Forced to flee to the United States after the violent Iranian Revolution of 1979 at age eleven,  Angella M. Nazarian takes readers on a physical and emotional journey from past to present, in her new book, Life as a Visitor. The book chronicles Nazarian’s difficult and triumphant journey to blend East and West. Incorporating prose, […]

You are probably sending all of your Jewish friends messages wishing them a Shanah tovah today. You might be doing it on facebook, gchat, twitter, or carrier pigeon. In Israel, you’re probably doing it via text or SMS, because apparently there are 43 million New Years greetings texted during Rosh Hashanah. It costs about 44 […]

Taste-testing apples and honey. Apples and honey are the quintessential Rosh Hashanah snack. We eat them and hope that we will be blessed with sweetness in the coming year. But there are so many kinds of honey, and even more kinds of apples, and they’re not all created (or priced) equal. Here at the […]

Chana Rachel Frumin is the director and founder of the Jerusalem Narrative Family Therapy Institute, where she is a marriage counselor and Orthodox matchmaker. With Tu B’Av, the Jewish day for love and matchmaking, coming up soon, I spoke with her about how she started setting people up, the challenges of making connections in the […]

What’s the key to any ultra-popular Jewish news story? Start out with a question — a popular Jewish activity, asking questions, and follow it with a wry, self-important anthropological explanation of this popular Jewish activity. Then you should probably follow it up with a sharp, vivid picture of a Jew in his traditional Jew garb, […]

Well, it’s a real shitstorm over at the Vatican since Pope Benedict lifted the excommunication that had been imposed on four bishops, one of whom is a Holocaust denier and generally sketchy guy. The Washington Post reports:
The biggest furor since the decision to reinstate them, however, has focused on one of the bishops, British-born Richard […]

Earlier today, Tamar called out the Hasidic community in Williamsburg for, well, defacing advertisements for restaurants that are seen as “excessive” and “indulgent.”

I don’t agree — and, of course, in one permutation this isn’t about food at all but about free speech (and, uh, derekh eretz, which means not breaking the laws of the land […]

Today at the office, we were talking about traditional Rosh Hashanah food. Black-eyed peas, primarily as a Sephardic custom, came up.
Funny, I thought. That’s what we eat in the South on New Year’s Day for good luck. Slashfood writes that the little legumes are eaten below the Mason-Dixon line because “they are thought to symbolize […]

Two things: first of all, Tamar Fox’s article on Jewcy about the struggle to erect an eruv — or what my friend Rob calls a “magic Jewish fence” — in Long Island. (We are digging the shout-out!) (And you should definitely read Blu Greenberg’s essay on MyJewishLearning about the relationship between eruvs and women.)
So yesterday, […]

Looking for a haggadah for your seder? We’ve got you covered.
Tamar Fox at Jewcy has five helpful hints, my favorite being “Mix and Match.” One of the best seders I’ve ever been to had more than 30 haggadot laid out on the dinner table. People could take whichever ones they wanted and chimed into to […]