My freethinking French grandmother, having raised herself during the first world war while her parents were away serving the nation, believed wholeheartedly in the value of financial and professional independence for a woman.
How does an Australian director whose only previous feature-length film, “The Sapphires,” about a quartet of talented aboriginal girls entertaining American troops in Vietnam, direct a movie about an Iranian-Jewish family caught in the fury of the 1979 revolution?
There’s a bird native to New Zealand called the kereru, a larger than usual pigeon with a green-and-purple head, neck and wings, and a healthy-size white breast, that gets high on its own fumes.
On my mother’s vanity table, all smooth mahogany and beveled mirrors, the pancake powder smelled like ball gowns and midnight music.
The director of the Mars Project. The first female space tourist. The first woman honored with the Fields Medal (the highest honor in mathematics).
I don’t know what it was like for the others, but, for me, Chanukah as a holiday has been a complete revelation.
You forget, you know, that there are other ways to live.
Before she started to fight mullahs, Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights lawyer of Nobel fame, spent a good deal of time advocating for them.
Time was, you could claim to be a patriotic Iranian, a supporter of Israel and a lover of the United States all at once and be believed by most Iranians.
The week after my parents’ wedding, at the swanky Officers’ Club in downtown Tehran, another Jewish couple were married in the same ballroom, by the same rabbi, and before many of the same invitees.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.