Liza Schoenfein is a former food editor of the Forward and author of the blog Life, Death & Dinner. Follow her on Instagram @LifeDeathDinner.
Liza Schoenfein
By Liza Schoenfein
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Food How Zabar’s became Zabar’s: an insider’s story
As a kid growing up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, I always wanted to be a West Sider — and I can sum up the reason in one word: Zabar’s. I crossed the park every chance I got. That’s where my best friend lived, and two blocks up from her apartment — occupying not one…
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Recipes Hamantaschen Pizza is a genius Purim snack
If you plan to follow the Purim directive to drink until you can no longer tell the difference between “blessed is Mordechai” and “cursed is Haman,” then it would be advisable to have something of substance in your stomach when you do. What if this year’s hamantaschen could stand in for an actual meal —…
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Food Arabs and Jews find peace — in the kitchen
Star in a TV cooking competition, you get famous. Try to make Middle East peace, you get ignored. That’s what happened to chef Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, who made headlines in 2014 when she became the first Arab contestant to win Master Chef Israel. But when she founded the A-Sham Arab Food Festival in Haifa, pairing Arab…
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Food A new cookbook will connect — and celebrate — Jews of Color
As a kid growing up in Chicago, Alana Chandler, who is a Japanese-Jewish American, felt both invisible and all too noticeable. “If you’re in a space with mostly Ashkenazi-looking people, Jews of Color tend to stand out,” Chandler explained. “We don’t look like what one thinks of as typically Jewish.” And though there are hundreds…
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Food The deepest secrets of Sephardic cooking are buried here
Some cookbook authors get their recipes from chefs. Hélène Jawhara Piñer got hers from the Inquisition. The coiled holiday breads, long-simmered stews, and honey-sweetened, orange-scented desserts collected within Piñer’s remarkable new book of Sephardic cookery derive not from family recipes passed down through well-worn cookbooks or hand-scribbled notes on food-stained scraps of paper, but from…
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Food Churros for Hanukkah anyone? The new Pati Jinich cookbook breaks down borders
Before she was a cookbook author and host of the James Beard Award-winning PBS series “Pati’s Mexican Table,” Pati Jinich was a political analyst. The relevance of this information became crystal clear the moment she began speaking with The Forward about her new cookbook, “Treasures of the Mexican Table.” “Food has the capacity to open…
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Food A Mexican Jew walks into a bar, and creates her own tequila
There once lived a woman in Guadalajara who was so beautiful that she was known as La Mujer Mas Bella — The Most Beautiful Lady. But it was her inner beauty that inspired her granddaughter, Dafna Mizrahi, to make tequila. “Everyone knew my grandma because of how beautiful she was, but more how internally beautiful…
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Food How I learned to make babka and rugelach from the master, Dorie Greenspan
My confession to Dorie Greenspan, the five-time James Beard Award-winning author of the delightful new cookbook, “Baking With Dorie,” was flat-out embarrassing: Until now, I’d never made either babka or rugelach. This was in spite of the fact that I’d been a longtime food writer—and had even been a food editor at the Forward. “I…
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