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These almost-too-cute-to-eat hamantaschen are baked for a good cause
(New York Jewish Week) — Baker Michal Prevor, the founder and owner of Babka Bailout, makes hamantaschen at her Jersey City bakery all year long, not just for Purim. Her inventive fillings of the triangular-shaped cookie include guava jam, dulce de leche and date nut.
Ahead of the festive holiday of Purim this year, which begins on the evening of March 6, Prevor decided to kick the creativity up a notch: She’s gone a bit wild, offering a collection of hamantaschen that are decorated to look like animals.
“When I was a little girl I ate with my eyes,” Prevor, 47, told the New York Jewish Week. “I always wanted to buy anything that looked like a character.”
Inspired by some googly eyes that she had leftover in her kitchen from Halloween, Prevor created the fanciful cookies, which sell for $6 each. Decorated as bunnies, kittens, giraffes and bears, the hamantaschen are almost too cute to eat. But make no mistake: Iced with white chocolate or dark chocolate and filled with a choice of nutella, dulce de leche or cookie butter — fillings she feels kids would like — the cookies are meant to be consumed and enjoyed.
As both her animal-themed hamantaschen and the unusual name of her bakery business might suggest, Prevor is not one to do the expected: The mom of two founded Babka Bailout in May 2020 at the height of the pandemic — despite the fact that she had never baked a babka before. Rather, her motivation was to help a friend who had fallen on hard times during lockdown and was having trouble feeding her family of five.
The plan, said Prevor, was to make and sell homemade babka and give the proceeds to their friend. Prevor, who lived in Hoboken at the time, went on a local moms’ Facebook group and wrote that she was selling babkas to help her friend. Within five minutes of posting, she sold 40 nutella or cinnamon babka at $14 each.
“The name for the company was my husband’s idea,” said Prevor. “Some people didn’t have the government to bail them out. Lots of people were left behind and not in great situations. The name was a fun spin — the babka would bail my friend out.”
Prevor’s husband, Grant, a home builder who bakes as a hobby, made that first batch of babka, while Prevor watched and learned. Their two daughters, Ariel and Amelie, who were 15 and 12 years old at time, pitched in, too. “Everyone was working,” said Prevor. “All hands on deck. It gave us a schedule, and it made my kids busy at a time when a lot of kids were very depressed.”
From there, Prevor started baking every week. “I was making hundreds of babkas a week from home,” she said. “It was quite an adventure. I had to start very early — the babkas had to rise. The oven could only fit eight babkas at a time, and it took 45 minutes to bake the babkas in the home oven at 350 degrees.”
“My oven door literally fell off from all of the opening and closing,” she added.
Prevnor had never baked babka before she launched Babka Bailout in May 2020. Since then, she’s expanded her menu with inventive creations. (Michelle Gevint)
Two months after Babka Bailout launched, Prevor began experimenting with different babka flavors, like cereal milk and oreos-and-nutella (both suggested by her daughters). In March 2021, she added hamantaschen for Purim. Prevor tested more than 40 different recipes for hamantaschen until she came up with an amalgamation that she felt was best — and decided to keep what she calls her favorite cookie permanently on the menu.
For flavor inspiration, Prevor said she draws upon the diverse populations of New York and Jersey City, in particular, as well as her own multi-cultural background: Prevor spent the first six years of her life on a moshav (an agricultural cooperative) in the Sinai Peninsula where her father, Ofer Rozenfeld, grew melons and flowers.
In 1981, ahead of Israel’s impending withdrawal from from the Sinai, the family moved to Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, where her father continued his farming. Then, a few years later, when Prevor’s older brother turned 18, the family returned to Israel so that he, and the other four children in the family, could eventually serve in the Israel Defense Forces.
Following her service, Prevor moved to New York where she attended New York University and double majored in political science and journalism. A year after graduation, she married Grant, a fellow Spanish-speaking Jew who grew up in Puerto Rico. In 2005, when their first daughter was 10 months old, the family moved to New Jersey.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Prevor sold irrigation equipment designed by her father. She had her last business meeting via Zoom in March 2020 — and two months later, she came face-to-face with her friend’s financial problems and decided to help. “Giving back to the community and tzedakah have always been indoctrinated into my upbringing,” Prevor said. “My parents took care of anybody they came into contact with who needed help. And I think that is part of having a Jewish soul.”
Babka Bailout’s business has continued to grow — in addition to online orders via their web site, Prevor’s products can be found at Butterfield Market, a gourmet grocery store on Madison Avenue and 85th Street.
Last September, Babka Bailout moved to a commercial kitchen in Jersey City, where Prevor and her family now live. She now has a storefront connected to the bakery where passersby stop in to buy treats — many Manhattanites place advance orders and make the short trip over the Hudson themselves, Prevor said.
“We are getting their hamantaschen for Purim this year,” said Joelle Obsatz, owner of Butterfield Market. “They have faces on it. I have never seen anything like it — I think it will be a hit. We will only be selling our house-made hamantaschen and Babka Bailout’s.”
As for Prevor’s previously down-on-her-luck friend, she now assists Prevor in the kitchen. These days, Prevor donates portions of Babka Bailout’s proceeds to numerous organizations, including Welcome Home Jersey City, an organization that supports refugees arriving in the area. “Whenever there is an opportunity to help, I do, either by baking or donating money,” she said. “Whenever an organization asks, my rule of thumb is to help.”
While Prevor may have never intended to become a professional baker, it’s clear she’s established a perfect niche for herself and her community. “In our little shop, people that pick up our baked goods come from all over — the Arab world, the Philippines, Latin America. Once they try them, they are hooked,” she said. “That kind of ties into all my flavors. I love diversity. I love learning from other people and taking flavors from other countries and making everybody feel welcome.”
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‘Text me when you get home’ — on confronting hatred as both a woman and a Jew
There’s a universal language that every young woman I know speaks. It’s an expectation, a pact even, to “text me when you get home.” A baseline understanding that the walk home isn’t always safe for us.
A different dialect of that same universal language exists across our Jewish community. It shows up when my mom texts me to ask, “does your shul have good enough security?” before I walk into Shabbat or high holiday services.
Being a Jewish woman in America means having to constantly do the calculus of how to be safe as a woman and as a Jew. And I know that my experience is not unique. With antisemitism rampant and other forms of hate still deeply embedded in our society, so many people across America with overlapping and intersecting identities — people of color, trans people and others — are also doing this calculus every single day.
The question I keep asking myself is why? Not why we have to do this constant mental exercise, but why it isn’t getting any easier. The FBI reported a decline in hate crimes in 2025, but those numbers don’t tell the whole story. Hate crimes often go unreported, whether because people don’t feel safe reporting to law enforcement or because agencies lack the training, resources and requirements to properly identify and document them. And beyond what gets counted, hateful rhetoric, threats, and violence continue to shape how we move through the world. Hate permeates our daily lives in ways that statistics alone cannot capture.
Turn on the news or scroll through Instagram on any given day and you can see why we don’t feel safer, despite what the data is telling us. You can see that the static noise of hate and violence continues to intrude on every aspect of our lives.
Our lives — across identities and generations — have been marked by hate, by story after story of deadly attacks at synagogues, mosques, churches, schools and supermarkets.
Twelve years ago, a man fueled by his hatred of women killed six and injured 14 people in Isla Vista, California — my hometown. When I think about that time in my life, I don’t think about graduating high school or my senior prom. I think about the flashes of images of my town, of the victims, on the news. And eight years ago today, a gunman took the lives of 11 congregants and wounded six others in an antisemitic attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. It was the day before my 22nd birthday, another moment in my life now marked by grief.
Hate and hate-motivated violence are not new phenomena in our country. But in the last decade, we have seen a normalization of hate that is both new and devastatingly familiar.
We have seen this normalization fester online, where once fringe antisemitic, misogynistic, racist, and anti-immigrant beliefs — like those held by the Isla Vista and Tree of Life attackers — are now part of mainstream conversations. We have seen this normalization take hold in our halls of power, where our president, members of Congress, and leaders around the country not only legitimize but promote hateful rhetoric and conspiracy theories.
And, we have seen this normalization thrive in policy, where hate and violence are being systematized in executive orders and legislation by the same leaders who made it normal. Policy can and should be used as a shield to keep people safe. Instead, it’s being weaponized before our very eyes to foster an environment where hate can thrive.
It’s no wonder we don’t feel safe when our president and many of our lawmakers are using their power to target women, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and so many others. It’s no wonder we question whether our institutions will protect us when the Department of Justice cancels grants supporting victims and programs designed to prevent hate and violence. And it’s no wonder survivors of gender-based and sexual violence feel abandoned when this administration is deliberately refusing to use Title IX to protect them but is instead weakening this law to harm trans people.
For people my age, who grew up with social media and the 24-hour news cycle that brought reports of hate directly into our homes, it can be hard to fathom what to do at this moment. But there are people all around us who not only know what to do, but have done it before.
I spend my days at National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) working to dismantle antisemitism and the hate plaguing all of our communities. I am fortunate to work with and learn from people who have dedicated their lives to building a world where every person can feel safe and thrive. We are fighting every day to ensure that our institutions and our laws protect people from hate, violence, and discrimination. NCJW has been doing this work for over a century, and we know that progress is not inevitable.
The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act, signed into law 17 years ago this week, was the result of nearly 20 years of advocacy — a reminder that disrupting hate and building a safer world requires perseverance. It takes leaders willing to fight against hatred, not embrace it. And, it takes partners, allies, friends, and neighbors to move the work forward together.
That is why we have no choice but to keep showing up, to keep fighting, even when the hate and violence all around us feels like it has taken over our lives. We have to keep working, every day, to build that world we seek, where our rights, our safety, and our dignity are not up for debate.
And hopefully, one day, we will all live in a world where we don’t have to say “text me when you get home.”
The post ‘Text me when you get home’ — on confronting hatred as both a woman and a Jew appeared first on The Forward.
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Seeking funding for a Yiddish project for kids or young people?
די פֿישמאַן-פֿונדאַציע פֿאַר ייִדישער קולטור האָט געמאָלדן אַז זי נעמט שוין אָן סובווענץ-אַפּליקאַציעס אויף נײַע פּראָיעקטן פֿאַרן יאָר 2027. די פּראָיעקטן דאַרפֿן האָבן פֿאַר אַ ציל דאָס שטאַרקן ייִדיש ווי אַ לעבעדיקע שפּראַך, באַזונדערס בײַ קינדער און דער יוגנט.
דער טערמין פֿאַר אַפּליקאַציעס פֿאַרן יאָר 2027 איז דער 7טער נאָוועמבער 2026. די אויסגעטיילטע סובווענצן וועט מען מעלדן אין דעצעמבער.
אַלע אַפּליקאַציעס מוזן זײַן אָנגעשריבן אויף ייִדיש און דאַרפֿן נאָכפֿאָלגן די אַפּליקיר-אָנווײַזונגען וואָס איר קענט געפֿינען דאָ.
אַפּליקאַציעס וועלן ווערן באַטראַכט אויף קאָנקורס-יסודות. מען בעט מען זאָל אַרײַנשיקן אַן אַפּליקאַציע (מיט אַלע נייטיקע בײַלייגונגען) דורך בליצפּאָסט צו:
applications@fishmanfoundation.org
The post Seeking funding for a Yiddish project for kids or young people? appeared first on The Forward.
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Democrats leader Golan approached by man with knife on Israeli election day
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Israel Police arrested a man carrying a large knife after he approached Yair Golan, head of the Democrats party, as Golan was campaigning in Tel Aviv on Election Day.
“Contrary to reports, no stabbing attempt occurred,” the police spokesman said in a statement.
The police said officers at the scene noticed a “suspicious object” protruding from beneath the coat of a man standing nearby. When they stopped him for inspection, they found a knife in his possession.
In a statement, Golan’s party said the man approached Golan “in a threatening manner” and that “when Golan’s security guards blocked him, a large knife slipped from beneath his clothing and fell to the ground.”
Police described the suspect as a Jerusalem resident in his 20s. He was arrested and taken to a local police station for questioning. They said the investigation “is ongoing.”
Following the incident, Golan said “incitement and violence will not deter us.” In a statement to the press he blamed the attack on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s negative campaigning and highlighted the ties between one of his spokespeople and Qatar.
“This is the direct result of the poison machine operated by Netanyahu and his Qatari agents. I call on everyone who cares about security and democracy to go out and vote now, so that we can ensure the country we love so dearly becomes a free and safe place once again,” Golan said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Democrats leader Golan approached by man with knife on Israeli election day appeared first on The Forward.
