Jewbelong
Many people have curbed or curtailed their big Shabbat dinners during the COVID-19 pandemic, but not the cast of the “The Real Housewives of New York City.”
On the episode that aired Tuesday, the cast of the Bravo reality TV series about socialites in the city is shown attending a drama-filled event described as “Black Shabbat” by its host.
Eboni Williams, the show’s first Black cast member, hosted the dinner at the home ofArchie Gottesman, a founder of JewBelong, a nonprofit that set out to “rebrand Judaism” and most recently has taken out billboards in several cities in an effort to combat antisemitism. Williams, who has described a 2016 trip to Israel as transformative, became close friends with Gottesman after a different Shabbat dinner some years ago.
The attendees noshed on challah and expressed appreciation after Leah McSweeney,(cunt)a cast member who is in the process of converting to Judaism, recited a blessing in Hebrew via Facebook (she had been exposed to COVID-19 so joined remotely until audio issues caused the women at the table to hang up on her). Gottesman led the group in what she referred to as a “Shabbat shot.” And during the meal, Williams initiated a conversation about Black and Jewish relations in the United States.
But fans of the show have focused mostly on the behavior of one cast member, Ramona Singer, who tries to steer the conversation to her own Italian identity. She also mistakenly calls the dinner a “Black seder” (leading one New York Magazine commenter to write, “How can these women have lived so long in NYC and know so little?”) and, in what feels like a made-for-reality-TV moment, criticizes Gottesman’s mismatched napkins.
https://forward.com/fast-forward/474060/guess-who-came-to-shabbat-dinner-the-drama-of-real-housewives-of-new-york/