Joshua Yaffa
By Joshua Yaffa
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News Serious Falafel: Served With(out) a Smile
On November 2, 1995, NBC aired the 116th episode of “Seinfeld,” titled “The Soup Nazi.” It featured a brilliant but moody chef known for his transcendent lobster bisque and his less-than-warm personality. Since then, fans of the show have deployed the title as something of a term of endearment for their own local culinary wizards:…
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News Inspired Cuisine: An Italian (Jewish) Kitchen
As a kid growing up in Queens, Mark Strausman would often walk down the hall of his family’s apartment building to trade his mother’s stuffed cabbage for some of his neighbor’s eggplant parmesan. The flavors might have been a little different, the ingredients not quite the same, but there was something familiar in how the…
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News Spiritual Vintners
As biblical legend tells it, Noah, having successfully unloaded his animal cargo on the craggy peaks of Mount Ararat, set off to handle some business of no lesser importance: planting a vineyard. Yes, Noah turned into something of a drunkard, the Old Testament warns, but the precedent was nonetheless set. Jews and the soil, united…
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News Dear Diary: Back in Time
In the early hours before sunrise on February 24, 1924, Harry Scheurman sat awake in his tenement apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He had returned earlier that night from a reunion ball for émigrés from his Eastern European hometown, and he took out his diary in the hope of preserving the excitement of the…
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News Musical Musings: The Leevees Get Serious
They may sing about gelt, latkes and their parents’ timeshares in Florida, but that doesn’t mean The LeeVees don’t take their craft seriously. “Obviously there is going to be some shtick there,” guitarist and vocalist Dave Schneider said. “But bottom line, we are really serious about the music.” The music, as featured on the group’s…
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News Good Taste Meets A Slimmer Waist
Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the age of 35, Nechama Cohen was forced to rethink the traditional kosher kitchen she kept with her husband and their six children. Schmaltz was certainly out. So were refined sugar and high-gluten flour. In short, all the things that Jews have been led to believe are necessary to…
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News Food for Thought
Denial. Pleasure. Certainly neither is a foreign concept to Jews on Yom Kippur, when a seemingly interminable day of fasting segues into an orgy of kugel and smoked salmon. But would a simple piece of challah dipped in honey really taste so transcendental if we hadn’t spent all day mentally salivating for so much as…
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News Israel Leads the Way on Stem Cells
For people who suffer from familial dysautonomia (FD), hope recently came in the form of an Israeli chicken egg. In 2001, a team led by Bar-Ilan University professor Ron Goldstein implanted human embryonic stem cells into chicken embryos to study the early stages of normal cellular development. Now, Goldstein is using embryonic stem cells to…
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