Barry Joseph
By Barry Joseph
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Culture Digital Learners Can’t Do It On Own
You know me, right? I’m the one you call to fix your computer or set the clock in your car, the one you can count on to have the latest electronic gadgets. But I am coming to you now as an educator with the unique privilege (and challenge) of working with today’s generation of so-called…
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Food The Great Egg Cream Debate
There’s something about an egg cream that can bring out the debate in some people. “There is egg cream on your face,” wrote one reader, “if you fall for those explanations of the egg cream.” Another simply wrote “Hogwash!” Luckily these were letters not to us but the New York Times, throughout the 1970s, in…
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Food Making Egg Creams for 111 Years, Even on Passover
David Fox has a problem with his rabbi. I sit across from David, at his office desk, in the family factory H. Fox and Company, deep in Brooklyn. David’s family founded the company and for the past century it has manufacturing a wide variety of flavored syrups. Today, however, I am only interested in one,…
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Food Eli Miller: A Day in the Life of a Seltzer Delivery Man
Seltzer delivery is a dying art. Once, hundreds of “seltzer men,” as they liked to be called, drove the city and walked the streets of New York, carting cases of pressured siphons through rain and snow. Now, less than a dozen remain and, like Jedis with their arcane knowledge and mystical allusions to better days…
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News Mixing Up The Spritz
Like Chinese food and pickles, seltzer –– an effervescent spirit that has inspired dreams of cures for such diverse ailments as scurvy and indigestion –– is often associated with Jews. An ad for an at-home seltzer maker touts its product as part of the history of Jewish ingenuity: “Matzo, circa 1440 B.C. — Chicken Soup,…
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News At Play With Maurice and Tony
The phone rings in Maurice Sendak’s rural Connecticut home. “Listen to this,” says his friend Tony Kushner in a perfectly deadpan voice. “J.K. Rowling Admits the Right is Right. She says she is happy because ‘Harry is teaching children to leave Christianity and worship Satan’s sexual member.’” After a pause, the credulous Sendak replies, “Really?…
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Opinion The Middle East Matrix, Reloaded
Last month saw the release of two highly anticipated, albeit quite different, sequels: the “Matrix Reloaded,” the Wachowski brothers’ follow-up to their first “Matrix” film, and the American-sponsored “road map,” the latest installment in an ongoing series of Israeli-Palestinian peace plans. A mere coincidence, no doubt. But there are few real-world dramas as heartbreaking and…
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News Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s selection as JTS commencement speaker roils graduating class
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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News Protesters picket Manhattan synagogue over Israel real estate sale, testing Mamdani and new law
In Case You Missed It
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Culture What the private equity takeover means for the bagel industry
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
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Looking Forward My artist grandmother nearly made aliyah. I don’t know what she’d think of Israel today