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One Year
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Pandemic: How We’ve Changed
Jesse Bernstein | JE Staff
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38 THE GUIDE 2021/2022
he first mention of COVID-19 in the Jewish Exponent
came on March 3, 2020.

The story combined reporting from JTA with contri-
butions from former staff writer Eric Schucht. In the fifth
paragraph in a story about the Israeli elections, Schucht wrote
that the final counting had not yet accounted for “the so-called
‘double envelope’ ballots, which include soldiers, hospitalized
patients, prisoners and, this year, citizens quarantined over
possible exposure to the coronavirus.”
Since that story, the Exponent has published more than 400
articles that mention the word “coronavirus”: op-eds, local news,
divrei Torah and more. But even this undersells the impact of the
pandemic on our work.

Rare is the story that includes interviews conducted in person
or photographs taken by a reporter. Recipes are often selected
with our inability to gather with large groups in mind. Most
trend stories are COVID-trend stories. Every obituary’s subject
was memorialized from afar. Our coverage of a tumultuous
presidential election and what was possibly the largest protest
movement in the history of the country, according to The New
York Times, were handled from home.

The world was fundamentally reshaped by the pandemic, and
no aspect of Jewish communal life has gone untouched.

As of March 7, 2021, nearly a fifth of the U.S. population has
received at least one dose of a vaccine, according to the Times.

For some, the end is finally in sight. Still, the pandemic persists
in taking our lives and our time. As the one-year anniversary
of Pennsylvania’s work-from-home order approaches, we took
inventory of what’s happened.

Ritual Life
In a Feb. 11, 2021, article “Preparing for Purim, Marking a Year
of Altered Ritual Life,” staff writer Sophie Panzer looked back to
the first Jewish holiday to fall during the pandemic.

“On March 9, 2020, news of the pandemic was making people
uneasy, but widespread shutdowns and research about the
dangers of gatherings had yet to fully take hold,” Panzer wrote.

Information about the safety of such an event was still
muddled then, so some congregations and Jewish groups chose
to proceed with caution, while others canceled events altogether.

This year, most synagogues hosted their Purim events outside, or