Sephardic Jews
The Latest
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Culture How Jewish exiles from Vienna remade Hollywood in their image
When the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened earlier this year, it faced criticism for neglecting the foundational role American Jewish immigrants played in the movie industry. Its recent symposium and screening series, “Vienna in Hollywood,” planned long in advance of the opening, helped set the record straight. It highlighted the contributions of the European…
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Food Pumpkin knishes and spicy pumpkin dip: Jews and pumpkins go back long before Thanksgiving
A Yiddish poem by the writer Leyb Kvitko suggests that pumpkin knishes were familiar to Jews in the Soviet Union
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Food This old Sephardic recipe will become your go-to chocolate birthday cake
Our all-time favorite family birthday cake is a Sephardi Jewish Passover cake. I got the recipe from my mother’s friend Lucie Ades, whose family came from France and was of Spanish ancestry. I am guessing that they were from Bayonne in Southwest France, where Jews fleeing the Inquisition in the early sixteenth century settled and…
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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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Fast Forward Jewish congresswoman storms out of Epstein hearing after Pam Bondi raises her record on antisemitism
In Case You Missed It
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Culture Why a forgotten teacher’s grave became a Jewish pilgrimage site
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Fast Forward Olympics committee defends sale of T-shirt commemorating 1936 Nazi-era Games
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News Muslim and Sephardic Jewish college students are connecting over shared heritage
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Looking Forward The one Jewish value everyone should hold dear in the age of AI
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