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Panettone, the Christmas cake, is having a moment — and a Jewish chef has carved off a big slice
(JTA) – Panettone, the fluffy, fruit-speckled archetypal Christmas cake, is this holiday season’s “it” dessert — and the creator of perhaps the most coveted version in the United States is an Israeli-American Jew.
The New York Times this week credited baker Roy Shvartzapel with spearheading “the American panettone revolution” through his business From Roy.
Shvartzapel has dedicated the bulk of his career to the airy Italian cakes, training under Iginio Massari, the undisputed master baker in Italy, and obsessing over each ingredient and step in the 40-hour production cycle. After a flurry of coverage in his company’s early days in 2016, and especially since being endorsed by Oprah Winfrey in 2018, Shvartzapel’s business has grown dramatically. Last year, he said he expected to sell nearly 300,000, at $75 a piece, both in stores and via mail order. This year, the price is $85, and preorders sold out by — without, Shvartzapel said on a podcast last year, any spending on marketing.
While Shvartzapel’s goal of turning panettone into a year-round treat means he has several non-traditional flavors in his repertoire, From Roy only offers a few at a time — and the company plans to keep it that way.
“There’s lots of pastry items that I love that I will never be making for my business,” Shvartzapel said on the podcast, with the chef Chris Cosentino. “I’m a big believer that less is more, generally speaking, in most things.”
Shvartzapel declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this month, explaining through a publicist that he was too busy before Christmas to speak. But in public comments and social media posts made before this year’s panettone “gold rush,” as the New York Times put it, he has offered details about the intersection of his Jewish identity and his Christmas baking.
From Roy’s cherry, white chocolate and pistachio panettone with almond glaze and pearl sugar as seen in the company’s California kitchen, Oct. 20, 2016. (Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Born in Karmiel, Israel, where a statue modeled on his mother holding him as an infant stands in a park, Shvartzapel was raised in Houston and now lives in California’s Bay Area with his children and Israeli-born wife, who also helped launch From Roy. A devoted athlete as a teenager, he played collegiate basketball and spent time on Karmiel’s Maccabi team but realized he would never make the NBA.
“Like every good Jewish boy,” Shvartzapel told David Chang, the Momofuku chef, on a 2019 podcast interview, he considered becoming a lawyer before realizing that cooking played to his passions and strengths.
After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 2004, Shvartzapel began looking for work in New York City. It was a cookbook by the Jewish baker Dorie Greenspan that indirectly led to his first job: He spotted a lemon tart in a new cafe that looked like one she had photographed by the master French chef Pierre Hermé, then talked his way into a job working there, at Bouley Bakery, under Hermé’s former executive chef. Ultimately, that led to him working in Paris, where he had the panettone that changed his life.
“The texture, the aroma, the chew,” he said in 2018. ”I tasted it and it was like one of those meditative lights-off moments. The crazy love affair began.”
Shvartzapel has spoken extensively about his intense work ethic, his struggles with depression and, of course, what sets his panettone apart from low-cost supermarket varieties. He has said less publicly about himself as a Jew. But last year, on Facebook, he wished his friends a happy Passover with a picture of a cheesy omelet and a side of chopped liver — both prepared with attention to the holiday’s prohibitions on leavened bread (such as panettone) but, together, not a kosher meal.
“Modern jew … I mean, gotta combine the dairy and the meat to make it particularly kosher for Passover,” he wrote, adding laughing emojis.
Although panettone is often mentioned in the same breath as its Jewish enriched-dough cousin, babka, its history is rooted in the Catholic Church. Legend has it that it was created by accident on a 15th-century Christmas Eve, and was served to Catholic students and even the pope by the 1500s, according to records from the time.
Still, it makes sense that America’s most prominent panettone maker is Jewish, according to Debbie Prinz, a food historian and author of the forthcoming book “On The Bread Trail,” which grew out of her exploration of Jewish celebration cakes.
“It’s not surprising that there’s this interchange, especially today, since the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews are even fewer than they used to be,” Prinz said.
But while Shvartzapel’s panettone path may be modern, historic patterns of cultural collision have often cut the other way, sending traditionally Jewish foods onto the Christmas table.
One notable example appears to be lebkuchen, a fruit-studded spice cookie popular in Germany. While the origins of the treat are not clear, one theory is that lebkuchen entered German cuisine through lekach, a honey cake eaten by Italian Jewish traders passing through during the Middle Ages, according to researchers at the Leo Baeck Institute, a German Jewish institution. (German Jews fleeing the Nazis imported contemporary lebkuchen recipes and, in several cases, became successful lebkuchen purveyors in New York.)
Meanwhile, in panettone’s home country of Italy, traditional Christmas menus include a host of dishes that are likely to have originated in Jewish kitchens: pezzetti fritti or mixed fried vegetables; bigoli, or buckwheat noodles, with onion and anchovies; spongata, a cake imported from Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition; and nociata, or nut bars.
Legendary panettone maker Iginio Massari poses in his bakery Pasticceria Veneto in Brescia, Italy, in June 2019. (Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)
Many of those foods were historically Jewish because they made use of ingredients such as eggplant that were considered distasteful by non-Jewish Italians, or of ingredients such as anchovies that Jews used because they were not permitted to access higher-quality fish.
“There are a number of recipes that we call Jewish that came out of the fact that the Italians were really nasty to Jews,” said Benedetta Jasmine Guetta, author of “Cooking all Guidia: A Celebration of the Jewish Food of Italy.”
“Most of the time, actually I’m going to say 100% of the time, people don’t know” that the dishes were originally Jewish, Guetta added. “This is a common problem and the reason why I wrote my book.”
But while Guetta’s focus is on the Jewish foods of Italy, in December, she often turns to that famous domed Christmas cake.
“I have definitely grown up eating a great deal of panettone. My parents checked the ingredients to make sure it didn’t contain pork fat,” she said. “It’s a yummy seasonal treat.”
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The post Panettone, the Christmas cake, is having a moment — and a Jewish chef has carved off a big slice appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Looking for the right Yiddish word? This 1950 reference book finds it for you
As more people explore Yiddish, a thick 1950 book I discovered on a beloved friend’s shelf can help anyone find the exact right word for any situation.
Der Oytser fun der Yidisher Shprakh (The Treasure of the Yiddish language) published by the YIVO Institute in New York and available digitally through the Yiddish Book Center, is a 1,000-page Yiddish thesaurus, modeled on Roget’s Thesaurus of the English Language.
Like Roget’s, a standard source for writers and students of English, Der Oytser is not arranged alphabetically, but according to concepts. If you’re looking for a word related to evil, you look up the concept “evil,” and there you find many words related to it, for example, “untoward, black, sinister, wicked, wrong, vicious, sinful and criminal.”
The book was born of a project by author Nahum Stutchkoff to create a new kind of lexicon for the Yiddish language. He launched the project under the editorial oversight of Max Weinreich, the great Yiddish philologist and then director of YIVO. Yiddish had had many dictionaries over the course of its existence, but never a thesaurus of this kind. The result is a magnificent work of lexicography, 15 years in the making, a storehouse of over 175,000 Yiddish words, phrases, folk sayings, and idioms.
The book is out of print but Yiddish students and enthusiasts can download it from the Yiddish Book Center’s digital library. There’s also a free digitized version of the book printed in the English alphabet for people who don’t read Yiddish. Instead of an index, readers use the search box.
In 1950, a mere five years after the Holocaust, the Oytser was finally published. It included a preface by Weinreich, with the following words:
The very fact that, despite the years of the huge catastrophe that befell our people, a great man with vision has appeared to gather the scattered treasures of our language, can surely serve as a symbol of our unbroken collective will to survive. In Nahum Stutchkoff we see a love of mame-loshn, a keen understanding of both broad concepts and the smallest of details, tireless perseverance and pragmatism in carrying out the designated plan for Der Oytser fun der Yidisher Shprakh.
It is without a doubt, the greatest complete achievement of Yiddish lexicography since Jehoshua Mordechai Lifschitz‘s dictionary, compiled during the last third of the nineteenth century.
For the first time we see the full inventory of the Yiddish language, in accordance with the knowledge that the field of Yiddish research has accumulated under the authority of the YIVO Institute.
Weinreich goes on to speak about the problems of standardizing Yiddish, Yiddish dialectology, the Germanisms, Americanisms, Slavicisms in Yiddish and how Stutchkoff addresses these issues.
In his own introduction, Stutchkoff states he had two purposes in mind: (1) to gather as many Yiddish words, phrases and proverbs as he could, and (2) to provide a helpful tool for the Yiddish speaker and writer.
When you use a dictionary, says Stutchkoff, you have a word in mind and want to find or clarify its meaning. The words in a dictionary, therefore, are arranged alphabetically. His thesaurus, on the other hand, like Roget’s, is for a user who has an idea but can’t recall the right word. It is therefore arranged according to ideas. He created 620 categories, such as onheyb, or beginning (category No. 41); glaykhayt, equality (153), and libe, love (500).
Let’s say you’re looking for a Yiddish word related to thieves. You may know the word ganef, thief, but need a different word. So you turn to the index at the back of the Oytser where there are thousands of words arranged alphabetically and find the word ganef, which has the number 483 next to it That means all the words related to ganef are listed under number 483 of the 620 idea categories. You would then turn to the section for number 483 and find no less than seven pages of terms and expressions related to ganef, including, for example, the word marvikher — a dealer in stolen items, as well as the proverb dos ken nor a ganef (Only a thief would think of that). Those seven pages demonstrate the incredible richness of the Yiddish language.
The Oytser also contains the colorful slang of various occupations and groups such as klezmers, thieves, cobblers, actors, tailors and butchers.
Nahum Stutchkoff wasn’t an academic. He was an actor, a playwright, and a popular radio personality before he became a masterful lexicographer.
Stutchkoff was born in 1893 in a town called Brok in Czarist Poland. When he was 7, his family moved to Warsaw, where he was sent to cheder and yeshiva. At the age of 16, he was drawn to the theatre. He began translating and reworking plays for a Yiddish theatrical company from the standard European repertoire, such as, for example, Moliere’s The Miser. Eventually he became an actor too, touring with the company throughout Poland and Russia.
In 1912 he served a stint in the Czarist army. Upon his release in 1917, he again joined a theatrical troupe, eventually becoming director of the Yiddish State Theatre in Vitebsk. In 1923, he emigrated to the United States.
In New York, where he settled, he performed in various Yiddish theatres and authored plays, musical comedies and operettas for the Yiddish theatre. In 1926, he became secretary of The Yiddish Playwrights League of America.
He then took up a radio career. Every Sunday, starting in 1932, on the Forward radio station WEVD (the call letters are the initials of Eugene Victor Debs, the leader of the American Socialist Party), he performed a children’s radio show called The Uncle Nahum Hour, as well as other radio programs.
In 1931, he turned to lexicography, publishing another creative work: a 330-page Yiddish rhyming dictionary.
Stutchkoff died in 1965, but he left us a great legacy: a wealthy storehouse of the Yiddish language that continues to inform and entertain Yiddish enthusiasts everywhere.
The post Looking for the right Yiddish word? This 1950 reference book finds it for you appeared first on The Forward.
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The harrowing German concept that Donald Trump has not yet managed to achieve
Since the start of his second term, Donald Trump has been following a despot’s playbook. Trump himself has all but acknowledged this, by gleefully sharing with New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for their new book a “historian’s” assessment that Trump has more power than Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao and Hitler.
Never mind that it wasn’t a historian at all who came to this conclusion, but a longtime friend and caddy of golfer Gary Player. The anecdote shows what’s going on in Trump’s head: the fantasies of an 80-year-old would-be despot who’s more fixated on his place in history than on the concerns of even the MAGA faithful.
What Trump has been up to amounts to nothing less than trying to capture and radicalize the American soul — persecuting immigrants of color, gays, lesbians and other minorities; coarsening Americans into Trump’s own brand of vulgarity; lobbing figurative Molotov cocktails at the rule of law; perverting America’s history; and sowing divisions that echo the raw spite that once split North from South. It’s an attempted American variant of what Germans call Gleichschaltung, the Nazis’ 1933 rapid re-engineering of every facet of German life — business, culture, sports, education, and all else — to conform to the doctrines of Adolf Hitler.
With America’s 250th birthday now behind us, it’s worth asking how far Trump has already taken the country down the path of an American Gleichschaltung.
As Hitler was rising to power, Germany was in a perpetual state of political, economic and social upheaval. During the 15 years between Germany’s World War I defeat and Hitler’s rise to power, roughly a dozen serious attempts were made to overthrow the government — from communist revolutions to right-wing putsches. The best known is Hitler’s own failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923.
On the evening of Nov. 8, 1923, Hitler and a contingent of Brown Shirts stormed Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller during a gathering of Bavarian government and community leaders. Climbing onto a chair, Hitler bellowed “The German revolution has begun!” The next day the Nazi leader led 2,000 followers on a march through the city, hoping to incite a nationwide uprising. Bavarian state police were waiting. About a dozen of Hitler’s followers were killed in a fusillade of gunfire. Hitler escaped but was tracked down and arrested. He was given a five-year prison sentence but a Nazi-friendly court granted him parole after only 10 months.
Hitler focused on rebuilding the party. When the Great Depression struck Germany, putting millions out of work, Hitler’s radical and antisemitic pronouncements found resonance among the populace, resulting in increased political power for the Nazi party. As successive coalition governments fell in the face of political and economic turmoil and street violence, the Nazi leader was made chancellor in January 1933 through backroom political dealings.
After fire destroyed the Reichstag on Feb. 27, 1933, there was little stopping the German chancellor on his march to one-man rule. The very next day key civil liberties — including freedom of expression, of the press, and of assembly, as well as protections against house searches and property confiscation — were abruptly suspended by a decree whose title claimed it was “For The Protection of People and State.” Amid mass arrests and terror by Hitler’s Storm Troopers, and with much of the populace already backing the Nazi leader, Gleichschaltung was carried out within two months.
Which brings us to Donald Trump.
The Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol echoes the Beer Hall Putsch in one essential respect: a leader inciting followers to march in an attempted coup d’état.
“After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol,” Trump told the MAGA mob at a rally. “Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” Trump lied; he didn’t accompany them on the march. Back at the White House, he let the violence happen as America watched in horror.
Neither Trump nor Hitler had to stay long in the wilderness. During Hitler’s brief incarceration at Landsberg Prison, Nazi comrades like Rudolf Hess made pilgrimages to visit the boss. For Trump, after retreating to Mar-a-Lago, it became a parade of sycophants — among them the late Lindsey Graham, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene — each making the journey to pay homage.
Trump’s intent to rule like an authoritarian began manifesting itself on the very first day of his return to the White House.
There was the flurry of Executive Orders on inauguration day, signed with Trump’s Sharpie in carefully choreographed photo-ops. It was all spectacle, as Trump basked in the role of a ruler issuing edicts that were intended to recast the land in his image. “Could you imagine Biden doing this,?” Trump boasted while holding up a freshly signed order. The most outrageous edict was Trump’s pardon of about 1,500 Jan. 6 insurrectionists, akin to Third Reich pardons for Nazis who had been convicted of crimes before Hitler ascended to power.
Trump’s unleashing of ICE and other federal agents to terrorize immigrants showed how far he was willing to go — masked agents making arrests at Home Depot parking lots and inside immigration courts, brutally yanking people out of their vehicles, and in Chicago, a raid that included agents rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter and using flashbang grenades, automatic weapons, and breaching tools as they burst into apartments.
Trump insists that he is above the law. His most radical acolyte — Stephen Miller — argued that Trump’s absolutist power extends to relations with other countries, an argument for taking Greenland.
And so here we are, a year-and-a-half after Trump’s second inauguration. The republic is battered, bruised and wobbly, but it still stands. To a significant degree this is because of federal courts that have blocked dozens of Trump’s assaults against democracy — often with excoriating words, like these from U.S. District Judge William Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee: “The President’s palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech.”
Hitler never faced this kind of judicial opposition. And he was never confronted with the magnitude and fearlessness of citizen resistance that has swept across the US — like the Minneapolis protests triggered by the killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
Trump’s approval ratings have plummeted because of his war in Iran and soaring consumer prices, some Republicans are finally daring to resist him, the MAGA movement is fraying, Jeffrey Epstein still dogs him, and a snowballing number of Americans are infuriated over Trump’s abuse of his presidential powers to enrich himself and his family — raking in at least $2.2 billion in 2025.
With the midterm elections four months away, our democracy may be facing greater peril than at any time since the Civil War. Like a mortally wounded beast, Trump may resort to desperate measures for survival. He’s already working to poison the midterms — dismantling federal election oversight, suing states to imply their elections are insecure, and stoking daily mistrust about any contest where Democrats might topple Republicans. Each move lays the groundwork for claiming fraud, contesting results, or deploying more extreme measures under the guise of “protecting” the vote.
We needn’t look too far back in history for despots who chose a scorched-earth exit as they faced the loss of power.
The post The harrowing German concept that Donald Trump has not yet managed to achieve appeared first on The Forward.
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The real reason Clavicular is in Israel
Clavicular is partying in Tel Aviv this week.
If you don’t know who that is, first of all, I’m happy for you. Clavicular is a looksmaxxer, part of an online male subculture that subscribes to the idea that becoming as hot as possible is the main, perhaps the only, meaningful thing to do with one’s life, and the only road to success. To achieve peak hotness — “ascend,” in looksmaxxing lingo — followers of the doctrine engage in such activities as hitting themselves in the face with a hammer to supposedly sharpen their jaw line (“bone-smashing”), or taking steroids and meth to improve their physique.
The last time Clav — as people call him, though his real name is Braden Peters — went viral, it was for getting turned down repeatedly by French women during Paris fashion week. The time before that was for dancing with a bunch of far-right influencers, including noted antisemite Nick Fuentes and manosphere titan Andrew Tate, to Kanye West’s Führer-sampling song “Heil Hitler” and singing along to the offensive lyrics.
Which is why Clavicular’s sudden appearance in Israel was such a surprise — and a controversial one. In one video, the bouncer at a Tel Aviv club kicks him out, saying no one who hates Israel is welcome inside. Several Israeli feminist influencers have also decried his visit, pointing to his bad behavior with women. And, of course, countless users online have accused him of normalizing genocide, including mega-popular streamer Hasan Piker. But others are excited by his presence; a female IDF soldier is also appearing in his videos (she’s now facing disciplinary action for the collab), as is Chabad influencer, Yossi Farro and he’s drawn excited crowds in Tel Aviv.
Farro was perhaps the first Jewish influencer to court Clavicular after the “Heil Hitler” incident; his usual schtick is wrapping tefillin with celebrities. But he made a video last month feeding the looksmaxxer the traditional Ashkenazi Shabbat stew cholent — Clav said it was good — and it went viral in the Jewish world, where people decried the effort at rehabilitation. But the clip also went viral with antisemites: Fuentes said he wanted to hang a mezuzah and get in with Jews, too.
The first announcement that Clavicular was in Tel Aviv also came with a post from Farro, crossposted by several large Jewish social media accounts. In the video, Farro gifts Clav a memento that could not be more of our times: a necklace featuring an OpenAI logo with a Star of David in the middle. Later, he posted a video of a conversation with Clavicular calling the biblical Joseph the first looksmaxxer. It felt surreal.
That’s the whole point. Clavicular is just as obsessive about his fame as he is about his looks. Clicks boost accounts no matter whether they’re from haters or followers; monetized social media pays the same amount for adoring comments as it does for ones calling Clavicular evil and praying to spit on his grave. Engagement is engagement. (Farro, who didn’t reply to a request for comment, seems to be operating by the same philosophy.)
The simple answer as to why he was in Israel was because it would be controversial — which it was — and controversy earns him money and eyes. Clavicular said that he noticed everyone was talking about the nation, but almost no influencers were going. He figured he would go viral if he bucked the trend. It’s not by accident that Clav’s one-time publicist, Mitchell Jackson, specializes in cancelled figures of all political persuasions, including Candace Owens, Caroline Calloway and an OnlyFans model named Adam22. The point is attention, not adulation.
In an interview with The Free Press, Clavicular said he did not see his visit as political; he came to party. And he criticized the idea that a young influencer should have any political take, or that the outlet should even ask about his views. He doesn’t know about anything but looksmaxxing, he wrote in a post, and believes it’s irresponsible for him to talk about anything else. While one could say advising teens to take steroids and meth is also irresponsible, he’s not wrong about his ignorance of geopolitics.
But many Israelis and Jews are happy to have him, despite his “Heil Hitler” singalong. Israel has been short on positive PR, and Clav has called the country beautiful and fun. Never mind that Clavicular is followed by at least as many haters, watching out of Schadenfreude, as he is fans, and hardly brings uncomplicated good vibes to Israel with him. At least someone popular among the youth, who are increasingly critical of Israel, said something good about the nation. Many Israelis seem desperate enough for global goodwill that they’re willing to overlook Clav’s antisemitism. People are even claiming he’s Jewish now. (And maybe he is; he hasn’t confirmed or denied, but he’s certainly never mentioned it before.)
And, of course, Clavicular does have adherents who believe anything he does is cool, that he’s always “mogging” (dominating via his powerful aura, more or less). So even if he proclaims he has no political opinion, everything is politics and his presence serves to cast Israel in a more positive light, even if it’s the nihilistic glow of an amoral influencer who cares about looking good above all else. He may be cringe, but he’s popular. Maybe that’s enough for some, but it highlights how low the bar is for Israel’s public image in this moment.
For Clavicular, though, it’s all a game. He doesn’t care about Israel’s image or the war in Gaza or settlers or Palestinians. His only side is his own, and even then he doesn’t need to be popular; he only needs to be seen. He said he plans to stream in Russia next.
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