A Fool There Was

There were once hundreds of wooden synagogues in Poland and Lithuania, but only a very few examples of this particularly Jewish form of architecture have survived. The Zabłudów synagogue, built around…

In Ashkenazic communities, circumcision benches with two seats were sometimes used from the nineteenth century on, one for the sandek, the godfather on whose lap the baby boy is circumcised, and one…

Beginning in 1958, Orkin took photographs from the window of her fifteenth-floor apartment overlooking New York City’s Central Park. She wrote that she spent a lot of time waiting “for the clouds to…