In the wake of his passing on August 7, 2020, I remember Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz in conversation, as the ever youthful rebel, questioning the whole universe, with a biting sense of humour. In the Orthodox world, where clothing defines the person, he made sure to stand out as a unique creature, combining worn jeans with…
If you read and discuss enough biblical commentary and ask why ancient figures didn’t do things along what we today think of as “Jewish” lines, you often get the response of ‘Well, they didn’t have the Torah yet. They didn’t know.’ It’s always been a point of comfort for me as someone who was raised…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi is under fire for calling immigrants from the former Soviet Union “Communist, religion-hating” gentiles. At a rabbinical conference in Jerusalem last week, Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef criticized Israel’s Law of Return for granting citizenship to Russians who are not Jewish according to Orthodox religious law, the Yediot Acharonot daily…
NEW YORK (JTA) — The Genesis Prize Foundation has announced that Natan Sharansky, a Jewish Refusenik, prolific leader in the Soviet Jewry emigration movement and former Israeli politician, will be awarded the 2020 Genesis Prize. Natan Sharansky will be honored in Jerusalem on June 18, 2020. The Genesis Prize, dubbed the “Jewish Nobel,” was started in…
I watched Roman across the camp’s dining hall, surrounded by a group of jeering boys. He was the other “Russian” at camp, but we had never actually spoken, intuitively certain that any contact would intensify their taunts. “Look at the two gross Russians. I bet they wanna make out, ew!” they’d probably say. I imagine…
It took author Boris Fishman close to six years to figure out “A Savage Feast”. It went through many iterations, as a cookbook, as a pure memoir, and ultimately ending up as a fusion of the two. The idea was born in 2004, when Fishman’s grandmother, whom he calls “the kitchen wizard of the family,”…
Saturday mornings are busy in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay neighborhood, as residents run errands and grab meals. The Underground Boxing Gym on Avenue X is strangely quiet, though. No one is sparring in the ring, or punching the heavy bags that hang from the ceiling, as they are Sunday through Friday. “We’re not open on Saturday,”…
Forget Chinese food. While American Jews nosh on sinful servings of moo shu, their Russian-speaking neighbors indulge in a syncretic Christmas ritual of their own, preparing for New Year’s celebrations. Over 1.7 million Jews left the Soviet Union since the 1970s, with some 500,000 settling in the United States. My own family arrived in 1989,…
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