Новости за 10.12.2015

“‘There wasn’t anybody who didn’t know Anzia Yezierska,’ commented a woman recently of the 1920s. Today, there is hardly anyone who does.”

Haifa’s residents are eating a lot more than latkes and sufganiot this Hanukkah. In addition to the holiday staples, those in the city are able to taste traditional Arab cuisine like hilbe, habisa, and haroumanieh, as part of what’s being billed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as Israel’s first ever Arab food festival.

According to FBI statistics for 2014, Jews were far more likely than members of other religious groups to be the victims of religiously motivated hate crimes. Despite Jews’ small numbers, 59 percent of the year’s 6,400 religious bias crimes were against Jews; to take one point of comparison, Catholics, who make up about a fifth of the country, accounted for only 6 percent of victims. The FBI said that hate crimes against Jews were down last year, but the Anti-Defamation League, which keeps its own statistics... Читать дальше...

Two years ago, on the second night of Hanukkah, my father passed away. Frankly, I imagine he had booked the date, himself, in advance, so the timing could not have been more appropriate. That year, Thanksgiving and Hanukkah shared a day of mutual observance; my father left this world accompanied by his two favorite holidays. As a rabbi, he saw a deep confluence between them. To him, both Hanukkah and Thanksgiving were about freedom and hope and the role we play in our own redemption.

This week on Unorthodox: America’s most badass Supreme Court Justice and TV’s most visible rabbi.

Many years ago I met the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward, who had gone to the Soviet Union in 1932. “I went to see the future,” he shrugged. He rode the trains. He got bedbugs. He wrote about it, saying, “No place on earth could be as interesting.” A current New York exhibition, The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Films, transmits the dynamism and vertigo of that time and place. The photographs are heroic and compositionally extraordinary; the films are epic. In some... Читать дальше...

Hanukkah can be fraught.

Ungrateful children dissatisfied with their presents. The Little Drummer Boy blaring at you in Rite-Aid. Grim office parties. Hearing yourself nag like a demented harpy about pre-dinner gelt-gorging. And when you fry up one batch of latkes, your hair smells like a McDonald’s for a week and every surface in your kitchen becomes as slick as Scott Disick’s hair and how the hell did that potato peel get on the ceiling?

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