Welcome to the Forward‘s coverage of Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest.
Welcome to the Forward‘s coverage of Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest.
Welcome to the Forward‘s coverage of Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest.
Welcome to the Forward‘s coverage of Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest.
Last August, my husband and I chose to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary by going to Costa Rica. It was our first vacation with an ecological focus, as recommended by old friends who have more refined tastes and more stringent religious commitments. We were delighted to have our girls accompany us. It was a vigorous…
Savta Zarifa is the paradigm of a fairy tale grandmother; plump, patient and never far from her kitchen. Unlike characters from Mother Goose stories, she did not bake gingerbread cookies but simmered tangy tomato dumpling soup over a kerosene stove or rolled countless grape leaves with herbs and rice. On Friday she also prepared hamin,…
It certainly wasn’t your average Friday night Sabbath. Here I was, aboard the Queen Mary 2, arguably one of the most famous passenger ships in the world. (The original Queen Mary ferried bygone passengers, like Cary Grant, the Duke of Windsor and Bing Crosby.) It was a sunny Friday morning, and I sat in my…
Growing up as Jew in Ogden, Utah, I attended a synagogue the size of a small house called Brith Sholem. When I was in kindergarten, Brith Sholem was the target of an arson attack that nearly gutted the entire building. The police never found the perpetrators, who lit two American flags on fire but left…
Early in my marriage, I would alternate Shabbat dinners between my parents and in-laws, who were both from Syria. They continued the custom of setting the Shabbat dinner table with loaves of Khubz ‘Adi, a Syrian flatbread to symbolize to the twelve loaves of shewbread that were the centerpiece of the altar in the Jewish…
Of all the salads that you can find in New York City restaurants today, none is more ubiquitous than the beet and cheese variety. Which makes it all the more surprising that I had never eaten it until I was a teenager. Despite the prevalence of beets in the Ashkenazi Eastern European culinary traditions of…
When my boyfriend, Matt, was called back into the Army to spend a third year at war, I moved into a tiny Brooklyn apartment alone. His recall had been a surprise. We were both working as journalists in New York at the time and had been together for almost two years. He had left active…
In 9th grade global history, one of the universal, all-encompassing answers that gets you at least partial credit on any question is ‘cultural diffusion’, or the process by which different groups assimilate the other’s practices and beliefs into their own milieu. On Friday evening, as the scent of lemon pledge radiates from every surface of…
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