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Mimi Sheraton, pioneering food critic and scholar of the bialy, dies at 97
(JTA) — Growing up in a Jewish home in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, Mimi Sheraton seemed destined for a life in food. Her father, Joseph, sold wholesale fruit and vegetables to vendors in the Lower East Side, and her maternal grandmother, Greta Breit, was a talented cook who made her strictly kosher food from scratch.
Her mother Beatrice, meanwhile, had a “certain low-key snobbish pride about her Austrian style of cooking” and eschewed Jewish dietary laws in favor of culinary exploration. “My mother supplemented her Eastern European Jewish dishes with a wide repertory of American recipes from newspaper clippings: lobster Newburg, shrimp creole, her take on on subgum chow mein, creamed chicken a la king in puff pastry,” Sheraton wrote in her 2004 memoir “Eating My Words.”
Sheraton, born Miriam Schulman, combined all of these influences to become one of the best-known food critics and writers of her generation. During a six-decade career, she served as a contributing editor and critic for New York magazine and, from 1976 to 1983, as the food and restaurant critic for The New York Times. She was a frequent contributor to other magazines, and the author of some 16 books, including a classic history of an iconic Jewish food, “The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World.”
Sheraton died on Thursday in Manhattan. She was 97.
Sheraton, the first woman to serve as the Times’ chief restaurant critic, was widely praised for the research and sense of history she brought to her role as a critic and a journalist. “The most prominent characteristic of her reviews was the vast amount of knowledge she brought to the job and the enlivened, precise language she used to convey that information,” wrote Charlotte Druckman, in her 2019 book “Women On Food.” “It was service journalism with expertise and voice.”
Sheraton brought that expertise to the bialy, the sometimes overlooked cousin of the bagel. “‘The Bialy Eaters’ is essential reading for anyone who cares about Jewish and New York food culture, a book about the sadness and horror baked into a food she loves,” Chris Crowley, a writer for Grub Street, wrote Friday. “Published in 2000, it follows Sheraton’s search for bialys first in Bialystock, from which it had disappeared because of the Holocaust, and then throughout the Jewish diaspora.”
Sheraton also explored her Jewish background and influences in her 1985 memoir, “From My Mother’s Kitchen: Recipes and Reminiscences.”
“We were cultural Jews for sure,” Sheraton told Hadassah magazine in 2015; she was known for hosting an elaborate Passover seder “filled with food but absent the Haggada,” the Jewish text for the Passover meal. In other essays, she described the lavish preparations made for the seders of her childhood, which were presided over by her rabbi grandfather and featured gefilte fish prepared from carp that had been swimming in a bathtub until hours before the meal.
Sheraton was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 10, 1926. She graduated from Midwood High School and from New York University. Her marriage to William Schlifman ended in divorce in 1954, although she kept that new surname that he used, Sheraton. In 1955 she married Richard Falcone, who died in 2014; she is survived by their son, Marc, and a granddaughter.
Before landing a reporting job at The New York Times, Sheraton wrote for an ad agency and Good Housekeeping, worked as food editor for Seventeen magazine, and served as a restaurant critic for Cue magazine, The Village Voice and other publications.
Her books include “Is Salami and Eggs Better Than Sex?” (1985, written with the comedian Alan King), “The Whole World Loves Chicken Soup: Recipes and Lore to Comfort Body and Soul” (1995) and “The New York Times Jewish Cookbook” (2002, with Linda Amster).
In April 2016, the Culinary Institute of America honored her as a Legend of New York Dining.
In a 2009 essay in Tablet magazine, Sheraton made note of an increasingly creative Jewish cuisine and how Jewish cooks often absorbed the flavors and techniques of whatever culture they found themselves part of.
“In a way, Jews might well have been the unwitting pioneers in what is currently celebrated as fusion cooking,” she wrote. “Now, perhaps, a new worldwide Jewish cuisine is being born that, like the old Ashkenazic and Sephardic cookery, borrows from other cultures, fusing to modern tastes while still honoring their beliefs.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
