Presenting: A cross between a pomelo and an orange and other novel Israeli produce varieties

From The Jerusalem Post

Researchers at Israel's Volcani Institute show off their new produce varieties to eager chefs.

Would you like your tomatoes with extra lycopene? How about a sweet, easy-to-peel grapefruit, or even chickpeas that don't make you gassy?

These products - among many others - are what scientists at the Volcani Institute's Agricultural Research Organization (ARO) - the research arm of the Agriculture Ministry - are working on bringing to the market.

At an event for several dozen chefs from around the country, researchers presented their work - and its tasty applications - to an eager and hungry group at ARO's headquarters in Beit Dagan. The cooks from the Israel Chefs Association heard from four scientists about their fields of specialty: fresh herbs, citrus fruits, strawberries and chickpeas.

Dr. Nativ Dudai, who specializes in aromatic and medicinal plants and herbs at ARO's Neve Ya'ar branch and also lectures at the Hebrew University, says the "perrie" basil strain developed by the ARO is the most popular fresh herb in Israel, and also exported overseas.

"It's not just about the quality of the herb, but also their ability to grow year round, and their shelf life," said Dudai.

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A Eulogy for Elsa Cayat, Who Laughed at Her Killers

Elsa Cayat was a French psychoanalyst and columnist who was murdered in the January 2015 shooting attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices. She was the sole female fatality at that terror site

In memory of the murdered ‘Charlie Hebdo’ satirist, book lover, therapist, Jew

By Delphine Horvilleur for Tablet Magazine

The following eulogy was given by Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur at the funeral of Elsa Cayat, in Paris, France, on Jan. 15, 2015. It is reproduced, in a translation from the French, with consent of the family.

Elsa used to begin each of her therapy sessions by saying to her patients: “So, now, tell me!”

So, I would like for us to listen to her invitation to hear other people’s words, and for us to speak, even if this cemetery is so far removed from her disarrayed office, even if the smoke from her cigarette no longer swirls in the air. Let us tell, at this place, who Elsa Cayat was, who she was for her parents, her brothers and sisters, her family, her partner, her nephews, her patients, her colleagues, for her Charlie Hebdo family, for her daughter.

We must tell how exceptionally intelligent this woman was, how vivacious she was in her wit and humor that you all knew. We must tell of the life of a woman who was out of the ordinary, as though we were telling a story—and I think she loved stories. Just as she loved books.

As a teenager she once told her sister: “You ought to read a book a day! Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud … It doesn’t matter!” That was her minimum diet for culture and for her love of knowledge and for words, as she conceived of them.

Elsa was passionately in love with books, especially detective stories—because she adored plots and novels that you can’t put down and where the endings, she would say, let you “always discover who the killer was, and even his motive.”

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A Marriage That Changed the Course of History

What Natalie Zemon Davis, pioneering scholar of early modern Europe, owes to her husband, and Martin Guerre

By Rachel Gordan for Tablet Magazine

The story of historian Natalie Zemon Davis, as she tells it, is largely one about the benefits that have accrued to an outsider. Sidelined during the early years of her career, her husband, the mathematician Chandler Davis, was arrested for creating and distributing Communist literature. In fact, in 1952, as a graduate student, Davis herself had done much of the research and writing for a pamphlet attacking the unconstitutional actions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was published anonymously by the University of Michigan Council for the Arts, Sciences, and Professions. As Davis later reflected, “the sexism of the House Committee members worked to my advantage in this instance: like legal authorities in early modern Europe, they assumed that if a married couple did something together, only the husband was really responsible.”

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The Top Ten Most Anticipated Jewish Movies Of 2015

We look at those films coming out this year featuring stellar Jewish acting, directing, and writing

By: Caitlin Marceau for ShalomLife

Although it’s always sad to see another year pass us by, the start of a new calendar one brings with it the promise of new memories to make, resolutions to keep, changes in your life you want to (finally) make and, of course, some exciting new films to get even the most stoic of fans buzzing with excitement.

So sit back, and get pumped, as we countdown the top ten most anticipated movies of 2015 featuring some of the most talented Jewish actors, directors and writers in the business.

10. Insurgent

The second film in the Divergent series, Insurgent, is coming to cinemas this March. The story is the continuation of Tris’ saga to stop the Erudite faction from tearing her society apart, while also coming to terms with the loss of her parents and what it truly means to be divergent. Although many fans of the trilogy were less than enthusiastic about the first film’s adaptation, audiences have high hopes for the second, which features Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort.

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The First Jew Scalped for America: Francis Salvador

From the Jewish Virtual Library

When we think of Jewish heroes of the American Revolution, Haym Salomon, the "financier" of the patriot cause or Isaac Franks, aide-de-camp to General George Washington, are the first names that come to mind. Rarely do we hear of South Carolina's Francis Salvador, the first identified Jew to be elected to an American colonial legislature, the only Jew to serve in a revolutionary colonial congress and the first Jew to die for the cause of American liberty.

Francis Salvador was born in London in 1747, the fourth generation of Salvadors to live in England. His great grandfather Joseph, a merchant, established himself as a leader of England's Sephardic community and became the first Jewish director of the East India Company. When George III ascended the British throne, Joseph Salvador arranged an audience for the seven-man delegation that officially congratulated the king on behalf of the Jewish community.

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Wagner and the Jews

Two centuries after the great composer’s birth, his anti-Semitism remains a bitterly contested issue. Perhaps that’s because neither his defenders nor his detractors have come to grips with its, or his, true nature.

By Nathan Shields for Mosaic Magazine

In 2013, as the classical-music world lurched from crisis to crisis, with orchestras on strike and opera companies vanishing into thin air, the bicentennial of the birth of the towering German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) offered a brilliant exception to the prevailing gloom. Productions of his operas filled houses from Seattle to Buenos Aires, and the great companies of Europe and the United States vied to present ever grander stagings of the colossal 15-hour cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. At a time when so many preeminent musical institutions are collapsing into bankruptcy or labor disputes, Wagner is one institution that seems to endure.

Yet Wagner’s powerfully continuing appeal in terms of dollars spent and seats filled is only a part, and the less important part, of his enduring significance. Wagner has always been remarkable not only for the breadth but for the depth of his impact, a depth that can be measured both by the intensity of the devotion that his works inspire and by the fact that his devotees have included many of the intellectual and political elite of Western society. When his fame was at its zenith in the latter part of the 19th century, his most fervent admirers were as varied as the young Friedrich Nietzsche, the poet Charles Baudelaire, and King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who helped to bankroll Wagner’s great festival in the northern Bavarian town of Bayreuth.

Today the Bayreuth festival, dedicated exclusively to Wagner’s works, stands at the apex of German cultural life, counting Chancellor Angela Merkel among its regular guests, while the years surrounding the recent bicentennial witnessed an outpouring of reflections on and encomia to the composer from figures as divergent as the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek and the Pope.

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Lone Star (of David) Story

A ‘moving’ tale of a synagogue being trucked across Texas

By Samuel D. Gruber for Tablet Magazine

This is a moving story—really. This past week, during Hanukkah, the 121-year-old wood-frame, clapboard-sided B’nai Abraham synagogue of Brenham, Texas, has been sliced in pieces, trucked across four counties, and re-erected on the Dell Jewish Community Campus in Austin. For the first time in decades the synagogue will host a daily Orthodox minyan and be the central place for an active Texas Jewish community. Brenham native Leon Toubin, whose family has cared for the synagogue since most of Brenham’s Jews moved away, has mixed feelings. He’s devoted himself to keeping the synagogue ready for worship in Brenham but has to admit that Orthodox Jewish life isn’t coming back to the town. Leon is in his 80s, wants to see the old shul be a center for prayer again, and wanted to settle things while there was still time. He decided to look for new options and reached out to the Austin Jewish Federation.

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