Sophia Marie Unterman
By Sophia Marie Unterman
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Culture My Grandmother’s Harrowing Journey From Nazi Germany To America
She crossed so many borders I started to lose track: Poland into Germany via cattle car; Germany into Czechoslovakia on foot; Czechoslovakia into Germany when she and her parents fell asleep in a (supposedly) broken-down train car that inched back into service while they slept; Germany into Canada on a steamer, loaded down with a…
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Culture As We Celebrate Our Exodus, Let’s Not Forget Our Role In Slavery
While most of New Orleans sits down to a dinner of red beans and rice, our seders will be beginning for us — porch doors flung open to let in Elijah (and the season’s first mosquitoes), bottles of wine clustered like brass quintets on tables as the corner church bells strike six. It’s Passover Louisiana…
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Food Fat Tuesday Our Way — The Best Jewish Food In New Orleans
Until Alon Shaya opened his amazing James Beard-award-winning Israeli restaurant in New Orleans, the city didn’t register as a place to go for Jewish food. But it turns out that Shaya is far from the only eatery offering excellent Jewish cuisine, whether Israeli or of the deli variety. Jews have been living in New Orleans…
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Food Gumbo Shabbat In New Orleans — Treyf But True?
I make the treyf groceries first. (In New Orleans, you “make” groceries; you don’t buy them.) Traffic inches along North Broad Street, everyone eager to start the weekend. The sun is a ripe satsuma hanging above the Mississippi, and the Superdome reflects the purple sky. I have several stops to make before I even start…
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Culture On Mardi Gras, Are Jews Still Outsiders in New Orleans?
The Rex parade entered the city at the port, the procession stepping from a lavishly decorated boat that drifted down the Mississippi and docked at the foot of Canal Street. It was afternoon on Mardi Gras Day, 1872. Historian Ned Sublette describes the scene in his history of the city, “The Year Before the Flood:…
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Culture Is This Sugarcane Plantation ‘America’s Auschwitz’?
The April issue of Smithsonian magazine featured a piece entitled “Inside America’s Auschwitz,” on the Whitney Plantation as “a rebuke – and an antidote to our sanitized history of slavery.” I came across this piece online, and I was drawn to the provocative headline as well as the setting, a town less than an hour…
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think Citizen
I read Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen: An American Lyric” this summer, as I started a new job, teaching at a high-needs public school in New Orleans. Soon before the school year began, Alton Sterling was shot and killed by a white police officer in nearby Baton Rouge. I tried to process the onslaught of police murders…
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Culture How Do You Teach the Holocaust to Kids Who’ve Never Heard of It?
By the time my third-grade teacher assigned Lois Lowry’s “Number the Stars,” I already had a basic understanding of the Holocaust. We sat in a circle to discuss the text as part of a lunchtime book club. My fellow classmates expressed awe at how scary it must have been for the main character to hide…
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