Between Hanukkah, Shabbat and assorted birthdays, we've lit a lot of candles around here the last few months. Sometimes when you light candles, they immediately flare out. Other times, the flame gets very, very small, but then recovers before burning out. When this happens, Birdie likes to say "you can do it little candle!" It's possible she's ( Read more... )

I just finished a staggeringly good book by Dara Horn called People Love Dead Jews. This collection of essays came out in 2021 and had its genesis in a Smithsonian article About Anne Frank that I remember reading in the magazine in 2018, here retitled as "Everyone's (Second) Favorite Dead Jew." The overall theme is an exploration not so much of ( Read more... )

Given that we started taking Birdie to Sunday School (or at her age, preschool/daycare at a synagogue), it's a probably completely unsurprising step that we are now officially members of that synagogue. This is the first time I've officially been a member of a synagogue since whenever I officially dropped off the member roles at my childhood ( Read more... )

On October 1, Birdie started Sunday School. Well, she's 2, so the "Torah Tots" program she is signed up for is more like "Sunday morning daycare at a synagogue," but even if you don't want to count it as her first organized educational activity, it certainly counts as her first daycare experience. We're signed up through the end of the year, and we ( Read more... )

One of the oldest, if not the oldest, member of my synagogue growing up was a woman named Dina Stern, who lived with her son Eric just a few blocks from B'nai Israel Synagogue. As a teenager, I occasionally walked her home from the synagogue after services, particularly on icy nights. As I've noted before, she was well known for handing out Andes ( Read more... )

One side effect of growing up in North Dakota is that we rarely saw our family. The United States is a big place, and our closest family members was in western New York or Kentucky, each of which was a minimum of 18 hours of consecutive driving away. While as an adult I was capable of driving that straight through if I had to, certainly anyone with ( Read more... )

Programming note: My mother her own self left a comment to clarify details about Aunt Maggie's. This is nigh unprecedented, as my mother has very little internet presence, so take advantage.

Our next recipe is Barley Mushroom Casserole. When I put together the list of recipes that I was considering using for this series, this recipe was not on it ( Read more... )

We didn't have people over for dinner terribly often when I was growing up, but when we did it was almost always someone connected to our synagogue. Typically such meals were either specifically tied to Passover, or more rarely another Jewish holiday. For those, my parents would sometimes invite singletons who had just arrived in town, like Jewish ( Read more... )

My mother made bread most Fridays for the Sabbath, but it wasn't always Challah. My recollection is that she cycled through a few different recipes, although to be perfectly honest I no longer recall most of them with any clarity besides the challah and the Casserole Batter Rye Bread. I'm not sure what it says about my mother's faith in my ability ( Read more... )

Somehow the last  two posts ended up being a brief history of growing up Jewish in North Dakota, so I thought I'd continue with the last explicitly Jewish food currently in my backlog, matzo ball soup ( Read more... )