Uncategorized
Panettone, the Christmas cake, is having a moment — and a Jewish chef has carved off a big slice
(JTA) – Panettone, the fluffy, fruit-speckled archetypal Christmas cake, is this holiday season’s “it” dessert — and the creator of perhaps the most coveted version in the United States is an Israeli-American Jew.
The New York Times this week credited baker Roy Shvartzapel with spearheading “the American panettone revolution” through his business From Roy.
Shvartzapel has dedicated the bulk of his career to the airy Italian cakes, training under Iginio Massari, the undisputed master baker in Italy, and obsessing over each ingredient and step in the 40-hour production cycle. After a flurry of coverage in his company’s early days in 2016, and especially since being endorsed by Oprah Winfrey in 2018, Shvartzapel’s business has grown dramatically. Last year, he said he expected to sell nearly 300,000, at $75 a piece, both in stores and via mail order. This year, the price is $85, and preorders sold out by — without, Shvartzapel said on a podcast last year, any spending on marketing.
While Shvartzapel’s goal of turning panettone into a year-round treat means he has several non-traditional flavors in his repertoire, From Roy only offers a few at a time — and the company plans to keep it that way.
“There’s lots of pastry items that I love that I will never be making for my business,” Shvartzapel said on the podcast, with the chef Chris Cosentino. “I’m a big believer that less is more, generally speaking, in most things.”
Shvartzapel declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this month, explaining through a publicist that he was too busy before Christmas to speak. But in public comments and social media posts made before this year’s panettone “gold rush,” as the New York Times put it, he has offered details about the intersection of his Jewish identity and his Christmas baking.
From Roy’s cherry, white chocolate and pistachio panettone with almond glaze and pearl sugar as seen in the company’s California kitchen, Oct. 20, 2016. (Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Born in Karmiel, Israel, where a statue modeled on his mother holding him as an infant stands in a park, Shvartzapel was raised in Houston and now lives in California’s Bay Area with his children and Israeli-born wife, who also helped launch From Roy. A devoted athlete as a teenager, he played collegiate basketball and spent time on Karmiel’s Maccabi team but realized he would never make the NBA.
“Like every good Jewish boy,” Shvartzapel told David Chang, the Momofuku chef, on a 2019 podcast interview, he considered becoming a lawyer before realizing that cooking played to his passions and strengths.
After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 2004, Shvartzapel began looking for work in New York City. It was a cookbook by the Jewish baker Dorie Greenspan that indirectly led to his first job: He spotted a lemon tart in a new cafe that looked like one she had photographed by the master French chef Pierre Hermé, then talked his way into a job working there, at Bouley Bakery, under Hermé’s former executive chef. Ultimately, that led to him working in Paris, where he had the panettone that changed his life.
“The texture, the aroma, the chew,” he said in 2018. ”I tasted it and it was like one of those meditative lights-off moments. The crazy love affair began.”
Shvartzapel has spoken extensively about his intense work ethic, his struggles with depression and, of course, what sets his panettone apart from low-cost supermarket varieties. He has said less publicly about himself as a Jew. But last year, on Facebook, he wished his friends a happy Passover with a picture of a cheesy omelet and a side of chopped liver — both prepared with attention to the holiday’s prohibitions on leavened bread (such as panettone) but, together, not a kosher meal.
“Modern jew … I mean, gotta combine the dairy and the meat to make it particularly kosher for Passover,” he wrote, adding laughing emojis.
Although panettone is often mentioned in the same breath as its Jewish enriched-dough cousin, babka, its history is rooted in the Catholic Church. Legend has it that it was created by accident on a 15th-century Christmas Eve, and was served to Catholic students and even the pope by the 1500s, according to records from the time.
Still, it makes sense that America’s most prominent panettone maker is Jewish, according to Debbie Prinz, a food historian and author of the forthcoming book “On The Bread Trail,” which grew out of her exploration of Jewish celebration cakes.
“It’s not surprising that there’s this interchange, especially today, since the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews are even fewer than they used to be,” Prinz said.
But while Shvartzapel’s panettone path may be modern, historic patterns of cultural collision have often cut the other way, sending traditionally Jewish foods onto the Christmas table.
One notable example appears to be lebkuchen, a fruit-studded spice cookie popular in Germany. While the origins of the treat are not clear, one theory is that lebkuchen entered German cuisine through lekach, a honey cake eaten by Italian Jewish traders passing through during the Middle Ages, according to researchers at the Leo Baeck Institute, a German Jewish institution. (German Jews fleeing the Nazis imported contemporary lebkuchen recipes and, in several cases, became successful lebkuchen purveyors in New York.)
Meanwhile, in panettone’s home country of Italy, traditional Christmas menus include a host of dishes that are likely to have originated in Jewish kitchens: pezzetti fritti or mixed fried vegetables; bigoli, or buckwheat noodles, with onion and anchovies; spongata, a cake imported from Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition; and nociata, or nut bars.
Legendary panettone maker Iginio Massari poses in his bakery Pasticceria Veneto in Brescia, Italy, in June 2019. (Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)
Many of those foods were historically Jewish because they made use of ingredients such as eggplant that were considered distasteful by non-Jewish Italians, or of ingredients such as anchovies that Jews used because they were not permitted to access higher-quality fish.
“There are a number of recipes that we call Jewish that came out of the fact that the Italians were really nasty to Jews,” said Benedetta Jasmine Guetta, author of “Cooking all Guidia: A Celebration of the Jewish Food of Italy.”
“Most of the time, actually I’m going to say 100% of the time, people don’t know” that the dishes were originally Jewish, Guetta added. “This is a common problem and the reason why I wrote my book.”
But while Guetta’s focus is on the Jewish foods of Italy, in December, she often turns to that famous domed Christmas cake.
“I have definitely grown up eating a great deal of panettone. My parents checked the ingredients to make sure it didn’t contain pork fat,” she said. “It’s a yummy seasonal treat.”
—
The post Panettone, the Christmas cake, is having a moment — and a Jewish chef has carved off a big slice appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Anne Frank and ‘Night’ may soon be required reading in Texas public schools. Is that good for the Jews?
(JTA) — In the years since school libraries became a culture-war flashpoint, Texas has been one of the most active states to pull books from shelves in response to parental complaints — sometimes including versions of Anne Frank’s diary and other Jewish books.
Now, Texas is pursuing a new approach: requiring that Frank’s diary, and several other Jewish texts, be taught throughout the state.
The Texas state education board recently discussed draft legislation that would create the nation’s first-ever statewide K-12 required reading list for public schools. Among the roughly 300 texts on the list: Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night”; Lois Lowry’s young-reader Holocaust novel “Number the Stars”; George Washington’s letter to a Rhode Island synagogue in 1790, and Frank’s diary — the “original edition.”
Each of the works could become mandatory reading for Texas’s 5.5 million schoolchildren as soon as the 2030-31 school year, as the state’s conservative education leaders seek to reverse a nationwide decline in the number of books read or assigned in class while also constraining the texts that activist parents tend to object to. Instead of letting individual teachers put together reading lists that might include “divisive” or progressive content, Republicans in Texas are trying to nudge the curriculum toward a “classical education” said to draw on the Western canon.
Supporters said the list would help ensure every student is on the same page.
“We want to create an opportunity for a shared body of knowledge for all the students across the state of Texas,” Shannon Trejo, deputy commissioner of programs for the Texas Education Agency, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about why the group undertook the list project.
While state lawmakers passed a law mandating at least one required book per grade, the board has decided to implement a full reading list. Trejo said the options had been whittled down from thousands of titles suggested in a statewide teachers survey. They were also cross-referenced with a variety of other sources, including books from “high-performing educational systems” in other states and reading lists from the high-IQ society Mensa.
“We’re trying to help students love reading again,” LJ Francis, a Republican member of the state school board who supports the list, said during the Jan. 28 meeting. “I personally think schools should be teaching more than what we have on this list.”
The proposal underscores a complicated moment for Jewish literature in Texas schools, where books about the Holocaust and Jewish history have recently been pulled from shelves amid parental complaints but are now poised to become required reading statewide. Jewish educators and free-speech advocates say the shift reflects both recognition of Holocaust education’s importance — and continuing tensions over who controls what students read and how those stories are taught.
The overall list largely centers the Western canon and deemphasizes modern works as well as most books about race and identity, although selections from Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass and other Black American authors made the cut. The Bible is also heavily represented, with selections from both the Old and New Testaments on the reading list.
The state’s Holocaust Remembrance Week education mandate means that Jews are one of the few ethnic groups whose stories are fairly well represented on the state’s required reading list. That doesn’t mean that Holocaust educators are unreservedly enthusiastic about the new approach.
“Obviously I’m pleased that they’re including quality Holocaust materials,” Deborah Lauter, executive director of TOLI, the Olga Lenkyel Institute for Holocaust Studies, told JTA. Lauter noted that many teachers trained by TOLI on how to teach the Holocaust in their classrooms — including in Texas — already rely on books that made the list.
But, Lauter said, teachers generally like to develop their own curricula to tailor to their classrooms. “Mandating certain books, I don’t know how teachers would feel about that,” she said.
Lauter also expressed concern about whether the state would be providing materials to help teachers decode the Holocaust texts for their students. Trejo told JTA that fell beyond the scope of the list and the statute.
“It is just the title that is going into the standards for the state of Texas,” Trejo said. “Beyond that, it would be up to publishers to look to, how can I support districts and teachers in teaching this title?”
To literacy activists in the state, the approach was concerning.
“This is censorship as well,” Laney Hawes, co-director of the Texas Freedom to Read Project, told JTA. The overall list, she said, reflects “a very narrow worldview,” and the large number of books on the list would make it difficult for educators to find time for additional texts of their own choosing in class.
At the same time, Hawes said, “there are some really worthwhile books on this list. ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ is an incredible book.”
The Jewish titles, Trejo said, were selected with additional input from Holocaust museum experts, local rabbis and Jewish day schools in the state. They also sought input from the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission.
“We were invited to provide input regarding a few specific parts of these proposals,” Joy Nathan, the commission’s director, told JTA in an email.
She named “Blessed Is the Match,” a poem by the Hungarian-born poet and resistance fighter Hannah Senesh, as a reading that her commission recommended for the draft list. “We will continue these direct conversations throughout the process.”
At the state education board meeting, a last-minute amendment proposed by the board’s GOP treasurer sought to remove dozens of works from the list, including Senesh’s poem and Washington’s letter.
The amendment would replace those texts with a new crop of selections, including “Refugee,” a young-adult novel by Alan Gratz that partially follows a German Jewish World War II refugee; Biblical passages on Moses; Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”; George Orwell’s “1984”; and a book about former Polish president Lech Walesa. The amendment also listed “Night” as required in two different grades.
The story of Moses, the board member said, made the amendment’s cut because “there are a lot of parallels between Moses leading the people out of Egypt and the American Revolution.” Debate on the topic dragged into the night, with board members arguing whether requiring Bible passages would violate the Establishment clause and which Biblical translation had superior literary merit.
Following the amendment, the board agreed to postpone a vote on the required books until April to give members time to review both lists. Another board member, pushing for greater racial diversity in the list, submitted his own titles for review as well.
Once voted on, the legislation would enter a public comment period prior to being formally adopted at a later meeting.
A long list of public commenters at the meeting opposed the law on various grounds, including that it was overly prescriptive, lacked proper balance between classical and modern literature, included more books than could realistically be taught, overly emphasized Christian texts over other religious works, and lacked racial and gender diversity. One teacher said that “Night” is traditionally taught at a different grade level than the law mandates.
Among those who testified against the policy was Rebecca Bendheim, a middle-school teacher at an Austin private school and author of young-adult novels about Jewish and LGBTQ identity. “I believe the list underestimates what Texas students can do,” Bendheim said.
A handful of commenters voiced support for the measure. Matthew McCormick, education director at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, which backed the law, said that it covers “important historical eras such as the Great Depression and the Holocaust.”
He added, “By approving this reading list, the board has the opportunity to enact a generational change by ensuring that every public school student has a strong foundation in literacy and literature.”
At Wednesday’s meeting, the board also voted on new required civics training for teachers and new required vocabulary lists, which would be extracted from the required books.
The state’s embrace of Jewish curricula comes after one Texas school district recently pulled “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” another young-reader Holocaust novel, following a “DEI content” weeding process aided by artificial intelligence. A state law currently on the books in Texas places classroom restrictions on “instruction, diversity, equity and inclusion duties, and social transitioning.”
While Jewish texts are generously represented on Texas’s list, works by and about authors of other identities are not; the high school list, for example, features no Hispanic authors. An estimated 245,000 Jews live in Texas, or less than 1% of the population, according to Brandeis University demographics; Hispanics, by contrast, form 40% of the state population, more than the white share.
The state offered lists of approved Holocaust materials teachers may select from when marking Holocaust Remembrance Week last month. Those approved materials, provided by the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, include many of the texts now required in the legislation.
The proposed legislation concerns activists in the state who oppose book bans and restrictions on students’ “right to read.” Hawes, a Fort Worth mother of four children in the state education system, first became an activist after her district removed the “Graphic Adaptation” of Frank’s diary from its shelves in 2022.
That district returned the book after public outcry. But other districts both in and outside of Texas followed suit by pulling the same edition, along with other Jewish books including “Maus” and “The Fixer,” over the last few years.
Seeing Frank’s diary on the state’s required reading list now, Hawes said, “feels weird to me.”
She noted that the draft legislation specifies that the “original edition” must be taught. The 2018 illustrated adaptation, which includes a passage of Frank discussing a same-sex attraction that had been excised from the original published edition, has been opposed by conservative parents across the country.
In a slideshow by the Texas Educational Agency that outlines the proposed requirements, Frank’s diary is portrayed as an “anchor” text for the 7th grade. “Blessed Is the Match,” an ode to self-sacrifice for a higher cause, and Washington’s letter, a landmark statement of religious tolerance, are listed as supplemental texts for the diary.
The goals of the unit, the agency states, are “factual accounts of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust” and “foundational American ideals of religious liberty and tolerance.”
The Biblical passages, the agency notes, are intended to fulfill a statewide requirement that school districts have “an enrichment curriculum that includes: religious literature, including the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) and New Testament, and its impact on history and literature.” Christian activist groups within Texas, and several elected officials, have pushed for years to promote Evangelical Christian texts in public schools.
The inclusion of Washington’s letter, which assures the Newport congregation that Jews will find safe haven in the United States, also struck Hawes as suspicious. The list contains numerous texts promoting patriotism but does not include any material addressing ongoing antisemitism in America.
“This is making us think that George Washington solved antisemitism. And he didn’t,” she said.
Lauter said that if Texas’s policy of statewide Holocaust book requirements becomes a broader trend, she would welcome it — despite her concerns.
“I think it’s a positive. We support more Holocaust education in schools,” she said. “It’s certainly better than the opposite, which is banning books.”
The post Anne Frank and ‘Night’ may soon be required reading in Texas public schools. Is that good for the Jews? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Arrests and clashes with police as Australians protest Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s Sydney visit
(JTA) — Thousands of protesters demonstrated across Australia on Monday against Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who traveled to the country at the invitation of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese following the Bondi massacre.
Upon arrival, Herzog visited the site of the antisemitic terror attack in Sydney, where 15 people were killed while attending a Hanukkah event in December. There, he laid a wreath and met with the family members of the victims of the attack.
“Standing here at Bondi – an iconic symbol of Australian life, now scarred by the December 14th massacre – I embrace our Australian Jewish sisters and brothers still reeling from this trauma,” wrote Herzog in a post on X. “My visit to Australia, to all of you, is one of solidarity, strength, and sincere friendship from the State of Israel and the people of Israel.”
As Herzog commenced his four-day visit, dozens of protests organized by Palestine Action Sydney erupted across the country by activists who labeled him as a war criminal.
Calls to disinvite Herzog were also made by Jewish groups in Australia, including the progressive Jewish Council of Australia, which published a letter in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday signed by roughly 1,000 Australian Jews who opposed the visit.
Ahead of the expected protests, The New South Wales government declared that Herzog’s visit was a “major event,” a distinction that expanded police powers to include directing the motion of demonstrators, closing specific locations and maintaining separation between opposing groups. Those who denied police directions were subject to fines of up to $3,862.
Alex Ryvchin, the co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, condemned the protest efforts in a post on X last week, writing that it is “shameful that so many resources are required to keep Australians safe from other Australians but that is the sad reality of our times.”
“There is no point appealing to them or reasoning with them because they are extremists driven by irrational motives,” wrote Ryvchin. “It is for the police and government to maintain order, keep Australians safe and protect us.”
On Monday, Palestine Action Group failed to legally challenge the restrictions in a Sydney court.
Despite the heavy restrictions on protests, large crowds of protesters gathered in Sydney on Monday, with many shouting pro-Palestinian slogans and carrying posters that read “Arrest Herzog” and “I’m not antisemitic, I am anti-genocide.”
Police used tear gas and pepper spray on some protesters in Sydney who attempted to continue their march after police intervened. New South Wales Police said that 27 people had been arrested during the protests, including 10 for assaulting police and 17 for failing to comply with directions and related offenses.
Palestine Action Group Sydney condemned the police actions in a post on Instagram, writing, “Tonight saw a sickening frenzy of police violence against 30,000 peaceful, anti-genocide protesters.”
In Brisbane, a city in Queensland, protesters were also heard shouting the common pro-Palestinian slogan “From the river to the sea” a day after the Queensland government announced it would propose a new law criminalizing public use of the slogan as well as the phrase “globalize the intifada.”
On Monday night, thousands of people gathered for a speech from Herzog at an event center in Sydney were barred from leaving as police worked to dispel the lingering protest presence outside.
The post Arrests and clashes with police as Australians protest Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s Sydney visit appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
1 in 3 American Jews were targeted by an antisemitic incident last year, AJC survey finds
(JTA) — One-third of American Jews reported being the target of an antisemitic incident in 2025, according to a new survey published by the American Jewish Committee.
The finding marked no change over the previous year, suggesting that American Jews could be settling into a distressing new normal in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
“Things aren’t getting markedly better,” said Ted Deutch, the CEO of the AJC, in an interview. “I don’t think that we can afford to accept it as a baseline. We can’t accept that, and America shouldn’t accept that.”
Surveying 1,222 American Jewish adults from Sept. 26 to Oct. 9, the AJC found a plateau in several indicators of sentiment.
Overall, 55% of American Jews reported avoiding specific behaviors in 2025 due to fear of antisemitism, including steering clear of certain events and refraining from wearing or posting things online that would identify them as Jewish.
The finding also marked no change since 2024, when 56% of Jews reported changing their behavior for fear of antisemitism, but was up from 46% in 2023 and 38% in 2022.
This year’s respondents were also asked if they felt “less safe” as a result of several high-profile recent antisemitic attacks, including the arson attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home in April; the deadly shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., in May; and the firebombing of a demonstration for the Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado, in June.
About a quarter of respondents said the attacks had made them feel “a great deal” less safe, while 31% responded “a fair amount” and 32% responded “a little.”
Overall, according to the report, two-thirds of respondents said that they believed Jews in the United States were less secure than a year ago.
Deutch said the findings of the group’s latest report should serve not only as a warning for Jews, but as a “warning sign of the cracks in the foundation of our society” for the wider public.
“This is about more than just what’s happening to Jews,” he said. “We’ve always been first, the Jews have always been a canary in the coal mine, and we have to take this seriously. The broader community has to take this seriously for the benefit, not just of our Jewish community, but for our society and our democracy.”
For the first time, the AJC also asked American Jews whether they approved of the way President Donald Trump was responding to antisemitism in the country.
Roughly two-thirds of respondents said they disapproved of Trump’s actions, though views split sharply along partisan lines, with 84% of Jewish Democrats disapproving of Trump’s response at least somewhat compared to 9% of Jewish Republicans.
The survey comes as some Jewish leaders have lamented what they have described as the inefficacy of efforts to combat antisemitism.
Last month at the Second International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, political theorist Yoram Hazony decried what he described as an “an extremely high level of incompetence by the entire anti-Semitism-industrial complex.” Bret Stephens, the right-leaning Jewish New York Times columnist, argued in an address last week that the Jewish community should abandon its efforts to combat antisemitism and instead invest in strengthening Jewish life.
For Deutch, the decision between combatting antisemitism and strengthening Jewish education and infrastructure was a false choice.
“It’s not a trade-off. We can’t afford to choose one or the other,” said Deutch. “We don’t have the luxury of deciding that we’re either going to invest in more education for our leaders and for ourselves and helping to create the next generation of well educated Jewish leaders, or engaging with the broader community and leaders across the broader community about the scourge of antisemitism.”
The post 1 in 3 American Jews were targeted by an antisemitic incident last year, AJC survey finds appeared first on The Forward.