Uncategorized
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.”
—
The post When it comes to a classic Jewish cookie, New York bakeries go beyond black and white appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Some of Mamdani’s Jewish allies criticize his use of ‘monsters’ to describe AIPAC
(New York Jewish Week) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday defended his use of the word “monsters” to describe AIPAC at a rally Friday for progressive candidates, as some of his Jewish supporters expressed concern that the term may connote an antisemitic trope.
The war of words came as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is increasingly a target of the progressive movement — including in acts of attempted violence — and as progressive Jews have accused some Israeli right-wing figures of dehumanizing liberal pro-Israel lobbying groups.
“Calling AIPAC and its backers ‘monsters’ casts them as less than human, rather than as human beings who are one’s political opponents,” Rabbi Jill Jacobs, head of the progressive rabbinic human rights group T’ruah, wrote in a Substack post Monday.
“I was taken aback,” Rabbi Misha Shulman, a Mamdani supporter who leads the progressive Brooklyn synagogue The New Shul, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the mayor’s comments. “I didn’t like those remarks. It was a little bit of a flag for me.”
At a press conference, Mamdani said he had been quoting Italian anti-fascist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, whose quote ending “Now is the time of monsters” the mayor had cited at the top of his speech. The rally was intended to boost the mayor’s preferred progressive candidates, including Jewish congressional candidate Brad Lander, ahead of New York’s closely watched Tuesday primaries.
“I used the term to describe all those who are preventing the birth of a new world,” Mamdani told a reporter who asked about the word. He continued, “My use of the term is a broad use that speaks to the untenable nature of a status quo that is quite literally starving people in this city, all in the name of sustaining something that we simply cannot defend any longer.” He did not explain how he saw AIPAC as connected to poverty in New York.
Mamdani insisted he was referring to “not solely AIPAC,” but he singled out the organization again in his Monday remarks to reporters, saying the lobbying group was backing “a status quo for immorality.”
During the rally last week, Mamdani had stated that Gramsci’s “monsters take many forms today,” including “AIPAC, for whom the only thing more frightening than democracy being allowed to run its course is an end to genocide and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s wars.” He added that AIPAC’s “goal” is “to turn us against one another.”
For some of the progressive Jews who have supported the mayor, his comments sounded alarms about the use of dehumanizing or sinister rhetoric to describe Jewish groups.
But Shulman said it was actually Mamdani’s remarks in the same speech painting AIPAC as a “dark money” group that was most alarming to him. AIPAC, a lobbying organization that also operates a political spending arm, does not conceal its donors, unlike the traditional profile of a so-called “dark money” campaign finance operation.
“For me, the question of dark money was the tougher knot,” Shulman said, calling Mamdani’s remarks a “tactical mistake.” In the context of rising antisemitism, he added, “For a left-wing leader to use that phrase, and invite traditional antisemitism into this conversation in that way, was not smart.”
Shulman is a member of Israelis For Peace, a New York-based ad-hoc group of progressive Israelis who broadly back Mamdani. While not speaking on behalf of the group, he told JTA their internal group chat lit up with debates over the appropriateness of Mamdani’s speech.
Jacobs of T’ruah said Mamdani’s remarks were part of what she described as a “disturbing trend” of recent left-wing attacks on the lobbying group, including Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner accusing his GOP opponent of being “bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu” because of AIPAC’s donations to her campaign.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who has aspirations of higher office, also recently became the first sitting member of Congress to sign a pledge from Track AIPAC, a purported AIPAC watchdog that also targets donations from more liberal pro-Israel groups, including J Street.
Over the weekend, a cafe posted on Instagram that it had rejected a payment from liberal Jewish New York Rep. Dan Goldman, whom Lander is challenging in the primary, because the money was “probably coming from AIPAC.” (Goldman has been endorsed by both AIPAC and J Street.)
While noting that AIPAC “absolutely deserves to be criticized, sidelined, and rejected for its decades of negative influence on American foreign policy,” Jacobs wrote that such critiques should be done “without dehumanizing language, and without hinting at a grand Jewish conspiracy.”
Such pushback from Jews who have worked with Mamdani is rare. JTA reached out to representatives for several of the mayor’s most visible Jewish allies on Monday, including Lander and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who spoke at the same rally. Sanders also criticized AIPAC. Neither returned requests for comment by press time. On social media after the rally, Lander celebrated the event, calling it “a tremendous honor” to rally alongside Mamdani.
IfNotNow and Jews For Racial and Economic Justice, two Jewish activist groups that endorsed Mamdani, similarly did not respond to requests for comment by press time. A spokesperson for Rep. Jerry Nadler, the retiring liberal Jewish Democrat who had endorsed Mamdani’s mayoral bid, also did not respond by press time.
J Street, the liberal pro-Israel lobby that positions itself as a foil to AIPAC, declined to comment on Mamdani’s remarks. Last month, hundreds of Jewish leaders criticized Yehuda Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, after Leiter called J Street a “cancer within the Jewish community.” Nadler was among the signatories of an open letter that said Leiter “dehumanizes fellow Jews.”
Centrist Jewish groups and figures, already no fans of Mamdani, also bashed his AIPAC comments. “Referring to fellow New Yorkers as ‘monsters’ is outrageous and dangerous, and the impact of your words extends far beyond politics,” American Jewish Committee CEO Ted Deutch wrote on X, addressing Mamdani.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Jewish Democrat representing New Jersey, wrote, “Swap ‘AIPAC’ for ‘Jews’ and it’s the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theory in the books.”
Both posts were reposted by AIPAC, which otherwise did not comment.
The post Some of Mamdani’s Jewish allies criticize his use of ‘monsters’ to describe AIPAC appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
U.K. PM Starmer leaves behind mixed record on antisemitism
(JTA) — U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who resigned the premiership on Monday, leaves behind a mixed record on fighting antisemitism in the Labour Party that Jewish organizations say will help shape their expectations for his successor.
Starmer announced that he was stepping down outside 10 Downing Street in the morning local time. He made the decision in the wake of mounting pressure from Labour members of Parliament and waning political support after the party’s devastating losses in the May 7 local elections and the success of political rival Andy Burnham in Manchester’s parliamentary election last week.
Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, has emerged as the leading contender after winning a Manchester-area by-election on Friday with 55% of the vote. Burnham has sought to position himself prominently on antisemitism and relations with the Jewish community in his bid to take over from Starmer.
In a post on X, Burnham thanked Starmer for his leadership and said the PM’s decision to resign “marks the beginning of a transition and it is important that this process is conducted in an orderly and responsible way. I will put myself forward as part of this process.”
Starmer confirmed he would remain on as caretaker prime minister until a successor was chosen.
“The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election,” he said. “I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question, and I accept that answer with good grace.”
The Jewish Labour Movement thanked Starmer in a post on X, noting that two years ago he inherited the party “at its lowest point” from former party leader Jeremy Corbyn, when it was “institutionally antisemitic.” It added, under Starmer, “our party has a clean bill of health on antisemitism.”
However, Starmer’s tenure was still met with plenty of criticism from the Jewish community over his handling of antisemitism, particularly in light of ongoing antisemitic attacks in the country. In recent months alone, four Hatzola ambulances were lit on fire; there were attempted attacks on three synagogues; two Jewish men in the Orthodox neighborhood of Golders Green were stabbed. Dozens of people have been arrested in connection with the incidents.
Starmer entered office in July 2024, leading his country’s thorny relationship with Israel in the aftermath of the Hamas Oct. 7, 2023, attack against the Jewish and the Gaza war that followed. He angered Israel with steps such as recognizing Palestine as a state and promising to uphold the International Court of Justice’s arrest warrant against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes.
With Starmer’s upcoming departure, focus has shifted to the contest to replace him, bringing renewed scrutiny to candidates’ positions on antisemitism, relations with the Jewish community, and Israel.
Starmer said he would give his successor his “full and unequivocal support,” adding that nominations would open on July 9 and conclude before the parliamentary summer recess on July 16.
Board of Deputies of British Jews President Phil Roseneberg posted on X, “When he took on the leadership of the Labour Party the first thing @Keir_Starmer said he would do is ‘tear out the poison of antisemitism by its roots’. His subsequent actions were transformative within the Party.”
He praised Starmer’s government for providing “unprecedented security funding,” and introducing legislation to proscribe the IRGC.
Burnham, for his part, has spoken out against antisemitism in the wake of violence attacks. Following the October 2025 Yom Kippur attack at the Heaton Park Congregation synagogue in Manchester, in which two people were killed, Burnham said in an official release, “Tonight, our first thoughts are with the families of those who have died, those injured and those traumatised by this – a horrific antisemitic attack on our Jewish friends and neighbours. We condemn it outright.”
He also wrote in a post on X on the same day, “Today we have witnessed a vile attack on our Jewish community on its holiest day. We condemn whoever is responsible and will do everything within our power to keep people safe.”
His positions on Israel and Gaza have also come under scrutiny. In a June 4 interview with The Guardian, Burnham did not invoke the term “genocide” in relation to the war in Gaza, but did say, “I can’t judge things of that enormity from where I am as mayor of Greater Manchester.”
He added, “But I do have concerns about the disproportionate nature of what has happened in terms of the destruction, and there has to be a full process of investigation and accountability.”
Additionally, 10 days after the Oct. 7 attacks, Burnham called for a ceasefire in a joint statement with 10 Greater Manchester leaders. The statement read in part, “We condemn unreservedly the appalling terror attacks on innocent civilians in Israel by Hamas on 7th October.”
The statement also noted that Israel has the right to take “targeted action within international law” to defend itself and to rescue its hostages, but added, “We also have profound concerns about the loss of thousands of innocent lives in Gaza, the displacement of many more and widespread suffering through the ongoing blockade of essential goods and services.”
Referencing his expected leadership bid, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy told the Jewish News on June 17 that Burnham had a few weeks earlier met with Jewish communal leaders in Greater Manchester.
When it comes to Israel, Nandy said Burnham “believes in justice, so he’s acutely aware of the need for a safe homeland for Jewish people, you know, and the particularly unique historical reasons why Israel came into existence.”
The post U.K. PM Starmer leaves behind mixed record on antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
NY cafe deactivates account after backlash over treatment of Rep. Goldman
(New York Jewish Week) — A Brooklyn café posted on Instagram that it refunded a purchase made by Rep. Dan Goldman, saying that it doesn’t serve “genocide enablers.”
“Do you see how it doesn’t taste like genocide juice?” the post by Poetica Coffee read. “Or are you still having a hard time telling the difference?”
In the post, the coffee shop included a photo of Goldman at the Lorimer Street location of their five Brooklyn spots. “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away or we would have turned you away,” the post said.
The caption on the post said Goldman’s money is “probably coming from AIPAC anyways” and told Goldman never to come back. The post was accompanied by the song “F— You” by British singer-songwriter Lily Allen.
Jewish community leaders immediately condemned the post, which was deleted when Poetica Coffee deactivated its account Monday.
“Assigning collective blame to Jews or perceived supporters of Israel over disagreements with Middle East policies is the very definition of antisemitism,” Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, said in a statement. “It is shameful and hateful, and businesses open to the public do not get to discriminate based on religion, ancestry, ethnicity, or stereotypes.”
According to its website, Poetica Coffee is “rooted in the Uzbek tradition where the guest is sacred, the books are unbanned, and the door is open to everyone.”
Goldman, who describes himself as “unabashedly pro-Israel,” is running for reelection in a contentious election Tuesday against former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, an Israel critic who also identifies as a “liberal Zionist.” Lander’s campaign did not respond to request for comment from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“I am sorry to see this post,” Goldman said in a statement earlier Monday. “The barista could not have been nicer to my 7-year-old daughter and me — allowing her to use the bathroom even though we had not purchased anything. I made sure to buy a coffee in return for her kindness. I hope you at least make sure she gets the tip that she deserved.”
Before deactivating its account, Poetica Coffee said it had been the recipient of multiple death threats, including at least one with Islamophobic rhetoric.
Goldman was refunded $9.82, according to now-deleted screenshots from Poetica’s post.
The post NY cafe deactivates account after backlash over treatment of Rep. Goldman appeared first on The Forward.
