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Food writer Alison Roman makes a comeback — and a brisket for Passover
(New York Jewish Week) — What first caught my eye about Jewish food writer Alison Roman was not any one recipe. Rather, it was a photo of her that was published in the New York Times in 2019: Roman was in her tiny Brooklyn kitchen, kneeling in front of her overstuffed and undersized refrigerator. She was wearing jeans and t-shirt — and her feet were bare and dirty. I simply loved the messiness, joy and imperfection of it all.
The photo accompanied a selection of Thanksgiving recipes written by the young and rising star, who was first introduced to the Times’ readership just over a year prior as an heir to Pierre Franey and his quick-to-prepare foods. Roman’s Thanksgiving menu included a dry-brined turkey, hand-torn sourdough bread stuffing with celery and leeks, leafy herb salad spiked with lemon zest, lemon juice and flaky sea salt. The recipes were a reflection of the author: approachable and decidedly not fussy.
That anti-perfect attitude is a hallmark of Roman’s style, and it’s certainly a theme of her latest cookbook, “Sweet Enough,” which comes out at the end of this month. It is her third (“Dining In” and “Nothing Fancy” preceded it) and, according to Variety, pre-publication it has already “shot to the top of bestseller lists.”
This new cookbook is devoted to desserts, although there are a handful of savory recipes, too. Many of the recipes, like her Summer Pudding with Summer Fruit, her bowl of Salted Chocolate Pudding, and her raspberries and sour cream, do not have to be baked, nor do they require fancy know-how or special equipment. She even encourages readers to eat these treats straight from the bowl or the pot in which they were cooked.
Roman became an important part of the food conversation in this country in an impressively short amount of time. By the time she was hired full-time at the Times, at 32, she had had a meteoric rise at Bon Appetit magazine, where she moved from freelance recipe tester to senior food editor in four years. By then, she had already published her first cookbook and had a cookie recipe that went viral on Instagram.
Her fall from grace in May 2020 was even faster. In an interview for the online publication The New Consumer, she criticized two prominent women of color, Japanese organizing guru Marie Kondo and Asian-American model, cookbook author and prominent Twitter user Chrissy Teigen, for licensing their names and essentially “selling out.” In the ensuing weeks, the backlash online was swift and fierce, accusing her of everything from inappropriateness to racism. Amid the moment’s perfect storm — the pandemic and the rapid rise of the Movement for Black Lives — her column at the Times was suspended.
Six weeks later, on June 21, she founded a Substack newsletter, simply titled, “A Newsletter.” She now cranks that out weekly to 229,000 subscribers, and her YouTube channel, “Home Videos,” has some 213,000 subscribers. Looking back, Roman describes that post-interview time period as “challenging,” but, as she told the New York Jewish Week, “it led me to writing more and writing more for myself. And I think that’s a good thing.”
These days, Roman, 37, who describes herself as “half Jewish,” is about to embark on her book tour. Ahead of the release of “Sweet Enough,” she spoke to the New York Jewish Week about her favorite Jewish dishes, her food philosophy, and what she loves about Passover, which begins this year at sundown on Weds., April 5.
This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.
New York Jewish Week: How did the idea for this book come to you?
Roman: I felt there was a need for a dessert book from the perspective of someone who was not a die-hard lover of baked goods or dessert — somewhere between indifferent and enthusiastic. I felt like there were probably others like me.
I embrace the fact that the desserts were not designed to be perfect and they don’t have to be. People accept the flaws of, say, a roast chicken, but if their cake is crooked it ruins their day.
I’m trying to normalize the fact that not everything will be perfect, and it’s OK.
You are from California. How has being in New York changed the way you cook?
Living in New York, I have an emphasis on accessibility. I don’t always have access to the best produce; when things are out of season it becomes more difficult. It makes my work stronger because you have to be resourceful. And since we don’t necessarily have cars in New York, I have to consider: How far do I have to schlep the groceries? Can I do this [dish] with fewer items?
You’ve said on the Jewish Food Society’s podcast that you made many Jewish friends in New York. You attended your first bar mitzvah here. Are you leaning more into Jewish recipes or foods since you are living in New York?
Not necessarily. I just did a new Passover menu, which will come out on March 30 in Passover Home Movies and in an accompanying newsletter. I think that the older I get the more I lean into hosting and doing Shabbat because it feels important to me.
Any Jewish foods that are favorites of yours?
Matzah ball soup is my favorite food of all time. Otherwise, most popular Jewish deli foods are something I gravitate towards, even before I realized they were “Jewish.” Latkes, and things like that. I like Jewish deli culture. And I liked that these foods, that my father and I love and enjoy, are connected to my father’s heritage, which is my heritage. It made me feel closer to it.
What is your favorite Passover dish?
I love my brisket. I don’t love brisket always but I think the one I make is fantastic. I like a really simple Passover menu. Braised meat. Crispy salad with lots of herbs and apples. Crispy potato — this year I made cheeseless gratin with olive oil, potatoes, salt and pepper. You are not grating potatoes or frying anything. It is not eggy like a kugel.
Part of why I like Passover is because, much like Thanksgiving, it’s a time of year when you know what you’re supposed to eat. You don’t have to give it a ton of thought.
Have the past three years, following your comments about Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen, changed you as a writer and a food person?
Yes and no. We are all different than we were three years ago. Whether it was time passing or the pandemic or whatever, I think everyone is a bit different. That time was challenging but it led me to writing more and writing more for myself. And I think that’s a good thing.
How would you frame your food philosophy?
“Unfussy” pretty much sums it up. I don’t believe in overthinking too much. The way I cook is very instinctual and very natural. I don’t try to manipulate anything into something it is not. I feel very intuitive. It feels not performative. It feels very genuine to me.
Where did your aesthetic for rustic, carefree, approachable food come from?
I consider myself independent, and most things I do are born from myself and my own intuition. I think, like any person, you will be impacted and influenced by the world around you but ultimately you need to be authentically yourself.
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The post Food writer Alison Roman makes a comeback — and a brisket for Passover appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Artist alters Whitney Museum display screens to protest Israel’s conduct in Gaza
The Whitney Museum of American Art has over 27,000 pieces in its collection. On July 3, artist Jonathan Allen tried to add a couple more to call attention to what he considers “Israeli atrocities.”
Late that night, Allen vandalized two electronic displays outside the Whitney, a contemporary art museum in Manhattan, plastering them with posters accusing Israel of genocide and targeting Palestinian children.
Staff soon removed the posters after being notified of the vandalism, the museum said in an emailed statement.“I think it’s important artists take risks and use private property and unconventional spaces towards political and social ends,” Allen told the Forward.
Whitney Director of Communications Ashley Reese wrote, “The Museum maintains a zero-tolerance policy for vandalism, harassment, discrimination, or bias of any kind.”
This is not the first time a pro-Palestinian protest has targeted the Whitney. Last year, the museum planned to hold a performance mourning Palestinians killed during the Israel-Hamas war. When footage surfaced of a performer telling audience members to leave a previous performance if they “believe in Israeli in any incarnation,” the Whitney canceled the event.
Shortly afterward, the group Writers Against the War on Gaza held a protest at the Whitney, passing out brochures demanding “the removal of board members tied to genocide, militarism and apartheid.”
Allen’s installation is part of his Interruptions series, where he puts translucent poster-size vinyl stickers with political messages atop digital advertising screens to create a flickering effect.
Since 2019, Allen has installed over 400 interruptions, which began with traditional paper posters. When New York City and the MTA added more digital ad displays, he transformed the posters into their current iteration, most recently featuring quotes from public figures that criticize either Trump or Israel. Allen installs most of his interruptions on city-owned property, such as sidewalk ads or subway monitors — even the children’s entrance of the Brooklyn Public Library.
He acknowledges his project “is temporary vandalism, technically,” but explains that the pieces are very easily removable and don’t damage the displays underneath.
For his most recent interruption, Allen used monitors owned by the Whitney without authorization from the museum. Allen chose the Whitney because he believes it “is the contemporary corporate sphere of the art industry.”
“I feel like bringing attention to this sort of issue in that context was important,” he said.
A joint Instagram post by Allen and Eye on Palestine said the installation highlights the findings of a recent UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry report.
The Israeli government has heavily criticized the report, calling it “defamatory” and a “libellous sham,” and from its inception has accused the commission of bias. Israel did not provide any information to the commission for the investigation.
“The Israeli security forces have deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children,” one poster says. Another poster stated: “If you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.”
Critics of the installation echo the Israeli government’s criticisms. Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer and content creator, called the display “blood libel.” The StopAntisemitism campaign also criticized the display on X. “they don’t care about Palestinian children,” they wrote. “The goal is to vilify Jews.”
Allen believes this is a mischaracterization. “I fully support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and I support Israel, insofar as its right to exist,” he said. “I don’t think the discussion about what’s happening in Gaza hinges at all on that.”
Though Allen’s installations are typically removed “within hours,” he says each one “has a second life, because it lives on social media, which is where it tends to get the most attention.”
The post Artist alters Whitney Museum display screens to protest Israel’s conduct in Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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European leaders downplayed the Holocaust. Now Trump is using their tactics against the Smithsonian
A new White House report accusing the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History of “extreme political activism,” and demanding the museum revise its exhibitions to elide the darker elements of the nation’s past, mirrors a troubling trend in Europe, where right-wing nationalist governments have spent the past decade forcing museums to minimize their countries’ roles in the Holocaust.
The 162-page report, issued this past weekend, faults the Smithsonian museum for dwelling, in the administration’s eyes, too heavily on slavery, and for teaching about race and gender in ways that President Donald Trump’s administration considers to “divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” It follows a 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” that directed federal institutions to purge “improper ideology” from their exhibits.
Reasonable people can disagree about specific details in museum exhibitions. But there is a difference between engaging in productive disagreements about historical emphases and demanding a national museum be solely devoted to make citizens feel good about their country. And the way that the latter approach has been used to downplay crimes against Jews in Europe should give American Jews, in particular, pause about it being deployed in their own country.
Propaganda in Poland
In 2017, Poland opened a permanent exhibit at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, which delivered a multi-layered account of the war. The exhibit highlighted Polish suffering under Nazi occupation as well as the Holocaust and the pogroms Poles carried out against their own Jewish neighbors, including the infamous 1941 Jedwabne massacre, in which several hundred Jews were burned alive in a barn by their fellow townspeople.
The right-wing Law and Justice party, known as PiS, called the exhibit “not Polish enough,” forced a merger that replaced the museum’s director, and altered the exhibition to foreground Polish heroism while softening material on Polish complicity in the extermination of three million Polish Jews. Five hundred eminent historians labeled those changes an attempt to turn the museum into a “propaganda institution.”
The following year, the Polish parliament went further, criminalizing any claim that Poland bore responsibility for Nazi crimes, with penalties of up to three years in prison. Yad Vashem warned that the law “jeopardizes the free and open discussion of the part of the Polish people in the persecution of the Jews at the time.” Under international pressure, Poland later dropped the criminal penalty, but the campaign to legislate a flattering national story had made its point.
Hungarian ahistoricism
The nation of Hungary offers an even starker case.
Former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government spent years developing the House of Fates, a Holocaust museum on the site of the Budapest rail station from which 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in a matter of weeks in 1944. Yad Vashem and Hungary’s largest Jewish federation, Mazsihisz, boycotted the project, warning that its planned narrative would leave visitors believing “the citizens of Hungary were essentially blameless for what was inflicted upon their Jewish neighbors.” In fact, Hungarian gendarmes rounded up and deported their Jewish neighbors with minimal direct German involvement.
Orbán separately made efforts to rehabilitate Miklós Horthy, Hungary’s Nazi-allied wartime ruler, as an “exceptional statesman,” and backed a Budapest statue honoring Holocaust victims that was widely seen as covering up Hungary’s role in the deportations by depicting the country as an angel attacked by a Nazi eagle. The implication: all Hungarians were equal victims of the Nazi occupation, an idea that conveniently overlooks the fact that the Nazis had many Hungarian collaborators.
The museum sat empty for years amid the dispute. Jewish leaders in Hungary have only recently reported progress toward a version that names Hungarian, and not just German, responsibility for atrocities against Jews.
The dangers of whitewashing
The recent histories of Poland and Hungary demonstrate that when a government decides that its national story shouldn’t include honest examinations of what its people did to vulnerable minorities, the nation’s integrity as a whole is imperiled.
This is the same demand the Trump administration has issued to the Smithsonian. The White House report does not claim that the museum has facts wrong; rather, it objects that the museum treats history as a tool for “social justice.” The administration demands, instead, “patriotic history” — exactly the same ultimatum issued by governments in Warsaw and Budapest.
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III says his institution’s goal is scholarship, not partisanship. The administration’s answer is that scholarship itself is the problem, if the story it tells is not celebratory enough.
The kind of “patriotic history” the administration wants entails, instead, a thinner historical accounting, built to avoid making visitors uncomfortable with the actions of their ancestors. A country pressured to foreground its heroism while pushing its failures to the margins is one that shows its own people that, effectively, minorities do not belong.
When Poland won’t discuss Jedwabne, or Hungary won’t acknowledge its own role in the deportation of Hungarian Jews, they send the message that they don’t see Jewish citizens as fully human — in either the past or the present. A U.S. that treats discussing the facts of slavery — or the immigration quotas that helped trap Jews in Europe — as a betrayal of national values is one that suggests the people it wronged, and their descendants, don’t matter.
A serious national museum has to depict a nation’s failures and achievements in the same frame. What the White House is proposing for the Smithsonian is very different, and very dangerous. Jews have watched this play out before and seen where it leads. A nation’s museums are essential to its capacity to reckon with the worst of its history. This is a capacity worth defending in Gdańsk, in Budapest, and now in Washington.
The post European leaders downplayed the Holocaust. Now Trump is using their tactics against the Smithsonian appeared first on The Forward.
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Mamdani more popular than Netanyahu among U.S. Jews, new poll shows
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose outspoken criticism of Israel has made him a frequent target of Jewish and pro-Israel advocates, is viewed more favorably by American Jews than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a new poll released Tuesday.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey of 1,022 Jewish adults nationwide, conducted from June 11 through June 17, found that 44% of American Jews hold a favorable opinion of Zohran Mamdani, compared with 39% who view him unfavorably. By contrast, just 32% of respondents said they have a favorable opinion of Netanyahu, while 59% said they have a negative view of the longtime Israeli leader
The poll suggests that Mamdani’s positions on Israel have not prevented him from maintaining a net-positive image among American Jews overall.
Mamdani won just 26% of the Jewish vote in last year’s mayoral election. Since taking office, he has faced scrutiny from Jewish leaders and Zionist organizations over his sharp criticism of Israel and embrace of Palestinian activism that is shaping his tenure as leader of the city with the largest population of Jews outside Israel. Mamdani refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and said he wouldn’t travel to the country. He has also pledged to order the arrest of Netanyahu if he visits the city on his watch, complying with an ICC arrest warrant. That will be tested in September when Netanyahu arrives to speak at the United Nations General Assembly.
Recently, the mayor skipped the annual Israel Day parade, where participation is a longstanding tradition for New York City leaders, and he also called for divestment from Israel’s economy. In congressional races in New York City, Mamdani actively campaigned for candidates who made inflammatory statements on Israel.
Netanyahu, who has been in office since 2009 except for an 18-month hiatus from 2021 to 2022, has seen his standing with Americans erode in recent years despite longstanding ties to the United States. He spent part of his childhood in the Philadelphia area, attended college in Boston and served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in the 1980s. Netanyahu has often spoken directly to American audiences, giving frequent interviews to U.S. television networks more often than he has spoken to Israeli media.
The AP survey, which had a reported margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points, also found that American Jews are increasingly critical of the Israeli government’s conduct in the Gaza war and its handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While a majority of American Jews — 73% — said Israel’s initial military response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack was justified, just 42% said they supported the continued military operations in Gaza through last year’s ceasefire. The survey also found that, similar to the broader American public, 30% of American Jews believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
The post Mamdani more popular than Netanyahu among U.S. Jews, new poll shows appeared first on The Forward.
