Imagine a windswept mountain town dotted with tar paper shacks. An unscrupulous mine owner twirls his moustache as he surveys the scene. Nearby, a one-eyed farmer and his fallen bride battle the rocky soil of their ramshackle homestead. Half-starved Indians skulk in the town’s shadows. Meanwhile, priceless cargo winds its way by train and wagon…
At the first poinsettia sighting, many of my Jewish friends from New York or Los Angeles recall youthful feelings of exclusion. To them I say, get over it. If you want to know authentic Christmas envy, try growing up Jewish in a frostbitten North Dakota town with a Lutheran church on every other corner. In…
Judging by the numbers, Micanopy, Florida, is a small town. Its population is just 609. According to its website, the town has three restaurants, two real estate offices, and one horse and carriage rental service. The closest Starbucks is 12 miles away, but tourists looking for an antique shop are in luck. Micanopy has 13…
I was born in Washington, D.C., where my mother called from her hospital bed to put me on the waiting list for a good nursery school. My own kids were born at home in Idaho (one in the bedroom, one in the living room), where getting them into a good preschool was a little less…
1) 1,525 Jews live in Idaho. 2) Idaho’s first congregation, Beth Israel, was founded in 1895. 3) Idaho’s first Jewish residents worked in mining camps. 4) The Falk family started Falk’s Wholesale Company in the early part of the 20th Century. It was later sold to Sears. 5) Moses Alexander was elected mayor of Boise…
It’s not every day that a Voodoo priestess kicks you out of her temple for asking about the lost books of Moses. But as we stood in Miriam Chamani’s Voodoo Spiritual Temple in New Orleans, asking about the connection between Voodoo and Judaism, she grew more and more agitated. “Would you go up to the…
One spring day in 1927, two New York City real estate speculators drove upstate to Dutchess County with a couple of girls and had a bit to drink. Before they got home again, they had bought half of Amenia, an old upstate mining hamlet ringed with dairy farms. By summer, they were selling bungalows on…
1. The first Jews to set foot in North America arrived in New York as a group of 23 in 1654. 2. Congregation Shearith Israel, founded in New York in 1654, was the first synagogue in the colonies. It was the sole purveyor of kosher meat until 1813. 3. By the late 19th century, there…
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