I was always vaguely aware that Passover was in some way an agricultural festival, but never realized that celebrating food could include consuming meat that came from animals I had known face to face. That was until last spring, when I spent Passover in Alamosa, Colo., a town situated in a high-altitude desert and populated by almost twice as many cattle as people. Spring is the windy season here, with gusts strong enough to pelt dust, sand and fertilizer (manure odor is part of this agricultural landscape in springtime) painfully at bare legs. Unlike spring in most places I have been, there is no greenery in Alamosa, where the rainfall rarely reaches more than 6 inches in a year.Read More
It’s not unusual to find overflow congregants watching High Holy Day services on a television in a synagogue classroom, but hearing songs from a recording rather than from a live cantor is still out of the ordinary. Perhaps for some it seems impersonal, nontraditional or risky.Read More
To the untrained eye, the basement-level laboratory at the National Institutes of Mental Health, in Bethesda, Md., looks like a scene out of NASA. Scientists sport full-body plastic suits, hair nets and blue booties — all in an effort to keep the outside world’s contaminations at bay.Read More
In 2002, an unusual advertisement in this newspaper caught subscriber Jack Nusan Porter’s eye: Two mysterious paintings, rendered by an unknown artist “at least 210 years” ago, were for sale. The paintings — which, as Porter later learned, were owned by a Ukrainian Jew named Alexander Goykham — had survived two centuries of anti-Jewish persecution, the Holocaust and finally the move with the Goykhams to their present-day home in Philadelphia. They were selling the sentimental pieces to help cover the cost of medical procedures.Read More
Certain topics of particular interest to adolescent girls go unaddressed in most classrooms, because they make many educators and students squirm: sex, gender, eating disorders, abusive relationships. Dr. Shira D. Epstein aims to change that situation.Read More
Copyright © 2012, Forward Association, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
