A hearty mazel tov to actor Josh Radnor and his bashert, Dr. Jordana Jacobs, who, in early January (January 6, to be precise), tied the knot and broke the glass under a snow-laden chuppah.
Radnor and Jacobs’ nuptials were documented by New York Times reporter Katherine Rosman, who ended up stranded overnight at their wedding venue, bunking with Jacobs’ high school friends, and the article might be one of my favorite pieces to have ever graced the Vows section.
Take for example this line: “No strangers to extraordinary circumstances, the couple fell for each other while tripping on mushrooms,” where they, according to Rosman, “slid into the DM of each other’s consciousness” through the “the psilocybin-infused metaverse.”
This classic meet-cute took place at a New York sound meditation retreat where, like one of the characters of his latest show, “Fleishman Is In Trouble,” Radnor was attending to recover from a break-up (Jacobs was also attempting to mend a broken heart).
The night before the meditation, Rosman recounts in the piece, the two were talking about the connections between love and death, which Jacobs has explored in her work as a clinical psychologist and Radnor was exploring in his music, in what would become his E.P. titled “Eulogy I,” which he released last November. One of the tracks on it, “NYC,” is a love song to both “a person and a city,” in which he talks about witty conversations while stoned and being in love and scared to need someone. In “Joshua: 45, 46” he compares himself to the biblical prophet.
In a 2018 workshop she ran, Jacobs said she is “alive today because love saved my family from death.” Her great-aunt met her husband during the Holocaust, while holding fake papers that stated she was Catholic. When she revealed to him that she was Jewish, he didn’t leave her but instead saved her, her sister — Jacobs’ grandmother — and other Jews from the concentration camps.
Radnor, who was raised Jewish in a suburb of Ohio and attended Columbus Torah Academy as a child, is best-known for playing Ted Mosby in “How I Met Your Mother,” but in recent years, he’s worked on some truly amazing Jewish projects, from “Hunters,” where he played actor and Nazi-hunter Lonny Flash, to “Fleishman,” where he played Libby’s husband, Adam. In the upcoming play “Ally,” written by “The Band’s Visit” Itamar Moses, he plays a Jewish college professor named Asaf who is asked to sign a “social justice manifesto.”
“What seems at first like a simple choice instead embroils him in an increasingly complex web of conflicting agendas that challenge his allegiances as a progressive, a husband, an artist, an academic, an American, an atheist, and a Jew. With tensions at an all-time high, Asaf is forced to confront the age-old question: ‘If I am only for myself, what am I?'” the play’s synopsis reads, quoting that famous line from Rabbi Hillel.
It was while he was working on “Fleishman” that Jacobs and Radnor fell in love. Jacobs is originally from Brooklyn and lives close to her family in the New York borough, a family of at least seven therapists (or at least seven who attended the wedding, according to the New York Times).
Their first date was a dinner in Brooklyn, where they “went very deep.” Radnor told her he had a “vulnerability hangover.” In the end, he moved to Brooklyn and proposed to Jacobs during a joint meditation session at Joshua Tree in California.
There are honestly too many good quotes from their Vows piece to tally, including Radnor saying they scheduled their wedding to take place on January 6, the anniversary of the attacks on the Capitol, because they “decided we would rebrand Jan. 6.”
Radnor’s Jewish “How I Met Your Mother” co-star Alyson Hannigan was in attendance, as was director Pamela Fryman, who asked that if they wanted to renew their vows, to do so in a different season. The guests were all covered in snow during the outdoor ceremony at New York’s Cedar Lakes Estate, a former summer camp for children from Harlem that had been shuttered for decades before it was turned into an event venue. Guests received “welcome bags containing incense sticks, an incense dish, CBD tincture and an ‘intention kit.'”
“The truth is, I didn’t get married until now because I was waiting for you,” Radnor told his beloved under the chuppah during their ceremony, which incorporated Jewish traditions and was led by their friend, Jacob Azia.
Afterwards, all the guests went inside to dry up while Radnor, “in his first official act as a husband, knelt at [Jordana’s feet and warmed them with a blow-dryer.” That’s pretty romantic!
While the snow might have made for quite a challenging experience for their wedding attendees, who ended up stranded at the estate as the roads were too icy, it did make for absolutely magical fairytale-like photos, in which Jordana looks like a Jewish snow princess.
“I can’t believe my great good fortune that I get to call this extraordinary woman my wife,” Radnor shared on his social media.
We are thrilled for this fascinating couple, and so grateful they shared the story of their wedding with the world. It is one for the psychedelic Jewish storybooks, indeed.
