Opinion // Rip-Off Rabbis and Sacred Scammers
By Naomi Ragen // Several high-profile Israeli rabbis have come under fire for less-than-holy schemes.
By Naomi Ragen // Several high-profile Israeli rabbis have come under fire for less-than-holy schemes.
In what ways, if any, do science and Judaism conflict?
Recent discoveries of large natural gas reserves off Israel’s coast will soon transform the country into an energy exporter, and bring in billions of dollars in new revenue. But the new finds also open up a Pandora’s Box of environmental, financial, social, security and foreign policy concerns.
Before I began reading Dissident Gardens, Jonathan Lethem’s new novel, I was advised to obtain a copy of Vivian Gornick’s Romance of American Communism for a little crash course on its context.
Think you know what to eat to stay healthy? That fats are bad for you? That you will never again be able to enjoy the umami taste of schmaltz on a piece of matzoh? Or the crunch of gribenes (chicken-skin cracklings) that brings back the joys of your grandmother’s kitchen?
Shortly after my bar mitzvah in 1943 at the Great Synagogue of Copenhagen, where my father had arrived from Czechoslovakia in 1934 to be the chief cantor, the roof caved in with all the uncertainties, terror and threats of annihilation. My family, along with some seven to eight thousand Danish Jews, were forced to flee their homes.
Avi knew his sister would take the news badly. Seven years his junior, Avi’s sister was given to fits of feeling, storms of wild emotion. This evening, as Avi awaited his sister in his home, he adjusted the plates at the dining room table, wiped the insides of wine glasses with the bottom of his shirt and folded and re-folded the three maps he’d purchased that day—topographic, political, historical—and had fanned on the table’s end.
Foie gras—the controversial and expensive delicacy described by the renowned food encyclopedia Larousse Gastronomique as “one of the jewels in the crown of French gastronomy”—is made from the liver of a specially fattened duck or goose