Naomi Tomky
By Naomi Tomky
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Food Is Making Perfect Challah Worth The $625 For New Cookbook?
Sometimes we top challah with sesame seeds, other times with poppy seeds. Sometimes we add raisins or, at Rosh Hashanah, form it into a round. What we — and I’m going to go ahead and speak for the majority of Jews here — haven’t done is add kiwi juice to our dough. “Modernist Bread,” a…
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Life Why I’m Reading Holocaust Literature Today, In Trump’s America
My agnostic, Presbyterian-raised husband and I, a reform Jew, never had conflict between our outlooks on life. We had a Jewish wedding; we are raising our child as Jewish, too. But the election of Trump, surprisingly, highlighted one difference between us, one that I had never noticed before. To me, the Holocaust was still very…
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Culture The Last Jews of Pike Place
The stamp of Sephardic Jews on Seattle is strong, from Benaroya Hall, where the Seattle Symphony plays, to the real estate holdings of the Alhadeff family, best known for the now-closed Longacres race track. But the ink of Sephardic influence is fading from Pike Place Market. The oldest operating market in the country, the biggest…
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Culture Meet the Rapping Rabbi of Seattle
Simon Benzaquen, a Seattle rabbi, first earned fame as the “Rapping Rabbi” for his recordings and performances with rapper Nissim in 2013, but he has since found a way to use the same music to further one of his personal passions: preserving the Ladino language. In an effort to ensure that the language of Sephardic…
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News My Lonely Passover in Uruguay
My college study-abroad term in Montevideo, Uruguay, left me with reasonable fluency in Spanish, a fear of slugs in sandwiches, the knowledge of more than a dozen soccer chants — and a deep, visceral love for the Jewish holiday of Passover and its accompanying festive Seder meal. The year before I lived in Uruguay, I’d…
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Opinion ‘Just things’ — like what my LA neighbors have lost — are what makes houses into Jewish homes
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Opinion Celebrating Shabbat in Los Angeles: Amid the fires, a still, small voice
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