In honor of Israeli Independence Day, some reflections on my search for an ancestral food in the Jewish homeland.
Israel, on my first visit in 1994, was teeming pitas, tomato-and-cucumber breakfasts and fresh-squeezed Jerusalem juices. (How did they pull milk from plump shriveled dates?)
At my cousins' house, Cohava shuttled...
0 Comments | Posted December 29, 2010 | 5:35 PM
Before the blizzard hit New York, I had my own watershed moment: Christmas with Shoah.
Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour epic returned to the big screen on its 25th anniversary. It opened in uptown Manhattan, at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, on Dec. 10, and landed at the IFC Center in New...
5 Comments | Posted November 11, 2010 | 3:04 PM
The cross is down, but the issue won't die.
Last spring, the Supreme Court decided (5-4) that an 8-foot cross could remain in the Mojave Desert as a memorial to fallen soldiers of World War I. It returned the case to a lower court and soon after, according to...
0 Comments | Posted November 1, 2010 | 12:08 PM
A month until Thanksgiving and already I'm brimming with gratitude. Thirty days, $5,000 and 70 backers.
The magic and the mania of my Kickstarter campaign ends today. Now I can focus on the project at hand, writing: The Book of Knish: Loss, Longing and Search for...
17 Comments | Posted October 29, 2010 | 9:53 PM
Halloween gives me the heebie-jeebies.
My awkward relationship with the holiday dates back a few decades, to a beloved jack-o-lantern who met a premature death in the incinerator room of my childhood apartment building in Queens, New York.
I've since moved to Brooklyn and...
4 Comments | Posted April 26, 2012 | 4:00 PM