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Citing industry changes, Kosherfest, oldest kosher food fair, announces its end
(JTA) — After more than three decades, an annual trade show of kosher foods that saw the evolution of the cuisine in America grow from gefilte fish and pastrami to “facon,” gluten-free cookies and CBD gum is no more.
“Exhibitors feel Kosherfest has run its course,” the company that organized the two-day event, Diversified Business Communications, announced on Wednesday.
The company’s statement attributed the decision to shifts in the supermarket industry and in how stores display and purchase kosher products. Buyers for supermarkets, it said, are increasingly likely to buy kosher products at general trade shows rather than events specific to kosher food.
“As this buyer is responsible for sourcing and purchasing a wide array of products, they are more likely to attend food events displaying items not just exclusive to kosher,” the company said. “A certified kosher only food show such as Kosherfest is too niche for their attendance.”
The decision to cancel Kosherfest — which has included more than 325 exhibitors displaying their products and has drawn as many as 6,000 attendees each fall — comes as kosher food has gone mainstream. As of 2018, according to the Boston Globe, some 40% of packaged food and drink sold in the United States was certified kosher. Last year, Rabbi Eli Lando, the executive manager of OK Kosher, a certification agency, said Jews make up just 20% of kosher products’ consumer base, according to the publication Food Dive.
At the same time, supermarkets and other pillars of the kosher marketplace have been joined by social media influencers in promoting new food products to Jews who keep kosher. That shift was accelerated during the pandemic, when Kosherfest was suspended for a year before returning to muted crowds in 2021. Recently, it had been showing signs of strain. Last year, the fair was still recruiting vendors just days before its opening. Vendors who had reserved booths for this year will have their payments refunded, the company said.
Some longstanding Kosherfest attendees thought the show had shifted to cater too much to influencers, while some influencers said the show never felt totally accessible to them.
“The food industry has evolved and social media influencers definitely have a voice and a presence and they get products in front of consumers,” said Chanie Apfelbaum, a kosher cookbook author and social media personality under the moniker “Busy in Brooklyn.” “So, it’s definitely something that was necessary that they weren’t really ready to bring to the table.”
Apfelbaum, who said she had been introduced to Korean cuisine after meeting a chef at Kosherfest, will be hosting a cooking competition at Kosher-Palooza, a new event that will take place later this month at the same New Jersey convention center that previously hosted Kosherfest.
Kosher-Palooza is geared to individual consumers, according to its website, with wine tastings, blind taste tests and cooking demonstrations taking place alongside displays of new products.
“You (and your appetite) are invited to a massive celebration of all things kosher with hundreds of food brands, cookbook authors, influencers, and experts, all under one roof,” announced a press release for the event distributed last month.
Among the companies highlighted on Kosher-Palooza’s website is KosherCatch, a New England-based fresh fish company. Its founder, Jeffrey Ingber, said he had been a longtime Kosherfest attendee but thought the show had waned recently.
“Over the past 10 years there was nothing new to see, which is a surprise because there are emerging products and new products and creative products coming out every year by manufacturers,” he said.
Apfelbaum said she had seen the same thing. “Definitely Kosherfest in the last couple of years has been very disappointing for anyone that’s in the industry,” she said. “I just found there weren’t that many vendors anymore. It really had slowed down.”
The demise coincided with a rapid explosion of accessible kosher products — in some ways making the show a victim of the success of its field.
“This year we’re celebrating the centennial of American kosher certification, and efforts by certifiers during that century have left the kosher industry in an excellent position,” said David Zvi Kalman, a scholar at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America who studies trends in Jewish life.
“The fact that there are kosher products up and down the supply chain means that manufacturers can easily source kosher ingredients, and ingredient manufacturers have an incentive to certify to stay competitive,” Kalman added. “While effective marketing has been important to the industry’s growth — it saved the [Orthodox Union] from a period of stagnation in the 1950s — there are now strong network effects that encourage companies to certify even without the help of events like Kosherfest.”
In a statement commenting on the end of Kosherfest, its founder, Menachem Lubinsky, said he was proud of the show’s 33-year run. Lubinsky sold the show to Diversified Business Communications in 2004 but remained involved in its production.
“Looking back, I can proudly say that the show was an amazing run and the impetus for a glorious chapter in the growth of kosher and the Jewish community,” Lubinsky wrote.
“The last three plus decades of the show was a period when tens of thousands of products became kosher, dozens of huge modern kosher independent supermarkets were launched, there was an explosion of kosher restaurants of diverse themes, dozens of new kosher cookbooks published, and we witnessed the advent of a new era in social media and the Internet to name but a few of these gigantic accomplishments,” he added. Kosher became popular in every area of life.”
With kosher products readily available in many places, observers said kosher-keeping consumers are increasingly looking for unique or boundary-pushing food experiences — a niche promoted by Fleishigs Magazine, a lead sponsor of Kosher-Palooza. “More than just the authority on kosher cooking, Fleishigs serves up kosher like never before,” the magazine, whose name is a Jewish term for meat dishes, promises.
“Kosher consumers are demanding fresh, new products that we want to see on the market and that’s what we want,” Apfelbaum said. “That’s what we’re looking for.”
One convener of discussion about new frontiers in kosher dining is Elan Kornblum, publisher and president of the Great Kosher Restaurants Magazine and the creator of the Great Kosher Restaurant Foodies Facebook group, which boasts more than 82,000 members. Kornblum will be hosting a meet-and-greet at Kosher-Palooza but this week took a moment to lament Kosherfest’s end in his Facebook group.
“In the 20 years I went, I certainly have had great memories, met some great people from all over the world and did a lot of business here,” he posted about Kosherfest. “Sad to see it end.”
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The post Citing industry changes, Kosherfest, oldest kosher food fair, announces its end appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The mysterious case of Barbra Streisand and the missing half-pound of Zabar’s sturgeon
The whole story of Barbra Streisand and the sturgeon began a few months ago on a Thursday when I was at my regular spot at the fish counter.
A very pleasant, attractive woman ordered a pound of Nova and, before Slim, my long sharp slicing knife, and I started our journey through the salmon, she said, “I’m buying this for Barbra Streisand.”
I was skeptical, so I asked her what her relationship was with Barbra. She told me her name was Christine and that she was Barbra’s editor and had edited Barbra’s autobiography. Well, that made me look up and take notice. She must be genuine, I thought, who would make up such a story?
As I sliced, I heard Barbra in my head singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and lost all track of time. I threw the lox I had sliced up on the scale with flair; one pound it was.
While I continued to work, an idea popped into my head. I spotted a succulent block of sturgeon in the showcase of fish and thought, “I’m going to cut as perfect a slice as I can, wrap it carefully in tissue paper and place it neatly in the Zabar’s wrapping on top of the pound of Nova.” I didn’t disclose what I was doing because I wanted it to be a lovely surprise — if she happened to like sturgeon, that is.
Two Thursdays later, when I arrived at work, I found a small square envelope sitting on my board face-up. It read “For Len.” Inside was a folded card on which was printed in raised gold letters “BARBRA STREISAND.”
I opened the card, looked inside and found a handwritten note: “Dear Len, What a lovely gift! Did you know how much I love sturgeon? Thank you. It was delicious!” She signed it “Barbra” in a nice, swirly signature.
That night at home, I just couldn’t get it out of my mind: I actually had a handwritten note from Barbra Streisand. How many people could say that? Now that I knew she liked sturgeon, I decided I would personally send her a pound as a gift. But then I stopped.
“You don’t know her,” I said to myself. “It would be inappropriate and silly. I went back and forth until I gave up, watched Yentl instead, then went to sleep.
That night, I had a dream.
Barbra was in Zabar’s, walking up and down the aisles, smiling, going through each department, carefully selecting items when, suddenly, she noticed that her shopping cart was full. At that moment, she found herself standing opposite me at the fish counter.
“Welcome to the heart of the store, Ms. Streisand,” I said.
She smiled, I smiled back. I invited her to step behind the counter so she could have a better, closer look at all the fish. Next thing I knew she was standing there beside me, asking about my slicing technique and, for that fleeting moment, I was the star — a master lox slicer.
“Look who’s here, guys,” I told my co-workers. “It’s Barbra Streisand paying us a short visit,” at which point Barbra and I began a duet — “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.” I wanted so much to finish the song with her, but I woke up before I could.
In the morning, as I considered Barbra’s thank you note and our unfinished dream duet, I realized that she and I have a lot more in common than meets the eye.
We are both old. She is 83 and I am 95. We’re both Jewish. We both like sturgeon. But most of all we are both professional singers — my career started in 5th grade, at P.S. 180 in Brooklyn, when I was chosen to sing the lead in Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.” Then, in 6th grade, I played Nanki-Poo in The Mikado. And, when I was 12, I sang in the Oscar Julius Choir at Tempel Bethel in Borough Park. I also sang at Jewish weddings — 50 cents as part of a choir, $1 when I performed a solo.
Suddenly, I realized that maybe it wouldn’t be so inappropriate to send Barbra a half-pound of sturgeon as a belated 83rd birthday present. Except I didn’t have her address.
Enter Christine.
On another Thursday, as I was cleaning my knives, one of my co-workers tapped me on the shoulder and told me there was a woman looking for me. And there she was. Did Barbra want more Nova, I wondered, or some sturgeon?
She told me she had an appointment in the neighborhood and thought she’d stop in and say hello. I told her how I had considered sending Barbra a belated birthday gift, though I added that it would be just as easy for her to order some online.
Christine gave me her phone number, so later I texted her and asked if I could send Barbra the sturgeon. “Sure,” she texted back and gave me an address.
I got to work.
I selected the best-looking block of sturgeon in the display counter, sliced off half a pound and wrapped it up. Then I removed the dorsal fin from the most succulent whitefish in the showcase, wrapped it and placed it on top of the sturgeon. I walked over to the bakery and retrieved one of Zabar’s rugelach, wrapped it in foil and placed it alongside the dorsal fin. There was a paper plate on the shelf behind me. I took out my black marker and wrote “Happy Birthday” to Barbra and signed my name.
I finished the package and brought it up to Bernardo in the shipping department, and gave him instructions as to where and to whom it should be sent. I returned to the fish counter thinking a job well done. But — she never got the sturgeon
I set the wheels in motion with the appropriate department at Zabar’s to investigate “The case of the missing sturgeon.”
In the annals of crime, there are those cases that go down in the books as unsolved; so too in the world of undelivered smoked fish. This is one of those cases.
As for the replacement sturgeon I sent to Barbra, a recent call to Christine revealed somewhat anticlimactically, that Barbra did receive it, but due to some confusion, it was sliced and sent as a regular shipment with no indication that it came from me, her fellow singing professional. Perhaps she sent a perfunctory thank you note to Zabar’s, perhaps she wondered why she was getting another round of sturgeon, without explanation, so close to her birthday, or maybe, just maybe, she suspected it was from her new friend, Len.
Still, I’d like to think that I’ll have another opportunity to wish her a happy birthday. When her 84th comes around in a couple of months, I’ll be at the fish counter. And I’ll be ready.
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Nick Fuentes says his problem with Trump ‘is that he is not Hitler’
(JTA) — In the fall, a video of Nick Fuentes criticizing Donald Trump drew the praise of progressive ex-Congressman Jamaal Bowman.
“Finally getting it Nick,” Bowman commented, apparently recognizing some common ground between himself on the left and Fuentes, on the far right, who said in the video that Trump was “better than the Democrats for Israel, for the oil and gas industry, for Silicon Valley, for Wall Street,” but said he wasn’t “better for us.”
Now, Fuentes says there is actually no common ground between him and those on the left.
“My problem with Trump isn’t that he’s Hitler — my problem with Trump is that he is not Hitler,” Fuentes said during his streaming show on Tuesday, which focused mostly on the potential for an American attack on Iran.
He continued, “You have all these left-wing people saying, ‘Why do I agree with Nick Fuentes?’ It’s like, I’m criticizing Trump because there’s not enough deportations, there’s not enough ICE brutality, there’s not enough National Guard. Sort of a big difference!”
Fuentes, the streamer and avowed antisemite who has previously said Hitler was “very f–king cool,” has been gaining more traction as a voice on the right. His interview with Tucker Carlson in October plunged Republicans into an ongoing debate over antisemitism within their ranks, inflaming the divide between a pro-Israel wing of the party and an emerging, isolationist “America First” wing that’s against U.S. military assistance to Israel.
Once a pro-Trump MAGA Republican, Fuentes has become the leader of the “groyper” movement advocating for farther-right positions. The set of Fuentes’ show includes both a hat and a mug with the words “America First” on his desk.
In a New York Times interview, Trump recently weighed in on rising tensions within the Republican Party, saying Republican leaders should “absolutely” condemn figures who promote antisemitism, and that he does not approve of antisemites in the party.
“No, I don’t. I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them,” replied Trump when asked by a reporter whether there was room within the Republican coalition for antisemitic figures.
Asked if he would condemn Fuentes, Trump initially claimed that he didn’t know the antisemitic streamer, before acknowledging that he had had dinner with him alongside Kanye West in 2022.
“I had dinner with him, one time, where he came as a guest of Kanye West. I didn’t know who he was bringing,” Trump said. “He said, ‘Do you mind if I bring a friend?’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’ And it was Nick Fuentes? I don’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Trump flaunted his pro-Israel bona fides in the interview, mentioning the recent announcement that he was nominated for Israel’s top civilian honor and calling himself the “best president of the United States in the history of this country toward Israel.”
Fuentes, meanwhile, spent the bulk of his show on Tuesday speculating that Trump will order the U.S. to attack Iran, and concluded that “Israel is holding our hand walking us down the road toward an inevitable war.”
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Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’
(JTA) — Larry Ellison, the Jewish founder of Oracle and a major pro-Israel donor, has recently been in the headlines for his media acquisition ventures with his son.
The new scrutiny on the family has surfaced a decades-old detail about Ellison: that he once rechristened a superyacht after realizing that its original name carried an antisemitic tinge.
In 1999, Ellison — then No. 23 on Forbes’ billionaires list, well on his way to his No. 4 ranking today — purchased a boat called Izanami.
Originally built for a Japanese businessman, the 191-foot superyacht was named for a Shinto deity. But Ellison soon realized what the name read backwards: “I’m a Nazi.”
“Izanami and Izanagi are the names of the two Shinto deities that gave birth to the Japanese islands, or so legend has it,” Ellison said in “Softwar,” a 2013 biography. “When the local newspapers started pointing out that Izanami was ‘I’m a Nazi’ spelled backward, I had the choice of explaining Shintoism to the reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle or changing the name of the boat.” He renamed the boat Ronin and later sold it.
The decades-old factoid resurfaced this week because of a New York Magazine profile of Ellison’s son, David Ellison, the chair and CEO of Paramount-Skydance Corporation.
Skydance Corporation, which David Ellison founded in 2006, completed an $8 billion merger last year with Paramount Global. Larry Ellison, meanwhile, joined an investor consortium that signed a deal to purchase TikTok, the social media juggernaut accused of spreading antisemitism. Together, father and son also staged a hostile bid to purchase Warner Bros. but were outmatched by Netflix.
After acquiring Paramount, David Ellison appointed The Free Press founder Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, in an endorsement of Weiss’ contrarian and pro-Israel outlook that has been challenged as overly friendly to the Trump administration.
Larry Ellison, who was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive Jewish parents, has long been a donor to pro-Israel and Jewish causes, including to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. In September, he briefly topped the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the world’s richest man.
In December, Oracle struck a deal to provide cloud services for TikTok, with some advocates hoping for tougher safeguards against antisemitism on the social media platform
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