Fiction | A Beggar’s Place

It’s raining again, and Estrella takes her green umbrella with her. Six, seven years ago, when she could afford to catch a cold now and then, she left her umbrella back at her apartment, deliberately. Only a cruel person would refuse to give a few shekels to a poor old woman, cold and soaking, huddled under an olive tree with no umbrella. But these days she has to be careful. She’s older now. Catching a nasty cold could really do her in. Nothing’s worse than Jerusalem rain. The drops seep into the bones and settle there permanently. Ranitidine 150 Mg Ranitidine 150 Buy Zantac Online Discount She packs her lunch, her battered maroon Bible that belonged to her father, may he rest in peace, newspapers, magazines, and other reading material, stuffing everything into plastic shopping bags, and catches the...

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The Spicy Tale of India’s Jewish Cuisine

Palak paneer, chana masala and the egregiously treif-sounding butter chicken may not scream “Jewish” and were highly unlikely to grace your grandmother’s holiday table. But Jews have a rich history in India and an even richer cuisine to match. For centuries, India has been home to Jews, primarily from three distinct groups: the Cochin Jews, the Bene Israel and the Baghdadi Jews. The Jews of Cochin, a port city on India’s southwestern coast, in the state of Kerala, have lived in India for at least a millennium. According to their tradition, they settled there after the destruction of the second temple and have been “augmented by waves of immigration from Yemen, from Turkey, from Egypt, from Syria, and even from Italy,” says Nathan Katz, professor of religious studies at Florida International University. They were an educated,...

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From the Editor | January/February 2013

Anxiety is not exclusively a Jewish trait, although as a people long subject to persecution, we continue to pass it on to our children. ranitidine 150 mg Zantac 150 Mg Buy Zantac 150 Mg Online When I was 18, I left home to spend a year in Tel Aviv. There, thousands of miles from the Jersey shore, I traveled to Jerusalem to meet my father’s cousin. My first impression was of a wild-haired man, an intense artist, so different from my methodical scientist father. Yaakov Kirschen is a cartoonist, the creator of Dry Bones and a fervent Zionist who had left his native Brooklyn behind. My father’s small family was wracked by petty arguments, suspicion and unspoken suffering, and I’d never met Yaakov before. Fortunately, my trip to Israel somehow trumped all that, and I was given...

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At Home With Norman Podhoretz

Having abandoned the left six decades ago, The 83-year-old former editor of Commentary and grumpy grandfather of the right is still waiting for the majority of American Jews to follow suit. A youthful Norman Podhoretz, with abundant black wavy hair, looks out from a sepia photo, circa 1943. He is standing with nine other boys in a Brooklyn schoolyard, all wearing identical dark club jackets with a big “C” on the breast pockets and smiles on their faces. The “C” stands for Cherokees, the street gang to which they belonged. While sitting in the den of his comfortable apartment on a quiet tree-lined street on New York’s posh Upper East Side, Podhoretz recalls that the main requirement for Cherokee membership “was to be tough and not to back down from a fight.” The Cherokees long ago faded...

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Inside Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood

Two years after the dawn of the Arab Spring and six months after Mohamed Morsi was elected president, democracy is still a work in progress in Egypt. Moment’s Daphna Berman talks with Eric Trager of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.   What is the origin of the Muslim Brotherhood? It was founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, a schoolteacher. The goal was to create a vanguard that could Islamize all its members, then society and the state and from there, pursue a regional Islamic order. The Brotherhood has two streams of thought: One is called Duat la Qudat, which means preachers, not judges. These are people who want to focus on social services, outreach and preaching, not politics. The second stream is called the Qutbists, named for Sayyid Qutb, who believed the Brotherhood should be a...

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Notable Cookbooks

From Brooklyn to Jerusalem to the Greek isles, a new batch of Jewish cookbooks takes you on a whirlwind tour of Jewish gastronomy. The Mile End Cookbook by Noah and Rae Bernamoff Hipster deli: Maybe the two words seem incongruous. But the Bernamoffs of Brooklyn’s Montreal-inspired Mile End Deli bring them together. Noah’s scruffy beard, Rae’s cat-eye glasses and the couple’s do-it-yourself approach to traditional Jewish foods establish their hipster cred; their smoked meat sandwiches, pickled beets and whitefish salad take care of the deli part. Their Mile End Cookbook brings retro back. With essays contributed from leaders of the nouveau deli movement, the book takes a philosophical approach: “Without tradition you’ll never be able to innovate, and without innovation you’ll never really be able to revive your traditions.”   Jewish Cookery Book by Esther Levy Everything old is new again: The...

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Ask the Rabbis: Does Jewish anxiety have a theological basis?

INDEPENDENT Anxiety is a universal human malady that strikes when we find ourselves at the crossroads of choice-making, equipped with several hefty wagonloads of relativities and barely a handful of absolutes.  It was not into the light of clarity that Moses journeyed for his encounter with God, but into the Great Cloud of Obscurity.  There he received two chunks of rock etched with divine absolutes. But by the time he returned to camp, the batteries had worn out, and the divine absolutes became an endless stream of possible interpretations and applications that continue to perplex us to this day. We live in the misty chasm of the most oft-repeated word in the Torah: “And.” It is in the struggle with the “and” that we grow; in grappling with the faded boundaries between clear and unclear, we...

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