29
Sep
11
Jun
Jewish Fizz: Seltzer, Egg Creams & Cel-Ray
by Joan Alpert
The old joke goes like this: An elderly Jewish man falls on a New York street on a hot summer day; a doctor rushes through the gathering crowd, checks the man’s pulse, and declares, “He fainted from the heat; get him water.” The old man raises his head and moans, “Make that seltzer.” In another version, he cries for an egg cream, and in still another, he calls for a Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray.
Carbonated water, the primary ingredient of these three Jewish champagnes, appeared first in European spas as a medicinal drink. Natural sparkling mineral water from the springs of a German village, Nieder-Selters—the linguistic origin for seltzer—was bottled and sold as early as 1728 in earthenware jugs, according to Barry Joseph, founder of Givemeseltzer.com and author of a forthcoming book on seltzer’s history....
15
Feb
Ask the Rabbis // Are Tattoos and Body Piercings Taboo?
Independent
The Torah’s proscriptions of tattoos applied to imitating religio-cultic ways of peoples who don’t exist anymore, such as Hittites and Yevusites, and later to any peoples with antithetical ways. However, they do not include socio-cultural customs. The late ultra-Orthodox halachic authority Rav Moshe Feinstein made this point on Jews and jeans based on the injunction “You shall not walk in the statutes of the nations,” which he said addressed religio-cultic practices, not social customs, and therefore, Jews could wear jeans. A decorative tattoo is a social custom. The second-century Rabbi Shim’on ruled that a tattoo is only forbidden if it’s a god’s name and thus related to worship. The Talmud also quotes Bar Kapara, who went further: “…only if you tattoo the name of a deity other than God.” Same with piercings. The Torah describes...
11
Jan
Post-Racial Rabbis
One of the first things that six-year-old Alysa Stanton noticed when her family moved into a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, was a rectangular ornament affixed to the doorpost of her new home. Her uncle Edward, a “devout Catholic who went to shul on occasion,” explained to her that it was a mezuzah. “He would wear a yarmulke sometimes,” she says, “and he knew a lot about a lot of things.” A few years later her uncle, who spoke eight languages, gave her a Hebrew grammar book, which she still has.
This fleeting introduction to Judaism set Stanton—the granddaughter of a Baptist minister and daughter of a Pentecostal Christian—on a journey that led her to convert to Judaism 18 years later. Stanton, now 45, recently passed another milestone on her spiritual journey. On June...
30
Nov
