The first time I admitted to myself that I had an eating disorder was after watching a film describing eating disorders and the Jewish Community called “Hungry to be Heard.” Until that point I was lost. I became a shadow, a nothing person who craved solitude and lived by counting. It had been 4 months…
I’ve started noticing hamentaschen showing up in local bakeries, and it made me wonder if one of the reasons we say “Purim Sameach/Happy Purim” is because we know that we’ll be eating lots of hamentaschen, the traditional Eastern-European Purim dessert. This joyous day celebrates the repeal of the death decree against the Jewish inhabitants of…
Courtesy of Hazon Seven years ago, Nigel Savage, founder of the Jewish environmental group Hazon, typed the phrase “Jewish food movement,” in quotes, into Google. There were zero results. Enter those words today, and you will find 80,100 results. But Savage no longer has to rely on Google for proof of his movement’s success. A…
Consume a lot of alcohol on Purim. As the Talmud pushes, “A person is obligated to drink on Purim to confuse the difference between the phrases ‘cursed be Haman)’ and ‘blessed be Mordecai.’ Megillah (7b). That would be a lot of drinking and any number of intoxicants could fulfill this mitzvah. This year you may…
The costumes line the streets and Purim is in the air. It’s really one of my favorite holidays, made more so by the preparations for our community’s traditional English-speakers Tzfat Purim shpiel. I excitedly anticipate the unique mishloach manot (gift packages) that my Sepharadi neighbors send – their homemade Moroccan Purim challahs, Djerbian orange-flavored donuts,…
My synagogue garden will be five years old this spring. That is how long it took to become a truly congregational enterprise, and not just a labor of love for me. Step 1: Get Leadership On Board Initially, I wanted to build the garden in the front of the shul. That was nixed by the…
While researching about Sephardic food, I realized that what for many were exotic flavors and foreign cooking techniques; for me was just average home food. So I started wondering why the Chilean and the Sephardic cuisine are so alike? I started comparing recipes and doing some research on their origins, to finally be able to…
What is the purpose of a community garden? A few weeks ago, I would have said that I knew the answer to this question: that a community garden’s purpose is to nourish people with healthy food and to subvert a corrupt system by providing an alternate model. However, at this year’s Hazon Food Conference at…
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