What makes a person? This is the question repeatedly set before us by Israeli poet and Holocaust survivor Dan Pagis, who died on this day in 1986 at age 56. Born in Romania, Pagis lost his mother at four and his remaining family during the Holocaust when he was imprisoned in a concentration camp in Ukraine. He escaped in 1944 and immigrated to Israel in 1946. He earned his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. By the 1960s, in what seems an unimaginable feat, Pagis had become one of the leading Hebrew poets of his generation and a preeminent scholar of medieval Hebrew poetry. Though most readers know Pagis from his universally lauded “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car,” or his other Holocaust poems, Pagis’ library of poems contained a vast array of settings all attuned to an endless search for self through relationship to the other, [...]

There is no love sincerer than the love of food. —George Bernard Shaw On this day in 1960, Jonathan Gold was born to Jewish parents Judith Gold, a high school teacher and librarian, and Irwin Gold, a probation officer. The first of three children, Jonathan began working as an editor at L.A. Weekly magazine while attending classes at UCLA. In 1986, he started his first food column, which later moved to the L.A. Times. He also contributed regularly to KCRW’s Good Food program. In 1999, he moved from Los Angeles to New York City to become a restaurant critic for Gourmet magazine. In 2007, when he was once again writing for L.A. Weekly, Gold became the first restaurant critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Gold died in 2018 from pancreatic cancer. Unlike his contemporaries, who typically visited only high-end, Michelin rated restaurants, Gold plumbed the depths of the Los Angeles eating scene to reveal the gems [...]