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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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A Democratic upset in Connecticut — but Israel was not a factor
(JTA) — Luke Bronin scored a decisive victory over longtime Rep. John Larson in Connecticut’s Democratic primary Tuesday, marking another defeat for AIPAC which had backed the 14-term congressman.
The pro-Israel lobby group is increasingly viewed as politically toxic in Democratic primaries across the country, with several progressive candidates notching victories after making opposition to the group a centerpiece of their campaigns.
Israel and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, however, were not at the forefront of the contest in Connecticut’s 1st Congressional District, reflecting a more nuanced picture regarding Democratic voters’ shifting sentiments toward Israel.
Bronin and Larson, the race’s two candidates with more traditionally pro-Israel positions, together won nearly 90% of the vote, with Bronin receiving 53% while Larson received 34%. The two progressive candidates in the race, Jillian Gilchrest and Ruth Fortune, who both accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, finished a distant third and fourth.
Bronin, 46, who has Jewish ancestry on his father’s side, is the former mayor of Hartford and also served in the Obama Administration as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes. His campaign largely centered on affordability and emphasizing the need for new leadership in the Democratic party.
“If we are going to fix this mess that we are in, we need to build a Democratic Party that is bringing a whole new energy to this fight,” Bronin told supporters following his victory.
Israel was not entirely absent from the campaign. Larson, who first took office in 1999, split with Bronin during a primary debate last month when Larson defended his recent vote in support of U.S. military aid to Israel.
“Yes, I voted in favor of making sure that Israel, our ally, is going to get the aid from the United States that it needs. But the Palestinians need humanitarian aid, and Donald Trump has got to enforce the law,” Larson said.
Bronin pushed back at Larson, replying, “Trusting Donald Trump to do the right thing is a mind-blowing example of putting hope over all of the evidence in front of us.”
While Larson had long supported Israel during his tenure in Congress, he has been critical of Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza and treatment of Palestinians and vocally opposed the United States’ war in Iran.
Bronin, meanwhile, has said he is against taxpayer money going toward funding offensive military aid to Israel, though he supports “defenses for civilians that protect civilian life against rockets and missiles and drones.”
“I think it’s hugely important that Israel exists as a safe, secure homeland for the Jewish people,” Bronin said when asked about his views on Israel on The Lisa Wexler Show in May. He also spoke out against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, explaining that the premier had “done enormous damage to Israel’s security, Israel’s standing in the world,” adding that “we have an obligation as a country to say what’s happening is not okay.”
Bronin slightly outraised Larson on the campaign trail, receiving roughly $3.1 million largely from individual donations from billionaires and large firms, while Larson received $2.7 million and relied more on donations from PACs, according to the Federal Election Commission.
Larson received roughly $120,000 in AIPAC-linked donations during the campaign cycle, according to the campaign finance database Open Secrets.
Bronin will now face Republican Amy Chai, a physician and mental health advocate, in the general election for the state’s first congressional district. The district, which spans Bristol, Hartford and Torrington, is home to 27,800 Jews, representing 3.9% of the total population, according to the Berman Jewish Data Bank.
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Jack Ukeles, who used data and idealism to shape Jewish communal life, dies at 89
(JTA) — Throughout a storied career of more than five decades that included key roles in teaching courses at elite universities, policy planning for city and state governments and community surveys for Jewish organizations around the world, Jack Ukeles had one consistent goal: to blend research, data and strategic problem-solving with idealism in making the world a better place.
Ukeles, who died July in Jerusalem at the age of 89, was widely and deeply admired as well for his integrity, wisdom and compassion on both a personal and professional level.
He was also one of the most prominent members of a cohort of Jewish social scientists who, from the 1980s through the 2000s, played a central role in setting the agenda for organized Jewish life. Philanthropists and nonprofit leaders sought their data and recommendations on hot-button issues like rising intermarriage, attachment to Israel, population trends and declining engagement with Jewish institutions.
In 1981, Ukeles joined the Jewish non-profit world as senior planning officer of the New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropies (now UJA-Federation of New York). He led the charity’s first scientific study of the New York area’s Jewish population, and major studies on senior services and Jewish poverty.
Five years later, he went out on his own, launching Ukeles Associates, Inc., and for 28 years led consulting projects combining his experience in policy research, planning and management for a range of secular and Jewish non-profits.
Speaking at the funeral in Jerusalem, where Ukeles and his wife, Mierle, lived since making aliyah in 2012, longtime friend and colleague Asher Ostrin predicted that Ukeles’s teaching, in both classrooms and nonprofit board rooms, will have a lasting effect, especially for American Jewry.
“Generations of Jewish communal professionals are his students, and are taught to reflect the method and values he held dear,” said Ostrin, an executive at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Those values were shaped growing up in a religious Zionist home, aware of the trauma his parents endured in Eastern Europe before settling in New York. Ukeles’s mother wanted a first-rate Jewish education for her only son, and after visiting a number of yeshivas, moved the family from The Bronx to Brooklyn so he could attend the Yeshiva of Flatbush, where he thrived academically and as student council president and member of the basketball team.
After seeing a newspaper ad announcing the opening of a university in Israel committed to integrating modern scholarship and traditional Jewish learning, he applied and was accepted in 1955 to Bar-Ilan University’s first class.
“My father was proud to be a member of that first class, and as a student leader there, he wanted to help build the school and be a part of its growth” in synthesizing secular and religious studies, his daughter Raquel Ukeles recalled. “But the administration wasn’t interested.” He was 18 at the time.
After a year in Israel, Ukeles attended a yeshiva and Brooklyn College, where he took courses in community planning, research and data. He received his B.A. in political science in 1959, and an M.A. in city planning two years later at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1962, Ukeles spent a year in New Delhi, India, as a Fulbright Fellow and returned to complete his Ph.D. at Penn in 1971.
During his graduate school years, Ukeles turned a summer job in the New York City planning department into a three-year position. He helped produce the first data-driven analysis of New York City’s housing needs, and was part of a team that reshaped the city’s approach to urban renewal.
He then turned to academia, starting a long-term pattern of moving back and forth between university posts — including the New School, where he later became chairman of the first urban policy graduate program in the U.S. — and designing and leading civil service and financial reforms in New York through the mayor’s office under Abe Beame and Ed Koch.
On behalf of Jewish organizations, he conducted a 2006 survey of Atlanta’s Jewish population that confirmed the explosive growth of Jewish communities in the Sun Belt, and co-authored a 2002 community study showing how Russian immigrants and Orthodox Jews were changing the face of New York City Jewry.
Ukeles was he co-authopr of a 2012 study showing that New York City area’s Jewish population was on the rise again, thanks largely to the growth of Orthodox households.(Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
In 2009, he wrote a report on how nonprofits can turn the severe economic downturn into opportunity. Drawing on his experience in city management, he advised nonprofits neither to panic nor deny the reality of squeezed budgets.
“You can forget about strategy if you do not have courage, if you do not have big ideas, or if you do not have vision, and most importantly, if you do not have compassion,” he said in a lecture that year drawing on the report. “In fact, without the ‘right stuff,’ you are in the wrong line of work.”
Family members noted that the common thread in Ukeles’s career in academia, city government and non-profits was to deal with difficult problems by making decisions based on real data, not theoretical ideas, and to bring the stakeholders around the table to make the best — or sometimes least worst — decisions based on need and priority.
Elie Kaunfer, CEO and president of the Hadar Institute, a center of Jewish life and learning, said that when Ukeles conducted the first formal evaluation of the organization in 2011, “he taught me so much about what kind of questions to ask — not just about experience of the program but ultimate impact on people’s lives.”
John Ruskay, former CEO of UJA-Federation, described him as “a loyal friend and dear colleague who I and so many others turned to repeatedly for counsel, for wisdom, for ‘chizuk’” (inner strength).
Sometimes his counsel came with critique. Steve Bayme, a former American Jewish Committee executive and longtime Ukeles friend, noted: “Jack knew how to offer constructive criticism and even occasional rebuke in ways that colleagues, including those in senior communal positions, could hear and absorb.”
Alan Gill, who served as CEO of the JDC, praised Ukeles for “his expertise in challenging and guiding us.” He said Ukeles “yelled at us” once, which was unheard of from consultants who tended to be dispassionate and analytical, he noted. But the outburst had “a positive effect,” Gill added, reminding JDC staff how much “the mission and work mattered” to Ukeles.
That sense of heartfelt criticism also applied to Ukeles’s devotion to, and frustration with, the state of Israel in recent years. He agonized over the growth of extremism in the haredi Orthodox community and Jewish settler violence, and he spoke out in pieces he published in The Times of Israel.
“Jack loved the Jewish people,” said Sally Gottesman, who was hired by Ukeles as a young consultant in 1997. Now an activist-philanthropist focused on gender and justice in the Jewish community, Gottesman said Ukeles was “a mentor and master teacher” and praised his efforts to promote equality for women.
A prime example was his support for and great pride in the accomplishments of his wife, Mierle, who in seeking to blend art with waste management became the official artist-in-residence of the NYC Department of Sanitation, a volunteer position she has held since 1977. Her unique career was the focus of an award-winning 2025 documentary, “Maintenance Artist.”
“Jack was my heart and soul,” she said. “His support, championing my being a free artist and a full person, all through the years, extending as well to his supporting the work of many other women artists of our time, was without a peer, without an end.”
In addition to his wife, Ukuleles is survived by his daughters, Raquel, who is head of collections at the National Library of Israel, and Yael, a product market manager and founder of two non-profit Israeli environmental education programs, and a son, Meir, who works with an Israel-based VC fund investing in startups.
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A pair of Jewish businessmen gave the Lakers their name. Now another Jewish duo is buying the team.
Back when the National Basketball Association was little more than a startup, two Jewish businessmen named Benjamin Berger and Morris Chalfen bought the worst team in the sport, the Detroit Gems, for $15,000. They relocated the franchise to Minneapolis and gave it a name that nodded to state geography.
Eighty years later, the Lakers are a global brand, have won 17 championships and play in Los Angeles — and for the first time since Berger and Chalfen sold, a Jewish duo will take the reins. Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger are buying a majority stake in the team, ESPN reported Wednesday. They’ll be paying a tad more than Berger did in the 1940s —the Lakers were valued at $12.5 billion in the sale.
It’s been a busy summer for Kushner, a real estate scion married to supermodel Karlie Kloss; his brother Jared is a former Trump administration fixture. A company backed by his VC firm, Thrive Capital, tried to buy a stake in the World Cup last month, causing an international backlash that may yet lead to the resignation of FIFA president Gianni Infantino. (That subsidiary, Thrive Eternal, also owns a stake in the San Francisco Giants.)
Kushner and Iger were reportedly angling to buy an expansion NBA franchise in Las Vegas before pivoting to the Lakers.
“As lifelong NBA fans, we are deeply honored for the opportunity to become stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the most iconic sports franchises in the world,” Kushner and Iger said in a statement to ESPN.
Kushner is now tasked with restoring the Lakers to “Showtime” glory — perhaps with Kloss courtside in the seat once held by an earlier model-turned-owner, Jeanie Buss.
He comes from a family well-acquainted with the tabloids. His brother, Jared, is married to Ivanka Trump and serves as a White House advisor. Their father, Charles Kushner, made billions in real estate development before he was sent to prison for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering. (Trump later pardoned him, and today Kushner serves as the U.S. ambassador to France.)
The sale comes 14 months after Buss sold the Lakers to Mark Walter, the head of a private equity firm and a co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Walter, who bought the team at a $10 billion valuation, is currently facing federal and SEC investigations into insurance companies tied to his broader business operations.
It was not publicly known that the Lakers were for sale, and ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne reported Wednesday that Kushner and Iger — who had previously been bidding for an expansion NBA team in Las Vegas — approached Walter with an offer he couldn’t refuse.
The sale would make the Lakers the 14th NBA team out of 30 with Jewish principal owners. The league was founded by Jewish businessmen in the 1940s.
The newcomers will inherit a roster in transition following the departure of LeBron James, who at 41 is a few months older than Kushner, the youngest majority owner in the NBA.
Behind James and Luka Dončić, the Lakers finished with the fourth-best record in the Western Conference last season and were eliminated in the second round of the playoffs. James signed with the Philadelphia 76ers this offseason in free agency.
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