Articles

‘Resilience - it’s like in the water here’

1 week ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

Rachel Lissack grew up in South Orange, but she’s a Tel Avivian now. That move around the world to the place that she feels very deeply is her home wasn’t the result of carefully laid plans as much as an inevitable response to an undeniable pull. “The air feels different here,” she said. So now that Israel is under attack, she’s living the same balancing attack as most other Israelis, she said. “Day to day, it’s obviously not nice, there is some fear, but there’s also a need for balance.
Searching for peace, finding no peace

1 week ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

It’s hard to know what to say this week, because it’s all too obvious or too terrifying or simply too sad.
‘I’ve never felt like this before’

1 week ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

You know how we often hear that Jewish summer camp can change a kid’s life? Jordyn Engel knows that’s true. It’s not the only thing that took her from a happy childhood and adolescence in Springfield to where she is now, a combat medic in the IDF. Covid factors in as well, as well as some very smart parenting. Ms. Engel, who is 23, one of three sisters — the others are Rachel and Samara — went to public school and became bat mitzvah at Temple Sha’arey Shalom in Springfield.
‘Thank God, the kids are very resilient’

1 week ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

When the sirens go off, the family just has to go to his 17-year-old daughter’s bedroom, Rabbi Ely Allen said. That’s the family’s mamad — its safe room — in Ramat Beit Shemesh. “That can be scary,” Rabbi Allen said; he didn’t mean the sirens, but the 17-year-old girl-ness of the room. “Fortunately, I work with young people, so I remember what it’s like.”Seriously, though, he and his family do feel safe at home, but “we have relatives who live in Haifa and Bat Yam Rishon.
‘We’re all in this together’

1 week ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

Elie Y. Katz loves being in Israel. But now it’s time for him to come home. Mr. Katz, a lifelong Teaneck resident who’s been a member of the town council for just about half his life and now is its deputy mayor, was in Israel with his family for a wedding. “That was last Monday,” he said. “We were supposed to go home on Sunday night.”But no.
A lion doesn’t concern himself with the opinion of sheep

1 week ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

‘A few weeks ago, in ‘Where is the Ring of Power,’ we discussed the potential of an Israeli attack against Iran,” Alexander Smukler of Montclair said. Mr. Smukler, our war analyst, who spent half his life in the Soviet Union and left there just before it imploded, with a hard-earned understanding of dictatorships and how to fight against them, wasn’t bragging.
Selling art, feeding the hungry

2 weeks ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

Most of us know the cultural tropes about the tormented artist. The writer who stalks around his typewriter, plunking out two or three words (it’s always a man, never a woman, and the machine is never a computer, or a word processor, or even a Selectric but always a from-the-dawn-of-time typewriter), then noisily tearing the sheet out of the contraption, crumpling it up, and throwing it into a corner, presumably to be picked up by the invisible maid or long-suffering wife.
Honesty matters

2 weeks ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

Misinformation is all around us. The times we live in are volatile, to the point where any editor on Earth 2 reading a manuscript that straightforwardly reported on what’s happening right here right now, presented as fiction, would reject it as way over the top. But it’s all real. And so is the misinformation that naturally accretes around the weirdnesses of our world, because it’s human to make up explanations and to believe them.
Rabbis, cantors confront preschool controversy

3 weeks ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

Maybe the problem was built in. A decade ago, the South Orange-Maplewood school district had more toddlers ready for public preschool than space to provide them with that crucial early education. So it rented space from local institutions. Now seven public preschools meet in buildings that the town does not own; those universal pre-K programs are administered by those outside institutions, but adhere strictly and completely to the curriculum and guidelines that the school board gives them.
‘My Soviet passport told me that I am a Jew’

3 weeks ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

It’s not as if there isn’t news coming out of Russia’s war on Ukraine. On Sunday, Ukrainian drones hit military targets in five areas inside Russia, including Siberia. The attack, led by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, had been planned for 18 months. The drones, which had been Trojan-horsed into Russia, demolished nuclear bomb carriers that were very valuable but so old as to be irreplaceable. And the United States knew nothing about it until it happened.