A wise man told me never to eat a meal prepared by someone who brags about washing his hands. His point was clear: You can’t trust someone who takes unusual pride in achieving a commonplace, because it suggests that for him it’s actually an extraordinary occurrence. It suggests that something that should happen every day…
Remember Chrismukkah of 2016, when Christmas fell smack in the middle of Hanukkah? Or Thanksgivukkah, that semi-rare event when Hanukkah happened to fall on that most American of holidays, Thanksgiving? (The last time this happened was 2013.) Now there’s another unicorn of a day. I’m talking about the fact that the barbecue-and-bonfire focused Lag Ba’Omer…
I could almost see my mother sitting in a wing-tipped teak chair at the head of a familiar oval dining room table in a caramel shade of teak. “Go on. Treat yourself,” I heard her say in her clipped London accent, surrounded by vintage Danish modern teak furniture from my 1960s childhood. But that couldn’t…
“We’re all mothers here in some way or another,” said a 50-something woman in writing class as we discussed some aspect of motherhood in a book. “No, we’re not,” I thought, but I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to hurt her feelings about not having children. Sure enough, the rest of the women in…
“This is a man’s world, this is a man’s world.” So sang James Brown, and unfortunately it seems that our current administration wants to keep it that way. The Godfather of Soul did go on to say, “But it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl.” That’s a nice afterthought; afterthought being…
When my mom asked me to post a photo on Facebook, I did not anticipate the impact that post would have on my understanding of my 98-year-old grandmother, her generation, and American history. It was October 6, 2016, and my mom had captured an image of her mom, my grandmother, proudly holding up her absentee…
Facebook Inc’s No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, paid a Mother’s Day tribute to single moms, acknowledging she never fully understood the difficulty of raising children without a spouse or partner until her husband died last year. “I did not really get how hard it is to succeed at work when you are overwhelmed at home,”…
It is hard to think of something more fitting to serve for Mother’s Day than babka. Named after the bubbes who baked them in Eastern Europe (babka translates to “grandmother’s loaf”), the brioche-tender, bread-cake hybrid, which comes swirled with chocolate or cinnamon, is the edible equivalent of maternal affection. Meanwhile, Mother’s Day celebrations tend to…
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