Sephardic Jews
The Latest
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Recipes The spinach frittata that connects me to my Sephardic grandmother
In one of the scenes from my book, “The Poetry of Secrets,” Isabel, the main character is served fritada espinaca, or spinach frittata, at a Shabbat dinner, her first one since she has been captured by the Spanish Inquisition. My choice of that food was deliberate. It’s an homage to my grandmother. She was born…
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Opinion The Inquisition decimated Sephardic Jewry. We still haven’t internalized its lessons
On a recent warm night in Madrid, a young woman shared that she had travelled over 3,000 miles, leaving her husband and two young children in Montreal, to claim Spanish citizenship. Over glasses of the local Alhambra brew, she told me that her grandparents spoke Ladino, and that whenever someone would mention Spain around her…
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News Why only Yiddish and Ladino? Oxford wants to teach you Judeo-Tat and Karaim
When Jews long ago ordered their coffee in Baghdad, gossiped in Derbent or traded recipes in Kurdistan, they did so in Judeo-Arabic, Juhuri and Neo-Aramaic— languages that are all but lost, and with them centuries of unique Jewish history, culture and tradition. Beginning this fall, Oxford University will be offering online classes in nearly a…
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Culture How macaroons became a must for Passover — even if no one likes them
I grew up with no macaroons. My mother was raised on almond macaroons that her grandmother made, but the experience was hard to replicate by the time I came around. “Every time I saw an almond macaroon, I bought it, but in bakeries you mostly only see coconut,” she told me. “It’s a travesty.” This…
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Community Reigniting charoses traditions
Growing up in Chicago in the 1950s, mine was the only lunch bag that trailed matzo crumbs. On coming to America we lived in a Polish Catholic immigrant neighborhood so I had no friends with whom to compare seder rituals. Despite this, Passover has always been my favorite holiday. No other yontiff rituals compared to…
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Food Danielle Renov’s new cookbook celebrates Sephardic and Askenazic food—just not raisins
There are 86 things Jerusalem-based, Long Island-born food blogger Danielle Renov wants you to know about her new kosher cookbook, “Peas Love & Carrots” — and about cooking in general. She lists them across two pages right up front, and like the book itself the list is highly practical and deeply personal — a combination…
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Books Discovering Louisa May Alcott’s Jewish history on Portuguese tour
Louisa May Alcott was often told as a child that her dark hair and dark eyes came from her Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Her mother, Abigail May Alcott, who had similar coloring, had learned this from her father, Joseph May, a late 18th-century Boston businessman whose Portuguese Jewish ancestors immigrated to Sussex, England, just before 1500….
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Fast Forward Portugal Approves 10,000 Citizenship Requests From Descendants Of Expelled Jews
(JTA) — Portugal has approved about a third of approximately 33,000 applications for citizenship under its 2015 law for descendants of Sephardic Jews, according to official data. Applications based on the 2015 law, primarily from Israel, Turkey, Brazil and Venezuela, are behind a 10-percent increase in applications in 2018, which saw 41,324 such requests in…
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Film & TV The new ‘Superman’ is being called anti-Israel, but does that make it pro-Palestine?
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Fast Forward Tucker Carlson calls for stripping citizenship from Americans who served in the Israeli army
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Music ‘No matter what, I will always be a Jew.’ Billy Joel opens up about his family’s Holocaust history
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Culture She was my Hebrew school bully — and I finally learned what happened to her
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Fast Forward Elon Musk wants your kids to use his chatbot. The same one that praised Hitler.
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Fast Forward Nation’s largest teachers union rejects move to cut ties with ADL
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Culture In this Holocaust story, there are few words, no swastikas, no yellow stars — just movement, passion and empathy
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