In her modest, shack-like home in southern Israel, my great aunt Toya served some of the best food I’ve ever tasted. After my Iraqi grandmother, Rachel, passed away, her cousin Toya (Victoria) Levy took it upon herself to fill void in our hearts and in our bellies. One of her duties was to prepare tbeet…
Our world has rarely seemed so impenetrably mysterious as it has these past days. The spectacle of hysterical weeping and wailing in North Korea follows hard on the heels of 10,000 protesters marching in downtown Cairo in outrage over photos of soldiers dragging women by the hair and stomped on them, stripping them half-naked in…
The recent intimations that Israel is planning a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure are not likely to lead to any such action anytime soon. More likely, they reflect an attempt to generate stronger international sanctions, coming as they did just as Vienna’s International Atomic Energy Agency was about to release a report confirming Israel’s…
Two more dead. One in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. Since earlier this year, when the Forward published a sorrowful package of profiles of the 37 Jewish men and women in the United States military who had died in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade, two more names now must be added to the list….
T’beet, a chicken stuffed with rice and spices and cooked buried in more rice and spices, was the traditional Sabbath lunch of the Babylonian Jews of Iraq for generations. I say “was” because apart from the older generation of exiled Iraqi Jews, like my mother and a few relatives, very few people make this dish…
The elderly woman steps up to her stove, quite agile for her 80-something years and pushes aside the platter of fried fish fillets we are not quite ready for. “Now you put [in] the sour,” she says to me dipping her fingers into the plastic spice jar and sprinkling the powder into the bubbling sauce….
Crossposted from Haaretz A few moments before the show, when the Jerusalem Theater auditorium was nearly full, a young man called out to an older woman: “Grandma, I’m here!” In another row, a young woman helped her grandmother to her seat. They weren’t the only ones. The homage to singer Nazem al-Ghazali drew at least…
On Monday, Lavie Tidhar wrote about Jewish vampires and Hebrew punks. His new novel, “An Occupation of Angels,” is now available. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: It…
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