My mom yells at me: \”Hurry up, it is almost Pesach and we haven\’t done anything yet.\”
The memory goes back several years, when I was a teenager living with my parents and brother in our three-story building in western Tehran.
The woman who brought to the Shabbat table dishes such as sweet pea kreplach and honey-and-pecan-crusted chicken with apricot chutney is tampering with tradition again, just in time for Passover.
It seemed that lots of people — including total strangers — had plenty of advice to offer my sister and my brother-in-law before the birth of their first child, an event the entire extended family anticipated for late summer 2003. And it wasn\’t just a matter of kindly (if ultimately incorrect) projections about the baby\’s gender or rueful warnings about all those sleepless nights to come.
\”The Hebrew Anarchist Comes to Town\” a 1893 New York Times article alarmingly proclaimed. To other reporters, she was \”Red Emma, Queen of the Anarchists.\”
Now that we\’ve just finished two seders celebrating our escape from Egypt, a new exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center demonstrates that not every Jew got out of Egypt — or wanted to.
Few writers know more about the dark, sometimes scandalous workings of the music business than Norman Lebrecht, the author of \”The Maestro Myth: Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power\” (Simon & Schuster, 1991) and the illuminating \”Who Killed Classical Music?: Maestros, Managers, and Corporate Politics\” (Birch Lane Press, 1997). A longtime newspaper columnist and host of a BBC Radio 3 show, \”Lebrecht Live,\” he won the Whitbread First Novel Award for \”The Song of Names,\” a brilliant debut and a dazzling piece of fiction.
When Rabbi Rachel Bovitz sat down a few months ago to read the novel, \”The Da Vinci Code,\” she was curious about the buzz surrounding the controversial best-seller. But what she wasn\’t prepared for was how profoundly disturbing she would find the book.
Conductor Murry Sidlin was browsing through a table of used, tattered books when he discovered a slender book about the Terezin concentration camp that told an unusual musical story.
On the outside, the interfaith comedic coupling of Lahna Turner and Ralphie May seems like an odd match: Lahna is a stunning Jewish Canadian who blends witty spoken-word pieces with off-color songs, while Ralphie is a morbidly obese Southern comic who delivers jokes with hip-hop flava and subscribes to Flip Wilson\’s Church of What\’s Happenin\’ Now.
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