Jewish Treats

Courland Jews, an Interesting History

There is no country by the name of Courland, but there is a historical subset of Latvian Jews known as Courland Jews. Their distinction comes from the connection in the 19th century of…

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Jewish Treats

Kitniyot and Gebruchts

Ashkenazi or Sephardi? Hungarian, Yekke (German), Lithuanian? At no other time on the Jewish calendar is it so important to know your ancestry as it is on Passover. What one does or does…

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Jewish Treats

Kitniyot and Gebruchts

Ashkenazi or Sephardi? Hungarian, Yekke (German), Litvak (Lithuanian)? At no other time on the Jewish calendar is it so important to know your ancestry as it is on Passover. What one…

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Jewish Treats

Irish in Fairbanks

In 1910, while visiting her family in her native town of Dublin, Jessie Spiro was introduced to her second cousin, Robert Bloom. He was eight years her senior and had spent the last…

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Jewish Treats

Midwestern Sour Cream

There are a host of Jewish foods that are associated with the American Jewish experience. Most of these, such as blintzes with sour cream, sour cream and bananas, and (of course)…

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Jewish Treats

Never to Forget

In 1938, when  native New Yorker Lucy Schildkret Dawidowicz (1915-1990) was 23 years old, she traveled to Vilna, Lithuania, in order to immerse herself in the Yiddish culture that…

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Jewish Treats

Kitniyot and Gebrouchts

Ashkenazi or Sephardi? Hungarian, Yekke (German), Lithuanian? At no other time on the Jewish calendar is it so important to know your ancestry as it is on Passover. What one does or does…

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Jewish Treats

Kitniyot and Gebrachts

Ashkenazi or Sephardi? Hungarian, Yekke (German), Lithuanian?At no other time on the Jewish calendar is it so important to know your ancestry as it is on Passover. What one does or does…

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Jewish Treats

Surviving Via Shanghai

In his youth, Rabbi Chaim Shmulevitz probably never imagined that he would visit Shanghai, let alone take care of the finances for several yeshivas in that Chinese city. Thanks to visas…

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Jewish Treats

Yente the Yiddish Writer

Yiddish literature entered its modern era in the 1860s, when Jewish writers began using the Germanic Jewish language to compose stories and poems. Many of the early writers of this era…

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