Talk of the Table | Meatballs Cursed by Jews
Among the pages of a medieval Middle Eastern cookbook lies a 600-year-old recipe with a title equal parts perplexing and alarming: “Meatballs Cursed by Jews.”
Spice Box: A Home Run For Acid Reflux
A home run for acid reflux
Book Review | When Honor Fades
Morningside Heights
By Joshua Henkin
Knopf Doubleday; 304 pp.; $26.95
During the early days of the pandemic, I noticed many readers craving dramatic stories in exotic settings to...
Beshert | “Change Your Space, Change Your Life”
My husband and I met as I, a lifelong Angelino, was fleeing Los Angeles. I had just lost a live-in boyfriend to a break-up and...
Memoir | A Secret Identity Revealed
Renowned international lawyer Allan Gerson writes about discovering his secret identity and uncovering his family's past.
Book Review | Building Community One Tile at a Time
At the Museum at Eldridge Street’s Egg Rolls, Egg Creams and Empanadas street festival—a celebration of Ashkenazi Jewish, Chinese and Puerto Rican communities held each summer (pre-pandemic) on New York’s Lower East Side—groups of Chinese Americans and American Jewish women play mahjong side by side, sometimes pausing to teach younger festivalgoers how to play.
Book Review | Waiting for the Messiah in Williamsburg
How did the Satmar Hasidim come to dominate the Brooklyn neighborhood known as Williamsburg?
Book Review | Greed, Drugs and Philanthropy
In this time of corrective unnamings—to remove traces of admiration or gratitude for the morally reevaluated—the names of unrepentant slaveholders, Confederate generals, contemporary sexual predators and other assorted wrongdoers have been erased or proposed for erasure from college dorms, military bases, city streets and more.
Ask the Rabbis | Does Absolute Evil Exist, and If So, What Does It Look Like Today?
Evil was introduced the moment God looked at Creation and “saw that it was good!” For the existence of good implies the existence of evil, just as big implies small and cold implies hot.
Book Review | A Writer Irreverent Even in Death
Even those familiar with the prolific English novelist and essayist Jenny Diski (1947-2016) don’t think of her as primarily a “Jewish” writer.
Jewish Pioneers in Television: The Next Generation with TV Historians Walter J. Podrazik and Harry Castleman
TV became the preeminent communication force in society from the 1960s onward, with Jews at the creative and business forefront. Walter J. Podrazik and Harry Castleman continue their entertaining survey of the medium’s history with a focus on influential figures such as Fred Silverman, Brandon Tartikoff, Barry Diller and Sumner Redstone and the groundbreaking shows they brought to the screen such as Seinfeld, Happy Days, Charlie’s Angels, Hill Street Blues, The Cosby Show, The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory plus made-for-TV movies and miniseries such as Roots. Their achievements paved the way for the growth of cable, and eventually streaming.
In the Nick of Time: What to Make of Yair Lapid’s Knesset Coalition
With just 34 minutes to go before the deadline, Yair Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid party, made the requisite call to Israeli President Reuven...