sarah in nyc

Two young, friends of ours are married to one another. They each write book reviews for serious intellectual journals and at dinner recently they both joked about how book reviews all need to take the same form. They all have to start out with an amusing anecdote that connects the reviewer to the topics covered by the books. Well, to be honest, I hang out in a kind of a bookish crowd and lots of my friends have written books, but two dear friends wrote books that got published within a few weeks of one another. At first glance, the books have very little to do with one another. However the underlying themes of both books are very similar. Celia Reiss' book  is a memoir of her mother, who died far too young in the form of a cookbook. It is a poignant book full of loss and memory and the power of love (in the form of pie).  Sacred Shelter  by my dear friend and neighbor Susan Greenfield is in many ways a harder more bitter meal to consume. ...

This is a challah baking week, and it is still winter so Shabbat starts on the early side.  Shabbat starts at 5:21 this week. It isn't as much of a mad rush as it was during the weeks when Shabbat began around 4:00, but still, if we expect to eat tonight the tasks all need to be completed in the right order. I got the challah dough going before I finished drinking my morning coffee and began kneading after my breakfast. Breakfast was, as it is most mornings fruit and almonds run through the food processor. I used to call this roughy, as opposed to a smoothy. Recently I have decided to re-brand my breakfast and call it fruit porridge. I have the feeling that if I were to market this it would sell better with the new name. Either way, an orange, some fresh cranberries, a handful of almonds and a package of vitamin C powder are what got me going in the morning along with a big cup of coffee. Once I got the challah kneaded and rising in the big aluminum b...

This is the d'var torah I gave yesterday at Ansche Chesed about the robes of the High Priest. Shabbat Shalom! When Jeremy asked me to give today’s d’var torah, it seemed like a perfect fit. This parasha describes the clothing worn by the Cohen Gadol, and as some of you know, I make Jewish ritual objects in fabric, including garments like tallitot and kittles. So when I started to think about this dvar torah, the first question I asked myself was the most basic – what did the Cohen Gadol’s garments actually look like? We all have some idea in our head about what the Cohen Gadol wears, ideas generally influenced by pictures we have seen in our Hebrew School textbooks and haggadot. We know there is some kind of a hat, either like a pope’s pointy hat or like the turban worn by the   machberet RAMBAM, as well as a breast plate, various layers of robes, and his hem is decorated with pomegranates and bells. Okay. So, to get a better idea, I went to Google Images and s...

Tomorrow I am giving a d'var Torah  about the vestments of the High Priest. If you are around, stop by. I have cooked Shabbat dinner but I will skip the description this week. This week I have rediscovered the value of complaining well. I had called Verizon to check on when they planned to actually fix our phone. When I was told  April 26, after I hit the roof, I realized that not giving phone service from January 25 to April 26 might actually be a legal problem for Verizon. I called the fabulous people at 311. They connected me to the New York State utilities board. The lovely woman I spoke to was appropriately outraged. Two days later, my phone was reconnected. Our internet has been intermittent (at best). yes, this too has been provided ( if you can call it that) by Verizon. After a looong talk with a rep at Verizon I have been upgraded to the "Escalations" office. It's like old fashioned customer service. I have a case number and responsive people t...

For the past few days, I have been feeling stuck. I was asked to give a   D'var Torah  this Shabbat. It ought to be an easy task for me, this week's reading is about the High Priest's vestments but my thoughts are all in a muddle. There is some work I ought to be doing but again, I was feeling uninspired. It was time to visit my favorite NYC museum, the Museum at FIT. The upstairs gallery was showing  Fabrics in Fashion , the downstairs gallery was showing  Exhibitionism 50 years of the museum at FIT . Both exhibits were just a nice way to visit old friends from the FIT collection or from exhibits that I really enjoyed over the years. These two Claire McCardle dresses were shown together to show how the same dress can be either a casual dress or a dressy one depending on the fabrication. The white printed cotton dress is for day and the bronze silk satin makes an elegant evening dress. The smocking on this dress is mindblowing. Seeing anything...