Rachel Rosmarin
By Rachel Rosmarin
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News Life After the Holocaust, at 90 and Beyond
My 92-year old grandfather, a Holocaust survivor from Lodz, Poland, sleeps in my childhood bedroom in Los Angeles. He has adorned its walls with photos of the dead: his wife, wearing a borrowed gown in a postwar wedding portrait; a daughter, beaming at her high school graduation, and other friends and family members. There are…
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Books Eight Magical Realist Novels by Jewish Women
It’s no surprise to voracious readers of female-authored fiction that the magical realism genre has flourished by the pens of the fairer sex. Readers with some enthusiasm for the genre may associate it with women of color in particular. For example, there’s Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel, following in the Latin American tradition of Jorge…
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Life Even Frum Girls Get GIFs
The thing about youth web culture is that kids of every background will appropriate trends to fit their own lifestyles. It’s not so easy for fashion, music or even food. But a social media meme? It’ll tear across the Internet, equally amusing to young netizens regardless of gender, race or class. And if Internet access…
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Life Meteor Town Saved My Grandparents
Chelyabinsk. The way my grandparents say the word is nothing like the way the newscasters on CNN pronounced it last week. The L is soft, and the accent is on the A. Chelyabinsk. The name of this Siberian town deep in the Ural mountains, where meteoric hellfire rained from above and spawned a thousand nightmares,…
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Culture The History of Yenta’s and its Dirty Roots
Read a follow-up post by Ezra Glinter on the true Yiddish history of the word “Yenta.” Pssst! Wanna know a juicy secret? Get this: The most well-known Yiddish word describing women doesn’t mean what we think it does. I’m no linguist, but after spending a little time on several authoritative Yiddish dictionaries, I’m convinced that…
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Life 31, Jewish and Nowhere To Go
The synagogue nearest to my new house is the second-oldest in Los Angeles. Recessed from the street in the largely Hispanic neighborhood of Highland Park, it’s so small that it nearly looks like a house — albeit one with lovely stained glass windows. The Rabbi, who used to be a dancer, seems to have brought…
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Life 8 Jewish Ladies of Instagram
Instagram, the artsy-fartsy photo-sharing app owned by Facebook, skews young. If one were to build a composite of the average Jewish female Instagrammer snapping away with her iPhone, she’d probably be a 16-year-old Jersey girl who collects and distributes “likes” with her #besties (best friends) of #selfies (self portraits) taken posed in front of a…
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Life Confessions of a Cocky Kugl Champion
See this trophy? Other than academic achievement awards in school, this is the first contest I’ve ever won in my life. And I won it for Kugl. My mom and I planned to enter the third quadrennial Kugl Kukh-Off, put on by Los Angeles cultural organization Yiddishkayt at the Silverlake Independent Jewish Community Center, as…
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