illustration by Lior Zaltzman My grandmothers, Bubbie R. and Bubbie G., lived next door to each other throughout my childhood in Wilmington, Delaware. They had also been next-door neighbors throughout my parents’ childhoods in that same city. Yet even then they were striking in their differences, as dissimilar to each other as night and day,…
I walked with my 90-year-old grandmother down a wide cobbled street in the middle of nowhere in Germany. We were in a small town called Bechhofen, and she hadn’t returned for nearly 80 years, since the threat of the Nazis forced her family to flee because they were Jewish. As my grandmother, Senta Baum, and…
Baboo is my grandmother. She’s one of those tiny Polish women whom you can’t picture without wrinkles, who dotes on her grandchildren with all her heart and spare cash, and who occasionally makes inappropriate jokes and then giggles at her own audacity. In short, she’s great. So it’s easy to forgive her for her occasional…
Sholom Aleichem’s granddaughter, Bel Kaufman, discusses teaching Jewish humor and storytelling at age 100. (And be sure to read this recent Forward piece on Kaufman.) The Smithsonian writes about the emergence of gender-specific baby clothes in the 20th century. “Who are you calling grandma?” asks the New York Times. And “why is my retired mom…
When it snows, I bake. This past snowstorm, I wanted to try something new (and old), mandelbrodt or mandel bread. An Eastern European Jewish dessert, which literally means almond bread, is in essense Jewish biscotti. Biscotti means “twice baked” in Italian and the double baking processes — once in a loaf form and once after…
As a participant at the 5th annual Hazon Food Conference in Sonoma, CA I was set to learn about the current state of the Jewish food movement. I was ready for the conversations about raw vegan fare, workshops on organic produce, and sessions on new urban farming techniques. But as I looked at the first…
Recipes can be like a blind date: the ingredients sound intriguing, expectations run high but the finished product is not always as advertised. If the date doesn’t pan out, it’s one evening. But when a recipe that dirties a big pot has the nerve to fall flat? This deserves the Yiddish thumbs-down “doss hot mayn…
As a child, Mothers Day was about making my mom the kinds of crayoned cards and beaded necklaces I now relish receiving from my own children. As a teenage and then adult daughter, it became about honoring my mother and grandmothers by visiting with them. We would go out to New Jersey, where I grew…
