Today I thought it would be fun to interview my husband about the joys (the joys!) of being married to someone who was born in Israel and moved to the U.S. when she was ten.

Danit: How is it being married to me?
Bill: I’d give it a seven.
Danit: That’s only a C. What the hell??

Well, I guess that’s enough of that.

The truth is, my husband is a lapsed Catholic from Minnesota. That makes him nicer than just about everyone except Canadians. On snowy days, he drives around the neighborhood trolling for people digging their cars out, and then he stops to help them. If their car needs a jump, it makes his whole day.

I met my husband in graduate school back in 2001. I had spent the previous four years in Israel, and the one useful skill I’d picked up was the ability to yell at people—preferably from the services sector—without even breaking a sweat. “This soup is cold!” I’d yell. Or, “What do you mean my deposit is non-refundable?!”

You can imagine the wacky sitcom potential here, if we weren’t both so fundamentally dull. It also led me to expect that when we had children, my aggressive dark genes would beat the crap out of his wussy blond ones. Instead, we ended up with this:

The Exorcist

(Obviously, my older son is already casting out demons.)

I guess it’s too soon to tell about the little one, but the big one is all peaches and cream and, at least according to my parents, who aren’t at all bitter, he looks exactly like my mother-in-law. Plus, except when he’s screaming that his food is too hot, he tends to be kind and helpful and even-tempered.

The reason I’m sharing this is because I’m surprised. I’d honestly believed that the survival of the Jews in the face of millennia of adversity would translate into genetic dominance, if not necessarily athletic prowess.

One final story:

I had my second baby six and a half weeks ago. When the first one was born two years earlier, the nurses at the hospital fell all over themselves to tell me how handsome he was. "Oh, you say that to everyone, don't you?" my husband fake-protested modestly.

"Actually, we don't," said the nurse. "If the baby's ugly, we say something like, 'Boy, what a lot of hair!'"

With the birth of boy #2, we discovered that this nurse had been telling the truth. This time around, not one person complimented our new baby's looks. And it wasn't just that these nurses happened to be reticent: I had to share a room with two other women, and I could hear these very same nurses exclaiming, "So sweet! So beautiful!" once they reached the other side of the privacy curtain. (Like my parents, I'm not bitter.)

Is it a coincidence, then, that #2 is the one who supposedly looks like me? (I’m not bitter about that either.)

But back to my husband, who’s so nice that he’s fetching me a Popsicle from the kitchen as we ready ourselves to watch CSI Miami (no, we don’t have cable).

Danit: Any other tips for marrying semi-Israelis?
Bill: Learn to like gefilte fish. And never, ever make them angry

Danit Brown, author of Ask for a Convertible, will be blogging all week as one of Jewcy's Lit Klatsch bloggers. Danit's book uses a fictional character to discuss life as an Israeli-American who has trouble fitting into both her parents' homelands.

When I was a teenager, I knew a girl who was such a big fan of the TV show Fame that she would take snapshots of her TV screen and send the stars of the show gifts on their birthdays. At the time, I thought she was weird: yes, I too have had dreams in which I was being wooed by celebrities (most notably, Barry Williams a.k.a. Greg Brady, but also, more recently, Barack Obama and Kelly Ripa), but even way back in junior high, I already knew instinctively that these people had better things to do than answer my mail.

And then my husband introduced me to the wonder that is blogging.

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Jennifer Felmley (center left) in cooking class.Jennifer Felmley is a nutritionist, chef, and cooking teacher with an infectious laugh who lives in San Diego. We talked to this culinary historian about Jewish cuisine and one of its most infamous components: Gefilte fish. She provides an upscale recipe for the stuff – gelatin included – below.

Why do you think Jewish food’s popularity is waning these days?
Well, traditional Jewish food is made with cheap ingredients, like brisket and whitefish, that are difficult to prepare and not as delicious as more expensive, and often fresher, food.

How do you modernize old recipes and make them more appealing?
I try to take traditional Eastern European food that we grew up with back to its roots by using the freshest ingredients. When immigrants came to the U.S., they had to make do with canned products and poorer qualities of meat. I try to keep things as fresh and clean as possible.

Why has gefilte fish gotten such a bad rap?
Many people, when they think of gefilte fish, think of a ball of fish suspended in goo. Not delicious. The dish came from Germany and was a small dumpling cooked in liquid. When the fish sits for a while in its stock, the collagen and protein from the fish gelatinize, which keeps it fresh, but also has a gross texture.

Tell me about your recipe.
The first time I made the salmon gefilte fish recipe, I thought “Oh, I’m so special!” But when I got to the fishmonger’s at the crack of dawn in L.A., there were these chichi ladies from Beverly Hills and private chefs buying salmon for their gefilte fish.

How do you serve it?
My grand-aunt made her herb sauce, which I tweaked a little bit. Adding fresh herbs is the way it was traditionally done. I also do a horseradish and sour cream sauce with lemon.

Do you prepare it often?
You know, I’d make it as part of my last meal [before fasting] if I could. When I do it for Passover, I make mountains of it, and I eat it for days afterwards.

How does being Jewish affect your cooking?
I’m the Martha Stewart of Judaism. I’m not going to sit at home and study Torah, but I will cook a huge meal for all my friends and family. I love Passover. I prepare for days. For the first few years I did it, I made the whole meal completely kosher, but it’s gotten so big, with over 50 people, it just got too expensive.

The Paint in Spain: Scenes from Dave's trip to Barcelona with graffiti writer Saber (click to pop out)A Korean bad-ass with a can of spray paint, maybe one of the more brilliant young American artists working today, David Choe will introduce himself this Saturday to the New York art world with his first gallery showing in Manhattan.