You Don’t Have To Be Jewish To Love Shabbat Dinner

Thousands of Jerusalem’s non-Jewish tourists pay to enjoy a special meal they can’t find in any restaurant: Friday night dinner in a Jewish home

By Sara Toth Stub for Tablet Magazine


On a recent Friday evening in Jerusalem, more than a dozen participants from a Chinese business delegation snapped photos of each other waiting outside a house in Nachlaot, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood best known for the famed Machane Yehuda outdoor food market. At this hour, the market was shuttered and empty, and various renditions of the kiddush could be heard coming from the densely populated hodgepodge of newly renovated and dilapidated apartments stacked along the area’s winding alleyways.

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Seeing the Lower East Side plainly for what it really was

By Elliot Jager for The Villager
By the time I came on the scene in 1954, the Jewish Lower East Side was basically finished. I don’t mean to irk former Grand St. neighbors or more recently arrived denizens, but those who yearn nostalgically for the “good old LES” most likely had little firsthand experience of the real thing.

Irving Howe’s epic history of the East European migration to the United States, and of the LES as a landing point, is decidedly not a work of nostalgia. His evocative “World of Our Fathers” wraps up a good few years before my bar mitzvah when I was 13 by describing the dismal

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Guest Post: Living Life Alone

Posted by Rabbi Richard Address in Jewish Sacred Aging

For many of us, the “holiday season” begins with Rosh Hashanah, and moves on thru Yom Kippur, Thanksgiving, Chanukkah, Christmas, and finally New Year.

If we are fortunate, we have friends who are sensitive to our “family-less” situation, and invite us to be part of their celebrations and rituals.  I am always greatful for these invitations and enjoy being part of what are often boisterous, fun, memory filled days.  But there is a part of me that recognizes that I am different – an outsider looking in.  Without spouse or partner, children or grandchildren, I lack common ground.  And often, I return home with feelings of sadness and loneliness – that awful isolation that makes my apartment feel so empty.

Much is written about this.  But what about the rest of the year?  How does living alone and without family effect day to day living?

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Hollywood's Last Survivors

Seventy years ago, the Holocaust ended. Only 11 people who lived through it remain from the world of entertainment. Now, in gripping video testimonials, Oscar winners, actors, Dr. Ruth and even Judy Garland's hairstylist tell their personal stories, filled with hope and horror, one last time as their themes of genocide, displacement and discrimination continue to resonate today. Plus:The Roman Polanski interview

Produced by Peter Flax for The Hollywood Reporter

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