Showing Results 1 - 10 of 16
A letter from Zuckerman, the commissioner, evidently written by an agitated hand. It had come from Brest Litovsk bringing the news of horror. He had been in Pinsk and…
Passover preparations for a Civil War–era Union soldier included importing seven barrels of matzot and collecting weeds to substitute for the symbolic bitterness of horseradish.
I set my table with metaphor:
the curling parsley—green sign nailed to the doors
of God’s underground; salt of desert and eyes;
the roasted shank bone of a Pascal lamb,
relic of sacrifice and…
What if Miriam were remembered just as a person rescuing her brother Moses rather than as the heroine responsible for saving the man who would redeem the Jewish people from bondage?
I want to tell you a good story that I heard on the first day of Succos. Someone told me he heard it from his father, a Hasid, and just forgive me, because I have to throw a lot of names at you, but…
“But what is dayenu? What is sufficient for us?” asks the Wise Daughter.
Dayenu
If Eve had been created in the image of God
and not as helper to Adam,
it would have sufficed.
Dayenu.
אִילוּ נוֹצְרַה…
The creator of the popular ritual of placing an orange on the Seder plate describes exactly how this innovation arose, its intended significance, and the problematic erasure of its origins.
On Saturdays, and on unusually busy days when my father could not take the time to come home to the noon dinner, it became my duty to take his midday meal down to him, very carefully packed in a large…
Father glared; Willy smiled. Father sat erect, his skullcap square on his head; Willy slouched, all relaxed, his cap slung at an angle like a beret. One declaimed the Hebrew text, loudly…
Egyptian Jewish American author André Aciman describes celebrating his last Seder in Egypt with his bags packed to leave his homeland for good.
