Good Enough to Read
Something has happened to cookbooks in the past 20 years or so. They have moved from the kitchen to the coffee table and even to the nightstand as more and more have developed captivating narratives to go along with the recipes.
Book Review // The Angel by Uri Bar-Joseph
Nine years have passed since the mysterious death of Ashraf Marwan, the senior Egyptian government official who volunteered to spy for Israel’s Mossad. Marwan remains at the center of a bitter controversy over why the October 1973 attack that launched the Yom Kippur War took Israel by surprise.
Top Ten Jewish Podcasts
If you don’t listen to a podcast (or eight), your coworker probably does—or your best friend, or your brother, or your grandma. Podcasts are the medium du jour, though the term itself—barely a decade old—is already a bit outdated.
Talk of the Table | Foods to Beat the Heat
Not all Jewish food is the heavy, hearty fare meant to sustain Eastern European ancestors through dark, cold winters. But Jews, of course, don’t come from just Eastern Europe—many come from hot-weather climates and have a culinary canon that suits the heat. Here are some of the best Jewish foods to indulge in when the temperature soars.
The Curious Case of Dorothy L. Sayers & the Jew Who Wasn’t There
A devoted reader examines the odd relationship between the so-called queen of British detective fiction and her Jewish characters.
Visual Moment // Odessa
“To this day I remember, feel, and love this town…I love this town because I grew up in it, was happy, melancholy, and dreamy in it. Passionately and singularly dreamy.”
Speaking Volumes // Anna Solomon on Unto the Soul
Around the time I first read Aharon Appelfeld’s Unto the Soul (1994), I was just barely starting to write about Jews.
Jewish Word // Bible
When biblical scholar Elsie Stern lectures about the ancient world at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, the first thing she does is hold up a Bible and tell her students, “For most of the first 3,000 years that these words were around, if you said ‘Bible,’ no one would have any idea what you were talking about.”
Jewish Routes // Greater Hartford
Just outside of Hartford proper, Jewish families have intermingled with new immigrants over the years to form an unusually cohesive community in the suburbs of Greater Hartford.
Books That Shaped Great Authors
We asked 20 prominent Jewish authors to discuss the books that shaped them.
Alan Furst Will Always Have Paris
In each of Alan Furst’s 14 novels about spies—not spy novels, he insists there is a difference—characters inevitably end up dining at Brasserie Heininger in Paris. The fictional restaurant, based on the real Brasserie Bofinger, with its opulent marble staircase and shucked oysters, represents the glamour and the joie de vivre of 1930s Paris, a city he calls “the heart of civilization.”
Book Review // The Extra by A.B. Yehoshua
There is a tradition, more prominent in theater than in fiction, of the unwanted guest. One thinks of such works as Kaufman and Hart’s 1939 play The Man Who Came to Dinner; the 1967 Stanley Kramer-directed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner…