On a recent Thursday in his experimental kosher kitchen, Noah Clickstein was brining, roasting and assembling local seasonal fruits and vegetables on plates for his diners – not uncommon tasks for the head chef at Lehrhaus, a Jewish tavern and house of learning in Somerville, Massachusetts.

But one of the vegetables made what Clickstein was doing unprecedented — at least in recent centuries.

Lehrhaus is the first North American restaurant to serve the qishut (key-shoot) — an oblong, light-green fuzzy melon that resembles a cucumber and hasn’t been on Jewish dinner plates since biblical times. Clickstein has found a variety of ways to pair the melon with local produce to highlight its versatility and flavor profile.

“We love telling stories, and we love introducing new things to people,” Clickstein told The Forward. “We hope people can learn something while being here, even if it’s just eating the food.”

Thousands of years ago, Jews stewarded qishuim, a fruit that thrived in the arid regions of Egypt, Italy and Israel. The fruit’s numerous mentions across the Torah and Talmud point to how popular the produce was for Jews at the time. But as exile and assimilation transformed Jewish life in the diaspora, the rooted connection between Jews and the qishuim withered, leaving other communities in those lands to cultivate the plant.

That changed in 2021 when the Jewish Seed Project — a research initiative of the Jewish Farmer Network — sought to connect Jews in the diaspora to the ancient plant.

Cross-pollinating contemporary descendants of the qishuim in gardens across the United States and Canada, a handful of growers have inched the plant closer to its biblical description, restoring a once-lost relationship with the fruit.

Planting a seed

The Jewish Seed Project began as a collaboration. Prolific seed keeper K Greene, who runs a seed company in New York’s Hudson Valley, had long been unraveling the story of seeds, making a career of researching and preserving plants from Black and indigenous communities. But he had yet to explore seeds that connected him to his own Jewish heritage.

He approached the Jewish Farmer Network with the idea of cultivating a Jewish cucumber, or qishut.

“As a perennially displaced and shunted-from-here-to-there people, the stories of seeds that are connected to our story” have been lost, said Shani Mink, the executive director of Jewish Farmer Network, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the agrarian roots of Jewish tradition.

In modern Hebrew, the word qishuim is used to describe a Middle Eastern variety of zucchini known in Arabic as a kusa squash. However, this variety only arrived in the region a few hundred years ago, ruling it out as the qishuim mentioned in 2,000- and 3,000-year-old biblical texts.

To piece together the puzzle of qishuim, Mink called on long-time peer, Noah Weinberg, a Jewish farmer and Torah scholar who founded Gann Farm in Newton, Massachusetts.

Weinberg turned to the National Library in Jerusalem and an ethnobotanist to uncover the vegetable’s biblical lineage and mysterious disappearance from Jewish life.

They found the first clues in the Torah, in Numbers 11:5-6: “We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt free of charge, the cucumbers, the watermelons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now, our bodies are dried out, for there is nothing at all; we have nothing but manna to look at.”

“The children of Israel are in the desert, and they’re having a common experience that many of us have, which is ‘I miss the food from home,’” Weinberg told the Forward. “For them it was a bunch of alliums — leeks, onions and garlic — and it was the qishuim and watermelons. So clearly this was a staple crop that people loved and was important to them in Egypt. “

From throughout the Torah and Talmud, Weinberg collected instructions for growing, harvesting and eating the fruit.

Talmudic discourse detailed an oblong vegetable with a fuzzy exterior that grew on a vine. Pale green in color, it is best picked on the early side, before it swells and develops a bitter taste. When eaten raw, qishuim taste quite similar to a cucumber: crisp and aqueous, though with an added tinge of melon sweetness.

Weinberg even uncovered mentions of the Shomer Qisu’im (watchman of the qishuim), a person whose sole job it was to ensure the plant’s proper ripening.

Harvesting an ancient cucumber

With a textual grounding established, the Jewish Seed Project began collaborating with farmers across North America to grow “diaspora gardens,” plots where research growers would cross-pollinate contemporary qishuim seed descendants from Italy, Egypt, Israel, West Bank and Gaza in the hopes of reaching back in time through their DNA to reconnect with the crop their ancestors once sowed.

The first few years of the project yielded fruits that were quite bitter, lacked the vegetable’s signature fuzzy exterior, or failed to meet other core traits.

In 2023, after a few years of selection and cultivation, the organization released a diasporic seed mix for individuals not associated with the project to steward themselves.

Now, in its sixth year, the Jewish Seed Project is honing in on taste, with many of its growers beginning to share the fruit both with and beyond their local Jewish community.

At a Rosh Chodesh Shabbaton in Alliance, Ohio, research grower Celeste Tannenbaum offered a brief lesson about the qishut’s history and brought 18 varieties of the ancient cucumber for participants to taste and help her select which plants to reseed next year.

“The more mature ones tasted like melon and were kind of sweet,” Batya Reed, 29 told the Forward, “But I actually liked the cucumber-flavored ones more.” Reed said she tasted one so bitter that Tannenbaum announced she would not plant it again.

Edda Mendes, 29 said the plant gave them “more context for my place in the world.”

“It’s hard not to feel alienated from so much of the world, in this country, in this time period,” they said. “So I’ve been increasingly digging into local history and ecology.”

In Colorado, where the plant is grown at a farm attached to the Boulder JCC, qishuim has become one of the many produce items shared with the city’s food pantries and nutrition programs.

“We donate it, and we tell our sites to think of it as a cucumber,” Becca Gan Levy, the Boulder JCC’s Farm and Sustainability Director, told the Forward.

‘The perfect vegetable’

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, the fruit has made its way into a commercial kitchen.

Clickstein has had the chance to experiment with the unusual vegetable each year since Lehrhaus opened in 2023.

The first year, Clickstein simply pickled the fruit. The following year, because the fruit had a dense texture similar to a squash, he sautéed it and added it to a quinoa salad layered with thinly sliced radish and roasted peppers.

This year he’s created the biggest selection to date, in what has been dubbed “Qishut-fest.” The spread features a qishut shirazi salad with tomato and red onion, blistered shishito peppers and qishuim plated on a bed of shipka pepper labneh, a savory tart filled with qishut, sautéed Swiss chard, and goat cheese spread, and of course, the time-honored vinegar-brined pickle.

“It was cool to get to see how this plant has changed,” Clickstein said.

Already, the salad and blistered pepper medley have sold out, with plans to continue serving the pickle and tart versions of the vegetable well into late October, or for as long as supplies last.

Just as its stewards have come to understand the plant more — its optimal maturity and growing conditions to ensure a pleasant flavor — so too has Clickstein come to acquaint himself and his customers with the vegetable’s versatile flavor profile.

“I really like this year’s crop and the direction it is going: meaning less bitter and more knowledge from the farmers on how to pick it correctly,” Clickstein told the Forward. He plans to lean further into cooked preparations of the crop and explore more ways to roast and sauté the vegetable to further unlock the qishut’s melon-like flavor notes.

“This was the perfect vegetable,” Clickstein said. “We serve it raw, pickled, roasted, and baked. Having tasted it these last few years, we really got to see the versatility and flavor of it, knowing it can be delicious raw as well as baked.”

Qishuim traditionally grow from April to November. As its season reaches its end, The Jewish Seed Project is already looking ahead to 2027. Using the data from the 11 participating research growers, the project will select which seeds will be grown again.

“Eventually we hope that through cross-pollination and selection for certain traits we will stabilize a variety of revived qishuim,” Mink said, “cobbled together from the genetic material stewarded by our neighbors and others over millennia.”

The post Jewish farmers planted an ancient seed. Now the fruit is making its American culinary debut. appeared first on The Forward.

Think of Yiddish today and you might picture Hasidic Brooklyn, Haredi neighborhoods in Israel or scholars working to preserve a language too often falsely written off as “dead” or “dying.”

But Texas? Ikh ken es nisht gleybn! (I can’t believe it!)

Sebastian Shulman, director of partnerships at the Yiddish Book Center, has spent the past year traveling around the U.S. and working with communities interested in Yiddish. Through the program, public libraries establish reading groups focused on English translations of Yiddish literature. Libraries in small towns across the Southwest, the Deep South and rural Michigan and Illinois have participated.

In Dallas, one library organized a daylong Yiddish festival that drew more than 500 people.

In Austin, Shulman gave a talk about Yiddish history during the city’s huge annual event, South by Southwest. The room for his lecture filled up, in spite of having to compete with the popular festival.

“There were young people and old people and Jewish people and non-Jewish people,” Shulman said. “It was such a deep hunger and a deep interest.”

At the end of the talk, a young Indigenous woman approached him and described similarities she saw between Yiddish and the culture and storytelling tradition of her own Cherokee Native American Nation.  He was moved by the encounter, which served as a testament to the bridges forged by Yiddish literature and history.

“Yiddish kind of blows apart the concept of the unexpected place,” Shulman said, calling it “a language of everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time.”

In a Santa Fe, New Mexico public library, Yiddish literature and history is preserved by those who didn’t necessarily inherit the language from their grandparents. Many of them aren’t even Jewish and encountered it for the first time in libraries, archives, classrooms, festivals and books.

Yiddish culture in New Mexico got even more of a boost last year when Jordan Wax, a Santa Fe-based composer and performer of Yiddish and New Mexican regional music, released an album of original secular Yiddish children’s songs.

Letters from history

David Katz, a longtime Texas resident who has spent years collecting and translating Yiddish archival material from the state, said he’s found a life-long mission of preserving not only the language and idioms – but also the human stories of Yiddish-speaking Jews who immigrated to towns across Texas.

Katz regularly receives requests from families around Texas, asking him to translate Yiddish letters and documents that are between 70 and 150 years old. He’s also assisted in translating materials donated to the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. Some contain ordinary family news. Others document poverty, illness, migration and the desperate search by Jews in Europe for a way out, as antisemitism intensified in the 1930s.

One letter from Germany from the early 1930s particularly stayed with him. The family wrote to relatives who’d already resettled in the U.S. about trying to obtain a visa to settle elsewhere, debating whether Canada, the United States or somewhere in South America might be the best destination.

Katz found it distressing that the family who wrote the letter seemed, ironically, to be unaware of the dangers facing them under the Nazis.“They’re debating about which climate might be better,” Katz recalled. “From their standpoint, they don’t know how bad things are about to get; it’s tragic to read that history so intimately.”

For Katz, translating these letters creates a connection to their senders and recipients.

“You read them, and even though the letters are maybe 100 years old, 80 years old, they very much make an impression on you that this is very understandable or approachable, because it’s Jewish life, not that different from today,” he said.

But that preservation work is only part of the story.

Susan Bronson, president of the Yiddish Book Center, said the center has increasingly worked with public libraries and Jewish communities around the country, and was inspired by the cross-generational and interfaith excitement to engage with Yiddish.

Many people attending these programs don’t speak the language. But translated literature, music, theater and lectures can provide an entry point.

Bronson has seen this among younger people through the Yiddish Book Center’s Great Jewish Books program, which introduces high school students to Jewish literature, including Yiddish works. Some students have said the experience helped them feel closer to a grandparent or better understand their family’s background.

The Yiddish Book Center’s oral history work has found Yiddish speakers in places people don’t typically associate with the language, including towns across the South and among Jewish farmers in New Jersey.

“It’s unexpected only because our perception of Yiddish became, in some ways, so narrow, but reality is more complicated and this narrow image obscures the breadth of Jewish life in America,” Bronson said.

Back in Texas, Katz is excited about the future possibility for Yiddish in the state, in the form of thousands of letters that remain untranslated and the old Texas Yiddish newspapers sitting on microfilm at university libraries.

“There are stories still waiting to be read,” he said, building on the state’s rich history.

Jewish immigrants spoke mame-loshen in homes and synagogues in Galveston, Dallas and San Antonio. They published newspapers in it, built community institutions around it and gathered to hear visiting writers and Jewish leaders speak the language.

In 1921, the Russian-born Yiddish literary critic Shmuel Niger traveled to Dallas and delivered a lecture in Yiddish to hundreds of people. A few years earlier, David Grün — better known as David Ben-Gurion, the future first prime minister of Israel — visited San Antonio, Texas twice where he addressed a packed room in Yiddish. He was meeting members of the Texas Labor Zionist chapter of Poale Zion (the Socialist Zionist movement), advocating for a sovereign Jewish state and raising money for Jewish immigrants to settle in Eretz Yisroel (The Land of Israel),

A lesser known historic Jewish community, deep in the “Bible Belt”, Waco, Texas had its first Jewish immigrants arrive in the mid-19th century. The first wave was Sepahardic, the second — Ashenazi. They built an Orthodox synagogue and later established an active chapter of the Jewish Workmen’s Circle, holding meetings in Yiddish.

A century after Ben-Gurion addressed Texan Jews in Yiddish, the language is still moving through the state — and far beyond it— not simply as a relic, but as a phenomenon people can continue to discover.

 

The post In the Southwest, public libraries are becoming Yiddish hubs appeared first on The Forward.

A quarter of college students who view Israel favorably also believe its government is committing genocide.

That’s according to a Brandeis study published earlier this month, which surveyed nearly 4,000 students across 303 colleges in fall 2025 about their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and concluded views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are more nuanced than often portrayed.

So how do students reconcile those views?

Researchers can’t say for sure, but one possibility is that students are distinguishing between supporting Israel’s existence and the actions of its current government.

The fact that many of the same students who say Israel is committing genocide also affirm its right to exist is not a contradiction, according to the Nexus Project, a watchdog group that works to combat antisemitism and protect open debate. In an Instagram post referring to the Brandeis study, the group lauded the nuance of the report.

“Collapsing both views into a single all-encompassing camp of ‘anti-Israel sentiment’ erases the gray area where most students actually live,” the post said.

Another explanation, the study says, is that the “genocide” label has less to do with actual views on Israel than political affiliation. Respondents who identified as liberal were much more likely to agree that Israel was committing genocide than those who identified as moderate or conservative. In fact, political ideology was a better predictor of whether someone said Israel was committing genocide than their stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, the study found.

Overall, condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza is the more popular position on campus. Close to three-quarters of all students agreed with the statement that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.

Students may also have different interpretations of the term “genocide,” said Graham Wright, first author on the study and an associate research scientist at Brandeis.

“It’s possible that some of them think, ‘I do generally support the Israeli government, but I don’t like some of the things they’re doing,’” Wright said. “The word genocide is just a stand-in for, ‘I don’t think they’re doing a good thing.’”

The very word genocide has also been a subject of debate.

Some Jewish groups, such as the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, have argued genocide is an accurate term to describe what they see as the deliberate destruction of Palestinian society.

Meanwhile, many pro-Israel advocates loathe the word genocide, legally defined as the intentional destruction of any national, racial, ethnic, or religious group, to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza following Oct. 7, 2023. They argue that Israel is seeking the destruction of Hamas, a terror group that states its intent to destroy the Jewish state.

Here are two other key takeaways from the study.

1. Most students differentiate between governments and their citizens — but not all

The study divided students into four groups based on their stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The largest group, 49% of students, supported civilians on both sides of the conflict.

Those students viewed both the Israeli and Palestinian people positively, while they expressed disdain toward the Israeli government, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

“This suggests that most people are able to make that distinction and have fairly nuanced views about a lot of these conflicts,” Wright said.

The vast majority of students, 85% of those surveyed, had unfavorable views of the Israeli government. But those views did not always extend to hostility toward the Israeli people. Students were split about half and half between favorable and unfavorable views of Israeli citizens.

Out of the 20% of  students who held strong anti-Israel views — meaning they were likely to view both the Israeli government and its people unfavorably — half also viewed Hamas favorably.

“Certainly, I think that’s concerning,” Wright said. “You have a relatively small number of students who have very extreme views on Jews in Israel, and that seems to be contributing to a lot of the hostility that Jewish students are experiencing.”

Those students may make headlines, Wright said, but most undergraduates aren’t thinking about Israel day-to-day. In fact, 56% of surveyed students said they had low knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the topic was of low to moderate personal importance to them.

2. Jewish students have diverse views on the conflict, but they were also more likely to view Israel favorably than their non-Jewish peers

The survey included responses from 743 Jewish students. About 29% of those respondents viewed Israel favorably, the largest share of any ethno-religious identity surveyed.

That higher support for Israel among Jewish students held across political divides. Both politically liberal and politically conservative Jews were less likely to hold anti-Israel views than their non-Jewish peers, the study found.

The largest proportion of Jewish students, 56%, were “civilian sympathizers” — the group that views both Israeli and Palestinian civilians favorably while disliking both governments.

A minority of Jewish students, 9%, held unfavorable views of both the Israeli government and its people and favorable views of Palestinians.

Overall, the results show subtleties in how college students view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the media rarely captures, Wright said. “You only detect the nuance if you ask about it specifically.”

The post These college students have favorable views of Israel. They also think it’s committing genocide. appeared first on The Forward.