For sprint kayaker Rami Zur, the three-month lead-up to the Beijing Olympics has itself been an international affair, divided among three countries and shared with fellow athletes from around the world. By the time the 31-year-old finally puts his boat in the water in China, he will have spent the bulk of the period in…
A group of Conservative rabbis has released long-awaited guidelines for a program that aims to monitor and certify working conditions in kosher food production. The guidelines for the Hekhsher Tzedek program, as it is known, are wide-ranging, with sections devoted to labor standards, the treatment of animals, corporate transparency and environmental impact. In order to…
Little known fact: I was actually on the Food Network once. The show was an Al Roker on the Road special about food clubs, and I was featured in a segment about a group called Girl Friday in Iowa City. Unfortunately, the episode aired on the first night of Pesach in 2004, so I’ve never…
I had one of the worst days of my life today (definitely top ten, possibly top five) but things didn’t get really bad until I was midway through throwing together a ratatouille. I think it’s a testament to my recipe that basically forgetting the dish on a stove on high heat for a good twenty…
Haifa, Israel — Barack Obama’s departure from Israel on July 24 marked the end of a summer visiting season during which the Israeli public displayed unusual enthusiasm for its political guests. Just over a month before the Illinois senator’s red-carpet visit, there was a frenzied reception for French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his pop star…
I am a little embarrassed to admit that The Jew & The Carrot went the entire summer last year without sharing a recipe for gazpacho. Of course gazpacho – a cold soup which has its roots in Southern Spain – does not obviously belong in the “Jewish food” category. Still, as Tamar rightly pointed out,…
Washington — As top Israeli, Palestinian and American negotiators prepared for a July 30 meeting in a last-ditch attempt to reach an agreement on the establishment of a Palestinian state by the end of the year, expectations of a breakthrough are decidedly low in their respective capitals. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and former Palestinian…
Bruce Adler, a two-time Tony-nominated actor who transitioned from the Yiddish theater to the Broadway stage, died Friday, July 25, in Davie, Fla., near Fort Lauderdale. He was 63. According to Moishe Rosenfeld, Adler’s booking agent, the song-and-dance man had been battling liver cancer for four years. Adler reached the height of his career with…
Just days after a protest at the site of the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse, a group of Orthodox rabbis and community leaders will be visiting the plant in Iowa on July 31. Agriprocessors, Inc., the country’s largest provider of kosher meat, is paying for a delegation of Orthodox rabbis and community leaders to visit the…
NEWS ITEM: An Israeli rabbi, an authority on kashrut, declared that giraffe milk is kosher. Said he: “The giraffe has all the signs of a ritually pure animal, and the milk that forms curds strengthened that.” The rabbi based his ruling on a recent finding by researchers at Bar Ilan University who had taken a…
LAUGHTER IN THE AISLES AT TOWN HALL’S FOLKSBIENE GALA With its curtain-raising musical opener, “Tzadiks and Nudniks, Shlemiels No Goodniks” — a takeoff on Stephen Sondheim’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” — the June 17 National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene benefit at Town Hall was off and running. In keeping with the…
