Last month, while researching an article for The Forward about Indian Jewish cuisine, I spent the afternoon in Montclair, New Jersey with Siona Benjamin. A home cook who grew up in Mumbai’s Jewish community, Benjamin demonstrated how to prepare a traditional Shabbat coconut curry and a sweet rice and coconut dish called malida that Indian…
‘The scent of clove and cardamom immediately brings me back to my grandmother’s kitchen in Mumbai,” Siona Benjamin tells me as she stands in her own sunlit kitchen, in Montclair, N.J., with the makings of coconut chicken curry — cans of coconut milk, fresh ginger and a round, silver tray lined with small bowls of…
Sometimes stories are so ingrained in us, so much a part of our culture, that we take them for granted. In these instances, artists become particularly valuable, revisiting and reinterpreting stories for us, giving them new life. In “As Subject and Object: Contemporary Book Artists Explore Sacred Hebrew Texts,” which runs through September 29 at…
Most people do not know that we are living in a golden age of Jewish American art. But, as I will explain in a lecture at the Jewish Museum on March 7, we are. Since around 1975, there has been an incredible but largely ignored outpouring of art based on the Bible, the Talmud, Kabbalah,…
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