07 Apr
Culture, Latest

Make Your Own Matzoh

By Nonna Gorilovskaya My friend and cooking goddess Jenna Huntsberger never tasted matzoh before she decided to bake her own. (Note to self: I am a bad Jewish friend.) She documented her valiant efforts on her ModernDomestic blog: This recipe is from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s book, The Bread Bible, but the recipe is originally from Noel Comess, founder of Tom Cat bakery in Queens, New York. The recipe takes liberties with the original recipe for Matzoh, which is traditionally made from plain flour and water. Beranbaum adds olive oil for crispness, and salt, wheat flour and rosemary for flavor. According to Jewish law, the dough must be baked 18 minutes after the dough is mixed, otherwise it is considered “leavened” and unsuitable for Passover. But Beranbaum’s dough rests for a full 30 minutes before shaping… While this...

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11 Nov
Latest

Son of Jewish Refugee Elected Prime Minister of New Zealand

By Nonna Gorilovskaya John Key, son of a Jewish refugee, was elected the next prime minister of Middle-earth New Zealand, the country best known for its kiwi fruit and as the gorgeous backdrop for the Lord of the Rings movies. Ruth Lazar, Key's mother, escaped Austria in 1939 with her family to Britain by paying for a paper marriage. After the war, she married George Key, and the couple immigrated to New Zealand. John's father died of a heart attack when he was six. Ruth raised John and his two sisters by herself in public housing. Key started out as a currency trader in his 20s and rose to become head of foreign exchange for Merrill Lynch and a multimillionaire. The center-right National Party recruited him to run as an MP in 2002, and his political career...

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03 Oct
Latest

But is Palin good for the Pakistanis?

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari got woman trouble. During their meeting at the United Nations, Zardari told the Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin that she was "gorgeous" and hinted that he just might hug her. Wrong answer! "Gushing compliments make Palin blush" one headline in Dawn, Pakistan's English-language daily, blushed. Pakistani feminists are enraged as are the religious conservatives. The Christian Science Monitor reports that "one radical Muslim prayer leader said the president shamed the nation for ‘indecent gestures, filthy remarks, and repeated praise of a non-Muslim lady wearing a short skirt.'" Presumably, praising a non-Muslim lady in a pantsuit or a Muslim lady in a short skirt would be totally kosher. Or, at the very least, not earn you a fatwa. Zardari is, of course, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, the twice former prime minister,...

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15 Sep
Latest

Dreams about Sarah Palin (with Jewish content)

At some point before I cast my ballot this November, I am going to have a dream about Sarah Palin. It is just inevitable—she is everywhere right now. And though I may be a would-be Palin dreamer, I am not alone. As of Friday, Slate received almost 500 letters from readers whose partisan, bipartisan, juicy and just plain weird dreams about Palin were, as we would say in California, totally awesome: It's hard to generalize about such a large group of dreams, but there were a few persistent themes: Palin as a gun-toting animal killer, pregnancies and denied abortions, baby Trig, and the landscape of Alaska. Many of you reported dreaming about John McCain dying and Palin taking over the Oval Office. Both men and straight women reported sexual fantasies involving the Alaska governor... Palin appeared sticking...

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08 Sep
Latest

Palin asked Jesus for a gas pipeline and God for a plan in Iraq

What did you do this weekend? Me? I just sipped some superb Merlot from nearby what Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of that backward village called New York City, would describe as "cosmopolitan" San Francisco and watched some videos of Republican veep pick Sarah Palin. Speaking at the Wasilla Assembly of God, her former church, last year, Governor Palin asked Jesus for a $30 billion natural gas pipeline in Alaska and called the war in Iraq "a task from God." As she put it, "Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God's plan." Perhaps more surprising than Palin's statements were those made by Pastor Ed Kalnins when he joined her...

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Black Jews and the 2008 election
17 Jul
Latest

Black Jews and the 2008 Presidential Election

One of my favorite Soviet jokes goes like this: An old Jew is taking a walk in a Moscow park when he sees a young black guy sitting on a bench reading a Yiddish newspaper. "What, it is not enough for you that you are black?" asks the Jew, sighing. In the land of the free, however, multiple minority identities are celebrated, if not always understood, as today's Christian Science Monitor article on African-Americans' embrace of Judaism points out: Numbers are hard to pin down. Besides well-known conversions such as that of the late entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., black Jews remain an unfamiliar part of the American religious landscape. Yet Lewis Gordon, director of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, estimates there are as many as 1 million blacks with Jewish blood in...

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