The long-running slogan “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” and the jingle “Pop pop, fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is,” secured the Alka Selzer brand into the consciousness of millions of Americans. But before “Plop plop, fizz fizz” there was a rabbi talking to a glass of the heartburn and hangover…
I would have sworn that the pumpkin-spice megatrend was started by Starbucks. But I would have been wrong. In an ad for condensed milk that appeared in the November 17, 1947 issue of the Forverts, alongside a recipe for coconut pumpkin chiffon pie, is ad copy says, “If you like pumpkin spice flavored pie…” The…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. A strand of DNA is a lot like computer software; it’s the blueprint for the complex computations that cells perform, and like a coding error in a computer program, a single mutation—either a deletion, insertion, or duplication—to the strand can cause cells to malfunction. But DNA doesn’t…
This originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. To read the previous chapter. As soon as they settled at their table, Leah looked at him and asked: “What’s your father’s relationship with God?” She sat facing him in some colorful thing, something fuzzy it seemed. His eyes roamed the room and then settled back on his tea…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Der Nister, a master of fantasy tales who later turned to Soviet-style realism in his writing, was a complicated man and rarely opened himself up to strangers. There were books of memoirs written about him but they deal, for the most part, with his earlier years. The…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Not long ago, I arrived in a small corner of Eden in rural western Pennsylvania: a bit of forest, a burbling brook, manicured lawns and camp-style wooden cabins and lodges. Displayed in and around the main lodge was all that a young child might desire—charmingly wrought sand…
The day after the Forverts published an article marking the eruption of a massive meat strike that began on May 15, 1902, the paper’s editor-in-chief, Abraham Cahan, wrote an editorial praising the women “who participated in the fight against the blood-soaked tyranny of a gang of meat thieves…” He wrote, “Whether or not these women’s…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. For the past few months I’ve been living in a place that no longer exists. I may be sleeping in my own bed in Tel Aviv, but every morning, at the light of dawn, I steal across the borders of time to a thriving Jewish street in…
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