Purim is the holiday to beat all holidays. Excessive drinking! Tinsel-y decorations! Thematic cookies, objects that exist just to make noise, a steamy backstory about a female role model, and, of course, costumes. We’re far from the season when Sexy Plumber outfits can be purchased off the side of the road, plus who the hell…
Hanukkah is a holiday based on traditions, not commandments. Eat foods fried in olive oil? Tradition. Exchange gifts? Tradition. Try to interest anyone under the age of 18 in a game involving a plastic spinning top? Weird tradition. There’s really only one big thing the rabbis of the talmud ask us to do for Hanukkah,…
(JTA) — Worried that the food you thought was kosher, or at least kosher style, has some hidden pork? Now, using a few test tubes, water and a small pregnancy test-like strip, you can find out in a few minutes whether your food contains pork traces. HalalTest, a new product developed by two French entrepreneurs, does…
Since I moved to the Adamah Farm 10 months ago, I have witnessed many miracles. I don’t mean the kind of miracles we often think of, in a biblical sense: an event that defies all laws of nature, and happens only once-in-a-lifetime (or only once-in-history, and only a very long time ago). In fact, the…
As Emily Matchar pointed out in her book “Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity,” a growing number of women have been taking up old-school activities like canning, baking, sewing and whatever else their mothers used to pay people to do. This D.I.Y. boom is seen as a feminist move by many of…
Been wondering what’s behind all those artisanal chocolate bars cluttering check-out lanes and tattooed women knitting booties for the babies permanently strapped to their chests? Or, as the show “Portlandia” so acutely captured in one of its most hilarious skits, the undeniable urge that crafty young folks have to put a bird on it? So…
Pickling cucumbers, cultivating yeast for Challah, sewing tallit … these hebraic homesteading projects are certainly not for everyone. But most Jews would agree that plenty of our traditions instill a cool-before-it-was-cool “Do It Yourself” aesthetic. This is a culture that often made do with very little and did it all behind closed doors, or within…
I recently discovered, and promptly became obsessed with, Emily Matchar’s blog New Domesticity. On the blog and in her upcoming book due out next year, Matchar explores the recent-ish explosion of “lost” domestic arts like bread-baking, bee-keeping and serious DIY laundry (handmade washboard, anyone?). I’d been noticing the popularity of this return to the ways…
