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Are locusts a plague? Not always–in fact, sometimes, they’re lunch. Four species of locust are listed in the Torah as being kosher. They are the red locust, the yellow locust, the spotted grey locust, and the white locust (Leviticus 11:20). It’s hard to know which contemporary bugs these correspond to; the biblical descriptions were written…
Today, Mark Twain is known for writing classic novels such as Huckleberry Finn and The Prince & the Pauper. But in his lifetime, he was most famous for The Innocents Abroad, a nonfiction travelogue of his journey to Palestine, which outsold all his other books. His trip took place in 1867, aboard a retired Civil War steamship that had…
If your seder plate is looking a little flat, here’s the perfect solution. The Passover Haggadah in Another Dimension (2009), like other haggadot, is a manual for getting you through the Passover meal. But this haggadah really pulls you into the story–or, rather, pulls the story out at you. The haggadah includes a pair of red-and-blue 3-D…
One of the newest and biggest centers of Talmud study is neither in Hasidic Brooklyn nor in Israel–it’s the nation of South Korea. The Talmud, the ancient collection of Jewish wisdom, stories, and laws, occupies nearly 3,000 pages in the original Aramaic. But today, a single-volume edition of the Talmud, translated into Korean,…
In a remote part of Greece off the Ionian Sea, a small population of Jews–the Romaniotes–have lived for more than 2,300 years. According to legend, a slave ship carrying hundreds of Jews was sunk in a storm over two millennia ago. The survivors, having reached the shore of Ioannina, were…
Humanity has stumbled upon some bizarre medical cures, from crystals to marijuana, but one of the downright oddest has to be the hirudo medicinalis, the European medicinal leech. Leeches have been used in medical treatments for over 2000 years–the practice is described in ancient Roman writings, as well as in the Talmud and Shulhan Arukh–but…
A young couple meets, falls in love, dances at their wedding, and then must flee the tiny shtetl where they live. This is the plot for “Almonds and Wine,” a new short animated film by Arnold Lipsey. The story–told without words, and using a simple style of cartoons and magic markers to a…
Jews aren’t generally thought of as warriors. But, from Joshua’s conquest of Canaan to Masada and the more recent Israeli wars, combat has been one of the more difficult facts of Jewish life. The Museum of Jewish Military History, which only exists online, was created by amateur historian and war re-enactor David…
In 1896, a pair of vacationing Scottish twin sisters purchased a manuscript in Cairo that they didn’t understand, though they did recognize its antiquity and language: Hebrew. At Cambridge University, they put the document before Solomon Schechter, a scholar and famed eccentric, who identified it at once. It was from the…
Jews recite the devotional prayer Avinu Malkeinu (Our Father, Our King) during the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The traditional melody is a slow, stirring, dirge. And, of course, it’s perfect for a heavy metal cover. The band Mogwai, a Scottish post-rock trio, wrote a 20-minute epic song, “My Father, My…
There’s a Jewish practice of saying a blessing before eating any food–a spiritual equivalent of saying thank you to the “chef.” But did you know that there’s also a blessing for food that’s on its way out? The blessing for going to the bathroom is known as “asher yatzar” (which translates simply as…
A summer in Italy sounds like an ideal vacation. Unless, of course, you’re part of a Jewish family that’s just fled the Soviet Union. That’s the set-up for David Bezmozgis’ new novel The Free World, released today. The year is 1978, and the Krasnansky family has just arrived in Rome from the USSR. While…
