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.”
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…
The Holocaust (Shoah) and the Nakba (al-Karitha) share three characteristics. First, both terms mean catastrophe, disaster or calamity.
“The Guide is an excellent representation of contemporary Jewish Cultural Arts to be celebrated throughout the entire Jewish community and beyond.” —James Goldman, Park Avenue Synagogue, NY.
Located just outside Jerusalem’s old city walls, Mount Zion is home to King David’s tomb, the room of the last supper and a former mosque. Today, a tangle of neglectful Israeli authorities has allowed the site to become a beacon for ultra-nationalist religious Jews.
Like much of the Jewish culinary canon, modern Jewish pastries were influenced by the world around them. The familiar cookies we see now in Jewish-style delicatessens were, in many cases, riffs on the desserts of various immigrant groups comingling with Jews in America…
Maya Benton was a high school senior living in Los Angeles when the Russian-American photographer Roman Vishniac’s first posthumous book, To Give Them Light, came out in 1993. Renowned for his iconic images of Eastern European Jews taken between the two World Wars, Vishniac had died three years earlier at age 92.
Over the past few months, a series of student protests has erupted across the United States on campuses such as Amherst, Dartmouth, Ithaca, the University of Missouri and Yale. While the specific spark of each protest has differed, their substance has been of like mind: Students are contending that their administrations have neglected an obligation to address bigotry, discrimination and intolerance, and specifically racism.
American Jews shouldn’t be disappointed that Israel’s not a liberal wonderland.
The Jewish presence in Vermont can be traced back to land speculators in the 1760s, but a more substantial group, primarily German-speaking, started settling in the state in the 1840s
The Passover seder is one of Judaism’s most simultaneously stable and mutable traditions: There are universally agreed-upon aspects of the ritual (the four questions, the bitter herb, the four cups of wine), and yet there are many variations
