By Benjamin Schuman-Stoler
We know some families have struggled for centuries with the age old quandary of breaking a matzah in two perfect pieces. In my family, prizes range from winning the leftover brisket to a two-dollar bill for the one who can make the cleanest break.
Alas! Behold! The answer:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj_HzQSWKBQ]
Now let’s see them try it with a shmura matzah…
There’s more to charoset than just apples, walnuts and sweet red wine. Chef Vered Guttman demonstrates how this symbolic Passover food is prepared around the world. She also makes homemade horseradish and other Passover specialties.
A year later, we speak every day, staying close during this pandemic. Helena, soon to turn 96, is quarantined alone inside her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It’s a home filled with memories. Photographs, books and artwork, much of it from her travels, cover walls and shelves. But her kitchen calendar, once abrim with engagements—lunches, dinners, concerts, plays—is now blank.
My sister was cooking up a batch of our late mother’s recipe for tzimmes Wednesday morning when the pot exploded.
Israeli officials warn that Wednesday night will be a make-it-or-break-it event in the fight against coronavirus.
Join Moment’s Ask the Rabbis, Opinion and Book editor, Amy E. Schwartz, as she explores readings and meditations to accompany your Passover seder–whether virtual or in-person. She’ll also be discussing Moment’s new virtual Haggadah supplement.
With best Passover wishes from my kitchen and family to yours, here are some recipes and food essays to tempt your palate, expand your repertoire and help bring you into the delight and meaning of the holiday, this year of 2020/5781, as we revisit Mitzrayim (Biblical Egypt) from our own narrowed places.
By 1865, it seemed self-evident that American emancipation resonated with biblical emancipation in powerful ways. But it had not always been so: This new resonance of meaning captured the hearts of American Jews only during the vicissitudes of the Civil War. Before the Civil War, most American Jews did not oppose slavery. There were exceptions, but most Jews voted Democrat, and Democrats were tolerant of slavery. The anti-slavery parties were tarred with nativism, which was distasteful and threatening to a Jewish community composed largely of immigrants and first-generation Americans. And many, including such luminaries as the Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise and the Orthodox rabbi Morris Raphall, considered acceptance of American slavery consonant with the Bible, which documents slavery and sets parameters for its practice within the Israelite community.
Conservative rabbi Amy Levin always makes lentil soup on Passover—but never in her grandmother’s pots.
that is hysterical! so random.