America

In college (at Emory Univeristy in Atlanta), I took a class called “The Modernization of Judaism.” The class was taught by a lesbian rabbi and, over the course of the semester, we studied the various divergent branches of the Jewish community (I attended an Orthodox Shabbat service, the women separate from the men) and learned how Reformed Jews (the Jews I was raised amongst) were a dying breed since they reproduced the least (Hasidic Jews have us significantly beat).

We also studied the two large waves of Jews that emigrated to America in both the 19th and 20th centuries. The first wave came mostly from Western Europe (predominantly from Germany); the second wave, a much larger wave, came from Eastern Europe as Russian Jews fled the pogroms. And if you were to study that second wave you’d see, splashing somewhere in the water, the ancestors whose crossing set cosmic forces in motion that led to the creation of this food blog. One of those ancestors was my mother’s father’s mother, Netty Rosenblum.

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