Habichuelas con dulce sold in Washington Heights Robert Capin for the New York Times The hardest part about keeping kosher hasn’t been having separate dishes and utensils and pots for everything. It hasn’t been giving up tasty treats like eel and octopus either. Yum. The worst part of keeping kosher is the utter lack of… Continue reading Hispanic Heritage Month Post #2: Dominican food!
My husband is trying to educate me in the ways of American pop culture before the 1970s, which is when my parents arrived in the United States. I confess that I didn’t know who the Beatles were until I was a teenager. I’d never heard Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin. And folk music by pop… Continue reading Hispanic Heritage Month Post #1: Latino Music Plug
” Willough” doll on RealKidz.com Oh. My. G-d. I discovered biracial dolls when I was doing some research for my application to SwirlCamp! which is a program run by Swirl. Swirl is a “national multi-ethnic organization that challenges society’s notions of race through community building, education, and action.” I am very tempted to buy my… Continue reading Biracial dolls
Here’s a funny little story about Israel…. On my first night in Israel, I realized that I was the farthest anyone in my family had ever been from the homeland, the Dominican Republic. Sure, New York, to which my parents had emigrated as children, was far from “D.R.” but Israel was literally on the other… Continue reading Fish Out of Water
This piece was inspired by a previous blog. “So, are you pregnant?” a friend asked bouncing over to me enthusiastically. I rolled my eyes and exhaled sharply. “What? What did I say?” Motherhood is hard. And I don’t just mean raising the babies. I mean having them. I mean trying to have them. And yes,… Continue reading Don’t Ask Me About My Uterus (Part 2)
A favorite author of mine who’s been keeping me up these late nights is Pulitzer Prize winner, Jhumpa Lahiri. I would like to pretend that I alone discovered this national treasure but the fact that her most recent collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, debuted at #1 on the New York Times best seller list… Continue reading When I grow up…
Here is my latest piece for Interfaithfamily.com. I’m posting it before it’s published on the web and will eventually replace this text with a link to the website: A Nation Divided: Coping with Racism in the Jewish Community “So where you from?” they ask. “New York,” I say. “No, really. Where you from?” “New York!”… Continue reading A Nation Divided: Coping with Racism in the Jewish Community
I get asked a lot about my “green goo” so I figured I’d just post about it to the site. My fridge is almost always stocked with this “green goo” and if it’s not we go without beans. And what, I ask those of you who understand the Dominican mind, is rice without beans? Nothing!… Continue reading The Famous Green Goo
I always got confused when a paper asked, “What was your first language?” I didn’t have one language, I had two. For as long as I could remember, I was spoken to in English and in Spanish. My parents had immigrated in their teens with my grandparents to the United States. By the time their… Continue reading Losing the Language
Junot Diaz with his little book. I called my father to tell him about Junot Diaz’s new book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I’m not sure which was stranger, the fact that I was calling my father (a rare occurrence) or the fact that I was talking to him about literature (he prefers… Continue reading Calls to the Platano Mainland
Memoirs of a Jewminicana 