“We don’t need that!� My Zaidie glares at my mother and puts the second of two (yes, two) containers of homemade cookies back in the cardboard box from whence they came. This ritual is repeated over and over with a multitude of food products—salad dressings loaded with fat and sugar, pack...

Hi there! Kara here. Just a simple girl who grew up in a Southern Baptist/ evangelical/ Methodist home south of Chicago. Then converted to Judaism through a well-known conservative synagogue in Los Angeles. I never bought that whole Holy Trinity theory. But that’s another story… My first Purim w...

One custom I have always liked about Purim (aside from the drunken revelry, of course) is Mishloach Manot, those fun Jewish goodie-bags that people give to each other during this festive holiday.  It’s like Trick-Or-Treating in reverse:  the candy, wine, cookies, etc come to you -no need to ...

I love the Purim season as much as the next Jew, but there is always one thing missing from my Purim hype: Hamantashen. It isn’t that I don’t like hamantashen.  On the contrary, I love hamantashen so much, I eat them all year round! This video is my (short) personal quest to find out if...

My father’s all-purpose costume for Halloween and Purim turned him into a five-foot-eight sunflower, a three part transformation that made an American Jew into an American seed into a symbol of Jewish passing in ancient Persia. Essentially, he would put on a green turtleneck and his green cour...

It’s like a religious ritual: before each meal at my mother in law’s house, we act out the same scene. We all stand around the table, goggle eyed and groaning at the sight, and Laura worriedly hunches her shoulders and states, “I don’t think there will be enough food.â€� She’s right: t...

Late on Shabbat afternoon, a few entrepreneurial conference participants listened to some words of wisdom from Noah Alper who, until he sold his kosher bagel shops in 1996, had been the largest kosher retailer in the United States.  Beginning in the late 1980’s, Noah’s Bagels had helped take wh...

With all the jokes about Jews loving Chinese food, it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a Jewish version of the Chinese zodiac calendar.  Now, by inputting your year of birth, you can find out which Jewish deli food (lox, bagel, black & white cookie…you get the picture...

Zane Caplansky is not your average deli man, if there ever was such a thing. After a peripatetic culinary career which has included opening a tea house on the steppes of the Himalayas to managing an Indian pizza restaurant, Caplansky has now brought smoked meat manna to Montrealers living in the oth...

Hazon and The Jew & The Carrot may be the homes of the new Jewish food movement, but in a way the general food movement, even without the ‘Jewish’ modifier, is still very Jewish. I am not referring to the fact that, much like many progressive movements, a disproportionate number of t...