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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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Berlin rabbi makes history as first European to head Conservative rabbis’ association
(JTA) — BERLIN — Gesa Shira Ederberg was not yet a rabbi when she was tapped to lead a seder, to teach Hebrew, and to organize an egalitarian minyan in her home city of Berlin. She happened to be in the right places when help was needed, recalls Ederberg, who was pursuing a degree in Jewish studies at the time. She wondered: Could she be doing more?
Three decades later, Ederberg is a veteran rabbi of Berlin’s first official egalitarian congregation on Oranienburger Strasse — and this month she reached a new milestone.
She was installed last week as the international head of the Conservative/Masorti movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, the organization representing more than 1,600 rabbis worldwide. For the first time, the group is being led by a European rabbi.
Her installation marks another milestone as well. “As far as the Rabbinical Assembly is aware — Rabbi Ederberg is the first Jew by choice to serve as president,” said a spokesperson for the organization.
For observers of Jewish life in Germany, the moment carries symbolic weight.
“This is quite an extraordinary deal, actually, because there’s never been a non-American or non-Israeli to head the Rabbinical Assembly,” said Deidre Berger, an American who has lived in Germany for more than 40 years and serves on the boards of both the German and worldwide Masorti organizations.
“It’s also a major step forward in relations between a broader group in the American Jewish community with Germany — with being willing to acknowledge that postwar Jewish life did get relaunched in Germany and is here to stay,” added Berger, the former head of the American Jewish Committee office in Berlin.
Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal, CEO of both the Rabbinical Assembly and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, said Ederberg’s election also reflects the movement’s embrace of Jews by choice.
“Welcoming converts is one of the ways in which our communities are growing and thriving,” he said. “So to have a colleague who made this choice to lead a Jewish life and then to become a rabbi is certainly something to celebrate.”
Ederberg’s installation took place in two parts: last week at Congregation Beth Sholom in Teaneck, New Jersey, followed by a second ceremony on Tuesday in Berlin, where her synagogue received a Rabbinical Assembly Torah mantle that remains with each president during their term.
“I will see it every time we open the ark,” she said. “It will be a reminder of my new responsibilities.”
Born in 1968 in the German city of Tuebingen, Ederberg grew up in a Lutheran family. Her father was in charge of his church’ youth exchanges with Israel, and Israeli teenagers often visited the family home. She traveled to Israel for the first time at age 13, an experience that helped cement what she said was “a deep connection” with the country and its people.
Ederberg later earned a master’s degree in Protestant theology. But her involvement in Jewish-Christian dialogue deepened her interest in Judaism, leading her to pursue Jewish studies in Berlin and eventually convert in 1995 at the Jewish Theological Seminary there.
Her decision grew partly out of her fascination with Jewish texts. “I was loving the texts,” she recalled early in her rabbinic career.
But it was also theological. She had come to believe that “the anti-Jewish tradition was an intrinsic part of Christianity,” she said at the time, and rejected interpretations portraying Judaism as obsolete.
Conversion, she added, was “a long and difficult process. You only get there if you really want it.”
Ederberg was ordained in 2002 at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. Her husband, Nils Ederberg — whom she met when both were Protestant students of Jewish studies — is also a rabbi. Ordained at Berlin’s Abraham Geiger College in 2014, he now serves as a military chaplain in Hamburg. The couple has three children.
After serving her first pulpit in Weiden, Ederberg returned to Berlin in 2007. There she became the first woman to serve as a rabbi in the city since Regina Jonas, a Liberal rabbi ordained in 1935 who was murdered by the Nazis, and only the second woman to hold a synagogue pulpit since the Holocaust.
She has helped build institutions for Germany’s small Masorti movement, founding Berlin’s Masorti elementary school in 2018 and serving as a founding member of Germany’s General Rabbinical Conference for non-Orthodox rabbis. She also served as a rabbinic adviser to the Zacharias Frankel College Conservative seminary at the University of Potsdam.
At the same time, she rose through the leadership ranks of the Rabbinical Assembly, serving in several voluntary roles before being elected vice president two years ago. She was elected president in December, succeeding Rabbi Jay Kornsgold of New Jersey, becoming the third woman to hold the role.
Ederberg’s installation comes at a challenging time for what was once America’s largest Jewish denomination, but has for years faced declining membership. As a centrist movement committed to what has been called “tradition and change,” it sits between a growing Orthodoxy on one side and a liberal Reform movement that has historically been far swifter to innovate.
Her installation also comes as broader changes in attitudes toward Jewish life in Germany have shifted. For decades after World War II, many American Jewish institutions viewed Germany as an unlikely place for Jewish communal revival.
Ederberg’s mentor, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, the former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America who encouraged her to pursue ordination, described her as “both the agent and the symbol of the potential of Conservative Judaism to flourish once again in Germany.”
That revival has taken place alongside a transformation of Germany’s Jewish population. Before World War II, about 500,000 Jews lived in the country. After the Holocaust only a small community remained, but immigration from the former Soviet Union beginning in the late 1990s helped rebuild Jewish life. Today roughly 100,000 Jews belong to congregations in Germany, with a similar number unaffiliated.
There are currently two Masorti congregations in the country: Ederberg’s in Berlin and another in Cologne.
Her congregation meets upstairs in a chapel attached to the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse in former East Berlin. The mid-19th-century building was heavily damaged during World War II; its windows overlook the empty courtyard that once held the synagogue’s Torah ark and pews. Today, congregants gather in restored spaces, including a hall above what once served as the women’s gallery.
While other synagogues now offer egalitarian services, Ederberg’s congregation once served as an incubator, giving many women their first opportunity to read Torah from the bimah.
“On the one hand, it’s an intimate setting in her synagogue,” Blumenthal said. “But also you see the depth of both knowledge and commitment of the folks who are part of her community.”
Ederberg knows that for some people, her German Christian background remains a hurdle. Jewish identity in Germany today often reflects complicated family histories shaped by the upheavals of the 20th century.
Not only are there numerous converts like herself; there also are many Jews with a mother or grandmother who survived the Holocaust and a father or grandfather who served in the Wehrmacht, she noted. The question of Jewish identity in Germany, Ederberg said, “is a broader question about individuals and their family history.”
Her own family history reflects that complexity: Both of her grandfathers served in World War II, one dying at Stalingrad and the other working as a mechanic.
Ultimately, she said, the mentorship she received from three German-born Jewish figures — Schorsch as well as Israeli educators Alice Shalvi and Zeev Falk — proved decisive.
Back when she was an accidental rabbi, called upon to lead seders and services and to teach in a pinch, Ederberg hadn’t made up her mind whether to pursue ordination. She might have chosen to become a diplomat, she says, if it had not been for those three mentors who took her by the hand.
“Their encouragement, their push towards rabbinical school, their push towards, ‘Yes, you should go back to Germany and do what you’re doing,’ was really crucial,” she said.
The post Berlin rabbi makes history as first European to head Conservative rabbis’ association appeared first on The Forward.
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Fox’s Bible story miniseries puts women front and center
Depending on where you start the clock, the founding of the Jewish nation was partially born of an act of extreme cruelty.
When Sarah welcomed Isaac, after decades of trying for a child, she persuaded Abraham to send away her handmaiden Hagar and her son by him, Ishmael. That God provided for the child and his mother in the wilderness, and made a great nation of Ishmael’s descendants, was a worthy consolation. But could Sarah have known this blessing would come to pass?
In the first installments of Fox’s shiny new six-part, Sunday school miniseries, The Faithful: Women of the Bible, debuting March 22, it is Hagar (Natacha Karam) who narrates the story of Sarah. Though their dynamic was complicated — the OG Handmaid’s Tale — Hagar concludes that Sarah was a friend, and through the ages, “came to symbolize motherhood” as the “first of the great matriarchs.”
The mission statement of The Faithful, devised by an interfaith team and written by Star Trek alum René Echevarria and directed by Danny Cannon (CSI, Judge Dredd, Geostorm), is to foreground the stories of women in the biblical narrative. To that end, Sarah —played by Minnie Driver, using her natural British accent, forcing Yank Jeffrey Donovan’s Abraham to match her Received Pronunciation — has more agency than she did in Genesis.
It is Sarah (then still Sarai) who tells the pharaoh that Abraham is her brother and dodges the monarch’s advances with the help of some divine intervention. Leaving the palace, she manages to liberate Hagar, who was enslaved there.
Billed in the first episode title as “The Woman who Bowed to No One,” this Sarah is strong-willed, petitioning the almighty, with screams and some hurled offerings, to open her womb. As in scripture, it is her idea to give Hagar to Abraham to produce an heir. Only in this iteration there’s a quid pro quo: If Hagar gives Abraham a child, Sarah will help her return to her homeland. When the baby comes, Hagar reneges, sparking Sarah’s jealousy and the pretense that Hagar is not Ishmael’s real mother.
When Isaac arrives, heralded by three hooded strangers who stop by Abraham’s tent before firebombing Sodom and Gemorrah, the friction between Ishmael and his younger, legitimate brother is too much for Sarah.
“Cast them both out,” she tells Abraham. “We have to protect Isaac no matter the cost.”
The scene is uncomfortable. The actor playing Ishmael is brown with a different accent than Driver or Donovan. The child actor playing Isaac is blond, and Abraham hoped he’d have his mother’s light eyes.
Josephus and Jewish tradition regard Ishmael as the founder of the Arab nation. In Islam, he, not Isaac, is Abraham’s heir and the son who experienced the would-be sacrifice of the akedah. It will perhaps be difficult for some to watch white actors settle Canaan and exile people of color and not recall the narrative now surrounding Israel, and the meme of just about everything being promised to Jews 3,000 years ago.
But The Faithful is too dull to be truly provocative.
A common refrain has Abraham describing his wish to stand with his bride, “shoulder to shoulder, no matter what.” We see their early courtship beginning when Abraham (then Abram) helps her to disrupt an arranged marriage and gifts her a blue shawl — the fact that they may have been half-siblings is duly glossed over. It’s Tanakh by way of Nicholas Sparks.
Making Hagar a passive protagonist is an interesting twist, but the proceedings are too rooted in the mythic to fully capture the human drama at the story’s core. (Her journey, in which she grabs a rock from her homeland, and decades later places it on Sarah’s grave, dubiously suggests the origins of a familiar Jewish custom.)
The series has reasonable production values — which will go on to track Rebekah, Rachel and Leah — and since it’s based on the most popular book of all time, there’s a built-in audience that could certainly overlook some hackneyed writing and soap opera acting. As far as entertainment of this ilk goes, the show is of the highest caliber, admittedly faint praise.
The tales were meant to be retold, and we see Abraham developing the Jewish oral tradition, speaking of Eden and the Tower of Babel around the campfire. One night he teases the story of Sarah’s cunning escape from Pharaoh’s court.
Sarah laughs, chiding him for presenting the incident “as if it were one of the sagas.”
“Who knows,” Abraham all but winks at the viewer, “it might be one day.”
It is, but not all tellings are created equal.
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Israeli couple killed by Iranian cluster bomb as Israel continues assassinating Iranian officials
(JTA) — A couple in their 70s were killed overnight Tuesday by an Iranian missile, apparently as they tried to reach a bomb shelter, amid an especially intense barrage of missiles aimed at the Tel Aviv area.
Yaron and Ilana Moshe were killed near their home in Ramat Gan, an upscale suburb of Tel Aviv; a walker found near their bodies suggested that they were on their way to shelter but could not move quickly, officials said. Damage from the cluster munitions, which shed smaller bombs as they land, was also reported at other sites including a main train station in Tel Aviv.
The barrage, Iran said, was retaliation for the killing the day before of Ali Larijani, the country’s security minister and a close ally of its assassinated supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Shortly afterwards, Israel announced that it had assassinated another top official, intelligence minister Esmaeil Khatib. The Israeli military said in a statement, “Khatib played a significant role during the recent protests throughout Iran, including the arrest & killing of protestors and led terrorist activities against Israelis & Americans around the world.”
Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, warned that “significant surprises” would be ahead as Israel continued to pummel targets in Iran.
A Wall Street Journal story published Wednesday details how Israel says it is choosing its targets, describing an extensive list of sites and people who are in its crosshairs. Israel knew security officers would gather in sports complexes after their offices were destroyed, then bombed the complexes once they were full, for example, according to the story, which says Iranians say order is beginning to fray on the streets but the regime appears far from falling. Israel said earlier this week that it had three more weeks of targets to work through.
Israel has also stepped up its campaign in and around Beirut, where it is targeting forces affiliated with Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy that operates out of Lebanon and has been bombing Israel since earlier this month.
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