New Stuff

Hamentashen fillings

These fillings go with Nanny’s hamentashen, the dough I use each year for making Purim pastry.  Prune or apricot filling 1 lb dried fruit water 2-4 tablespoons of honey grated ginger, lemon rind Put fruit in a medium saucepan and fill with water almost to cover. Add honey and ginger for apricots, grated lemon rind […]


Nanny’s hamentashen

  This is my grandmother’s recipe and my mother taught me how to make them. Sometimes my uncle would come assist. Now my daughter and a friend’s daughter help me. These are plain, simple and simply the best hamentashen ever, because they evoke childhood, family and Jewish life in the best possible way. They may […]


Which Hillel are you?

Ah, youth! For only youth, in all its headstrong, contradictory and stubborn ways could see the need to partner against its own interests. The driving desire to be seen as open-minded, fair and even-handed, though, is what must drive the Open Hillel movement, those students who feel that International Hillel’s partnership guidelines are too restrictive. […]


Wrapped up in seriousness 1

The first time I put on tefillin, I was probably in a post bat mitzvah class. One of the madrichim from my Israel trip brought his set to class. I don’t recall what the lesson was about, beyond showing us the workings of the tefillin and how to wrap them, but this being a Reform […]


Recognizing a leader

In 2009, JCC Rockland named its community service award after Rubin Josephs, who had recently died at age 82. Ruby, was noted in his obituary as being a “champion of charity.”  More than this, he defined what it meant to be a community leader. He led the way on so many causes, founding both the […]


Tel Aviv is not Sun City 2

When I was working my first post-college job in the library of the Dallas Morning News, I had more papers at my disposal than anyone in the pre-internet era would have known what to do with. As I did my work, filing and cross-filing clips and attending to back-end content of one of the first […]


Chicken katsu

This is a family favorite, and probably one of the most requested dishes I make. It is just the right amount of salt and grease to be perfectly satisfying, if not the best thing for you. The chicken breasts brown quickly and have a lot of flavor.  Ingredients 1.5- 2 lbs of boneless, skinless chicken […]


Turkey and latkes meet for a once-in-a-lifetime mashup 4

I had already had enough of Thanksgivukkah and its menurkeys (that’s a menorah shaped like a turkey for you blissfully uninitiated) when I saw the bourbon pecan pie adorned with Chanukah gelt. This was supposed to be yet another recipe merging the Chanukah and Thanksgiving traditions, but really it was just a pecan pie with […]


Shalshelet, Joseph and me 1

First, I’d like to give you a little background about how I learned to leyn as an adult, more than 20 years ago. Avrom and I moved to North Carolina, and not knowing anyone, we started going to Beth El, a small Conservative congregation, figuring it was a good way to meet other people. It […]


Sufganiyot 1

Chanukah and Thanksgiving coinciding is an extremely rare alignment of the Hebrew and Gregorian calendars. I’ve created pumpkin cream filled sufganiyot as my offering for Thanksgivukkah. Ingredients: ¼ cup lukewarm milk or water 1 teaspoon dry yeast 3 tablespoons sugar 1 whole egg plus 1 egg yolk 3 tablespoons sour cream or vegetable oil Pinch […]