Washington, D.C

DC’s Shawn Shafner Brings Jewish Tradition to Center Stage

Published

12 months ago

April 30, 2025

DC’s Shawn Shafner Brings Jewish Tradition to Center Stage

Shawn Shafner. (Photo by Jay Belsky)

Shawn Shafner balances many roles: teaching artist, educator, activist, actor, mindfulness coach and longtime summer camp staff member.

Shafner, who holds a bachelor of fine arts in drama and theater arts, facilitates Jewish ritual theater programs, educating audiences on the East and West coasts about Torah and Jewish tradition.

The multidisciplinary artist is an early childhood educator and ritual facilitator for the nonprofit Storahtelling, where he’s worked since 2005. Shafner runs the theater department at Camp Ramah in northern California in addition to his seasonal work with Trybal Gatherings, a summer camp experience for young adults.

Shafner looks forward to premiering one of his solo shows in June at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, D.C., where he is an Atlas Arts Lab resident. It’s called “Sheldon Feldman Sings the Songs They Told Me Not to Sing.” Shafner lives with his fiancé in the Brightwood Park neighborhood of D.C.

Tell me about your Jewish upbringing and background.
I guess you could say I grew up in the Conservative movement [in Colorado]; the synagogue we belonged to growing up was within the Conservative movement, but we were always on the Reform side of that. We definitely celebrated Jewish holidays, [but we] didn’t have a strong Shabbat practice growing up — we didn’t go to temple very often — although my sister and I both went to religious school once a week, then twice a week to prepare for our b’mitzvah.

I went to NYU … and college was when I began to find my own journey through Judaism. I was at the musical theater school at NYU Tisch [School of the Arts] and I remember asking a friend, “Are you going to Hillel for the High Holiday service?” — I think I went to the Rosh Hashanah service and I didn’t find it super inspiring. And she said, “I don’t do that; I’m going to the art museum where I’m doing my observation of the holiday.” I was like, “You can do that?” That year, I followed [my friend] there and realized that there is a different way to have contemplative experience.

How did you get to where you are today?
I did a project with Hillel, a devised play about someone wrestling with their queer identity called “Song of Solomon.” Through that, I met the women who would later found the Kohenet Institute and a year later, I received a Spielberg fellowship through the Foundation for Jewish Camp. I was tasked with creating a theater program at a Jewish summer camp. The training for it was a fellowship for a week at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute with [Rabbi] Amichai Lau-Lavie, the founder of what’s now called Lab/Shul, but was then called Storahtelling. That was really my full entrance into Jewish adulthood.

At one point, Amichai and other faculty started playing music and said, “Flip through the siddur. Whenever you find a line or even a word that moves you, go ahead and say it out loud.” We sort of made our own prayer that way. That really changed my understanding of what it meant to be Jewish and to practice Judaism.

What were your responsibilities at Lab/Shul?
I started making interactive theater that brought the stories of the Torah alive. We’d go to communities and when the Torah service began, myself, another actor and two musicians would open the story into this interactive play that was either translated by biblical characters in the story or modern-day people who were reading the story. [Our performances] included the pshat (literal meaning) of the Torah with midrash (rabbinic additions), both ancient and more contemporary.

We were also inspired by the Jewish Renewal movement to open the Torah up with group aliyot (calling up to the Torah), and an interactive question session where we invite the audience to put themselves in the stories. We essentially used techniques from psychodrama in order to reveal their own feelings and emotions around stories.

You’ve been an actor and artist since the age of 5. What about art appeals to you?
Art is a window into what the human experience is in a way that removes our specific identities and enables us to imagine what it could be like to be anybody. I think we’ve always needed it, but now, especially, the ability to have empathy and compassion for an experience that’s not your own is so important. It’s really integral in the Jewish experience as well. “I’m a stranger in a strange land and I have been a stranger before.” Our midrash teaches us this idea that we are to see ourselves through the other. It’s important that we have access to universality of the human experience, and this is really where art comes in.

How do you make summer camp fun for young adults through Trybal Gatherings?
Trybal Gatherings is for adults, primarily for people in their 20s and 30s, and we have a cohort of folks from the D.C. area who come every year, and it’s been a pleasure to watch that community grow. There, it’s kind of like giving young adults a taste of their childhood back, whether they went to summer camp and loved it, or went and didn’t like it and are coming back to reenact their summer camp experience, or if they never went to camp but want a taste of it, or maybe their partner went to camp but they’re not Jewish.

What’s great about Trybal is that they give this connection to Judaism that’s really open. It doesn’t proclaim to have the one true way to practice. However you show up Jewishly is the right way. Our Jewish connection can be through liturgy, through Shabbat, but also through things I do at camp, like through making pickles, doing improv together and celebrating some of our Jewish comedians, through meditation [and] through practicing mindfulness within the Jewish tradition.

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Washington, D.C

Storm Team4 Forecast: A chilly, gusty Sunday before a cool start to the week

Published

8 hours ago

April 19, 2026

Press Room

Storm Team4 Forecast: A chilly, gusty Sunday before a cool start to the week

4 things to know about the weather:

Chances of rain in the morning
Gusty Sunday
Chilly Monday
Temps will rise again through the work week

Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to check the weather radar on the go.

After a nice and warm Saturday, changes arrive for part two of the weekend.

The first half of your Sunday will have a chance for showers. Winds will pick up with our next system and are expected to gust to about 20-30 mph. Cooler air will settle in, and lows Sunday night fall into the 40s.

Highs temps Monday will reach only into the mid to upper 50s.

However, temperatures will rise through the week, so you won’t need your jackets every day.

QuickCast

SUNDAY:
Showers, then partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 30 mph
HIGH: Lower 60s

MONDAY:
Partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 25 mph
HIGH: Upper 50s

Stay with Storm Team4 for the latest forecast. Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to get severe weather alerts on your phone.

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Washington, D.C

‘It’s a twilight zone’: Iran war casts deep shadows over IMF gathering in Washington

Published

1 day ago

April 18, 2026

Press Room

‘It’s a twilight zone’: Iran war casts deep shadows over IMF gathering in Washington

The most severe energy shock since the 1970s, the risk of a global recession and households everywhere stomaching a renewed surge in the cost of living – hitting the most vulnerable hardest.

In a sweltering hot Washington DC this week, the message at the International Monetary Fund meetings was chilling: things had been looking up for living standards around the world. But then came the Iran war.

“Some countries are in panic,” said the fund’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, addressing the finance ministers and central bank bosses in town for the IMF and World Bank spring meetings. “The sooner it [the Iran war] ends, the better for everybody.”

Such gatherings are not typically used to fight geopolitical battles. “You don’t get people shouting at one another at these things,” one senior figure remarked. But, as a record-breaking April heatwave swept the US capital, no one could ignore the mounting damage from the Iran war.

Those familiar with the mood over breakfast at a meeting of the G20’s representatives on Thursday, which included Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the outgoing US Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell – said the atmosphere in the room was sombre amid an open exchange of serious views.

“It is such a twilight-zone meeting,” said Mohamed El-Erian, a former IMF deputy managing director who is now chief economic adviser at the Allianz insurance group. “There are several shadows hanging over it: one is the shadow that comes from concern about the global economy as a whole.

“The second is that some countries are going to be particularly hard hit, and it’s mostly countries that very few people are talking about. But the third concern is the adding of insult to injury: the fact that the US, which started a war of choice, is going to be hit, but by a lot less than elsewhere in relative terms.”

Before Thursday’s breakfast, Rachel Reeves had started her day with an early-morning jog. Joined by her counterparts from Spain, Australia and New Zealand for a run down the iconic National Mall, she posted an Instagram selfie with a not-so-subtle dig: “Friends that run together – work together.”

A day earlier, the chancellor had told a CNBC conference that she thought “friends are allowed to disagree on things” as she criticised Trump’s Iran war as a “mistake” and a “folly” that had not made the world safer.

Rachel Reeves posted this image on Instagram from Washington DC on Thursday with the message: ‘Friends that run together – work together.’ Photograph: Rachel Reeves/Instagram

Speaking at a venue just steps away from the White House, before a one-on-one meeting with Bessent, she said this “fair message” was needed because UK families and businesses were feeling the pain from higher energy prices triggered by the conflict.

Those close to Reeves insist her meeting remained cordial. Britain and the US have significant shared interests in AI, financial services and trade. The chancellor also said the UK government had little time for the Iranian regime.

But with the IMF having warned on Tuesday that the Iran war could risk a global recession – in which Britain would be the biggest G7 casualty – it was clear Reeves had travelled to Washington ready to pick a fight.

“I’m struck by how vocal she has been and the words she used,” said one global financier. “We know the disagreement between Bessent and [European Central Bank president] Christine Lagarde earlier in the year. But that was in private.”

At a cocktail party held at the British ambassador’s residence for hundreds of diplomats and financiers – including the Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, the chief executive of Barclays, CS Venkatakrishnan, and dozens of senior figures – this transatlantic tension, weeks before King Charles’s US state visit, was a major topic of conversation.

The other, in the balmy residence gardens, was one of its former occupants, Peter Mandelson, as revelations about the former ambassador’s appointment threatened to further rock the UK government.

Before the war, the agenda for the IMF had been about global cooperation; the adoption of AI, jobs and work to eradicate poverty. Each of those tasks had now been complicated, but not least the task of countries working together.

For many at the meetings, the focus was on forging closer global cooperation without the world’s pre-eminent superpower.

“Everybody is talking about how you hedge against American decisions,” said David Miliband, the former UK foreign secretary, who now runs the International Rescue Committee. “You can’t do without them, because they’re 25% of the global economy. But, in a lot of fora, they’ve pulled out.

“So everyone has to think, how does one structure international cooperation? The old west is not coming back. And so everyone has to figure out how to position themselves for that world.”

For those gathering in Washington, there was irony in the fact that they were meeting in the halls of institutions founded, under US leadership, to promote global cooperation after the second world war. The whole idea of the Bretton Woods institutions was to avoid the dire economic conditions and warfare of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet this year’s meeting was taking place amid these intertwining problems.

In their conversations about the best economic policy response to the shock of conflict, the economists also knew the real power to make a difference lay two blocks across town from the IMF and the World Bank – behind the security cordons and construction equipment blocking the White House from public view. “It is not clear they can do anything about it,” said El-Erian.

Still, with a booming economy driven by AI – including Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model, the topic of much conversation – most countries cannot afford to completely break off US ties.

“People want to find ways to insulate themselves from the mess. But, on the other hand, they admire the US private sector,” El-Erian said. “The best way I’ve heard it put, is: they want to go long the private sector and short the mess. But it’s almost impossible to do.”

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