by Adam [➚] · Sunday, May 20th, 2012
I’m a secret fan of Food Network’s Chopped, and recently between episodes discovered a weird sister show focused on dessert called Sweet Genius. Its eponymous, singular judge and host is a weird and kooky cross between Willy Wonka and Dr. Evil. Get it- Evil Genius, Sweet Genius? Yeah well the show is filled with the same odd humor… Its pretty ridiculous, but I admit its better than watching Cupcake Boss, whose name doesn’t even have a pun… The show has its fans and deriders, but mostly I think it has addicts to its quirkiness.
There was always something odd about the Sweet Genius himself. His flamboyant style hinted at his being gay, but unless you knew his name is Ron Ben Israel, his Austrian accent never would have outed him as a Tel Aviv born-Jew. Of course, his Viennese mother might have something to do with that, as well as giving him knowledge of delicate European style confections, which appeared in Martha Stewart, Vogue and many food pron books before the New York Times named him “the Manolo Blahnik of cakes.”
New Yorkers and foodies may be more familiar with Ron Ben Israel, but for those less in the know, JTA profiles the Sweet Genius star:
In 1999 he opened Ron Ben-Israel Cakes in New York’s SoHo neighborhood with one oven and one mixer. As people fled downtown New York after the 9/11 tragedy, he was able to capitalize on lower rents and expand his operation.
Coming from a secular Israeli upbringing, Ben-Israel wasn’t ideologically interested in making his shop kosher, but for a caterer for some of New York City’s biggest hotels, it was a prudent business decision.
He chose OK Laboratories, the Chabad-affiliated kashrut organization headquartered in Brooklyn, which now certifies his shop’s pareve cakes.
After serving in the IDF in the 70′s , he studied dance and pursued a Ballet career that eventually brought him to NYC, where while working odd jobs to make rent he discovered baking.
Sounds like a sweet story. Only a sweet genius could have cooked it up. Check out the full profile here.
by chaneld1621 [➚] · Friday, April 20th, 2012
If you work for a Jewish organization, you’ve probably experienced the phenomenon of food being everywhere. Sometimes it’s gross, sometimes it doesn’t belong to you, but it’s pretty ubiquitous. With this infusion of nutrients come statements such as the following (overheard), in reaction to delicious baked goods:
“Oh, no, that’s so bad. I can’t eat that.”
“I’d have to do to the gym if I ate that.”
“I can’t believe you walked past it! You have so much willpower!”
It saddens, but doesn’t surprise me, that it was all women making these comments. It also doesn’t surprise me that people think of food as having moral value-it’s good or it’s bad, it’s not something that nourishes you or that you should enjoy, that you give to others so they can enjoy it too.What we really mean when we say, “That food is bad,” is “I am a bad person for eating it.” If we eat food that we enjoy (or if we eat, period), we should immediately torture ourselves emotionally and/or physically, and make sure everyone around us knows that we’re doing so, and in turn, make sure that those people feel a certain way about their own eating and exercise habits.
Diet culture is relentless and misogynist, and it affects us in ways we aren’t even aware of. (I’m holding back here, folks. I’m not getting into the crazy, exploitative, capitalist that is the diet industry. See how I did that?) Maybe you’re not trying to trigger people when talking about the 5 pounds you’d like to lose, but people hear that shit. It creates body hatred and it erodes relationships between women (who, let’s face it, are a lot of the population working in Jewish organizations in a certain capacity).
There’s a certain tension between culture, Jewish and American, and food. In spite of our bodies being real bodies, we’re bombarded with the ideal that is impossible to achieve. We know that Jewish women are living with eating disorders, that the statistics are on the rise, and that many cases are unreported. Part of Jewish (or any other ethnic group’s) assimilation into American culture means adopting the ideals of the physical body. I often think of dieting and diet culture as a shiny red ball thrown at women as if to say, “Look over there!” As in, think about how to be this specific, empty version of perfect, put your energy into getting skinny at all costs, instead of channeling it into redistributing power. (And by the way, diet talk doesn’t only affect women, it affects everyone.)
I’m proposing that Jewish organizations adopt a “No Diet Talk” policy, with the aim of moving towards a different culture around food and bodies in our organizational spaces. This doesn’t mean you can’t commiserate about your diet behind closed doors with a trusted colleague. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be on a diet. It does mean that when there’s food to be enjoyed, you let people enjoy it without talking about how you are on the quest to lose weight. You don’t comment on other people’s food choices, (“Are you really going to eat that?”) or talk about how much you go to the gym, or how much you need to.
This does mean that policing ourselves. It’s likely that we don’t even realize how much we talk about diet and weight until we don’t do it anymore. Saying,“You look great! Did you lose weight?” is so common, it’s practically small talk. We can do better.
by guestpost [➚] · Tuesday, April 17th, 2012
This is a guest post by Leora Mallach, the Co-Founder and Director of Ganei Beantown: Beantown Jewish Gardens. You can join her this Sunday April 22nd to celebrate Earth Day at the first Boston Jewish Food Conference at Hebrew College in Newton Centre, MA. When not shifting paradigms in the Boston Jewish community, she can be found doing batik.
There feels to be a lot of energy currently around the “new Jewish food movement.” It’s not new, nor a passing fad, but a logical element within the continuum of the broader Jewish food conversation.
If we acknowledge it is a movement, and the growth in both national and place-based organizations over the last few years would indicate it is, we must consider where this momentum comes from. What we eat as Jews has been discussed, dictated and consumed from the earliest of days. The story of the migration of our ancestors and their adaption to local culture and cuisine is well documented. It has produced such great rifts like the debate over whose bagels are better: Montreal or NYC. (Duh, NYC)
All religion is interested in sustainability. According to Wikipedia , “Sustainability is the capacity to endure.” Our current rabbinic tradition has origins in the preservation of culture and community after the destruction of the Temple. We are a religious continually struggling with adaption to the period of galut (exile) while still holding true to values, ritual and community. This too has manifested and morphed over the centuries. More »
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol [➚] · Thursday, April 5th, 2012
By request:
No offense everyone, but nothing else is going on my seder plate.
Orange, okay – that actually has a venerable history (I was told by a Moroccan rabbi,that Moroccans have put oranges on their seder plates for generations), but no apples, no tomatoes, no marzipan, olives, paper airplanes, tobacco, safety pins, boots to the head, old shoes, picnic tables, automobile engines, stuffed rabbits, keys, construction equipment, window glass, or used kleenex. Nothing. Else.
I’m happy to have people bring questions to the table, but the seder plate is the seder plate, and this addition of objects has gotten out of hand.
1. Charoset,
2. Chazeret
3. Beitza
4. Maror
5. Zaroa (Actually Selek, because our house is dairy)
6. Karpas
7. Orange
makes a perfect kabbalistic tree of the seven lower sefirot (which is actually why we have 6 plus the matzah, which is seven for the seven lower sefirot – bet you didn’t know that, did you?) adding anything else makes the sefirotic tree impossible, so nope, nothing else. I can talk about freedom without adding any other objects to my table
by Adam [➚] · Wednesday, April 4th, 2012
Its 48 hours before Pesach, and having read ”The Year of Living Biblically”, I’m preparing a lamb to meet its end so that I can smear its blood on the lintel of my door… What’s that? I don’t have to do that? Okay, the neighbors will be so relieved…
I will still have to rid myself of my chametz, however, as I can not possess or own any during Pesach. Before I engage in Bedikas Chametz, the search for chametz, I simply open my pantry- BAM! Bits of cereal at the bottom of the box. Legumes of all shapes and sizes, pasta and so on and so forth. On to the fridge. I half-eaten kugel from last week. Some fruit salad. Cheese slices. Egg Beaters.
Anyone else find themselves snarfing down whatever odds and ends remain the week before Pesach? Some people hate Passover cuisine. After a week of leftover crumbs, I’m ready to tear into Matzah. Whatever is sealed, I sell through a duly appointed process involving a Rabbi, pretzel logic and a certain number of he-goats and zuzim.
Those who do not avail themselves of the Rabbinic end-around of selling it on contract for a week with an option to an agreeable gentile have three options. 1. Keep your chametz and incur the wrath of the almighty and the sneers of neighbors. 2. BURN IT!
WOO HOO! Let’s burn everything in sight! It’s like Black Rock but with Bread! Its PAN-demonium! After all, we wont have another huge bonfire for 40 days when its Lag B’omer so let’s have a Biscuit Inferno! Cue the Music!
But wait, isn’t burning things bad, like crossing streams in ghostbusters? And can’t we do something with that stuff? There may be some excellent items sitting around. A bag of flour. A whole cake. A loaf of bread. Peanut Butter. Perfectly good food. Option 3: Donate.
In the Hagaddah we’re instructed Kol Difcheen- let all who are hungry come and eat. So how about it then? Donate your Chametz. You wont miss it. Fine, keep that bottle of Blanton’s, but the rest? Drop it at your local food pantry. Many congregations have a system set up for this. And in Israel, Modi’in’s Biur Hametz Project is coordinating the distribution of hametz to needy African refugees and migrant workers. That sounds so much more sensible.
It could be given to other as well. In Morocco, it was apparently the custom to give Hametz to one’s Arab or Berber neighbors. The Muslim neighbors would then repay the favor by supplying the pastries for the Mimouna festival at the end of Pesach. Such a healthy symbiotic way to coexist. Maybe that’s fantasy and maybe there’s a broader lesson. But in the interim, donate your your Hametz. To paraphrase Monty Python, BRING OUT YOUR BREAD! (to which the matza replies, I’m not quite bread yet…)
by Kung Fu Jew [➚] · Thursday, March 15th, 2012
Mazel tov to Uri L’Tzedek, the Orthodox social justice organization that pioneered an fair wage certification, has reached their 100th certification! If I weren’t at a bris this weekend, I’d be there.
by guestpost [➚] · Thursday, March 8th, 2012
This is a guest post from Pork Memoirs, a story project about pork and identity by friend-of-the-blog and food journalist Jeffrey Yoskowitz. His project seeks to “explore the struggles and celebrations of our often complicated relationship to the ‘other white meat.’” This Purim-themed memoir introduces Ari, a disaffected secular Israeli whose anti-religiousness manifested itself in baking pork-themed hamantaschen.
Ari Miller • Tel Aviv, Israel
Hamantaschen were an annual feature of my American-Jewish childhood. I made them with my mom and siblings. They were filled with poppy seeds because dad liked them, cherries because we all liked them and prunes because Jews will purchase any pie filling if put on sale.
When I became a baker in Tel Aviv it seemed only natural that I would make oznei haman, as the cookies are called locally. (It became hard to explain hash-entaschen in Hebrew, but that’s another story.) I have no religious leanings, mind you, it’s just that there are professional expectations of a baker. More »
by guestpost [➚] · Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
This is a guest post by Naomi Kramer, longtime friend of Jewschool and even longer time lover of cooking and cookbooks.
You don’t have to love women or Zionism to enjoy the beautiful Hadassah Everyday Cookbook. Non-female identified cooks, post-zionists, never-were-zionists, and everyone else will still enjoy the delicious eats from Leah Koenig. I regularly rely on its easy-to-browse recipes for hosting Shabbat dinners. I use it so much that I voted it for Best New Kosher Cookbook here.
For me, a cookbook needs a few key ingredients to get me excited: mouth watering pictures, tasty recipes, and guidelines that are easy enough but not written for four year olds. But this gorgeously-photographed book isn’t just sexy gastro-porn — though there are lots of spectacular photos in full color. More »
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol [➚] · Wednesday, July 6th, 2011
Two quick articles that I read last month: The first is an article that groans about how Jewish eaters are getting so picky that it’s getting to be impossible to invite Shabbat guests. The second is an article which advises all those people who create meaningful programming for Jews to quit it, will ya? because they’re actually enabling whiny, entitled Jews (the study that he quotes is about Baby Boomers, but I think he’s generally aiming this for everyone) to continue to view Judaism as a consumer product.
Both of these articles have a familiar tone: “What a bunch of whiners Jews today are!” And to some extent, there’s something to be said for that. In the shabbat meals article, towards the end, Rabbi Rebecca Joseph comments, “This is a problem of an affluent society and an affluent group within that society.” Again, true. Indeed, homeless Jews, poor Jews and Jews struggling to make ends meet aren’t going to be picky about what is served to them at a shabbat meal – or any other (I was reminded of recently rereading the book Rachel Calof’s Story about a Jewish woman who emigrated from Russia to be a pioneer bride, and while they certainly cared about kashrut, which is demonstrated throughout the book in various ways, when her husband comes home with a tin labeled herring and it turns out to be pickled pigs feet.. well, she doesn’t say that they ate, but she certainly hints at it. When there’s no other food, you eat what there is).
Nevertheless, there’s a certain oddity about these two articles. For example, let’s take the shabbat meals article: The title is, “With increasingly particular eaters, Shabbat meals get tough.” And yet, that isn’t actually the sense I get at all from the actual content of the article – let alone from my personal experiences. More »
by Kung Fu Jew [➚] · Sunday, June 19th, 2011
Brought to you by Pursue: Action for a Just World and co-sponsored by Hazon, Uri L’Tzedek, and the Brooklyn Bridge CSA, comes Chewing on Food Justice, a series of events offering a breakdown of our broken down global food system. The kick-off is tomorrow night on the topic of defining “food justice,” and followed by food sovereignty in July and food workers in August.
Details below the fold. More »
by Adam [➚] · Tuesday, June 7th, 2011
I’ve long agreed with the sentiment of this Wall Street Journal article- that Borscht is an underrated, under-appreciated food among the under 40 set. Though I know Russians my age who enjoy a bowl now and then, most of my generation has never heard of it let alone tried it. It is a low calorie, no-fat food but it somehow never has caught on as an item either among hipsters, health-niks or beet-niks (couldn’t help myself..). The Borscht Diet! Borscht-tinis! Hey, did you hear that new eastern european brass band, Borscht!
Somehow, outside of pockets of immigrants, this delicious cold soup has never made it to the culinary heights of other foods. Its interesting to read the inner workings of the Gold family struggling with the flagging sales of their flagship product. With all the Jewish foodies out there, I’m wondering if maybe they’ve missed something or if any has some sage advice for Borscht producers (hey- sage in Borscht?).
by Justin [➚] · Monday, April 18th, 2011
The following is a recipe I just threw together inspired by Greek Haroset.
soak dried dates and apricots in water for about an hour; strain and save soak water
chop dates and apricots into mush (I like to do it on wax paper for easy cleanup)
put into a large mixing bowl
in a dry, hot pan toast fennel seed, coriander seed and white peppercorn–once you smell the amazing fragrance and hear the seeds pop, remove from the heat–grind according to your desire (i smashed it with a glass bottle between wax paper)
mix the spices in with the fruit and mix well, adding splashes of the soak water if necessary to ease mixing.
chop walnuts, fold into the mixture
add in finely chopped fresh dill (yup, fresh dill–and it HAS to be fresh; mint will work too, but dill is better)
add in a splash or two of red wine, mix it up really well
and there you have it, a sweet, spicy sticky haroset that your bubbe wouldn’t recognize!
enjoy!
by BZ [➚] · Sunday, April 10th, 2011
(Crossposted to Mah Rabu.)
Our coverage of the Humpty Dance continues.
Foods mentioned in the Humpty Dance that are chametz:
- crackers
- licorice
- oatmeal
- biscuits
- Burger King (in most of spacetime)
Foods mentioned in the Humpty Dance that are not chametz:
- a pickle
- Hennessy
- Burger King (in Israel during Pesach)
by David A.M. Wilensky [➚] · Monday, January 3rd, 2011
From JTA:
Lawmakers, Jewish leaders and kosher businesses are lobbying New York’s new governor Andrew Cuomo to restore the state’s kosher law-enforcement division.
Budget cuts and retirements over the last year have left the division with one employee, the division’s director, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The cuts in the department, which once employed 11 kosher inspectors, will save up to $1 million a year in salary, benefits and services, according to the newspaper, citing a state Department of Agriculture and Markets spokesperson.
Read more…
So New York can either save $1 million a year, or it can get back into the business of government-sponsored certification of religious claims. Is this a hard choice?
by dcc [➚] · Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010
So for those of you who had anything better to do than say keep up with Princeton’s great hummus debate of 2010 may not have heard the news out of the Central Jersey Ivy League last week.
The referendum failed. According to The Daily Princetonian a total of 1,014 students voted against the referendum, while 699 students voted in favor (out of 4,878 undergraduates total).
In a follow-up article about the vote, both sides seem to claim victory and honestly I think the real winners are the food service workers who have to deal with both sets of entitled Princetonians.
As I wrote before, this is possibly the stupidest student government action I have ever heard of…however it did spark some sort of real conversation about boycotts and divestment. In the same article, Yoel Bitran, of the poorly named PCP, said, “We’re having a big panel on boycott, divestment and sanctions coming up next week, and we’re very excited to plan for next semester.”
Maybe the pro-Israel group can have an equally constructive conversation about the reasons building settlements is ok because God said it was cool.
by Raysh Weiss [➚] · Sunday, December 5th, 2010
Image of the day:
A Jewish shopper at Balducci’s main location in Greenwich Village noticed this most unlikely display last week (three years ago, but we’re a people of history) and lodged a complaint with the management, who quickly cast the blame on a stock clerk, according to the NY Daily News.
What’s next? A blow-out deal on Manischewitz wine and kashe varnishkes for Christmas?
Attention Balducci shoppers: clean up in aisle nine!
Chanukah ham story epilogue: if you would like this image and others like it immortalized on an apron, mug, calendar, or magnet, said Balducci’s customer Nancy Kay Shapiro wants to make your dreams a reality.
by dcc [➚] · Tuesday, November 30th, 2010
By now you all have heard of the Princeton referendum being offered by a group of concerned students at the Ivy League campus in New Jersey. Sabra Hummus has been declared an enemy of Palestine and should be banned from campus there should be other options for students to purchase when they desire a creamy Middle Eastern dip.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for meaningless political action in college; after all I was an elected member of the student senate back in college, so I know all about that. But when it comes to an elite institution of higher learning such as Princeton, I kind of expect more than a call to action that involves the inclusion other chickpea spreads. More »
by Kung Fu Jew [➚] · Thursday, November 18th, 2010
This is a long-overdue shout-out to my friends Naf and Anna Hanau — friends and former coworkers from my days at Hazon — for their entry this summer into the micro-enterprise field of kosher organics. Naf went so far as to receive shochet training himself and together with wife and Jewish food educator extraordinaire Anna, have sourced chickens and turkeys from all-natural farmers in upstate New York and in Pennsylvania.
And now, just in time for Thanksgiving, they are delivering kosher organic turkeys to the NYC area.
Know another organic and kosher provider? Let us know in the comments.
[Post-note: Naf informs me the turkeys are pastured, which is better than organic. They don't pay for certification and thus can't/don't use the term organic. The use here is mine.]
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