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Jewish farmers planted an ancient seed. Now the fruit is making its American culinary debut.
On a recent Thursday in his experimental kosher kitchen, Noah Clickstein was brining, roasting and assembling local seasonal fruits and vegetables on plates for his diners – not uncommon tasks for the head chef at Lehrhaus, a Jewish tavern and house of learning in Somerville, Massachusetts.
But one of the vegetables made what Clickstein was doing unprecedented — at least in recent centuries.
Lehrhaus is the first North American restaurant to serve the qishut (key-shoot) — an oblong, light-green fuzzy melon that resembles a cucumber and hasn’t been on Jewish dinner plates since biblical times. Clickstein has found a variety of ways to pair the melon with local produce to highlight its versatility and flavor profile.
“We love telling stories, and we love introducing new things to people,” Clickstein told The Forward. “We hope people can learn something while being here, even if it’s just eating the food.”
Thousands of years ago, Jews stewarded qishuim, a fruit that thrived in the arid regions of Egypt, Italy and Israel. The fruit’s numerous mentions across the Torah and Talmud point to how popular the produce was for Jews at the time. But as exile and assimilation transformed Jewish life in the diaspora, the rooted connection between Jews and the qishuim withered, leaving other communities in those lands to cultivate the plant.
That changed in 2021 when the Jewish Seed Project — a research initiative of the Jewish Farmer Network — sought to connect Jews in the diaspora to the ancient plant.
Cross-pollinating contemporary descendants of the qishuim in gardens across the United States and Canada, a handful of growers have inched the plant closer to its biblical description, restoring a once-lost relationship with the fruit.
Planting a seed
The Jewish Seed Project began as a collaboration. Prolific seed keeper K Greene, who runs a seed company in New York’s Hudson Valley, had long been unraveling the story of seeds, making a career of researching and preserving plants from Black and indigenous communities. But he had yet to explore seeds that connected him to his own Jewish heritage.
He approached the Jewish Farmer Network with the idea of cultivating a Jewish cucumber, or qishut.
“As a perennially displaced and shunted-from-here-to-there people, the stories of seeds that are connected to our story” have been lost, said Shani Mink, the executive director of Jewish Farmer Network, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the agrarian roots of Jewish tradition.
In modern Hebrew, the word qishuim is used to describe a Middle Eastern variety of zucchini known in Arabic as a kusa squash. However, this variety only arrived in the region a few hundred years ago, ruling it out as the qishuim mentioned in 2,000- and 3,000-year-old biblical texts.
To piece together the puzzle of qishuim, Mink called on long-time peer, Noah Weinberg, a Jewish farmer and Torah scholar who founded Gann Farm in Newton, Massachusetts.
Weinberg turned to the National Library in Jerusalem and an ethnobotanist to uncover the vegetable’s biblical lineage and mysterious disappearance from Jewish life.
They found the first clues in the Torah, in Numbers 11:5-6: “We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt free of charge, the cucumbers, the watermelons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now, our bodies are dried out, for there is nothing at all; we have nothing but manna to look at.”
“The children of Israel are in the desert, and they’re having a common experience that many of us have, which is ‘I miss the food from home,’” Weinberg told the Forward. “For them it was a bunch of alliums — leeks, onions and garlic — and it was the qishuim and watermelons. So clearly this was a staple crop that people loved and was important to them in Egypt. “
From throughout the Torah and Talmud, Weinberg collected instructions for growing, harvesting and eating the fruit.
Talmudic discourse detailed an oblong vegetable with a fuzzy exterior that grew on a vine. Pale green in color, it is best picked on the early side, before it swells and develops a bitter taste. When eaten raw, qishuim taste quite similar to a cucumber: crisp and aqueous, though with an added tinge of melon sweetness.
Weinberg even uncovered mentions of the Shomer Qisu’im (watchman of the qishuim), a person whose sole job it was to ensure the plant’s proper ripening.
Harvesting an ancient cucumber
With a textual grounding established, the Jewish Seed Project began collaborating with farmers across North America to grow “diaspora gardens,” plots where research growers would cross-pollinate contemporary qishuim seed descendants from Italy, Egypt, Israel, West Bank and Gaza in the hopes of reaching back in time through their DNA to reconnect with the crop their ancestors once sowed.
The first few years of the project yielded fruits that were quite bitter, lacked the vegetable’s signature fuzzy exterior, or failed to meet other core traits.
In 2023, after a few years of selection and cultivation, the organization released a diasporic seed mix for individuals not associated with the project to steward themselves.
Now, in its sixth year, the Jewish Seed Project is honing in on taste, with many of its growers beginning to share the fruit both with and beyond their local Jewish community.
At a Rosh Chodesh Shabbaton in Alliance, Ohio, research grower Celeste Tannenbaum offered a brief lesson about the qishut’s history and brought 18 varieties of the ancient cucumber for participants to taste and help her select which plants to reseed next year.
“The more mature ones tasted like melon and were kind of sweet,” Batya Reed, 29 told the Forward, “But I actually liked the cucumber-flavored ones more.” Reed said she tasted one so bitter that Tannenbaum announced she would not plant it again.
Edda Mendes, 29 said the plant gave them “more context for my place in the world.”
“It’s hard not to feel alienated from so much of the world, in this country, in this time period,” they said. “So I’ve been increasingly digging into local history and ecology.”
In Colorado, where the plant is grown at a farm attached to the Boulder JCC, qishuim has become one of the many produce items shared with the city’s food pantries and nutrition programs.
“We donate it, and we tell our sites to think of it as a cucumber,” Becca Gan Levy, the Boulder JCC’s Farm and Sustainability Director, told the Forward.
‘The perfect vegetable’
Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, the fruit has made its way into a commercial kitchen.
Clickstein has had the chance to experiment with the unusual vegetable each year since Lehrhaus opened in 2023.
The first year, Clickstein simply pickled the fruit. The following year, because the fruit had a dense texture similar to a squash, he sautéed it and added it to a quinoa salad layered with thinly sliced radish and roasted peppers.
This year he’s created the biggest selection to date, in what has been dubbed “Qishut-fest.” The spread features a qishut shirazi salad with tomato and red onion, blistered shishito peppers and qishuim plated on a bed of shipka pepper labneh, a savory tart filled with qishut, sautéed Swiss chard, and goat cheese spread, and of course, the time-honored vinegar-brined pickle.
“It was cool to get to see how this plant has changed,” Clickstein said.
Already, the salad and blistered pepper medley have sold out, with plans to continue serving the pickle and tart versions of the vegetable well into late October, or for as long as supplies last.
Just as its stewards have come to understand the plant more — its optimal maturity and growing conditions to ensure a pleasant flavor — so too has Clickstein come to acquaint himself and his customers with the vegetable’s versatile flavor profile.
“I really like this year’s crop and the direction it is going: meaning less bitter and more knowledge from the farmers on how to pick it correctly,” Clickstein told the Forward. He plans to lean further into cooked preparations of the crop and explore more ways to roast and sauté the vegetable to further unlock the qishut’s melon-like flavor notes.
“This was the perfect vegetable,” Clickstein said. “We serve it raw, pickled, roasted, and baked. Having tasted it these last few years, we really got to see the versatility and flavor of it, knowing it can be delicious raw as well as baked.”
Qishuim traditionally grow from April to November. As its season reaches its end, The Jewish Seed Project is already looking ahead to 2027. Using the data from the 11 participating research growers, the project will select which seeds will be grown again.
“Eventually we hope that through cross-pollination and selection for certain traits we will stabilize a variety of revived qishuim,” Mink said, “cobbled together from the genetic material stewarded by our neighbors and others over millennia.”
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How a Jewish, German-averse writer came to love Berlin
Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times
By Wendy Lesser
Harper, 352 pages, $32
For years, Wendy Lesser was a proud, Germany-avoiding Jew with what she calls “an ingrained distaste for the nation that gave rise to the Third Reich.” Then, in 2003, Lesser, founder and editor of The Threepenny Review and a prolific critic and author, was the recipient of a fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. Those few months in residence started her love affair with that history-embattled city, where she now returns regularly and feels surprisingly at home.
“One of the things I discovered, when I eventually got to Berlin,” she writes in her latest book, Berlin Before and After, “was how deeply Jewish that city’s culture still is. Or…how thoroughly the German and Jewish cultures at one time entered into each other, so that the versions we now have of them…are still colored by that mutual infusion.”
Berlin Before and After is Lesser’s highly idiosyncratic, selective take on the city — as much travelogue as cultural history. Its subtitle, A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times, evoking the civil rights abuses of the Trump era, reveals something of its raison-d’être. But Lesser doesn’t belabor the comparison, by now a cliché of American political discourse. She is at least as interested in the diverse artistic pleasures of contemporary Berlin as in the historical shadows that shape its landscape and personality.
The conceit of the book is simple: Lesser begins with an admiring look at Berlin in the year 1929, which she defines as “the last year in which it was possible to turn a blind eye” to impending disaster. “Runaway inflation, widespread economic despair, and violent social unrest were just around the corner,” she writes, “but they were invisible to most people.”
Lesser skips over the rise of the Third Reich, the Holocaust and the devastation of World War II and resumes her narrative in the contemporary city, with its wealth of museums, memorials and other cultural attractions. An aficionado of Berlin’s public transit, she ends, somewhat bizarrely, by taking readers on an extended bus ride across the city.
Some of the greatest achievements of the Weimar period, she argues, date to 1929. Lesser proceeds chronologically but also associatively, touching on architectural treatises, novels (including Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel), and the photography, paintings, silent film, dance and theater of the era. Though her focus isn’t political, she lauds the achievements of chancellor and, later, foreign minister Gustav Stresemann. She also remarks on the celebrity of Albert Einstein, one of the many German Jewish scientists and intellectuals who eventually found refuge in the United States.
In the section “Berlin Now,” Lesser is concerned with the impacts of two separate, but related traumas: the Nazi era and the Cold War, epitomized by the Berlin Wall dividing the city into east and west. Berlin’s intense memorial landscape has by now been the subject of countless articles and books, but that doesn’t impede Lesser from digging in. “Berlin is the companion who never shuts up, and what it wants to tell you about is itself,” she writes. The city “lives on a daily basis with its history in a way that is true of no other place I know.”
Lesser is right on the big picture. But her patience for dissection of both the history and its memorialization is limited. She rushes through the Topography of Terror museum (admittedly, a heavy lift), built on the site of Gestapo and SS headquarters and the Reich Security Main Office. She has little to say about the German Resistance Memorial Center, another site-specific museum, located in the military headquarters where the failed July 20, 1944, assassination plot against Adolf Hitler was planned. And she contemptuously dismisses what she calls “the self-glorifying architecture” of Daniel Libeskind’s generally acclaimed Jewish Museum Berlin in a single paragraph, without any reference to the many important shows it has mounted over the years or to its revamped (in 2020) core exhibition.
Nor does Lesser explicitly consider the notion of the “counter-memorial” — those self-effacing monuments that serve as a critique of more conventional, celebratory memorials. She nevertheless describes several of them. Among the earliest is Bibliothek, the underground “empty library” memorial on Bebelplatz, commemorating the 1933 book burnings that took place there. She visits Peter Eisenman’s vast, unmissable (and controversial) Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, but makes no mention of its excellent underground museum. She examines the now ubiquitous Stolpersteine (Stumble-Stones), recording the last known residences, deportation dates and fates of Berlin’s Jewish residents, and Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock’s Places of Remembrance, whose playful signs attached to lampposts catalog the plethora of anti-Jewish ordinances enacted by the Third Reich.
She also covers memorials to Germany’s division, including remnants of the Wall, the Stasi Museum, the Spandau Zitadelle (with its collection of “toxic monuments”) and the gruesome Hohenschönhausen Prison, whose brutal past clearly captures her imagination.
Berlin’s greatest draw for Lesser is arguably its culture, though it, too, is inseparable from history. She delves into the art of Gerhard Richter, the music of the Russian-born conductor Vladimir Jurowski, the television series Babylon Berlin, and the literature and film of East Germany.
The resulting narrative is an intellectual potpourri, probably most engaging to those who know Berlin (but not too well) or who might be contemplating a visit. Lesser follows her own wide-ranging curiosity and assumes that we’ll tag along. “Viscerally and consciously, with a kind of self-awareness that is rare in a collective entity,” she writes, radiating enthusiasm, “Berlin has continued to reveal itself to me in ways I never cease to find moving.”
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What Black voters can teach Michigan Jews about Abdul El-Sayed
Jewish Democrats in Michigan face a tough choice. They can vote for Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate whose views clash with their own, or withhold their support for the Democratic candidate for senator in a razor-close election that may determine which party controls the Senate.
In a race where a single percentage point separates the two candidates, and in which Jews make up 1.4% of the electorate, every Jewish vote counts. That’s why it’s instructive to look at the history of another minority voting bloc — Black Americans.
Black Americans have faced a version of the El-Sayed dilemma for a century: Should they support a candidate who is imperfect or even hostile on issues they care about intensely, or hold their noses, be pragmatic and vote for the larger prize of institutional power?
Black Americans “don’t have the luxury of picking a candidate who is purely for their interests,” Sam Fulwood III, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who specializes in race and public policy, told me in a phone interview. “I don’t think there’s ever been a moment in history where there’s been a pure choice.”
I get why so many Michigan Jewish voters see El-Sayed as the ultimate “impure” choice. He said he’d cut off both offensive and even defensive military aid to Israel. He called the Israeli government evil, comparing it to Hamas. He has campaigned with Hasan Piker, the influencer who called Israel “the Jewish ISIS” and said that American Jews bring violence on themselves by supporting Israel.
Amid a storm of criticism and calls to distance himself from Piker, El-Sayed reiterated his support for Jews. “I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said.
At the same time, El-Sayed’s progressive stances on health care, education and economic justice and even his sharp criticism of the Israeli government have resonated with some Jewish voters.
Others have been satisfied by his pledges to fight antisemitism and his call for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that, in his words, guarantees equal rights “for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike.”
“So many young Jewish people are active in Abdul’s campaign, and it’s their Judaism that leads them to that position,” said former U.S. Rep. Andy Levin, a self-described Zionist.
Many Michigan Jewish Democrats remain unconvinced. Just before the High Holidays, dozens of Michigan rabbis and Jewish leaders signed onto a list of “non-negotiable” principles about Jewish safety and Israel that any candidate hoping to earn their support must espouse. The petition, called Non-Negotiable Michigan, didn’t name El-Sayed directly, but it’s clear he was its target.
Ultimatums cut both ways. In setting terms for El-Sayed Jewish leaders have created one for themselves. Elections, despite what we learned in high school, aren’t popularity contests. A vote isn’t an approval. It’s a choice.
The Democratic Jews on the fence over El-Sayed may ultimately be faced, come November, with the prospect of an imperfect candidate representing a wing of the party they fear, versus two more years of a Republican majority that will continue to rubber-stamp the Trump administration’s damage to the economy, democracy, the environment, the social safety net, health care and immigrant rights.
If the choice is novel for many Jewish Democrats, it’s old news for Black Americans.
The dilemma goes back at least as far as the 1936 election, when Black voters shifted to the Democratic Party to vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt, even though FDR, fearful of losing Southern support, repeatedly refused to support federal anti-lynching legislation.
Or consider Lyndon Johnson. In 1957, Johnson, then Senate Majority Leader, stripped the enforcement teeth out of that year’s Civil Rights Act to get it passed, bypassing the objections of civil rights leaders. Seven years later, after Johnson became president and signed the Civil Rights Act, Black voters delivered him about 94% of their vote — despite a legislative record on civil rights that had been mixed at best.
Even more recently, Black voters have had to sacrifice the perfect for the good, supporting Hillary Clinton despite the impact of Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill that contributed to mass incarceration.
In all these cases, Black voters didn’t overlook or excuse these records. Instead, they made a strategic calculation to focus on the bigger goals, realizing politicians are often imperfect vehicles to get us there.
“Black Democrats have overlooked differences in the Democratic Party and even overlooked prejudice because they knew the Democratic Party was much better than the alternative,” Ada Horwich, a longtime Democratic Jewish activist in Los Angeles told me. “We need to learn from their political behavior.”
Perhaps the best example, Fulwood reminded me, was John F. Kennedy, who saw the civil rights movement as a domestic distraction. But in 1960, after Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed, Kennedy privately — so as not to offend Southern Democrats — called Coretta Scott King to offer support, while his brother Robert worked behind the scenes to secure King’s release. That persuaded King’s father, King Sr., to throw his considerable electoral influence behind the Democrat.
“He took a lot of Black voters with him,” said Fulwood, “even though Kennedy was not great.”
Fast-forward to 1963, and JFK came around to support the movement.
“It’s a difficult thing,” King Jr. said at the time, “to teach a president.”
One lesson is that politicians are teachable. Stances that seem “non-negotiable” now can change.
That mixture of cold calculation and hope is exactly what this election is asking Jewish Michiganders to negotiate. Or, as Fulwood said of so many electoral choices Black Americans have faced, “One candidate is very bad, and one is less bad.”
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South Florida Democrat Moskowitz airs campaign ad targeting antisemitism with concentration camp footage
(JTA) — South Florida U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz pulled on his family’s story as Jews in the Holocaust in a campaign ad targeting antisemitism, as he strives to retain his seat in the November general election.
“In every generation, they rise against us,” the Jewish incumbent says in the ad over a background of somber music and black-and-white photos from a concentration camp. “My great-grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz.”
“In our generation, right here, the Parkland shooter had swastikas carved into his gun,” he continues, standing in front of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, referring to the 2018 fatal shooting that killed 14 students and three educators.
Moskowitz, a top Democratic supporter of Israel in Congress, who fended off progressive challenger Oliver Larkin in a heated August primary, emphasizes in the ad that he has worked to fight antisemitism through bipartisan laws. Some of this legislative action has involved increasing security at synagogues and Jewish nonprofits and expanding education to reduce hate crimes.
“Never again is now,” Moskowitz concludes.
Moskowitz won the August primary with 63.5% of Democratic voter support, to Larkin’s 36.5%. But Larkin was vocal throughout the race about his opposition to arms sales to Israel, going so far as to label the country as a “religious supremacist” nation.
As Moskowitz prepares to face former Boca Raton Mayor Scott Singer, a Republican who is also Jewish, the Democrat may be facing a tight race in a region that had previously been solidly blue.
The 25th Congressional District, which includes parts of Delray Beach, Boca Raton and Miami Beach, is about 25% Jewish, according to local estimates.
Yet recent redistricting efforts have transformed the region into territory that President Donald Trump would have likely won in the 2024 elections. In fact, the Cook Political Report declared a shift from “solid D” to “toss up.”
“There’s no doubt that the race for the new 25th District will be highly competitive in a favorable environment for Democrats,” the report stated.
Moskowitz’s team emphasized the “deeply personal” nature of the congressman’s battle against antisemitism, in a statement issued alongside the ad’s release. He is confronting this challenge, his team explained, by “connecting his family’s experience during the Holocaust to the hatred that continues to threaten our communities today.”
While Moskowitz’s great-grandparents died in Auschwitz, his grandparents were able to escape Europe right before the war. His grandmother left on the Kindertransport, an organized effort that rescued Jewish children from Nazi-controlled territories beginning in 1938.
By Tuesday evening, the Google Ads Transparency Center, which includes data on YouTube ads, did not yet reflect how much money the campaign had spent on its ads there. Meta’s Ad Library also did not yet have data as to how much had been spent on the Facebook version of the ad posted there.
Stephen Sussman, a professor of public administration at Barry University, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that although “Holocaust imagery should never become routine campaign material,” he doesn’t believe that this ad has crossed a line.
“The Holocaust was, of course, a real event that continues to shape Jewish life and memory,” Sussman said, recognizing that Moskowitz’s great-grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz and that many Jews today feel threatened by antisemitism.
“He is not comparing his opponent to Hitler or using the Holocaust to make an unrelated political attack,” Sussman added.
The professor also noted the ad’s direct connections to the congressman’s record, such as his leadership in passing bipartisan legislation on antisemitism awareness and in boosting funding for synagogue security.
Sussman acknowledged that when Holocaust imagery becomes part of a campaign, there “is a legitimate concern” that other people might deploy that imagery less responsibly. But he stressed that given Moskowitz’s history and work record, as well as the current political climate, this particular ad is “powerful but defensible.”
Ken Goldstein, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco, offered a similar perspective, explaining that of the thousands of ads he has watched in his lifetime, he found this one to be powerful but not particularly controversial.
“He was certainly using pictures of the Holocaust, jarring images, but they were his family’s story,” said Goldstein, who is an expert on the impacts of political advertising.
“I don’t think he’s using it to personally attack anybody else except the Parkland shooter,” he added, noting that the ad isn’t being used to attack an opponent. “This one does not strike me as particularly harsh, unfair, or out of bounds at all.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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