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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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Why Venezuela’s Jews are optimistic about their country’s future — even as the government promotes anti-Israel conspiracies
In Venezuela, where the citizenry has largely been supportive of Jews but the government has embraced anti-Zionist rhetoric, the shrinking Jewish community is watching closely as the country enters a period of political uncertainty.
Once a community of 25,000 Jews at its peak in the early 1990s, today there are between 3,000 and 5,000 Jews living in Venezuela. Many emigrated in the early 2000s, fleeing not because of antisemitism, but due to political and economic turmoil, according to Rabbi Pynchas Brener, the former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Caracas, who lives in Miami.
Now, there is hope that the country’s government could move toward democracy — and even the possibility that some of the many Jews who fled the country might return, Brener told the Forward.
Still, it is a cautious optimism, with uncertainty surrounding who will permanently succeed Maduro to lead the government.
‘Zionist in character’
For Venezuelan Jews, that hope may be tempered by recent comments from Venezuela’s acting president Delcy Rodríguez, who described the U.S. military intervention as “without a doubt, Zionist in character” — promoting a conspiracy blaming Israel for Maduro’s capture.
But some Venezuelans say that’s the kind of rhetoric they’ve come to expect from their government.
After being accused of stealing the 2024 presidential election, Maduro blamed “international Zionism” for the protests that erupted in its aftermath. In November, he declared that “the far-right Zionists want to hand this country over to the devils.”
“It’s nothing new,” said Samy Yucutieli, a Venezuelan Jew who immigrated to Israel in 2017 to give his kids a better life. “The Venezuelan government is against the state of Israel. Venezuelans, the common people, are not antisemitic, like you see in other places.”
Before 1999, the Jewish community “was very much respected in Venezuelan society,” according to Dina Siegel Vann, director of the Latino and Latin American Institute of the American Jewish Committee. “You had some really outstanding professionals, intellectuals, etc. And until Chavez came to power, that was the case. There was almost no antisemitism.”
Relations between Israel and Venezuela soured when former President Hugo Chávez took office in 1999, and Venezuela openly aligned itself with Iran and became a ripe environment for Hezbollah-linked financial and logistical networks.
Under Chavez, Jewish institutions were subjected to police raids, including two operations at the Club Hebraica Jewish community center in 2004 and 2007. In 2009, Chávez severed diplomatic ties with Israel over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians during that year’s Gaza war and publicly implored Venezuela’s Jewish community to rebuke Israel for its actions.
Jewish life in Venezuela, however, has persisted — despite roughly 20,000 Jewish Venezuelans leaving the country over the past decade alone.
There are an estimated 16 synagogues in Venezuela, all of which are Orthodox. There are also Jewish schools, community centers, and a Jewish home for seniors, according to Brener.
The community is “very tight knit, very well organized, all sorts of institutions — even though they’re so reduced in numbers,” Brener said.
Venezuela’s Jewish community is also characterized by its strong support for Israel, according to Siegel Vann, who described Latin American Jewry as “mega Zionist.” However, she said, Venezuelan Jews must express their connection to Israel “under the radar.”
For the past 20 years, the regime has used antisemitism strategically, she said, “either when they want to divert attention or to send messages to the United States.” “The Jewish community is always trying to react on a case-by-case basis,” she said. “They understand that any activity or any position that they can take on behalf of Israel can be misconstrued, so they have to be very careful and cautious.”
Optimism is tempered for a community that has borne the brunt of such tactics. “They’re hopeful, but right now, it’s very difficult to dismantle a state that was run a certain way for 25 years,” Brener said. “But for the first time in over two decades, it’s finally in the right direction.”
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BBC draws fire after airing Holocaust cello repair story that does not specially mention Jews
(JTA) — In a Christmas special this year, a BBC One program devoted a quarter of its episode to telling the story of a Jewish child refugee whose cello was damaged while fleeing the Nazis on the Kindertransport.
But while the story itself is steeped in Jewish history, the segment of the program failed to make any mention of Jews, igniting criticism from British Jews who are on high alert for signs of antisemitism from the network.
Now, the BBC has issued a clarification, adding a note to the program description in its iPlayer app explaining that the Kindertransport evacuated Jewish children from Nazi territory.
The production company behind “The Repair Shop,” a popular show where family heirlooms are refurbished, said it believed the historical context of Martin Landau’s cello would be obvious to viewers when Helen Mirren, the famed actress who recently portrayed the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, brought it in during the episode that aired Dec. 26.
“We were honoured to share the history of Martin Landau’s cello and play a small part in telling an important and emotive story with contemporary resonance,” a Ricochet spokesperson said in a statement. “We felt that Martin’s story was told clearly and succinctly, and we believed the fact that he was Jewish was implicit in the story.”
Born in Berlin in 1924, Landau — who later became a prominent theater director — was 14 when he brought his cello with him on board the Kindertransport, a rescue effort that brought nearly 10,000, mostly Jewish, children to safety in Europe during World War II.
But before getting on the train, the neck of Landau’s instrument was “deliberately snapped in two,” according to a description of the episode on the BBC website.
“Despite this blow, Martin guarded the cello carefully for the remainder of his life, eventually gifting it to Denville Hall, a care home for retired members of the entertainment industries, of which both he and Dame Helen are loyal supporters,” the episode’s description continues. “Sadly, the cello has remained silent for over 80 years, and the residents would dearly love to see it restored so that they can hear it played for the first time.”
Thirty-one members of Landau’s family, including his parents, were killed in Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz, according to his obituary in The Times. In London, Landau went on to become a prolific producer of plays and musicals. He died in 2011 at 86.
The Jewish Chronicle was first to report frustration over the show’s lack of explicit mention of Landau’s Jewish identity. It reported that a reference to Jews appeared to be truncated from a sentence by Mirren, who said, “…children were put on the Kindertransport.”
The episode is one of several antisemitism and Israel-related controversies to hit the British public broadcaster in recent months. In October, the BBC was penalized after it failed to identify the narrator of a Gaza documentary as the son of a Hamas government official. Over the summer, it was also criticized for airing a performance by the punk group Bob Vylan that included chants of “Death to the IDF.”
On Saturday, the BBC also reached a settlement with an Israeli family whose home it filmed following the Oct. 7 attacks without consent.
Now, the network has added new language to the “The Repair Shop” episode, too.
“This program is subject to a clarification. The Kindertransport was the organized evacuation of approximately 10,000 children, the majority of whom were Jewish, from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia,” the iPlayer description read. (The initiative was funded largely by Jewish groups, but a small number of the children rescued were Roma, Christian children of Jewish parents or the children of political prisoners.)
During the episode, the repaired instrument was played by the British Jewish cellist Raphael Wallfisch, whose 100-year-old mother Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is the only surviving member of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz.
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At a former driving school, Kehillat Harlem plants roots for Jewish life uptown
(New York Jewish Week) — The “Yes You Can” driving school is no more, but the sign that still hangs over its former storefront in Central Harlem is something of an apt message for the new tenant — a fledgling synagogue that aims to demonstrate the vitality of Jewish life in the neighborhood.
Kehillat Harlem, a non-denominational “shul community,” moved into the Adam Clayton Powell storefront last year after seven years in transit. Since its founding, it has held services in a basement, a local cafe and even outdoors.
Now, Kehillat Harlem is using the space for what its founding rabbi, Kyle Savitch, says is the only option for weekly Shabbat services in the neighborhood, even as a host of new initiatives aim to serve Harlem’s growing Jewish population.
“We’re the only synagogue in Central Harlem that’s meeting every Friday, every Saturday, let alone having meals and everything else, so I definitely think we’re serving a need there,” Savitch said. “For folks who are looking to move or looking to join a new community, sometimes what they want to know is that there is consistency in Jewish life, and so I think we’re able to provide that.”
But Kehillat Harlem isn’t just striving to add a synagogue to the neighborhood. Savitch also aims to leverage the shul into a community hub or even, one day, a restaurant serving Jewish food.
A dress rehearsal came last month on the first night of Hanukkah, when roughly 70 people filled Kehillat Harlem’s storefront space for the shul’s annual Hanukkah speakeasy. To enter the event, which included a jazz band, latkes and kosher tequila from Tekiah Spirits, partygoers used the secret password “Lehadlik ner,” the Hebrew phrase meaning “to light a candle.”
“We’re exploring how our role in the community can expand to infrastructure in terms of kosher food, in terms of space access, in terms of places to gather,” Savitch said.
Kehillat Harlem is hardly the only entity to tackle those questions in Harlem, which once had one of the largest Jewish populations in the world. Once home to roughly 175,000 Jewish residents at its peak in 1917, the neighborhood saw most of them leave as it transformed into a hub of Black culture during the Harlem Renaissance. Some of the neighborhood’s synagogues remain standing, but have been converted into churches.
Over the last 15 years, the neighborhood’s Jewish population has gone from an estimated 2,000 people to 16,000 adults and 8,000 children, according to a 2023 study by the UJA-Federation of New York.
To serve them, a branch of the young professional programming nonprofit Moishe House has opened up, as has a branch of the Upper West Side’s Marlene Meyerson JCC with its own rabbi-in-residence and monthly Shabbat service. Tzibur Harlem, an initiative founded in 2024 by Rabbi Dimitry Ekshtut and Erica Frankel, offers programming including occasional Shabbat services; it recently played a role in getting a Hanukkah menorah added to a local Christmas display.
But when it comes to regular prayer services, the only option until Kehillat Harlem opened was the Old Broadway Synagogue, an Orthodox congregation founded in 1911 that serves families in West Harlem and Morningside Heights.
Many observant Jews in the neighborhood were looking for something different, said Savitch, who was ordained at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a liberal Orthodox seminary, in 2021.
Kehillat Harlem, he said, “came out of the need for a Jewish community in the neighborhood, which was inclusive and welcoming to everyone who walked in the door. Our community is very diverse. There’s folks who are observant, there’s folks who aren’t observant, there’s queer folks, there’s folks in interfaith relationships, and there wasn’t really a place in the neighborhood for all those people to go and feel comfortable.”
Arielle Flax, a 32-year-old Jewish Harlem resident and co-president of Kehillat Harlem, described the shul’s ethos as “socially progressive but halachically traditional,” meaning that she seeks to follow Jewish law.
While Kehillat Harlem has a mechitza, the gender partition that separates men and women in Orthodox synagogues, it also has a third section for genderfluid or nonbinary participants. Unlike at most Orthodox synagogues, where reading from the Torah is restricted to men, people of all genders are invited to read from the Torah.
“We want to be as inclusive as possible, while still keeping that bar for those who do want to fulfill the more stricter obligations for Judaism,” said Flax. “We try to empower people of all genders, all backgrounds, to participate, to feel like they are contributing and involved and not just spectating.”
Before Flax joined Kehillat Harlem in 2017 for its inaugural Shabbat, she had hesitated to move to the neighborhood because of its sparse Jewish infrastructure, but the presence of the fledgling congregation had helped tip her decision.
“I immediately felt like I had a place to go as soon as I moved up to New York, which is great, but before we moved up we were a little concerned,” said Flax.
Since then, Flax said she had seen the neighborhood’s Jewish population grow.
“I think by having Kehillat Harlem and other organizations in the area, I think more Jewish people are kind of coming out and getting involved in Jewish life in Harlem,” she said. “I think that’s a really beautiful thing.”
Laura Lara, a 50-year-old Argentinian native who moved to Rego Park, Queens, in 2022, said that she had struggled to connect to a Jewish community in the city until attending Kehillat Harlem’s Purim party last year.
“Being an emigre from another country and another language, finding the right place was a little bit hard for me at the beginning,” said Lara. “Finally, I found a place, and I went to a celebration of Purim in Harlem, and I found the diversity, everyone has a voice, everyone has a place, and that is what I like.”
After making the “schlep” to services and community events at Kehillat Harlem over the past year, Lara said that she and her husband are considering making the move to Harlem.
“I am also thinking of moving to the area,” said Lara. “I feel like I live in a bubble in my neighborhood, my community and the values and the place is far away from my home.”
In August, Kehillat Harlem marked a milestone — and another journey from Queens to Harlem — by dedicating a Torah that had been rescued during the Holocaust from Germany in 1940 and donated by the former Bayside Jewish Center.
“By bringing this Torah into Kehillat Harlem and returning it to use, we’re literally carrying it into the next generation,” Savitch said at the dedication ceremony. “We’re weaving together its survival through the Holocaust, its history in Queens and its future here in the neighborhood of Harlem, so we’re marking not just the dedication of this Torah, but the renewal of Jewish life in Harlem.”
Savitch said his dream is for Kehillat Harlem to become a one-stop shop for services, classes and communal gatherings and kosher food in Harlem.
Doing so could help hack the high cost of real estate in New York City. In neighborhoods with dense Jewish infrastructure, small synagogues have begun sharing space with Jewish organizations, but that’s not as much of an option in Harlem.
“The dream is really to have a fully multi-purpose space, especially as costs are going up and synagogues are having a hard time paying rent, and restaurants are closing left and right, especially kosher restaurants,” said Savitch.
While other parts of the city boast dozens of Jewish and kosher restaurants, Harlem has fewer options for its Jewish neighbors, including Silvana, a restaurant that serves Israeli cuisine, and Tzion Cafe, a kosher and vegan Ethiopian-Israeli restaurant.
To fill the gap in kosher offerings, Savitch transformed Kehillat Harlem into a makeshift restaurant in 2024 for Passover, and hosted a weekly program called “Shtiebel Sundays” last year where kosher pastries and coffee were for sale.
While Savitch said that Shtiebel Sundays hadn’t garnered revenue for the shul, he said it was “successful as a community-building model.”
“That’s also part of what we’re doing,” he said. “In a community that can’t necessarily yet support a fully functioning kosher cafe, restaurant, whatever it is, we’re providing that as a nonprofit.”
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