What is babka? The iconic Jewish treat is similar to—but not exactly synonymous with—coffee cake (which is lighter, fluffier and sweeter), and it’s not quite rugelach (which has a flaky cream cheese dough and is made without yeast).
In the second place-winning story from the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest, a Manhattan publicist returns to his sleepy Southern hometown and attempts to revitalize its Jewish life.
Lev returns from the park eager for breakfast. He pulls his chair across the tired linoleum and calls out, “Won’t you join me? Your show can wait.” He hates the way he sounds, like a grown man coaxing a cat from a tree…
What is our responsibility as Jews toward Syrian refugees?
Ethiopian food, famous for its spicy stews and the spongy flatbread called injera, burst onto the international food scene—especially in the United States—in the 1970s and 1980s, when thousands of Ethiopians fled political turmoil in their home country.
Should rabbis talk to their congregants about BDS?
On Monday, September 23, 2013, Juliana Deguis Pierre was mopping the floors of the house of a wealthy family in the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo when a journalist from the daily newspaper El Caribe appeared at the door. “They can’t give you your document because your father came from Haiti,” the journalist told her before snapping her photo without permission and abruptly departing.
Honey is potent stuff in the Jewish world. Since ancient times, it has been a powerful trope for love, hope and promise, and it is the key ingredient of the iconic honey cake, which retains its High Holiday status to this day.
The world watched in horror earlier this year when videos went viral showing ISIS bulldozing the 3,000-year-old ruins of the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud in Iraq—a city so old it is mentioned in Genesis. The militants toppled walls and bas-reliefs, sledgehammered statues and used a bulldozer to overturn and shatter a majestic human-headed, winged bull statue that had long guarded the city’s Nergal Gate…
San Francisco, the gleaming mecca of all things tech, got its big break during another era of innovation: the Gold Rush of the mid-19th century. Before then, several hundred people lived in Yerba Buena, which became San Francisco in 1847, after the territory was seized by the United States during the 1846 Mexican-American War.
In August 1903, a 22-year-old Viennese Jewish socialite by the name of Adele Bloch-Bauer wrote to a friend that the renowned Austrian painter Gustav Klimt had agreed to paint her portrait. It was to be a commission from her husband, sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. The cost, according to Anne-Marie O’Connor’s book The Lady in Gold, was considerable—4,000 crowns at the time, or about a “quarter of the price of a well-appointed country villa.” Klimt could not start the portrait until winter, so it wasn’t until December that the young Adele ventured to his studio to sit for the portrait.
