Gerald Eskenazi
By Gerald Eskenazi
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News Shabbat on the Queen Mary 2
It certainly wasn’t your average Friday night Sabbath. Here I was, aboard the Queen Mary 2, arguably one of the most famous passenger ships in the world. (The original Queen Mary ferried bygone passengers, like Cary Grant, the Duke of Windsor and Bing Crosby.) It was a sunny Friday morning, and I sat in my…
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News Baby-Sitting Means a Trans-Atlantic Flight
It used to be so simple: On Sunday mornings I’d go upstairs to my grandma’s part of the house, snuggle in bed with her and sing “You Are My Sunshine.” How she kvelled. But being a grandparent now involves, for many of us, trans-Atlantic baby-sitting, or jetting down to Florida, or perhaps learning the shorthand…
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News When Travel Brings Out Our Heritage
In corners of the world I never expected my Jewishness to surface, my ancient heritage finds me. Or is it the other way around? Whenever I’m in Manhattan’s Diamond District, I get a twinge of nervousness and guilt: I worry about how I’ll react when an Orthodox Jew stops me and asks, with that unmistakable…
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News An International Hunt for the Elusive Bagel
I was sailing along the Nile on a fancy cruise, breakfast-time. I looked in the breadbasket, and there I saw them: bagels! On the Nile!? I knew, just knew, they couldn’t be good. And they weren’t. They were white bread made round. Yet, there was a certain beauty, a symmetry, in me, a Jew, fressing…
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Opinion The Olympics Aren’t Always Fun and Games
Ever hear of a Jewish motocross racer? Neither have I, and I’ve been around sports for almost 50 years and written about Olympics from the Alps to Barcelona. Yet somehow, despite our producing a minuscule number of participants, Jews wind up making news at the Olympic Games. I don’t necessarily mean on the playing fields,…
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News Eating (Jewish) in India
The candles were lit just before sundown, and the Sabbath meal was about to be served. Instead of challah, though, we started off with tapioca chips. And there was no sign of brisket anywhere. For we were in Kochi, India (formerly known as Cochin), and the setting for Friday dinner was at one of the…
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News On Record: Baseball History
Jews and Baseball, Volume I: Entering the American Mainstream, 1871-1948 By Burton A. Boxerman and Benita W.Boxerman McFarland & Company, Inc., 232 pages, $39.95. Baseball, like Yiddish, has generously gifted many words and expressions to the English language. The game even has an expression for a mediocre ballplayer whose career was short: “He was up…
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Opinion They’ve Been Good Sports
I’ve never heard of a more chilling taunt in the world of sports: “You’re next for the gas ovens, Zeidel!” It was screamed back in 1968 by a Boston Bruin opponent at a Philadelphia Flyers’ hockey player named Larry Zeidel. And yet, as this spring training marks the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s belated entry…
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