Carol Novis is from Winnipeg, Canada. She has written for publications in Canada, the US, South Africa and Israel, where she worked for 15 years as a writer and editor on The Jerusalem Post. She is also the author of the humorous cozy mystery “Long in the Sleuth,” about quirky seniors who solve murders in a Jewish retirement home. She lives in Kfar Saba, Israel.
Anthony Scaramucci may be history as far as the current White House is concerned, but the Pandora’s Box he opened in his obscenity-laced rant is not about to slam shut. Scaramucci obviously thought that The New Yorker was far too distinguished a publication to quote him directly. How wrong he was. Following the expose in…
As the waters of the Sea of Galilee lapped at the foot of the back garden, I rocked gently in a hammock and pondered the possibilities. Should I stroll down to the beach, where the children played in the sand? Feed the carp in the fishpond, or curl up with a book in the Bedouin-style…
There’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news: A single latke contains about 65 to 100 calories. (And who eats just one?) The sour cream? Another 60 calories per glob. Other Hanukkah foods, such as fritters in syrup eaten by Sephardi Jews and deep fried chicken, popular with Jews in Italy, are not…
Along with the custom of eating apples, honey and round challah for Rosh Hashanah, many Jewish cultures have developed their own traditional holiday foods. Some Jews of Sephardic origin, for example, serve a baked fish head to symbolize “the head and not the tail,” while in Egypt, black-eyed peas and pomegranates are featured as symbols…
“This is a good year for etrogs,” said Levi Zagelbaum, a wholesaler who is president of the Esrog Headquarters Inc. in New York. Despite the fact that the fruit was picked especially early in the season in Israel, in observance of shmitta (the biblical commandment to let soil lie fallow every seventh year), Zagelbaum has…
‘Bread is life,” said Noam Ben-Yossef, curator of the exhibition Bread: Daily and Divine, which is currently on display at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. “It symbolizes a multitude of things, from fertility, to plenty, to civilization itself.” Maggie Glezer, author of “A Blessing of Bread: The Many Rich Traditions of Jewish Bread Baking Around the…
On Passover, Jews are told to read the Haggadah (literally “the telling”) as if one personally had been a slave in Egypt and then redeemed. By individualizing the text, each person confronts the narrative in new ways, in terms of his or her own life and times. The result has been a multiplicity of Haggadot…
When Susan Weidman Schneider and her family left New York for Washington, D.C., eight years ago, she found herself dizzied by the chaos of the move. Then the doorbell rang. “My friend and rabbi, Avis Miller, was there with a daffodil and a package of mishloach manot for Purim,” she recalled. “It was enormously sweet…
אין פֿאַרגלײַך מיט די פֿיזישע פּאַוויליאָנען געשאַפֿן פֿון אָפֿיציעלע לענדער איז דער ייִדישלאַנד־פּאַוויליאָן געבויט אויף אידעען
