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 date to Crusaders and Mamluks. She turned at sign-less intersections and slipped through nameless passageways, before stopping by 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 stacked around him. 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 spice mixture carried notes of cumin, caraway and dandelion. The sumac, salt and ground sesame made it bright and earthy at once.
“How did you find this place?” I asked Sarah.
“I mean, I live here.”
Fairy Lights in God’s Backyard
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 to the Old City. We long ago bonded over our common love for Jerusalem, journalism — and Venice Beach.
Fairy Lights in God’s Backyard is her second book about life inside the ancient walled section of Jerusalem. 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 and a near-death explosion — all experienced by a sharp, sensitive observer living amidst Jews, Muslims and Christians in the most contested third of a square mile in the world.
I opened the book up at 11 a.m. and finished it by 4 p.m., leaving behind circled passages, dog-eared pages and margin notes.
Her passage on the local grocery is a good example.
‘The least political way to tell the truth.’
“There is a shelf in a corner market that doesn’t make sense,” begins one of the many short chapters.
Sarah describes a single shelf in a local grocery store 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 keeps a jumble of random, far-flung ingredients in one place.
“People keep asking for home,” he said.
The people who shop there stop in front of the shelf, sometimes with a nostalgic look in their eyes, a lump in their throat, sometimes to argue over a recipe, taking items out, putting them back, defying any order. The shopkeeper gave up trying to organize the shelf.
“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 will start 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.”
The Mad Hatter in Ottoman Jerusalem
The Old City is divided into four quarters: Arab, Jewish, Armenian and Christian. Sarah moved into her last apartment there in October 2025.
The apartment itself crossed borders. It was on the seam between the Jewish and Armenian Quarters. Armenian conversations mixed with the Hebrew songs from the Jewish schoolchildren.
And it was old and layered, like Jerusalem. Built over a Byzantine well, which connects to a system of Roman tunnels, the apartment walls themselves were “much newer,” from the 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” — planting rosemary, lavender, mint, sage and, yes, za’atar on the roof.
A regional war in a stone cylinder
From that sweet base, she recorded a particularly fraught time in the always-fraught city.
Her downstairs neighbor Claire, whom she greeted several times each day, implored 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 sirens wailed — and each time Sarah and her neighbors descend 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 Americans 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.”
‘A deep, abiding care’
There are many other times when Sarah witnesses 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.”
That’s what makes the book such a beautiful and important read. The hope it offers is earned. Sarah is not naive to the violence and resentments that tear her society apart, but she also lives out something most of us, and the media, miss: There is a deep undercurrent of shared humanity that runs through the land as well.
That became vividly apparent when her sweet apartment blew up. A faulty propane tank exploded, collapsing her home around her,.
The terrifying experience propelled her through her own cycle of grief, exile and return. Friends, neighbors and strangers — Arabs, Jews, Armenians — rushed to her aid, literally freed her from destruction, then helped her build her life back.
“In the smoke — acrid and choking — there was also something else rising,” she wrote. “A deep abiding care for one another. The kind that lives here but doesn’t make headlines.”
A pillowcase of za’atar
It took me more than a year but I eventually went through the small pillowcase of za’atar I bought that day in the Old City. I used it to make za’atar and cheese turnovers and chicken schnitzel with za’atar from Reem Kassis’ The Palestinian Table, flatbreads covered in olive oil and za’atar from Yasmin Khan’s Zaitoun cookbook, and of course I served it the way it appears on most Palestinian tables: in a pool of bright olive oil atop some labne.
For brunch I piled roasted tomatoes on yogurt, sprinkled it in za’atar, then fried an egg and poured the hot olive oil over it all. At dinner I roasted carrots with za’atar and served them with a yogurt and tahini sauce.
On our last trip to Israel, I met Sarah for a drink at Hataklit, a neighborhood bar near Zion Square. She and her son have found a new place. She’s still at Times of Israel, where she’s 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.
Za’atar-roasted carrots with yogurt-tahini sauce
You can buy za’atar from Sindyanna, a collective of Arab and Jewish women in the Galilee region who produce wonderful local products to further coexistence. Make sure you roast the carrots until they are soft with crispy edges. The world would be a better place if more people over-roasted their vegetables. Serves 2.
1/2 pound carrots, cleaned and cut into quarters lengthwise
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup za’atar
1/4 cup yogurt
1/4 cup tahini
1 small clove garlic, peeled and crushed
2 teaspoons honey or date syrup
1 teaspoon lemon juice
Salt and pepper
Preheat oven to 500 degrees F.
Stir yogurt, tahini, lemon juice, garlic and 1 teaspoon za’atar until smooth. Spread on plate.
Toss carrots with remaining olive oil and za’atar, salt and pepper. Spread on parchment-lined baking sheet or inside cast iron pan and roast, turning occasionally, until soft and with some crispy edges. This takes about 20-25 minutes.
Toss the hot carrots with honey or date syrup. Place on the bed of sauce. Sprinkle with additional za’atar and serve hot or at room temperature.
Olive oil-fried eggs with yogurt, roasted tomatoes and za’atar
In this dish, warm olive oil releases the fragrance of the za’atar as it melts away at the cool yogurt. It takes all of five minutes to make. Served with good bread that you’ve toasted and splashed with more olive oil.
Makes 1-2 servings
2 eggs
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 cup cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
1/2 cup plain or Greek yogurt, or labne
1/4 cup za’atar
Salt and pepper
Preheat your broiler. Toss the cherry tomatoes with a tablespoon of the olive oil, a couple pinches of salt and some freshly-ground pepper. Place in a cast iron pan or on a baking sheet and broil until soft and flecked with brown or even black, about 7-10 minutes.
Smear the yogurt on a serving plate. Spoon the tomatoes and their juices onto the center of the yogurt.
Heat the remaining oil in a small frying pan or skillet. There should be about 1/4 inch of oil on the bottom. When hot, crack the eggs into the skillet.
Fry the eggs, using a metal spoon to bathe the tops of the eggs in hot olive oil. Sprinkle with a pinch of salt and some pepper.
When the whites are set, use a spatula to place the eggs to on top of the yogurt. Sprinkle the za’atar over the eggs, yogurt and tomatoes, then pour the hot olive oil from the pan over it all. Serve this with toast drizzled with olive oil and more za’atar.