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First posted in 2017, we are bringing back some of our favorite articles from Mark Lazar, who originally launched our Center for Jewish Life. The Forbidden Fruit Contrary to Renaissance Art and Freudian thought, the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was not an apple or a banana, but a fig! What other leaf could hide the private parts of Adam and Eve? They were after all, made in the image of God …and presumably quite well endowed. The Bowl of Lentil Stew How much could a bowl ...

“Butterflies don’t live in here, in the ghetto.” The phrase is the last line of a poem, “The Butterfly,” penned in 1942 by Pavel Friedman, who was in the Terezin concentration camp and ghetto constructed by the Nazi Gestapo in the Czech Republic. More than 150,000 Jews were sent there. The Butterfly Project, founded by educator Jan Landau and artist Cheryl Rattner Price, was created to commemorate Yom Hashoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Fainbarg and Chase ...