I like to plan ahead. My mother used to tease me about coming down to breakfast on the morning of November 1 and announcing “Next year for Halloween I’m going to be…..” With that in mind, it’s not too early to start thinking about Passover 2019. People who are new to Jewish tradition are often startled to realize that there is no single text for the Seder service, that any individual, family, rabbi, congregation, is free to write his/her/their own text, which will then be just as valid, in a religious sense, as any other. The text, known as the Haggadah (accent...

We are trying to persuade a large local bookstore to let us put together a selection of Jewish-themed mysteries that they could feature in time for the Jewish holidays in the fall. My people, we buy a lot of books, and come the holiday-season, with all that family togetherness, we tend to get a little desperate for distraction. A novel with Jewish themes, I figured, would go some way toward lessening the guilt we’ll feel for burying our heads in books, rather than in the bosoms of our families. And it’s not like it’s hard to come up with a...

Years ago, when F&M was but an infant Felony, we signed up for a small-press fair, and were given a booth next to a publisher that specialized in “transgressive” fiction. Their booth was staffed with many lavishly tattooed 20-somethings, who snarled winningly at the passers-by about how gritty and edgy their books were, unafraid to walk the mean streets, treading the fine line between sci-fi and the reality that dares to speak its name. Our booth was staffed by me, sitting in front of a pile of Margery Allingham paperbacks. At the time I was fat, and definitely over 40…