Thank you, Marcia Garfinkle

Thank you, Marcia Garfinkle

The Rockies may crumble
Gibraltar may tumble
They’re only made of clay
But our love is here to stay.
– Ira Gershwin

Well, not quite. Not really. But sort of.

For almost 30 years, we at the Jewish Standard have been graced with the wonderful presence of Marcia Garfinkle, our associate publisher. She came to the paper as a young widow with four children to support, and stayed through great-grandmotherhood, through all the changes that time and technology have given us, helping the rest of us keep our balance.

Marcia has now retired, although our howls of loss have led to tell us that she will continue to be around, albeit unofficially. She tells us, entirely correctly, that she has many things she wants to do, and wants to make sure that she has time and energy to do them. We acknowledge that truth, but still we don’t want her to go.

Marcia is an extraordinary person. She is warm and wise, sensitive and intuitive, loving and tough, and very very smart. She is a link to the generation before her, the immigrants who came to this country well before World War II, settled in the Lower East Side or Newark or Paterson, and later moved to Brooklyn or Bronx or Bergen. She remembers Yiddish spoken as a vital language. She remembers radio.

She is not sentimental, though; she understands change viscerally and she is open to it. She is not scared by new things, and she helps us overcome our fear.

Marcia also is sane, in a way that few people are. She sees the world clearly and reacts to it with restraint, logic, and love.

She is a huge asset to this newspaper, to this community, and to this world.

We are all better, as professionals and as people, as Jews and as Americans, because we have learned from Marcia.

-JP

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