Rob Eshman is a senior columnist for the Forward. Follow him on Instagram @foodaism or email [email protected]. For his food writing and recipes go to foodaism.com.
Rob EshmanSenior Columnist
By Rob Eshman
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Food It’s artichoke season: here’s your harvest dinner menu
My artichokes took a beating in the December storms, which they liked. By last week the wide dusky green leaves and stalks, swollen fat from all the water, produced bouquets of tight, cone-shaped flower buds. That’s when I called dinner. Last winter at the Forward’s virtual gala, I auctioned off an Artichoke Harvest Dinner for…
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Opinion The long, sad echo of applause for Will Smith
If, as the Talmud tells us, silence is akin to complicity, what about … applause? The guests at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre for the 94th Academy Awards Sunday night weren’t required to wear masks, but with both Purim and the worst of the pandemic in the rear-view mirror, we finally got to see who they really…
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Food Did Jews name this classic Italian cookie?
When the Italian bakery and cafe Il Fornaio opened its first American branch in San Francisco, I was hired as a cookie baker. The night before my first day on the job, I tried my first pot brownie, and then, rookie mistake, my second. I spent the night in a paranoid wakefulness, arrived at work…
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Opinion Why did the Academy leave the Jews out of its museum, anyway?
Amid all the controversy created over the Academy Museum’s initial decision not to include the story of the motion picture industry’s largely Jewish immigrant founders in its permanent exhibit, one question remains unanswered: Why? Why would the museum organizers, with $484 million and more than 300,000 square feet, decide to tell the story of the…
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Food Drink spring: Make your own bittersweet aperitif
Every spring morning I walk into my backyard, take a deep inhale, and wish I could bottle that smell. This year, I did it. The artichokes put an herby bitterness into the air, the verbena adds citrus, the bay notes of grass and menthol. It is a delicious, fleeting smell, so present in the air…
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News 56 suitcases and a ticket to Warsaw: One woman’s Ukraine relief effort
Barbara Cook was watching the horror in Ukraine unfold on TV and feeling helpless when she stood up, turned off the television, and started packing her bags. Fifty-six bags, to be precise. Cook, an entrepreneur who lives in the East Bay and the daughter of Holocaust survivors, started gathered donations of clothing, toiletries and suitcases…
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Food Shamrock-taschen? This year make corned beef and cabbage hamantschen.
This Purim, which happens to coincide with St. Patrick’s Day, there are two kinds of hamantaschen you should consider buying or making. The first are any of the traditional three-cornered Purim cookies that are being sold to raise money for Ukraine. Check this list for bakeries participating in Hamantaschen for Ukraine and buy some. The…
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Food When Purim falls on St. Patrick’s Day, drink a Haman O’Reilly
If Purim and St. Patrick’s Day, which both fall on March 17 this year, have one thing in common, it’s drinking. To mark the two holidays’ joint appearance on the calendar, Jay Sanderson, the former CEO and president of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, concocted a cocktail that combines the flavors of each. He…
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