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A Brooklyn Jewish foodie wants to make haroset a year-round treat
(New York Jewish Week) — For many, the highlight of the Passover seder is haroset — the nutty, fruity, sweet and crunchy paste spread on matzah and meant to symbolize the mortar slung by enslaved Israelites.
Such was the case for Michael Rubel. His mother’s haroset — made with “chopped apples, Manischewitz, raisins and lots of cinnamon,” as he describes it — was something he looked forward to all year. It was delicious, rare and one of the few distinctly uncommon Jewish foods he remembered from growing up in Kansas City, Kansas.
In fact, Rubel, 26, wondered why such a treat would be confined to Passover. “I can’t tell you how many Jews have said to me, ‘Yes, I’ve always asked why we only eat this once a year,’” Rubel told the New York Jewish Week. “It feels almost universal.”
So the Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn resident, decided to do something about this sad state of affairs: Last week he launched the food brand Schmutz, which makes a haroset that is meant to be eaten all year round.
Rubel launched his brand online and at a party at East Williamburg’s Tchotchke Gallery on April 1. Within 48 hours, that first drop — which consisted of a traditional Ashkenazi apple and walnut haroset, as well as a fig and pistachio haroset inspired by a 15th-century Italian recipe — sold out. According to Schmutz’s Instagram, they sold 249 pounds of the stuff, or around 500 jars.
Schmutz haroset is not kosher for Passover; as for the brand’s name, which means “dirt or unpleasant substance” in Yiddish, Rubel says it is meant to be ironic — haroset may be delicious but it “is not a pretty food,” he concedes.
Michael Rubel, 26, mingles with guests who came to the “Schmutz” launch event at Tchotchke Gallery on April 1, 2023. (Jeffrey Rubel)
The nine-ounce jars retail for $18, which Rubel acknowledges is expensive. “It’s small-batch crafted and definitely a specialty product,” he said, “but I’m excited to make this product even more accessible going forward.”
Rubel believes that haroset can evolve into something like a jam or a condiment, a shelf-stable food that’s readily available in restaurants, synagogue gift shops and specialty food stores. The opportunities are endless — as the brand’s website says, “schwirl it in oatmeal and schpread it on cheese and schmear it on toast and schlep it to a picnic and schling it on leftovers and schpoon it from a jar.”
Though Rubel works a day job in product development at a software startup, he had previously worked in restaurant kitchens and in product development for a snack company. This, he said, gave him insight into both the production side and the business side of developing a new snack food.
Then again, haroset is more than a delicious snack or topping, according to Rubel: It also epitomizes the Jewish food experience, providing a unique opportunity to highlight the diversity of Jewish cultures. Each unique haroset recipe, he said, serves as a window into different Jewish experiences all around the world.
“One Passover during Covid, I fell down a rabbit hole of global haroset recipes, and fell so deeply in love with this food as a prism into the diaspora. It’s emblematic of a central Jewish tradition; we carry some shared instructions around the world and do different things with it,” he told the New York Jewish Week. “You’ve got a history of French folks making haroset with chestnuts, Italian communities using pine nuts. There’s tropical cherries in Suriname; dates in places like Iraq and India; peanuts, bananas, rose petals, pear and more elsewhere. Even within those communities, you see it done very differently, with different tastes, textures and beyond.”
So far, Rubel has created two flavors of the jarred haroset — fig and pistachio and apple and walnut. He hopes to include more in the future. (Landon Cooper)
Rubel wants Schmutz haroset to be part of the movement exposing Jews and non-Jews to the diversity of Jewish food. Though the first drop consisted of just two varieties, he promises more are around the corner for later this spring. “I love Ashkenazi foods so deeply, and yet, Jewish food is more than that,” Rubel said. “It feels especially important in this moment, when Jews are getting a lot of public attention, to share the depth of global Jewish cuisine, and to show that there’s no one type of Jew.”
Liz Alpern, a co-owner of Gefilteria — a brand, launched in 2012, that took another Passover staple, gefilte fish, mainstream — told the New York Jewish Week via email that she is “excited about Schmutz because it’s offering the wider world the opportunity to enjoy one of the most beloved foods from the Jewish canon.”
“Michael is thoughtful and knowledgeable about the countless global variations on charoset and he’s introduced me to many flavors I hadn’t heard of before,” Alpern added. (Gefilteria helped sponsor and cater Schmutz’s launch party last weekend.)
Having lived in New York for four years now, Rubel said he is realizing just how much Jewish food is available here — and how little is available elsewhere. That’s something he aspires to change. “I’m excited to bring a new Jewish energy not just to the kosher aisle but beyond it,” he said.
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The post A Brooklyn Jewish foodie wants to make haroset a year-round treat appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Is the movie ‘Nuremberg’ about the wrong Jewish psychiatrist?
Douglas Kelley, the real-life U.S. Army psychiatrist portrayed by Rami Malek in the recently released motion picture Nuremberg, wrote a book titled 22 Cells in Nuremberg that came out in 1947, a year after he finished his five-month stint at the Nuremberg trials.
Nearly 60 years later, interviews conducted by Leon Goldensohn, a Jewish psychiatrist who replaced Kelley at the historic war crimes trials, were published in The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist’s Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses. Goldensohn who spent more time with Nazi prisoners than Kelley did, and this book, translated into 16 languages, arguably sheds more light on the Third Reich criminals.
Goldensohn and Kelley were responsible for monitoring both the physical and mental health of the Nazi prisoners, and both their lives ended tragically: Goldensohn died of a heart attack in 1961, five days after his 50th birthday; Kelley died by suicide in front of his family at the age of 45.
Leon Goldensohn’s son Dan, now 77, said that his father’s interactions with the prisoners were deeper than the ones Kelley had.
“There’s a couple of defendants who say in Leon’s book how much they preferred talking to him,” Dan Goldensohn told me.
One of those defendants was Hermann Goering, the commander of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, who complimented Goldensohn on his technique as a psychiatrist.
“I feel freer to talk to you than to some other psychologists,” Goering told him.
I checked in with Leon Goldensohn’s sons and daughter and their cousins when the movie Nuremberg opened and the actor portraying Douglas Kelley appeared larger than life on the silver screen. The movie was about “the wrong psychiatrist,” Dan Goldensohn told me over the phone.
“We lost our chance to have Leon’s work once again in the public eye, because of Kelley,” Dan said. “When people talk about an Army psychiatrist at Nuremberg, Kelley’s name comes up. Leon’s name hardly does. Anyway, we have our jealousies.”
A French production company did make an hour-long program based on the Goldensohn book that aired on The History Channel, but the psychiatrist’s surviving relatives said it was not well done. Dan Goldensohn said the family came close to signing a deal with an Italian company for a film or TV series based on the book.
“It suddenly collapsed as soon as they heard that this other movie was signed with real actors and a real director,” he said.
‘The best brother in the world’
Dr. Eli Goldensohn, a world-renowned neurologist at Columbia University who died in 2013 at 98, took up the book project when he retired at the age of 83. Eli, who was four years younger than Leon, spent 10 years gathering and organizing materials, writing short summaries of all the interviews, and transcribing all those that hadn’t been transcribed. Eventually, he donated his brother’s papers to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
When the book was published in the fall of 2004, Eli Goldensohn told me his only disappointment was that it “didn’t really describe Leon’s wonderful war record.” Leon Goldensohn had been Division Psychiatrist of the 63rd Infantry Division, which fought in France and Germany, and received several decorations for service on the front lines.
Eli remembered his older brother fondly.
“The Nazi prisoners respected Leon because he was an objective person and was fundamentally a gentleman who was able to meet them on any level,” Eli told me back in 2004. “He was the best brother in the world. I did this book to memorialize the existence of one of the finest people I ever knew.”
Anticipating Hannah Arendt
Eli Goldensohn’s son and daughter assisted him on the book. Ellen Goldensohn, who had served as editor-in-chief of Natural History magazine for many years, helped with the copyediting. Her brother Marty Goldensohn, a veteran of public radio newsrooms, introduced Eli to his friend Jim Bouton, the former Yankee pitcher and best-selling author, who convinced Eli to pursue a deal with a major commercial publisher. (Eli ended up signing with Knopf, where the interviews were turned into a book by Ashbel Green, the editor who had worked with such dissident writers as Andrei Sakharov, Jacobo Timerman and Vaclav Havel.)
Ellen Goldensohn said her uncle Leon’s work was prescient, given that it came 17 years before Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
“In 1946 he really knew the banality of evil and what was asked of these people who ran the Nazi regime,” she told me.
Marty Goldensohn remembers that his mother Betty, who lived to be 101, complained about her husband commandeering the extra bedroom in their assisted living apartment for the book project.
“Eli, get these file boxes out of here or I’m going over to the other side,” she joked, the other side being the Third Reich.
Marty said his father’s labor of love on the book was motivated, in part, by a sense of history, something he shared with his brother Leon.
“Leon was a Jewish doctor and he had compassion,” Marty told me. “He was in the middle of something that the historian Tony Judt once described as ‘a seam of evil.’ He was at the seam and how could he resist asking the key questions that had to do with the horror that had been perpetrated?”
The ‘Good’ German
Of the 476 pages in The Nuremberg Interviews, 33 are devoted to Goering, who told Goldensohn he was nauseated by Picasso, referred to the virulently antisemitic newspaper Der Sturmer as “that stupid journal” and claimed that of all the accusations leveled against him, the charge of looting art treasures caused him the most anguish.
In conversations with Goldensohn, Goering insisted that he was never antisemitic, that Adolph Hitler was a great leader who was betrayed by some of his subordinates and that he, Goering, would go down in history as a man who did much for the German people.
When Leon Goldensohn pressed Goering on his culpability in the genocide of European Jewry, the prisoner gave a classic “Good German” defense: “Certainly, as second man in the state under Hitler, I heard rumors about mass killings of Jews, but I could do nothing about it and I knew that it was useless to investigate these rumors and to find out about them accurately, which would not have been too hard, but I was busy with other things,” he said. “And if I had found out what was going on regarding the mass murders, it would simply have made me feel bad and I could do very little to prevent it anyway.”
The post Is the movie ‘Nuremberg’ about the wrong Jewish psychiatrist? appeared first on The Forward.
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Hamas, Islamic Jihad Announce Hostage Body Handover
A Red Cross vehicle, escorted by a van driven by a Hamas terrorist, moves in an area within the so-called “yellow line” to which Israeli troops withdrew under the ceasefire, as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages seized during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in Gaza City, Nov. 12, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alk
The armed wings of Palestinian terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad said on Thursday they would hand over the body of a hostage at 8 pm local time (1800 GMT), though Israel said it had not received any official notification of a planned transfer.
Islamic Jihad, which is allied with Hamas and also seized hostages during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that precipitated the Gaza war, said the body was recovered in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.
Under an October ceasefire deal, Hamas released all 20 surviving hostages still held in Gaza in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and wartime detainees held by Israel.
The agreement also provided for the return of the remains of 28 hostages in exchange for the remains of 360 militants.
Until Thursday, the remains of four hostages were still held in Gaza.
An Israeli government spokesperson told reporters Israel was unaware of any planned return, despite media reports suggesting the handover could take place later on Thursday.
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Coalition Led by Iraqi PM Sudani Comes First in Iraq’s Election, Commission Says
A man holds a flag of Iraq from a car with an election poster featuring current Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani, as supporters of the Reconstruction and Development Coalition celebrate after preliminary election results were announced in Baghdad, Iraq, Nov. 12, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ahmed Saad
A coalition led by Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani came first in Iraq’s parliamentary election, the Independent High Electoral Commission said on Wednesday.
His coalition received 1.317 million votes in Tuesday’s election, the commission said.
Reuters reported earlier that Sudani placed first, citing two electoral commission officials with knowledge of the results.
Sudani was seeking a second term in Tuesday’s election, but many disillusioned young voters saw the vote simply as a vehicle for established parties to divide Iraq’s oil wealth.
However, Sudani tried to cast himself as the leader who could make Iraq a success after years of instability, arguing he had moved against established parties that brought him to power.
No party can form a government on its own in Iraq’s 329-member legislature, so parties build alliances with other groups to become an administration, a fraught process that often takes many months.
The final total turnout in Iraq’s parliamentary election reached 56.11 percent, the electoral commission said earlier on Wednesday.
“The voter turnout is clear evidence of another success, reflected in the restoration of confidence in the political system,” Sudani said in a televised speech following the announcement of the initial results.