A few years ago, I followed the author and journalist Sarah Tuttle-Singer deep into Jerusalem’s Old City searching for the best za’atar.

To be clear, I was searching. She knew exactly where to go.

Sarah plunged through the crowded, narrow market streets of the Shuq Attarin, or Perfumers Market, whose vaulted ceilings and open stalls served Crusaders and Mamluks. She turned at signless intersections and slipped through nameless passageways, before stopping at a mad scrum of customers outside a small, open shop.

“Here it is,” Sarah said. “The best.”

An elderly man filled orders from barrels of spices and shelves of herbs, potions and remedies. When we managed to grab his attention, Sarah used her surprisingly decent Arabic to order me a kilo.

It tasted nothing like the spice mix I was stuck buying in L.A. The wild oregano that forms the floral, green base of the mixture carried notes of cumin, caraway and dandelion. The sumac, salt and ground sesame made it bright and earthy at once — a blend of disparate flavors that don’t obviously belong together but somehow do.

“How did you find this place?” I asked Sarah.

“I mean, I live here.”

Sarah was raised in Venice Beach and moved to Israel in 2011 with her two children and then-husband, an Israeli. She began writing for The Times of Israel and eventually moved into the Old City itself. We long ago bonded over our common love of Jerusalem, journalism — and Venice Beach.

Her latest book, Fairy Lights in God’s Backyard , is her second nonfiction book about life inside those ancient walls. I loved her first, Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered, but I wondered, how much more is there to say?

The answer is: plenty. The Oct. 7 massacre. The destruction of Gaza. The Iran missile barrages. A new child. A near-death explosion. All of it filtered through a sharp, sensitive observer living among Jews, Muslims and Christians in the most contested third of a square mile on Earth. I opened the book at 11 a.m. and finished it by 4 p.m., leaving behind circled passages, dog-eared pages and margin notes.

‘The least political way to tell the truth’

Her passage on the local grocery is a good place to start. “There is a shelf in a corner market that doesn’t make sense,” begins one of the book’s many short chapters. Sarah describes a single shelf stocked haphazardly with Bulgarian jam, Italian pasta, Polish pickles, Armenian spice mix, and “tahina labeled in Arabic, Hebrew and Turkish.” She asked the shopkeeper why he kept such a jumble of far-flung ingredients in one place. “People keep asking for home,” he said.

Shoppers stop in front of that shelf, she writes — sometimes with a nostalgic look, a lump in the throat; sometimes to argue over a recipe, pulling items out, putting them back, defying any order. The shopkeeper gave up trying to organize it.

“Jerusalem, after all, does not behave politely or geographically,” Sarah writes. “It stacks centuries on top of each other and calls it a street. It builds apartments on Crusader arches and prays in languages that never learned to forgive each other. Why should a shelf obey borders that people themselves could not?”

Sometimes, she writes, a conversation starts in front of that shelf. My mother used to make this. We ate this only on holidays. You can’t get the good kind anymore. The shopkeeper, she writes, “understands something important: that in Jerusalem, food is often the least political way to tell the truth. You can argue borders for hours, but you cannot argue the taste of something that raised you.”

An apartment on the seam

It’s the same lesson, I realized later, sitting behind that scrum in the Perfumers Market: My kilo of za’atar was itself a shelf of sorts, oregano,  sumac and sesame, none of it asking permission to belong together.

The Old City is divided into four quarters — Arab, Jewish, Armenian and Christian. Sarah moved into her last apartment there in October 2025, on the seam between the Jewish and Armenian Quarters, where Armenian conversation mixed with church bells and the Hebrew songs of schoolchildren next door.

The apartment itself crossed borders. It was built over a Byzantine well that connects to a system of Roman tunnels; the walls themselves were “much newer” — 17th century. She moved in with her toddler son and made it a home, decorating in bright colors and pastels, a style she calls “Mad Hatter in Ottoman Jerusalem,” and planted rosemary, lavender, mint, sage and, yes, za’atar on the roof. Even her garden was a small act of layering something new onto something ancient.

The war in a stone well

From that sweet base, she recorded a particularly fraught stretch in an always-fraught city. Her downstairs neighbor, Claire, whom she greeted several times a day, kept asking Sarah to explain how it is that she, an old woman, outlived her young son.

It’s a question Sarah has heard so many Israeli and Palestinian mothers ask since Oct. 7. “Every time I heard Claire ask why she was still here instead of her son, I heard echoes of mothers everywhere who have asked the same impossible question,” she writes.

Then the Iran war began and the sirens wailed, and each time, Sarah and her neighbors rushed down into the 1,500-year-old Byzantine well to wait out the incoming missiles: the ancient Armenian priest, the chain-smoking French tourists, the Arab TV broadcaster and his extended family, children scared of ghosts, the pedantic American with his “thirty-two-minute breakdown of geopolitical implications,” Muslims, Christians, Jews, and a pit bull named Baku — all brought together hoping to survive the mullahs’ wrath, “a regional war compressed into a stone cylinder beneath the Old City.”

The shelf upstairs holds whatever people ask for. The well below holds whoever happens to be home when the sirens go off. Between the two, Sarah keeps finding the same unlikely arrangement: people who don’t agree on much, sharing space anyway because the ground gives them no other choice.

There are other moments, too, when Sarah watches the divisions that outsiders think define Israel and Jerusalem melt away. When a fire breaks out and residents pour from their homes to help extinguish it. When she suffers an unexplained cardiac event one evening, and friends and neighbors show up to rush her to the ER.

“The paramedics arrived and so did, apparently, half the neighborhood,” she writes. “I haven’t seen this many Jews and Arabs crammed into one small room since the Oslo Accords.”

‘A deep, abiding care’

That’s what makes the book such a beautiful and important read. The hope it offers is earned. Sarah isn’t naive about the violence, fear and resentment tearing her society apart, but she also lives out something most of us, and most of the media, miss: a deep undercurrent of shared humanity running through that land as well.

That became vividly clear when her own sweet apartment blew up — a faulty propane tank burst, collapsing her home around her. The experience sent her through her own cycle of grief, exile and return. Friends, neighbors and strangers — Arab, Jewish, Armenian — rushed to her aid, literally dug her out of the wreckage, then helped her rebuild.

“In the smoke — acrid and choking — there was also something else rising,” she writes. “A deep, abiding care for one another. The kind that lives here but doesn’t make headlines.”

It took me more than a year, but I eventually worked my way through the little pillowcase of za’atar I’d carried home from the Old City that day — folded into turnovers, dusted over roasted vegetables, and, most often, the way it appears on nearly every Palestinian table: pooled in olive oil atop labne.

On my last trip to Israel, I met Sarah and her boyfriend for a drink at Hataklit, a neighborhood bar near Zion Square. She and her son have found a new place. She’s still at The Times of Israel, now writing a feature called Peoples of Israel, profiling an endlessly interesting cast of characters. And to share her love of Jerusalem’s people, cultures and food, she’s even leading occasional tours through the Old City.

If you go, I recommend the za’atar. It won’t taste like anywhere else — which, if Sarah’s book is right, is exactly the point.

A version of this essay first appeared in Rob Eshman’s Substack, Foodaism.

The post From Jerusalem’s Old City, a book that defies Israel’s media image  appeared first on The Forward.

For Jewish student Maxanne Wallace-Segall and Muslim student Nabila Rahman, the months after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel were filled with a tense quiet.

Then freshmen at Stuyvesant High School, a public school on Manhattan’s southern tip, the two girls had only been friends for a few weeks. As their social media feeds became inundated with polarizing content from across the spectrum, neither of them knew how to bring up what had happened.

“I felt like I couldn’t talk about the war with one of my closest friends in the world, just because I was terrified about what I would say and what she would say,” Wallace-Segall said.

That tension ended when Wallace-Segall interviewed Rahman for an article in their high school paper about the pain many students were experiencing in the first months of the Israel Hamas War.  Broaching the subject for the first time, they realized that — despite coming from different perspectives — both were primarily concerned that their friends were OK.

“It wasn’t a question of ‘do you support Israel or Palestine?’. It was a question of [if you were] OK; if your family was OK. That was what mattered at the moment; her opinion didn’t matter, even if it differed from mine,” Rahman told Wallace-Segall for the article.

Now rising high school seniors, the duo runs The Together Project, a citywide organization dedicated to dialogue between Muslim and Jewish teens — Zionists and anti-Zionists alike. This summer, that dialogue has deepened and the reach has widened with the launch of a twice-weekly program called the Ohel/Ahl Fellowship, named after Hebrew and Arabic words for friendship. Since June, Jewish and Muslim teens from public, private, religious, and secular schools in the New York area have come together around sacred texts, swapped stories, consulted experts and explored each other’s neighborhoods and perspectives.

Emboldened by their first conversation, Wallace-Segall and Rahman began speaking about the conflict with Muslim and Israeli friends. But, when starting the organization, those friends opted not to participate. The Muslim friend’s family refused to let them talk to people who supported Israel, while the Israeli friend wasn’t allowed to talk to anti-Zionists. The organization continues to face this challenge, with some criticizing its inclusive nature. On one Instagram reel posted by the project, a user commended the concept, but pointed out the number of Palestinian deaths and disagreed with participants working alongside Zionists.

“i was like yessss this is what we need!!” they wrote at first. “only for u to include zionists 💀absolutely not. none of you are truly anti-zionists if you agree to work closely with zionists, especially at this time.”

But that misses the point, Wallace-Segall said. “To exclude the Zionist narrative would be to exclude the issue itself.”  That widespread opposition toward dialogue highlights “the necessity and urgency of starting it even more,” she added.

To expand citywide, the girls drew upon their previous connections — someone with whom Wallace-Segall often debated about the subject, another who had written poetry about her religious identity. Currently, the organization has branches at four public high schools in three of the city’s five boroughs.

The Together Project also established a partnership with the New York Society for Ethical Culture, a social activism organization that offers meeting space for several grassroots organizations and hosts all branches of the Together Project, and other interested students, for a citywide conference three times a year in winter, spring and summer.

At those seasonal meetings, students go over historical timelines, read books, articles, sacred texts, and poetry and push themselves to grapple with hard topics. The conversation subjects range from comparisons of the Torah and Quran to what Muslim and Jewish teachings say about queerness, and how being a member of the LGBTQ community informs support for Israel, given its comparatively tolerant culture, and support for Palestinians in Gaza, given the nature of their collective struggle.

Wallace-Segall’s favorite conversations are those that question “why do you believe what you believe?”

“It really gets everyone to think about the specific moments with their families and their friends and reading the news in which different aspects of their opinions have been shaped,” she said.

Last November, members of the group attended a United Nations conference on establishing a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction. As she listened, Wallace-Segall was inspired by those “dedicating their lives to committing to peace.” At the end, four of The Together Project members were given the opportunity to speak about their organization and share their thoughts on the solutions that had been presented.

“So often in the UN, when we see discussions of rebuilding communities … it’s decades or years after the conflict happened,” Wallace-Segall said in her speech. “I think the time to start rebuilding communities is now.”

At Ramaz Upper School, a Jewish day school in Manhattan, now rising senior Gabriel Flatto-Katz found himself in a Jewish bubble. Amidst the tensions of the New York City mayoral election, he realized that he “didn’t have any Muslim person that I could call a friend,” and sought to start an interfaith student organization.

Despite reaching out to many Muslim organizations, however, he wasn’t able to find any interested partners. Then he discovered the Together Project and helped Wallace-Segall and Rahman develop this summer’s Ohel/Ahl Fellowship.

The fellowship has enabled students who were already involved, along with many new ones like Flatto-Katz, to engage more deeply with meetings twice a week. So far, the fellows have hosted speakers from the Rose Castle Foundation, which helps equip leaders to navigate conflict; explored the Islamic wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and analyzed poetry by Israeli and Palestinian writers.

Rather than jump right into sensitive political discussions, students explored each other’s religious identities and established trust in initial meetings, so they have felt more comfortable sharing sensitive opinions in the latter half of the fellowship.

According to Gershon Rozenberg, a rising senior at SAR High School, a co-ed modern Orthodox yeshiva in Manhattan, that turning point arrived during a recent discussion the students had about war. Participants shared conflicts that felt most personal to them and their families and how this might impact their thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some mentioned the Vietnam War, the Bangladesh Civil War and the Holocaust.

Rozenberg called it “the most vulnerable conversation we’ve had among fellows.”

For Rahman, this conversation helped her realize just how personal the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is for Jews. “For people like Gabi who literally have family in Israel, there was so much more at stake,” said Rahman, who doesn’t know anyone who is Palestinian.

Along with speakers, the fellowship has a board of mentors from Jewish and Muslim organizations, including Rose Castle, the Tannenbaum Foundation, Jewish Theological Seminary, and a Palestinian representative from Debate for Peace.

“We’re still kids running a kids’ program,” Flatto-Katz said. Mentors provide necessary guidance on how to run an interfaith organization, advise on ground rules during sessions and recommend texts to study. To build a consistent base of students at each meeting, mentors also have helped recruit teenagers they had worked with previously.

Flatto-Katz recruited Rozenberg after reading Rozenberg’s piece in SAR’s campus newspaper arguing that the school “should do a better job of understanding the Palestinian perspective.”

To complement the students from private Jewish day schools, leaders have been reaching out to private Muslim schools. But they’ve encountered difficulty.

“A lot of the kids have never met a Jewish person before, so it’s hard for them to make that first step,” Rahman said.

Many of the students from private Jewish schools say they have been moved by the contributions of Muslim participants, including rituals like chanting from the Qur’an or talking about their religion. “People have enjoyed the ability to hear something so different than what they’re used to,” Flatto-Katz said.

Within Jewish youth spaces, Flatto-Katz said students strongly support Zionism, but also crave  hearing new perspectives. It’s not always easy for Flatto-Katz to “have really hard conversations,” as he has family in the region, but he senses and shares a “hunger for understanding.” Agreement or consensus is not required, he said.

“This is my friend Nabila who doesn’t agree with me on 99% of things, and I think it’s really cool that we get frozen yogurt together,” Flatto-Katz said.

To Rahman, the diversity of high school environments and the formative teenage years are what makes the work they are doing now so significant.

“Making sure younger people are involved in this kind of things is so important,” she said, “because they are the ones who are going to be shaping the future.”

The post ‘I felt I couldn’t talk about the war’: Jewish and Muslim teens make space for tough conversations appeared first on The Forward.

Not that long ago, many homes had pianos. Few do now, and a sad sight is a piano left out on the street. Two years ago we moved a Steinway into our home, and until recently, we had two grands in our living room, the Steinway and the Chickering, which I grew up with. There is also a mini Schoenhut, along with a full-size Casio keyboard upstairs.

The Chickering first resided at my grandparents’ apartment on Central Park West. Under it sat a Schroederesque Schoenhut grand. I would sit on the bench in front of the Schoenhut and tinkle the keys while my grandmother Anna played above. The Chickering, a five-foot, seven-inch quarter grand, came to my childhood home in Forest Hills after she died in 1966. There my brother David and I took lessons from our teacher Fred Kahn. Mr. Kahn was easily in his 70s, and a former student of the concert virtuoso Arthur Friedheim who had studied with Franz Liszt. He performed at Carnegie Hall when he was just eight, and later Steinway Hall had him play at their showroom across 57th St. as a way to attract customers. I fondly recall my lessons with him, especially his improvisations, how he effortlessly switched tempo and rhythm so a piece by Bach morphed into a country & western or klezmer tune.

I first heard my wife Lillie play on the Chickering. It was Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 10. Lillie studied at Queens College’s Aaron Copland School of Music when we lived in Kew Gardens, and we had her Sargent grand in our apartment. She also had a Baldwin spinet at her mom’s in Manhattan. We moved the Sargent to Lillie’s sister Yuri’s apartment when I had a fellowship at Northwestern in 1994. Then when my mom and dad sold the house the following year, Lillie and I had the Chickering hauled up a steep stoop in Park Slope. I remember it being so heavy that it cracked one of the brownstone risers, though the piano was thankfully not damaged. Even better, our landlord had been planning to restore the stoop, so we didn’t have to chip in for the chip.

Soon after, Lillie took a teacher-training program at the School for Strings in Manhattan to learn the Suzuki Method. In 2001, we moved to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and in 2006 spent a summer in Chicago. One of the first things we did was buy the Casio. Early one morning we were awakened by the sound of Chopin coming from the front room. Lillie and I rushed out to find our four-year-old Emma at the keyboard. Alas, we quickly realized that she was not the reincarnation of Clara Schumann after whom her older sister was named. Instead she had somehow pressed the right series of keys, and it played the programed piece.

Back home, Emma had cello lessons in nearby Montclair, and while Lillie taught in our living room, Clara, Emma and I would drive to Manhattan where Clara would spend up to two hours with her piano teacher, Barbara Herman. During Clara’s lesson, Emma and I would roam the halls of the nearby Natural History Museum. We all would then go to Ottomanelli and have chicken pot pies and then ice cream next door at Emack & Bolio’s.

The Chickering filled our home with much music. Clara practiced on it, and Lillie would go over music with her. I enjoyed it when they played together, especially a duet from Schubert’s “Trout Quintet.”Lillie would also help Emma prepare for her cello recitals, and later went over pieces with her when she took up the clarinet and joined the high school marching band.

Since the early ‘90s, Lillie has been studying on the Upper West Side with her teacher Denise Kahn. She and Denise’s other students regularly gather at their various Manhattan apartments to perform their pieces for each other, and as Lillie practices at home she is always amazed that I can soundly nap on the couch just a few feet away during her most fortissimo playing.

The Steinway made it to our home from the country house of one of those pianist friends. In 2024, Lillie and I spent a cool spring afternoon at her place in Stockbridge, Mass. so Lillie could test out the piano; while there she Zoomed her piano technician back in New Jersey to ask questions. The Steinway is a rebuilt six-foot, model O from 1910. Until it arrived, it was on the Chickering that Lillie’s students had their lessons for the past two decades.

Four days a week, our home is filled with the sounds of a wide variety of pieces, from “Frog on Logs” to sonatinas by Friedrich Kuhlau, rags by Scott Joplin, even the “Linus and Lucy” Peanuts tune by Vince Guaraldi. Some of the younger ones can’t sit still, but it is always satisfying to see those who stick with it and then one day start to see their lesson as more than a chore imposed on them by their parents, and come to love playing music. Each June, they all perform in a recital at the Congregational Church up the street.

Hundreds of piano makers once thrived in New York and Boston. Chickering started in Boston in 1823, became one of the nation’s finest manufacturers, and had a hall on 57th St. that rivaled Steinway’s just a block to the west. The firm moved to East Rochester, NY in 1927 and stopped producing instruments in 1983. Sadly, most American piano makers are now gone. On bulk days in our town, we have seen a few pianos sitting on the curb, and Lillie has alerted others of their presence in the hope that someone would rescue them.

Two years ago, I was out for a walk. Along the curb sat a diminutive Schoenhut upright. I have no idea what happened to my grandmother’s Schoenhut grand, and happily hoisted and adopted this homeless one. Not surprisingly, Lillie’s students have embraced the mini-me piano, and during their lessons, some of the younger ones like to hop over and play on it, with the instrument offering up its chime-like, glockenspiel sounding versions of their pieces while Lillie accompanies them on the piano.

We only need one main piano, though, and the last thing we were going to do was toss out the Chickering. I do realize that the piano is but an object, one fashioned from mahogany, rosewood, ebony, ivory, metal wires, and felt. But the Chickering had a real presence and voice in our home, one that brought joy. Quite simply, it was part of our family. I am therefore not surprised that I got teary eyed as we said goodbye to it on June 15. I am glad to say that movers ferried it to a new home up the road. And while the spot where it stood, one filled with much meaning, seems quite empty now, we do hope that the Chickering will create fond memories for another family.

Before it left our home, Lillie played on it that Beethoven sonata that she first performed for me.

The post In the history of a family’s pianos, a glimpse of a disappearing New York history appeared first on The Forward.