"American Baby" - A Comprehensive Look at Adoption in the USA

Gabrielle Glaser's "American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption," tells an important and often overlooked story through the lens of one Jewish adoption in the early 1960s. An author interview and book review by BJV editor Albert Stern, himself an adoptee.

"Ghetto Songs": Unlikely Juxtapositions and Unexpected Contradictions

Trumpeter and bandleader Frank London (co-founder of The Klezmatics) talks to the BJV about his new album, "Ghetto Songs," an exploration of music created in, and inspired by, life within ghetto walls

The Art and Culture of Singing Yiddish: A talk with Polina Shepherd

Singer, multi-instrumentalist, and choirmaster Polina Shepherd talks about "singing in Yiddish" with our correspondent Tela Zasloff, sharing how she absorbed the music growing up in the Former Soviet Union and how she now shares it on her weekly Zoom program, “Sing with Me: Russian &…

Omer and Shmita: Counting Our Way into a New Season

As the festival of Shavuot approaches, Rabbi Liz P.G. Hirsch of Temple Anshe Amunim reflects on the promise of return and renewal suggested by the traditional practices of counting the omer and shmita, the cycle of resting the land every seven years.

"Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore"

Fascinated by the lands from which her grandparents emigrated, Williams College professor emerita and Gastronomica editor Darra Goldstein pursued “the elemental flavors underlying traditional Russian cuisine." Our Traveling With Jewish Taste correspondent Carol Goodman Kaufman writes…