Renee Ghert-Zand
By Renee Ghert-Zand
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Food 2000 Falafel Balls and Counting, A Mission To Understand the Falafel
For Ari A. Cohen, Falafelism is not only the title of his new documentary film, but also a philosophy, a way of looking at life. The film, which aired last month on Canadian television, opens with Cohen in falafel gumshoe mode, wearing cool, dark shades, sitting behind the wheel of his car. “Here I go…
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The Schmooze Throwing Art in Glass Houses
Streetcar bells clang, workers hurry to their offices, and shoppers and tourists meander along the crowded sidewalk. Lital Dotan, a fair-skinned young woman with long, frizzy, strawberry blond hair, clad in a white terrycloth bathrobe, stares out at the busy downtown San Francisco scene from a couch in the front window of the Marina Abramovic…
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Life Apples, Honey — and Israel — in My California Backyard
Libi bamizrach va’ani b’sof ma’arav. “My heart is in the East, but I am in the farthest West.” Those were the sentiments of Yehuda Halevi, the Jewish-Spanish physician and poet who lived in the 11th and 12th centuries. They are also mine. However, while for Halevi, “East” represented the Land of Israel, for me it…
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Life On ‘Ma’am’ — and Israel’s Sage Approach to Honorifics
Natalie Angier doesn’t like to be called, “Ma’am.” The honorific was the subject of this recent article that Angier — a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and the author of several books including “Woman: an Intimate Geography” — published last weekend in The New York Times. The article’s subtitle reads, “Defenders of the honorific say it…
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Food Cooking With the Spices of Israel
“When it comes to Israeli cooking today, it’s not your mom’s kitchen anymore,” according to Ronit Madmone. She and her husband Shuli should know. As owners of Whole Spice, a large spice store in Northern California, a wholesale spice business and an online spice shop, the native Israeli couple keeps up on cooking trends in…
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Life Gertrude Berg, My Inspiration
Gertrude Berg left this world at the age of 68 on September 14, 1966, two months to the day before I entered it. I’d like to think that maybe our souls met one another in a possible netherworld between life and death. I imagine that the departed Berg whispered something in my fetal ear —…
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Life ‘Today You Are … Still a Child’: Why 13 Is Too Young For Bar/Bat Mitzvah
We learned from the cover story of the past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine that there is a debate raging in developmental psychology and neuropsychology circles as to whether there is a new stage in human development called “emergent adulthood.” Some might call it “prolonged adolescence,” but apparently, a lot of people are asking a…
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Culture The Challenging Financial Model of Jewish Early Childhood Education
When she sees how excited her 7-year-old son, Isaac, is to go with her to pick up his younger sister, Tzipporah, at his old preschool, Ginna Green is convinced that she and her husband made the right decision to send their children to Gan Mah Tov, in Oakland, Calif. Green is confident that the Jewish…
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