By Robin Jacobson. Every day we eat. During Jewish holidays and celebrations we eat more. After all, the Talmud itself links eating and drinking with rejoicing (Pesachim 109a). So it comes as no surprise that many books on the Jewish bookshelf, besides cookbooks, relate to food in some way. Two recently-published examples are The Middlesteins, …
By Robin Jaconbson. One of America’s most sacred spaces sits on a Virginia hilltop, roughly 125 miles from Bethesda. Millions have visited Monticello, beloved home of President Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. Visitors wander through the rooms Jefferson designed, marvel at his ingenious inventions, and view the quarters where slaves lived and …
By Robin Jacobson. One hundred years ago, on a summer’s day in Sarajevo, a Serb nationalist gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, during a ceremonial motorcade parade. The assassination was the spark that ignited the First World War. Within six weeks, for reasons that scholars continue to probe and debate, …
By Saul Golubcow. I was a very young child when I fell in love with Israel. Like the lover in Song of Songs, I thought it as “all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.” Now, in reading Yossi Klein Halevi’s book, I have fallen in love with Israel all over again …
By Robin Jacobson. On a cold January morning in Paris in 1895, thousands turned out to watch the public humiliation and military “degradation” of a Jewish officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Wrongly convicted of treason, Dreyfus was dramatically stripped of the epaulettes, gold braid, and red stripes on his uniform, and his sword was broken. The …
By Robin Jacobson. For decades, one of the rituals of American Jewish parenting has been introducing the kids to Fiddler on the Roof, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. I remember the magical experience of sitting in a dark theater with my parents, grandmother, and great-aunt, all mesmerized by the shtetl world unfolding …
By Robin Jacobson. By the time you read this, “The Monuments Men,” with its all-star cast (George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, Bill Murray, and Hugh Bonneville) will have opened in local theaters. If the film does justice to the brave band of scholar-soldiers who rescued Europe’s artistic and architectural masterpieces during World …
By Robin Jacobson. On our first day in Israel seven years ago, my family spent an all-too-brief hour in Zikhron Ya’akov, a picturesque hilltop village near Haifa. So jet-lagged were we that we only remember dimly stopping before the famous Aaronsohn house, the hub of a Jewish spy ring during World War I. This year …
By Robin Jacobson. When you linger over a cup of aromatic, freshly brewed coffee on a wintry day, you may think you are simply savoring a favorite beverage. In truth, as you sip that familiar, bittersweet concoction, you are tapping in to a rich vein of Jewish culture. For centuries, coffee has infused Jewish economic, …
Wander any beach this summer and you will notice two types of readers. Some ambitious souls appear to have saved their densest, heaviest, most significant reading for the lazy, languid days of summer. In the opposite camp are the weary folk who rest their brains in light, frothy fare sure to be long forgotten by …
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