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4 Hanukkah recipes from across Asia that meld local cultures with Diaspora traditions
TAIPEI (JTA) — Asian-Jewish cuisine is a complex tapestry.
Jewish communities have existed across Asia for longer than many might assume, especially near major historical trade routes in places such as India, Singapore and Indonesia. Other communities developed during and after World War II. Some were part of or assimilated into local cultures, while others blended culinary traditions from other lands with the cuisines of their new homes.
So what do Jews in various parts of Asia eat on Hanukkah? Jews hailing from India, Singapore, Indonesia and Japan spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about some of their go-to holiday recipes.
Jeremy Freeman’s negi latkes use a type of onion native to China and grown across East Asia. (Jeremy Freeman)
Tokyo, Japan: Negi latkes
Before moving to Japan with his wife, Maiko, five years ago, Jeremy Freeman was selling vintage Jamaican records in New York City. In fact, Maiko was the one with the restaurant — Oni Sauce, a Japanese home-style food stand in Brooklyn’s Smorgasburg market.
But when the two made the move to Tokyo with their kids, they decided to switch it up. Freeman’s Jewish background takes the stage at their Tokyo restaurant, Freeman’s Shokudo — specifically, the smoky side: Freeman’s specializes in smoked fish and meats with a rotating seasonal menu. They often dabble in Japanese-Jewish fusion, with offerings like the bialy (made on request by a local Japanese bakery) with whitefish salad made from smoked saba (mackerel), smoked daikon pickles and tobiko, or flying fish roe.
On Hanukkah, Freeman whips up these potato latkes made with negi, a type of onion native to China and grown across East Asia, that falls somewhere between a scallion and a leek. Negi has a stronger flavor than white onions typically used in latkes, and they also produce a lot less water, creating a batter that’s cleaner and easier to work with. At Freeman’s Shokudo, they’re topped with creme fraiche, tobiko, and ikura or salmon roe.
Recipe
Ingredients
2 large potatoes
2 negis (Japanese leeks)
2 eggs
1/2 cup matzah meal
Tobiko
Ikura (salmon roe)
Dill
Sour cream
Directions
Grate potatoes with the large hole side of a box grater. Use your hands to squeeze out as much liquid as possible.
Chop negi into thin slices as you would with scallion. Mix with potatoes and add the two eggs (beaten) and matzah meal. Season with salt and black pepper.
Heat skillet or cast iron pan with safflower oil. Add a drop of the potato mixture to test oil temperature. When it sizzles, the oil is ready. In batches, so as to not crowd the pan, add potato mixture in a thin layer for pancakes about the size of a palm. When browned on one side, flip the pancake. Make sure the pan does not get too hot.
To serve, add a dollop of sourcream and top with ikura and tobiko and a sprig of dill.
Rosita Goldstein says Indonesian and Jewish cooking go hand in hand. (Rosita Goldstein)
Singapore/Indonesia: Deep-fried corn fritters
Rosita Goldstein’s Saturday morning Shabbat meals have become something of a local legend among Singapore’s Jewish community. Twice a month for a decade, she hosted anywhere from 30 to 100 community members at her home, where she prepared abundant spreads of Jewish and Indonesian classics now memorialized in a cookbook.
Goldstein, who is originally from Indonesia and converted to Judaism after meeting her husband, Harvey, in Singapore, says culinary traditions from Indonesia meld easily with kashrut, or Jewish culinary rules.
“A lot of recipes don’t use pork,” she said. “And then second of all, in the Jewish tradition, we don’t mix meat and dairy, and it’s very easy, because in most of Indonesian food, we use coconut milk.”
Life is a little slower now for the Goldsteins, who recently moved to Virginia and hope to split their time between the United States and Singapore. On Hanukkah, these deep-fried Indonesian corn fritters, served best with sour cream and sweet chili sauce, are a family favorite. In Indonesia, they’re a popular street food, but they are also a nod to the Hanukkah custom of frying in lots of oil.
Recipe
Ingredients
2 cups fresh or frozen corn kernels
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 cup thinly sliced spring onion
1/4 cup chopped celery leaves
1 large egg
1 cup water
Oil, enough to deep fry the corn fritters.
White ground pepper, and salt to taste.
Directions
In a mixing bowl, mix the ingredients together until the flour, baking soda, garlic powder, white pepper, salt, egg and water are all well combined.
Add the corn kernels, spring onions, and celery. Mix it well.
Heat the oil in the pan. Using a spoon or small ladle, spoon portions of batter into the hot oil and fry. . Do not overcrowd the pan. Cook both sides of the corn fritters until golden brown.
Serve with sour cream and sweet chili sauce.
Esther David serves her vegetable patties with coriander chutney on Hanukkah. (Esther David)
Gujarat, India: Vegetable patties with coriander chutney
According to legend, the Bene Israel trace their beginnings in India to a shipwreck on the country’s west coast over 2,000 years ago. When British rule began in 1858, they came to Gujarat, a state on the coast and embraced local life there while maintaining their Jewish identity, leading to the formation of unique customs and culinary traditions.
Esther David is a Bene Israel Jew who grew up in Gujarat and writes about the Jewish Indian experience in her novels. Her most recent book, “Bene Appetit,” recounts the diverse traditions and cuisines of India’s five Jewish groups — traditions she says are quickly being forgotten due to modernization and immigration.
At Hanukkah, fried vegetable patties or fritters are traditional, usually served alongside carrot halva. David likes to serve the fritters with coriander chutney.
Recipes
Vegetable patty ingredients
6 potatoes
½ cup green peas
¼ teaspoon red chili powder
½ teaspoon cumin powder
1 tablespoon chopped coriander leaves
Salt to taste
Eggs, breadcrumbs, flour and oil for frying
Instructions
Peel potatoes and shell green peas. Cook both until soft.
Mash the potatoes and combine with peas. Add red chili powder, cumin powder, coriander leaves and salt to taste. Mix with oiled hands. Divide the mixture into equal portions and shape into round patties. (Optional: add 1 small grated carrot to the mixture of potatoes and peas.)
In another bowl, whisk eggs until frothy and dip each patty in the egg mixture. Then roll in a platter of flour and breadcrumbs and cover on both sides.
Heat oil in a pan and fry patties on both sides until golden brown. Drain and serve hot.
Coriander chutney ingredients
1 small bunch fresh coriander leaves
10 leaves fresh mint
1 medium green chili
½ cup grated coconut
¼ teaspoon sugar
Salt
Instructions
Clean and finely chop the coriander, mint leaves and green chili. Mix with the grated coconut, sugar and salt. Process in a mixer and serve with the patties.
Brod goreng means “fried bread” in Indonesian. (Screenshot from YouTube/Beqs Kitchen)
North Sulawesi, Indonesia: Brod Goreng
The Jewish community in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, might be one of the smallest in all of Asia. Made up mostly of descendants of Dutch Jews who came to Indonesia with the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century, the population has declined over time as Jews have attempted to assimilate amid an environment that is not always welcoming to them. In 2013, a historical Dutch synagogue in Surabaya, on the island of Java, was demolished by a real estate developer following protests by Islamic groups.
Yaakov Baruch, the rabbi for North Sulawesi’s community, is a descendant of both Dutch Jews and Holocaust survivors. He shared a recipe for brod goreng, a sweet fried bread for Hanukkah.
A Dutch-Indonesian culinary creation, brod goreng was only eaten in areas where Dutch Jews were living, Baruch said. “The Jews combined the culinary [traditions] between European and local Indonesian food, since this food is closer with sufgiyanot,” he said. “So the Jews in this country always prepare this ‘brod goreng’ next to our Menorah during Hanukkah.”
Recipe
Ingredients
250g flour
1 egg
5 tbsp sugar (you can add more if you like it sweet)
1 tsp yeast
2 tbsp butter
Water
Oil for frying
Directions
Beat sugar, eggs, butter until slightly white. Add flour & yeast, then add water little by little while stirring, until there are no lumps. Leave it for about 30 minutes, covered with a napkin.
Heat enough oil to submerge the portions. Before frying, stir the mixture for a while, then use a tablespoon to spoon pieces one by one into the cooking oil. They will be sticky when taking them off of the spoon. Fry until golden brown. (Optional: serve with powdered sugar.)
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Meet Matt Turner, the only Jewish player on Team USA in the World Cup
(JTA) — When the U.S. squad suits up Friday night to face off against Paraguay in its opening contest in the 2026 World Cup, one Jewish player will be in the mix.
Goalkeeper Matt Turner is not only the lone Jew on the U.S. team but he could well be the only Jewish player in the entire tournament, which is being jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada starting on Thursday. It’s the first edition of the tournament to be hosted by three countries, and the first to feature 48 teams.
Israel did not qualify for the World Cup and hasn’t since 1970 — due, in part, to geopolitics that pushed its soccer federation to compete in the talented European body, not in Asia.
Jewish players DeAndre Yedlin and Daniel Edelman, who both play in the MLS and have previously played for the national team, are not on the roster this summer. Yedlin played with Turner in the ‘22 tournament in Qatar, where Turner, 31, was a star.
Turner, a New Jersey native, discovered his Jewish heritage by finding his paternal great-grandmother’s emigration papers that had allowed her to flee Lithuania during the Holocaust.
“Once I found the documents, I was certainly very, very excited,” Turner told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2023. “America, in general, it’s a melting pot, and everybody has those roots elsewhere. So to understand your story, your history, a little bit is really nice.”
The revelation allowed him to obtain a Lithuanian passport, which made it easier for the goalie to pursue soccer opportunities in Europe. It also changed his relationship to his Jewish identity.
“The more my father and I dug, the more we learned, the more connected I felt to my Jewish side, the Jewish culture of my family,” Turner said at the time. “It really changed a lot of me.”
Turner, who now plays for the New England Revolution in MLS, started all four matches in 2022 for an American club that advanced to the Round of 16. He was the first American goalie with back-to-back shutouts in a World Cup since 1930.
Turner has 53 career appearances with the national team, with a 29-16-8 overall record, including 27 matches in which the opposing team did not score at all. He has also played in the Premier League and was the 2021 MLS Goalkeeper of the Year.
This time around, he is seen as less likely to start, following the ascent of a teammate to the top goalie slot. Still, he says he is moved to be part of the national team once more.
“I’ll probably cry when the national anthem goes,” he told FOX Sports. “It’s just such a huge honor — overwhelming honor — to be granted that responsibility to be on this team to do our best in those roles and ultimately, change soccer here forever.”
Although there are few Jews on the field during the 39-day tournament that ends July 19, one familiar Jewish face — or more accurately, voice — will return this year. Legendary Argentine broadcaster Andres Cantor, whose famous “Goooooooal” calls have helped popularize the sport in the United States, will be calling his 12th consecutive World Cup.
Cantor was born in Buenos Aires to a Romania-born mother and a father whose family fled the Nazis in Poland. He moved to the United States as a teenager and has publicly embraced his Jewish identity.
The post Meet Matt Turner, the only Jewish player on Team USA in the World Cup appeared first on The Forward.
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Their nickname is the Red Crosses, but these World Cup challengers practice at a Jewish day school
For years, San Diego Jewish Academy had been preparing for the World Cup. The school, serving students from pre-K through 12th grade, has one of the best soccer fields in California, and tournament organizer FIFA had approved the site to serve as a national team’s base camp — if any visiting countries were interested.
When the school looked at the World Cup’s qualifying nations, they wondered if their plans might be for naught.
“You have Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Iran — teams that wouldn’t necessarily choose the Jewish Academy,” said Adam Benmoise, SDJA’s director of auxiliary programs. “We were nervous.”
To their relief, the World Cup schedule delivered a stroke of luck. The four teams playing group-stage games on the West Coast did include Qatar. But one the others was a country famous for its neutrality. Switzerland began practicing at the Jewish day school June 2.
Both sides have found the arrangement a winning one. For Switzerland, San Diego Jewish Academy is more than just a practice field. It’s also a gym, a media center and an office space. (Or a synagogue, if they needed one.) And for SDJA, a pluralist school with about 500 students, the rental arrangement doesn’t just pay the bills: it also connects the local Jewish community to the world’s biggest sporting event.
The partnership is the culmination of four years of planning for Benmoise, a lifelong soccer fan whose job is to drum up outside revenue for the school. Recognizing the unusual quality of the SDJA field — real grass, not turf — he pitched the school’s CFO and athletic director on the idea of renting it out to pro teams with an eye on the 2026 World Cup.
His first move was to bring San Diego tourism officials for a site visit. They were shocked — and word got around about the 56-acre hillside campus.
“It’s a true gem,” Benmoise said. “It’s built properly, it’s manicured properly, it’s mowed properly, we have the proper irrigation. It has all of the footprints of a professional-grade soccer field, but was built for a school.”
The field was used for practices during the Gold Cup, a biennial international soccer tournament, then by Major League Soccer and touring European clubs, and finally by the U.S. men’s and women’s national teams — whose rave reviews of the campus put San Diego Jewish Academy on FIFA’s radar.
To be added to FIFA’s official site catalogue for the World Cup, though, the vetting was more rigorous. The international soccer governing body has strict pitch standards, and it employs a phalanx of inspectors and groundskeeping experts to ensure fields are up to par and consistent with one another. Benmoise also had to prove that SDJA’s facilities could accommodate the wide-ranging needs of a national team program.
In response, the school expanded the playing area by covering an unused softball diamond with 16,000 square feet of sod — a project funded by school donors. (SDJA hasn’t fielded a softball team for over a decade, Benmoise said.) The school also rented and installed a 4,500 square foot tent with tile flooring to set up a gym alongside the pitch — a temporary construction that will be paid for by the Swiss. Benmoise is hopeful the school will get to keep the workout equipment.
Sergio Affuso, a press officer for the team, said in an email that Switzerland was “very happy” with the base camp. “It is great to see how enthusiastic everyone is about hosting us here, included the kids of the school, and the facilities are very well prepared,” Affuso said.
Per FIFA rules, each of the 48 countries playing in the World Cup has to host a public community day at their base camp to locals during one of its first five days of practice. But because school was still in session those days, FIFA allowed SDJA to invite only the internal school community to the event.
That day — June 3 — the SDJA student body, faculty and a few dozen parents filled the bleachers to watch the “Red Crosses” practice. Then the team set up some mini games to play with the kids — shooting on the goalies, passing and dribbling drills, and the crowd-pleaser known as “three Swiss players against 45 fourth graders.”
A pair of journalism-interested SDJA students are getting another special perk: the Swiss federation hired them as media interns for the duration of their stay in San Diego.
Benmoise didn’t want to share how much FIFA is paying to use the field, but said the compensation is “very generous.”
“Let’s just say we’re not charging FIFA the same that I would charge, like, a youth team,” he said.
SDJA isn’t the only Jewish school whose facilities rate professional use. A pair of Orthodox high schools in Los Angeles rent their basketball gyms to NBA players for off-season workouts. The all-star roster that uses those courts appreciate not only their quality, but also the schools’ privacy and security.
Benmoise said the Swiss team — which kicks off against Qatar on Saturday in San Francisco — was thus far too focused on game prep to explore the rest of the campus. But a social media post from the team’s Instagram account about their practice field did cause a stir back home.
The post was an overhead map of the practice facility, showing the dressing area, the play area, the goalkeeper area and — on the next slide of the carousel — the hills beyond the field, labeled “snake area.”
“Watch out for the snakes 🐍 👀,” the caption read.
An alarmed Swiss media published a number of stories about the threat of serpentine pitch invasions, forcing Affuso clarify that the post was an attempt at humor.
“People in Switzerland understood the joke,” he told The Athletic. “But maybe, abroad, they didn’t.” (Benmoise said snakes had “never been an issue” on the campus.)
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Mamdani was set to meet Colombian president known for inflammatory Israel rhetoric
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had planned to meet this week with Colombian President Gustavo Petro — who has compared Israel’s leaders to Nazis and recently defended his use of the phrase “Heil Hitler” on social media — during the South American leader’s visit to New York, a source familiar with the mayor’s schedule plans confirmed.
The meeting — set to be Mamdani’s first with a foreign leader — was reportedly canceled after the Trump administration intervened, directing Colombian officials to call it off, arguing that it would violate the terms of Petro’s entry into the United States for a United Nations Security Council session on Wednesday.
The State Department revoked Petro’s visa last fall after he appeared at a pro-Palestinian rally in Manhattan, calling on U.S. soldiers to disobey presidential orders over its support for Israel’s war in Gaza and urging an armed response to counter Israel’s action against the Palestinians. Petro was granted a limited waiver this week to attend the U.N. meeting on the Middle East.
A former member of Colombia’s M-19 guerrilla movement and elected in 2022 as the country’s first socialist president in decades, Petro has repeatedly drawn condemnation from Jewish and Israeli leaders since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks for comparing Israel’s military actions to those of Nazi Germany. In 2024, he severed diplomatic ties with Israel, accusing the Jewish state of committing genocide in Gaza, an allegation Israel has strongly rejected.
This week, Petro came under fire after posting the phrase “Heil Hitler” on X in response to an op-ed supporting the right-wing presidential candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, ahead of Colombia’s June 21 presidential runoff. Petro defended the post, saying he was criticizing what he described as the author’s “fascist” rhetoric rather than endorsing the Nazi slogan itself. In his UN remarks, Petro again compared Israel to the Nazis.
A City Hall spokesperson declined to comment on the matter.
The mayor’s canceled sit-down with Petro is the latest flashpoint in his fraught alliances with inflammatory critics of Israel.
Mamdani has faced scrutiny from Jewish leaders and Zionist organizations over his sharp criticism of Israel and embrace of Palestinian activism that is shaping his tenure as leader of the city with the largest population of Jews outside Israel. During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and said he wouldn’t travel to the country and called for divestments in Israel’s economy. Recently, the mayor skipped the annual Israel Day parade.
In congressional races in New York City, Mamdani has actively been campaigning for candidates who have made inflammatory statements on Israel, including challenging U.S. military aid to the country and accusing the Jewish state of genocide. In particular, Mamdani has thrown his support behind former Columbia University Gaza War encampment activist Daraliza Avila Chevalier, who is challenging Rep. Adriano Espaillat with the incumbent’s support for Israel front and center. Avila Chevalier, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s NYC chapter, attended the Oct. 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square, which was broadly condemned for celebrating the Hamas attacks on Israel. She has continued to defend her participation, saying that she showed up in anticipation of Israel’s “outsized reaction.”
Mamdani reignited tensions with many Jewish communities by posting a Nakba Day video produced by his City Hall media team commemorating the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in 1948. That was followed by what was perceived as a delayed and ultimately supportive response to pro-Palestinian protesters who descended on a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood where a synagogue was hosting a real estate sale that included West Bank properties.
The head of Mamdani’s office of international affairs, tasked with interacting with the United Nations and handling diplomatic relations, is Ana Maria Archila, the past co-chair of the Working Families Party who led campaigns critical of Israel. On his first visit to the U.N. headquarters in March, Mamdani met with Secretary-General António Guterres, whom Israeli officials have criticized for his statements about the war in Gaza, accusing him of failing to sufficiently condemn Hamas. Israel recently cut ties with Guterres and barred him from entering the country following the blacklisting of Israeli authorities in a UN report regarding sexual violence in conflict zones.
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