A wonderful, new cookbook by chef and scholar Hélène Jawhara-Piñer gives readers and food lovers and unprecedented glimpse into hundreds of years of Sephardi cuisine. Reaching back all the way to the 13th century, Sephardi: Cooking the History provides some 50 recipes gleaned from her research into such sources as medieval cookbooks, Inquisition trials, medical treatises, poems, and literature -- written in a variety of languages, including Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Occita

This past week saw the sad loss of David Gitlitz, a devoted and longtime historian of Spanish & Portuguese Jewry from the time of Inquisition and beyond. Over his career, Prof. Gitlitz served on the faculty of the University of Nebraska, SUNY-Binghamton and the University of Rhode Island, where he also served as provost. He also published a number of books on the subject of Sephardi Jews, including, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto Jews. But perhaps his most

Herman Prins Salomon, a stalwart preserver of Spanish & Portuguese history and customs, passed away on Jan. 31. Born in the Netherlands in 1930, he moved with his family to Canada in 1939 to escape the Nazi onslaught, eventually settling in New York where he earned a PhD in French Literature from New York University followed by a second PhD in Romance Languages from the University of Amsterdam. Armed with the knowledge he had learned, Prof. Salomon served for more than 40 y