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Adir Michaeli, maestro of the babka, bakes his way into the heart of Manhattan
(New York Jewish Week) — In a city where love of babka borders on a religion, Adir Michaeli, founder of Michaeli Bakery, is the (you’ll pardon the expression) high priest of the confection.
You may not know his name, but if you love good babka, you probably know his product. Michaeli, 39, was once the pastry department manager and head pastry chef of Lechamim Bakery in Tel Aviv; there, Michaeli told the New York Jewish Week, he spent two years perfecting the babka recipe. When Lechamim founder Uri Scheft wanted to expand to the United States, he tapped Michaeli to help open Lechamim’s American cousin, Breads Bakery, in New York. Since opening in 2013, Breads has since become the gold standard for babka in New York.
After three years with Breads — which has since expanded to five locations in the city — Michaeli left the company to start his own business, which he said was a dream of his. Now, after a fitful start due to COVID, Michaeli Bakery has developed its own devoted following at two locations in Manhattan.
“People love these pastries,” said Michaeli, referring to New Yorkers’ embrace of the babka, rugelach and bourekas for which Breads, and now Michaeli, has become known.
Of course, it’s not like New Yorkers were suffering from a lack of babka prior to either bakery’s arrival. Lots of bakeries, notably Green’s Bakery of Brooklyn, had been making and selling the gooey, yeasted cake for decades. Local New York comedian Jerry Seinfeld even devoted an episode of his eponymous show to the sweet treat back in 1994.
But Breads brought a babka to New York unlike anything that New Yorkers had ever tasted before. It was made with a laminated dough, similar to croissants, and it was at once light, fluffy and rich, layered with butter, stuffed with Nutella and chocolate chunks, and glazed with a simple syrup. A couple of months after Breads opened on East 16th St. near Union Square in 2013, New York magazine food writers Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite anointed Breads’ babka as the best in the city.
“The business went boom!” Michaeli told the New York Jewish Week. Almost overnight, Breads went from a virtually unknown purveyor of Israeli pastries to an essential stop on the tourist food trail.
“Everyone starts to come and take pictures with the babka,” said Michaeli. During their first Rosh Hashanah, not long after the New York magazine article appeared, Michaeli said the bakery sold 3,000 loaves of babka in a single day.
(Co-founder Scheft left Breads in 2021 and now runs Bakey, a Boston bakery. As for Breads’ current ownership, a spokesperson said that Michaeli “had nothing to do with the creation of Breads Bakery’s Babka.”)
After leaving Breads, Michaeli considered opening up a bakery in Tel Aviv and briefly returned there, but, assessing the competition, he soon realized that his future was in New York.
“There was only one Israeli bakery in New York — more [of them] should come,” he said.
Living on the Upper West Side while working on his business plan and meeting with potential investors, Michaeli did some baking for Anat Sror, an Israeli-born caterer and owner of Cafe Petisco, a now-closed restaurant on the Lower East Side.
Sror knew that Michaeli wanted to start his own bakery, and though she had never invested in anybody before, she decided to back Michaeli. “He’s very talented, very passionate, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do,” said Sror. “He had a great business plan. Plus, we had worked together so I knew exactly what he is capable of. I felt it was a good risk to take.”
Sror helped Michaeli find a storefront not too far from Cafe Petisco. They both agreed it was not an ideal location, but it was within their budget. “We trusted that once people try his stuff and get to know the bakery, things will be easier,” Sror said.
Michaeli Bakery opened on Division St. on the Lower East Side in May 2019. Conceived as an “Israeli patisserie,” it sold pastries, cookies, cakes, cream cakes, cheesecakes, sandwiches and, on Fridays, challah.
Less than a year later, however, just as the bakery was developing a name for itself, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the city to its knees. As New Yorkers stayed home or left the city altogether, Sror shut her restaurant and catering concern. Meanwhile, Michaeli streamlined his bakery’s offerings, focusing on babka, rugelach and bourekas, dropping the sandwiches and cakes on his original menu.
During the long months of the pandemic, Michaeli said he worked round the clock, keeping the business open seven days a week and working as the establishment’s baker, barista and manager. On the bright side? “It gave me the flexibility to build the business over time,” he said.
His efforts paid off: Less than three years later, in March 2022, Michaeli and Sror opened a second location on East 90th St. and First Ave. “The decision to open on the Upper East Side was because customers kept saying it was too far to come to the Lower East Side,” said Sror.
Sensing “the vibe” uptown, according to Michaeli, he decided to make the bakery kosher. “My integrity is that if I’m kosher, I’m kosher,” he said, referring to his decision to have kosher supervision for both bakeries, and to close them on Saturdays and early on Fridays. “Uptown Sunday is super busy, we need the reset of Saturday. “
“My vision is that I do the best that I can,” he added. “Everyone on the team is the same. Every day should be 100%. There is no 99%. This is the DNA of the place.”
One loyal customer, art consultant Andrea Meislin, raves about the “chocolate-y, gooey and decadent” babka at Michaeli, what Meislin describes as “babka to die for.” In addition to the chocolate babka, Michaeli makes a vegan chocolate babka, cheese and cherry babka and halvah babka. His Galil bourekas, made with goat cheese, onion and za’atar, are very popular, too.
These days, the biggest challenge Michaeli faces, he said, is dealing with the enormous demand the holidays bring. “For Hanukkah, I sent the manager out to the line on the street, to say that we are sorry. We can’t catch up with demand,” said Michaeli. “We told customers [on line] to go away. It was horrible. It is a problem I am trying to solve.”
Moving forward, Sror is optimistic that the bakery will expand: “It will either be another location, perhaps on the Upper West Side, or we are thinking about making a bigger location to be able to produce a bit more,” she said. Sror hopes Michaeli will be able to expand his menu, perhaps by adding his classic, light Israeli cheesecakes, what Michaeli calls “Grandma Cheesecake.”
When asked what differentiates Michaeli’s baked goods from Breads’ or other bakeries’, the baker refused to compare, stating that he just aims to do the best he can, all the time. “If someone says this is better than this or that, I really don’t care,” says Michaeli. “There is no competition. This is what we do.”
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How Jews made ‘Les Miz’ Christian again
At the end of the 1941 school year, 13-year-old Yitshkok Rudashevski went to meet his friend from the Soviet youth movement. Their confab, and that clear summer day, was soon disturbed by the howl of a siren and the raining down of bombs.
“The street was full of smoke,” Rudashevski wrote in his diary. “It is war.”
On Sunday June 22, Nazis mobilized Operation Barbarossa and began their push toward Vilnius. That Rudashevski was determined to fight back could be credited, at least in part, to the book he had with him at the start of the offensive, which he planned to share with his comrades.
“I carry with me Der Giber in Keytn [The Hero in Chains],” the Yiddish translation of Les Misérables, Rudashevski wrote, “from which we will read together about Gavroche, the child of the Paris proletariat who fell on the barricades alongside the adult fighters.” (Gavroche died in the street fighting of the 1832 June rebellion in Paris; Rudashevski would survive Lithuania’s June uprising, and its ensuing antisemitism, to be murdered by Nazis in the Ponary massacre of 1943.)
It makes sense that Rudashevski, a dedicated Marxist and product of the Lithuanian Yiddish school system, would find a kind of role model in Victor Hugo’s gamin.
That Les Misérables in translation was popular among Yiddish-speaking socialists — it was serialized in the Forverts in our first year of publication — is itself unsurprising, given the book’s preoccupations with social justice. That its ethic was a fundamentally Christian one seemed to matter less than its overall message: a universal concern for “the wretched” and vulnerable, particularly children, women and the formerly incarcerated. This last factor may have resonated deeply with Baderekh, a Yiddish theater troupe composed of displaced persons, who staged the story in 1946 Berlin.
I’ve been reading Les Misérables for about a year now (it’s long and brimming with Hugo’s commentary on post-Napoleonic revolts, essays on the argot of the underworld and digressions on Parisian city-planning) and was successfully influenced to buy a nosebleed seat to the arena tour of the musical at Radio City last Friday. Watching the megawatt melodrama, it occurred to me that in much the same way Jews conquered the Christmas song catalogue, the Jewish creative team behind Les Miz brought Hugo’s doorstopper to the world — and arguably made it more Christian.
Composer Claude-Michel Schönberg, born in France to Hungarian refugee parents who lost much of their family in the Holocaust, and the Tunisian-born Sephardic lyricist Alain Boublil created a concept album and early stage version that was Gallic in the extreme, and so more concerned with Enlightenment concepts than an enlightened human soul.
But when the show was brought to British shores, Boublil, Schönberg and original directors John Caird and Trevor Nunn reimagined the structure, adding a prologue with Valjean and the bishop, who gifts him silver candlesticks to restart his life after 19 years slaving as a convict at the shipyard in Toulon.
The revamp, which brought on journalist Herbert Kretzmer as lyricist, gave the bloodhound Inspector Javert a new solo — beloved by Ben Shapiro — where he connects his unyielding policing to the watchful stars and the God who punished Lucifer for his challenge to the heavenly order.
Valjean prays. A lot. And it ain’t the Shema.
The key innovation of the musical may well be how it sets Valjean and Javert in opposition. Whereas in the novel, Javert seems to have no God save the rigid rule of law, in the show his dogma derives from what its creatives recently, and reductively, referred to in a New York Times interview as an “Old Testament” form of justice. His foil, Valjean, the redeemed man of mercy, stands in for the New Testament’s core of forgiveness, which the show clearly favors.
If it’s odd that the presentation of this false binary was trusted to a Jew named Herbert Kretzmer, it hasn’t seemed to deter many Jews from embracing the show as they once did the novel.
A couple of years ago, I attended a virtual Rosh Hashanah service that used the musical’s final takeaway, “to love another person is to see the face of God,” as its thematic thrust. (It was a bit much for me.) It would make just as much sense — though it would be cringe in the extreme — to deploy the show for a Yom Kippur sermon on atonement.
The Jewish affinity for the material is helped by that Hugo, unlike so many — probably most — of his contemporaries is not marred by antisemitism. He inveighed against pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 1880s, warning in an English paper that “Christianity is martyrizing Judaism” and publishing a not-so-subtle allegory about the Spanish Inquisition to drive the point home. I’d say he was doing the Emile Zola thing before it was cool, but it was never particularly popular to speak out in this way in the French Third Republic.
While Kretzmer was born in South Africa to refugees from a later wave of Tsarist pogroms, he and the other Jewish writers of the Les Miz musical do not seem to have been particularly observant. The strongest hint of the cultural inheritance is in the klezmeresque intro to “Master of the House,” a theme of the penny-pinching innkeeper Thénardier. (If that’s problematic, Thénardier later makes an antisemitic remark when the tune is reprised, implying he’s not Jewish himself.)
The show nonetheless points to universal values legible to Jews and, indeed, the world. Like Fiddler before it, Les Misérables is a global phenomenon not on the merits of its specificity, but for how it draws on a common humanity. The Yiddish left of the 20th century read the book; protesters in Hong Kong and China can now be heard singing the musical’s anthem of angry men.
As Hugo wrote in his introduction to the book, “so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.”
It may be immodest, but history, and his own adapters, have proven him right.
The post How Jews made ‘Les Miz’ Christian again appeared first on The Forward.
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When a country has gone insane, a ‘psychotic’ Israeli play like this makes total sense
What happens when individuals — and societies — lose their grip on reality, sanity, truth, or all three at once?
Af Mila L’Ima, or “Not a Word to Mother,” a play, running now at Beit Lessin in Tel Aviv, is a window into the mental state of the State of Israel right now. Like much of great Jewish literature, it combines comedy with tragedy.
Written by Noam Gil, and directed by Udi Gottschalk, the play opens with an air-conditioner repairman who finds himself summoned to the home of a woman he does not know. But she hasn’t called him there to fix her air conditioner.
After a few awkward — and very funny — minutes, the lady spits it out: Four days ago, she found out that her husband is having an affair with the air conditioner repairman’s wife.
“No,” he says. “Not my Galya.”
The woman can prove it to him, she says. She asks the repairman to hide, lie in wait for the two philanderers —and then attack her cheating husband with a rolling pin.
“No,” the repairman says, but soon a car is in the driveway, and the woman and the repairman dive behind the curtains.
It’s not who they think it is. Corinne, the woman’s teenage daughter, arrives with her crush, Nadav. The girl proceeds to discuss her mother in uncharitable terms. “I would kill myself if I turned out like her,” the girl says.
After a few minutes, another car arrives in the driveway.
This time it is the woman’s husband and the repairman’s wife, and they’re all over each other.
Just as they rip each other’s clothes off on the coffee table, the teenage daughter, dressed in her Scouts uniform, opens a door, and sees it all.
The repairman and the woman from the first scene emerge from their hiding places.
The horrified and traumatized teenage daughter has filmed the coffeetable make-out scene on her phone. And worse, she recognizes her father’s mistress; it’s her high school teacher.
The teenage daughter threatens to put the video up on TikTok. The adults panic. The situation spirals out of control; after catching his wife in the act, the seemingly peaceful repairman bloodies the nose of the woman’s husband. And Nadav, who can’t leave the apartment because no one will give him the keys — in Israel you need keys to leave the house —loses it.
“P’sichi! P’sichi! P’sichi! P’sichi! P’sichi, ” he yells. Psichi means “psychotic” or “crazy” in contemporary Israeli slang.
But this play is not just about one family’s petty, “psychotic” mess; these characters are each a type of mess in which the audience might recognize themselves: a philandering bal t’shuvah husband, talking big to his mistress about opening up new restaurants when he’s really bankrupt; a woman who has convinced herself she deserves a man with gigantic ambitions; a self-sacrificing, middle-aged mother who has given up on her own dream of writing a play to care for her husband and children; a teenage girl who claims to hate her own mother. Each character is trying to find a way of surviving this mess.
“When you live in a place that is psychotic, everything is normal,” one character observes. The entire audience laughed knowingly.
This line gains resonance as the play zooms out from the “psychotic” behavior of the four adults and the two teenagers to take a look at the place they are all living in: Israel.
In a chaotic household in a chaotic country, the characters look to Jewish tradition to try to stabilize themselves. “Ridfu shalom,” the air conditioner repairman keeps telling the screaming spouses around him, riffing off Psalms 34:15. “Pursue peace.”
But can you always pursue peace?
This play acknowledges that in some situations, that’s not possible. In that way, it looks straight at the belief of many Israelis that now, after everything — the Oslo Accords, the Second Intifada, the withdrawal from Gaza, and finally Oct. 7 — the two-state solution may simply not be something that can be pursued.
And maybe that’s why everyone has gone psychotic, and why so many theatergoers packed the house, to laugh in a time of tragedy — and, to use an American idiom, to “feel seen.”
As I was writing this in a Tel Aviv coffee shop, a young man came over and asked if he could ask me something. I said sure, expecting to be asked for money.
But he sat down and said he was a lochem, a fighter, and was just released, and needed to talk with somebody. Would I be willing to speak with him for a few minutes?
I said of course.
He wanted to be heard. He said his name was Tom, he was the second of six children and hoped to study business administration. We talked about where we grew up, how being a second kid feels like being inside a sandwich, and the difference between a mandatory draft in Israel and selective service in the US. And then he apologized. He said he had to keep walking to stay calm.
If he were to walk over to the Beit Lessin theater, he would find the benches on Dizengoff Street covered with bumper stickers memorializing young men lost in battle. Not far away, there is a fountain that memorializes those killed on Oct. 7. But these memorials do not provide answers. What’s sanity? What’s insanity? What’s “p’sichi” and what’s just a normal reaction to pain?
There are no easy answers. I waved to Tom as he walked on.
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It’s not just Harvard and Columbia. Small liberal arts colleges are quietly settling antisemitism complaints.
As major universities across the U.S. strike deals with the Trump administration over antisemitism complaints, a handful of small liberal arts colleges have been quietly settling cases of their own.
In the past week, Oregon’s Reed College and Pennsylvania’s Haverford College have both settled complaints accusing them of failing to protect Jewish students in the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war. Pomona and Occidental Colleges, both in southern California, settled complaints in late 2024 and 2025, respectively.
At least nine other small liberal arts colleges — which unlike universities mainly focus on undergraduate and interdisciplinary education over research — are still locked in disputes.
These include Sarah Lawrence and Union in New York; Swarthmore and Lehigh in Pennsylvania; Middlebury in Vermont; Whitman in Washington; Wellesley and Williams in Massachusetts; and Scripps in California.
All colleges declined the Forward’s requests for comment.
“Institutions are failing to effectively respond to anti-Zionist conduct targeting Jews, as they’re legally obligated to do,” said Denise Katz-Prober, special counsel of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a non-profit dedicated to advancing the civil rights of the Jewish people. “Most, if not all, of the measures that would apply to a larger institution also apply to a small liberal arts school.”
In most cases, Jewish legal advocacy organizations such as the Brandeis Center, the Anti-Defamation League, or StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice (SCLJ) have leveled the accusations by filing complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
Jews at Haverford, a group of Jewish students, faculty, parents and alumni of the Pennsylvania school, opted for a different tactic, filing a civil lawsuit against the college.
The Trump administration launched investigations of 60 colleges and universities, including small liberal arts colleges. But it has not taken the same drastic measures with them as it did with larger universities, where it used federal funding as leverage. While some schools agreed to the federal government’s demands and reached multi-million dollar financial settlements, others like Harvard did not, and were subsequently hit with lawsuits. A judge dismissed the lawsuit against Harvard on Thursday.
Most complaints have been filed under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and allege that colleges didn’t take sufficient action when Jewish students complained they were discriminated against. The complaint against Reed College alleged that the school’s inaction after a student claimed she was harassed for being a Zionist created an environment where, soon after, the mezuzah on her doorframe was destroyed and a rock was thrown at her through her dorm window.
At Lehigh, a Jewish student’s mezuzah was stolen, according to the complaint, and, shortly after, a “Stand With Palestine” sticker was placed outside the same door. Lehigh police conducted and closed a brief investigation, the complaint says, but when the student identified who admitted to placing the sticker, the college declined to discipline them or increase security surveillance in the dormitory. Because of this, the complaint says, the Jewish student requested alternative housing for his own safety.
“This is outrageous and blatantly unequal treatment,” reads the complaint, filed by StandWithUs.
The lawsuit against Haverford accuses the school of being too permissive with pro-Palestinian protesters, who occupied the school’s main administrative building in December 2023. According to the suit, protesters would perform chants “quoting from the Hamas Charter,” which calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews. The suit also accused the president of saying she would take “no punitive action” against the protesters.
At Wellesley, a student resident assistant sent an email to the underclassmen in her dorm saying, “there should be no space, no consideration, and no support for Zionism within the Wellesley College community,” according to the complaint filed by the Brandeis Center.
The RA sent an apology letter to residents, according to the complaint, but soon after posted on her social media that she stood by her statement, sent the apology because she “had a gun to [her] head,” and called students who objected to her message “some weak bitches fr.” The Title VI complaint against Wellesley alleges that the school didn’t do enough to address this issue.
As part of their settlements, Reed, Pomona and Occidental agreed to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism. The schools also agreed to include education to fight antisemitism in their bias training, and to strengthen the rules for campus demonstrations with regard to time, place and manner.
Haverford also agreed to adopt the IHRA definition, which states that claiming Israel’s existence is a “racist endeavor” or comparing “contemporary Israel policy to that of the Nazis” can be antisemitic.
Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at the University of Pennsylvania and an advocate for free speech on college campuses, fears that adopting this definition will stifle that freedom.
“I’m Jewish, and anti-Zionist rhetoric is hard for me to hear,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “But that’s why I should hear it. Zionism is probably the most contested question on our campuses right now. Unless everyone can address it freely and openly we’ll never get a good purchase on it.”
Katz-Prober of the Brandeis Center said the IHRA definition does not restrict or censor speech.
“The IHRA definition specifically and explicitly states that criticism leveled against Israel, similar to that leveled against any other country, is not antisemitism, and also requires context,” she said.
“Antisemitism cannot be effectively addressed without first being able to understand and recognize it and the IHRA definition is the most effective and widely accepted tool for doing just that.”
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