Photograph by Katarzyna Bialasiewicz/Thinkstock As Jews around the world gathered to celebrate Hanukkah last month, traditional foods such as latkes, sufganiyot, sfinge and other deep-fried delicacies lined our dinner tables. Today, modern Jewish food is celebrated as more than just the krepelach and pickled herring from Eastern European kitchens. It is recognized as a rich…
Illustration by Kurt Hoffman It was on a trip to Madrid, about four years ago, that I finally understood the paradox of opposites: that there’s no such thing as opposites, really, and that what you get when you try to run as hard as you can in the opposite direction to your upbringing is, well,…
Maia Hirschbein with some of her favorite olive oils. Photograph by Emily Potter It was in an olive grove in Tuscany that Maia Hirschbein had an epiphany that would determine her future. Already a food lover, she had come to Italy in 2012 to study its food, culture and language, and with no other particular…
The team — two of us snipers, a spotter, the lieutenant, and a driver, sit around a table in the small office of Major W, commander of this special infantry unit. I examine a grainy black-and-white photo that’s being passed around — a chubby middle-aged man in a jacket with white sleeves standing in a…
● My 1980s & Other Essays By Wayne Koestenbaum FSG Originals, 336 pages, $16 Why would you read a collection of essays by a critic who writes mostly about artists (of many kinds — filmmakers, painters, poets, singers, etc.) about whom you do not, with a few exceptions, know anything? Maybe because the critic teaches…
When the Forward published my essay on being in an interfaith relationship last year, I could never have predicted that I would eventually decide to put together an entire anthology of essays by women in Jewish interfaith relationships. Before I wrote my essay, I had carried ideas for it in my head for a long…
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