Uncategorized
A fifth question this Passover: what makes Trader Joe’s matzah different from all other matzah?
(JTA) — For millennia, Jews have eaten matzah. And for years, Jewish patrons of Trader Joe’s have been able to purchase matzah off the shelves of the tiki-themed grocery chain — which has gained its own quasi-religious following.
Now, for the first time ever, Trader Joe’s will be selling matzah under its own famous private label.
The question, even among the store’s diehard Jewish fans, is what makes Trader Joe’s-branded matzah different from all other matzah.
The grocery chain with more than 500 stores nationwide, and known for characteristically friendly, Hawaiian shirt-clad employees and a limited selection and high turnover of products, has gained a cult-like following in its 56 years of operation. An Instagram fan account boasts nearly 2 million followers; the internet is abound with memes about falling in love with Trader Joe’s cashiers; and dozens of Facebook groups with thousands of members each exist to cater toward the specific dietary needs of loyal shoppers.
Those loyalists include no small number of Jews who keep kosher. The store stocks a number of Jewish, Israeli and Middle Eastern foods — from an “everything but the bagel” spice mix to spicy zhoug sauce to kosher-certified turkeys ahead of Thanksgiving, and frozen latkes. Trader Joe’s caused a small uproar in 2012 when it stopped stocking kosher pareve semi-sweet chocolate chips. After a campaign by Jewish customers, the chain brought the product back to its shelves in 2021.
But whether that loyalty will extend to the store’s matzah is unclear. Some shoppers said they were excited about the new offering, while others wondered whether it would be any different from the matzah Trader Joe’s has sold in previous years. Still others said that by putting its name on one of the most quintessential Jewish foods, Trader Joe’s “signals that Pesach products have gone mainstream,” in the words of Susan Robinson, a member of Kosher Trader Joe’s, a Facebook group with more than 63,000 members.
The decision also demonstrates that Trader Joe’s takes its kosher-observant customers seriously, said Rachel B. Gross, a professor at San Francisco State University who teaches a course on U.S. Jews and the history of food.
“My understanding is that they’ve never wanted to do everything,” Gross said. “But they have had a really strong kosher game because that worked really well with the way they approached the niche markets in general.”
For years, Trader Joe’s sold matzah made by a brand called Holyland, and it’s unclear whether the chain’s new boxes hold the same old product. The company — which is secretive about who produces its private-label foods — told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency only that the new private label matzah is made by “one of the largest and oldest matzo-making bakeries in Israel.”
Whether the Holyland once sold by Trader Joe’s is made by the same company as Holyland Shmura Matzo — a circular handmade variety — is similarly unclear. But there are hints, beyond the name, that they come from the same company, which is based in Israel. Both share the same distributor, and both include a logo on the front bearing the web address NaturallyBetterWithYouInMind.com, a site that boasts “high quality, all natural, kosher foods.”
A representative of the distributor of both Holyland products, a New Jersey company called Kayco, did not know whether the current Trader Joe’s product is the same as the Holyland matzah. The new Trader Joe’s matzah box says only that it is distributed and sold by Trader Joe’s, which is headquartered outside of Los Angeles.
That confusion has led to an ambivalent reaction among some members of Kosher Trader Joe’s. Multiple members of the group shared photos of the new boxes at their local stores, encouraging each other to buy the matzah in order to press the company to produce it again next year.
Some commented on the new box design, while others remarked on the price — $2.69 per box, a slight increase over the $2.49 Trader Joe’s charged for the Holyland boxes last year, according to an Instagram fan page. (Name-brand boxes of matzah at the same weight cost slightly more at other retailers, ranging from about $3.22 for a 16 ounce box of Yehuda Matzos to $4.49 for Manischewitz’s version of the unleavened bread.)
“Trader Joe’s has sold Holyland Matzah for at least a decade, if not longer,” wrote one member. “I’m surprised that it has taken them this long to put it under the Trader Joe’s private label.”
Others were just happy to have access to matzah at all. Another member recalled that supply chain delays and restrictions related to COVID-19 led to shortages of Passover products, and that in Manhattan’s East Village, where he lives, “TJ – and the Holyland Matzo – became a Pesach saver. That’s what the commotion is all about.”
(Members of the group who adhere to strict kosher laws may not have tried the new matzah yet due to a tradition of not eating matzah between Purim and Passover, although a few customers remarked that it feels thinner than Holyland matzah.)
In addition to matzah, Trader Joe’s will sell Teva Glatt kosher-for-Passover Angus beef brisket and a few kosher-for-Passover wines including Sara Bee Moscato and Baron Herzog chardonnay and cabernet. The company will publish a complete list of its kosher-for-Passover offerings closer to the holiday, which begins the night of April 5.
Gross said the conversation over Trader Joe’s matzah fits in with the way Americans celebrate Passover, which she said is intimately tied to brands. She cited the proliferation of well-known Passover products like the haggadah published by Maxwell House coffee, which was first printed more than 90 years ago, or Manischewitz’s many Passover foods. The way the holiday has been shaped by brands, she said, is “in some sense, a traditional American Jewish experience.”
“Jews have really learned over the last 110, 120 years how to trust brands, and trust brands around kashrut, especially around Passover,” Gross told JTA.
“We know that the people who keep kosher are such a small minority,” she added. “And we know that the number of people who look for heckshers are not primarily Jews, which makes me wonder how many non-Jews buy matzah, or [how many] they expect to buy matzah.”
But for at least one member of Kosher Trader Joe’s, brand loyalty was not enough to make the new matzahs stand out.
“Most articles written about this Matza as well as online comments make it out to be something earth-shattering and revolutionary, and fail to mention that Trader Joe’s has carried matza around this time, in every single store, for years and years under the Holyland Brand,” wrote Yoseph Goldstein. “Have folks easily forgotten this? Is it really the ‘coolness’ of the box?”
—
The post A fifth question this Passover: what makes Trader Joe’s matzah different from all other matzah? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish
דער ירושלימער יוטוב־שטערן וועלוול קירשנבוים האָט לעצטנס אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש פֿון אַ פּרעכטיקן וויזיט, וואָס ער האָט געמאַכט אין מאַראָקאָ. עס באַגלייט אים זײַן חבֿר אַבֿרהם פּרץ.
אינעם ווידעאָ זעט מען ווי קירשנבוים דאַוונט שחרית מיט די אָרטיקע ייִדן און באַזוכט אַ גוט אָפּגעהיטענעם בית־עולם, וווּ עס ליגן באַערדיקט גרויסע צדיקים ווי למשל הרבֿ חיים בן עתר (1696–1743), באַקאַנט ווי דער „אור החיים“. „מענטשן מיינען, אַז נאָר אין אייראָפּע זענען דאָ קבֿרים פֿון צדיקים!“ זאָגט קירשנבוים.
מיר זעען אַ גרויסע, שיינע שיל מיט אַ פֿײַנער אַרכיטעקטור אין קאַזאַבלאַנקאַ; דעם גרויסן אַראַבישן שוק, וווּ קירשנבוים קויפֿט זיך אײַן מלבושים פּונקט ווי די מאַראָקאַנער גייען אָנגעטאָן. ער באַוווּנדערט אויך די שיינע טיי־גלעזער און טשײַניקן, וואָס מע פֿאַרקויפֿט דאָרט, און באַקענט זיך מיט אַ ייִדישן סוחר וואָס האַנדלט מיט זילבער און גאָלד, פּונקט אַזוי ווי זײַן טאַטע און זיידע האָבן געטאָן פֿאַר דור־דורות.
The post VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood
A star-studded new movie set in a Soviet prison is coming out in November. James Franco and Rob Lowe anchor the cast of Confession, playing a brutal prison guard and an imprisoned dissident professor, and a disheveled Nick Nolte appears as a fellow prisoner.
These actors were once huge gets, and their names could convey legitimacy to a project. Nolte and Franco both have received Academy Award nominations. Lowe was a member of the Brat Pack, and was a regular on The West Wing.
Confession, written by Ben Shapiro and produced by the rightwing tabloid-esque news site The Daily Wire, is not the expected fare for actors with that kind of name recognition; Shapiro’s screenwriting aspirations have been the target of ridicule for years.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the only Daily Wire production getting big names; Danny Trejo signed onto a pro-ICE movie about Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, and Jonathan Majors led Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels earlier this year.
Each one of these actors has been, in some way, canceled or in career doldrums so may have been more open to working with The Daily Wire. And some have claimed that they did not know who Shapiro was, or what his politics were; Trejo’s son, Gilbert, said his 82-year-old father did not endorse ICE and was misled about the movie before he signed his contract.
Movie studios have struggled through the pandemic and the streaming era, both of which have tanked box office receipts, leaving the field open for movies from offbeat production studios. In addition to The Daily Wire, there has been a whole ream of Christian movies attempting to shift the stereotype of bible movies — that they’re preachy, low-budget straight-to-TV affairs with cardboard acting — to something more prestigious, or at least profitable.
The Christian company Angel Studios has been placing screenings of the half philo-semitic, half-antisemitic Jesus TV series The Chosen in movie theaters across the country, produced the right-wing hit The Sound of Freedom and is pumping out faith-based movies like the animated King of Kings Christmas story and David, a kiddie movie about the biblical king. Recently, Pinnacle Peak Pictures, another faith-based production company, premiered Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, another bible movie that was notable enough to merit a review in The New York Times. (Though admittedly it wasn’t a particularly positive one.)
For decades, Hollywood, and the media industry at large, has been associated with liberalism, progressive politics and diversity. (This is part of why conservative conspiracy theorists often insist that Jews control the media.) Even when conservatives are in power, satirical movies have poked fun at the ruling class — Team America: World Police spoofed George W. Bush’s foreign policy, while M*A*S*H critiqued Richard Nixon. During the current Trump administration, we’ve seen One Battle After Another lambasting immigration policies and rising white nationalism, Eddington on misinformation and populism, and The Apprentice depicting Trump directly.
But a rising number of higher-budget, bigger releases from the right wing, whether The Daily Wire’s conservative political parables or the Christian fables, are bringing a new kind of messaging — about the importance of God and country, about gender roles, about about the centrality of Jesus to the U.S. — to the American movie-going public.
This is no accident. A group of powerful conservative Christians, many of whom worked on Project 2025, are proponents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a blueprint for Christian nationalism that instructs Christians to gain influence and control over the “seven mountains” of society — which include media, entertainment and the arts. The Mandate is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a decentralized evangelical movement embraced by millions of Americans.
Jeremy Boreing, the director of many Daily Wire movies — though he has since left the company — said on a podcast hosted by businessman Patrick Bet-David that “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture” as a way of proving that “there is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”
Cultural power, of course, requires more than just a lot of movies; they have to be well-done, or at least appear to be. Previous Daily Wire productions, as well as other right-wing, MAGA movie ventures, have been hacky. Lady Ballers, about an unsuccessful men’s basketball team pretending to be women so they can dominate the league, was an unsubtle, unfunny and ultimately unwatchable spoof of transgender athletes. And even plenty of higher-budget attempts, like Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, can still fall victim to wooden acting and writing.
But now, with the financial success of movies like The Sound of Freedom and biblical parables like The Chosen, bigger stars are being drawn to projects like the Daily Wire’s lineup of pro-ICE, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ movies. With those bigger stars may come new audiences who might not have watched a Christian movie or Daily Wire project otherwise. And where there is money and viewers, mainstream Hollywood will go, too, no matter how progressive people expect the industry to be. We’ve already gotten a biblical epic from Amazon Prime, with The House of David, and there are likely to be many more to come.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was the biggest movie in town.
The post Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons
If there was something off about the logo the Atlanta Falcons unveiled on social media Wednesday, whoever runs their accounts did, uh, not see it.
Behind the black falcon graphic that began appearing on the football team’s helmets in the 1960s was a new background — a flag of red, tan, black and white vertical stripes. To thousands of people who responded to the logo, it looked distinctly German — in a 1930s kind of way.
“The Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland,” one fan wrote.
A day after its posting, the new profile picture had unleashed a deluge of Nazi memes in the 4,000-plus replies on X. One picture swapped in the logo for Nazi flags in the background of a historical photo of a Hitler rally. Another edited the Falcon claw to look like a Nazi salute.
Others depicted Hitler in a Falcons cap, references to Inglourious Basterds and the Battle of the Bulge and a World War II joke invoking a blown lead in Super Bowl LI.
“Falcons were up 28-3 at Dunkirk,” that tweet read.
The Falcons’ snafu enters a small but growing catalogue of Reich-coded brand mixups. Who can forget the German national soccer team’s ‘44’ soccer jerseys? There was also the swastika-emblazoned Hallmark gift wrap; the accidental Hitler mugs; and (for my money) the worst of the bunch, Zara’s concentration camp uniform shirt.
All of those have been addressed; so far, the Falcons’ has not. We’ve reached out to them for comment.
The post ‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons appeared first on The Forward.
