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Tell us about your Jewish life growing up

We were very much the Passover family and the temple once-a-year family. My mother never met a holiday she did not like; we had the Christmas tree and the menorah.

To my mom, holidays—literally any holiday—meant family and family gatherings. Her Jewishness was more of a cultural identity than a religious identity, and that’s where I fall as well.

My father [Edgar Rosenberg]’s family was mostly lost in the Holocaust. I was made to be very aware of that, of the inherent antisemitism. You couldn’t grow up, at least my parents’ generation and us, the generation after them, without a working knowledge of what happened baked in.

As the United States enters its 250th year, where do you see the American Jewish community?

It’s a very difficult and terribly dangerous time, where the far left and the far right all scream the loudest. And that is what Jews hear.

Your mother was vocal about supporting Israel and standing against antisemitism. How would she have responded to celebrity silence today around Jew-hatred?

La Ghriba, the oldest synagogue in Africa, believed to have been founded in 586 BCE by Jews fleeing the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem.

Teacher, call on me! Hebrew school, Bronx House, Washington Avenue, the Bronx, early to mid-1940s.

The Bronx House was established in 1911 to serve the large number of first-generation Jewish-Americans who had moved to the Bronx to escape the crowded conditions of Manhattan tenements. A Jewish settlement house in what was then New York’s most heavily Jewish borough, its goal was to improve the quality of residents’ lives by offering arts, education, and recreation activities within the context of Jewish communal values. In the 1920s, the programming of the Bronx House reflected the radical nature of many Jewish residents, teaching consumer education and establishing retail cooperatives, hosting union meetings, offering night classes in Yiddish, and featuring many left-wing Yiddish speakers in its lecture series. In the 1930s and 1940s, when this photograph was taken, it operated as a Jewish Community Center. The classroom seen here is decorated with posters supporting immigration and aid to Palestine. Vishniac’s photographs of the Bronx House were probably commissioned by the Jewish Educational Committee (a photograph by Vishniac at the same site appears in one of their pamphlets).

Vintage Israeli stamps depicting the Seven Species designed by Zvi Narkiss (צבי נרקיס, Israeli, 1921-2010), 1958.

The Seven Species (שבעת המינים‎, Shiv'at HaMinim) are two grains and five fruits mentioned in the Torah as special produce of the Land of Israel: wheat, barley, grape, fig, pomegranate, olive (oil), and date (honey). These staples were central to the diet of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel in biblical times and hold spiritual significance, as shown by the unique blessing recited after eating them to thank G-d for the land's abundance. Their first fruits were offered as bikkurim in the Temple in Jerusalem.

אֶרֶץ חִטָּה וּשְׂעֹרָה וְגֶפֶן וּתְאֵנָה וְרִמּוֹן אֶרֶץ־זֵית שֶׁמֶן וּדְבָשׁ

"a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey" - Devarim (Deuteronomy) 8:8.

Miriam Margolyes for British Vogue’s July 2023 pride themed issue: “I wouldn’t want to be straight for anything.”

The limestone filed - Zin Mountain - Israel

Me and a few friends went on night shooting to the south of Israel, where you can see the milky way galaxy without light pollution, we start taking photos, and after 3 hours and 300 photos a huge meteorite appeared for a second. we all saw it and we said "WOW" and the next thing we thought is if our manage to take this photo, well, as you can see here, my camera was operational during this moment.

little more information about the meteorite, it lasted for almost a second and maybe even more, the color of the tail was yellow. here with the current setting it overexposed (it wasn't my plane to take photo of a falling star)

If I make it to Plag Haminchah, can I make it all the way to sunset? And then of course, I'll have made it that far, might as well just wait til the end of the fast proper!