Talk of the Table | Michael Twitty’s Kosher Soul Food
Chef Michael Twitty—a writer, culinary historian, cook and Hebrew school teacher—is an African American Jew (he converted at age 22) who uses his culinary prowess to explore the threads of his identity. In 2013, he became a well-known presence in culinary circles when he wrote an open letter to celebrity chef Paula Deen, which quickly went viral
Author Interview // Mark Helprin
Much like the swashbuckling heroes of his popular novels, author Mark Helprin has led a life of great adventure. As a young man, Helprin served in the Israeli army, the Israeli air force and the British merchant navy, and he’s earned his living as an agricultural laborer, a factory worker, a military adviser, a Wall Street Journal columnist, a political speechwriter and much more.
Book Review // Debriefing: Collected Stories
Not long after the publication of her acclaimed 1992 historical romance The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag had dinner in a small Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal.
Book Review // When Basketball Was Jewish: Voices of Those Who Played the Game
In Farewell to Sport, published in 1938, the popular New York Daily News sports columnist Paul Gallico, when departing the world of sports to write fiction (The Poseidon Adventure later became one of his best-sellers), reflected on the wide variety of sports and sports figures he had covered.
Book Review | Jewish Comedy: A Serious history
Funny Jews: An Epistolary Conversation
Simon Schama Steals The Show
The Effusive British Historian And Master Storyteller Is Back To Tell Part Two Of His History Of The Jewish People.
A Short History of Little Words
It’s hard to escape the OMGs and LOLs of today, but don’t blame millennials—acronyms actually originated thousands of years ago with the development of the ancient Hebrew alphabet. Around the 10th century BCE, Hebrew letters emerged out of ideographic pictures and, soon after, groups of letters started to be used in place of frequently recurring words.
A Jewish Artist in Post-Dreyfus Paris
When the 22-year-old Italian Jewish artist Amedeo Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1906, his health was already compromised. He had suffered childhood bouts of pleurisy, had nearly died of typhoid fever at age 11 and had been diagnosed with tuberculosis at 16. In his first years in the City of Light, which was rife with anti-Semitism in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair...
Book Review | The Book of Separation by Tova Mirvis
One Shabbat, toward the end of the morning service, Tova Mirvis was stricken by a debilitating headache, in which “the pain concentrated along the line where my hat met my head.”
Book Review | Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss
In three of her novels thus far, Nicole Krauss inhabits multiple points of view, exploring the almost mystical ways in which lives that seem separate can intertwine.
"Beautiful Israel:" See it Here
One of the cheesier keepsakes I’ve ever bought in Israel came, not surprisingly, from a touristy shop on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street. A fridge magnet,...