Uncategorized
An amended Conservative Jewish Passover policy taps into the booming gluten-free market
(JTA) — Ahead of Passover 2020 — as life worldwide ground to an abrupt halt in the face of a rapidly spreading pandemic and people faced the specter of empty grocery shelves, or staying confined at home — a range of rabbis tried to make it a little easier to observe the holiday.
Long lists of foods and newly lenient guidelines from Jewish organizations circulated among people who keep kosher for Passover, explaining which foods they could purchase and eat on the holiday, given the year’s extraordinary circumstances. The message — sometimes explicit, sometimes implied — was that these special permissions applied only temporarily.
Now, one rule instituted as a COVID provision by the Conservative movement is becoming permanent: Before Passover begins, Jews may buy certified kosher products that have kosher-for-Passover ingredients and are certified gluten-free and oat-free — even if they aren’t explicitly certified kosher for Passover.
When it first appeared in 2020, that rule was written in a way that suggested it was an emergency measure, using the words “when the situation demands.” This year, that four-word phrase has been removed from the Rabbinical Assembly’s Passover guide, and the guidance has moved from a separate section into the main list of allowable products.
The edit reflects how some shifts in Jewish practice that first appeared at the outset of the pandemic, as stopgap measures, have since been normalized. It also allows — for at least a narrow set of Jews who observe Jewish ritual in accordance with the Conservative movement’s dictates — more robust and potentially less expensive options for keeping kosher during Passover.
Rabbi Aaron Alexander, chair of the Kashrut Subcommittee on the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which issues the movement’s Jewish legal rulings, said the change does not reflect a shift in the movement’s approach to Jewish law, known as halacha. Instead, he said, it reflects confidence that the Food and Drug Administration’s strict rules about how products can be labeled can be trusted when it comes to Passover observance.
“It’s not a significant change in how we understand halacha in general and how we understand the general Passover laws,” Alexander said. “It’s always been the case that there are products you can buy without a KP [symbol] before Passover, when you can be pretty sure that there’s no chametz and that any accidental admixture would be minimal.”
The requirement for foods to be certified gluten-free and oat-free, Alexander said, is “an extra line of defense” for people buying products before Passover that are not explicitly labeled kosher for Passover.
The policy shift opens new doors to kosher-keeping Jews: Rather than seeking out specialty items with Passover kosher certification, often carried only in kosher supermarkets and in major markets, they can observe Passover by taking advantage of the increasing number of products that are labeled kosher, gluten-free and oat-free, as long as the ingredients accord with Passover laws.
The gluten-free marketplace is estimated at $6 billion a year in the United States and is growing by an estimated 10% each year, according to industry trend reports. The marketplace serves people with celiac disease — whose incidence is rising — as well as people who seek to reduce or eliminate their gluten intake for perceived health reasons.
Some people with celiac disease say they look forward to Passover because more products will hit shelves that they can count on to be free of gluten. Now, Jews who follow the Conservative movement’s guidance can benefit from some of the wide array of gluten-free foods that are already available.
On Passover, five types of grain are prohibited (except for when they are used to make matzah): wheat, spelt, barley, oat and rye. By purchasing products that are certified gluten-free and oat-free, consumers can avoid buying food that contain those five ingredients.
“In an effort to definitively alert consumers to the presence of wheat gluten in packaged foods, the FDA mandates that any product including the words ‘gluten-free,’ ‘no gluten,’ ‘free of gluten,’ or ‘without gluten’ must contain less than 20 parts per million of glutinous wheat, spelt, barley, or rye,” a footnote to the guide states. “This eliminates the possibility of a gluten-free packaged food containing 4 of the 5 hametz-derived grains in any quantity that would be viable according to Jewish law.”
Alexander emphasized that the gluten-free and oat-free guidance should be seen as “a good way to figure out whether or not the products you’re getting before Passover could be problematic.” He cautioned that looking at the rest of the ingredients is crucial: Some certified gluten-free products, for example, could still be prohibited for Passover because they contain yeast.
Sarah Chandler, an ordained Hebrew priestess and Jewish educator who used to run a pickle business, already bought food with gluten-free labels during her pre-Passover shopping.
“It’s very practical, and it’s also consistent with other levels of kashrut,” Chandler told JTA regarding her pre-Passover shopping. “The fact that you and I can go to a grocery store and buy eggs — you don’t need a kosher symbol on it. We just know that it’s eggs. We’re not worried that the egg is from a bird of prey and not kosher. We can just assume that [if] it says ‘chicken eggs,’ they’re chicken eggs.”
She added, using a Hebrew term for kosher certification, “We don’t need a hechsher on it. The hechscher just means a certain level of supervision.”
Chandler is a vegetarian and eats a variety of nut butters, which are often expensive. Recently, she bought a jar of gluten-free cashew butter that was on sale for $6 instead of its regular price $12. (A jar of almond butter by a kosher brand marketed for Passover can run around $18.) Because it’s still unopened and the ingredients are kosher for Passover, she plans to eat it during the holiday.
Kosher-keeping Jews with gluten intolerance and celiac disease have especially found a lifeline in the growing marketplace of gluten-free food.
Lisa Goldman, also known as the “Gluten Free Jewish Momma,” is an Orlando-based advocate for the gluten intolerant on behalf of her now-grown daughter, who was diagnosed with celiac disease in 2012.
“My daughter was crying over not being able to have matzah balls because matzah [is] very high in wheat,” Goldman recalled. “So it was so exciting when all of the Jewish brands started to come out with a gluten-free version of many of their products.”
By the Way Bakery, a kosher, gluten-free and dairy-free bakery in New York City founded in 2011 by Helene Godin, may be a destination where Jewish shoppers who abide by the Conservative ruling could get food for the holiday. It is offering multiple Passover items this year, though the menu isn’t certified kosher for Passover.
By the Way Bakery is certified kosher, and its individual products that are sold in Whole Foods are in the process of being certified gluten-free.
“I’m really careful with the word ‘certified,’” Godin told JTA. “We are not certified with respect to Passover. I can tell you what is in [our products]. We’re very transparent. If you go to our website and you go to the FAQ section, there’s a link to our ingredient summary. And we list everything that’s in every product.”
Some of the items on this year’s Passover menu include an orange almond cake that Godin calls “the little black dress of desserts” because it goes with everything, and a chocolate truffle torte. By the Way Bakery’s cakes and cookies are made with wheat flour alternatives, many of which fall into the category of kitniyot, or foods such as legumes, corn, and rice that some Jews, including many Ashkenazim, avoid eating on Passover. Sephardic Jews traditionally eat kitniyot on the holiday and the Conservative Movement began permitting the consumption of kitniyot during Passover in 2016.
“There are people who say, ‘You’re not kosher enough,’” Godin said. “And there are people who say, ‘Oh, I’ll eat that.’”
Another popular gluten-free kosher bakery, Modern Bread and Bagel, is offering non-kitniyot foods for Passover. Like By the Way Bakery, Modern Bread and Bagel is not certified kosher for Passover, but all of its kitchen’s ingredients are kosher for Passover.
Godin says her company gains new customers every Passover, but this year has been an especially busy time. The number of orders for the orange almond cake, which has not been on the menu in several years, was three or four times larger than what she expected.
“Our projections were that we would be up 20% over last year. And we’ve well exceeded that,” she said. “Post-COVID, people just want to celebrate and get together.”
—
The post An amended Conservative Jewish Passover policy taps into the booming gluten-free market appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Can the US really bring Iranians democracy?
The protesters at a January rally I attended in New York City’s Washington Square Park were loud and raw throated as they denounced the brutal Islamist regime in Tehran, then in the midst of slaughtering thousands of their comrades in Iran. A crowd of more than 1,500 called on the United States to make good on President Donald Trump’s all-caps promise that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”
I turned to an Iranian friend next to me who was lustily joining cheers calling for the tyrants’ overthrow. Like most of the rest of the protesters, she was also cheering the demonstration’s other prominent images: Israeli flags, the images of President Donald Trump and photos of Reza Pahlavi, the son and self-declared heir of the autocratic monarch Iranians ousted in 1979.
My friend’s parents had once been members of Iran’s leftist Tudeh Party, the country’s official communist faction, which was among the staunchest opponents of Pahlavi’s father. Recalling my own 20-month stay in Iran toward the end of his rule, I asked my friend if she understood the rampant corruption and repression under which Iranians lived during that time.
Was she aware of the role the U.S. played in installing the shah in power, and the torture of dissidents by SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, with support from Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad — a record Pahlavi has never acknowledged?
My dear friend fixed me in her gaze with clear eyes, devoid of illusion.
“Yes,” she said simply. “And it would be better.”
Lowered expectations
Whether the bombs and missiles the U.S. is now raining down on Iran will fulfill the promise Trump held out for protesters remains an open question. But In New York City, back in January, there was no mistaking their desperate faith in him — or the irony of that faith.
It was the U.S., after all, that joined with Great Britain in 1953 to overturn the democracy Iran enjoyed 73 years ago. Twenty-six years of U.S. support ensued for the autocracy that followed.
During the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988, it was the U.S. that also supplied Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, with critical intelligence and precursor chemicals that enabled him to manufacture and deploy outlawed chemical weapons against Iranian troops and civilians, asphyxiating thousands.
Given this history and the woeful fates that befell Iraq and Libya after U.S. intervention, many liberals voice grave doubt that any U.S.-forced regime change could restore democracy to the country. But they may be missing an important point: the extent to which crushing U.S. economic sanctions and the Iranian government’s own brutal repression, corruption and incompetence, have produced economic and political desperation among many Iranians, which radically lowers the bar.
The redemption of ‘Big Satan’
Opponents of Trump can recite a litany of his political and personal depravities, his affronts to democracy here at home, and his unreliability as an international partner in support of human rights and democracy abroad.
But I’ve noticed, anecdotally, that such recitations fall on deaf ears with many Iranians.
Two reasons rise to the top, in my mind, that explain this.
The first is the enormous credibility that Trump and the U.S. have derived from being among the primary hate targets of Iran’s despotic regime. This effect has also benefited Israel, the partner of the U.S. in waging this war. Decades of demonization of “the Big Satan” — and Israel, “the Little Satan” — from leaders so many Iranians despise have performed a miracle of reputational resurrection.
Today, this relentless drumbeat of vitriol has rendered the CIA’s subversion of Iran’s mid-20th century democracy — and Israel’s help in setting up SAVAK — a distant memory. This theocratic regime is the present danger.
Secondly, as a famous saying in Washington goes, “You can’t beat something with nothing.” That appears to be why many Iranians, for now, are turning to Trump. In Iran, the protesters’ own lack of leadership and resistance infrastructure plays into this. There is no Charles de Gaulle or Nelson Mandela waiting in the wings to take charge, with highly disciplined and battle-tested resistance groups to support them.
Another important factor may be the American left’s inability to offer Iranians a compelling alternative vision.
Several liberal members of Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, have consistently praised the bravery of the protesters and their cause. But they have not proposed any way to hold their killers accountable, and have opposed Trump’s war as the way to do so. Their approach, diplomacy and international law, produced President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2016, which radically constrained Iran’s nuclear weapons development.
Based on my reporting from Iran for the Forward back then, I can attest that vast numbers of Iranians strongly supported this at the time. They saw the JCPOA as a way to open Iran up to greater Western influence over time — the greatest fear of the country’s hardline ayatollahs.
But Trump tossed that achievement into the rubbish heap of history in his first term. And the left’s toolbox has been useless since. In the meantime, outside of government, some on the left have played down or ignored the Iranian government’s killings and abuses — or even attributed January’s protests in whole or part to Mossad agents embedded in Iran.
‘Striving for democracy’
Another friend, still living in Iran, told me recently that his grandson had left him feeling shamed. How is it, his grandson asked, that his generation had allowed the shah to be overthrown and replaced by this cohort of theocratic thugs?
My friend in Tehran had no answer.
My friend’s parents had been ardent supporters of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, the fiercely nationalistic Iranian leader ousted by Britain and the U.S. in 1953. But now, the prospect of a return by the shah’s son as a U.S.-backed autocrat with strong ties to right-wing Israelis didn’t phase him at all.
For his part, Pahlavi has publicly espoused a commitment to secular liberal democracy. But just last month his main support group, the National Union for Democracy in Iran, proposed that Pahlavi should serve as the unambiguous “Leader of the National Uprising” who will be empowered to issue official decrees, install hand-picked executive officials during a “transition to freedom and stability” and act as commander-in-chief of Iran’s military forces.
His supporters, meanwhile, have been widely accused of harassing and viciously threatening opponents who do not accept him in this role.
Would a secular, hopefully more competent, authoritarian dictatorship, whether led by Pahlavi or someone else with U.S. backing, be an improvement, I asked my friend in Tehran?
Even as bombs were falling from the sky onto his city last week, he texted back: “Yes sure!”
“I think this can be a phase towards a better situation for striving for democracy,” he added.
To be honest, I fear he and other like-minded Iranians are betting on moonbeams. But even after Israel bombed Tehran’s oil storage facilities over the weekend, engulfing the city in a poisonous black cloud, he texted me poetry.
“Under the black smoke…I saw trees that were hosting a multitude of blossoms with their thin bodies,” he wrote. “It seemed like they were supposed to remind us of spring….To us, who have been stuck in a rut for years? The ideological Mafia rule of the Islamic Republic of Iran has stolen 47 springs from us.”
The post Can the US really bring Iranians democracy? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Lawsuit says DOGE used ChatGPT to flag Jewish-themed humanities grants as ‘DEI’ before canceling them
(JTA) — The Department of Government Efficiency tagged Jewish themes as “DEI” in ChatGPT when searching for federal humanities grants to cancel last year, according to a class-action lawsuit.
The methodology contributed to the cancellation of National Endowment for the Humanities grants to study violence against women during the Holocaust, postwar Soviet Jewish literature and hundreds of other topics, even as the NEH would soon bestow $10.4 million, its largest-ever grant, to the Tikvah Fund, a politically conservative Jewish cultural project.
The suit brought by the Authors Guild; a member organization for several academic groups including the Association for Jewish Studies; and a number of individual scholars seeks to restore the canceled funding, which comprised around 80% of the NEH’s grants and was cut amid the Elon Musk-led task force’s broader slashing of federal spending last year.
The suit names the NEH, its acting chair, and several DOGE staffers as defendants, including Justin Fox, who the suit alleges was behind the ChatGPT methodology.
While DOGE’s use of keywords to cancel research grants was already known, as was the sweep’s effect on Jewish projects, the suit has revealed new details in its methodology, including staffers’ use of ChatGPT and their contention that works dealing with Judaism are a form of DEI.
In a filing on Friday, attorneys for the plaintiffs said Fox specified that he considered Jewish grants, including those focusing on the Holocaust, part of DEI.
“For a different grant about violence against women during the Holocaust, Fox testified that ChatGPT properly classified the grants as involving DEI, and thus slated it for termination, because it was ‘specifically focused on Jewish cultures’ (as in, it was about the Holocaust) and the ‘voices of the females in that culture,’” reads the filing.
“More generally, Fox stated that he identified as DEI any grant about a specific ‘minority group,’ meaning any particular ‘ethnicity, culture . . . race or gender or religion,’” the filing went on.
“It’s a Jewish — specifically focused on Jewish culture and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture,” Fox stated about one canceled grant for a project about “violence against women during the Holocaust,” as the latest court filing described it. Fox continued, “It’s inherently related to DEI for that reason.”
When asked in a deposition about the criteria for cancellation, the NEH’s acting chair Michael McDonald said he hadn’t known that DOGE used ChatGPT in its selection process, while also noting that he didn’t agree with the assessment that the Holocaust constituted DEI. The final authority for canceling the grants rested with DOGE, not McDonald, depositions indicated.
Fox, the suit alleges, had created his own “Detection List” of identity-based traits, with separate categories for “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants,” before running the databases through the generative AI software.
His prompt, according to the lawsuit: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.” The grants that turned up were all terminated, with only a few exceptions.
Many Jewish-themed projects were among the NEH cancellations, including a grant for “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union,” a translation project that was published in book form last month. The book was singled out during the lawsuit’s discovery phase, which noted, “ChatGPT classified this grant as DEI because ‘[t]his anthology explores Jewish writers’ engagement with the Holocaust in the USSR.’”
“I find it annoyingly amusing that they weren’t bothering to read the grants themselves — that they needed a machine to give them some sense,” Sasha Senderovich, a University of Washington professor who co-translated the volume with University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign professor Harriet Murav, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Three-quarters of their NEH grant had already been paid out, Senderovich said. He believes the NEH’s decision to cancel his grant was an example of “authoritarian logic.”
The book “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” showcases Jewish literature written in the Soviet Union; at right, Jewish women buy flour before Passover in Moscow in 1965. (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)After Senderovich used similar language in a Forward story last year following the cuts, an NEH official called the accusation “tendentious” and accused “wokeness and intersectionality” of being the true authoritarians in a text to McDonald, according to the court filing.
While the DEI justification has generated headlines, Senderovich said, “I think it’s also somewhat misleading to get hung up on what they typed into ChatGPT.”
The NEH’s final grant cancellation list, he noted, included many projects that had not been flagged as DEI. One such cancellation noted by the plaintiffs’ attorneys — which DOGE canceled over McDonald’s objections — was “a grant to advance the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill [sic] University.”
Murav, for her part, told JTA, “I am reeling from these cascading waves of hatred.” She rejected the idea that Jews should be considered part of DEI: “DEI initiatives seek to redress historic failures in American society. DEI efforts in the world of the university are not aimed at American Jews, because American Jews are over-represented in the professions and in the academy.”
Also canceled by DOGE: a project on “the untold story of Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust,” according to the suit. Documentary filmmaker Marisa Fox, whose own grant for a project matching that description was canceled, bemoaned the Trump administration’s new priorities in the Hollywood Reporter last year.
“I’ve seen firsthand how meeting a Holocaust survivor, whether in person or through a project, can dispel the most deep-seated antisemitic beliefs,” Fox — no apparent relation to the DOGE staffer — wrote then. “But if the NEH, NEA and local humanities councils are defunded, the platforms that can bridge divides will be severely limited. And so, too, will our chances of stemming hate’s rising tide.”
Even as staffers appeared to classify Jews as “DEI,” the NEH is moving forward with its support of Tikvah-aligned Jewish scholars. Ruth Wisse, a prominent Yiddish and Jewish cultural scholar, emeritus Harvard professor and senior fellow at Tikvah, is set to deliver the NEH’s annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities later this month at what has been rechristened the “Trump Kennedy Center.” Wisse’s lecture is titled “A Message from the ‘Blue and White’ in the ‘Red, White, and Blue,’” a reference to the colors of the Israeli and American flags.
A request for comment to Tikvah CEO Eric Cohen was not returned as of press time. Tikvah had a previously unreported connection to NEH senior leadership, the deposition shows: Dorothea Wolfson, who has worked with Tikvah and directs a program established by a former Tikvah board chair, is married to Adam Wolfson, the NEH’s assistant chair for programs. Adam Wolfson said in the deposition that he had made introductions but wasn’t involved in the grant selection.
As it shines a spotlight on DOGE’s practices, the suit also brings a different long-simmering debate to the forefront: whether Jews are considered part of “DEI,” the broad suite of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at universities and other institutions that conservatives have railed against.
Some prominent Jewish voices, including current CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, have argued that DEI practices are at least latently antisemitic because their practitioners do not consider Jews an underrepresented minority. The Trump administration’s crackdown on campus antisemitism has frequently been paired with anti-DEI initiatives.
Yet at the same time, a broader anti-DEI push on the right has also ensnared Jewish projects, or generated confusion among university administrators as to whether Jewish events should be canceled on campuses where DEI is outlawed.
Fox, according to investigations of DOGE staffers last year, is a former investment banker whose DOGE tenure also included stints overseeing cuts at USAID and the General Services Administration. His NEH tenure coincided with a directive for that organization to eliminate $175 million in federal grant funding. The DOGE project largely wound down following its architect Musk’s official exit from government a few months into its tenure, decimating numerous federal agencies and jeopardizing some initiatives to benefit Jews.
“It’s just ridiculous. You have these kids being told just go in and cut as much as you can,” Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Author’s Guild, told JTA about the DOGE maneuvers. “They were given no real instruction.”
The guild is one of several organizations that have co-signed onto the lawsuit, which is requesting the refunding of the grants. It is now awaiting a judge’s ruling on a summary judgment that would avoid a trial.
Among several individual authors represented by the guild in the suit is Jewish author and independent scholar William Goldstein, founding editor of the New York Times’ Books website, whose NEH grant was meant to fund a biography of Jewish LGBTQ playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer.
The post Lawsuit says DOGE used ChatGPT to flag Jewish-themed humanities grants as ‘DEI’ before canceling them appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Lindsey Graham urges Israel not to strike Iranian oil depots even as he says he helped make war happen
(JTA) — Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has called on Israel to rein in its attacks on Iranian oil infrastructure, marking a rare note of caution from a Republican lawmaker who has said he helped push the United States to join Israel in waging war against Iran.
In a post on X on Sunday, Graham praised Israel for its role in the war before adding that “there will be a day soon that the Iranian people will be in charge of their own fate, not the murderous ayatollah’s regime.”
“In that regard, please be cautious about what targets you select,” continued Graham. “Our goal is to liberate the Iranian people in a fashion that does not cripple their chance to start a new and better life when this regime collapses. The oil economy of Iran will be essential to that endeavor.”
Graham’s post linked to an Axios article that reported that the United States was alarmed by Israeli strikes over the weekend that targeted 30 Iranian fuel depots. On Monday, U.S. gas prices rose to their highest levels since 2024.
The warning from Graham, an ally of President Donald Trump and staunch supporter of Israel, comes days after the Republican hawk told the Wall Street Journal that he had played a key role in urging Trump to strike Iran.
Prior to the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, Graham made several trips to Israel where he met with members of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whom he said he coached on how to lobby Trump to strike Iran.
“They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” Graham told the newspaper.
On Monday, Graham also directed his criticism at Saudi Arabia’s decision to stay on the sidelines of the campaign against Iran.
“It is my understanding the Kingdom refuses to use their capable military as a part of an effort to end the barbaric and terrorist Iranian regime who has terrorized the region and killed 7 Americans,” wrote Graham in a post on X Monday. “Question – why should America do a defense agreement with a country like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that is unwilling to join a fight of mutual interest?”
The post Lindsey Graham urges Israel not to strike Iranian oil depots even as he says he helped make war happen appeared first on The Forward.