One woman navigates the conflict between the patriarchal history of her culture’s cuisine, sexual repression, and her budding feminism.

Before Rebecca Newberger Goldstein won the Jewish Book Award and a MacArthur Genius Grant, she was a high-school student growing up Orthodox in White Plains.

We are now in a period known as the seven weeks of consolation. But this year, we do not find comfort.

That day it didn’t matter that I’d never been bat mitzvahed, that my mom was a completely non practicing Christian. I was a Jew, and there were Nazis with guns.

In 1938 Austria, Kristoff is apprenticed to a master stamp engraver, while in 1989 Los Angeles a journalist, Katie Nelson, is getting divorced.