I watched Roman across the camp’s dining hall, surrounded by a group of jeering boys. He was the other “Russian” at camp, but we had never actually spoken, intuitively certain that any contact would intensify their taunts. “Look at the two gross Russians. I bet they wanna make out, ew!” they’d probably say. I imagine…
It took author Boris Fishman close to six years to figure out “A Savage Feast”. It went through many iterations, as a cookbook, as a pure memoir, and ultimately ending up as a fusion of the two. The idea was born in 2004, when Fishman’s grandmother, whom he calls “the kitchen wizard of the family,”…
Saturday mornings are busy in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay neighborhood, as residents run errands and grab meals. The Underground Boxing Gym on Avenue X is strangely quiet, though. No one is sparring in the ring, or punching the heavy bags that hang from the ceiling, as they are Sunday through Friday. “We’re not open on Saturday,”…
'The Jews in America have assimilated the Christmas tree more than it has assimilated them,' one Forverts writer mused
A group of Russian immigrant families who all lost a loved one on 9/11 have become a tightly-knit support network since the attacks
Alexander Kalantirksy speaks halting Hebrew with a heavy Russian accent. He was seated in a straight-backed chair in his small, dark apartment in Bat Yam, a suburb of Tel Aviv. “Nu, I am not a hero,” he said matter-of-factly, and a bit impatiently. “I am an engineer. I knew what it meant. It had to…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. When Meribel Goldwin arrived from Belarus in 1994, she was ten years old and skinny. A couple years of eating hot dogs and sliced white bread on a food stamp budget, as well as traditional Russian foods prepared with sugar, salt and hydrogenated fats, turned her into…
Despite its origins in the work of the Jewish Karl Marx, and its early Soviet Jewish advocates, communism never served the Jewish people particularly well. Less than two decades after the Russian Revolution, Josef Stalin’s Great Purge made a particular — if unofficial — target of Jews. One decade after the 1938 end of the…
