We're continuing this week with more Jewish fiction, this time with Jean Meltzer's Kissing Kosher, a delectable tale as sweet and rich as a loaf of babka. In this romantic comedy, with similar vibes to Romeo and Juliet, there are two feuding families whose patriarchs started a bakery half a century ago, but what neither family agrees on is who wronged who. Caught in the middle is Avital Cohen, granddaughter to Chayim Cohen, founder and owner of Best Babka in Brooklyn, an artisan kosher ...
Judaism
WOMS: The Familiar
I hadn’t planned on reading The Familiar because the cover creeped me out a bit and I wasn’t sure if it would be too dark for me. How wrong I was. I’m so glad my friend persuaded me to give this a read because it was a heartbreaking, beautiful love story, one only Leigh Bardugo could have written. Though I haven’t read her new Ninth House series, I have read all but one of Bardugo’s Grishaverse books. To me, Bardugo is a superior writer because she has a way of weaving tragedy so humane ...
From Mourning to Joy
This past year is coming to an end, at least on the Jewish calendar, and that means I have been reminiscent, as one does when they assess their lives before the chagim, or holidays. For us, for Israel, this past year has been tinged, if not saturated, with sorrow and grief. Since October 7, our lives have never been the same. There have been days where my grief was near inconsolable, where I wandered through the day like a phantom, feeling more a shadow of myself than anything real or ...
The Hidden Power of Yud
I don't have much to share that I haven't already said in either of my last two blog posts where I both announced the upcoming changes to my blog---to be released later this month---and some changes at my day job, which proved to help amend the distress and attacks I endured earlier last year. (Still feels weird to think it, officially, was last year now.) In fact, I'm not sure I have much to share or say in this new year at all. Not yet, at least. There have been a lot---and I mean, a ...
WOMS: The Pomegranate Gate
It's been too long since I shared my latest read, and I cannot wait to tell you more about it. Allow me to introduce you to the novel, and also the beginning of a new series, which has stolen my heart in every way imaginable: The Pomegranate Gate by A. E. Kaplan. Rich, imaginative, lush, exquisite—I could gush about this book, but let me get to the substance of how it is all those things and more. The Pomegranate Gate is a Jewish historical epic fantasy set in an alternative version of ...
