Uncategorized
A rectangular latke takes shape at Edith’s Sandwich Counter in Brooklyn
(New York Jewish Week) — At Edith’s Sandwich Counter, a “Jew-ish” takeout place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the most popular bagel sandwich is their bacon-egg-cheese-latke (BECL) combo. Each element of the sandwich’s filling is made to order: crispy bacon, an omelet cooked in an individually-sized tamagoyaki pan, topped with sharp cheddar and a freshly fried latke.
Since opening as a brick and mortar store in spring of 2021, the BECL has become Edith’s most popular bagel sandwich — and demand for the latke as a stand-alone side dish is high, too. This presented a challenge: As anyone who’s ever hosted a Hanukkah party knows, cranking out those fresh, crispy latkes, one at a time, had become challenging. They sell thousands of latkes a week.
“It was getting harder and harder for us to keep up,” owner and founder Elyssa Heller told the New York Jewish Week. “I wanted to find a way to improve the quality of our latke and use our growth as a vehicle for getting better.”
Enter Heller’s invention: the rectangular latke. While Edith’s does not serve traditional Jewish deli food (see crispy bacon, above), they do take historical elements of how Jews ate throughout the Diaspora and incorporate them into their menu. After doing some research, Heller determined that what makes a latke a latke is not its circular shape (which it assumes when the batter is dropped by the spoonful into oil), but that the potatoes are mixed in an egg batter and then fried.
Case in point: The name alone, “latke,” simply means “little oily,” according to Gil Marks’s “The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food.” In other words, a latke is about the oil, not the ingredients nor the shape. “Every food has a standard of identity, characteristics that define it,” said Heller. “Nothing was ever mentioned about a latke needing to be round. As opposed to round challah on Rosh Hashanah, which represents the cycle of life, the shape of the latke has no symbolic meaning.”
In other words, a latke is still a latke even if its shape fits in the box.
Here’s how they do it: The latke batter — which consists of Yukon Gold potatoes, onions, eggs, potato starch and matzah meal — is poured into a large sheet pan and par-baked so that it is 80% done and keeps its shape when cut. The giant latke is then cut into rectangles, the same size and shape as the omelet it sits atop in the bagel sandwich. Then, when an order comes in, the almost ready-to-eat latke is fried and served piping hot.
The resulting sandwich, in which egg and latke match in size, is Instagram-worthy — an essential requirement in the food world of today. And, just as important, the diner gets a bite of latke with each bite of egg.
Diners are delighted by the results: Comments on Instagram range from “this is the innovation we need” to “I want those crispy corners.” At the same time, they don’t seem particularly surprised. “People know that, here at Edith’s, we do things our own way while honoring traditions,” Heller said.
(You may be thinking, “Aren’t the hash browns at McDonald’s essentially a rectangular fried latke?” True, the fast food giant has been selling rectangular-shaped portable potatoes for more than 40 years, but again: A latke is typically made with an egg batter; hash browns are not.)
Heller, who also owns Edith’s Eatery & Grocery, a sister establishment to the sandwich counter, founded both places to make good Jewish food accessible all year long — not just for the holidays. The latkes, based on Heller’s grandmother’s recipe, are on the menu 365 days of the year. Their BECL comes on Edith’s signature twisted bagel for $13.50; if you want just the latke, you can have that for $2.75 (add $1.25 if you want it topped with creme fraiche).
For Hanukkah — which starts this year on the evening of Sunday, Dec. 18 — Edith’s Sandwich Counter and Edith’s Eatery & Grocery will be preparing their new rectangular latke, which will be accompanied by a choice of ketchup, hot sauce, apple sauce or creme fraiche. They will also serve braised brisket and jelly donuts, although the team at Edith’s has not yet determined the jelly flavors they will use.
In the spirit of “intellectually driven food” that Heller espouses, Edith’s also has a Russian cheese pancake, syrniki, on the menu. It is similar to the cheese pancakes that Jews in Eastern Europe prepared for Hanukkah before potato cultivation became widespread there starting in 1840. Made with farmer’s cheese and accompanied by smetana, a cross between sour cream and creme fraiche, and tart currant kissel, a thick fruit syrup, it is available for Hanukkah and all year round, too.
Interested in making rectangular latkes of your own? Our friends at our partner site, The Nosher, have Edith’s recipe here.
Edith’s Sandwich Counter is at 495 Lorimer Street in Brooklyn.
—
The post A rectangular latke takes shape at Edith’s Sandwich Counter in Brooklyn appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
University of Michigan will have a leader who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court
A civil rights attorney who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court and made social media posts viewed as pro-Hezbollah and antisemitic, has won his bid for the University of Michigan Board of Regents.
Michigan is one of a few states in which voters play a direct role in choosing university overseers. As a regent, Amir Makled (D) will help oversee expenditures at the university where his clients, the student protesters, were arrested. The position is unpaid and carries an eight-year term. Democrat Paul Brown won the other seat up for election, maintaining the board’s 6-2 Democratic majority.
Makled beat out Republican challenger Lena Epstein, who is Jewish and previously identified as a “Jewish Messianic believer of Christ,” but recanted the statement and later said she was “100% Jewish.” Mainstream Judaism does not accept Messianic Jews because they believe in the divinity of Christ and try to convert Jews to Jesus.
Epstein told the Forward in an April interview that the Democrats had handed her an opportunity to win the seat by endorsing Makled, who was facing intense scrutiny. In one of his controversial posts, Makled called Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah a “martyr” after he was killed by Israeli strikes in 2024. He lost an endorsement from Service Employees International Union for the posts and later deleted them.
In the regents race, voters picked up to two of six candidates, with the top two winning. Makled received 25.6% of the vote while Brown received 27.2%. Epstein received 22.2% while her fellow Republican Michael Schostak received 22.6%.
Makled’s election comes as part of a wave of Democratic Party wins, including in Michigan, which elected as Senator Abdul El-Sayed (D), who also faced severe backlash for statements related to Israel and Gaza and for appearing alongside streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric.
Israel played a major role in the rhetoric surrounding Michigan’s midterms. But voters, including 60% of Jewish voters that voted for El-Sayed according to early exit polls, favored sharp critics of the Jewish state to candidates in support of it.
The post University of Michigan will have a leader who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
This grandson of Holocaust survivors is headed to Congress. The ADL has concerns about his antisemitism record.
The election of Daniel Biss, a Jewish critic of Israel, to an Illinois congressional seat Tuesday has sparked a public feud between the Anti-Defamation League and the liberal Zionist group J Street over whether the ADL remains a credible voice in the fight against antisemitism.
After Biss, the former Jewish mayor of Evanston, Ill., won his seat Tuesday night, the ADL Midwest took to social media to express “serious concerns” about Biss’ “approach to antisemitism.”
J Street, which had endorsed Biss, hit back, noting that Biss is the grandson of Holocaust survivors and calling the ADL’s statement “a shanda,” the Yiddish word for disgrace.
“It is hard to read this statement without wondering how far the ADL has drifted from the organization it once was – a gold standard in our community for standing up against bigotry, hatred and discrimination,” J street wrote on X.
Biss, who speaks Hebrew and spent childhood summers in Israel, was elected with 75% of the vote in a district where 11% of the electorate is Jewish.
“It saddens me to watch the ADL, once a preeminent civil rights organization, devolve into an entity that traffics in fear, intimidation and extremism,” Biss wrote in a statement to the Forward. “This kind of rhetoric does nothing to keep the Jewish people safe—in fact, it undermines that very cause.”
The ADL has long faced scrutiny from critics who view the watchdog group as labeling too broad a swath of Israel criticism as antisemitic, while less forcefully condemning antisemitism when it comes from the political right.
“Our statement speaks for itself,” an ADL spokesperson wrote in an email to the Forward.
In its statement, the ADL pointed to a specific set of concerns involving Biss’ record as mayor of Evanston, Illinois, the college town home to Northwestern University.
Biss did not provide Evanston police support that Northwestern requested after reported “antisemitic conduct” at the Gaza war encampment on campus in April 2024, the ADL said, “raising serious questions about whether the safety, dignity, and equal access of Jewish students were treated with the urgency they required.”
Biss has defended his decision not to dispatch police to the encampment, writing in response to a congressional inquiry that forcibly clearing the protest would have gone against police department advice and suppressed “constitutionally protected speech.”
The ADL also said that Biss “dismissed scrutiny of his response as a politically motivated attack fueled by AIPAC, rather than substantively addressing the concerns raised by Jewish students and community members.”
Biss made opposition to AIPAC a central theme of his primary campaign for Congress after the hardline pro-Israel lobbying group spent millions opposing him and supporting another candidate, state Sen. Laura Fine.
In an interview with the Forward in March, Biss said it was “absurd” that AIPAC opposes imposing any conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel. “And then try to enforce it with millions of dollars of dark money, is certainly bad for democracy and bad for our politics here in America,” Biss added.
At the same time, Biss faced pressure to his left on Israel in the primary, defeating Kat Abughazaleh, a Palestinian-American who has characterized Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a genocide. Biss, who has described himself as a progressive Zionist, declined to use the word genocide, despite repeated calls from Abughazaleh to do so.
In a March op-ed in The Nation, Biss wrote that he believed he was one of AIPAC’s top targets partly because “I’m the grandson of Holocaust survivors. My mother is Israeli. My extended family lives in Israel. AIPAC knew that they couldn’t dismiss me as anti-Israel or antisemitic.”
The ADL also criticized Biss for supporting the repeal of an anti-BDS law, which bars Illinois from investing public pension funds in companies that boycott Israel. That position, the ADL said, “raises additional concerns about his willingness to stand against efforts to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state.”
In an April Substack post explaining his position, Biss said that he personally opposes the global movement to boycott Israel, but he does not believe the government should “stop people from using their economic agency to advocate for their values.”
Biss will succeed Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Jewish lawmaker who represented the district for nearly three decades and was also an outspoken critic of AIPAC.
The post This grandson of Holocaust survivors is headed to Congress. The ADL has concerns about his antisemitism record. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
At the Vatican, two elderly men — one Jewish, one Catholic — exchange gifts and mutual admiration
On Wednesday, two senior citizens, Robert Zimmerman, 85, a Jew originally from Minnesota, and Robert Prevost, 71, a Catholic of Chicago, had a brief meeting at the younger man’s office in central Italy.
Sources on the scene report that Zimmerman was in town for business and Prevost, who goes professionally by Leo, had recently cited Zimmerman’s work in the preface to a book about nuclear disarmament.
Both men dressed in uniform, looking a bit Spy Vs. Spy, with Zimmerman in a black hoodie and Prevost in white with a small white skull cap. The confab was brief, a bulletin from Prevost’s workplace reported, consisting of “greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges.”
Prevost gifted Zimmerman with prayer beads, and Zimmerman presented Prevost with a copy of his memoir, published under his pen name, Bob Dylan.
While Zimmerman was raised in a Jewish home, he had, for a time in the late 1970s to early 1980s, converted to born-again Christianity, confounding many.
The post At the Vatican, two elderly men — one Jewish, one Catholic — exchange gifts and mutual admiration appeared first on The Forward.
