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In Turkey, a festival revives a jewel of the Sephardic world and aims to break stereotypes
IZMIR, Turkey (JTA) — Prague has the dubious honor of being chosen by Adolf Hitler to be a record of what he hoped would be the vanquished Jews of Europe. The Nazis left many of the city’s synagogues and Jewish sites relatively intact, intending to showcase them as the remnants of an extinct culture.
That has made Prague a popular tourist destination for both Jewish travelers and others interested in Jewish history since the fall of the Iron Curtain: the city provides an uncommon look into the pre-war infrastructure of Ashkenazi Europe.
Could Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city, become a Sephardic version, in terms of history and tourism? That’s the goal for Nesim Bencoya, director of the Izmir Jewish Heritage project.
The city, once known in Greek as Smyrna, has had a Jewish presence since antiquity, with early church documents mentioning Jews as far back as the second century AD. Like elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, though, its community grew exponentially with the influx of Sephardic Jews who came after their expulsion from Spain.
At its peak, the city was home to around 30,000 Jews and was the hometown of Jewish artists, writers and rabbis — from the esteemed Pallache and Algazii rabbinical families, to the musician Dario Marino, to the famously false messiah, Shabbetai Zevi, whose childhood home still stands in Izmir today.
Today, fewer than 1,300 remain. The establishment of the state of Israel, coupled with a century of economic and political upheaval, led to the immigration of the majority of Turkish Jewry.
“From the 17th century, Izmir was a center for Sephardic Jewry,” Bencoya told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We can’t recreate that, but we cannot forget that either.”
Izmir is located on Turkey’s Aegean coast. (David I. Klein)
Celebrating in the former Jewish quarter
Bencoya, who is in his late 60s, was born in Izmir but spent most of his adult life in Israel, where he led the Haifa Cinematheque, but he returned to Izmir 13 years ago to helm the heritage project, which has worked to highlight the the culture and history of Izmir’s Jewish community.
Over nine days in December that included the week of Hanukkah, thousands attended the annual Sephardic culture festival that he has organized since 2018. The festival included concerts of Jewish and Ladino music, traditional food tastings, lectures on Izmir’s Jewish community, and — since it coincided with Hanukkah and also a Shabbat — both a menorah lighting ceremony and havdalah ceremony were conducted with explanations from Izmir’s leading cantor, Nesim Beruchiel.
This year’s festival marked a turning point: it was the first in which organizers were able to show off several of the centuries-old synagogues that the project — with funding from the European Union and the local municipality — has been restoring.
The synagogues, most of which are clustered around a street still called Havra Sokak (havra being the Turkish spelling of the Hebrew word chevra, or congregation) represent a unique piece of cultural heritage.
Nesim Bencoya speaks from his office next to the restored Sinyora Synagogue in Izmir. (David I. Klein)
Once upon a time, the street was the heart of the Jewish quarter or “Juderia,” but today it is right in the middle of Izmir’s Kemeralti Bazaar, a bustling market district stretching over 150 acres where almost anything can be bought and sold. On Havra Sokak, the merchants hock fresh fruits, and hopefully fresher fish. One street to the south one can find all manner of leather goods; one to the north has markets for gold, silver and other precious metals; one to the west has coffee shops. In between them all are other shops selling everything from crafts to tchotchkes to kitchenware to lingerie.
Several mosques and a handful of churches dot the area, but the synagogues revive a unique character of the district that had been all but lost.
“The synagogues here were built under the light of Spain. But in Spain today, there are only two major historic synagogues, Toledo and Cordoba, and they are big ones. You don’t have smaller ones. Here we have six on one block, built with the memory of what was there by those who left Spain,” Bencoya said.
Those synagogues have been home to major events in Jewish history — such as when Shabbetei Zvi broke into Izmir’s Portuguese Synagogue one Sabbath morning, drove out his opponents and declared himself the messiah (he cultivated a large following but was later imprisoned and forced to convert to Islam). The synagogue, known in Turkish as Portekez, was among those restored by the project.
Today, only two of Izmir’s synagogues are in regular use by its Jewish community, but the others that were restored are now available as exhibition and event spaces.
Educating non-Jews
Hosting the festival within Izmir’s unique synagogues has an additional purpose, since the overwhelming majority of the attendees were not Jewish.
“Most of the people who come to the festival have never been to a synagogue, maybe a small percentage of them have met a Jew once in their lives,” Bencoya said.
That’s particularly important in a country where antisemitic beliefs are far from uncommon. In a 2015 study by the Anti-Defamation League, 71% of respondents from Turkey believe in some antisemitic stereotypes.
The festival included concerts of Jewish and Ladino music, traditional food tastings and lectures on Izmir’s Jewish community.(David I. Klein)
“This festival is not for Jewish people to know us, but for non-Jews,” Bencoya said. Now, “Hundreds of Turkish Muslim people have come to see us, to listen to our holidays and taste what we do.”
Kayra Ergen, a native of Izmir who attended a Ladino concert and menorah lighting event at the end of the festival, told JTA that until a year ago, he had no idea how Jewish Izmir once was.
“I know that Anatolia is a multicultural land, and also Turkey is, but this religion, by which I mean Jewish people, left this place a long time ago because of many bad events. But it’s good to remember these people, and their roots in Izmir,” Ergen said. “This is so sad and lame to say out loud, but I didn’t know about this — that only 70 years ago, 60% of this area here in Konak [the district around Kemeralti] was Jewish. Today I believe only 1,300 remain. This is not good. But we must do whatever we can and this festival is a good example of showing the love between cultures.”
“I think it’s good that we’re respecting each other in here,” said Zeynep Uslu, another native of Izmir. “A lot of different cultures and a lot of different people. It’s good that we’re together here celebrating something so special.”
Izmir’s history as a home for minorities has not been all rosy. At the end of the Ottoman period, the city was around half Greek, a tenth Jewish and a tenth Armenian, while the remainder were Turkish Muslims and an assortment of foreigners. In the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922 — remembered in Turkey as the Turkish War of Independence — the Greek and Armenian quarters of Izmir were burned to the ground after the Turkish army retook the city from the Greek forces, killing tens of thousands. A mass exodus of the survivors followed, but the Jewish and Muslim portions of the city were largely unharmed.
Izmir is not the only city in Turkey which has seen its synagogues restored in recent years. Notable projects are being completed in Edirne, a city on the Turkish western border near Bulgaria, and Kilis, on its southeastern border near Syria. Unlike Izmir, though, no Jews remain in either of those cities today, and many have accused the project of being a tool for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government to assuage accusations of antisemitism, without actually dealing with living Jews.
Losing Ladino and a ‘quiet’ mindset
Bencoya lamented that he is among the last generation for whom Ladino — the Judeo-Spanish language traditionally spoken by Sephardic Jews, but only spoken by tens of thousands today — was at least a part of his childhood.
“When you lose language, it’s not only technical, it’s not only vocabulary, it’s a whole world and a way of thinking,” Bencoya said.
The project is challenging a local Jewish mentality as well. Minority groups in Izmir, especially Jews, “have for a long time preferred not to be seen, not to be felt,” according to Bencoya.
That mindset has been codified in the Turkish Jewish community’s collective psyche in the form of a Ladino word, “kayedes,” which means something along the lines of “shhh,” “be quiet,” or “keep your head down.”
“This is the exact opposite that I want to do with this festival — to be felt, to raise awareness of my being,” Bencoya said.
The Bikur Holim Synagogue is one of the few still functioning in Izmir. (David I. Klein)
One way of doing that, he added, was having the festival refer to the community’s identity “as Yahudi and not Musevi!” Both are Turkish words that refer to Jews: the former having the same root as the English word Jew — the Hebrew word Yehuda or Judea — while the latter means “follower of Moses.”
“Yahudi, Musevi, Ibrani [meaning Hebrew, in Turkish] — they all mean the same thing, but in Turkey, they say Musevi because it sounds nicer,” Bencoya said. “To Yahudi there are a lot of negative superlatives — dirty Yahudi, filthy Yahudi, and this and that. So I insist on saying that I am Yahudi, because people have a lot of pre-judgements about the name Yahudi. So if you have prejudgements about me, let’s open them and talk about them.”
“I am not so romantic that I can eliminate all antisemitism, but if I can eliminate some of the prejudgements, then I can live a little more at peace,” he added.
So far, he feels the festival is a successful first step.
“The non-Jewish community of Izmir is fascinated,” Bencoya said. “If you look on Facebook and Instagram, they are talking about it, they are fighting over tickets, which sell out almost immediately.”
Now, he is only wondering how next year he will be able to fit more people into the small and aged synagogues.
“For Turkey, [the festival] is very important because Turkey can be among the enlightened nations of the world, only by being aware of the differences between groups of people, such as Jews, Christians, others, and Muslims,” he said.
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‘There was a campaign’: UN torture official says colleagues tried to block her letter documenting Oct. 7 atrocities
An Australian lawyer tasked by the United Nations with monitoring and documenting allegations of torture and cruelty is accusing colleagues within the UN human rights system of trying to block the publication of a Jan. 2024 letter she wrote documenting allegations of abuses committed during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel months earlier.
Alice Edwards, who since 2022 has served as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, said she faced weeks of pressure from colleagues who argued that allegations included in the letter she drafted were false and urged her not to send it.
“There was a campaign to prevent that letter going out,” Edwards said in remarks delivered earlier this month at University College London and obtained by the Forward. “There was weeks of being bullied and deterred from writing it and telling me that everything in it was false.”
Edwards’ statements resurfaced a long-simmering conflict in the UN human rights system around its treatment of Israel, which is frequently singled out by UN resolutions and by rapporteurs as a perpetrator of human rights violations.
Meanwhile, other UN rapporteurs have declared doubts on evidence of sexual violence committed during the Oct. 7 attacks — prompting a surviving hostage and the head of an investigative commission that published a report last month compiling witness and survivor testimonies to confront them this week at a hearing in Geneva.
Edwards’ letter, sent in early 2024 to Palestinian authorities and copied to Hamas, detailed allegations of torture, sexual violence, including rapes and gang rapes, burning people alive, and other abuses committed during the Oct. 7 attacks.
According to Edwards, colleagues had given extensive feedback on drafts of the letter, with some items removed from the final version as a result. “All the comments of these individuals had been taken into account,” she said, adding that “the letter shrunk considerably.”
Even after those revisions, Edwards said, only one counterpart — the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Morris Tidball-Binz — ultimately signed the communication before it was sent.
Other special rapporteurs and working groups who had expressed interest in signing it, she said, “had also been bullied by others not to sign on.” Edwards added: “There was this concerted effort for this letter not to put on record some allegations that had been received.”
Contacted by the Forward, Danny Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN sent a written statement. “Dr. Alice Edwards’ testimony exposes an uncomfortable truth: when it comes to Israel, facts are too often sacrificed on the altar of politics,” said Danon. “The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable. For more than two years, Israel has documented and presented the horrific crimes committed against its citizens.”
UN special rapporteurs are independent human rights experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to monitor, investigate and advise on thematic topics that include torture, violence against women, and education among others. While their recommendations are not binding, their advice informs UN action and aims to influence governments’ responses to alleged violations.
Israeli officials and advocacy groups had long argued that the United Nations devotes disproportionate attention to Israel’s alleged wrongdoing compared to other countries and holds Israel to a double standard. Since the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, they say, the UN and its rapporteurs have not adequately condemned Hamas’ atrocities and the treatment of Israeli hostages.
Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has said that the Israeli government’s failure to cooperate with her mandate has undermined investigative efforts and “represents a profound injustice to all the victims.” She also has called into question reports from victims, witnesses and investigators who described rape as part of the Oct. 7 violence.
In a post on X in November 2025, Alsalem wrote: “No Palestinian applauded rape in Gaza. No independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October 2023.”
She also wrote of allegations of Hamas perpetrated sexual violence against Israelis: “I firmly believe that never have we seen such a weaponization of accusations of sexual violence as well as disinformation to manufacture consent for the commission of a genocide – aided and abetted by the media and governments around the world.”
The tensions resurfaced publicly this week at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva when Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, founder and chair of the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, presented findings from the commission’s recently published report, Silenced No More.
The report, which has been received by governments, international organizations, academic institutions, and policymakers around the world and boasts many endorsers, is the most comprehensive body of evidence yet of sexual violence on October 7. It catalogues witness testimonies, accounts from hostages about sexual abuse during their captivity, and analysis of over 10,000 photos and videos, including hours-long videos recorded by the perpetrators.
“For two years, we immersed ourselves in testimonies of unimaginable violence,” Elkayam-Levy said Wednesday during her presentation of the findings at the UN in Geneva. “We revealed 13 patterns of abuse — including rape, gang rape, sexual torture, burning, and the deliberate mutilation of victims’ faces and genitalia.”
She went on to single out the UN human rights representatives as unresponsive to the evidence. “Will the UN rapporteurs who doubted or denied these crimes acknowledge the truth?” she said, adding, “We call upon you to recognize our findings.”
A day earlier, Ilana Gritzewsky, a survivor of Hamas captivity who has spoken publicly about sexual violence she experienced, confronted Alsalem directly during a live testimony in an emotional appeal.
“Ms. Alsalem, you said there was no evidence of sexual violence on October 7,” she said. “I am the living proof of sexual violence by Hamas. When I and other Israeli women begged not to be raped, why were you silent?”
‘She was very brave’
Asked about Edwards’ allegations, the UN office that supports the special rapporteurs and other independent human rights experts provided a statement to the Forward: “While the experts frequently issue joint communications on issues that engage multiple mandates, participation in any particular communication remains at the full discretion of each expert, in line with their mandate.”
According to Dr. Shelly Aviv Yeini, the former head of the international law department at the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, Edwards and the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, were among a small number of UN officials who meaningfully engaged with hostage families after the terror attacks. Individuals within the Office of the Secretary-General reached out later in the war.
Aviv Yeini told the Forward that her group and the International Jewish Lawyers Organization provided Edwards with a report that informed Edwards’ later work. Edwards published a report determining that the families of hostages should also be recognized as direct victims of torture and hosted an event in Geneva alongside the forum to present and discuss those findings.
“I think she was very brave, acknowledging the families and defending us in a time when it wasn’t so easy,” said Yeini.
Adam Wagner, who spoke at the event and represented hostages with British ties taken by Hamas, told Edwards that she was “the only UN official” whom hostage families felt “ever reached out to them or did anything for them.”
Edwards’ position at the UN, like those of all other UN rapporteurs, is unpaid. As a part of her work, she is able to go on one official visit to a country for the purpose of investigating allegations of torture per year. Edwards says she supplemented this with several other trips, which she funded herself. In December 2024, she embarked on a self-funded trip to Israel to investigate the Oct. 7 atrocities, during which she visited southern Israel, including kibbutzim that had been decimated by Hamas, and spoke with victims and hostage families, among others.
Edwards said at the talk that she believes she was the only UN special rapporteur to request access to the video compilation assembled by Israeli authorities to personally review footage from the Oct. 7 attacks. According to Yeini, Edwards met repeatedly with hostage families, visited attack sites, and reviewed evidence firsthand.
Edwards told the Forward in a statement that the role of independent experts is “to document violations wherever they occur and regardless of the identity of the victims or the perpetrators.”
“Our credibility depends on maintaining public confidence that human rights are applied universally,” she said. “Where people perceive selectivity, double standards or political alignment, confidence is weakened.”
The post ‘There was a campaign’: UN torture official says colleagues tried to block her letter documenting Oct. 7 atrocities appeared first on The Forward.
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The Netanyahu-Trump alliance reaches its breaking point
For decades, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest political asset was the United States. Even Israelis who distrusted him, opposed him, or blamed him for deepening the country’s divisions often accepted one proposition: Netanyahu understood the U.S. better than any other politician. He knew how to preserve Israel’s position at the center of American politics and power, without which the country would be in danger.
That belief is no more.
As negotiators meet this week to discuss the future of the Middle East, Israel finds itself in an extraordinary position. Central questions under discussion involve Israel’s security, Israel’s freedom of military action, and the future of Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions.
Yet Israel is not in the room. Iran is.
The result, in Israel, has been something close to wall-to-wall shock and condemnation. And the harshest criticism is aimed not at the agreement but at Netanyahu himself. Switzerland looks like a vindication of the deepest concerns of opponents who have long argued that Netanyahu mortgaged Israel’s bipartisan support in Washington in exchange for a close relationship with President Donald Trump.
“The strategic damage that this government is leaving behind in terms of our relationship with the United States is damage that will take years to repair,” said former Cabinet minister Izhar Shai.
Netanyahu “built Israel’s entire strategic position around President Trump,” Shai added. “But Trump does what is good for himself and for his voters. He does not act on behalf of the state of Israel.”
Someone might want to convey that message to Trump, who has repeatedly suggested that he determines what Israel can and cannot do, and publicly implied that Netanyahu follows his instructions.
Now, as Trump makes promises about Israel’s actions without Israel in the room, he’s solidified the international impression that the hallowed U.S.-Israel relationship has been reduced to that of a superpower dictating terms to an utterly dependent client. No American president from either party has treated an Israeli prime minister this way — at least in public.
An alliance close to fracturing
Many Israelis are confronting the once-unthinkable possibility that their country’s relationship with the U.S. has been materially damaged by the very leader who claimed unique mastery over it. The concern is not merely that Trump disagrees with Netanyahu. It is that influential figures in Washington increasingly appear to believe that Netanyahu helped draw the U.S. into a military confrontation with Iran based on assumptions that were flawed from the outset.
Since Netanyahu spent years narrowing Israel’s political base in the U.S., there’s nowhere for Israel to turn. Netanyahu’s repeated confrontations with Democratic administrations, beginning most dramatically with his 2015 speech objecting to President Barack Obama’s proposed nuclear deal with Iran, steadily weakened bipartisan support. His identification with Trump — whom he openly supported in the 2024 election — meaningfully deepened that trend.
Meanwhile, relations with many European governments deteriorated, especially during the cataclysmic Gaza war. The result is that Israel now finds itself with fewer reserves of international goodwill than at any point in recent memory.
For Israelis, the American relationship has never primarily been about aid. The billions of dollars in annual military assistance are important, but for a half-trillion-dollar economy they are not decisive. The real value of the alliance is strategic.
American backing provides Israel with a level of deterrence that no other country can offer. It shields Israel diplomatically, particularly at the United Nations. It anchors the network of trade, investment, technological cooperation and international legitimacy on which Israeli prosperity depends. Without that support, Israel would face far greater risks of diplomatic isolation, economic pressure and boycotts.
Israelis understand this intuitively, even if their politics do not always reflect it. It is their prosperous economy that finances a sophisticated military. International trade and investment help sustain that prosperity. Strong alliances help make those relationships possible.
Remove enough pieces from that structure, and eventually even Israel’s military power will begin to erode. Remove the U.S., and it could crumble.
A boon for Israel’s military foes
The immediate strategic implications of negotiations are also serious. If Washington agrees to constrain Israeli freedom of action in Lebanon as part of a broader accommodation with Tehran, as appears possible, Israel could find itself pressured by its strongest ally to withdraw from positions it regards as essential to its security. For residents of northern Israel, many of whom only recently returned home after months of displacement, that prospect is deeply unsettling.
And a weakened Israeli deterrent could strengthen Hezbollah politically as well as militarily. The organization is battered. But if Israel is forced to accept restrictions on its freedom of action while Hezbollah remains intact, the Lebanese government — which recently took risks by signaling a willingness to challenge Hezbollah’s dominance — may conclude that confrontation is no longer worth the danger.
In the worst case scenario, Hezbollah could emerge from the crisis with greater influence than before, emboldened to test Israel through provocations, targeted attacks or efforts to intimidate opponents inside Lebanon.
Israel’s military future as regards Iran also looks grim. The Islamic Republic has emerged strategically strengthened from this conflict. It’s all but certain that Tehran has no real plans to abandon its long-term nuclear ambitions, even if it accepts temporary restrictions. Israelis’ expectation now is that Iran will eventually resume enrichment activities — while Israel’s ability to respond militarily has been narrowed by understandings reached over its head.
That is why the current moment feels so dangerous. Israelis are considering, for the first time for real, that by relying on Trump, Netanyahu has wrecked the strategic framework that has underwritten Israel’s security and prosperity for generations. The October election may therefore become more than a referendum on the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, Gaza or Iran. It may become a referendum on the central promise that sustained Netanyahu’s political career for decades: that whatever his faults, he knew how to manage America.
The post The Netanyahu-Trump alliance reaches its breaking point appeared first on The Forward.
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The White House cabinet is eating like your zayde
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is hawking a new diet: sauerkraut. Yes, lacto-fermented cabbage. And it’s catching on with Trump’s cabinet, according to The Wall Street Journal, which reported that Vice President JD Vance, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are all heaping their plates with cabbage — apparently “drawn by the promise of slimmer waistlines and glowing skin.”
This claim may sound like it belongs in the marketing material for some sort of beauty product, or a scammy gas station supplement, rather than a jar of preserved vegetables. But RFK Jr. boasted that he lost 20 lbs in 30 days from eating mass amounts of the stuff. One might assume something like a tapeworm is responsible for such extreme weight loss — especially given Kennedy’s previous worm-related medical issues — but he asserts it’s all thanks to cabbage.
The diet, drawn up by one Dr. Sean O’Mara, an MD who advertises himself as an “executive biological consultant to high-performance leaders,” is apparently not just about sauerkraut; it includes other fermented vegetables, urges followers to also eat steak, snack on “old world cheese” and cut out alcohol and sugar.
Admittedly, this sounds like a fairly normal, low-carb diet. But sauerkraut is so core to the meal plan that members of the cabinet have taken to making their own, and carrying it around just to make sure they’re never without. Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, said on a podcast with Steven Miller’s wife, Katie, that she has had to refuse to stow a container of sauerkraut in her clutch when she and her husband go out for a nice evening. But, she said, he brings it anyway, presumably in his own bag. Or maybe tucked under his arm.
It’s hard to imagine anything more bubbie-coded than whipping out a jar of sauerkraut from a handbag while out at a nice dinner.
It’s not that Jews have some kind of patent on fermented vegetables; they exist in many cultures, like kimchi in Korea and miso in Japan. Sauerkraut specifically is common throughout European countries like Germany, Czechia and Russia.
But in the U.S., there’s a pretty strong association between Jews and pickles, whether they be sauerkraut or cucumbers, thanks to the deli culture imported with Jewish immigrants into the U.S. Jews created a pickle district on the Lower East Side, selling the preserved vegetables from pushcarts and spreading the food through the city. We’ve long been aware of the healthy gut biome effects of a lacto-fermented vegetable.
Ashkenazi food has long been made fun of for being gross — largely thanks to innovations like jarred gefilte fish, its beige-heavy color palette and, as the Wall Street Journal piece hinted at, the diet’s resulting gastrointestinal effects. Much of shtetl food culture was the result of hardship, and the need to preserve food through long winters, not an attempt for glowing skin and slim waistlines. The hardier the vegetable, the longer it lasted. Enter the cabbage. There are few foods less sexy than cabbage. (And I love cabbage.)
Which is why it’s so funny to see some of the most powerful men in the U.S. adopting the diet of a poor shtetl Jew — and doing so for aesthetic reasons.
There are a lot of weird diets and quasi-scientific buzzwords like “seed oils” and “clean protein” floating through the MAHA world that these American leaders often play to. But most of those, at least the ones promoted by men like Vance, have some cross-over focus on manliness and discipline — they’re about building muscle in some sort of primitive way. Think the carnivore diet or Kennedy’s obsession with beef tallow. Seeing these men turn to a diet I associate with my grandmother because they want to lose weight feels absurd, especially in the days of Ozempic for those with the funds to pay for it. Perhaps that does not have the right optics.
Of course, sauerkraut is nothing to be ashamed of. In recent years, Jews have been reclaiming pride in their food cultures; bespoke pickling classes have boomed. So the White House cabinet’s sauerkraut kick is really just them being really late to the shtetl chic trend. But you still should probably be ashamed of smuggling your own food into a nice restaurant, even if it’s sauerkraut.
The post The White House cabinet is eating like your zayde appeared first on The Forward.
