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When it comes to a classic Jewish cookie, New York bakeries go beyond black and white
(New York Jewish Week) – As far as New York Jewish desserts go, perhaps the most ubiquitous is the black and white cookie, that soft, sweet, frosted treat found at bakeries and bagel stores throughout the city.
Black and white cookies, sometimes called half-moon cookies, are understood by most to be a Jewish dessert. “Seinfeld” once dedicated an episode to singing their praises. “You see, Elaine, the key to eating a black and white cookie is that you wanna get some black and some white in each bite,” Jerry says. “Nothing mixes better than vanilla and chocolate. And yet still somehow racial harmony eludes us. If people would only look to the cookie, all our problems would be solved.”
But now, in a testament to New Yorkers’ innovation — or possibly the old adage, “everything old is new again” — bakeries across the city are riffing upon this tried-and-true classic. These days, black and white cookies are available in a myriad of colors and flavors: yellow and blue to support Ukraine, red to celebrate Valentine’s Day, brown and yellow to mark the merger of banana, chocolate and hazelnut.
The banana walnut flavored black and white cookie. (Zaro’s Family Bakery)
The latter is one of six new flavor combinations at Zaro’s Family Bakery, where brothers and fourth-generation owners Brian, Michael and Scott Zaro have wholeheartedly embraced new versions of the two-tone classic. Earlier this month, the bakery unveiled its new black and white cookie color and flavor combinations, which include orange and white (cream cheese frosted carrot cake), green and black (mint chip), as well as an M&M-topped cookie, a sprinkle-filled birthday cake flavor and a cookies and cream flavor.
“We’ve been making the black and white cookie for 95 years,” Brian Zaro, who has been working full time for his family’s business since 2006, told the New York Jewish Week. “My brother, Scott, had a vision to make an iconic item that meets innovation.”
A carrot cake flavored cookie is topped with orange and white cream cheese frosting. (Zaro’s Family Bakery)
The black and white is one of the signature offerings at Zaro’s, which is known for setting up shop in New York’s biggest transit hubs, including Grand Central Terminal, Penn Station and LaGuardia airport. The bakery’s website boasts that it sells over 90,000 black and white cookies annually, and this season’s new flavors join Zaro’s chocolate chip black and whites, which they have been offering for several years, Brian said. (Black and white on the outside, with chocolate chips baked into the dough.)
Of course, these creative interpretations prompt an obvious question: How far can a bakery stray from chocolate and vanilla before a black and white is no longer a black and white?
“It’s a valid point,” Brian Zaro admits. “But right now, yes, it’s a black and white. That could change; we always try to be as open-minded as possible.”
Shannon Sarna, author of “Modern Jewish Baker” and editor at our partner site The Nosher, agrees. “I’m not a purist,” she said. “I don’t think they have to be black and white to be a real black and white cookie.”
For Sarna, what are most important to the integrity of a black and white are the flavors and technique. “A good black and white cookie is going to have a little taste of vanilla or orange or lemon zest that might be in the dough,” she said. “It’s got to have a good quality icing. It’s not going to just taste like sugar. It’s going to have a little chocolate flavor and it’s going to have a little bit of the white, more vanilla-y taste.”
For some, the doughy cookie with its signature bi-color frosting is only as good as the sense of nostalgia it offers. As the New York Times wrote back in 1998, “Today’s black-and-whites cannot compare with the black-and-whites of yesteryear, of course, just as no mayor will ever be as good at LaGuardia and no team as beloved as the Dodgers.” Sarna, who grew up in New York, calls black and whites “the cookies of my childhood.”
The black and whites as we know them were said to have been popularized by the Upper East Side’s Glaser’s Bake Shop, which was founded in 1902 by John Herbert Glaser. Glaser reportedly brought the black and white recipe with him when he immigrated to the United States from Bavaria.
Third-generation owner Herb Glaser, who ran the bakery with his brother until it closed for good in 2018, is not able to confirm this — but, at 70, he says that they were a feature of the bakery since he was a young boy.
Though he now lives “in the country,” Glaser is well aware of the new black and white trends. “Some of the businesses are making them a little too outrageous,” he said. “They’re not really black and whites anymore.”
Still, Glaser said that his bakery did occasionally make the cookies in different colors — for graduation parties, schools and, most notably, in orange and blue when the Mets were in the World Series in 1986. “I’m a traditionalist but I understand,” Glaser added. “It’s a marketing thing and that’s fine. It’s a way to stay in business.”
“I think there’s a sort of New York pride associated with it as ‘the New York cookie,’ and it just so happens to be a really good cookie,” said Noah Aris, the baker and proprietor of The Cardamom Man, which sells its baked goods online and at street markets. Aris bakes black and whites with blue and gold frosting as a fundraiser for humanitarian relief in Ukraine. In addition to lemon zest in the dough, Aris has added lavender, leaving the dough flecked with dots of purple.
The different colors “help start a conversation for me to talk about what I’m about as a bakery and raising money for Ukraine,” he said. “Then you hear [the customers’] story about their experiences with black and whites. It’s fun.”
Breads Bakery started baking black and whites with their signature laminated dough when they opened their Upper East Side location last year. “I operate under the simple thesis that when you give people something great they’ll appreciate it regardless of what their expectation may have been.” Peleg said. (Ashley Solter)
At some bakeries, innovation starts in the dough. Last holiday season, Breads Bakery rolled out black and whites made with a laminated, croissant-like base instead of the classic doughy, cakey consistency .
“The first time I took a bite of it, it became very clear to me that we’ve elevated this cookie to a new level and given it the treatment that it deserves,” Breads owner Gadi Peleg said. “I think we have done enough to wink at the nostalgic nature of the cookie — there’s enough there to sort of connect you to the memories that you may have associated with a black and white cookie. But it’s just different enough to bring it into a more modern New York, the New York of today.”
At Kossar’s Bagels & Bialys — which now has three locations across the city and one more on the way — customers will find traditional black and whites sitting alongside all-chocolate or all-vanilla frosted versions, as well as multi-color and M&M-topped versions.
“Some people like only the chocolate, some people like only the vanilla. So we use that as our inspiration to move forward,” said general manager Sharon Bain. “People do love the fact that we’re doing something with the black and white. We’re catering to everyone.”
Kossar’s will frost the cookies with green for St. Patrick’s Day or red for Valentine’s Day, but the reboot is only skin deep. According to Bain, the “black and white refers to the chocolate and vanilla flavors of the frosting, and not the color.”
For Brian Zaro, too, the flavor and color innovations are all about customer satisfaction, and this year the new black and white varieties are also available at the Zaro’s outpost at the Bryant Park Winter Village. “It’s new for us,” Zaro said. “But so far so good.”
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The post When it comes to a classic Jewish cookie, New York bakeries go beyond black and white appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Sarah Hurwitz, former Obama speechwriter, creates firestorm with remarks about Holocaust education
(JTA) — In the safe confines of a gathering of Jewish fundraising and communal professionals, Sarah Hurwitz’s remarks about antisemitism and Holocaust education earned polite applause. By the time they made it to social media, they’d become kindling in a rhetorical firestorm over the Gaza war — and the uses and abuses of Jewish memory.
Hurwitz — a former speechwriter for both Barack and Michelle Obama who has written two books about her embrace of her Jewish identity as an adult — was one of three panelists Nov. 16 at the opening plenary of the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America in Washington. They were asked to address antisemitism and Jewish identity at a “crossroads.”
Speaking from notes, she began her remarks with the fairly uncontroversial observation that “young people” are exposed to a media diet that amplifies the fringe, including antisemitic influencers like Nick Fuentes. She also made the somewhat more contentious point that images of “carnage” in Gaza are making it hard for defenders of Israel like her to debate “facts and arguments” with younger Jews.
But then she veered into talking about Holocaust education, suggesting that the Jewish “bet” on promoting Holocaust education had backfired, at least as a vaccine against antisemitism.
“Holocaust education is absolutely essential,” she said. “But I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism, because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think, ‘Oh, antisemitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people.’ So when on Tiktok, all day long, they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, ‘Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big, powerful people hurting the weak people.’”
Hurwitz’s framing could be seen as descriptive, explaining how the emotional structure of Holocaust education — emphasizing victimhood, power imbalance and trauma — leads some students to align emotionally with Palestinians rather than with Jews. She went on to suggest that moral lessons from the Shoah are often taught in a way that’s too binary — oppressed vs. oppressor, powerless vs. powerful — without helping students understand how antisemitism functions in complex ways, even when Jews have sovereignty and power.
But beyond the GA audience, the backlash was fast and fierce. Instagram and Reddit filled up with posts accusing her of saying, as one post put it, “that it was a mistake to teach Americans that genocide is bad.”
Jenin Younes, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, accused Hurwitz of using Holocaust trauma to silence criticism of Israel’s military operations.
“Holocaust education is not failing,” she said. “It’s succeeding — because it is teaching young people to recognize oppression and call it out, even when it doesn’t serve political agendas.”
Progressive Jews also objected. “She’s not disagreeing with the moral lesson that we should stand against the powerful harming the vulnerable,” wrote Rabbi Sandra Lawson on Substack. “She’s upset that people are applying it universally. The lesson was supposed to stay contained, meant only for certain victims.”
The point of Holocaust education, wrote journalist Spencer Ackerman, is “[n]ot to exceptionalize Jewish suffering, but to activate solidarity. To recognize that there is a continuum of atrocity perpetrated by dominant classes against subjugated ones.”
Hurwitz’s remarks about a central pillar of Jewish advocacy may have been tailor-made for the JFNA crowd, made up of mainstream Jewish professionals uneasy about whether current tools — Holocaust education, Israel trips, anti-antisemitism training by pro-Irael groups — can stack up against the anti-Israel messages young people encounter. JFNA has joined several initiatives aimed at presenting a more “nuanced” view of the war in Gaza, with the goal of countering misleading or anti-Israel narratives in the mainstream and social media.
But Hurwitz also entered a decades-old — and, since Oct. 7, increasingly fraught — debate over the goals of Holocaust education. Does “never again” mean a universal call to protect human rights and prevent genocide, or is it a narrower call to make sure Jews are never again vulnerable to mass murder? And if the latter, does that somehow inoculate Israel from accusations that it can, in the interest of self-defense, oppress a weaker people?
That debate was at the heart of a dust-up in September, when Los Angeles’ Holocaust museum deleted an Instagram post that proclaimed, “‘Never again’ can’t only mean never again for Jews.” The graphic showed six interlocked arms of different colors, one with an Auschwitz tattoo. Another slide declared: “Jews must not let the trauma of our past silence our conscience.”
The museum explained that it deleted the post because it was “easily open to misinterpretation by some to be a political statement reflecting the ongoing situation in the Middle East.” Indeed, appreciative supporters of Palestine and angry supporters of Israel read the original post as a statement about the death toll and hunger crisis in Gaza.
Ben Ratskoff, an assistant professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles, wrote that the museum’s retraction “reflects a deeper turn away from the universalist approach that has been at the heart of institutional Holocaust memory culture since the 1990s.” Elie Wiesel, he noted, framed the Holocaust as “a Jewish tragedy with universal implications and applications.” In 2000, the Stockholm Declaration, which founded the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, also declared that “the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning.”
“Teaching about the Holocaust,” the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains on its web site, “can inspire students to think critically about the past and their own roles and responsibilities today.”
Israeli historian Amos Goldberg noted in July that Holocaust memory in the West deals with a deep tension between two sentiments. In the first, “human rights-oriented” version, “the world pledged itself to human rights, to curbing nationalism, and to strengthening democracy as a lesson from the Holocaust.” The second sentiment, he writes, “was empathy toward the Jews as the primary victims of Nazism, and their perception as Europe’s ultimate ‘Other.’”
With Israel facing accusations of genocide in Gaza — including from Israeli scholars like Goldberg, the International Association of Genocide Scholars and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem — these divergent lessons of the Holocaust have been fiercely debated, and sometimes weaponized.
After the massacre of Oct. 7, supporters of Israel invoked the Holocaust to express their feelings of vulnerability. “The murderers of Hamas are guided by the exact same goal” as the Nazis, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared at Israel’s official Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration in 2024. Many pointed out that Oct. 7 was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, implying a parallel of effect if not scope.
Palestinians and their supporters also invoked the Holocaust, a comparison that intensified as the war ground on and accusations of “genocide” made the comparison at least implicit.
Jewish groups not only denied the accusation of genocide, but rejected the comparison, whether made by Hamas or the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine.
“These comparisons are not simply misguided or exaggerated; they have a double-edged effect,” wrote Simone Roadan-Benzaquen, managing director of the American Jewish Committee’s Europe office, in January. “On one hand, they trivialize the Nazi atrocities by equating them with a contemporary conflict, tragic as it may be, that differs fundamentally in purpose and scope. On the other, they invert historical roles, casting Jews — victims of an unparalleled genocide — as today’s oppressors….
“The result is an assault on memory itself.”
Hurwitz served as chief speechwriter for Hillary Clinton during the 2008 presidential campaign, later as senior speechwriter to Barack Obama, and, from 2010 to 2017, as head speechwriter for Michelle Obama. After leaving government, Hurwitz wrote about her personal journey from “lapsed” or “cultural” Jew to one more deeply engaged with its core texts, rituals and history. Her two books on that journey have made her a popular draw on the Jewish lecture and podcast circuit.
It’s by no means clear if Hurwitz intended to say, as critics charge, that Holocaust education was a mistake because it fostered sympathy for the Palestinians. She did not respond to a request for an interview.
But in her latest book, “As a Jew,” published in September, she does argue that Holocaust education fails if it doesn’t explore the full historical scope of antisemitism, or, taking inspiration from the writer Dara Horn, if it doesn’t show how Jews lived in addition to how they died.
“If the main thing you know about antisemitism is the Holocaust, it’s easy to get the impression that antisemitism originated sometime in the twentieth century, and the Holocaust was a one-off — that out of nowhere, after just a few decades of hating Jews, the civilized world lost its mind and started killing them,” she writes.
Her book also includes a spirited defense of Israel, which puts her in the crosshairs of anti-Zionists and other harsh critics of Israel. At the GA, Hurwitz may have been describing the limitations of Holocaust education in teaching about antisemitism, but she waded directly into a fight about applying the lessons of the past to the crises of today.
The post Sarah Hurwitz, former Obama speechwriter, creates firestorm with remarks about Holocaust education appeared first on The Forward.
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Historic Early 20th Century Railcar Gets Installed at Boston’s Unfinished Holocaust Museum
A historic railcar being installed in the Holocaust Museum Boston on Nov. 25, 2025. Photo: Holocaust Museum Boston
A restored early 20th-century railcar that was believed to be the type used to transport Jews to extermination camps across Nazi-occupied Europe during Word War II was installed on Tuesday morning in the Holocaust Museum Boston, which is still being built.
The railcar was lifted by a 173-foot-tall tower crane and installed on the fourth floor of the museum currently under construction across from the Massachusetts State House. The railcar is over 30 feet long, 12 feet high, 8.75 feet wide, and weighs more than 12 tons. A group of supporters, city leaders, government officials, Jewish communal leaders, and other community representatives gathered on Tuesday morning to see the railcar’s installation.
“The hardest truth this railcar forces us to confront is this: the Holocaust was not carried out by the Nazis alone. It was carried out by people, ordinary people, who kept the trains running, who stamped the papers, who followed schedules, who chose silence over courage. The machinery of genocide ran because countless individuals did their everyday jobs and looked away,” said Jody Kipnis, co-founder and CEO of Holocaust Museum Boston, before the installation. “This railcar will stand at the heart of the Holocaust Museum Boston to confront that truth.”
The railcar was donated by Sonia Breslow of Scottsdale, Arizona, whose father was among less than 100 people who survived the Treblinka concentration camp, where 900,000 others were murdered. Breslow’s father was transported to the extermination camp in a railcar like the one installed at the Holocaust Museum Boston. He immigrated to Boston after surviving the Holocaust.
“Seeing this railcar lifted into its new home took my breath away,” said Breslow. “My father survived a transport to Treblinka in a car just like this. Most who were taken there did not survive. For this railcar to be in Massachusetts, a place where he rebuilt his life, is deeply personal. It ensures that his story, and the stories of millions, will never be forgotten.”
The railcar was discovered in a junkyard in Macedonia in 2012, shipped to the United States, and stored in Arizona before being transported to Massachusetts for conservation. Over the past six months, it was restored by renowned conservator Josh Craine of Deadalus, which is a company that has focused on the conservation of historic artifacts, sculptures, and architectural ornaments since 1989.
The railcar will provide an immersive experience for visitors once the Holocaust Museum Boston opens in late 2026. Visitors will be able to walk through the railcar and it will be displayed by a protruding bay window, making it visible from the street. Outside, people walking by will see museum guests enter the railcar but not leave, “an intentional design symbolizing the millions who never returned and the freedoms that were stripped away,” the museum explained.
“This railcar is not just an artifact, it’s a witness,” added Kipnis. “We want visitors to feel its weight, to understand that millions of people stood where they will stand. Our mission is to transform that understanding into moral courage. At a time of rising hate, the urgency of this museum has never been greater.”
Operated by the Holocaust Legacy Foundation, the Holocaust Museum Boston will be New England’s only museum dedicated exclusively to Holocaust education and the first new museum to be built in Boston in over 20 years.
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Russia Rules Out Big Concessions on Ukraine as Leak Shows Witkoff Advised Moscow
Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomes US President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff during a meeting in Moscow, Russia, Aug. 6, 2025. Photo: Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Pool via REUTERS
Russia will make no big concessions on a peace plan for Ukraine, a senior Russian diplomat said on Wednesday, after a leaked recording of a call involving US envoy Steve Witkoff showed he had advised Moscow on how to pitch to Donald Trump.
Witkoff is expected to travel to Moscow next week with other senior US officials for talks with Russian leaders about a possible plan to end the nearly four-year-old war in Ukraine, the deadliest in Europe since World War II.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday he was ready to advance the US-backed framework for ending the war and to discuss disputed points with the US president in talks that he said should include European allies.
Kyiv and its European allies are worried that details of the plan leaked last week show it bows to key Russian demands – barring Ukraine‘s NATO entry, enshrining Russian control of a fifth of Ukraine, and limiting the size of Ukraine‘s army.
Trump later said progress was being made and Moscow was making concessions even though the war – in which Russian forces have been advancing – was only going to move “in one direction.”
But, while welcoming the Trump administration’s efforts, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters in Moscow on Wednesday: “There can be no question of any concessions, or any surrender of our approaches to those key points.”
TRANSCRIPT OF WITKOFF-USHAKOV CALL LEAKED
Moscow also raised concerns about the leak to Bloomberg News of the transcript of a call between Witkoff and Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov in which the US envoy advised Ushakov on how to pitch a peace plan to Trump.
Trump, on Air Force One, brushed aside a question from a reporter about why Witkoff appeared to be coaching Russian officials as simply “what a dealmaker does” and “a very standard form of negotiation.”
But Russia said the leak was an unacceptable attempt to undermine peace efforts and amounted to hybrid warfare.
Ushakov said he had used WhatsApp to speak to Witkoff on several occasions and the Russian newspaper Kommersant, which interviewed Ushakov, ran a story headlined: “Who set up Steve Witkoff?”
Bloomberg said it had reviewed a recording of the call. It was not clear how Bloomberg got the recording of the conversation.
A Bloomberg News spokesperson said: “We stand by our story.”
TOO EARLY TO TALK OF PEACE, KREMLIN SAYS
Trump said on Tuesday Witkoff would meet Putin and that Jared Kushner, who helped negotiate the deal that brought about an uneasy ceasefire in the Gaza war between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, would also be involved.
“As for Witkoff, I can say that a preliminary agreement has been reached that he will come to Moscow next week,” Ushakov told reporters.
Asked by reporters whether a peace deal was close, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted by Russian news agency Interfax as saying: “Wait, it’s premature to say that yet.”
Russian forces control more than 19% of Ukraine following Moscow‘s 2022 invasion, and have advanced in 2025 at the fastest pace since 2022, although the advances remain slow and Kyiv says Russia has incurred heavy losses to achieve them.
Ukraine and its European allies echo former US President Joe Biden in saying the invasion is an imperial-style land grab for which Moscow must not be rewarded.
Putin casts the war as a watershed moment in relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 by enlarging NATO and encroaching on what he considers Moscow‘s sphere of influence.