In the fall of 2008, we re-launched the food bank at my synagogue, Valley Beth Shalom. The economy had started to crash, and the synagogue responded, in part, by reinvesting in this project to help San Fernando Valley residents who needed a hand. Little did I know that within a few weeks, our little food…
On a recent Friday afternoon, 32 seventh-graders from San Francisco’s Brandeis Hillel Day School piled into a yellow school bus for a rather unusual field trip. Instead of heading to the zoo or a science museum, they went to the supermarket. With Jewish values on food and sustainability as their guide, students cased the aisles…
On my first day back in the “World of People Who Can Eat Out,” I found myself at a table full of homemade food. It was Shabbat, and my hosts had transformed a box of local produce into tangy carrot-ginger soup, mashed potatoes with roasted red turnips, and vibrant purple coleslaw. Even after 31 days…
As a high school student , my son, Neil, was diagnosed with mental illness. He lives with schizophrenia every day. As a student, he was an outstanding athlete at Manhasset High school. He excelled in lacrosse, basketball and track. But, starting in his junior year, things changed for Neil and for our entire family. In…
When President Obama spoke about climate change in his inaugural speech, it was a small victory for the hard working members of environmental organizations everywhere to finally hear that their agenda was being acknowledged on a large scale. One of these hardworking individuals is Mirele Goldsmith, the director of the Jewish Greening Fellowship (JGF), a…
On Tuesday, I had an evening that would make the proverbial bubbie plotz (and with credit to my Bubbie, when I told her where I was, she kind of did). I left my Brooklyn apartment while it was still dark, and boarded the train from Penn Station to Washington DC, the sun was rising out…
During my month of eating in, I came across a few statements from Achai ben Josiah. Back in the second century, this biblical scholar compared someone who buys grain rather than growing their own to “an infant whose mother has died and who is taken from one wet nurse to another, but is never satisfied.”…
By my bedside at any given time, I have two or three books on rotation. Currently one of those books is Russ Parsons’ How to Pick a Peach. The main idea is simple, but often overlooked: good food comes from good ingredients. In today’s world, how many of us know to store an onion, or…
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