Новости за 07.03.2017

Last night in Seoul, South Korea, Team Israel beat Chinese Taipei in the World Baseball Classic. Now, you probably haven’t heard about this tournament, let alone the fact that Israel is fielding a national team in it—but you should.

Did you dream of owning a little piece of Joan Rivers after the posthumous Christie’s auction last year, but couldn’t quite fathom paying several thousand dollars for a silver dog bowl? Maybe you’ve been stalking a brooch advertised as having once been hers on a resale site lately, but can’t quite bring yourself to pull the trigger, because honestly, how hard is it to take any piece of random costume jewelry and say it belonged to Joan Rivers? Could Joan herself even say for sure?

There are a lot of mediocre Purim books. That’s because there are a lot of mediocre books about everything. (What’s Sturgeon’s Law again? Ninety percent of everything is crap?) But here are a few selections that aren’t just good Purim stories, they’re good story-stories.

Once considered a sleepy, backwater Negev town, Be’er Sheva is now a booming center of the Israeli high-tech industry and the home of a world-class university. Israel’s fourth-largest metropolis in terms of population has now taken one more step forward into modernity: 13 streets in the new Kalaniyot neighborhood will be named for women.

Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world.

Every year at Purim we look forward to eating sweet triangular pastries called hamantaschen, but the first recipe I could find for cookies we might recognize as hamantaschen—filled with poppy seeds—appeared in Aunt Babette’s Cookbook of 1889. So what did American Jews eat on Purim before then? Purim fritters, also known as Queen Esther’s toast.

The first known ghetto was created for the Jews of Venice in 1516. There, guards locked the gate at night and opened them in the morning, but after that, the residents could move around. Visitors came and went. In Aung Mingalar, however, no one can leave, no matter what time of day, without permission, and no one can come in without permission.

When artist Meydad Eliyahu was growing up in Mesilat Zion, a moshav in central Israel, he smelled stewing curry leaves and heard the sounds of the South Indian language Malayalam. But there was always a “big silence” around talking about the source of these traditions. “On one hand the Kochi model of how communities lived together for centuries was optimistic,” he said, citing his ancestor’s peaceful lives in India before nearly 2,000 people migrated starting in the 1950s after the creation of Israel. Читать дальше...