Give me cake!

Mask of Masculinity

Tear it off and dip it in.

I wish we had some pumpernickel.  What you do is, you get one of those big round loaves of pumpernickel, or you could use really dark German rye, and sort of hallow out the top – you know those bread bowls at Panera?  Imagine it six thousand times bigger, and full of spinach dip.  And [...]

Christmas Eve is the big Italian thing

Christmas Eve is the big Italian thing where everybody gets together in the same couple houses in Long Island, and eat an all-fish dinner. It’s kind of crazy because you got Fat Uncle Sonny who’s got nubs for fingers because he’s four hundred pounds and can barely move, and the blood doesn’t reach there. [...]

Jewish food for me wasn’t kugel, wasn’t matzoball soup.

Jewish food for me was Arabic food. The food that we would have on religious holidays like on Roshashana, all this stuff was like a stuffed grape leaf, or stuffed peppers, and it was a Middle Eastern way of cooking, although Eastern Europeans do stuffed peppers also. Dishes like marakh, which is like a [...]

Dressing up as a tray of potato pancakes

It was hard not to be aware of being Jewish when I was going to a school that was taught half in Hebrew. I remember dressing up for a school-wide Hanukkah party as a tray of potato pancakes. It was a simple costume—just a big foil circle dotted with jagged brown paper circles. [...]

“Curry is Iraqi.”

I was aware of being Iraqi, I guess early on. But it was mostly through normal stuff. I was born in ’73. And when I was six or seven years old there was a girl named Sofia Javed who was from India-Pakistan. I think her family may have been mixed. [...]

Instead of crying, you tell jokes

Like Idaho, the potato state, Russia was a potato country. We would get lots of potatoes. Soups because it was cold. You wouldn’t get lots of vegetables and that kind of thing. And also we had a number of years with really terrible food shortage, so it wasn’t easy to get food [...]