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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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I gathered the data on Jewish fiction publishing. The trends are alarming.
(JTA) — In early 2023, I wrote a novel that was Jewish in every possible way. The lovers called each other “ahuvati” and “neshama sheli” — Hebrew for my love and my soul. There were scenes in Tel Aviv, family histories shaped by the Holocaust, a climax involving cancellation by left-wing antisemites, and an overall tone of aching sadness.
I was already a successful nonfiction author with two books that had sold more than 150,000 copies. I had a track record and a substantial online platform, And my new book garnered substantial interest. When I began querying fiction agents in early 2024, I received 20 requests for the full manuscript and four offers of representation in just six weeks.
But there were warning signs. One non-Jewish agent told me that my Jewish social media presence might make the book impossible to sell. “At least your characters aren’t Zionists,” she said. (My characters were obviously Zionists.) A Jewish agent gave me painful but pragmatic advice. She told me that I should probably remove all Jewish content in the book that didn’t directly drive the plot. Most painfully, she suggested that I change the name of a character named Yael. “It’s one of my favorite names,” she said. “But it’s Israeli.”
I signed with an agent who assured me that no such changes were necessary, and the novel went out to publishers.
It did not sell.
There are countless reasons a book may not be published. Taste is subjective. Editors carefully build their lists. Nobody is owed a book deal. And it remains entirely possible that my novel wasn’t as good as the agents thought it was.
But after I shared my experience online, Jewish writers began telling me stories that sounded unnervingly familiar. Authors whose expected book deals vanished. Writers whose agents could “no longer champion” their careers. Books that were bought for six figures before Oct. 7 but barely promoted afterward. Israeli agents with stacks of manuscripts that American publishers would not even consider.
For Jewish authors, perhaps the most visceral gut punch was a viral spreadsheet titled “Is your fav author a zionist???” It was a list of Jewish fiction authors, color-coded by how Zionist they were perceived to be, with a column detailing their purported transgression. The spreadsheet itself was eventually taken down, but the message sent to the industry was clear: If you work with Jewish authors, it will cost you.
Aware that even the staggering evidence I was amassing remained anecdotal, I wanted to find a way to track the impact of what was happening more empirically.
I turned to Publishers Marketplace, the leading industry database where many book deals are announced, and reviewed fiction deals for books by Jewish authors that publicly signaled Jewish or Israeli content. What I found was grim. Between 2023 and 2024, there was a 76% decline in fiction deal announcements to large presses that mentioned Jews, Judaism or Israel. The numbers improved somewhat in 2025, but they did not recover. Compared with 2023, announced sales of Jewish books were still down 47% at large presses.
And the early 2026 numbers are worse: Looking at what has been announced so far this year and annualizing the comparison, fiction deals mentioning Jewish content are down 82% at large presses compared with 2023.
Like all data sets, this one is imperfect. Not every book deal is announced on Publishers Marketplace, and not every announcement mentions Jewish content when a book contains it. It may be that agents and publishers are less willing than they once were to mention Jewish themes in deal announcements, despite the content of the books themselves.
But the data is the best we have for now. And if the problem is that Jewish content is something the industry feels that it needs to obscure when announcing deals, that is also a major problem.
Whatever the explanation, I found that there is no question that publicly announced fiction deals foregrounding Jewish themes dropped sharply after Oct. 7, and the decline appears to be worsening. This should alarm anyone who cares about Jewish literature, but also anyone who cares about the free exchange of ideas.
I am currently working with the Anti-Defamation League as it examines antisemitism in publishing. Part of my efforts have been to understand what’s happening on an individual level, because while data is important, it can only tell us so much.
As someone well connected in the Jewish literary scene, I reached out on social media to ask people across the industry to share their experiences. I expected a handful of messages. Instead, my inbox filled with accounts from published and unpublished authors, agents, editors, Big Five employees, audiobook performers and marketers. People from every part of the industry described specific patterns of exclusion around Jewish writers, Jewish stories and Israel-related material. These trends fit with what PEN America related at length last week in its report on Jewish and Israeli exclusion in publishing — a report that I believe held back from reckoning fairly and honestly with what Jewish authors are facing.
I had begun my investigation wondering whether my own novel simply wasn’t good enough. And the truth is, it may not be. But this isn’t about any one book. What we’re looking at is a broader pattern: Jewish stories have become professionally risky, while Israel-related material has become positively radioactive. Because of that, many institutions within publishing appear to be choosing silence over confrontation.
The stakes here are not simply professional disappointment for Jewish authors, or even the destruction of creative careers. For the Jewish community, the stakes are existential. If Jewish stories are not published, then part of the Jewish record goes missing.
As a people, text has been our portable homeland. We have used words to bind ourselves together, in argument and agreement, across generations. Sentences have tied Am Yisrael to Eretz Yisrael. Modern Zionism was argued into existence through pamphlets and speeches. Law, memory, argument, longing, testimony, jokes, recipes, grief, liturgy: we have always carried ourselves through history in words.
In the rabbinic telling of the Roman siege of Jerusalem, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai’s plea is: “Give me Yavneh and its sages.” He does not ask to save the temple or Jerusalem, but instead to save the Jewish people through the study of Torah. In the face of what could have been our obliteration, he helped usher in the era of Rabbinic Judaism by placing his faith in our texts.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum and his fellow members of Oneg Shabbat secretly documented Jewish life under Nazi occupation. As the death vise of history tightened around them, they preserved Jewish testimony. And in 1949, just months after Israel’s War of Independence, S. Yizhar published “Khirbet Khizeh,” a novel documenting the moral complexity of 1948 in real time. He trusted his readers’ collective empathy and intellect, even while his new state was raw, precarious, traumatized and still fighting to understand herself.
Jews do not wait until history is finished with us. We write while the dust is still in our mouths.
But our stories don’t only serve as testimony to our pain. They are also about sex, food, family, money, mysticism, ambition, marriage, doubt, Israel, diaspora, bad decisions, holy arguments, vulgar jokes, longing, grief, pleasure, and survival. They are the record of people who are still here, still making art, still spinning stories in multiple languages.
It is true that many of our most lasting stories did not need a publishing house at all. But carrying those stories forward has always been collective work. If the institutions entrusted with publishing literature will not carry or promote Jewish stories, then Jews will have to build the institutions that will.
While I still hope to publish my own novel one day, this stopped being about my manuscript a long time ago. What matters now is reenvisioning Jewish publishing as an act of peoplehood — one that we must all roll up our sleeves to make happen.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post I gathered the data on Jewish fiction publishing. The trends are alarming. appeared first on The Forward.
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How a Trump attack on Jon Ossoff could fuel the first Jewish presidency
(JTA) — Jon Ossoff, the Jewish senator from Georgia and the focus of speculation about a 2028 run for the presidency, is prepared to be the target of an address Thursday night by President Donald Trump.
Ossoff told reporters that if Trump, as expected, questions his and Sen. Raphael Warnock’s 2021 election wins, then the president would be “calling Georgia voters illegitimate.”
Trump has repeatedly claimed without basis that his 2020 presidential election defeat in Georgia, and wins by Democrats Ossoff and Warnock in runoffs the following January, were rigged. He has deployed federal law enforcement to Georgia to search for evidence of fraud, even though repeated probes have uncovered nothing.
The speech comes as Ossoff has gained national attention for his repeated attacks on the president in his reelection bid against Trump-endorsed Rep. Mike Collins.
Ossoff’s battle with Trump could fuel buzz for his vying for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.
Ossoff has repeatedly denied interest in running for president this cycle. But Democratic pollster Adam Carlson imagined an excerpt from a “Former President Ossoff’s memoir in 2060.”
“I wasn’t planning on running for president. It was never an ambition of mine,” Carlson wrote on X, following initial reports that Trump’s address could come as soon as Monday. “Then Trump did that super weird address on July 13, 2026 and here we are.”
Ossoff, 39, were he to run and win, would be the first Jewish president of the United States, and his Jewish identity has crept into discussions about his potential candidacy.
He has drawn comparisons to Barack Obama, who said in 2006 that he “will not” run for president, two years before he did so successfully.
The buzz around Ossoff has largely focused on his sharp criticism of Trump, attracting some prominent left-wing figures. Progressives such as Gen Z commentator Jack Cocchiarella and Zohran Mamdani adviser Morris Katz have lauded Ossoff’s messaging.
Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker — a harsh Israel critic who has drawn allegations of antisemitism — said Ossoff “will be my dark horse pick, depending on how he presents himself if he has ambitions for higher office.”
One subject that Ossoff has largely steered clear of during his reelection campaign is Israel, a growing wedge issue among Democrats and a litmus test for democratic socialists like Piker. While multiple possible presidential candidates have sworn off the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, Ossoff has not weighed in on the group.
Ossoff has positioned himself as an Israel supporter who opposes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Just over a month after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, he referred to himself as a “pro-Israel Jewish American” in an address. He said he was praying for the Israeli hostages’ freedom and urges “mercy for the innocent civilians in Gaza.”
He has since voted to block some weapons sales to the country — along with an increasing number of Senate Democrats who have questioned military assistance to Israel as the war has devastated Gaza — while voting to allow the sale of defensive weapons. He wrote in July 2025 that “the United States must continue to support the Israeli people, who face the persistent threat of rocket and missile attack and have been subjected to intense aerial bombardment from Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen.”
Ossoff’s first vote against weapons in November 2024 spurred a critical open letter from several Georgia Jewish organizations including synagogues, Jewish schools, the local Anti-Defamation League chapter and other groups. His vote also drew the attention of AIPAC, which released 30-second ads attacking U.S. senators — including Ossoff — who had voted to block weapons sales.
Radio host Eric Messersmith said last month that, in an effort to win over a party that is divided on Israel, Ossoff “might be the Democrat that can thread the needle because even though he’s Jewish, he’s very critical of the Israeli government, very critical of Benjamin Netanyahu.”
“He has credibility on that issue, so it’s possible that I think he could fill that lane in between the two extremes of the Democratic party,” Messersmith said in a widely circulated conversation on CNN.
CNN’s Elex Michaelson drew criticism online when he added, “As a Jew, some people read a little more Jewish than other people, and Jon Ossoff may not read as Jewish as [Pennsylvania Gov.] Josh Shapiro does, for whatever’s that worth.” Michaelson later apologized.
Ossoff has deep ties to the local Jewish community, and has spoken about the impact of growing up around his uncle who was a Holocaust survivor.
Living among survivors “has a profound impact on how I view the State of Israel, recognizing that the State of Israel was established 75 years ago as Jews rebuilt in the ashes of the Holocaust, and sought to establish a secure homeland for the Jewish people,” Ossoff told the American Jewish Committee in May 2023.
The Georgia Democrat’s team reported that Ossoff raised an $20 million in the year’s second quarter, ending it with $42 million in cash on hand.
Jewish Insider reported that some Jewish Georgians are torn. Collins has faced accusations of antisemitism and having ties to the far right. Collins’ son-in-law is a white nationalist social media influencer who has shared antisemitic material and Nazi imagery, CNN reported on Thursday. Collins has said some of his own statements were misunderstood, and has defended himself by citing his support for Israel.
“Donald Trump’s handpicked candidate Mike Collins is a notorious bigot, antisemite, and extremist,” Ossoff posted on social media last month.
Ahead of Trump’s address, Ossoff said he expects the president “to use whatever he puts out there on Thursday as a pretext” to interfere in the November election, or “to lay the groundwork for challenging the result.”
The post How a Trump attack on Jon Ossoff could fuel the first Jewish presidency appeared first on The Forward.
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In the wake of Graham Platner’s success (and fall), a candidate to replace him changes his mind about ‘genocide’
(JTA) — When Jordan Wood vied last fall for the Democratic nomination for Maine’s U.S. Senate seat, he avoided accusing Israel of genocide, citing a link between rising antisemitism and “the language” that people use.
Graham Platner, who went on to overwhelmingly win the nomination, did not stint on using the term. Platner is out after accusations of sexual assault, and Wood is once again running in the abbreviated primary to replace him. (Platner has denied the accusations.)
And now the former congressional staffer is changing his tune.
“I believe we can’t continue to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” Wood wrote on social media last week. “It’s a moral atrocity. We should be using our taxpayer dollars to fund schools, healthcare, and childcare here at home, not on bombing innocent civilians.”
Last November, Wood said he was concerned the word was so loaded as to be dangerous. He told Democratic commentator Kaivan Shroff that he believed Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, but stopped short of using the term genocide.
“I’ve hesitated on it because I’m also seeing a real rise in antisemitism in the United States,” Wood said then. “My husband is Jewish, and the acts of violence toward Jewish Americans is very much connected to the language that we use.”
It would be “a huge deal for the United States Congress to designate what’s going on in Gaza as a genocide officially,” Wood said
“There could be consequences to that of U.S. citizens that have served in the IDF,” he said. “Do they get prosecuted?”
Wood’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on what prompted him to adopt the term.
The Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to nominate a replacement for Platner, an anti-Israel progressive, in hopes of unseating GOP Sen. Susan Collins.
Wood, along with major candidates Troy Jackson, Nirav Shah and Shenna Bellows have all accused Israel of having committed genocide since launching their campaigns, underscoring the shrinking popularity of Israel among Democratic voters and their representatives in the wake of its war in Gaza – and perhaps noting Platner’s success in making Israel an issue in the race.
In an interview this week with The Advocate, Wood criticized the embattled Platner, while saying that he would “carry on that platform” that had energized Maine voters.
“I separate Graham, the movement, from the person,” Wood said. He pointed to issues like conditioning aid to Israel and rejecting corporate PAC and AIPAC money, as priorities that he shared with Platner.
Wood told Shroff in November that he would not take money from AIPAC, and added that there is a “huge amount of distrust” of the pro-Israel lobbying organization among Democratic voters.
“I believe the only way to truly prove to a voter that you are voting and prioritizing policies in their best interest, and for our country’s best interest, is to remove any perception of corruption or misdealing,” Wood said.
He has also been consistent in saying that he would vote in support of Bernie Sanders’ resolutions to block the sales of certain weapons to Israel, while maintaining that that shouldn’t mean halting the U.S.-Israel relationship altogether.
“The United States should absolutely have a cooperative relationship with Israel, and I want that relationship to work. But a real partnership is not a blank check,” Wood told Jewish Insider last week. “It comes with honesty and accountability. The United States has enormous leverage with the Israeli government, and we’ve been refusing to use it.”
Wood and a number of other candidates will participate in a televised debate on CNN on Thursday night, ahead of the July 27 nominating convention.
The post In the wake of Graham Platner’s success (and fall), a candidate to replace him changes his mind about ‘genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.
