Watch Our Discussion on Jewish Florida with Tamara Berens, Paul Kruss, and Ariel Yeshurun

I n recent years, south Florida has emerged as a vital hub of Jewish life. Bringing together Latin Jews, Orthodox Jews, secular Israelis, and Jewish migrants from the northeast, the region has nourished a distinctively American Jewish culture unlike anywhere else in the world. In her April Mosaic essay about Jewish life in south Florida, the writer Tamara Berens finds that it has become a kind of Jerusalem on the Atlantic, which makes it, in her view, “the second-easiest and -best place to be a Jew.”

To explore how that happened and to get a deeper understanding of what makes south Florida such a remarkable place to live as a Jew, we invited Berens, the business owner and communal leader Paul Kruss, and the Miami Beach rabbi Ariel Yeshurun to speak with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver. Together, they gave an inside look at the dynamism of Jewish life in south Florida, and what it reveals about American Jewry. The event took place Tuesday, May 3, at 12 pm Eastern time, live on Zoom. Watch a recording and read the transcript below.

Watch